LABOR IN THE 1930’S: A THUMBNAIL SKETCH
As we have seen in previous sections, the labor movement was narrow and timid in the 1920’s. The mass of unskilled workers remained without unions and therefore without basic rights. American business leaders were riding high, confident of an economic system that would give enough material goods to workers and of a political system that was anti-union enough to assure their continued dominance.
Then came the great depression, catalyzed by the stock market crash of the fall of 1929. The first response of some working people was confusion. As unemployment increased, many among the unemployed blamed themselves for being without work. Unions declined as their members lost jobs and as unemployed weakened their bargaining power.
The major organizing drives of the early 1930’s were led by members of the Communist Party and focused on the unemployed. Unemployed councils in many major cities demonstrated against evictions and for relief checks, and they organized mass demonstrations against hunger.
Out in the countryside, farmers organized against judges and other officials holding foreclosure sales. And in 1932, veterans of World War I marched to Washington to demand the immediate granting of a war bonus, originally promised them for 1945. President Herbert Hoover called out the army and had the veterans violently expelled from the capital.
Hoover stuck stubbornly to the view that federal relief checks would demoralize the unemployed. He had no objections to charity that came from local governments or private groups, apparently assuming that aid from those groups would have less of a negative effect on recipients. As Hoover clung to the past, the depression worsened. By 1932, one of every four Americans was out of work. Increasingly the unemployed understood that their situation was not a result of personal individual failure but of the breakdown of the economic system. Anger and demonstrations increased.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and took office in the Spring of 1933. Among the many pieces of legislation whipped through the Congress in the first months of his administration were federal relief bills (financing payments to the unemployed) and recovery programs for agriculture and industry. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (Triple A) included methods to compel farmers not to grow food; the government, in effect, used economic incentives to force the supply of agricultural products down and prices up. Although the Triple A was declared unconstitutional in 1935, it embodied the essentials of the farm policy that are still with us today.
The Roosevelt Administration’s program for industrial recovery, the National Industrial Recovery Act, nudged businesses to control prices and production in order to avoid overproduction and falling prices. Although it may have given a psychological boost to the economy, it did little to promote long-term economic recovery, in part because it did little to increase purchasing power.
One part of the NRA was important for labor. Section 7a said that workers had the right to collective bargaining. This guaranteed nothing. Many companies did not abide by Section 7a and quickly formed company unions to resist genuine workers’ organizations. Also, at first, there was no board to administer Section 7a and after such a board was formed, its mandate and operating principles were unclear. In some cases members of the recovery administration actually worked against unionism.
Nevertheless, 7a gave a psychological lift to workers and they began to pour into unions in 1933 and 1934. This was an organizer’s dream. Workers asked to be organized; they beseeched AFL offices for union cards.
But the AFL, out of fear of radicalism and militancy, and because it worried that its craft structure might go under, refused to seize this chance of a lifetime. AFL unions expelled new militant workers and the AFL itself refused to charter new industrial unions that would include in one organization all the workers in a single industry.
Workers took things into their own hands in 1934. In that year there were three very successful strikes that changed the history of the labor movement. Teamsters struck in Minneapolis, long-shore workers on the Pacific Coast, and auto parts workers in Toledo, Ohio. You can read about the details of each strike in books mentioned in the bibliography at the end of this course guide. The common characteristics of these three strikes were that:
The success of these strikes was only a beginning, but a most important one. They turned things around for the union movement. They expressed the growing demand of workers for unions and for new kinds of strong, militant unions. They showed a willingness to take things out of the hands of the conservative bureaucrats who had long controlled unions.
Both a wing of the labor establishment and a wing of the political establishment responded to this upsurge. In 1935, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers led the formation of the C.I.O. (at first, within the AFL, the Committee of Industrial Organizations and later, as an independent federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations). The C.I.O. had two central historical two central historical functions: first, it would actively organize workers into unions, and second, it would organize them into industrial unions, one union per industry.
The C.I.O. reflected the upsurge of workers’ militancy; on Lewis’ part it represented both an attempt to build a large, strong labor movement and an attempt to assure that the unions would not be too radical. Lewis was certain that if he and people like him did not organize workers, the radicals would.
Just as some labor leaders within the AFL moved to the left to ride the wave of labor militancy, so too did liberal politicians. In 1935, the Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act). Essentially, the Wagner Act was a response to the upsurge of labor militancy. It was an attempt to clarify the legal status of labor relations and it was an attempt to channel and soften labor activism. It was dialectical or two-sided in that it gave new legality to unions while it also sought to limit workers’ power. It was fundamentally conservative, not in the reactionary sense, but in the progressive sense of one who changes some of the parts in order to preserve the basic system. In this case, the Wagner Act aimed to keep labor militancy in safe, legal channels. Many business leaders would not be happy with the law (to say the least) but ultimately it would help preserve the fundamental business system from anti-capitalist attacks.
By itself the Wagner Act was no guarantee of anything. It did not organize any workers. Workers had to organize themselves. Moreover, many companies felt that the act would not be upheld in the Supreme Court; many pieces of New Deal legislation had already been struck down by the courts and this one might too. And so employers fought the law or tried to ignore it.
It is in this political context that we can understand the significance of the sit-down wave of 1936-1937. About 400,000 workers engaged in 500 sit-down strikes in 1937. Why the in-plant sit-down? It was the surest way to keep strikebreakers (of whom there were plenty) out of the plant and it was a good way to preserve rank-and-file control of the strike. Certainly sit-downs were against the law, at the very least constituting illegal seizure of private property or trespassing. But if workers were determined to resist the authorities, authorities would have to calculate how much civil turmoil and how much popular alienation from the law they wanted to cause.
The crucial sit-down strike was the one at Flint, Michigan against General Motors. The strikers held the plants for some 44 days, from December 1936 through early February 1937. They won recognition for the United Auto Workers union and wage increases. Again, as in 1934, strikers resisted police attacks and were prepared to fight the national guard had it been ordered to oust the strikers.
The sit-down wave, and especially the Flint strike, was a shot in the arm to the union movement. Total union membership almost doubled from 3.9 million in 1936 to 7 million in 1937. Although the CIO had many long hard struggles ahead, another corner had been turned.
This new wave of worker militancy had important affects that registered in various sectors of the American ruling groups. In the spring of 1937, Myron Taylor, head of United States Steel, agreed to recognize the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee without a strike. Why did he do so? Not because he liked unions. He had several reasons; two were especially important: 1) war orders were coming from Europe, and Taylor had to assure his customers of continuous production, which he could not do if he were threatened with strikes; 2) [I think] Taylor was playing the role of the shrewd conservative - bend a little, accept unions, and work with them in order to call a halt to the radicalization of American labor. Better to work with moderates like John Lewis than communists and other radicals. So Taylor must have been thinking.
There was a second major event in labor history in the Spring of 1937. On April 12, 1937, the United States Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act; it declared that the act was indeed constitutional. Why did the court make this decision after having struck down so much New Deal legislation in the past? Surely it was not the discovery of some long-forgotten principle in law. Rather the political situation had changed.
For one thing, in February of 1937, Roosevelt had grown so tired of the Court’s obstructionism that he proposed a new law to allow the president to appoint up to fifteen new justices to the court for every sitting justice over seventy-years old who refused to resign. Although the plan eventually backfired and was never passed, it threatened the Supreme Court with radical changes. And remember, when Roosevelt spoke, he had a popular mandate. He won the presidency by overwhelming margins in 1936, losing the electoral votes of only two states in the union. The Supreme Court justices must have feared that popular antagonism to its decisions threatened its authority and popular loyalties to the court.
Perhaps also some members of the court became convinced that capital did not fight fair with labor. The LaFollette Committee in Congress in 1936 and 1938 had shown that business used hundreds of thousands of dollars for spies, bribes, guns and tear gas to fight unionization. The committee seemed to have demonstrated that capital was violent and unscrupulous in its attacks on labor. Perhaps it became clear even to some of the conservatives on the Court that government must assist labor against what sometimes amounted to a kind of corporate fascism.
Finally, I speculate that the Court understood it was in the best interests of the American political and economic system - as perceived by some of its shrewder leaders - that worker militancy had to be channeled before it got out of hand and challenged the fundamental institution of capitalism. Here were workers in the streets fighting police, seizing private property, working closely with Communists (indeed, some workers were Communists), ignoring court injunctions and resisting laws. This had to stop, and short of fascism - putting all striking workers in jail - one way to channel worker militancy and also to restore some sense that the political system was a fair one was to support the Wagner Act. Take union struggles out of the streets; put them before labor boards and in the courts. Thus some of the justices have might reasoned.
The court would soon go a long way toward completing such a strategy. In 1939 in NLRA v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, it outlawed the sit-down strike, despite the fact that Fansteel had refused even to discuss labor issues before the strike, and had violated the NLRA by refusing to bargain and by intimidating workers with labor spies. Justice Hughes of the Supreme Court condemned the sit-down as an unlawful seizure of property and added that the purpose of the NLRA (Wagner Act) was to promote "peaceful settlements of disputes by providing legal remedies for the invasion of the employees’ rights." In short, whatever the grievance, workers must go through proper channels.
The year 1937 was not the end of union organizing or militant strikes. Many major industrial employers resisted unionization until World War II. But the period of the 1934-1937 saw the birth of the modern labor movement; the period from 1934-1945 saw the growth of that labor movement until almost a third of the American labor force was unionized. Most of all, unskilled workers in industry were finally brought into unions. The War period and after brought a bureaucratization of the unions and during the Cold War radicals were purged. But whatever critiques one can level at the union movement today - and there are many - it is important to recognize that before the unions had organized industry, workers were generally poorly paid, labored under horrible conditions, and, for the most part, were treated like cattle. If you did not smile pretty at the foremen, you could lose you job. If you did not bribe him on the docks, you might never get a job. Unions were created by workers for better living and working conditions and, and most of all, to create one small niche of democracy in American industry.
Today unions are under attack on many fronts, external and internal. Can they recapture the energy and the methods of rank-and-file participation in the 1930’s? Can they reverse the steady decline in union membership? Finally, can union leaders and members once again speak as representatives of social justice and economic democracy - as representatives of the general interests of millions of Americans?
(* = Paperback, although some may be out of print.) None of the following is required.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS: AUDIO CASSETTE TAPE:
"The U.S. Economy from the Great Depression to the Present"/Reaganomics
by Dr. Frank Stricker
This tape brings the story from the 1930’s up to the late 1970’s. It raises a number of questions that might stimulate your thinking for the final assignment, depending on which topic you choose.
Because it stops in the late 70’s, the tape cannot deal with the Reagan revolution, which constitutes a radical attempt to change the political economy that has developed since the 1930’s. Cuts in social programs and cuts in tax rates have resulted in an upward shift of income shares; that is, those at the top have ended up with a smaller share. That, in my view, was one of the goals of the Reagan program.
The deep recession that the Reaganites supported, the attack on unions which began with the firing of PATCO members, and cuts in government income maintenance programs (such as AFDC, CETA, and Food Stamps) all had the goal and the result of weakening the bargaining power of workers. The essence of the Reagan economic program was not the magic of supply-side tax cuts which were to increase savings and investment. The tax cuts did not stop the recession and essentially we had a Keynsian recovery from the recession - a recovery fueled by consumer and government debt rather than savings and investment. Rather the essence of Reaganomics was an attempt to strengthen business and weaken labor, in order to raise profit levels without resorting to conscious government planning for re-industrialization and full employment and without placing severe limits on the flight of capital and jobs abroad. The recession of the early 1980’s, and unemployment rates at their highest levels since the 1930’s, were, as some members of the Reagan administration admitted, part of the solution rather than part of the problem. High unemployment forces employees to give up wage increases and other benefits in order to keep their jobs; it also forces them to accept lower pay and poorer working conditions than if they had strong financial support while they searched for a job. At the same time, Reagan’s leadership of the assault on trade unions weakened their ability to resist attack. (The union leadership must also bear much responsibility for the failure to resist.) Finally, attacks on social programs made it more difficult to be unemployed and more likely that the unemployed would take any job because they had fewer or no alternatives. In short, I do not view the Reaganomics program as a democratic program designed to help everyone, but as a program designed to hurt those at the bottom and help those at the top. Of course, Reaganites would argue that in the long run his program helped everyone. (His program echoes Andrew Carnegie’s; it is an attempt to revive Social Darwinism as much as that is possible in this day and age, and it makes similar promises about general benefits.) But I disagree. I believe average living standards continued to fall in the 1980’s and a sound base for the growth of high-wage jobs was not laid down.
Of course you are free to disagree with my interpretation of Reaganomics. Many of you no doubt will. You may have the chance to make your position known to me in your final assignment, which includes Reaganomics as one of the options. In the 1990’s, too, we have the advantage of hindsight; we can make judgment about the long-term effects of Reaganomics on wages, the manufacturing base, and public and private debt.
Use footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical references and a bibliography to indicate the sources of your information. Use your own words. Generally avoid quotations and especially long quotations, but if you do take material word-for-word from other sources, be sure to use quotation marks and give the source. You can use any material that is appropriate, and you must include relevant material from the course. You must use at least one book that you have not already read for the course. Beyond that, how many books or articles you look at will depend on your topic and the amount of time you have. In all cases, you must develop your paper as an argument, and be critical of counter-arguments, as well as self-critical of your own or favored arguments.
Write your paper on one of the following topics:
Did Reagan’s economic program work? Was it fair? If it succeeded, was it worth the cost? How important was the tax program to Reaganomics? Was Reaganomics a permanent solution to structural economic problems that seemed apparent in the 1970’s and 1980’s? Perhaps focus or Reaganomics and income distribution or Reaganomics and welfare issues.
Sources: For views laying the groundwork for Reaganomics, there are many books, including George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty*, Jack Kemp, An American Renaissance, the writings of Milton Friedman, Frank Ackerman, Hazardous to Our Health: Economic Policies in the 1980’s. However, to do this one adequately, you need to get more recent perspectives. You’ll need to do some digging in the library, too. You should keep up with economic news if you want to answer this question by reviewing any of the following: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Monthly Review and Dollars and Sense. You might also take a look at William Grieder’s "The Education of David Stockman," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1981. The commentaries by members of the Los Angeles Times Board of Economists are brief and pointed. Examples are the two opposing viewpoints by Lawrence Klein and Arthur Laffer on supply-side economics, Los Angeles Times, (Part IV, p. 3-June 26 and July 10, 1984).
A suggestive analysis of the current economic crisis is Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline. Even if you find that you disagree with its arguments, you will learn a great deal about recent economic history, productivity, politics, Reaganomics, alternatives to that system. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan’s Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (Pantheon Paperback)*, argue that Reaganomics aimed to cut income maintenance programs in order to restore the harmful effects of unemployment and force people to take any job at any wage.
Precisely how you define the topic will be determined in part by the sources you get. There are a number of fascinating (but sometimes difficult) books related to this topic. Among them, Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture* and Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American in an Age of Diminishing Expectations*. An important but difficult book is Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth, which speaks directly to the paradoxes of material abundance and continued levels of dissatisfaction. It can be supplemented with Adrian Ellis and Krishan Kumar, Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies: Studies in Fred Hirsch’s Social Limits to Growth. Other important works are Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction, and Staffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class. The former includes psychological theories of dissatisfaction and the latter - in a sometimes technical way - asks why increasing affluence is accompanied by the feeling that there is never enough time.
There are many possible topics. Examples include:
- Start with Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy (1984), add the critique in Chapter 2 of Christopher Jencks’ Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (1992), lay out the arguments, and attempt to judge whether government social programs actually caused poverty in the 70’s and 80’s. A related question: what did cause poverty rates to stop falling?
- Use William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1990 paperback of 1987 original) for a social and economic analysis of urban poverty among minorities, add Jencks’ critique (Chapter 4 in Rethinking), and then add whatever else is necessary to evaluate Wilson’s explanations; or, read Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996).
- Pick a section of Margaret Weir’s Politics and Jobs (1992) to begin a study of employment policy in some period in recent U.S. history.
- Study the War on Poverty. You can start with several very negative chapters in Allen Matusow’s The Unraveling of America (1984) and the instructor can help you focus after that. There are lots of juicy issues here, including: whether community action involvement by the poor would cure poverty; whether Head Start and the Job Corps worked; why the federal government did not create more jobs; why the poor were not simply given money to lift them above poverty lines.
- There are dozens of other topics relating to poverty: low-income Americans; unemployment and poverty; structures that make people poor; government programs that helped de-industrialize the cities; welfare and Social Security payments.
- Analyzing de-industrialization, the permanent loss of productive capacity and jobs in heavy industry (auto, steel, rubber, etc.). For this topic, there are many sources. A good one from the labor point of view is Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The De-industrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry*.
- Analyzing the essential and fundamental causes of environmental pollution.
- Analyzing the decline of the American auto industry.
- Analyzing the future of the American steel industry.
- Describing and evaluating the Philosophy and Economics of the Free Marketeers (e.g. Milton Friedman).
- Analyzing the social responsibility of the corporation: mainly profit?Examples of sources: Neil Chamberlain, The Limits of Corporate Responsibility, Neil Jacoby, Corporate Power and Social Responsibility, and Dow Votaw and S. Prakash Sethi, The Corporate Dilemma.)
- A topic relating to U.S. economic interests in the third world.
- A topic relating to art and culture in a capitalist society.
- Etc. The number of current topics related in some way to the themes of this course is infinite. You can be flexible in defining a topic that meets your interests. Write me if you are having a problem.
HUXCRSGD.554 - http://www.csudh.edu/hux/syllabi/554/four_1.html