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Fundamentally, labor's story is the story of the American people. To view it narrowly, to concentrate on the history of specific trade unions or on the careers of individuals and their rivalries, would be to miss the point that the great forces which have swept the American people into action have been the very forces that have also molded labor. Trade unionism was born as an effective national movement amid the great convulsion of the Civil War and the fight for black freedom... Labor suffered under depressions which spurred the whole American people into movement in the seventies, in the eighties, and in the nineties. It reached its greatest heights when it joined hands with farmers, small businessmen, and the black people in the epic Populist revolts of the 1890's and later in the triumph that was the New Deal. For labor has never lived in isolation or progressed without allies. Always it has been in the main stream of American life,... Labor's story, by its very nature, is synchronized at every turn with the growth and development of American monopoly. Its great leap forward into industrial unionism was an answering action to the development of trusts and great industrial empires. Labor's grievances, in fact the very conditions of its life, have been imposed by its great antagonist, that combination of industrial and financial power often known as Wall Street. The mind and actions of William H. Sylvis, the iron molder who founded the first effective national labor organization, can scarcely be understood without also an understanding of the genius and cunning of his contemporary, John D. Rockefeller, father of the modern trust. In the long view of history the machinations of J. P. Morgan, merging banking and industrial capital as he threw together ever larger combinations of corporate power controlled by fewer and fewer men, may have governed the course of American labor more than the plans of Samuel Gompers
- Sales Rank: #606380 in Books
- Brand: Brand: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
- Published on: 1979-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 399 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Labor's Untold Story, Told
By Alfred Johnson
As I have often noted this space is dedicated to the struggles of the American (and international) working class and their allies. Part of understanding those struggles is to know where we have been in order to have a better grasp of where we need to head in order to create a more just, socially inclined world. In my travels over the past few years I have noted, even among those who proclaim themselves progressives, radicals and revolutionaries, a woeful, and in some cases willful, lack of knowledge about the history and traditions of the American labor movement. In order to help rectify that lack I will, occasionally, post entries relating to various events, places and personalities that have helped form what was a very militant if, frustratingly, apolitical (or not purely anti-political, especially against its left-wing) labor history.
In order to provide a starting point for these snapshots in time I am using what I think is a very useful book, "Labor's Untold Story", Richard O. Boyer and Herbert Morais, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Of America (UE), New York, 1976, that I can recommend to all those militants interested in getting at least a first taste of what the once mighty organized American labor movement was all about. For those unfamiliar with labor history the UE, cited here as the publisher, was a left-wing union that was split by the main labor federations during the "red scare" of the 1950's for being "under Communist influence" and refusing to expel its Communist Party supporters. The other organization created at the time was the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The history of that split and its timing that caused a wasteful break in the struggle for a single industry-wide union that has been the goal of all thoughtful labor militants will, of course, be the subject of one of these entries at a later date.
That UE imprimatur, for this writer at least, is something of a plus but you know upfront that this is a pro-labor history. That said, this 400 page book is chock full of events, large and small, complete with very helpful footnotes giving greater detail (mercifully placed at the bottom of the page where the subject is mentioned), that helped turned the American labor movement from an atomized, motley group of conflicting racial, ethnic and political tendencies in the last part of the 19th century to something like a very powerful and somewhat self-confident organized force by the 1940's. After that period there is a long term decline that, for the book, ends with the period of the "red scare" noted above and for the rest of us continues until today.
In any case here you will learn about the embryonic stages of the modern labor movement after the American Civil War with its urgent industrial demands to provide goods for a pent-up market war-ravaged market and creation of a transportation and information system adequate to meet those needs. Needless to say labor received short shrift in the bargain, especially at first before it was even minimally organized. The story here it should be made clear, the story anytime labor is the subject of discourse, is organized labor. The atomized working class as a whole minus this organization does not exist as a historical force. That, my friends, is a great lesson for today as well.
As such, it important to note the establishment in the 1870s of the National Labor Union and its offshoots, later the Knights of Labor and the role of its class collaborationist leaders. Also noted is the fight in the coal mines of the East and the legendary saga of the "Molly McGuires" in Pennsylvania our first well-know labor martyrs. Then the fight moves west to the lead, copper, silver and gold mines. That push west can only mean the establishment of the Western Federation of Miners, the emergence of the paragon of an American labor leader Big Bill Haywood, his frame-up for murder in 1905 and the subsequent rise of the Industrial Workers of The World. Wobblies (IWW). Along the way there are various attempts to form a workers party, the most promising, if amorphous, being the Tom Watson-led Populist Party in 1892 before the somewhat more class-based Socialist Party took hold.
Of course no political study of the American working class is complete without a big tip o f the hat to the tireless work of Eugene V. Debs, his labor organizing and his various presidential campaigns up through 1920. While today Debs' efforts have to be seen in different way in light of the fact that our attitude toward labor militants running for executive offices in the capitalist state and his `soft' attitude on the question of the political organization of the working class with an undifferentiated party of the whole class, he stands head and shoulders above most of the other political labor leaders of the day, especially that early renegade from Marxism, Samuel Gompers.
The first "red scare" (immediately after World War I) and its effect on the formation of the first American communist organizations responding to the creation of the first workers state in Russian ( and of the establishment of the internationally-oriented Communist International), the quiescent of the American labor movement in the 1920s (a position not unlike the state of the American working class today), the rise of the organized labor movement into a mass industrial organization in response to the ups and downs of the Great Depression, the `labor peace' hiatus of World War II, the labor upsurge in the immediate post-World War II period and the "night of the long knives" of the anti-communist "red scare" of the 1950s brings the story up to the time of first publication of the book. As to be expected of a book that pre-dates the rise of the black civil right movement, the women's liberation movement and the struggle for gay and lesbian rights there is much less about the role of race and gender the history of the American labor movement. Not to worry, the black, feminist and gender scholars have been hard at work rectifying those omissions. And I have been busy reviewing that work elsewhere in this space. But here is your start.
43 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Illusion-shattering and heartbreaking, worldview changing
By darien@briefcase.com
The plans of John D. Rockefeller had more to do with the course of American Labor history than those of Samuel Gompers. This is the main premise of Labor's Untold Story, an economic history of America from Labor's viewpoint. Covering the years from 1860 to 1955, when it was published by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union, it presents a fast-paced narrative, skillfully weaving stories in a highly readable and entertaining format. United Electrical was and is a progressive union, in the lead for workers rights. This union has suffered for its advocacy of the worker. It still exists and has a membership of about 35,000 workers in occupations ranging from highway toll-takers to graduate student assistants.
Labor's actions have been determined, in the long view of history, not so much by the actions of Labor leaders but Labor's adversaries. Boyer and Morais maintain that Labor has reacted to employers rather than the opposite. Division and destruction of Labor occurred primarily through actions of employers and the government. Multitudes of people have sacrificed their livelihoods, families, and even their lives to further the cause of Labor, with mixed and halting progress. Labor's Untold Story tells us that Business' exploitation of employees causes depression and other economic upheaval, and makes a convincing case.
As a beginning example the "Molly McGuires" of the Pennsylvania coal mining region will do nicely. For starters, historians agree that no group called the Molly McGuires existed in that area in 1873. This was fabricated for publicity purposes by the mine owner, Franklin B. Gowen. He originally recognized the union in the belief that a strike would help to create a coal shortage and push up the price. He used the Molly McGuire myth, along with $100,000, to persuade Pinkertons to come in and help infiltrate this alleged secret organization that was plotting such harm to mineowners. When Gowen cut the miners' wages below the contract level, they struck. The miners and their families were starved, hunted, ambushed and some killed by a vigilante group sponsored by the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. After six months of hunger and bloodshed they went back to work, defeated. The union was destroyed, and those who had led the strike were blacklisted (not allowed to work in the coal mining industry). Six Irishmen and the men they led in the Ancient Order of the Hibernians were determined to rebuild the union and restore miners' wages. Gowen decided that no action was unjustified in getting rid of these troublemakers. He paid two informants who swore that the Irishmen had freely confessed to many murders in their presence. The first trial featured Gowen, the mine owner, as the special prosecutor. The man who actually committed the crime with which these Irishmen were charged testified against them and won his freedom. Nineteen men were convicted and hanged. The last two men were hanged in a rush so the governor's pardon would not reach them in time to save their lives.
Ethnic conflict, a primary tool of Big Business to set workers against one another, is surpassed in its effectiveness by the Red Scare tactic. "Calling red" has worked for over 100 years. Union organizers and sympathizers, oppressed workers, regardless of the desperate conditions they tried to alleviate, became ineffective once identified as Socialists or Communists. The opposition's definition of Socialism or Communism was often wildly inaccurate. It made no difference whether the charge was true; it still worked to cripple Labor action.
Chapter 10, titled Victory, outlines the rise and fall of the Committee for Industrial Organization, the CIO. The first action of the CIO occurred against the Firestone Tire Plant #1 in Akron, Ohio, on January 29, 1936, where the workers had been subjected to speedup. They stayed in the plant for three days, and won their battle. The speed-up decreased, and the base rate of pay increased. Workers everywhere, exhilarated by the success of Firestone workers began to sit down, and joined the CIO. Within six months, the CIO had 2,000,000 members. "Top AFL Leaders warned workers that the CIO was a Communistic plot but they continued flocking in, unimpressed. Although the formal charge made by the AFL against the CIO was dual unionism and refusal to abide by majority rule, its leaders never tired in associating the new organization with Moscow." In August 1938, President of AFL Metal Trades Department John Frey told the Dies un-American Activities Committee that the CIO was Communist dominated. "This testimony marked the beginning of the a government sponsored blacklist, inaugurating in recent times the Business use of government to destroy Labor via the red scare".
The strength of the CIO was its left-and-center (political) coalition. Philip Murray, the leader of the CIO after Lewis' departure in 1940, was subjected to extreme pressure from Big Business for several years that finally broke him and the CIO. He declared that all member unions had to support the policies and vote for the candidates that the Executive Council approved. Allegedly, patriotism demanded the expulsion of the left unions. This split member unions away from the CIO, undermining its successful policy of unity in the face of external pressures and politics. The United Electrical Workers, Fur and Leather Workers, Mine Mill and Smelter Workers who had been the pace-setters in raising wage scales and winning conditions were expelled from the CIO on October 31, 1949. Labor's Untold Story, ending in 1955, does not look at possible solutions to the way business is financed in western society. If the stockholders are the tail wagging the dog, should be we looking for some other means of capitalizing business?
Labor's Untold Story is remarkable in its ability to recast economic history from the working person's viewpoint. The traditional press does not encourage us to think about what happens in our daily work lives that lessens our dignity as workers and decreases our ability to support our families. Many stories in this book are shocking and heartrending. The authors worked from primary sources and what they judge as credible secondary sources. The book has the ring of veracity. It would be of interest to check other interpretations of the incidents cited in this book to see how others have analyzed them.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
History of the People
By Drew Hunkins
Authentic people's history to the core, Boyer and Morais' Labor's Untold Story covers all the gritty drama and history that shaped the world for working people throughout the United States. The exciting and neglected story of working people and their struggles for humane conditions and a living wage is vividly documented in this outstanding work. Any book that starts out with this gem of a Lincoln quote: "Outside the family, the strongest bond of human sympathy should be one uniting all working people of all nations, tongues and kindreds" is certain to be wonderful.
It does a fantastic job in documenting myriad instances of police violence towards striking and locked-out workers. Beginning with the historic Haymarket affair in Chicago where cops instigated a riot during a worker's demonstration and wound up jailing early heroes of the American labor movement who were eventually executed on trumped up charges; Labor's Untold Story goes on to explain the role of the International Workers of the World and Big Bill Haywood, all women and men worthy of emulation. Their struggle for simple free speech rights is told and the Wobblies and Eugene Debs are chronicled in vivid detail. Boyer and Morais put together a sensational description of the Great Depression explaining the causes such as over production combined with poor wages for the masses, and the everyday conditions for the working populace.
Probably the finest chapter deals with the Flint Sit-Down strike of the 1930s. The impetus for the debilitating yet exhilarating strike being the speed-ups dictated by management which literally led to death for many workers as they slumped over the production lines in exhaustion. Another interesting fact pointed out in Labor's Untold Story is the National Association of Manufacturers admiration for Hitler. NAM, that reactionary group of rightwing business boyz, certainly did have some fascistic tendencies in common with Nazism according to Boyer and Morais. Lastly the rise of the more radical and worker friendly CIO is documented with a keen eye for detail and the Taft-Hartley Act, which essentially destroyed labor rights in the United States, is explained including the fact that it was virtually written by the business men who had been screaming like spoiled toddlers for its implementation since the Wagner Act.
Labor's Untold Story is a welcome history book, one stocked full of fascinating stories that every American worker should have some familiarity with. It's the definitive account of what got American workers the modicum of working benefits many of them now take for granted. Much of this book should have been turned into a wonderful film years ago, but of course corporate owned studios generally stay as far away as possible from true labor history. That's not to discount the few independent studios that have put together fine films about some of these topics on shoestring budget.
It should be noted that this book recently came out in a new edition, the cover art portrays an intriguing historical photo documenting a gang of cops beating a single worker.
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