Lessons from the militant past

January 22, 2003
Issue 

Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century
by Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin DG Kelley
Beacon Press, 2001
174 pages, $34.50 (pb)
Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans
By Stephen Franklin
Guilford Press, 2001
308 pages, $39.95 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

In the middle of rush-hour on a Saturday morning in February 1937, union organiser Floyd Loew moved to the middle of the busiest floor of Woolworth's Five and Dime store in Michigan, Detroit, blew a shrill blast on his whistle and yelled, “Strike, girls, strike!”. One hundred and eight sales clerks in the massive variety store, all women, promptly proceeded to occupy the store for what was to be an eight-day sit-down strike.

It was the height of the Depression but also the height of a labour uprising. A wave of spectacular sit-down strikes engulfed the United States. Two months earlier and just 110 kilometres away in Flint, Michigan, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) had brought General Motors, the largest corporation in the world, to its knees with a six-week factory occupation.

The Woolworth's “girls” demanded a 40% wage rise, an eight-hour work day, free uniforms and laundering, seniority rights and that new employees be hired through the union office. With 2800 stores in five countries, Woolworth's was the McDonald's of the 1930s, a global behemoth, generating exorbitant profits from exploitation of its young workers. Frank Woolworth, the company's founder, put it succinctly: “We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods.”

The “cheap help” looked at the wealthy owners of Woolworth's and saw that these millionaires were rich because their workers were poor. Fired by an indignant class consciousness, vigilant women strikers guarded the doors while their comrades set up a strike committee, as well as food, store clean-up, health, cheer-up, scrapbook and bed committees. But it was the entertainment committee that was the busiest — teenage women know how to party hard.

Two union organisers, both Marxists, cranked-up morale through solidarity visits from teachers, auto workers, cooks, hotel employees, musicians and other unionists. With more sit-down strikes beginning and a consumer boycott threatened, Woolworth's caved in and conceded every one of the union's demand.

The sit-down strike was a winner. By terminating the business of factory or store, it choked off profits and made capitalists more reluctant to call in police or strikebreakers because of the risk of damage to company property. The example was contagious. Workers in department stores, shoe stores, drug stores and restaurants successfully followed the Woolworth's lead; for each sit-down strike, there were hundreds of other employers who, when faced with the mere threat of an occupation, raised the white flag.

It had not always been this positive. Howard Zinn sombrely revisits the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 in which 26 mining men, their wives and children were machine-gunned and incinerated to death on April 20. Ludlow was the central event in a 14-month coal strike in southern Colorado which turned into armed class warfare with 66 dead.

Colorado coal-mining companies, headed by John D Rockefeller Jr, the richest man in the world, declared war on the United Mine Workers (UMW) organising drive and strike for better wages, hours and safety. Hundreds of private security guards (and their “Death Special”, an armoured car with a Gatling machine gun), Colorado police and the 1000-strong mounted Colorado National Guard shot miners, raped women, abused children and tortured prisoners. Their guns protected the scabs imported to break the strike.

The union defended itself with arms and solidarity. Meetings were held and funds raised coast to coast. Train crews black-banned the movement of strikebreakers. Four-hundred women from the Denver United Garment Workers Union volunteered as nurses. One company of 82 soldiers of the US Army, mobilised by President Woodrow Wilson to end the strike, mutinied and refused to board a train that was to take them to the war zone.

But Rockefeller, through the weight of private and state arms, ground the union to defeat after 14 months. The strike, though lost, was nevertheless an inspiring struggle, and the UMW made a successful return to Colorado in 1928.

The lessons from these strikes are relevant to the three strikes from the 1990s which are the subject of Stephen Franklin's Three Strikes. Decatur, Illinois, was the venue for three big, important though defeated, strikes by agricultural processing workers, auto workers and rubber workers against their companies' attempts to impose harsh new contracts.

Three giant multinationals aggressively targeted their workers' wages, working hours and health and pension benefits, which had been won through decades of union struggle.

Caterpillar, the US-owned heavy machinery manufacturer, took on the UAW. Bridgestone/Firestone, the Japanese-owned tyre manufacturer, attacked the United Rubber Workers (URW). AE Staley, the British-owned soy and corn processors, turned against the Allied Industrial Workers.

Each strike was a marathon (Caterpillar lasted 17 months, Bridgestone 27 months and Staley four years) because of the corporations' use of “permanent replacement workers”. In the US, a corporation can sack its striking workers and replace them with strikebreakers without breaching any law. The unemployed and lower-paid non-union workers could be made to resent union workers and their relatively high wages. When Caterpillar advertised for replacement workers, it received 40,000 calls on the first day alone.

Even though many union members returned to work, panicked by the spectre of losing jobs, houses or marriages, a large, solid core of Decatur union members fought on with determination. “Road warriors” from the union locals fanned out across the US and the globe to build solidarity and raise millions of dollars in financial aid.

With the factories still running, the odds were stacked against the unions, but it wasn't hopeless. It was, however, going to be harder to win with a knife planted in your back by your own side. The leaderships of the three unions, and the peak US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, hobbled the strikes by diverting resources to “corporate campaigns”. However, the “shareholder revolts” and “corporate disinvestments” did not materialise.

Coca-Cola stopped buying its sweeteners from Staley but this was just a commercial decision. Thirty city governments resolved not to buy Bridgestone tyres, but this was a poor substitute for rank and file organisation and solidarity.

The URW did not adequately raise its employed members' dues, and the construction and other unions failed to honour picket lines. The bureaucratic machines that controlled the unions preferred to cooperate with management and make concessions, while fostering political illusions in the administration of US President Bill Clinton — which delivered a big fat zero. A proposal for a federal government ban on contracts for firms which employed replacement workers was allowed to lapse by a president in hock to his corporate paymasters.

The unions' top leaderships' political and industrial moderation helped to scuttle the strikes. Up against powerful forces, and betrayed by their own leaders, corporate greed won the day in Decatur as the three strikes ended in demoralising defeat.

This makes a dismal appendix to a depressing story of union decline in the US. The strength and ruthlessness of the US ruling class, and disastrous union leadership strategies, has seen organised workers drop from 35% of the US work force in the 1950s to just 13% (9% in the private sector) today.

As Zinn argues, however, labour history is even more important in times of defeat. Workers and activists need to “look backward to look forward” and recapture the “fighting spirit” of the sit-down strikers of the 1930s and the young women of Woolworth's who fought and won. An unfavourable balance of forces can't be wished away, but if the unions pitch truly, it can be “three strikes and you're out” to the capitalist offensive.

From Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003.
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