Beaten down worked up, p.22
Beaten Down, Worked Up, page 22
During the 1950s and 1960s, Meany not only rejected a push to appoint an AFL-CIO assistant for women’s affairs but also refused to develop programs to get unions to stop discriminating against women. Barbara Easterling, an official with the Communications Workers of America, said that naming women to top leadership positions was “just something that wasn’t done.” That was one reason more than three thousand women gathered in Chicago in 1974 to found the Coalition of Labor Union Women, a group meant to give women a larger voice in the labor movement. Addie Wyatt, an official with the meat cutters’ union who was elected vice president of the new coalition, said, “The slogan ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ isn’t quite true.”
During the 1970s, many women were asking why the AFL-CIO hadn’t named even one woman to its thirty-five-person executive council. It was not until 1980, the year after Meany retired, that the executive council added Joyce Miller, the second-ranking official in the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.
Meany’s successor, Lane Kirkland, also showed little interest in women’s issues, resisting pressure to create an AFL-CIO women’s department. In 1990, after millions more women entered the workforce the previous decade, an AFL-CIO economist declared that women workers were the key to reinvigorating the labor movement. At the time, there were just two women on the AFL-CIO’s executive council, even though 38 percent of all union members were women. (Today 45 percent are.) Karen Nussbaum, co-founder of 9to5, a group that addressed challenges that female office workers faced, said that women often got the cold shoulder from union organizers. She recalled a Teamsters leader telling her, “ ‘You can’t organize women, because they think with their cunts, not their brains.’…We ran into that a lot, actually.”
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In 1902, W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American writer and civil rights activist, noted that forty-three national unions had no black members and that twenty-seven didn’t allow black apprentices. Three years later Du Bois joined with other intellectuals in the Niagara Movement, a black civil rights group, to condemn “the practice of labor unions in proscribing and boycotting and oppressing thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because they are black.”
Some major unions welcomed blacks as members. In the 1880s, the Knights of Labor, and then in the early twentieth century the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), stressed the idea of solidarity for all workers and were eager to have blacks as members.
To be sure, many employers deliberately fomented tensions between black and white workers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, companies repeatedly sought to undercut unions and strikes (and higher wages) by bringing in black workers, and sometimes Chinese workers, desperate for jobs. Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founding president, sometimes showed stunning hostility toward these minorities, even though he at times called for nondiscrimination and sought to expel unions that discriminated against blacks. Gompers said in 1899 that blacks were a “convenient whip placed in the hands of the employers to cow the white man.” In 1905, he said, “Caucasians are not going to let their standards of living be destroyed by [N]egroes, Chinese, Japs, or any others.”
In 1917, one of the nation’s most horrific racial incidents occurred, spurred in part by white union leaders. Workers at the Aluminum Ore Company went on strike in East St. Louis, Illinois, and management brought in blacks from the South to serve as strikebreakers. Union leaders responded by “provok[ing] a veritable hysteria of race hatred,” an NAACP official wrote. After one union meeting, three thousand whites marched into East St. Louis, shooting and lynching blacks and setting fires that destroyed whole neighborhoods, causing ten thousand blacks to lose their homes. The journalist Ida B. Wells estimated that between 40 and 150 African Americans were killed.
A. Philip Randolph, one of the greats of the labor movement—as well as the civil rights movement—abhorred the way that companies, time and again, pitted the races against each other. “If employers can keep the white and black dogs on account of their race prejudice fighting over a bone, the yellow capitalist dog will get away with the bone—the bone of profits,” Randolph wrote in 1919 for the Harlem newspaper that he edited.
In 1925, Randolph began a struggle to win union recognition for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. (The porters had tapped him to be president of their union because he, not being a Pullman employee, couldn’t be fired or harassed.) Finally, in 1937, the Pullman Car Company recognized that overwhelmingly African American union, and only then, after years of resisting, did the AFL agree to admit the Brotherhood into the federation.* In 1936, Randolph urged the AFL at its convention to let the Brotherhood join and to expel unions that discriminated against black workers. “White and black workers…cannot be organized separately as the fingers on my hand,” he said. “They must be organized altogether, as the fingers on my hand when they are doubled up in the form of a fist….If they are organized separately, they will not understand each other. They will fight each other, and if they fight each other, they will hate each other. And the employing class will profit from that condition.”
In 1941, Randolph angered President Roosevelt by threatening to mobilize 100,000 people for a march in Washington to press the government to end segregation in war industries. Roosevelt pressured Randolph to call off the march, but Randolph agreed to cancel it only after FDR issued an executive order that called for an end to segregation in America’s defense industries. Randolph’s agitation also went far to persuade President Truman to end segregation in the armed forces in 1948.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Randolph pressed the AFL and then the merged AFL-CIO to crack down on national unions that had discriminatory constitutions and segregated locals. Randolph got support from the famed Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote in his landmark 1944 book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,
The fact that the American Federation of Labor as such is officially against racial discrimination does not mean much. The Federation has never done anything to check racial discrimination exercised by its member organizations.
At the 1959 AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, Randolph again took up the fight, urging George Meany to expel two unions that allowed segregated locals. Meany, upset by Randolph’s assertiveness, angrily barked at him, “Who the hell appointed you the guardian of all the Negroes in America?” Coming out of a union, the plumbers, that was notorious for discriminating against blacks, Meany had a checkered history toward African Americans. In a slap at the civil rights movement, he and the AFL-CIO refused to endorse the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; indeed, when put to a vote, only two of the thirty-five members on the AFL-CIO’s executive council voted to back that historic march: Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph.
When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the AFL-CIO’s convention in Miami Beach two years later, he criticized Meany’s harsh words to Randolph, reminding Meany that Randolph was an unstinting champion of labor for decades. Picking up Randolph’s fight, King chided the assembled labor leaders for failing to stamp out blatant racism inside the house of labor:
Discrimination does exist in the labor movement. It is true that organized labor has taken significant steps to remove the yoke of discrimination from its own body. But in spite of this some unions, governed by the racist ethos, have contributed to the degraded economic status of the Negro….In every section of the country, one can find local unions existing as a serious and vicious obstacle when the Negro seeks jobs or upgrading in employment. Labor must honestly admit these shameful conditions.
Randolph was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and Reuther’s UAW provided much of the financing for it. Meany wasn’t even in Washington the day of the march, even though Randolph and Reuther were among the speakers. Prodded by Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., the AFL-CIO ultimately threw its lobbying clout behind the landmark civil rights legislation enacted in the 1960s.
In many parts of the labor movement, there had been racial progress. Within the CIO, workers called each other “brother” and “sister,” regardless of race. In 1941, despite the Ford Motor Company’s efforts to divide the races, the UAW and the CIO pulled off a successful strike by black and white workers at Ford’s colossal 85,000-employee River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. That strike caused the vehemently antiunion Henry Ford Sr. to surrender and grant union recognition to Ford’s 130,000 factory workers.
For each step forward, though, there was often a step or two back. In 1944, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, bowing to Roosevelt administration pressure, promoted eight African Americans to streetcar motormen. The Transit Workers Union supported those promotions, but forty-five hundred white workers, opposed to the promotions, went on strike, preventing 300,000 people from getting to work and disrupting war production. Union leaders were unable to persuade the strikers to return to work, and the federal government sent in more than five thousand soldiers to help end the strike.
In 1959, Herbert Hill, the NAACP’s labor director, wrote an article for Commentary magazine saying that some unions “conscientiously worked to eradicate institutionalized job bias.” He praised the UAW, the United Rubber Workers, and the United Packinghouse Workers. Hill then listed fourteen unions that “practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation (in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’), or enforce separate, racial seniority lines.” Here he cited mainly rail and construction unions, including the electrical workers, the ironworkers, the operating engineers, and the plumbers.
It was not until 1964, as Congress was passing its civil rights laws, that the final, foot-dragging labor unions removed the “whites only” clause from their constitutions and bylaws. It was federal pressure and the tenor of the times, not George Meany, that made this happen.
King certainly saw the many shortcomings in labor, but he also saw it as a great friend of African Americans. In a speech to the AFL-CIO in 1961, he said,
Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.
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American labor also had a dismal early history with regard to Asians and Latinos. Sadly, Samuel Gompers shared much of his era’s prejudice toward Chinese immigrants, who, in the 1870s and 1880s, were heavily employed in railroad construction and agriculture. Gompers, who went to work in a New York cigar factory at age fourteen, wrote in his autobiography that in 1878 one-fourth of the nation’s forty thousand cigar makers were “Chinamen” on the West Coast and that during strikes “we had to meet the threats of employers to import Chinese strike breakers.” Gompers and many unions championed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with one writer calling him “perhaps the most important of the advocates of Chinese exclusion and author of some of the most racist demagoguery presented during the anti-Chinese movement.” Gompers once wrote that the Chinese “as a race were cruel and treacherous” and called them “this Asiatic contamination” in which “gambling hells, opium joints, dens of iniquity and vice” abound. A report of the AFL’s convention in 1905 said, “Surely, America’s workmen have enough to contend with, have sufficient obstacles confronting them in their struggle to maintain themselves…without being required to meet the enervating, killing, underselling, and under-living competition of that nerveless, wantless people, the Chinese.”
Three decades after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, immigrants from Mexico, Japan, and Korea had filled many of the jobs once held by Chinese workers. Again complaining that immigrants were taking jobs and depressing wages, unions helped win passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which set severe limits on immigration from Asia and southern Europe. But with farms in the Southwest relying on Mexican immigrants, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce persuaded Congress to exempt Mexicans from those quotas. Unhappy about that exemption, William Green, Gompers’s successor as head of the AFL, went to Mexico to seek to persuade government and labor leaders there to suppress immigration into the United States, but he had little success.
As the immigrant population from Mexico rose, American unions often shunned Latino workers. Some unions organized them, often into segregated locals, fearing that these Latino workers might become strikebreakers. It was only after Communist organizers—some of the nation’s most effective organizers—began unionizing farmworkers in the 1930s and led several strikes, which the growers and police crushed, that the AFL began organizing Latino farmworkers, albeit halfheartedly. The CIO, however, with its vision of wall-to-wall unionizing, eagerly organized Hispanic as well as black and Asian American workers. By 1942, the CIO had unionized fifteen thousand Mexican workers in Los Angeles.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, millions of Americans joined the armed forces, and the nation’s farmers were desperate for workers. In response, the federal government created the bracero program, which brought in as many as 200,000 low-paid Mexican “guest workers” some years. This often-exploitative program—the braceros frequently lived in labor camps—lasted from 1942 until 1964. Unions complained that employers sometimes used the braceros to undercut strikes, and it was only when the program ended that the AFL-CIO grew serious about unionizing farmworkers. The AFL-CIO gave financial backing to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a group that focused on organizing Filipino farmworkers in California. When that union struck grape growers in and around Delano in 1965, a second struggling union—the National Farm Workers Association, founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta—joined the strike. (The two unions later merged and renamed themselves the United Farm Workers.) That grape strike lasted five years and became a crusade, which included a dramatic three-hundred-mile march from Delano to Sacramento and inspired one of the most successful consumer boycotts in American history. Two hundred UFW supporters fanned out to supermarkets and houses of worship across the country, persuading millions of Americans to shun table grapes. The United Auto Workers pledged $5,000 a month to the farmworkers’ strike fund. “You’re going to win this strike,” the UAW’s Walter Reuther told one strike rally. “And we’re going to stay with you till you do.” Stung by the boycott, twenty-six table grape growers signed union contracts in July 1970, increasing the percentage of the industry that was unionized to two-thirds.
As a boy, Cesar Chavez picked cotton, carrots, strawberries, and other crops in California after his family had lost its 120-acre farm in Yuma, Arizona. He served in the navy and then got involved in community organizing. Dolores Huerta quit her job as an elementary school teacher to devote herself to lifting farmworkers. “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.” Though self-effacing and ascetic, Chavez became the UFW’s inspiring leader; Huerta became its chief organizer and negotiator. Chavez and the union won national, even international support as he engaged in long, harrowing fasts that drew attention to la causa. The New York Times wrote that Chavez “blend[ed] the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi with the organizational skills of his mentor, the social activist Saul Alinsky.”
Chavez played a pivotal role in cementing, indeed expanding, ties between Latinos and the labor movement. He also became an icon for Latino rights and recognition. “The union’s survival, its very existence, sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity,” Chavez said. “That we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were empowering the least educated among us, the poorest among us.”
A high point came in 1975 when Governor Jerry Brown signed a landmark law giving California’s farmworkers a government-backed right to bargain collectively when a majority of workers at a farm vote to unionize. (That provision resembled the National Labor Relations Act, which excluded farmworkers.) At its zenith, the UFW bargained for about one-fourth of California’s 200,000 farmworkers. The union’s numbers and influence waned in the 1980s, however, undercut by employer opposition and the Teamsters’ maneuvering to sign contracts with many growers. Chavez said the Teamsters were seeking to destroy his union and steal its members, with many growers preferring the Teamsters, viewing it as easier to deal with and less demanding. (The growers also liked that the Teamsters were not mounting highly publicized crusades that made them look bad.) Internal tensions within the UFW also badly weakened the union; Chavez accused numerous aides of disloyalty and fired them. The union’s membership had fallen below ten thousand by the time of Chavez’s death in 1993.
In 2000, with illegal immigration rising, the AFL-CIO adopted a bold new policy on immigrants, casting aside its often hostile attitude. The labor federation called for amnesty and a path to legalization for the six million undocumented workers in the United States at the time—most of them from Latin America and Asia. Labor leaders saw how these immigrants were often horribly exploited. They also viewed such workers as an important part of labor’s future. “With this resolution, the AFL-CIO proudly stands on the side of immigrant workers,” said Linda Chavez-Thompson, the AFL-CIO’s executive vice president and the highest-ranking Hispanic in the federation’s history.
