Ujima WIRE | #StrikeEdition
From Alabama to Algeria, the fight to transform conditions for workers has been splashed across the front pages of newspapers since the start of the year. In California and New York, graduate students organized teach-ins and strikes to widen visibility around labor exploitation within universities and educational institutions writ large. Workers have organized strikes at cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, while dozens of others have made efforts to unionize. In the media world, editors and writers have been fighting for the last decade.
Meanwhile, Amazon workers have been organizing across the globe as the multinational company rakes in billions of dollars in revenue, with little trickling down to the low-wage employees throughout the supply chain. More locally teachers, nurses, and truck drivers have been sitting down at bargaining tables across Massachusetts.
The pandemic has had a devastating effect on the global economy and shined a light on the value of labor within our economic system. Historically strikes, the most common form of work stoppage, have been utilized as a method of leveraging power to negotiate labor conditions across many industries. By withholding labor, which employers depend on to produce goods and services, workers are able to work in concert to resist an often occurring power imbalance that exists between themselves and employers.
Last winter the Institute of Policy Studies reported that “[a] handful of billionaires and corporations have seen their wealth surge to record levels, in part as a result of their monopoly status and opportunism during the pandemic.” This surge in wealth against the backdrop of unprecedented economic vulnerability, housing instability, low pay, and weak employee protections has fueled a wave of grassroots labor organizing, which has been steadily rising since 2018.
In this edition of the Ujima WIRE, we will explore the organized labor movements that have been campaigning for workers’ rights and better working conditions for all of us.
Roots of the Labor Movement
The organized labor movement can be found as early as the early days of western colonialism and settlement. In the groundbreaking text Tacky’s Revolt, Harvard professor and historian Vincent Brown traces a series of insurrections and uprisings in modern-day Jamaica. “Brown studies the movements of the insurrection closely and draws conclusions about its military and political aims. With experience of African political and economic life, the slaves sought something more than freedom alone,” notes John Gardner in a review for The Guardian. “The economic, political and cultural consequences of this war within wars reverberated out from Jamaica to other colonies, across the ocean to Great Britain and back again to the island, where the revolt reshaped public life and lodged deeply in collective memory.”
Though not commonly recognized as a part of the greater labor movement narrative, it is important to locate these movements towards freedom as sites of economic, political, and social struggle. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” writes the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Though Black workers were disenfranchised, they continued to fight through the early 20th century for better political and working conditions to create the basis of the modern labor movement.
In an essay on the subject of Black labor movements, James Gilbert Cassedy writes, “Locating records that document the role of African Americans in American labor history can be difficult because the federal agencies and offices that created these records arranged their indexes and files by name of institutions such as the name of the company or the name of the union involved in a controversy.” The archive, of course, is the story of a nation’s memory and, as many scholars assert, very purposefully occlude certain historical subjects. Still, we can look to the Caulkers Association, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, American League of Colored Laborers, the Colored National Labor Union, National Domestic Workers Union of America, and many others as early drivers of the movement to protect the common interests of, mostly working-class, Black workers through the Industrial Revolution. Collective action, and many times strikes, were part and parcel given the rampant discrimination, low wages and racism workers faced.
By the Great Depression, the labor movement seemed to stall nationally as widescale unemployment soared, however, it would be remembered as a period of great gains for workers. In 1930, unemployed councils sprung up across the country, demanding adequate economic relief and organizing eviction protests. Many of these chapters were interracial and took part in local and national demonstrations. Black Communist leader and founder of the African Blood Brotherhood Cyril Briggs celebrated the movement as “the successful breaking down of the wall of prejudice between white and Negro workers fostered by the employers and the substitution of working-class solidarity and fraternization.” This unique instance of solidarity would crop up throughout the Civil Rights movement, though far and between as workers of color still faced discrimination in the workplace, racialized violence in the streets, and rarely had access to join all-white unions.
Black Power
In the 1960s, the Black political movement had made gains at the federal level, “[y]et what is too often neglected in both African American studies and US labor studies is an account of the extensive African American activism in the industrial unions,” writes Lee Sustar in the International Socialist Review.
Sustar notes that many participants in organized protests and urban rebellion of the Black Power era were workers. Their social activism “found expression in workplace militancy as well. Between 1956 and 1965, there were never more than 4,000 strikes in a single year in the US. Then, from 1967 to 1974, there was an average of 5,239 strikes per year. From 1956 to 1965, an annual average of 1.53 million workers were involved in strikes. But from 1967 to 1971, an average of 49.5 million strike days were lost annually. The strike wave peaked in 1970, with 66.4 million strike days lost.”
He continues, “Rank-and-file initiative was central to this strike activity. […] Besides the postal workers’ strike, the most successful wildcat was the three-month walkout by Teamster truckers, which included a $1.85 increase over 39 months, an average wage increase of 13 percent per year. This constituted ‘the highest nationwide increase for a leading union in the country’s history.’ […] Rising with the number of strikes were pay increases established in labor contracts. The inflation-adjusted wage levels of 1973 remain the historical high, underscoring the gains won by the strikes.”
Additionally, students, postal and auto workers were among notable organized labor and strike movements, spurred by the Black Power movement, who won better conditions for their respective fields.
’Til This Day
Union membership over the decades has fallen, and with it, we have seen the stalling of the minimum wage, loss of the social safety nets gained since the 1930s, and a rise in corporate monopolies. In 2018 the United States saw a record number of strikes due to labor disputes. “A total of 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year — the highest number since 1986,” reported Alexia Fernández Campbell for Vox. In 2019, teachers and private-sector workers, for instance, those in the grocery and automotive industries, kept 2019 on pace with campaigns from Dedham, MA to the Pacific Northwest.
“Data released this week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 2019 had a higher number of “major work stoppages,” meaning strikes and lockouts, involving 1,000 or more workers than any year since 2001. The Economic Policy Institute notes that 2019 also saw the most strikes involving 20,000 or more workers than any year since 1993, when BLS first started keeping track,” reported Mother Jones in February 2020, “The General Motors strike in September and October was the largest strike of the year in terms of work days lost; the 29-day strike, involving 46,000 workers, resulted in a cumulative loss of more than a million days of labor and a $600 million loss for GM.
The end-of-decade rise in strikes comes even as the unemployment rate remains below 4 percent. In a report released yesterday, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute suggest that this means workers feel confident that if they lose their job for striking, they can find another. It also suggests workers are unsatisfied with their pay. ‘Working people are not seeing the robust wage growth that one might expect with such a low unemployment rate,” the researchers stated, “and inequality continues to grow.’”
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new term rose to describe workers, which includes many people of color, who the economy couldn’t function without. “The workers whose labor was all too often been ignored, dismissed, or rendered invisible before Covid-19 arrived were suddenly thrust into the spotlight, greeted with rounds of applause and signs of gratitude and granted a brand new designation: essential,” stated Kim Kelly in an op-ed for NBC News.
The honeymoon soon faced strife, as workers coordinated strikes, walkouts, and protests for workplace protection, safety, and better pay. “We left for our own protection,” said Norma Kennedy, an American Apparel factory worker, to the Guardian. “Beforehand, management said if someone tested positive they would shut down and have the plant cleaned. When workers tested positive, they didn’t want to shut it down. They’re not really concerned about the workers.”
The Guardian continues, “Working conditions, low pay and lack of safety protections have triggered protests throughout the pandemic as workers across various industries, including food service, meat processing, retail, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare have come together to protest about issues, many of which were apparent before the coronavirus. ‘There are no federal mandates or requirements to implement the social distancing guidance or anything else. It’s only guidance and employers can choose to implement them or not,” said Deborah Berkowitz, director of worker safety and health for the National Employment Law Project. “And that is why, in an unprecedented way, they are walking out to bring public attention to the fact that their companies are not protecting their safety and health.”
New Horizons
Last month, President Biden signed an executive order “creating a White House task force to promote labor organizing, an attempt to use the power of the federal government to reverse a decades-long decline in union membership.” This follows decades of lobbying and organizing by labor activists across the country, from domestic workers to teacher’s unions.
“The task force [led by Vice President Harris] will focus on, among other things, helping the federal government encourage its own workers to join unions and bargain collectively, and finding ways to make it easier for workers, especially women and people of color, to organize and bargain in parts of the country and in industries that are hostile to unions […] Mr. Biden’s task force will solicit the views of union leaders, academics and labor advocates and is to deliver its recommendations within 180 days,” writes Noam Scheiber for the New York Times.
While the outlook seems hopeful, with President Biden regarded as the most pro-union president in years, opposition still looms. The defeat at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, AL., though heavily supported by activists and political officials, signals a need for reform and “new organizing strategies.”
Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, might have said it best, “[E]ssential workers don’t want to be treated anymore as if they were disposable. They are demanding a voice in how their companies respond to the pandemic. Having a voice is a life-and-death matter now more than ever. Success will be a matter of whether consumers and policymakers will be inspired by these workers’ courage.”
More Resources:
- In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation by Matthew Desmond
- This is Hell! Podcast — No peace is given with Vincent Brown
- The Negro and the Labor Unions by Booker T. Washington
- A Brief History Of Labor, Race, And Solidarity by Labor Commission on Race and Economic Justice
- Black Power at the point of production, 1968–73 by Lee Sustar
