[Antiracism] Labor's Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally?

[WMass Jobs with Justice]

The labor movement, as well as the civil rights movement, achieved their
greatest influence when the Democratic administration in power perceived the
leadership of these social movements as troublesome, unreliable, and
unpredictable allies. ~ Historian Nelson Lichtenstein
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Portside Labor labor-moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG  


Labor's Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally? by Nelson
Lichtenstein
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=360 
 
Nelson Lichtenstein is MacArthur Foundation Professor of History at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the
Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. His most recent book is The Retail
Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. This article
is from a talk given at the AFL-CIO Executive Board Meeting on March 1,
2010.
 
 
With a perilous set of midterm elections on the horizon, it would be
understandable if labor and its liberal allies just closed ranks with
President Obama and the Democrats, downplayed any disappointment they might
feel, and muted their critique of his often lukewarm liberalism. After all,
if the Republicans take one or both houses of Congress, then the whole Obama
presidency will be in danger.
 
As every good unionist knows, solidarity is a great thing, but in this case,
it is the wrong prescription for the American labor movement. Instead, the
unions and other labor partisans should be difficult and demanding allies of
our president. History shows that such a posture would generate the greatest
political and organizational dividend, for labor as well as any insurgent
group that seeks to transform American politics and policy. To show what I
mean, let's take a look at two eras of labor and social movement success -
the 1930s and the 1960s - in order to win a few insights that might be
useful for our own times. As Mark Twain once wrote, "History never repeats
itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
 
There are three points to be made about such times past. First, conservative
movements and right-wing ideas actually grow more extreme in eras of liberal
and labor reform. We know that is true today, but it was also true at other
moments of change or potential change in twentieth-century U.S. history.
Second, when a Democratic administration is in power, the most potent and
efficacious strategy for labor and its leadership is to be - and be seen as
- a troublesome, even unreliable ally. And third, the labor movement needs
to be, and be seen as, a social movement. This does not come without
organizational costs. It is a dangerous strategy, but such a transformation
is essential if anything resembling an organized labor movement is to
survive.
 
We sometimes look at past moments of victory through rose-colored glasses,
but neither the era of the New Deal nor that of the civil rights movement in
the 1950s and early 1960s were times of uncontested liberalism. They were
also times of mobilization, a renewal of ideas, and activism on the Right.
The opponents of reform were not always out-of-touch reactionaries. They
were often innovative and aggressive men and women who would later achieve
power and position when the political winds tilted in their direction.
 
The Right grew in these eras not because of too much radicalism on the part
of labor and civil rights activists, but because any great reform, no matter
how carefully put forward, polarizes a society. The rise of labor in the
1930s created a kind of civil war even within the working class.
 
It was mainly nonviolent, and it would later subside, but such polarities
can be expected whenever many Americans, even some that one might expect to
be allies, see change as a subversion of their religious or ideological
worldview. In the 1930s, that social and ideological civil war divided not
just American parties, but also churches, factories, and many communities.
Anti-labor and anti-FDR rhetoric was pervasive in the years of the Great
Depression, even as the unions triumphed at Flint and Pittsburgh and in the
mines and mills of countless smaller towns.
 
One of the great right-wing demagogues of that time was Father Charles
Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Royal Oak, Michigan who pioneered the use
of radio for sermons and political talk. He was a brilliant speaker whose
audience far exceeded, in comparative terms, the reach of Fox News and its
most flamboyant pundits. Coughlin had been a supporter of FDR and labor in
1933 and 1934 because he hated the big banks, the big corporations, and the
Depression itself. "Roosevelt or Ruin" was the slogan he deployed when FDR
ran for president in 1932.
 
Indeed, Coughlin thought that Wall Street and the Communists were the twin
evils of a secular Satanism subverting the virtuous citizens of the United
States. And as Elizabeth Warren has reminded us in such compelling fashion,
Americans really do mistrust the bankers and the speculators of that New
York street, today as much as eighty years ago.
 
Father Coughlin broke with FDR when he realized that the New Deal would
regulate Wall Street, not abolish it; and because Coughlin and some other
conservative Catholics believed that the new, militant industrial unions
(who deployed as organizers lots of socialists and Communists and other
kinds of secularists) were stealing the loyalty of their own parishioners
right out from under them. Indeed, it was the success of the UAW-CIO right
in Coughlin's own Detroit that sent him into a frenzy of anti-labor,
anti-Semitic, and anti-FDR invective. To Coughlin, the New Deal was a Jewish
plot and the UAW a red front. Sinclair Lewis was thinking of people like
Father Coughlin, as well as Huey Long, the roughshod governor of Louisiana,
when he published in 1935 It Can't Happen Here, a novel that imagined a
fascist dictatorship come to America.
 
Father Coughlin was eventually defeated and silenced when the very highest
leaders of the Catholic Church realized that he was a grave liability. The
Church did not want to force American Catholics, who were probably a
majority of all the workers enrolled in the new unions during the later
years of the Great Depression, to choose between their Catholic faith and
the CIO and its New Deal allies. Cardinal Francis Spellman, the powerful,
conservative New York bishop, eventually told FDR and other federal
officials that he would stand aside if the federal government cut off
Coughlin's radio license.
 
The first point to remember from this tale is that liberal administrations
and social movements are bound to face right-wing demagogues. To defeat that
threat, labor and other progressive groups must go after their base. This is
best done by mobilizing their own constituencies, to create an alternative
structure of meaning and motion around which those on the fence or even deep
within the enemy camp may rally. That is what the CIO did to Coughlin. The
second point is that there was never an era of good feeling in American
politics, nor for that matter an era when labor and its liberal allies could
comfortably command the allegiance of a majority of the populace. They have
always been under attack.
 
The next important point to remember is that the labor movement, as well as
the civil rights movement, achieved their greatest influence when the
Democratic administration in power perceived the leadership of these social
movements as troublesome, unreliable, and unpredictable allies. Labor
leaders like John L. Lewis of the Mineworkers, Philip Murray of the
Steelworkers, and Walter Reuther of the Autoworkers were frequently seen by
the White House as "going off the reservation," a phrase I first encountered
in the archives at Hyde Park when I poured through the files of FDR's public
policy staff.
 
In 1936 John L. Lewis took a half million dollars from the UMW treasury -
real money in those days - and parceled it out to FDR's reelection effort,
but on Labor Day 1937 Lewis denounced the president for trying just a few
months before to remain neutral during the Little Steel strike, an
industrial war that reached its bloody climax when ten demonstrators were
shot to death by police outside of the Republic Steel Corporation on
Chicago's South Side. Declaimed Lewis in his rich Shakespearian voice:
 
Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and
they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one
who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house
to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its
adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.
 
In 1940 John L. Lewis, by then president of the CIO, rejected FDR's bid for
a third term and supported Republican Wendell Willkie, because he thought
U.S. entry into the Second World War would lead to the same disastrous
results for labor as involvement in the Great War twenty years before:
right-wing reaction, strike-breaking, and the destruction of industrial
unionism.
 
John L. Lewis was a difficult and sometimes vain individual. Did he win
friends in the White House? Certainly not! Did he win respect for the labor
movement and policies more to their liking? Yes, if only because FDR and his
advisors were determined, on the eve of the Second World War, to ensure that
labor would be an ally and that the influence of Lewis, and the politics he
represented, would be effectively marginalized.
 
The same was true of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights leadership
in the early 1960s. Like the leaders of labor during the insurgent 1930s and
1940s, civil rights leaders were unreliable allies, because the movements
they represented were multifaceted and in many respects uncontrollable.
These ministers, students, and local activists were loyal first and foremost
to the movement over which they tried to preside.
 
Although King's canonization today often obscures the real tensions that
existed between his movement and the administrations of John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson, King, like John L. Lewis, was indeed a troublesome and
unpredictable ally. When, in the late summer of 1964, LBJ asked King to
suspend demonstrations during the fall campaign, King was inclined to go
along, but he soon rejected the president's request because he simply did
not have the power or even the moral authority to enforce such a suspension
on a social movement then at flood tide. King thereby cemented his own
leadership and pushed the president to back with unprecedented vigor one of
the nation's most radical pieces of legislation, the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
which finally consigned a reactionary brand of states' rights to the dustbin
of American history.
 
One other example of this sort: just before May 1, 2006, Congressional
allies of the Latino organizations and unions that were about to stage a
massive "Day Without Immigrants" march advised organizers to hold off - or
at least to have their march on a Saturday, not a workday, when the event
would be less disruptive. But the organizers, a very loose-knit coalition,
went ahead, and with magnificent results, which transformed a march into a
general strike and helped solidify a Latino-labor alliance that did much to
engender the massive vote for Barack Obama two years later. 
 
And now to my final point. The labor movement wins when it is broad and
inclusive, but the expansion comes with its own dangers. Today, given the
dire straits in which the labor movement finds itself, those risks must be
courted. We know about those risks and rewards from the experience of social
movements in the recent past. The feminist movement provides a fitting
parallel. It has transformed America - but who are the feminists, and how do
you organize them? You don't. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when that
movement took off, people simply announced that they were part of the
women's liberation movement: there was no test, no membership card, no dues
to pay, no line to follow.
 
The same was true of the labor movement in the first third of the twentieth
century, before the codification of labor law and the creation of the
administrative apparatus necessary to enforce it. Under those circumstances,
there was plenty of room for a labor movement to define itself in expansive
fashion. Was it an immigrant rights organization which gave voice to
Southern and Eastern Europeans recently stigmatized by the 1924 immigration
restriction law? Was it a movement for industrial democracy, even socialism,
in which middle class people could participate, and even become leaders? Or
was it a community mobilization in which women and all sorts of non-workers
of that time could play major roles?
 
Those questions remain controversial. In the early 1970s when the feminist
movement pushed at labor's door, many women unionists began to organize a
group that eventually became the Coalition of Labor Union Women. But would
unaffiliated pro-labor feminists be allowed to join? This would have added
invaluable energy to the new labor-feminist alliance, but it would also have
transformed CLUW into the kind of grouping that the labor leadership of that
era might not entirely understand, much less control. So George Meany, who
actually remembered similar conflicts stretching all the way back to the
Women's Trade Union League in the 1920s, decreed that only existing union
women could become part of CLUW. That organization was built, but it lost
its links to the feminist Left.
 
It is therefore not enough for organized labor to broaden itself by
welcoming new forces into its ranks. It must also adopt as its own the
students and activists who are now on the outside looking in. It is from
those unruly movements and initiatives that a new generation of activists
will arise. In courting such individuals, labor faces the unpredictable and
the untidy, because the AFL-CIO may well be held responsible for the actions
and rhetoric of people it does not fully understand or control. But that is
a risk that must be taken if we are to become a social movement once again.
 
 
PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.
 
Submit material: email labor at portside.org.
Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
Subscribe: email support at portside.org, subject 'portsidelabor subscribe'
Unsubscribe: email support at portside.org, subject 'portsidelabor unsubscribe'
Account assistance: portside.org/contact
Archives: http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A0=PORTSIDELABOR
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To manage your subscription settings or unsubscribe, go to
<http://lists.wmjwj.org/mailman/listinfo/workersrights>
http://lists.wmjwj.org/mailman/listinfo/workersrights, or to unsubscribe,
send a blank email to
<mailto:workersrights-unsubscribe at lists.prometheuslabor.com>
workersrights-unsubscribe at lists.prometheuslabor.com.
 
The Western Mass. Jobs with Justice Workers' Rights list posts opportunities
for you to learn about and show solidarity with workplace and working class
struggles. And these events are opportunities for JwJ members to fulfill
their pledge: " <http://www.jwj.org/pledge.html> I'll be there for workers'
rights at least five times a year!" This is the core mission of Jobs with
Justice ( <http://www.jwj.org/> www.jwj.org), affirming that workers' rights
are human rights.
 
To subscribe, send a blank email to
<mailto:workersrights-subscribe at lists.prometheuslabor.com>
workersrights-subscribe at lists.prometheuslabor.com or go to
<http://lists.wmjwj.org/mailman/listinfo/workersrights>
http://lists.wmjwj.org/mailman/listinfo/workersrights.
 
Western Mass Jobs with Justice
640 Page Blvd #101
Springfield MA 01104
(413) 827-0301 
 <mailto:wmjwj at wmjwj.org> wmjwj at wmjwj.org
 
Check out our other mailing lists at http://wmjwj.org/our-lists.  
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/antiracism/attachments/20100624/6f388d7e/attachment-0001.htm>