A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis

Author:Erik Loomis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971628
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

Cold War Workers

The decline of union radicalism was not written when the Oakland General Strike ended. The union movement still had a lot of momentum. Overall, union membership rose from 10 million in 1941 to 15 million in 1947.44 But the 1946 strike wave led to a massive political backlash. Despite the growing power of the American working class, unions had almost no presence in much of the nation. More than 50 percent of CIO members lived in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York, while only 14 percent lived in the South and Southwest. In these parts of the country, politicians had no political reason to support unions with voters who found unions distant, vaguely foreign, and often threatening.45 The hate the CIO felt in the South during Operation Dixie was reflected in the votes of southern politicians and in the actions of southern white workers who saw unions as northern Jewish institutions that promoted race mixing and integration. In the 1948 U.S. Senate election that launched Lyndon Johnson into the national spotlight, he lambasted his opponent Coke Stevenson for being in the pocket of unions, even as Johnson himself courted CIO support behind the scenes. It was the smart political move for a conservative Texas electorate. It was much the same in Arizona. Democrats controlled state politics in the 1940s, but they had more in common with Alabama Dixiecrats than northern liberals. They despised the New Deal and would support Barry Goldwater’s radical right 1964 presidential candidacy. Said one CIO organizer, “There are two types of Democrats here. Both are controlled by the same interests”; that is, the state’s business community.46

By the end of 1946, calls poured in from newspaper editors and politicians to purge the communists from organized labor and make sure workers could never again call a general strike. Unions faced growing political pressure against their leftist members. The Smith Act of 1940 mandated that all aliens register with federal authorities and allowed for the deportation of alien subversives. The first Smith Act trial was against Socialist Workers Party members, including members of Teamsters Local 574, which had led the 1934 Minneapolis truckers’ strike. Eighteen people were found guilty of violating the law, laying the groundwork for the anticommunist crusades of the postwar period.47

All of this led to the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. This law banned most of the actions the CIO had used to win their transformative victories, including wildcat strikes, secondary picketing, mass boycotts, and union donations to federal political campaigns. Labor called it the “Slave Labor Bill” and found their newfound power suddenly fleeting. The bill allowed states to pass so-called right-to-work laws that force unions to represent people in the workplace who refused to become members or pay dues. This meant that politically conservative states could make unionization much more difficult, undermining the potential for a revived Operation Dixie. In today’s anti-union mania, several states have recently passed such laws, including the former union strongholds of Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as West Virginia and Kentucky.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.