People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy by Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols

Author:Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Science, Economics, Journalism, Writing, United States, Society, Politics, Technology
ISBN: 9781568585222
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2016-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.147

Indeed, Army bases were often adjacent to left-wing coffee shops—sometimes affiliated with the FTA148 movement—and African American, Latino, and a significant number of white GIs were radicalized. It convinced the brass that the draft was no longer viable and led to the institution of a professional army.149

When these veterans returned to jobs in American factories they brought an entirely new sensibility to a generation of workers already changing with the times. “With all the shoulder-length hair, beards, Afros and mod clothing along the line,” Newsweek observed after a visit to the Lordstown, Ohio, GM plant, “it looks for all the world like an industrial Woodstock.”150 By 1970 the “situation exploded in an upsurge of pent-up rank-and-file militancy,” as historian David Noble explained.151 The early 1970s saw the greatest wave of strike activity, work stoppages, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes since 1946. In 1970 alone 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale work stoppages of one kind or another. The Wall Street Journal characterized the situation as “the worst within memory.”152 There were aggressive attempts led by young workers to take over the steelworkers and mineworkers unions, among others, and throw out the traditional leadership. Management was “dealing with a workforce,” Fortune informed its readers, “no longer under union discipline.”153

The concerns of the workers were far more than wages and benefits; after all, real wages for male workers hit their historic peak in 1972. Automation, both in its elimination of jobs and dehumanization of those that remained, was a huge issue for the young workers. As Noble put it, workers were not happy with “management’s obsession with and struggle for control over workers.”154 “It is imperative for labor,” dissident young longshoremen wrote in a 1971 pamphlet opposing union leadership and management, “to challenge the notion that the employer—in the name of ‘progress’—can simply go ahead and slash his workforce or close his factory or, as is being planned in our industry, close an entire port, and to do so without any regard for the people and community involved.”155

“At the heart of the new mood,” the New York Times reported, “there is a challenge to management’s authority to run its plants, an issue that has resulted in some of the hardest fought battles between industry and labor in the past.” The symbol of this new wave was the three-week-long 1972 strike at the Lordstown plant led by “a group of young, hip, and inter-racial autoworkers” whose primary issue was opposing the “fastest—and most psychically deadening—assembly line in the world.”156 There were efforts to link this working-class radicalism to student and antiwar activists and liberals in general. As progressive journalist Jack Newfield put it in 1971, the way to unite these forces was to build around “the root need to redistribute wealth and the commitment to broaden democratic participation.

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