Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns

Author:Joe Burns [Burns, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642596816
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2022-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

Injunctions and State Power

Historically, when labor has responded with militancy, we have had to confront repression from the government, condemnation from the corporate press, and the biased “black robed” defenders of capital— judges. From the jailing of socialist union leader Eugene Debs for his role in the Pullman strike to the 1914 Ludlow massacre to mowing down strikers and their families in the 1937 Little Steel strike, the rich have been ruthless in protecting their untold wealth. So any strategy based on militancy must deal with the issue of state and employer repression.

Ahmed White has studied employers’ use of violence in great detail in labor history, including a book about the Little Steel strike called The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America. One of the relatively rare defeats for labor in the 1930s was the campaign of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee to organize a group of companies called Little Steel. The giant US Steel had reached an agreement to recognize the union after seeing the sit-down strikes in auto. But Little Steel, which included Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, held out against unionization. The group was anything but little and vehemently anti-union.

Like other scholars, White notes that questions of violence and coercion are central to any strike.

The essential purposes of picketing—especially the mass picketing—were to coerce scabs from entering the mills, draw out those who remained inside and ultimately prevent the company from running the plants…. For their part, the companies were quite willing to use force to push through the picket lines, intimidate picketers, and provoke them and thus undermine the legitimacy of the cause while paving the way for legal intervention.5

The essential problem unions face is that in order to win a strike, the union must be able to forcibly stop scabs. But when they do, employers paint the actions as violent and use force themselves or get the government to intervene.

Like many of the strikes of the 1930s, the Little Steel strikes started off with mass picketing at plants in the South Side of Chicago and Youngstown, Ohio. Thousands of picketers surrounded plants, prepared to starve the employers out. The employers, however, were prepared to go into battle. The congressional La Follette Committee investigated in the wake of the strike and “determined that during the strike, the Little Steel companies in Ohio and Michigan were backed by 3,600 armed men (not counting the National Guard), of which nearly 2,000 were under their direct control.”6

During a peaceful demonstration that would come to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, Chicago police fired on the crowd, killing ten and injuring many others. Unlike many of the other battles of the 1930s that were under the leadership of class struggle unionists, the top-down Steelworker leadership failed to escalate the dispute. With the government intervening to break the picket lines, the strike was eventually lost.

Contained within this battle are the essential points of union activity.

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