Still marching, still fighting

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LabourStart's Labour Photo of the Year

Kudos to the photographer, Gerardo Correa. More info on the context for the picture here.

Hillbilly Women by Kathy Kahn (Avon Books 1972)

When all this murdering and killing happened over at Evarts, that was when the coal company hired gun thugs and they met up with the miners that was out on strike. Well, Dad took the blame for those killings. Course, he'd been a coal miner all his life and they'd worked him day and night in those mines. And he worked with the union to make things better for the people.

But Dad wasn't at Evarts when the killings happened. He was out robbing the commissary. But Dad's brother, Sam Hicks, was there at Evarts. I think he was the one that had the machine gun. But all this time, Dad was robbing the company store.

I think it was in the spring of the year, long about '31. Dad and the other miners had come out on strike and the gun thugs were after them.

I remember Dad coming to the house and getting the shotgun and a lot of shells. He made us all get under the floor and told Mommy to keep us barricaded under there and not let us out. And I remember Mom a-beggin' him not to go out. But they had been working him hard in those mines, night and day. So he went out and joined the other miners on strike.

so anyway, this night he come in after the shotgun, that was the night before the killings at Evarts started. But Dad, the reason he wanted the gun was some of the miners and their families was starving and they needed some food. He aimed to get it for them.

Dad went up to the commissary and took about five other men with him. He went into the commissary and held his shotgun on the company men. Then he told the miners to fill all these bags full of food. They filled hundred pound bags of beans, sugar, lard, coffee, and taters. While he was holding the gun on the company men, Dad said what time he was around organizing with the union there wasn't going to be no people going hungry . . . The men took the food out and distributed it according to the size of the families that was out on strike.

Wyoming Wilson speaking to Kathy Kahn.

Division Street: America by Studs Terkel (New Press 1967)

I think the poor class of people, both Negro and white, as bad as I hate to say this, being a union man, I believe they've forgotten a lot of these things. In those days, if you had a car transfer, nobody threw away a transfer. They would put it where somebody else could get it. Nobody threw away a cigarette butt. It was awful hard to find a cigarette, but if a guy had one, he would choke it and give it to the next guy. Everybody was very friendly at that time.

Today, based on the war economy and the unions, some people make a few dollars, and the feeling, the atmosphere is different. Labor's respectable now, it's status quo. If you fight against these guys, you're labeled. Fear. A lot of fellas want to know how come George Meany don't walk together with Martin Luther King, you know, in these demonstrations. We evade the question. (Laughs.)

There was a meeting downtown where all the business agents were, labor leaders. I thought they were gonna pull Mayor Daley's pants down and kiss him. These guys go overboard. And they were raising a question of why we wasn't organizin' more. Why there wasn't more than five Negroes out of two, three hundred guys! So I finally got up enough courage to get the floor. (Laughs.)

So I told 'em, "Looking around the room here, you guys got all diamond rings, manicures." Honest, I didn't know Bill Lee* had a telephone in his Mark IV, air-conditioned, chauffeur, everything. (Laughs.) And I said, "The image of so-called labor leaders is not what it was in the old days. Now you can't tell 'em from a businessman." So they accepted the criticism. ('Lew Gibson' speaking to Studs Terkel about the contrast between the hungry thirties and the prosperous sixties.)

* Bill Lee was the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor at the time.

On the Republic Window Sit-In

Latest post from the World Socialist Party of the United States website has an interesting take on the Republic Window Sit-In.

Hardhats, hidden history and hard realities

I'm a bit chastened to admit this but the fact of the matter is that I used to read more about the history of the American Labor Movement when I was back in Britain than I do now that I live in the States.

It wasn't so much that I was doing the 'revolutionary tourism' bit, but more a matter of being able to score some excellent books secondhand on the subject that would be now beyond my financial reach. The Encyclopedia of the American Left or Louis Adamic's 'Dynamite' or Joyce Kornbluth's 'Rebel Voices' or any of Eric Foner's volumes of labor history are must haves to have on your shelf. Such books are just not as readily available second-hand as they once were. Not sure if the internet is to blame or maybe there is a new generation of radicals who are less inclined to pass their books on. I hope it's the latter.

The gaps in my knowledge of American Labor have to be filled in somehow, and local cable tv is as good a place to start as any.

This morning's New York 1's carried the wee nugget that on this day in history in 1970 100,000 construction workers (and others) marched down Wall Street to show their support for Nixon's war policy in both Vietnam and Cambodia. Led by the President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, Peter Brennan, the march was to show both the respectable face of blue collar America and its social patriotism in light of the 'Hard Hat Riots' that had taken place in New York City twelve days before.

On May 8th a couple of hundred construction workers had run rampant against anti-war demonstators who were protesting about the murder of the four students at Kent State University four days previously and, as the New York Times article already linked to states, their violence was savage, indiscriminate, and made the actions of a minority of R*ngers supporters in Manchester last week look like a Teddy Bears picnic by comparison.

I did write a "wee nugget" when initially making reference to this shameful episode in American Labor history, and I meant it despite the fact that it doesn't reflect too cleverly on the 'noble worker'. Mob violence is mob violence whoever is meting it out and I do think it's necessary to get some sense of the whole picture of the US Labor Movement. It was (and is) exceptionally grubby in places and its unsavoury nature doesn't begin and end with 'On The Waterfront' or the likes of Gompers and Meany.

Breaking News: SEIU invades Labor Notes

Breaking story from the World Socialist Party of the United States website:

"The Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) has sent in several bus loads of members to disrupt the annual meeting of Labor Notes in Detroit. The Labor Notes conference is one of the most important gatherings of rank and file labor activists in Canada and the US . . . ." [READ MORE]

There is no defence for intimidatory tactics within the union movement. We should be supporting the fullest democracy and participation. It's that simple. It should be the abc of working class self-organisation.