U.S. bosses fight unions with
a ferocity that is unmatched in the so-called free world. In the early days of
the republic, master craftsmen prosecuted fledgling unions as criminal
conspiracies that aimed to block their consolidation of wealth and property.
During modern times, corporations threaten
the jobs of pro-union workers in over half of all union elections—and follow through on the threat
one-third of the time. In between, bosses have resorted to spies and frame-ups,
physical violence, court injunctions, private armies of strikebreakers, racist
appeals and immigrant exploitation.
The labor
question has never been a genteel debate about power and fairness in
America.
A new book from the University
of Illinois Press’ “The
Working Class History in American History” series offers a broad survey of
how bosses have historically engaged in union-busting. Against
Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism is a
collection of scholarly essays edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson.
The essays that comprise Against
Labor cover a period that stretches from the late 1880s to the Clinton
era. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger explore the racist assumptions that were
built into so-called “scientific management.” The men with the stopwatches who
broke production down into ever smaller tasks had ethnic preferences for each:
Lithuanians for grinding steel, “American Poles” for forging, never Mexicans
for the night shift and so on. A happy (for management) side effect of this
speed up was the simmering resentment between different nationalities that hindered
workplace solidarity.
Chad Pearson shines a light on
Progressive-era worker organizations that were created and propped up by
employers to help workers resist “union monopolies.” In other words, they
created unions for scabs to break strikes and open up closed union shops.
Robert H. Woodrum looks at the
use of the Ku Klux Klan and employer-sponsored vigilantism to run union
organizers out of the Alabama docks and reverse the modest gains southern
workers made during World War I. Michael Dennis updates the southern picture by
documenting the UFCW’s sustained, large-scale organizing drive in non-union
Virginia supermarkets in the early 1990s. Already facing enormous competitive
pressure from Walmart, the supermarkets dug in for a years-long fight with little
concern for the law. The story is a perfectly concise example of just how
broken the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was as a venue for
protecting workers by the time Bill Clinton took office.
None of these stories are
particularly earth-shattering revelations to people who study unions and
union-busting. What’s most notable is how employer tactics get recycled and
adapted from era to era, and that no era was free from union-busting. That’s a
key point of Against Labor. Editors Feurer and Pearson place their
collection squarely within the new body of scholarship on the “rise of the
right.”
Contrary to a popular
narrative that has an activist right wing resurging in the years between Nixon’s
1968 election and Reagan’s
firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981, the modern right wing
began rising in reaction to the New Deal. Many employers simply never accepted
the legitimacy of state intervention on behalf of union rights that was
enshrined in the original National Labor Relations Act. These employers—mostly
small and mid-sized firms—acted as an advance guard against union rights.
They pressed against the edges
of the law, testing their ability to fire union activists for cause, replace
strikers, lockout recalcitrant unions and restrict organizers’ access to the
job site. They learned to love making the NLRB go to court to enforce orders
against bosses’ union busting, for in the courts they found far more
sympathetic arbiters of management’s rights. The biggest holes in labor law’s
protections of workers rights, exploited
in the anti-union drives of the 1980s, mostly come from bad court decisions
in the postwar years that some people like to kid themselves were a golden age
of labor-management cooperation.
Sure, there were employers who
talked a good game about their (junior) “partners” in labor, kept their
pensions and healthcare plans funded and mostly avoided knock-down, drag-out
contract fights. But, clearly in retrospect, they were ready to beat down and
bust their own unions just as soon as the advance guard of reactionaries
created a political environment where it was possible.
The most fascinating story in
the collection, “The Strange Career of A.A. Ahner: Reconsidering Blackjacks and
Briefcases,” comes from Feurer. It tells of a hired gun whose career bridged
two very different eras of labor-management relations in the Kansas City area.
Scholars have referred to the advent of the NLRB as a kind of transition
from blackjacks
to briefcases for anti-union employers. It’s commonly assumed that the
Pinkertons, thugs and company “unions,” employers’ first line of defense
against unions in the 1920s, were muscled out of the way by a new generation of
lawyers who promised to “work the system” to represent their clients’ interests
at the NLRB. But in Ahner we find a direct, lineal connection between the two
approaches.
Ahner ran his own detective
agency beginning during World War I. For the right price, he would spy on
workers, plant bombs and frame union activists (he had lots of friends in law
enforcement at a time when there weren’t terribly rigid boundaries between
local business and police). This work continued into the 1930s, when he was
investigated by a Senate committee probing how employers were violating the new
labor act.
Recognizing that times had
changed, Ahner improved his image, if not his underlying philosophy. Working
with a local priest, he became co-chair of the St. Louis Labor-Management
Committee, which counseled conciliation and arbitration. Through this
“volunteer” work, he lined up consulting gigs with unionized employers. Mostly
this was for bargaining and grievances, where union representatives who knew
his history would be aghast to find him sitting across the table with an air of
respectability. But occasionally—even in the 1950’s—he was called on for union
avoidance work, where he pressed the limits of employers’ rights to their own
free speech and to squelch their workers’.
Ahner’s story enriches our
understanding of the real roots of today’s anti-unionism. One wishes Rosemary
Feurer had expanded her research on Ahner and others like him and made that the
subject of her book.
It also serves as a warning
that today’s union-buster will claim to have “always” had a “productive working
relationship” with unions when we begin to win again. But the only “always”
that applies to American capitalists is that they are always against labor.
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