On this Labor Day, Let’s Remember What Unions Have Done for America
Reprinted from Fabius Maximus (under Creative Commons License)
by Fabius Maximus
Summary: On this Labor Day let’s revisit the lost history of the union movement, and its vital contribution to building the middle class.
To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines. To realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen. To be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father. To know these things is to understand what American labor means.
— Adlai Stevenson, in a speech to the American Federation of Labor, New York City on 22 September 1952
Contents
- Rise and Fall of America’s Middle Class seen in graphs
- Throwing away a 150 years of effort
- For More Information
- A note from our past
(1) Rise and Fall of America’s Middle Class seen in graphs
Since 1990 wages are falling as a share of Gross Domestic Income (GDI); profits are rising. The reasons are complex, the result has by now become unmistakable: a shift of our national income from return on labor to return on capital. Since the nation’s wealth is so highly concentrated, the result is rising inequality of income.
Wages as a share of Gross Domestic Income: down and falling.
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Profits as a share of Gross Domestic Income: up.
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(3) Throwing away a 150 years of effort
The middle class was not a gift of the Blue Fairy. Instead of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” there was 150 years of worker working together, mobilizing against their employers — who organized cartels to fight their employees and raise prices for their customers.
It was a long bloody struggle, The victory of unions was foundational for the growth of America’s middle class. The fall of the unions was a major factor undermining the middle class. It had many causes: corruption, greed, stupidity, infiltration by organized crime — and the long successful counter-revolution by corporations, now eroding away the middle class.
For a blow-by-blow of unions rise see this series by Erik Loomis (Asst Prof of History, U RI). The toll these people paid is as much a cost of building America as much as that paid by our the members of our armed forces.
- September 9, 1739: The Stono Rebellion
- July 2, 1822: Denmark Vesey executed for planning slave revolt in South Carolina
- August 21, 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion
- July 3, 1835: Paterson Textile Strike of 1835
- February 13, 1865: Sons of Vulcan win nation’s first union contract
- December 6, 1865: Ratification of the 13th Amendment
- June 21, 1877: Molly Maguires executed in Pennsylvania
- July 14, 1877: The Great Railroad Strike
- May 6, 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
- September 2, 1885: Rock Springs Massacre
- May 4, 1886: Haymarket Riot
- December 11, 1886: Creation of the Colored Farmers Alliance
- February 8, 1887: Grover Cleveland signs the Dawes Act
- November 22, 1887: Thibodaux Massacre
- July 4, 1892: People’s Party Convention
- July 6, 1892: The Homestead Strike
- July 11, 1892: Miners outside of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho blow up the Frisco Mill
- February 7, 1894: Cripple Creek gold miners strike
- April 30, 1894: Coxey’s Army
- June 26, 1894: Pullman Strike
- May 12, 1902: Anthracite coal miners strike in Pennsylvania begins, TR mediates
- December 30, 1905: Murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg
- November 22, 1909: Uprising of the 20,000
- August 9, 1910: invention of electric washing machine transforms women’s unpaid domestic labor
- March 25, 1911: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
- May 3, 1911: Wisconsin passes first workers compensation law
- February 24, 1912: Beating of the women and children at Lawrence
- June 7, 1913: Paterson Silk Pageant. Addendum here.
- August 3, 1913: Wheatland Riot
- April 20, 1914: Ludlow Massacre
- November 19, 1915: Joe Hill executed in Utah
- November 5, 1916: The Everett Massacre
- July 12, 1917: The Bisbee Deportation
- August 1, 1917: Frank Little lynched in Butte
- June 16, 1918: Eugene Debs arrested for violating Espionage Act, for opposition to WWI
- February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike
- November 11, 1919: The Centralia Massacre
- May 19, 1920: Matewan Massacre
- August 25, 1921: Battle of Blair Mountain
- June 11, 1925: Davis Day
- August 25, 1925: Founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
- August 23, 1927: Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
- March 7, 1932: River Rouge march and repression
- May 9, 1934: Longshoremen strike begins in San Francisco
- May 16, 1934: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike
- November 9, 1935: Creation of the CIO
- February 11, 1937: The Flint Sit-Down Strike ends
- May 30, 1937: Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago
- January 25, 1941: March on Washington Movement leads to end of official segregation in defense industry
- August 4, 1942: Creation of the Bracero Program
- June 6, 1943: Detroit Hate Strike
- July 17, 1944: Port Chicago explosion
- August 22, 1945: Air Line Stewardesses Association, first flight attendant union, forms
- September 22, 1946: Tobacco workers win contract in North Carolina, starting CIO’s Operation Dixie campaign
- December 2, 1946: The Oakland General Strike
- June 20, 1947: President Truman vetoes Taft-Hartley Act
- April 8, 1952: Truman nationalizes steel industry – Workers wages cannot rise as fast as CEOs’
- December 5, 1955: Merger of the AFL and CIO
- January 17, 1962: President Kennedy issues Executive Order 10988, authorizing collective bargaining for public workers
- April 4, 1968: Assassination of Martin Luther King during sanitation strike in Memphis
- January 5, 1970: Murder of UMWA reformer Jock Yablonski
- July 29, 1970: United Farm Workers force growers into the first union contract in the history of California agricultural labor
- April 28, 1971: OSHA begins
- May 26, 1937: Battle of the Overpass
- March 23, 1974: Coalition of Trade Union Women holds first meeting
- October 23, 1976: International Woodworkers of America Local 3-101 holds a monthly union meeting
- August 3, 1981: Air Traffic Controllers go on strike in biggest disaster in organized labor’s history
- September 17, 1989: The Pittston Strike
- May 10, 1993: Kader Toy Fire
- January 1, 1994: NAFTA
- March 4, 1998: Supreme Court rules in Oncale v. Sundonwer Offshore Services. Same-sex sexual harassment
For More Information
Posts about the conflict between labor and capital:
- The new American economy: concentrating business power to suit an unequal society, 27 April 2012
- Public employee unions – an anvil chained to the Democratic Party, 15 February 2013
- Why the 1% is winning, and we are not, 26 May 2013 — They are smart, organized, and have planned how to win.
About the New America, now under construction:
- Origins of what may become the 3rd American Republic (a plutocracy), 8 April 2011
- Why Americans should love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – we live there, 13 December 2011
- The new American economy: concentrating business power to suit an unequal society, 27 April 2012
- The voice of plutocrats yearning for dominance and control, 16 September 2012
- We’ve worked through all 5 stages of grief for the Republic. Now, on to The New America!, 8 January 2013
- Compare our New America to the America-that-once-was (a great nation), 12 June 2013
- Glimpses of the New America being born now, 18 June 2013
- Why Elizabeth Bennet could not marry Mr. Darcy. Nor could your daughter., 12 July 2013
- Watch as plutocrats mold us into a New America, a nation more pleasing to their sight, 18 July 2013
- Billionaires mold our schools to produce better help in a New America, 20 July 2013
(4) A note from our past
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