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Industrial unionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Industrial Union" redirects here. For the Finnish trade union, see Industrial Union (Finland).
Part of a series on
Organised labour
Labour movement
Labour rights
Trade unions
Strike action
Labour parties
Academic disciplines

Industrial unionism is a trade union organising method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of skill or trade, thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations.

Industrial unionism contrasts with craft unionism, which organizes workers along lines of their specific trades.[1]

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  • Industrial Unionism: CIO, Flint Strike of 1936 and the UAW
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  • The I.W.W. - Its History, Structure, and Method by Vincent ST. JOHN | Full Audio Book
  • American Federation of Labor (American Labor Movement)
  • The State of the Unionism

Transcription

One of the core questions of the New Deal was how to stimulate demand for goods. That is how to get money into the hands of working people who would spend it. Now for FDR, one of the best ways to do this was to affirm the rights of labor to organize for better wages. It seems sort of odd to imagine that the federal state would support labor. After all, think about all the events of the 19th century were federal troops were used repeatedly to break labor unions. And yet, this is what Roosevelt does with the passage of the Wagner Act. It creates for the very first time a legal right of workers to organize. The legal right not only to organize but to have a government body the National Labor Relations Board oversee elections to make sure that those elections of unions are enforced. They can use the courts to support the rights of unionists to organize. This is a radical shift both for workers and for politics. It marks the beginning of the long term alliance between the Democratic Party and organized labor. The widespread support of the Roosevelt administration, not only in the Wagner Act but an earlier acts as well, lent labor a new legitimacy, a new kind of social authority that labor leaders try to capitalize on. And so a resurgent labor movement of the 1930s in the face of the Great Depression came not only above but from below, from the resurgent organizing especially of unskilled workers. Now in the 19th Century, the AFL had been very clear they didn't want unskilled workers those who are outside of skilled crafts to be part of the a AFL. But in the 1930s, there was yet again another attempt to organize the unskilled by a man named John L. Lewis. The most radical thing about John L. Lewis who was a western miner was, in fact, how non radical he was. Let me explain that for a second. What I mean is that previous organizations, like the Knights of Labor, that tried to organize unskilled workers were always hell-bent on overthrowing capitalism, reforming society, transforming the basics of how the economy worked. John L. Lewis just wanted better wages for the workers. And so his organization, the CIO, which initially starts with miners and with garment workers and textile workers, is focused on bringing unskilled workers into the benefits of modern capitalist consumption. Let me explain. Consider how steelworkers that were part of the CIO began to organize. Listen to this thing I'm going to read to you that was spoken in Homestead, Pennsylvania on July 5, 1936. "Through this union we shall win higher wages, shorter hours and a better standard of living. We shall win leisure for ourselves, and opportunity for our children. We shall abolish industrial despotism. We shall make real the dreams of the pioneers who pictured America as a land where all might live in comfort and happiness." And happiness? What? Leisure? Comfort? These are not the things that one says when one is embarking on a radical program. This is really the bread and butterism of Gompers brought to industrial labor. But organizing industrial workers, organizing the unskilled has always been much more difficult because they are so easily replaced. What made it different in the 1930s was the change in the constitution of capitalism itself, in the heavy industrial investment, in things like assembly lines, in things like these long distance supply chains of different components. And so what John L. Lewis' genius was in recognizing that in the 1930s the new kind of heavy investments in production allowed for a new kind of organizing. If you were looking to organize a new union in the middle of the Great Depression, you would probably be thought of as crazy. I mean after all, the Great Depression, this is not a time of when workers are in high demand. And yet, it's in the middle of the Great Depression in December of 1936 that the United Auto Workers, one of the most vigorous and powerful post-war unions, finds its beginnings. It happens in Flint, Michigan. And it happens there because of the strategic genius of the new CIO. You see, in Flint, Michigan at one particular plant, the Fisher Body Plant #1, GM made the bodies for all their cars. For all their cars, there a particular set of dyes that stamped metal into a body. It couldn't be replaced. And so if somehow that auto body plant could be shut down, everything else in the GM network would also shut down, all the tire plants, all the lights, everything. What they realized was that factories were no longer isolated. They were part of long distance national supply chains. And to pick the most vulnerable place in that supply chain was to bring down the entire company. Even if it was the largest company in America. Even if it was General Motors. GM knew that they were planning this. And so they tried to sneak these dyes out of the factory in the middle of the night. And luckily, the workers had anticipated this and set up an emergency lighting system. So the slope of a switch, a light went off and 3,000 workers stormed the factory. They immediately got into the factory. And what happened next is what was truly radical, especially for someone as lazy as I am. They just sat down. They just sat down. They just sat down on sofas. They play cards. They hung around. And what did that mean? It meant that the machines couldn't be moved out. But most importantly, they couldn't be shot at either. They couldn't be shot at. They could be attacked because of the threat of damage to these very expensive dyes that couldn't be reproduced anywhere else. GM tries to get them out. They shut off the heat in the middle a Michigan winter. They cut off food. And so the workers had to take food up 24' ladders through the windows. Even some shots were fired, though not as many as one would think because they were afraid of damaging the dyes. And so this control, this control of the factory, this ability of the workers not only to occupy that space, but defend it, not only with the water hoses that threw water out in the middle of the freezing air but also with two pound door handles that they could easily throw at anyone that would rush them. They could defend it. But they could only defend it against the local police and the company guards. And this is where it takes a turn because the governor did not send in the militia. The president didn't send in the Army. The president was in support of labor generally. And the governor was, himself, the son of a mine worker. A mine worker's son was now the governor of Michigan. And so he wouldn't send troops against workers on strike. They shut down the plant. And 44 days later, they get their agreement from General Motors. In the middle of the Great Depression, a group of ragtag unionists stood up and brought down the most powerful corporation in America, winning an agreement not just for them in that particular plant but for all auto workers everywhere. They got better wages, benefits, seniority, many of the benefits which were then affirmed by the federal government and the NLRB. This is a turning point for organized labor in America. The CIO, the UAW, these are now a part of the American labor movement. And unorganizable workers are now organized. The unskilled are now part of that American prosperity as well. And don't worry, GM learned its lesson in the aftermath, they install tear gas in all their factories so that at the push button, every single worker could be tear gassed. But the CIO was already underway. And so even though by 1939, the Supreme Court rules sit downs illegal, of course, because they are seizures of property, illegal seizures of property. And that right to property has to be defended. But already the CIO has maintained control and has brought this new order to the American economy.

History

Early history

In 1893, the American Railway Union (ARU) was formed in the United States, by Eugene Debs and other railway union leaders, as an industrial union in response to the perceived limitations of craft unions. Debs himself gave an example of the inadequacies that his fellows at the time felt towards organising by craft. He recounts, that in 1888, a strike was called by train drivers and railway firemen on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railways, but other employees, particularly conductors, who were organised into a different unions did not join that strike, with strikebreakers brought on to help their employers.[2]

In June 1894, the ARU voted to join in solidarity with the ongoing Pullman strike, and within hours of the union lending support to the boycott, traffic from the Pullman Company traffic ceased to move from Chicago to the Western United States. The sympathy strike then spread to the Southern and later the Eastern United States. A statement was issued by the chairman of the General Managers Association, which represented railway companies that were mainly situated around Chicago, admitted:

We can handle the railway brotherhoods, but we cannot handle the A.R.U.... We cannot handle Debs. We have got to wipe him out.[3]

The General Managers Association turned to the United States government, which immediately sent the United States Army and the United States Marshals to force an end to the strike.

Popularisation and radicalism

A cartoon from the May 1919 IWW periodical One Big Union, published in Revolutionary Radicalism, shows a worker choosing between the AFL and IWW slogans.

In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Chicago at the First Annual Convention of the IWW, six weeks after the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League. It was created as a rejection of the craft unionism philosophy that the American Federation of Labor endorsed, and from its inception, the IWW would organize without regard to sex, skills, race, creed, or national origin unlike the Federation.[4][5] It argued for a mass-oriented labour movement, the One Big Union, and declared that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common."[6][7]

The critiques of the Federation included the strikebreaking that member unions participated in against each other, jurisdictional squabbling, autocratic leadership,[8] and a strong relationship between union and business leaders in the National Civic Federation.[9]

After Debs' six month imprisonment after the ARU's dissolution, he, along with Ed Boyce, Bill Haywood and others, were instrumental in launching the Western Labor Union, soon renamed the American Labor Union, which was the precursor to the IWW. The new organisation was militant in its operations and housed revolutionary socialist and radical ideals, with Boyce proclaiming that labour must "abolish the wage system which is more destructive of human rights and liberty than any other slave system devised."[10] The preamble of the IWW's constitution further emphasised that "There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on...."[11]

Persecution

In the United States, IWW executive board officer Frank Little was lynched from a railway trestle.[12] Seventeen Wobblies in Tulsa were beaten by a mob and driven out of town.[12] In the third quarter of 1917, the New York Times ran sixty articles attacking the IWW.[12] The Justice Department launched raids on IWW headquarters across the country.[12] The New-York Tribune suggested that the IWW was a German front, responsible for acts of sabotage throughout the nation.[12]

Writing in 1919, Paul Brissenden quoted an IWW publication in Sydney, Australia:

All the machinery of the capitalist state has been turned against us. Our hall has been raided periodically as a matter of principle, our literature, our papers, pictures, and press have all been confiscated; our members and speakers have been arrested and charged with almost every crime on the calendar; the authorities are making unscrupulous, bitter and frantic attempts to stifle the propaganda of the I.W.W.[13]

Brissenden also recorded that:

...several laws have been enacted which have been more or less directly aimed at the Industrial Workers of the World. Australia led off with the "Unlawful Associations Act" passed by the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth in December, 1916... Within three months of the passage of the Australian Act, the American States of Minnesota and Idaho passed laws "defining criminal syndicalism and prohibiting the advocacy thereof." In February, 1918, the Montana legislature met in extraordinary session and enacted a similar statute.[14]

While Brissenden notes that IWW coal miners in Australia successfully used direct action to free imprisoned strike leaders and to win other demands, Wobbly opposition to conscription during World War I "became so obnoxious" to the Australian government that laws were passed which "practically made it a criminal offense to be a member of the I.W.W."[15]

One Big Union

Historically, industrial unionism has frequently been associated with the concept of One Big Union. On July 12, 1919, The New England Worker published "The Principle of Industrial Union":

The principle on which industrial unionism takes its stand is the recognition of the never ending struggle between the employers of labor and the working class. [The industrial union] must educate its members to a complete understanding of the principles and causes underlying every struggle between the two opposing classes. This self-imposed drill, discipline and training will be the methods of the O. B. U.[16]

In short the Industrial Union, is bent upon forming one grand united working class organization and doing away with all the divisions that weaken the solidarity of the workers to better their conditions.[16]

Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, that is the proposition that all wage workers come together in organization according to industry; the groupings of the workers in each of the big divisions of industry as a whole into local, national, and international industrial unions; all to be interlocked, dovetailed, welded into One Big Union for all wage workers; a big union bent on aggressively forging ahead and compelling shorter hours, more wages and better conditions in and out of the work shop... until the working class is able to take possession and control of the machinery, premises, and materials of production right from the capitalists' hands...[16]

Industrial unionism by country

Australia

Verity Burgmann asserts in Revolutionary industrial unionism that the IWW in Australia provided an alternate form of labour organising, to be contrasted with the Labourism of the Australian Labor Party and the Bolshevik Communism of the Communist Party of Australia. Revolutionary industrial unionism, for Burgmann, was much like revolutionary syndicalism, but focused much more strongly on the industrial nature of unionism. Burgmann saw Australian syndicalism, particularly anarcho-syndicalism, as focused on mythic small shop organisation. For Burgmann, the IWW's vision was always a totalising vision of a revolutionary society: the Industrial Commonwealth.[17]

Korea

The theory and practice of industrial unionism is not confined to the western or the English-speaking world. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) is committed to reorganizing their current union structure along the lines of industrial unionism.[18]

South Africa

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is also organized along the lines of industrial unionism.[19]

United Kingdom

See also: Industrial Workers of Great Britain

Marion Dutton Savage associates the spirit of industrial unionism with "the aspiration of workers for the control of industry" inspired by Robert Owen in 1833-34. The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GCTU) recruited skilled and unskilled workers from many industries, with membership growing to half a million within a few weeks. Frantic opposition forced the GCTU to collapse after a few months, but the ideals of the movement lingered for a time. After Chartism failed, British unions began to organize only skilled workers, and began to limit their goals in tacit support of the existing organization of industry.[20]

A new union movement that was "distinctly class conscious and vaguely Socialistic" began to organize unskilled workers in 1889.[21]

Industrial unionism thence proceeded primarily by combining craft unions into industrial formations, rather than through the birth of new industrial organizations. Industrial organizations prior to 1922 included the National Transport Workers' Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen, and the Miners' Federation of Great Britain.[22]

In 1910 Tom Mann went to France and became acquainted with syndicalism. He returned to Britain and helped to organize the Workers' International Industrial Union, which was similar to the IWW from North America.[23]

United States

In 1904, the Western Federation of Miners was under significant pressure from military and employer violence in the Colorado Labor Wars. Its labour federation the American Labor Union had not gained significant membership. The AFL was the largest organized labour federation, and the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE) felt isolated. When they applied to the AFL for a charter, the Scranton Declaration of 1901 was the AFL's guiding principle.[24]

Gompers had promised that each trade and craft would have its own union. The Scranton Declaration acknowledged that one affiliate, the United Mine Workers was formed as an industrial union but that other skilled trades—carpenters, machinists, etc. were organized as powerful craft unions. These craft unions refused to allow any encroachment upon their "turf" by the industrial unionists. The concept came to be known as voluntarism.

The federation turned the UBRE down in accord with the voluntarism principle. The Scranton Declaration acknowledging voluntarism was adhered to, even though the craft-based railway brotherhoods had not yet joined the AFL.[25] The AFL was holding the door open for craft unions that might join, and slamming it in the face of the industrial unions who wanted to join. The following year, the 2000-member UBRE joined the organizing convention of the IWW.

Before Herbert Hoover became president, he befriended AFL President Gompers. Hoover, as the former United States Food Administrator, president of the Federated Engineering Societies, and then Secretary of Commerce in the Harding Cabinet in 1921, invited the heads of several "forward-looking" major corporations to meet with him.

[Hoover] asked these men why their companies didn't sit down with Gompers and try to work out an amicable relationship with organized labor. Such a relationship, in Hoover's opinion, would be a bulwark against the spread of radicalism reflected in the rise of the "Wobblies," the Industrial Workers of the World. The Hoover initiative got no encouragement from those at the meeting. The obstacles that Hoover did not comprehend, [Cyrus] Ching recorded in his memoir, were that Gompers had no standing in the affairs of any company except to the extent that AFL unions had organized the workers, and that the federation's focus on craft unionism precluded any effective organization of the mass-production industries by [the AFL's] affiliates.[26]

The craft-based AFL had been slow to organize industrial workers, and the federation remained steadfastly committed to craft unionism. This changed in the mid-1930s when, after passage of the National Labor Relations Act, workers began to clamor for union membership. In competition with the CIO movement, the AFL established Federal Labor Unions (FLUs), which were local industrial unions affiliated directly with the AFL,[27] a concept initially envisioned in the 1886 AFL Constitution. FLUs were conceived as temporary unions, many of which were organized on an industrial basis. In keeping with the craft concept, FLUs were designed primarily for organizing purposes, with the membership destined to be distributed among the AFL's craft unions after the majority of workers in an industry were organized.

In the United States, the conception of industrial unionism in the 1920s certainly differed from that of the 1930s, for example. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) primarily practiced a form of industrial unionism prior to its 1955 merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was mostly craft unions. Unions in the resulting federation, the AFL–CIO, sometimes have a mixture of tendencies.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Savage 1922, p. 3.
  2. ^ Brissenden 1919, p. 86.
  3. ^ Rayback 1966, p. 201.
  4. ^ Solidarity Forever—An oral history of the IWW, Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, Deborah Shaffer, 1985, page 140.
  5. ^ Cahn 1972, p. 201.
  6. ^ Fusfeld 1985, pp. 6–7.
  7. ^ Constitution and By-Laws of the Industrial Workers of the World, Preamble, 1905, http://www.workerseducation.org/crutch/constitution/1905const.html Retrieved April 19, 2007.
  8. ^ Brissenden 1919, p. 87.
  9. ^ Thompson & Murfin 1976, p. 5.
  10. ^ Dubofsky 2000, p. 40.
  11. ^ Preamble to the Constitution, Industrial Workers of the World, 1905, http://www.workerseducation.org/crutch/constitution/1905const.html retrieved March 12, 2011
  12. ^ a b c d e Starr 1997, p. 48.
  13. ^ Brissenden 1919, p. 340, quoting a March 17, 1917 Solidarity reprint of Direct Action (Sydney).
  14. ^ Brissenden 1919, p. 280.
  15. ^ Brissenden 1919, pp. 341–342.
  16. ^ a b c Daniel Bloomfield, Selected Articles on Modern Industrial Movements, H.W. Wilson Co., 1919, pages 39–40.
  17. ^ Burgmann 1995.
  18. ^ This is KCTU, Building Industrial Unionism http://kctu.org/2003/html/sub_01.php Archived 2005-02-10 at the Wayback Machine
  19. ^ About Cosatu, One industry, one union - one country, one federation "About Cosatu". Archived from the original on 2007-12-12. Retrieved 2007-11-30.
  20. ^ Savage 1922, p. 6.
  21. ^ Savage 1922, pp. 6–7.
  22. ^ Savage 1922, pp. 7–8.
  23. ^ Savage 1922, pp. 13–14.
  24. ^ Thompson & Murfin 1976, p. 7.
  25. ^ Thompson & Murfin 1976, pp. 7–8.
  26. ^ Raskin 1989.
  27. ^ Cahn 1972, pp. 253–254.

Bibliography

External links

This page was last edited on 28 February 2024, at 15:57
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