EDITOR'S NOTE: Berry Craig is the webmaster/editor for the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, a member of the state AFL-CIO Executive Board and a member of AFT Local 1360
"The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class,” President Joe Biden often says. So does Gov. Andy Beshear.
They’re right. I taught history in the community college in Paducah for 24 years. History indeed teaches that unions “built the middle class.”
But today—Labor Day--let’s take a brief look at America before the advent of the union movement. Let’s turn the clock back to 1890 when unions were few, mostly local, and comprised of skilled tradesmen.
Skilled trades unions came together in 1886 and formed the American Federation of Labor. But the great majority of American workers, especially industrial workers, were not in unions.
So absent a union, what was your workweek like? If you worked in a factory, on average, you’ll spend up to 100 hours a week on the job.
Married with children? Your pay is so low that your wife and your kids – as young as 10 – will have to go to work to help make ends meet. As miserable as pay was for men, it was even less for women and persons of color. Children were paid less than adults.
Industrialists praised child labor as a godsend. They claimed work taught kids responsibility and kept them off the streets and out of trouble.
“The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labor,” said one millionaire industrialist. “As early as he may get at labor the more beautiful, the more useful does his life get to be.” Who enjoys Coca-Cola? The guy who praised child labor was Asa Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola company.
So with mom, dad and the kids all working, surely families made ends meet, right?
Nope.
In 1890, 12 million families lived in the U.S. The average annual family income for 11 million families was $380. The poverty line was $500 in the 1880s.
Think about 100 hours a week. That averages a little more than 14 hours a day, seven days a week.
But think of all that overtime pay! All over 40, time-and-a-half? Double time for Saturday? Triple time for Sundays and holidays? There was no overtime pay. It was all straight time.
What about paid vacations and weekends off? Nope.
Every day you went to work in the factory—or a mine or a mill or the railroad--you literally risked life and limb. Most bosses considered workers mere flesh and blood extensions of machinery. The bosses resisted safety devices because they made machines more expensive.
Bosses worshipped the bottom line. Their object was to make as much money as they could for themselves, their managers and their stockholders. Sound familiar?
Preventable accidents killed or maimed thousands annually. Other workers died slow deaths from exposure to toxic chemicals and other poisonous substances, such as mercury, benzine and asbestos. (Coal miners got black lung from coal dust; textile workers got brown lung from airborne cloth fibers.)
Employer-provided health insurance? Nope. Workers compensation? Nope.
Factory work wasn’t steady. You’ll get laid of maybe three or four times a year. Unemployment insurance? Nope. When the work stopped, so did the paycheck.
Congratulations! You managed to survive to your golden years. Time for a pension, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid! Nope, nope, nope and nope.
You moved in with your grown kids or other relatives if you had a family—and hoped or prayed for the best. If you had no family, you hoped or prayed even harder, and ended up on the street, in the poorhouse or at the poor farm.
Think they were happy retirement homes? Think again. "Their construction coincided with an increasingly negative attitude toward poor people,” according to The History Channel. “These facilities were designed to punish people for their poverty and, hypothetically, make being poor so horrible that people would continue to work at all costs. Being poor began to carry an intense social stigma, and increasingly, poorhouses were placed outside of public view.”
No Americans were more impoverished than the elderly who were no longer able to work.
In no other industrial democracies have the owners of business and industry fought so long, so hard, so stubbornly—and yes, so violently—to defeat unions than in America.
Business and industry owners paid politicians big bucks in Washington and in state capitals like ours to keep worker safety regulations off the books and unions at bay. They still do.
Pro-business state and federal judges happily issued injunctions to stop strikes. Keep striking, and your union will be slapped with a crushing fine and you’ll be thrown in jail.
Well into the 20th century, owners and managers hired what were called “detective agencies” – armed men – to escort scabs through picket lines. The United Mine Workers of America called them “gun thugs.”
If detective agencies couldn’t break strikes, owners could always count on cops and sheriff’s deputies. If lawmen weren’t enough, conservative, pro-business Democratic and Republican governors were glad to send in state militia or national guard troops.
Union-busting was bipartisan even in the White House. In 1877, conservative, pro-business Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops to smash the Great Railroad strike. In 1894, conservative, pro-business Democratic President Grover Cleveland called out Federal troops to crush the Pullman Strike.
In the 1930s, the tide began to turn in labor’s favor. A liberal Democratic-majority Congress approved historic federal legislation that gave unions the right under law to organize and bargain collectively. Liberal Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt was glad to sign the legislation.
"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do would be TO JOIN A UNION," FDR said.
The result was massive, unprecedented organizing drives in mining and manufacturing. “The president wants you to join the union!” said signs the UMWA posted across the coal fields.
So for the first time in history, federal law guaranteed the right of workers to join a union. Some business and industry owners complied, however reluctantly.
Others fought tenaciously to keep the union out. They even hired private armies.
Henry Ford so despised unions that he hired a private army, dubbed the Ford “Service Department.” The “service” they provided the boss was beating up and intimidating union organizers.
Ever hear of the Battle of the Overpass?
In 1937, as many as 40 of Ford’s “Service Department” henchmen savagely beat several United Auto Workers organizers, including Walter Reuther. on an overpass outside the big Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich.
Reuther, later the longtime UAW president, recalled:
“Seven times they raised me off the concrete and slammed me down on it. They pinned my arms . . . and I was punched and kicked and dragged by my feet to the stairway, thrown down the first flight of steps, picked up, slammed down on the platform and kicked down the second flight. On the ground they beat and kicked me some more...”
Ever hear of the Memorial Day Massacre?
On that holiday in 1937, the Chicago police—who had a long reputation for helping industrialists break strikes—opened fire on an unarmed, peaceful crowd of strikers and their families outside a Republic Steel mill near the city.
The gunfire killed 10 people. Other police clubbed strikers, injuring many. Nine were permanently disabled.
Conservative Republican politicians—and their allies in the press—stood by the industrialists, denouncing FDR, unions and the new labor laws as “socialistic,” “un-American” and even “communist.” Sound familiar? Conservative pastors railed against unions from the pulpit, calling them un-Christian. Sound familiar?
Through the Roosevelt era and beyond, the right wing remained grimly determined to wipe out the gains labor under FDR.
In 1947, a Republican-majority Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act—over Democratic President Harry Truman’s veto. Taft-Hartley opened the door to state “right to work” laws.
State after state—notably in the South—went right to work. (Why Dixie? Conservative, white supremacist Southern Democrats in Congress also voted for Taft-Hartley. A big reason they hated unions was that in a union everybody was equal. They saw that as a dire threat to the racist Jim Crow system which segregated Blacks from whites and denied Blacks the vote.)
Dr. Martin Luther Jr. saw the labor and civil rights movements as natural allies. At the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, he declared “that…he labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
In conclusion, on this Labor Day, allow me to leave you with more words to remember: more spoken words from Dr. King and some written words from Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey:
“The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress,” Dr. King said at the 1965 Illinois State AFL-CIO convention. “Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and above all new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”
I treasure my paperback copy of Humphrey’s book, The Cause is Mankind: A Liberal Program for Modern America. Printed in 1965, its pages have yellowed a bit.
Like Dr. King’s remarks, what Humphrey wrote is as true as ever this Labor Day: “Union organizations have provided for millions of formerly inarticulate citizens the forum in which to hammer out policies affecting the world in which they live and which their children will inherit. And not only have they hammered out policies, but they have developed techniques and resources for implementing those policies.”
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus reminds us not to put our light under a bushel. So this Labor Day and every other day: Don’t hide your union light under a bushel. Let it shine for all to see. Be union. Be proud.