Part I: An Exceptionally Hostile Terrain
Pundits and scholars frequently talk and write about the American labor movement as if it has always been "exceptional" or different from the mass-based, radical labor movements of other advanced democratic countries in Western Europe. This exceptional character has been irregular, however: in the mid-1880s, during the heyday of the Knights of Labor, commentators characterized the American working class as more advanced in terms of organization, militancy, and group consciousness; but by 1906, however, when Werner Sombart penned his famous essay Why Is There No Socialism in the United States, the American labor movement had become distinctive-not for being uniquely strong and class conscious but instead for being weaker and more politically conservative than labor movements in Western Europe.
Those who portray the American labor movement as having always been weak and conservative frequently argue that the explanation for this lies in a failure of American working-class solidarity and combativeness. Such a portrayal, however, is ahistorical. In the United States, it has been American employers, unlike their European counterparts, who have had the "exceptional" power to be able to create an exceedingly hostile terrain for labor, aided frequently by a state that openly intervened on their side rather than on the side of workers.
The skeletal outlines of America's true labor exceptionalism can be seen as having been deeply inscribed in the primal struggles of the Knights of Labor, a remarkably egalitarian organization that sought to organize all workers in America's heterogeneous labor force, regardless of skill level, nationality, race, or gender. The Knights experienced a period of explosive growth in the early 1880s, which was followed by an equally spectacular decline. Within five years the Knights of Labor had collapsed as a viable national organization.
As historically important as the Knights were as an organizational expression of indigenous social unionism, their real sociological significance has resided more in the cause of their death than in the way they lived. The primary reason for the downfall of the Knights of Labor was a paradoxical result of their rapid growth and early success, which resulted in the mobilization of powerful employers' organizations (see Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism).
The simple lesson imprinted in the years following the Knights' defeat was unmistakable: broad-based organizing and radical politics would be soundly repressed. Indeed, the use of state and federal troops to break strikes increased dramatically in this period: official records report that between 1886 and 1895, state militias were called out at least 118 times to put down labor unrest, often to protect strikebreakers.
Consider events like the Pullman railroad strike of 1894, led by the renowned socialist Eugene V. Debs. After shutting down most of the nation's rail traffic when workers honored a boycott of cars made by the Pullman company, the union was utterly destroyed by a powerful employers' association that was successful in persuading state and federal troops to violently repress the strike. The troops killed 13 workers and arrested 705, including all the union leaders. Some leaders of the AFL referred to the Debs' union, the American Railway Union, as "the second edition of the Knights of Labor" and used its failed strike as a further lesson that sectional unionism and pragmatic politics were the only way for unions to survive in the hostile, antilabor terrain of the United States.
To get a sense of just how much harsher U.S. employers and governments were towards labor action, compare the number of workers killed in industrial disputes from 1871-1914 in Western Europe and the United States: seven in England; thirty-five in France; sixteen in Germany, and between five and eight hundred in the United States! (see Mann, in Sources of Social Power)
The downfall of the Knights played a crucial role in fixing the trajectory of twentieth-century trade unionism in the United States. Their defeat underscored the exceptional social power of employers and served to solidify the position of a much more conservative "business unionism" as a rival to the Knights' egalitarian social unionism. In other words, the defeat of the Knights served as a lesson that was hammered home by those who supported the moderate, pragmatic unionism of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Broad-based organizations and political radicalism were painted as dangerous and as
sure paths to repression and defeat, while conservative nonradical politics were advocated as the best road to survival.
Part II: High Walls- U.S. Labor and the Immigrant Worker
High walls were thus built around American trade unionism at the precise moment when the changing social composition of the American working class required a much broader organizational and ideological vehicle. By 1895 the pace of immigration accelerated dramatically; during the first decade of the new century proportionately more immigrants arrived than in any other decade in American history. With employers increasingly organizing work within the factories on the basis of ethnicity and language, their mostly southern and eastern European workforce was subdivided and segregated into various distinct occupational compartments.8 Furthermore, ethnic segmentation went hand in hand with both a widening wage differential for skilled and unskilled work and a processes of ethnic fragmentation. (see Warner, Streetcar Suburbs p 242-243)
A comparative study of the experience of two towns in Massachusetts indicates that where industrial unionism had deep roots, working-class institutions assimilated immigrants, thus strengthening community-wide solidarity. And where there were fewer such integrating institutions, immigrants formed tightly knit ethnic enclaves that undermined collective action and wider community solidarity (see Cumbler, Working Class Community).
The conservative craft-unionism of the AFL allowed for an intensified ethnic segmentation, by default, and also served as an institutional outpost of racist and nativist sentiment within the labor movement itself. When forced as a matter of organizational efficiency, Gompers occasionally encouraged the organization of Black workers or the creation of local organizations of women workers, but generally both he and the leaders of most craft unions explicitly excluded Blacks and women from their ranks, as well as those without a proper "trade." Furthermore, both the AFL and its affiliated unions mobilized strenuously to support the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, an effort that was enhanced by a vicious xenophobia (see the chapter entitled "Samuel Gompers and Business Unionism" in Buhle, Taking Care of Business).
Part III: The IWW and the Dialectic of American Unionism
The Gompers brand of unionism produced significant symbolic opposition to itself in movements like the Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies," the IWW). Active from 1905 to its violent demise in 1917, the IWW was, as Paul Buhle has remarked in his study, "everything that the AFL refused to be and did not wish to be." (see Buhle, p 66) The AFL proudly represented itself as the organizational expression of a select "labor aristocracy," while practicing a business-oriented pragmatism in its dealings with employers.
In sharp contrast, the IWW practiced a revolutionary syndicalism that eschewed institutionalized "labor relations" entirely. Celebrating their marginal status in their theme song, "Hallelujah, I' m a Bum!" the Wobblies rode the rails from conflict to conflict, organizing the most marginal segments of the labor force (immigrants, the unskilled, migratory laborers), while readily "filling the jails" in struggles to assert their right to free speech.
The Wobblies had no system for collecting membership dues, maintained no strike fund, rotated their officials to prevent the formation of organizational hierarchies (under the slogan, "We are all leaders"), and refused to sign labor agreements, the very basis of a collective bargaining system. (see Rothenbuhler, Liminal Fight)
In other words, in refusing to act like a "responsible" trade union, or for that matter like an organization at all, the Wobblies can be seen as having been a relational product of its opposite, the relentlessly pragmatic business unionism of the AFL.
Like the Knights of Labor before them, the Wobblies' brief institutional existence served to demonstrate the extremely short life expectancy of radical unionism in the United States prior to the 1930s. In the aftermath of World War I, with a militant strike wave of four million workers beginning to wane, employer associations led by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and aided by the Justice Department of the U.S. government, the quasi-fascist American Legion, and even the AFL itself, mounted a ferocious campaign to break IWW strikes, to harass and deport its leadership and its immigrant followers, and to refine the process of the "red scare" campaign into a formidable ideological (and practical) armament in the defense of the social order. (see Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity)
[end excerpt]
No comments:
Post a Comment