Labor Day or Labor(less) Day? Thinking About A New Generation — Lew Rosenbaum

Labor Day or Labor(less) Day? Thinking About A New Generation 

Musing by Lew Rosenbaum on Labor Day 2016

Detail from the Rogers Park Mural “We The People” by Diana Berek, Juan-Carlos Perez, and Chiara

Friday September 2.  The beginning of the four day Labor Day weekend.  How to think about what labor faces now, not just the trade unions which are the usual celebrators of this weekend, but about labor in its broad aspect, the class of workers including the partially working, the hardly working, the not working, the never to be able to work? Then Lynn Bremer said that that the “artist of the day” on XRT radio would be . . . performances of songs for Labor Day. At that moment he put “Bang The Drum All Day” on, I turned the radio up, and laughed out loud. I decided at that instant that not working would have to come on Labor Day itself, but until then . . .

Day One: What Is Working Class Life?

Diana interjected, as I listened to XRT’s Labor Day offerings, “The Eagle Flies on Friday.” If Stormy Monday begins the week, it’s payday when the paycheck comes and the eagle flies. YES!! Saturday we go out and play, Sunday kneel down and pray!

In between Sunday and Saturday, however, comes the workaday world.  Such a richly layered narrative of working class life in such a compressed, concise, framework,  Patty Griffin’s lyric resonates with me on so many levels. “You could cry, or die, or just make pies all day.”  Click here for “Making Pies.”

“Will the wolf survive” is the question facing us all as we find ourselves strangers in our own strange land, fighting for survival.  The visuals on this one lead into Day Two’s theme, with the migrant’s constant search for home.   Click here for “Will The Wolf Survive?”

Day Two, Saturday:  The Sharpest Expression Facing Labor Is Homelessness

This is the “Trump version” of “I ain’t got no home in this world.” At least we know where Donald learned his racism now. Check out also how it begins in the first verse: “The po-lice make it hard, wherever I may go.” No romanticism about good cops vs bad cops, it’s the role they play in society.   Click here for “I Ain’t Got No Home”

“No matter who you are, no matter where you go in life, you’re gonna need somebody to stand by you.”  Street musicians performing this song in streets all around the world, starting on the beach in Santa Monica, Ca.    Click here for “Stand By Me”

“If Woody Guthrie were alive today, he’d have a lot to write about,” says Bruce Springsteen introducing this version of his Ghost of Tom Joad.  A searing guitar solo leads into the final ” I’m sittin down here in the campfire light waitin on the ghost of Tom Joad”   Click here for the “Ghost of Tom Joad.”

Day Three, Sunday: How “Which Side Are You On?” Changes

Florence Reece sings the original mine workers song.  In Harlan County, there are no neutrals there.  Spare and sharp. Click here for “Which Side Are You On?”

Rebel Diaz launches a torrid hip-hop take on this classic. “The truth is, we’re in so much debt, the only way out is revolution or war.  So now the question is, which side are you on?”  Click here for the Rebel Diaz version.

“We’re on the freedom side” is Adam Gottlieb’s take on this song, updated to 2016 in Chicago.    Click here for the Adam Gottlieb version

Day Four, Monday:What Does The End of Work Mean?

This is the song I heard on the radio the Friday before Labor Day, part of WXRT’s Labor Day song focus, that kicked off my idea for this musical reverie.  Nelson Peery asks in The Future Is Up To Us, “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about surviving”?  I don’t want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZclddLcOYYA  Click here to bang on the drums all day.

David Coe wrote, and in this version sings, a song made popular by Johnny Paycheck.  Thankfully I no longer have to say “take this job and shove it” (though more than occasionally I remember how little my social security covers, and I think wistfully I’d like to have a job to be able to shove) Click here to take your job and shove it!

Pete Seeger sings “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” my favorite utopian song of abundance, written by Harry McClintock, where they hung the jerk that invented work. Click here to find Big Rock Candy Mountain communism!

Ali Hangan writes – The Canary in the Cage: Black Families and the White Working Class

The Canary in the Cage: Black Families and the White Working Class

by Ali Hangan

Folks,

The black population’s history is one of tragedy and triumph. On the one hand, the population has suffered over 400 years of slavery and entrenched segregation. On the other hand, the Civil Rights movement is considered an American success story. The Civil Rights movement opened up a renewed sense of optimism for the future of the black working class and other oppressed groups. But in the late 1970’s and 80’s, that spirit of optimism began to wane.

American industry confronted with increased competition from abroad, cut costs by outsourcing work and adopting automation. A large swath of black workers in the cities that were once employed became unemployed and ultimately became unemployable. Those families that could move left to the suburbs leaving the remaining population on urban islands with few economic opportunities.

The lack of economic opportunities in the urban black communities provided a fertile ground for a drug economy. Crack cocaine and the culture associated with the drug began to spread at epidemic levels throughout the nation. In the wake of the crack epidemic more intensified policing policies arose in response. The purpose of these policies was not to stop crack per se, but rather to prevent its spread among the more politically organized suburban communities. The tactics to carry out these new policies became the genesis of increased militarization of the police.

The enhanced police tactics entered into the national consciousness by black Hip Hop artists. In 1985, Toddy Tee produced “Battleram” about the LAPD armored vehicle used to smash in crack houses. In 1988, the song “Fuck the Police” by NWA told the story of police intimidation of young black males. And in 1990, “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy called upon black communities to defend themselves against the police.

While these songs brought a consciousness to the Gestapo tactics being used to police black communities, it paradoxically renewed old stereotypes about urban black males. With the music industry’s new marketing of music through videos in the 1980’s, they streamed images of black males as gang members into households across the country. This perception of a “black Armageddon” on MTV shifted public opinion toward support of a more comprehensive strategy to police urban black communities.

The new strategy fell under the auspices of the Federal drug enforcement policy, which became known as the “War on Drugs.” The War on Drugs began during the Nixon Administration in 1971. It was a Federal campaign for the prohibition of drugs and enhanced military intervention, with the stated aim being to reduce the illegal drug trade. In 1982, Vice President George H. W. Bush led a push for the involvement of the CIA and U.S. military in drug interdiction efforts. In 1989, under now, President George H. W. Bush, he authorized the creation of a Federal Drug Czar to oversee the war on drugs. Later, raised to a cabinet-level position by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Currently, the Federal Government spends 51 billion annually on the war on drugs. [citation]

The War on drugs has had a devastating effect on the black population:

“The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black.” —- 40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People, Common Dreams, June 2nd, 2015

“The War on Drugs targets Black people. Drug arrests are a big source of bodies and business for the criminal legal system. Half the arrests these days are for drugs and half of those are for marijuana. Despite the fact that Black and white people use marijuana at the same rates, a Black person is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person. The ACLU found that in some states Black people were six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites. For all drug arrests between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Black drug arrest rate rose dramatically from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same period, the white drug arrest rate barely increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per 1,000 persons. ” [Ibid]

The same process that I have attempted to describe amongst the black population is reaching into much broader sections of the working class. Since the economic crash of 2008, capitalism has transitioned into a new stage of development. The increased demands on American companies to compete in the “Just in time” global economy has compelled each to be more flexible adopting more advanced automation and robots. The results have been increased productivity but at the expense of middle-income and unionized jobs impacting many white workers.

The latest wave of economic restructuring has had strong parallels to the process that began in the urban black communities in the 1980’s. This process of decay amongst the white working class has manifested in two visible ways:

1) The surge in the use of meth among the white population.
2) The groundswell of support by the white working class of Donald Trump’s proposals to scale back protectionist policies.

The first two articles that follow focus on the black population but, should be viewed more broadly as a canary in the cage for the entire American working class. In other words, the declining social conditions of the black population provides us with a window into the future for the entire working class as a whole. The flip side is this: As more sections of the working class become equally impoverished it creates a practical basis to move beyond silly notions of race to unify workers politically around a broader class struggle for their common economic survival.

What do you think?

One love,

AH
Excerpt from The incredible crushing despair of the white working class:

“Carol Graham, a happiness researcher at the Brookings Institution, recently analyzed Gallup’s data on life satisfaction and found that when it comes to their outlook on the future, the most desperate groups are poor and near-poor whites.

Gallup asks people to rate their current lives on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life they could be living and 10 is the best. Crucially, they also ask people to imagine what their lives will look like five years in the future.

Among the poor, whites are the demographic group least likely to imagine a better future for themselves, Graham found. Poor Hispanics were about 30 percent more likely to imagine a better future than poor whites. The difference for poor blacks was even larger: They were nearly three times as likely to imagine a better future than poor whites.”

“Part of the optimism gap is indeed because of “a shrinking pie of good jobs for low-skill/blue collar workers,” Graham said in an email. “Whites used to have real advantages (some via discrimination) that they no longer have … they are looking at downward mobility or threats of it, while poor blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to parents who were worse off than they.”

And paradoxically, while some inequalities between races are shrinking, other inequalities within races are growing. Across all races, for instance, the wealthy are gobbling up an ever-growing share of the income pie and leaving less behind for everyone else.”

The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today
KPCC Airtalk with Larry Mantle: The Movement for Black Lives platform and politics

Half of US jobs could be taken by robots in the next 20 years — here’s how likely it is that yours will be one of them

The incredible crushing despair of the white working class
— “The heights by great men [and women] reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight but, they while their companions slept, they were toiling upwards in the night.” —- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Capitalism is Dead — Lew Rosenbaum

Capitalism is Dead 

Lew Rosenbaum

1.

Cicada time comes

In August heat, metallic

Raspy resonance

 

Rising and falling,

They call each other across

Neighborhoods, forests,

 

Screaming crescendos

Like the grinding of monumental gears

The autumn of industrial capitalism

Signaling but not aware that its winter is near

Cicadas are not aware of their end,

Killer wasps prey on adults and

Nymphs bury themselves in the soil

Or burrow in vain against the blacktop

 

In any case it is the end

Or at least a foreshadowing

And so it is with capitalism

For which spring will never come again.

 

2.

Bright summer day drive

On June Street, Los Angeles,

Gazing at mansions

 

Of rich, famous and

Powerful Angelenos

Secure behind gates

 

Counting their money

Planning their investments to

Take over the world

 

Sheridan and I, riding with the windows open

Almost as wide as our mouths

Before the luxuriant gardens, pillars, sculptures

Conspicuous consumption barely beyond our fingertips

And he, dazzled but not demeaned,

Screaming out the window

His rich southern baritone forming

The spaces in between, around the words,

“You dead, mothahfuckahs, you dead

You jest don’t know it yet!”

 

3.

Putrid odors reek

from pustules on the body

of capitalism,

 

I’m stepping on crushed,

mutilated, skunk-smelling

flesh, wading through pools

 

of phlegmy green fluid

oozing from liquefied lungs

of a dying beast.

 

Some of their cadaverous practitioners

recognize the end of the road, they

see the phosphorescent signs that wave

good-bye to workers, they feel the

mercurial flow of the golden fetish

slipping between their fingers into a void:

where has the magical value gone, once upon

a long time ago created and stored in

cold marble banks, in monster machines,

wealth now vanished or languishing in piles

on walmarted, targeted shelves without,

without, without value,

claiming the magic number zero.

 

I’d waste my energy to drive a stake

through your vampire heart, capitalism; you are already

dead

but you don’t know it. Or, if you do, you are

ready to move on to the next phase of private property,

ready to reconstruct society to conform to new, fancy tools

that don’t need people

ready to deform and fascisolate society to maintain your control

over a restless mass who cannot survive without

deposing you,

capitalism: you, dying, are already dead.

Foreseeing the end, you are an expiring dragon

flailing your rusted drone-tipped tail

against those who will imagine and build society in their interests

because they must.

 

Let’s seize the world from

your Voldemort grip, transform

it in our own hands,

 

cooperative,

and creative, we have been

naught. We shall be all.

On My Mother’s 120th Birthday: The Ideas of a New Generation

 

Anna Rosenbaum with Meyer Lederman, 1922

LEW ROSENBAUM· SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016

My mother, Anna Hodos, was born June 24, 1896. The place was Oshmyany, a town at that time in Lithuania. I write “at that time” because it was close to the border with Russia, and, from time to time, was either in the Russian empire. . . or not. Borders are often political constructs imposed by imperial states, after all.

My grandfather brought his family to the United States ahead of the Russian (czarist) army attempting to conscript him (we believe that he assumed the name Hodos to escape conscription; when we talked about it, my sister Greta and I could never be sure what their real surname might be). They came to the U.S. after the failure of the first Russian revolution of 1905, traveling across Europe and shipping to the U.S. from Liverpool, England. Arriving in Ellis Island in 1906, my grandmother was turned away because she had an eye infection, trachoma. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trachoma was the leading reason for immigrants to be deported from Ellis island. She returned to Europe with her youngest child, to return some time later through Canada. I can only imagine her fear at leaving her family behind to go back to Liverpool, knowing no English; her strength returning to Liverpool, only to fight her way back to her family in the U.S.

The family must have had some kind of network to rely on. It was a time of great Eastern European immigration to the U.S. The garment factories and the tenements where the garment workers lived in New York were filled with Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Upton Sinclair wrote about Lithuanian immigrants to Chicago in his epic novel of the same period, The Jungle. Several Lithuanian language newspapers served that large community and periodicals in nearly every other European language brought the news to those working in the stockyards and the steel industry. Branches of my family would settle in New York and Chicago, but my grandparents settled in the small industrial and farming community of Ansonia in Southern Connecticut. The town was situated on the Housatonic River valley, the home of metal industries and textile mills. My family must have brought some resources with them, because they established a feed and grain store serving the agricultural community.

I believe that my mother finished high school. She was slated to work in the store while her younger brother went to college. Regardless of her educational level, she was caught up in the intellectual ferment of the period. She would have none of being bound to the small town store. Greta told me that she ran away to New York to try to make her way there, but her father came after her and brought her back to Ansonia. She remained rebellious, however, and joined the radical movement of the time, the YPSLs or Young People’s Socialist League, and was influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1919, John Reed (at that time perhaps the best known journalist in the U.S.) published his pathbreaking Ten Days That Shook The World, describing his observations while in Russia during the revolution. Anna got a letter from Reed along with a copy of the book. Reed wrote that “the Capitalist press is endeavoring to suppress the sale of the book,” refusing to review it and give it any distribution outside of the big cities in the Northeast. He appealed to the Comrades to help distribute the book and to make money for their collectives at the same time.

New ideas permeated the immigrant working class movement in this period. The big garment workers unions, headquartered in Chicago and New York, led organizing drives in New York and New England. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911 killed over 100 workers and sparked the fight for labor law reform for the next two decades. The Bread and Roses strike engulfed the textile mills of Lawrence, MA in 1912, with 23,000 workers taking to the streets, defying ethnic differences that the employers had used to keep them apart.. Workers and intellectuals around the world rallied in defense of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, accused of murder in 1920 and executed in 1927 in Boston.

In this turmoil Anna met Meyer Lederman, pictured above in 1922 with her. He styled himself something of a “socialist Zionist,” though I never knew what he meant by that. There was, among the socialist leaning Jewish workers of the period and going back to the late 1800s, a trend who argued that wherever there was a Jew, the Jewish nation existed. This group refused to integrate themselves into the revolutionary organizations of the nations in which they lived, demanding a separate organization for themselves. This strand of socialism sparked debates in the garment workers movement. Perhaps this was a fundamental disagreement between Anna and Meyer; that I do not know. After the Communist Party was formed, she became part of that movement, but she and Meyer remained friends to the end of his life.

But somewhere in the early 1920s she met George Rosenbaum, whose last name she would assume without ever getting married. George never became a citizen.. Anna considered him an anarchist if he had any definitive political philosophy. He made friends with people on Book Row in Manhattan, worked in the Dauber and Pine used book shop, and then opened up his own store as the depression deepened. The store went out of business in a few years, and from the store he took what he thought were some of the valuable titles — and about 25 volumes of Russian and Soviet politics and history. The fear of deportation hung over his head throughout his life. His and Anna’s memory of the Palmer raids to arrest and deport radicals (1919-1920) revived in the post WWII McCarthy witch hunt.

From this union came my sister in 1928, and me in 1942.

I’m thinking of Anna today, June 24, of course, since she would have been 120 years old on this day. But there’s more. We are immigrants, the objects of the kind of hatred that the presidential race in the U.S. today is stoking. My people would have been those Trump would ban from immigration: after all, we bore the infection of Bolshevism. We were the wave upon wave of immigrants who took jobs from Americans in the steel plants and stockyards, driving the wages down. We were the scum feared by the voters in the British election to exit the European Union. I’m thinking of Anna today, because the Lithuanian/Russian border is today even more a figment of the political imagination, as is the U.S./ Mexican border.

In the era of globalization information flows freely ignoring borders. Capitalist relations have flown freely to the far reaches of the earth, leaving no nation untouched. Attempts to limit labor migration fail very much for the reason that labor follows the trail of capital and information. You can no more build a wall against labor than you can against electrons. But just as in 1919, when John Reed wrote to my mother, the new ideas and experiences of the immigrants in our society add to our understanding of the world. A social revolution is brewing today, even more than in 1919, because of the globalization and the electronic/technological revolution that has taken place.

Anna died in 1983, the same year that the bookstore I worked in got a computer. She would not recognize the world of today, almost 100 years after the third Russian Revolution of 1917. She would see instantly that the expectations of her working class life no longer beckon to the class created by the computer. And I suspect she’d quickly understand, that broad equality of poverty represents something fundamentally different in the new class structure of America and the world. Her generation could expect to participate in the expanding economic benefits accruing to workers. Reforms would take care of that. This generation can only reform society by taking it over, by wresting power from those who control the means of producing what we need to survive. By wresting power from those who are accelerating their calls to ban immigrants and build walls.

Our ideas and hopes, which come from the lived experience of our expectations, pose the real danger to the rich and powerful. I think Anna would be eager to distribute these ideas, just as she was called on to distribute the ideas of her generation.

.

Lilac Time a poem by Lew Rosenbaum

[In November, 2008, my sister Greta died.  She was a graduate of the Yale Music School, and talking about music was one of the irreversible bonds that joined us.  Whenever I would hear something new, the first thought that pierced my mind was, what would Greta say? That is still the case.  Her birthday, May 10, comes at the time when lilacs prepare to bloom, and so lilacs and music always drive me to think of Greta even more than at other times.  This poem was written on May 10, 2016.  The photos were taken in the courtyard where Diana and I live, May 30 2016. — LR]

Lilac Time

The lavender time of year: Lilac, salvia and phlox in bloom, May 30, 2016

by Lew Rosenbaum

In the mist and rain, the heavy air

Bears the dense fragrance of the lilacs

It’s May, and at the lavender time of year,

The cavorting violets just past the riot of scilla,

When soon the purple salvia will flourish,

I think most intensely of you, dear Greta, and

Wish that we could celebrate another birthday,

That we could walk together even the short walk

From your home to the stand of white lilacs

And bury our heads in the blossoms and perfumes

And stop, think for the moment, our laughs reverberating

In the morning sunlight, bees drinking the nectar,

Think of our childhood, of you and me

Standing beneath the boughs of that purple-robed tree

In our back yard where I first learned the names

Lilac and Greta.

 

The lavender time of year: Salvia, phlox and lilacs in bloom, May 30, 2016

The mist and rain cloak the heavy air

A Prince-like purple rain, perhaps because

His death has not quite settled in, and I want to

Talk to you, whose death will never settle,

We can never compare notes about “Motherless Child”

I will never get to ask you about

His strident, angry guitar chords

Tearing the air between us

We would have had to talk about Paul Robeson

The simple piano arrangement of the despairing art song

I want to ask you how you feel when you hear

Prince’s scream, when you see the flair of the dance

And we would whisper about our own mother

And motherlessness.

 

Maybe I’d steer our sentences toward Merle Haggard,

And I can hear you now telling me what you admire,

That my enjoyment spans the genres,

While your ears limit your appreciation, and then

I make my case, for aren’t we all outlaws,

Through music you introduced me to as blues and folk?

Aren’t these words, these notes

Our song of rebellion too?

We would hold hands and embrace,

The responsibility of any

Serious human being today,

Our rebellion our song.

 

 

Memorial Day Massacre by Christian Sullivan

[At this year’s commemoration of the Memorial Day Massacre, an annual event sponsored by steelworkers who help us remember the history of our working class, high school student Christian Sullivan read his award-winning, very perceptive essay. What I found particularly useful was the author’s consideration of what is different today. Things are indeed different, fundamentally different, and it is exciting to see young people grappling with what this change means.  — Lew Rosenbaum]  

“On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, police opened fire on a parade of striking steel workers and their families at the gate of the Republic Steel Company, in South Chicago. Fifty people were shot, of whom 10 later died; 100 others were beaten with clubs,” a quote by Dorothy Day from her book Selected Writings summarizing the events of the Memorial Day Massacre. There is no doubting that date was one of the worst tragedies in Chicago history, and nothing can justify the actions of the police officers, press, and steel companies involved during, and after, this horrific incident occurred. There were a number of causes and aftermaths of this event, and these valiant steelworkers should be an example to workers of the modern day of how important and powerful labor unions truly are.

To understand the causes of the Memorial Day Massacre, one must understand the way businesses think. When it comes to the production of a product, the profit of the company is based on how much money and resources are put into making said product versus the amount of money they bring back selling said product; the smaller the production fee, the larger the profits. One large production fee is the salary of every worker and employee who help in the making of the product. In the business world, the smaller their employees’ salaries are, the better the company’s profits. At the same time, as executives at higher pay, they don’t want to lower their own, regardless of how gross or unfair it may be. The only other way for them to increase profits would be to raise the prices of their goods and risk upsetting the consumer, which could potentially lead to lesser profits and loss of business to lower priced competition. With that being said, we can now better understand the cause of this massacre that took place outside of the Republic Steel Company.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), previously known as the Committee of Industrial Organization, was an organization that heavily encouraged and aided the unionization of workers in industrial jobs such as the steel industry. CIO was quickly succeeding in the creation of a steel workers union, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), even being recognized by one of the largest companies in the steel industry, U.S. Steel, which was notoriously anti-union beforehand. They signed a contract with SWOC, promoting the act of “collective bargaining,” the negotiation of terms and treatment between companies and employees. Many other large and small steel companies signed this same contract, recognizing the union and agreeing to negotiation; yet, six companies, known as “Little Steel” still refused to accept the unionization of steelworkers, one of these companies being Republic Steel.

In the business world, unionization equals less profit. If companies are to maximize profit, they must be in full control of wages and treatment of their workers, otherwise, they must sacrifice profit for the health, well-being, and fairness of their employees; therefore, collective bargaining was out of the question for any company looking to make the most money they possibly can. Allowing collective bargaining and unionization forces a company to recognize the power and say its workers have in its business, disallowing them to continue taking advantage of them.

As such, Republic Steel continued to refuse any dealings with SWOC, resulting in mass protest in order to hurt production to the point of forcing Republic Steels hand into union acceptance, as done with many other opposing steel companies before it. SWOC planned a march to the Republic Steel company and a peaceful picket; however, Republic Steel, already knowing about the picket, set up a police blockade outside of its company gates. When the march reached its destination, they were immediately confronted by the police. With the peaceful picketers refusing to give in, several officers drew their guns and began firing into the crowd, killing 10 innocent civilians and injuring 30 others whilst they were fleeing. Other police officers drew their clubs and brutally beat several other protesters, permanently disabling nine of them, and severely injuring another 28. That was the Memorial Day Massacre.

Press and media tended to be completely bias, supporting the police side. Any footage of

The New York Times called the demonstrators a “mob.”

the massacre was held from the public in order to prevent “mass hysteria.” Not a single police officer was convicted of a crime and any evidence that could have shown the use of excess force was hidden from the public eye. The story was even morphed by police and media, claiming that the protesters carried weapons and were under the influence of drugs.

As aftermath, protest was completely changed for the future. As mass gatherings and pickets often lead to violence, injury, and sometimes death, it became a lesser focus of organized unions. Instead, unions began focusing a lot more on legal action and communication with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in order to make safer, more concrete change. After just five more persistent years, those who had given their lives that fateful day in front of the Republic Steel company no longer did so in vain. Legal actions with NLRB caught the attention of the Supreme Court, and all remaining steel companies included in Little Steel were forced by national law to unionize, showing that unions can succeed and can do so through the system. It showed that unions had the power to change things for the better, whether it be through protest in a field or plea in the courtroom.

As years went on, that feeling of power was reduced. The decline in labor unions in the past 50 years is in no way a natural one. Companies, as well as the government, have been purposely trying to decrease the popularity of labor unions. Companies have armies of lawyers looking for loopholes in contractual obligations, and government, mostly those of the Republican Party, have been doing what they can through congress to legally decrease the amount of power labor unions withhold. On top of all of this, companies who do not want to deal with the fair pay and treatment of union workers are simply outsourcing their jobs to other countries where unions have no power and displacing American citizens from jobs in the process. All of this is adding to a mental effect on American citizens that unions are no longer powerful enough to change anything. People no longer believe in unions’ abilities to protect them from the unfairness of large companies, some even blaming them solely for the loss of jobs in America. Even though our problems remain the same, the unions protecting us from those problems have grown weaker and less numerous.

Today, people are still facing the exact same problems the steel workers were back in 1937: unfair wages, unsafe working conditions, and unfair pensions; however, unlike back then, companies and government know what to do to get around labor unions. Labor unions game has not changed, but the companies’ has. At the same time, union support as fell so greatly, that even old tactics are not being implemented for change. No one believes they can make a difference, so they often do not try. Places where simple picketing and court actions would work are not even making the attempt. Taking a lesson from the steelworkers of the 1930s may not fix some of the more complex issues in bigger businesses nowadays, but it still has untapped power in some work places. People are just simply too disheartened to use them.

None of this means organized labor is beaten, defeated, dead, or gone; simply outdated.

Roman Villarreal’s sculpture, a tribute to Chicago steelworkers, dedicated in 2015 in Steelworkers Park

Union power needs a revamp. They need to come up with new ways to picket, new ways to negotiate, and new ways to combat unfairness. As companies update their ways of avoiding union power, unions need to update their ways of checking companies. All of this is made even harder by the fact that sometimes even our own government is suppressing the unions and the public is losing faith in organized labor. Unions need to update their ways, show people they have the power to equalize employer/employee relations again, and show them that becoming an active union member can make a difference. All of this could be made much easier by having a government that will also support union power and push bills in their favor rather than against. None of this is possible overnight. This is a process that will take years to happen and, as with all things, will not happen at all without people taking action to make happen.

In all, the fact that unions have power at all is a thing to be thankful for, and we owe a great debt the CIO, SWOC, NLRB, and every group, union, and national association that keeps workers from unfair treatment and pay as best they can today. Sure, we may not ever be as successful as our predecessors who worked toward work force equality and fought and even died for us, not only in the Memorial Day Massacre, but in every protest, movement, or event. The Memorial Day Massacre was a tragic incident, and from it came one of the most important strength our generation need to make it in this country, a stronger, more active labor union. Now it is time to rejuvenate it and strengthen it just as they did. How? We will not know until we make the effort to figure it out as a whole, together, as a union.

 

 

On Reading the “Anthology of a Thousand Poets” Ho Chi Minh

On Reading the “Anthology of a Thousand Poets”

Ho Chi Minh

They used to sing of nature’s charms –
hills, streams, mists, flowers, snow, moon, and wind.
Today, a poem must have steel.
A poet must learn to wage war.