Why do we celebrate labor on a day different from the remainder of the
world?
Elliott Lauderdale
Labor historyconsidering ethnicity and gender in
a struggle for justicePaternalism and anarchy
Structual inequality without culpability
Daoist Zhuang Zi 3 C BCE
• "A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation.".'
• Henry David Thoreau an early US anarchist.
• Zhuang Zi cited in - Murray N. Rothbard (1990) – Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire* Journal of Libertarian Studies 9 (2), 46 http://web.archive.org/web/20081216214953/http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_3.pdf
Lowell System
Fighting excessive hours
In a letter to a friend in 1846, (Sarah ) Bagley [b. 1806 edited the labor newspaper The Voice of Industry.] promoted the labor reform publication Factory Tractsas representing the interests of those “who are not willing to see our sex made into living machines to do the bidding of the incorporated aristocrats and reduced to a sum for their bodily services hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together.” Although the struggles of Bagley and other mill girls to achieve legislation for a 10-hour day failed, Lowell’s textile corporations did reduce the workday to 11 hours. “Mill girls” Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP)
Boardinghouse for NE farmgirls
When an anti-slavery speaker came to Lowell in 1834, he drew an angry stone-throwing mob. Mill owners and workers depended on Southern cotton, and anyone who threatened the system was unwelcome. Ever since Slater's cotton mill was established in 1790 and the cotton gin invented three years later, Southern cotton and Northern textiles had had a reciprocal relationship. The North's appetite for raw cotton spurred increased cotton production and the expansion of slavery. Lowell not only bought Southern cotton, but it made"negro cloth" that was sold to plantations.
1840s Potato famine, Irish and German, then Italian immigration replaced striking women from N.E.
Job discrimination produces cheap labor, Erie Canal, Chinese on the Transcontinental Railroad, ethnicities as strikebreakers, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Native Am and Chinese denied citizenship
Uplifting Pineywoods people (women) of Graniteville, NC (Jones,
AW, 222, 229) according to the Lowell model) [total not = NH production, 10% in 1850 – 25% 1860 GA 50 mills] and blacks or women
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a [constructive, nonviolent ] tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
…
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral that individuals.
…
This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Racial Division of Laborracial ideologies have been invoked to justify the legal subordination of a number of groups of wage earners . (16) “We dislike them because we are unjust to them.” By this he meant that injustice preceded the ideology that sought to justify it. (AW, 20)
May Day 1 May 1886A general strike in many cities for the 8 hr work day, 600,000 in Chicago. Haymarket Square a follow-up rally to protest police shootings the day before at McCormick Plant.
Peaceful demonstration breaking up when police charged and bomb was thrown 4 May.
Martyrs
Albert Parsons, a speaker, of Al and 7 tried and sentenced to death He and 3 others sang the Marseillaise before they were hung 11 Nov 1887
Pardoned for the unfairness of their trial. No evidence any labor
organization was responsible for bomb
Underline ideology against othersfrom contemporary papers
"bloody brutes", "red ruffians", "dynamarchists", "bloody monsters", "cowards", "cutthroats", "thieves", "assassins", and "fiends“. NY Times: hoodlums, bummers, riffraff, rabble, looters, ruffians, rapscallions...idiots
Manipulating ideology
Labor Day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, who organized the first parade in New York City. After the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred in Chicago on May 4, 1886, U.S. President Grover Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the affair. Thus, in 1887, it was established as an official holiday in September to support the Labor Day that the Knights favored.https://web.archive.org/web/20070930082656/http://progressivehistorians.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2041
in 1909-10, led by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, more than 20,000 workers struck against sweatshops in New York
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, http://www.britannica.com/blogs/
2011/03/triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-tragedy-turning-point-
workers-rights/Lectures Frances Perkins, September 30, 1964
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
Workplace Issues Today
Catherwood ILR Library
129 women and 17 men, mostly young European immigrants who were locked
in died
A. Phillip Randolf , long time leader of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters & Negro American Labor Council (381 LiA) against dual unions
Mobility allowed communication of civil rights struggle around country
Bayard Ruskin w/ A. Phillip Randolfother notables, plan DC march 1956
GRIGGS ET AL. v. DUKE POWER CO. No. 124 SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 1971
401 U.S. 424; 91 S. Ct. 849; 1971 U.S. LEXIS 134; 28 L. Ed. 2d 158; 3 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 175; 3 Empl. Prac. Dec. (CCH) P8137
On certiorari, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed. In an opinion by Burger, Ch. J., expressing the unanimous view of the court, it was held that the Civil Rights Act prohibits an employer from requiring a high school education or passing of a standardized general intelligence test as a condition of employment in or transfer to jobs when (1) neither standard is shown to be significantly related to successful job performance, (2) both requirements operate to disqualify Negroes at a substantially higher rate than white applicants, and (3) the jobs in question formerly had been filled only by white employees as part of a longstanding practice of giving preference to whites.
Earlier this year, McCartin said, just before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was set to introduce his bill to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public employees, Walker told a meeting of his advisors: “This is the last time we meet before we drop the bomb….Now it’s time to follow Reagan’s example.” PATCO 1981http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Organizing-Bargaining/Reagan-s-Union-Busting-in-PATCO-Strike-Reverberates-Today
Twenty-five were killed and 55 injured in the fire, trapped behind locked fire
doors. Imperial Food 1991. 11 years no safety inspection. Overregulation?
Elizabeth Warren on Gov Christie keynote in Tampa
• And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research — less to build a future. http://elizabethwarren.com/blog/we-built-it-together
Selected Bibliography
Dulles, Foser Rhea & Melvyn Dubofsky. ( 1984). Labor in America. (LiA) Arlington Heights Ill: Harlan Davidson.Illinois Labor History Society. http://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/haymarket.htmlIndustrial Workers of the World. http://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_maydayJones, Jacqueline. (1998). American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor. (AW) NY: Norton.Reid Luhman. (2002).. Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt. “Mill girls” Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP) http://www.nps.gov/lowe/planyourvisit/upload/Agents_05.pdf
