Lessons for Our Struggle

Frances Fox Piven

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781608462162
• eBook ISBN: 9781608462292
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"Piven has embodied the best of American democracy."— The Nation

Frances Fox Piven reminds us why we must understand the labor, civil-rights, and anti-imperialist struggles of the Depression era if we are going to advance the struggles of the present.

Frances Fox Piven is the author of many important books.

The Turbulent Years

THE TURBULENT YEARS is the second volume of Irving Bernstein’s history of the era of the Great Depression. It describes a brief period when American workers were on the move on a scale that had never been matched before and that has not been matched since. From the textile villages of the South to the auto plants of Detroit to the docks of San Francisco to the truck depots of Minneapolis to the tire plants of Akron to the steel mills of Pennsylvania, and even to the dime stores and movie houses of Main Street America, across the country and in industry after industry, workers marched and rallied, mobilized in walkouts, sit-downs, and street battles. The movement created real power, enough power to change the American industrial capitalist system, and to change it for the better. The changes unfolded in the workplace, where workers learned that by shutting it down they could force the hand of the boss and even win the right to unionize.

The changes also unfolded in politics. Always in the American past, worker insurgencies had ultimately been defeated by the armed force of the state and the hostile rulings of the courts. The movement of the 1930s not only stayed the coercive hand of the state, but actually won a series of legislative victories that made the state the protector of workers in their perennial battles with employers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had not gained office as a champion of labor rights, and he had withheld his support from a bill proposed by Robert Wagner, senator from New York, that would place government authority behind collective bargaining. The strike movement and the economic repercussions it threatened forced FDR’s hand. The National Labor Relations Act was passed, FDR signed it, and shortly afterward the Supreme Court accepted it. In the American experience, this period was the high point of labor power.

Bernstein’s meticulous research into the complex developments that contributed to the mobilization of workers in the 1930s provides an unparalleled account of the swiftly moving worker politics that gave us the New Deal. The key leverage of workers during the Great Depression was their ability to shut it down, to stop production, and by doing so jeopardize the manufacturing systems that in the end depended on worker subordination and cooperation. As the workers’ movement escalated, wages increased and working hours fell, and this despite a new dive in the economy that began in 1937. The biggest and most virulently anti-union corporations in America were suddenly ready to recognize unions, in return for the regularization of production that they hoped unions would ensure. After the Supreme Court ruled in a much-awaited decision that the National Labor Relations Act was constitutional, FDR called Congress into a special session to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing minimum wages and maximum hours.

The rationale for the landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which dealt with collective bargaining, was that giving workers a voice in industrial relations would regularize management-worker relations and bring industrial peace. In time, unionism did go far toward doing that, but at a great price in labor power, although this was not quickly evident. The big corporations struggling to contain worker insurgency were ready to accept unions, on condition that the new unions would take responsibility for preventing the walkouts that were disrupting production. The union contract was key to the new labor regime. Once a union had been certified by an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the union negotiated contracts that made the union itself responsible for ensuring uninterrupted production. There was probably not much choice, because this and only this was the reason that management had been brought to the bargaining table. Nevertheless, although we are getting ahead of Bernstein’s story, this labor victory also tamed the movement that had been responsible for the victory in the first place.

For about twenty-five years after World War II, big corporations were willing to live with unions. These were the years when the American economy ruled the world. But gradually, as the Western European and Japanese economies recovered from the destruction of the war, international competition began to erode the profit margins of American corporations, and business leaders grew impatient with big labor. Beginning in the late 1970s, prodded both by the pressures on profits generated by intensified international competition and by the opportunities that internationalization represented, big employers in the United States created a propaganda apparatus of think tanks and policy institutes, and deluged the media and Congress with arguments and data that purported to prove the truth of the neo-laissez-faire (or neoliberal) analysis. This was nothing less than an ideological campaign to revive the nineteenth-century idea that markets were governed by a species of natural law that could brook no interference, whether from government regulation or from worker-employer compacts. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, neoliberal doctrines made the same claim, albeit on an international scale. And, admittedly, there was at least a superficial plausibility to the argument that accelerating internationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Occupy Together
• The War against the Poor
• The Lean Years
• The Turbulent Years