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Poor Workers' Unions
Rebuilding Labor from Below (Completely Revised and Updated Edition)
Vanessa Tait
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eBook - ePub
Poor Workers' Unions
Rebuilding Labor from Below (Completely Revised and Updated Edition)
Vanessa Tait
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A classic account of low-wage workers' organization that the US Department of Labor calls one of the "100 books that has shaped work in America."As low-wage organizing campaigns have been reignited by the Fight for 15 movement and other workplace struggles, Poor Workers' Unions is as prescient as ever.
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Unionizing the Movements
More than a quarter-million people turned out for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. There Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair John Lewis spoke about liberation from “economic slavery.” “Hundreds of thousands of our brothers are not here,” Lewis said. “They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages, at all. . . . What is there . . . to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5.00 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?” At the time, African Americans had twice the unemployment rate of whites, and those who had jobs took home on average 50 to 60 percent of white workers’ pay.1
The march had been called by the Negro-American Labor Council, an organization founded in 1959 by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in reaction to the AFL-CIO’s refusal to adopt internal desegregation measures. The march was to focus on jobs and economic issues, but later organizers broadened it to include pending civil rights legislation. The nation’s trade union leadership was unenthusiastic about the march: the executive council of the AFL-CIO, led by its president George Meany, refused to endorse it. However, some local, national, and international unions within the federation were active participants and endorsers. One such endorser was the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, the only white labor representative on the march’s coordinating committee.2
This lack of enthusiasm for civil rights among white-led trade unions was hardly a surprise. Since the 1955 merger of the industrial union–based CIO with the trade union–based AFL, the AFL’s conservatism had predominated, especially on issues of race, corroding whatever good relations existed between civil rights organizations and the more racially progressive CIO. Financial contributions from trade unions to civil rights organizations were insultingly small. In 1959, for instance, labor contributions to the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), a major national civil rights organization, amounted to only $1,347, most of it from more progressive unions such as ILGWU and AFSCME.3
The scene at the Negro-American Labor Council’s February 1961 meeting in Washington, DC, was typical: for the eight hundred unionists and community activists in attendance, reported the independent left newspaper the Guardian, “the AFL-CIO was the main target of attack. . . . Nearly every speaker criticized AFL-CIO leadership for ‘dragging its feet’” on rooting out racism within the trade union movement.4 Also in 1961, after years of skirmishes between Meany and pro–civil rights unionists led by Randolph, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) released a scathing report on civil rights in the first five years of the AFL-CIO merger, detailing racist practices in trade unions, apprenticeship programs, and AFL-CIO bodies. “The basic status of workers in the labor movement who are non-white is that of second class citizenship,” proclaimed Randolph, the sole African American on the twenty-member AFL-CIO executive council, to AFL-CIO convention delegates in 1961. But the AFL-CIO’s executive council rejected the allegations, instead blaming pro–civil rights unionists for the “‘gap that has developed’ between organized labor and the Negro Community.”5
All four major civil rights organizations—the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC, and CORE—had protested union-backed racial discrimination and unfair hiring and had called on the AFL-CIO to organize unrepresented workers of color. Receiving no response, civil rights organizations launched nationwide protests in 1963 calling for jobs and fair employment. A few years later, in 1965, they began to try their hand at organizing “freedom unions” for poor workers unrepresented by trade unions.
In the late 1960s the women’s movement faced a similar dilemma. Becoming aware of how gender relations structured economic oppression, feminist activists saw women workers making an average of fifty cents to each dollar paid to men, not including the unwaged “second shift” in the home. Women who were union members took part in widespread gender activism in the ’60s and ’70s—organizing against the sex-typing of jobs and winning major legal decisions against discriminatory employers.6 But female membership in unions was abysmally low during the ’60s—only about 12 percent of working women belonged to unions, even though women made up 40 percent of the American workforce.7
The male-dominated AFL-CIO’s lack of interest, and in some cases lack of ability, in organizing primarily female workplaces drove women to create their own institutions outside existing trade unions. The solely economic focus of trade unions held little appeal for women workers, whose concerns—including day care, protection against sexual harassment, and respect and dignity on the job—often went unnoticed by trade union reps. Working a “double day” on the job and at home helped form a different consciousness about work—one that was not limited to economic issues in the waged workplace. This conception would become central to movement-based organizing efforts among women in clerical and service sector jobs. An emerging feminist consciousness influenced the formation of scores of organizations for domestics, welfare mothers, and clerical workers—all framing their demands in terms of workers’ rights and civil rights, as well as class and gender solidarity.
Into this gulf of trade union inactivity a new generation of social movement activists launched a wave of economic organizing in which class became central to movement building. While they didn’t necessarily carry the label “labor,” hundreds of campaigns for equal employment and workplace rights flourished amid the civil rights, New Left, and women’s movements of the ’60s and early ’70s. Some were short-lived; others survived to establish a long-term presence in, and an effect on, movements for social change. Most important, these organizations brought the voices of marginalized poor workers into the struggle for economic justice, building consciousness about their experiences and expanding the labor movement in crucial ways. These poor workers—day laborers, low-wage clerical and service workers, welfare recipients, and the marginally employed—would play an increasingly important part in movements for labor and economic justice over the next decades.
Jim Crow Must Go
Following the 1963 March on Washington, civil rights organizations impatient with trade union inaction put fair employment at the top of their agendas from coast to coast. From 1963 to 1964, as CORE historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick note, “campaigns against job bias were the most common projects among the northern and western chapters—and generally the most successful.”8 Activists in San Francisco captured national attention when a coalition of civil rights groups began organizing for equal employment in response to high rates of joblessness in the Bay Area. Named the United Freedom Movement, the coalition had the goal of confronting de facto employment segregation through confrontation, using militant civil disobedience. Sit-ins, pickets, and boycotts brought the Bay Area into the forefront of the action and marked a new emphasis on economic oppression as a main focus of the growing movement.
The United Freedom Movement campaign harked back to earlier “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s, when African Americans in several cities successfully boycotted exploitative white-owned businesses located in their segregated communities.9 But the strategy also strongly borrowed from community-based labor organizing techniques. Activists presented employers with demands for fair hiring and insisted that an agreement be signed directly with the United Freedom Movement. If an employer refused, they would commence civil disobedience. This bore striking similarities to union organizing drives—but in this case, a local civil rights coalition acted as the collective bargaining agent, and an employer’s failure to sign a contract would be answered with civil disobedience by community members instead of a strike by workers.
San Francisco’s United Freedom Movement first targeted Mel’s Drive-In, a local restaurant chain that relegated African Americans to bottom-wage dishwashing and janitorial jobs. As historian Larry Saloman describes, daily picketers carried signs with messages such as “I’ll have a freedomburger please,” or entered the restaurant and placed orders for “freedom and jobs for Negroes.” After nearly one hundred arrests and with the threat of more demonstrations to come, Mel’s management signed a fair hiring agreement for all thirteen restaurants in the chain. Buoyed by the victory, San Francisco activists picked new targets. Merely the threat of a 1963 Christmas boycott of downtown department stores compelled the stores to sign hiring agreements. And the Lucky supermarket chain, with an atrocious record of minority hiring, became the testing ground for the “shop in.” CORE picketers had found that shoppers in predominantly white neighborhoods crossed their lines, limiting their impact on the stores’ business. So protesters entered the stores, filled their grocery carts, lined up to check out, then left saying, “I’ll have more money to pay when you hire more Negroes.” The Lucky action lasted nine days, and management finally signed an agreement with CORE guaranteeing that only people of color would be hired at Lucky stores for an entire year.10
In March 1964, the Bay Area civil rights struggle landed right in the middle of the San Francisco’s elegant Sheraton Palace Hotel, glimpsed in this book’s introduction. After a series of pickets and arrests, some fifteen hundred protesters surrounded the hotel, and according to historians Natalie Becker and Marjorie Myhill, “before long, the picketing turned into a walk-in, the walk-in into a moving, chanting serpentine, the serpentine into a sit-in, and the sit-in into a sleep-in,” paralyzing the hotel’s business. The spectacle of an interracial group of activists sleeping in the ritzy hotel lobby was splashed across San Francisco’s newspapers. Demands included increasing the number of African American workers at the hotel; at the time there were only 19 Black workers out of 550 employees, and they worked in the “back of the house,” out of sight of the hotel’s wealthy clientele. After two days, activists emerged with a fair hiring agreement not just for the Sheraton Palace but also for thirty-three of the city’s other hotels, many of whose owners feared they would be the activists’ next targets.11
Civil rights activists also besieged San Francisco’s auto row, lying in cars or on desks to press their demands for equal employment. “Young Negroes and whites slipped into shiny new Plymouths, Valiants and Furies,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, while “the showroom resounded almost continuously with chants, yells and songs.”12 Demonstrating crowds as large as five thousand virtually shut down business during March and April 1964, winning an industry-wide jobs agreement modeled on the Sheraton Palace victory. Activists moved on to the powerful Bank of America, which faced huge pickets in thirteen California cities and demands that it hire at least thirty-six hundred people of color within a year. In one demonstration, some ten thousand people surrounded a downtown San Francisco branch; in another, activists defied a court order by sitting in at a San Diego branch. Other tactics were smaller but effective: civil rights workers would ask a teller for pennies in exchange for bills, then circulate to a new teller to change the money back to bills. Months of such tactics, along with continual demonstrations and bad publicity, forced the bank to promise to increase its Black employment by nearly 40 percent.13
In all, the San Francisco jobs campaign produced over 375 equal employment agreements promising thousands of jobs to African Americans and other people of color.14 This was classic grassroots labor organizing, and it was not limited to a single employer or even a single industry. Through direct confrontation, activists forced employers to bargain directly with civil rights groups and sign binding agreements with them. Civil rights groups became, in effect, bargaining agents for the Black community as a whole. In direct contrast, San Francisco’s unions, for the most part, represented white workers in the industries targeted and did not participate in the demonstrations. One exception was the city’s left-leaning ILWU local, which pressured the mayor to settle the Sheraton Palace dispute.
Young activists dominated San Francisco’s multiracial CORE chapter, including eighteen-year-old Tracy Simms, an African American high school student who acted as spokesperson during the Sheraton protest. She’d gotten interested in civil rights at Berkeley’s Woolworth’s boycott at the age of fourteen. Writes historian Jo Freeman, “Newspaper accounts implied that it really stuck in the craw of the hotel association and the city leaders to have to negotiate with an 18-year-old girl.”15 Early on, some 70 to 80 percent of CORE’s activists were young white college students, about half female. As the struggle wore on, participants were decidedly more racially diverse—over half were African American at the time of the auto row protests, with many more older nonstudents lying down to be arrested.16
CORE chapters across the nation attacked a wide range of discriminatory employers. Jobs campaigns in Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, Columbus, East St. Louis, Berkeley, and Washington, DC, met with some success, though not as dramatic as San Francisco’s. Such campaigns were notable for their emphasis on economic justice: in contrast to the South, segregation in northern cities was achieved through economic oppression, not laws.17
From the Freedom Movement to Freedom Unions
Civil rights activists also made the leap from organizing for jobs and fair hiring practices to encouraging the formation of independent community unions. In Mississippi, workers from SNCC helped residents of the Delta town of Shaw to organize the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU). Shaw’s main employer was a sewing plant that refused to hire Black people; most were relegated to poverty-wage day labor in the cotton fields. In 1965, angry residents decided to act and, an anonymous observer wrote, forty-five of them—“cotton day laborers, tractor drivers, haulers, domestic servants, part time carpenters, mechanics, handymen, former sharecroppers and renters”—met in a tiny church to form a union.18
Nineteen-year-old George Shelton was elected the union’s chair. The group’s draft constitution stated that its purpose was “to organize the poor people” and allowed any person over fourteen years old “who works, whether employed or not,” to join. In a 1965 fundraising letter, Shelton told potential supporters that most farm workers in Mississippi made only thirty cents an hour, and “some workers, particularly the maids, don’t even get this.”19 Even the highest-paid workers made only $3 for a ten-hour d...