I'm Sticking to the Union

I'm Sticking to the Union

I'm_Sticking_to_the_Union

Jacob Schlitt

"I recently read an excellent piece by Elaine Bernard of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program in the Fall 2008 issue of DSA’s Democratic Left."

2009

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I’m Sticking to the Union

I recently read an excellent piece by Elaine Bernard of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program in the Fall 2008 issue of DSA’s Democratic Left. It was called "The State of US Labor and Building Union Power." Two points stood out: That unions have been in a steady decline for the past 50 years and now represent only 12% of workers (and only 7.5% of private sector workers). And workers who organize themselves are more committed trade unionists than those who go to work for an employer that is already organized, and see there dues as simply another deduction.

Elaine cited 1955 as the date that unions reached "highest density," when one out of three workers was a union member. I can't claim credit, but I was organizing for the ILGWU from 1951 to 1954. I grew up at a time when the labor movement was becoming an important force in American life. Thanks to the New Deal, the Wagner Act was passed, the NLRB was created, and workers felt that government was finally on their side. It was against the law to fire a worker for union activity. Unions that had struggled for decades to organize and negotiate contracts with their employers, were finally winning recognition.

In the '30s, '40s and '50s, everybody knew Walter Reuther (UAW), John L. Lewis (UMW), David Dubinsky (ILGWU) and Sidney Hillman (ACWA). They knew there was an AF of L led by a plumber named George Meany and a CIO led by a steel worker named Philip Murray. And in 1955 they merged and became the AFL-CIO. It is true that some people thought that unions were communist-controlled, and other people thought they were gangster-controlled, but for the most part, people acknowledged that unions were a force for good: they were instrumental in improving the wages, hours and working conditions for their members, which benefited non-union workers as well. But most important, you had job security. You had the protection of a contract.

As a small child, I knew about the ILGWU because my mother had been a member. I am not sure when I first learned that she had taken part in the 1910 Cloakmakers Strike, and that she was a shop chairlady and active in Local 9, the cloak finishers local, before she married in 1916. However, after my father died in 1931, my mother's attempt to return to work was thwarted by the union. She was no longer a member. It was the depression. There was very little work. What there was went to members in good standing.

By the late '30s, my mother finally got sporadic employment at a union shop on Beach Avenue in the Bronx, Zweig and Sternheim. I have a vivid memory of that shop. I used to go there with my mother when she had work, and I didn't have school. I would sit on the floor next to her and collect all the empty spools of thread and build castles and towers. I remember walking up the one flight of stairs to the factory. We would enter, I believe my mother would punch a time clock, and we would walk across the factory floor to the finishers' tables. In the front of the shop were the operators, and next to them were the pressers. Toward the back were the long tables on which the cutters spread the material. After they were cut, they would be bundled and given to the operators, and then to the finishers, and finally to the pressers.. I took all of this for granted. Most of the workers were Jewish and Italian. My mother didn't develop any friendships with the people with whom she worked.

There was also an office where I assume Mr. Zweig and Mr. Sternheim and a secretary or bookkeeper worked. My mother once told me, very angrily, that when the union's Business Agent visited the shop, he would go into the office and then leave. He did not stop to talk to the workers, or the shop chairman. This was my mother's image of an ILGWU Business Agent around 1940. When I applied to the ILGWU Training Institute 10 years later, my mother asked me what it would lead to. I told her I would be an organizer. That was OK. And after that? I replied, "a Business Agent." She couldn’t restrain her derision. "So you went to college to become a Business Agent? I can’t believe it."

Despite her contempt for business agents, my mother felt a loyalty to the union. She often said that a bad union is better than no union. Her reasoning was interesting. You can make a bad union better. You can get rid of the corruption and elect honest officers. But if you don’t have a union, the bosses will exploit you and you have no recourse. You have no contract, no mechanism for making things better.

I suspect I absorbed this view very early in life. As a pre-teen, my heroes were FDR and Walter Reuther. I remember the newsreels of the sit down strikers in the Detroit auto plants. I was in awe of the workers in the steel mills and the coal mines, and their struggles to form unions. By the time I graduated from high school, my commitment to organized labor was firmly established, though it was tempered by my mother’s less than enthusiastic feelings about the ILGWU. Still, she admired David Dubinsky and his leadership, as well as his politics. It was to reach her and workers like her that the American Labor Party was formed in New York in1936 by a group of labor leaders led by Dubinsky. My mother considered herself a socialist, an admirer of Thomas and Debs and Hillquit, but she was also a realist. She felt that only Roosevelt could save America. My mother bought our first radio in 1936 in order to hear Roosevelt’s speeches.

By the time I entered CCNY, I began to think about two possible vocational goals: to become a high school social studies teacher, or to go to work for a union. I knew that unions had research departments and education departments. I felt that would be a meaningful career. I majored in Economics, taking all the labor courses available, and I took all the Education courses that I needed to qualify to teach.

In 1945, when I entered college, the war had ended. Germany and Japan were defeated. The United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. In Europe, six million Jews had been killed. Europe had been devastated. At home, GIs were returning, and the war plants were converting to peacetime. Women who had worked in the factories were expected to give up those jobs and return to their kitchens, or to more traditional work.

My mother was now working fairly steadily. It was hard for her to travel downtown, but she did it. And she was again an active member of Local 9. She read the union's newspaper, "Justice" in its Yiddish version "Gerekhtikeit" and supported the Liberal Party. We denounced the passage of the Taft-Harley Act in 1947. We cheered and wept at the creation of the State of Israel, and my mother dreamed of visiting Israel when she retired from work. And she kept wondering why the nations of the world could not find another way to resolve differences, other than war. Tragically, my mother died in 1951, when I was organizing in Cleveland, And the nations of the world continued to fight wars.

In 1955, the AFL and the CIO merged, but there were still sharp differences between the older craft and the newer industrial unions. There were political and philosophical differences, and there were differences with regard to priorities. And these differences continued over the years. At one time it was the UAW that left the Federation, at another the IBT, most recently the SEIU. There are still people who think of unions as either radical or gangster-controlled, or both. And employers have done a very effective job of fighting unions. And the unions have done a very poor job of fighting back. And now it is 2009, and as Elaine Bernard pointed out, unions today represent the lowest percent of workers in recent history.

To be continued.

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