Year 501 (53 page)

Caterpillar decided in the ‘80s that its labor contract with the UAW was “a thing of the past,” the
Tribune
study observes: the company would “permanently change it with the threat of replacement workers.” That tactic, standard in the 19th century, was reinstituted by Ronald Reagan to destroy the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) in 1981, one of the many devices adopted to undermine labor and bring the Third World model home. In 1990, Caterpillar shifted some production to a small steel processor that had broken a Teamsters Local by hiring scabs, “a swift and stunning blow to the workers, a harbinger” of what was to come. Two years later, the hammer struck. For the first time in 60 years, a major US manufacturer felt free to use the ultimate anti-labor weapon. Congress followed shortly after by effectively denying railroad workers the right to strike after an employer lockout that stopped the trains.

Congress's General Accounting Office found that companies felt much more free to threaten to call in “permanent replacement workers” after Reagan used the device in 1981. From 1985 to 1989, employers resorted to the threat in one-third of all strikes, and fulfilled it in 17 percent of strikes in 1990. A 1992 study showed that “four of five employers are willing to wield the replacement-worker weapon,” the
Wall Street Journal
reported after the Caterpillar strike, and one-third said they would use it at once.

Labor reporter John Hoerr points out that the decline in workers' income from the early 1970s has been paralleled by decline in strikes, now at the lowest ebb since World War II. Militant labor organizing during the Great Depression brought about labor's first—and last—political victories, notably the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, which granted labor rights that had long been established in other industrial societies. Though the right to organize was quickly weakened by Supreme Court rulings, it was not until the 1980s that corporate America felt strong enough to return to the good old days, moving the US off the international spectrum once again. The International Labor Organization (ILO), taking up an AFL-CIO complaint in 1991, noted that the right to strike is lost when workers run the risk of losing their jobs to permanent replacements and recommended that the US reassess its policies in the light of international standards—strong words, from an organization traditionally beholden to its powerful sponsors. Among industrial countries the US is alone, apart from South Africa, in tolerating the ardent union-busting devices.
10

“Paradox of ‘92: Weak Economy, Strong Profits.” The headline of a lead article in the
Times
business section captures the consequences of the “one-sided class war” waged with renewed intensity since the end of the affluent alliance. “America is not doing very well, but its corporations are doing just fine,” the article opens, with corporate profits “hitting new highs as profit margins expand.” A paradox, inexplicable and insoluble. One that will only deepen as the architects of policy proceed without interference from “meddlesome outsiders.”
11

What the “paradox” entails for the general population is demonstrated by numerous studies of income distribution, real wages, poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and other social indices. A study released by the Economic Policy Institute on Labor Day, 1992, fleshed out the details of what people know from their experience: after a decade of Reaganism, “most Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and considerably less security,” and “the vast majority” are “in many ways worse off” than in the late 1970s. From 1987, real wages have declined even for the college educated. “Poverty rates were high by historic standards,” and “those in poverty in 1989 were significantly poorer than the poor in 1979.” The poverty rate rose further in 1991, the Census Bureau reported. A congressional report released a few days later estimates that hunger has grown by 50 percent since the mid-1980s to some 30 million people. Other studies show that one of eight children under 12 suffers from hunger, a problem that reappeared in 1982 after having been overcome by government programs from the 1960s. Two researchers report that in New York, the proportion of children raised in poverty more than doubled to 40 percent, while nationwide, “the number of hungry American children grew by 26 percent” as aid for the poor shrank during “the booming 1980s”—“one of the great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced,” a spokesman for the culture of cruelty proclaimed (Tom Wolfe).
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The impact is brought out forcefully in more narrowly-focused studies; for example, at the Boston City Hospital, where researchers found that “the number of malnourished, low-weight children jumped dramatically following the coldest winter months,” when parents had to face the agonizing choice between heat or food. At the hospital's clinic for malnourished children, more were treated in the first nine months of 1992 than in all of 1991; the wait for care reached two months, compelling the staff to “resort to triage.” Some suffer from Third World levels of malnutrition and require hospitalization, victims of “the social and financial calamities that have befallen families” and the “massive retrenchment in social service programs.”
13
By the side of a road, men hold signs that read “Will Work for Food,” a sight that recalls the darkest days of the Great Depression.

But with a significant difference. Hope seems to have been lost to a far greater extent today, though the current recession is far less severe. For the first time in the modern history of industrial society, there is a widespread feeling that things will not be getting better, that there is no way out.

2. “Fight to the Death”

The victory for working people and for democracy in 1935 sent a chill through the business community. The National Association of Manufacturers warned in 1938 of the “hazard facing industrialists” in “the newly realized political power of the masses”; “Unless their thinking is directed we are definitely headed for adversity.” A counteroffensive was quickly launched, including the traditional recourse to murderous state violence. Recognizing that more would be needed, corporate America turned to “scientific methods of strike-breaking,” “human relations,” huge PR campaigns to mobilize communities against “outsiders” preaching “communism and anarchy” and seeking to destroy our communities, and so on. These devices, building upon corporate projects of earlier years, were put on hold during the war, but revived immediately after, as legislation and propaganda chipped away at labor's gains, with no little help from the union leadership, leading finally to the situation now prevailing.
14

The shock of the labor victories of the New Deal period was particularly intense because of the prevailing assumption in the business community that labor organizing and popular democracy had been buried forever. The first warning was sounded in 1932, when the Norris-LaGuardia Act exempted unions from antitrust prosecution, granting labor rights that it had received in England sixty years earlier. The Wagner Act was entirely unacceptable, and has by now been effectively reversed by the business-state-media complex.

In the late 19th century, American workers made progress despite the extremely hostile climate. In the steel industry, the heart of the developing economy, union organization reached roughly the level of Britain in the 1880s. That was soon to change. A state-business offensive destroyed the unions with considerable violence, in other industries as well. In the business euphoria of the 1920s, it was assumed that the beast had been slain.

American labor history is unusually violent, considerably more so than in other industrial societies. Noting that there is no serious study, Patricia Sexton reports an estimate of 700 strikers killed and thousands injured from 1877 to 1968, a figure that may “grossly understate the total casualties”; in comparison, one British striker was killed since 1911.
15

A major blow against working people was struck in 1892, when Andrew Carnegie destroyed the 60,000 member Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) by hiring scabs—yet another anniversary that might have been commemorated in 1992, when the UAW was laid low by the very same methods, revived after a sixty-year lapse. The leading social historian Herbert Gutman describes 1892 as “the really critical year” that “shaped and reshaped the consciousness of working-class leaders and radicals, of trade unionists.” The use of state power for corporate goals at that time “was staggering,” and led to “a growing awareness among workers that the state had become more and more inaccessible to them and especially to their political and economic needs and demands.” It was to remain so until the Great Depression.

The 1892 confrontation at Homestead, commonly called “the Homestead strike,” was actually a lockout by Carnegie and his manager on the scene, the thuggish Henry Clay Frick; Carnegie chose to vacation in Scotland, dedicating libraries he had donated. On July 1 the newly-formed Carnegie Steel Corporation announced that “No trade union will ever be recognized at the Homestead Steel Works hereafter.” The locked-out workers could reapply individually, nothing more. It was to be “a Finish Fight against Organized Labor,” the Pittsburgh press proclaimed, a fight “to the death between the Carnegie Steel Company, limited, with its $25,000,000 capital, and the workmen of Homestead,” the
New York Times
reported.

Carnegie and Frick overcame the workers of Homestead by force, first sending Pinkerton guards, then the Pennsylvania National Guard when the Pinkertons were defeated and expelled by the local population. “The lockout crushed the largest trade union in America, the AAISW, and it wrecked the lives of its most devoted members,” Paul Krause writes in his comprehensive history. Unionism was not revived in Homestead for 45 years. The impact was far broader.

Destruction of unions was only one aspect of the general project of disciplining labor. Workers were to be deskilled, turned into pliable tools under the control of “scientific management.” Management was particularly incensed that “the men ran the mill and the foreman had little authority” in Homestead, one official later said. As discussed earlier, it has been plausibly argued that the current malaise of US industry can be traced in part to the success of the project of making working people “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be,” in defiance of Adam Smith's warning that government must “take pains to prevent” this fate for the “labouring poor” as the “invisible hand” does its grim work (see pp. 25, 145). On the contrary, business called upon state power to accelerate the process. Elimination of the mechanisms “to consult our neighbor” is a companion process in the taming of the herd.

Homestead was a particularly tempting target because workers there were “thoroughly organized,” and in control of local political life as well. Homestead held firm through the 1880s while a few miles away, in Pittsburgh, labor suffered severe defeats. Its multi-ethnic work force demanded their “rights as freeborn American citizens” in what Krause describes as “a workers' version of a modern American Republic,” in which workers would have freedom and dignity. Homestead was “the nation's preeminent labor town,” Krause writes, and Carnegie's next target in his ongoing campaign to destroy the right to organize.
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Carnegie's victory at Homestead enabled him to slash wages, impose twelve-hour workdays, eliminate jobs, and gain monumental profits. This “magnificent record was to a great extent made possible by the company's victory at Homestead,” a historian of the company wrote in 1903. Carnegie's “free enterprise” achievements relied on more than the use of state violence to break the union. As in the case of other industries from textiles to electronics, state protection and public subsidy were critical to Carnegie's success. “Under the beauties of the protective tariff system the manufacturing interests of the country are experiencing unparalleled prosperity,” the
Pittsburgh Post
reported on the eve of the lockout, while Carnegie and others like him were preparing “an enormous reduction in the wages of their men.” Carnegie was also a master swindler, defrauding the city of Pittsburgh in collusion with city bosses. Famed as a pacifist as well as philanthropist, Carnegie looked forward to “millions for us in armor” in construction of battleships—purely for defense, he explained, hence in accord with his pacifist principles. In 1890 Carnegie had won a large naval contract for his new Homestead plant. “It was with the help of...powerful politicians and crafty financiers who operated in the grand arenas of national and international government—as well as in the backrooms of Pittsburgh's businesses and city hall—that Carnegie was able to construct his immense industrial fiefdom,” Krause writes: the world's first billion-dollar corporation, US Steel. Meanwhile, the new imperial navy was “defending” the US off the coasts of Brazil and Chile and across the Pacific.
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The press gave overwhelming support to the Company, as usual. The British press presented a different picture. The
London Times
ridiculed “this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for his self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.” The far-right British press ridiculed Carnegie's preachings on “the rights and duties of wealth,” describing his self-congratulatory book
Triumphant Democracy
as “a wholesome piece of satire” in the light of his brutal methods of strike-breaking, which should be neither “permitted nor required in a civilized community,” the
London Times
added.