Engaging with American Democracy » November 13th: Labor & Ideology in America

November 13th: Labor & Ideology in America

Announcements

  • EXTRA CREDIT: A Braver Campus Dialogue–REGISTER
    Under what circumstances should the United States become involved in international conflict?
    • Monday, Nov. 17th, 4:00pm
    • Woodward 135
  • Student Debate Fellows {This is not associated with Charlotte Debate}
  • Discussion Post #9 due this week
  • Heads up on Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s “The Memo” (1971)

Plan for the Day

  • Brief History of Labor Movements in the United States
  • Brief History of Marxism
  • The United States becoming a world Superpower
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • Cesar E. Chavez {time permitting}
  • Democracy/Liberty/Freedom/ETC. quotation:
    “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline. Other forms of discipline are imposed, but in freedom we must have self-discipline. Therefore, a soldier goes to his task because he feels within himself the duty to do it, to discipline himself, not to respond merely to the methods of tyranny and dictatorship..”
    —Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Remarks Upon Receiving the 1958 World Peace Award at the AMVETS Luncheon.” The American Presidency Project, 1 May 1959.

History of Labor: Rights, Power, Freedom

Although I mention above that we’ll discuss Labor History in the United States, I’m backing up a bit to show how long human civilization has organized and tried to codify labor membership and rules. It makes sense that people would organize around their employment and want to maintain proper wages as well as the vetting system of new skilled tradespeople. Today, we have unions and industry organizations that advocate for workers, and many of them are international organizations. These organizations are massive compared to the local groups that banded together.

Minimum Wage, Guilds, and Incorporated Towns

One of civilization’s oldest known legal codes specifies payment for specific commercial endeavors: The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1755–1750 BCE). The code is quite detailed and justified by Hammurabi, who claims, “I am Hammurabi, king of justice, to whom the god Shamash has granted (insight into) the truth” (Roth 135). The Code specifies the following:

  • “¶ 257 If a man hires an agricultural laborer, he shal give him 2,400 silas of grain per year.” (Roth 129)
  • “¶ 261 If a man hires a herdsman to herd cattle or the sheep and, he shall give him 2,400 silas of grain per year.” (Roth 129)
  • “¶ 274 If a man intends to hire a craftsman, he shall give, per [day]: as the hire of a …, 5 barleycorns of silver; as the hire of a woven-textile worker, 5 barleycorns of silver; as the hire of linen-worker…” (Roth 131)

Even in Ancient Mesopotamia, there were attempts to standardize payment for goods and services. There’s also a suggestion that professional standards (“being up to code”) were practiced and regulated:

  • “¶ 228 If a builder constructs a house for a man to his satisfaction, he shall give him 2 shekels of silver for each sar of house as his compensation.
  • “¶ 229 If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make his work sound, and the house that he constructs collapses and causes the death of the householder, that builder shall be killed.”
  • “¶ 230 If it should cause the death of a son of the householder, they shall kill a son of that builder.”
  • “231 If it should cause the death of a slave of the householder, he shall give to the householder a slave of comparable value for the slave.”
    (Roth 125)

We’re a long way from thinking about the hourly minimum wage and the actual conditions of this work, but we have a legal basis for “just” compensation.

Guilds

Guilds are groups of skilled craftsmen and merchants, and they have a long history. In addition to guilds standardizing measurements from Ancient Mesopotamia, guilds existed in Ancient Rome, but we often jump to the Medieval Guilds of Europe to lay the foundations of organized Labor in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Guilds of Medieval Europe had support of the Church, and flourished among Germanic and English groups. Because of our focus, we’ll draw a line from there to post-WWII American Unions. Some important aspects of these Medieval Guilds:

  • “Accredited” the process of progression: apprentice, craftsman, journeyman, and master (even grandmaster)
  • Codes/Standards for work
  • Set boundaries for areas of commerce
  • Settled disputes among members
  • Safey net for elderly or injured members (and families)

The Oxford English Dictionary (available on campus and when signed into Atkins off campus) has both definitions and a nice history in its entry on “guilds.”

United States Labor History

There were “guilds” and professional organizations before the United States was established. These groups were organized around occupation. We often point to the rise of the Industrial Revolution as a starting point for our sense of Unions today. One of the first groups to strike were the Cordwainers (shoemakers and leather workers) in 1804. Interestingly, unions were “legalized” (or had the beginning of a legal basis) in a Massachusetts Supreme Court case Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842). However, union members (especailly the leaders) were at risk of the following:

  • Seen as thwarting private enterprise
  • Convicted of conspiracy
  • Heavy fines

The Labor movement in the United States is not all picket lines of workers on strike. There was a lot of violence that eventually led to better working conditions codified in law. Here are a few to consider:

  • Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (West Virginia & Maryland)
    Railroad workers went on strike (for 52 days–more than Congress’s “strike”) because their wages were cut by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O). The workers weren’t in a union, but they were a collective. The workers didn’t allow any goods to be transported, so the National Guard was brought in. The unrest spread to several states, and many people were killed.
  • Haymarket Affair (Chicago 1886)
    What began as a protest for an 8-hour workday (which seems a bit long), literally blew up: Someone threw a stick of dynamite after police fired into a crowd of rioters who were storming the gates of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. Local anarchists were arrested, and the public turned against unions and German immigrants.
  • Homestead Strike (near Pittsburg 1892)
    Pennsylvania steel workers, specifically members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW), went on strike to protest Carnegie Steel Company’s wage cuts while the Company made record profits. Pinkerton agents tried to squash the strikers, but they were stopped, and people were killed on both sides. The National Guard came in and ended the strike. AAISW disbanded.
  • Pullman Strike (Chicago 1894)
    Railway Union members went on strike and called for a boycott against the Pullman Company for refusing to recognize the American Railway Union (ARU) headed by Eugene V. Debs. Riots broke out and people were killed, which led President Grover Cleveland to send in the Army. The strike went around the country and was unpopular with the public. Debs went to prison, and the ARU was disbanded, but Debs would eventually return.
  • International Association of Bridge Structural Iron Workers (1906-1911)
    This group decided to dynamite sites (bridges, factories, warehouses, etc.) that were “open shops,” ones that prohibited or didn’t require union membership to work. This is more terrorism than “protest,” but it shows how violent Labor got.

Brief History of Marxism

Unfortunately, there’s no definitive definition of “marxism” because the philosophy has been adapted, rethought, and changed from when Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) wrote The Communist Manifesto (PDF) in 1848. However, regardless of one’s stance, M/marxism has been influential as well as controversial. This isn’t attempting to be an exhaustive history but to get us to Eisenhower’s anti-communist stance and show it’s influence on Labor movements.

Quotes from The Communist Manifesto

  • “I. Bourgeois and Proleterians” (first page after many Prefaces)
    • “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
    • “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
    • In the 1888 edition, Engels define these terms:
      • “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.”
  • “II. Proletarians and Communists”
    • p. 22: “All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.”
    • p. 23: “Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”
      • “In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.”
    • p. 24: “You must, therefore, confess that by ‘individual’ you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
      • What do you think “swept out of the way” might mean?
    • p. 25: Notes on the family and education
      • “Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”
      • “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.”
      • “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”
      • “And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
      • Think about the socialization process of education.

Marxist Theory — Texts and Contexts are Social Constructions

As a literary theory, Marxism is a 20th-Century development influenced by the writings of the 19th-Century philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. At a basic level (again, we could go into more detail), Marxist analysis “focus[es] on the study of the relationship between a text and the society that reads it” (Bressler, p. 193). Another core Marxist principle is the idea of reality or consciousness: cultural analysis, our focus in this course, is intertwined with the idea that “[a] person’s consciousness is not shaped by any spiritual entity; through daily living and interacting with each other, humans define themselves” (Bressler, p. 193). Marx and Engels, products of newly industrialized/ing cultures, critique industrial society and theorize the following two tenets of industrial society: base and superstructure.

  • Base: “the economic means of production within a society” (Bressler, p. 193); think capital, land, wealth, etc.
  • Superstructure: the institutions and ideologies of a society that “develop as a direct result of the economic means of production, not the other way around” (Bressler, p. 193).

It’s important to understand the difficulty of critiquing a culture that one belongs to because there’s little chance for critical distance. We (humans in general) like to believe culture is absolute and not relative to the social conditions in which we interact or, in Marxist terms, the economic system in which we exist. For example, capitalism is pervasive in American culture and the “free” market is seen as the only appropriate way to organize or distribute resources. Therefore, the means of production and who owns those means influence the ways in which institutions form.

Cesar E. Chavez’s “United We Shall Stand: Delano Manifesto” (1966)

This is a short piece, but it requires the context of the labor movement in the United States. Grape workers (California wine and table grapes), with support of farm workers across California, went on strike. This went on for several years: Remembering Delano’s Historic Grape Strike (video).

Eventually, California would pass the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in 1975. One specific component of the ALRA is that “it provides agricultural unions with an additional bargaining tool by allowing the unions, under the conditions specified in the Act, to bring indirect pressure on a primary employer by requesting that the public not patronize the neutral who is doing business with the primary” (Levy 793)

The Rhetoric of the Manifesto

I wanted you to see the “poster” of the excerpted El Plan de Delano, so you can feel the force it has. The full version is here (PDF). Consider the effect of the following:

  • para. 1: “We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings.”
    • “We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny.”
  • para. 2: “We know why these United States are just that–united.”
    • “The strength of the poor is also a union.
  • para. 3: “…bargain collectively. We must use the only strength that we have, the force of our numbers….UNITED WE SHALL STAND.”
  • para. 4: Repetition of “we do not want” that leads to a contrast.
    • “We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor, we do not want charity at the price of our dignity.”
    • “We want to be equal…”
    • “WE SHALL OVERCOME.”

More resources and background on this strike:

By 1969, the boycott had stopped the sales of California table grapes in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal and Toronto. In July 1969, the Giumarra family told the union they wanted to sign a contract. They agreed to assemble the other 28 major grape growers, and, after three days of intense negotiations, the growers agreed to recognize the union, raise the grape pickers’ pay, create a hiring hall, set up a joint labor-management committee to regulate pesticide use and contribute to the farm workers’ health and welfare plan.”
“César Chávez.” AFL-CIO

Questions (time permitting)

  • What types of boycotts (or buycotts) do you recognize contemporarily?
  • Are boycotts (or buycotts) engaging with democracy?
  • Do you think boycotts (or buycotts) are effective?

Next Class

We’ll finish up Eisenhower and Cesar E. Chavez’s “United We Shall Stand: Delano Manifesto” (1966) before moving onto the excerpt from Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s “The Memo” (1971). Don’t forget to do Weekly Discussion #9 before Friday, 11/14, 11:07pm.

Works Cited

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. (4th ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007.

Levy, Herman M. “The Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 – La Esperanza De California Para El Futuro.” Santa Clara Lawyer, vol. 15, no. 4, 1975. Digital Commons

Roth, Martha Tobi. “Laws of Hammurabi.” Law Collections From Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Altanta: Scholars Press, 1997, pp. 71-142.