[lbo-talk] Fitch's lack of legal and economic history (Re:NATION review of Fitch

Nathan Newman nathanne at nathannewman.org
Sat Mar 11 05:15:08 PST 2006


----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>

Jim posted:
> Oddly absent in Fitch's bleak account is the power of business in
> America. After all, employer violence, legal obstacles to
> organizing and the constant fear of reprisal from the boss have
> deterred untold numbers from union activism. And this, in turn, has
> helped create a climate in which corruption could flourish.

-All trade unions in all countries confronted such violence, legal -obstacles, and fear of reprisal from the boss. Arguably, American -unions had it easier than European unions. After all, the US ruling -class, unlike the European ruling class, did not impose fascism on -the populace here.

What I wish is that the discussion on Fitch was informed by all the far more interesting labor books released in recent years. On this point, Josiah Lambert's IF THE WORKERS TOOK A NOTION: THE RIGHT TO STIRKE AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT would be a good place to start.

If we discuss the post-WWII period, Yoshie's is a clearly and dramatically false comment. Corporate power in Europe was decimated by WWII, leaving workers with far weaker opponents and a state strongly favoring union organization. This was diamettrically opposed to the US where corporate America emerged from WWII fat with profits and a strategy of combined McCarthyism and legal changes to cripple the union movement. The state violence used to destroy the radical unions -- both arresting leadership and using state machinery to displace them with more conservative unions -- was overwhelming.

Before WWII, while fascism had pervasively repressed a whole range of civic organizations in Europe periodically, it's reasonable to describe the US governments approach to unionism as selective fascism, as Lambert details, where in the midst of democratic rhetoric, union rights were systematically repressed, creating a whole democratic culture where union rights to act were made alien to pervasive democratic culture.

And against the idea of American workers as passive, they engaged in a level of engagement and mass action that brought them into direct confrontation with the full military power of the United States military, repeatedly. The conservativism of US unions, in Lambert's words, was the result of that state violence-- "The emergence of pure-and-simple unionism and the transformation of the right to strike were a reaction to the state's use of force to suppress strikes." As Lambert details, in the late 19th century, troops were deployed by federal and state governments in HUNDREDS of strikes to crush them, and local police were deployed routinely in most of the rest. The courts would use injunctions routinely to shut down strikes and boycotts-- remember, the hatmakers union was made subject to fines and arrest for publicly asking customers not to buy from a non-union hat maker in the 1908 Danbury Hatters case before the Supreme Court.

The political effect of this suppression was pervasive-- "The failure of incorporate the labor movement into the national party system after the Civil War [meant] that the American state no longer treated working Americans who exercised their right to strike as citizens but as public enemies."

On one hand, this meant that the level of state and corporate violence against unions was on a scale unmatched in Europe until the emergence of fascism -- which suppressed all civic forces, not just unions, which meant unions could come back strongly after WWII on an equal or greater footing with other democratic forces -- but the key point is that in the period of "Origins" in Fitch's description, Fitch barely talks about the role of the state in shaping the labor movement, except to make the bizarre statement that after 1842, the law changed to give unions legitimacy: "Ever since, union leaders have been uniquely allowed to impose their services on client and adversary alike."(p. 80)

This is probably the single most ignorant piece of legal history I've ever read, but then Fitch never seriously engages an analysis of the role of state violence, both active and through the hamstringing of unions through labor law, in creating the context for any of the problems he describes.

Only in the last chapter does he note that the fact that there is no real right to form unions in the US compared to Europe -- please note Yoshie that even Fitch doesn't agree with your view of better law in Europe, even if he doesn't really analyze its significance. As he states on p. 355:

"Guaranteeing such rights in America would be unprecedented. Yet it's common and well established in other advanced industrialized countries. It was back in 1891 that Germany established the Law for the Protection of Labor, which mandated elective bodies in firms with more than twenty workers." (355)

In the same period in the US, the military was being used to break strikes across America and large-scale boycotts were made illegal. Take the 1899 Coeur d'Alene mining strike-- federal troops were deployed and military law was imposed to break the radical Western Miners union. A thousand union members were arrested and despite local courts ordering their release after habeous corpus petitions, the US military refused to release them.

This was followed a few years later in Colorado with the full-scale arrest of WFM miners there, the suspension of habeous corpus, and the breaking of strike efforts.

Even the United Mine Workers faced total military suppression if they stepped over the line-- a tough battle in 1912 in Paint Creak, West Virginia led to the declaration of martial lawm the arrest of two hundred strikers without warrants, and the use of military tribunals against civilians.

The list goes on and on, but the point is that you can't understand a lot of union history without understanding that unions largely ended up with three choices for much of early history -- hold to radical ideology and be destroyed (with a few interesting and important exceptions), collaborate to some extent with the state and the bosses, or bring in alternative sources of violence to take on the state and employers.

The latter choice is a the key basis for the violence and corruption Fitch discusses, but gives no real context for. Fitch talks broadly about the 1905 Chicago Teamsters strike as an example of union corruption, but instead of his contextless discussion, I recommend people read Andrew Cohen's ** The Racketeer's Progress : Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940 ** which details how the lack of legal legitimacy for unions led to particular strategies by unions in the context of an emerging economic clash between local economies and emerging national and global manufacturing and retailing systems.

The bottom line is that the almost complete absence of serious legal history or economic context makes Fitch's narrative a shallow, cherry-picked narrative of anecdotes, not a serious study of the problems facing the labor movement, either historically or in the present.

Nathan Newman



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