Three Strikes

Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century

by Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin DG Kelley

Beacon Press, 2001, 174 pages, $34.50 (pb)

Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans

By Stephen Franklin

Guilford Press, 2001, 308 pages, $39.95 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/28407

In the middle of rush-hour on a Saturday morning in February 1937,

union organiser Floyd Loew moved to the middle of the busiest floor of

Woolworth's Five and Dime store in Michigan, Detroit, blew a shrill blast

on his whistle and yelled, �Strike, girls, strike!�. One hundred and eight

sales clerks in the massive variety store, all women, promptly proceeded

to occupy the store for what was to be an eight-day sit-down strike.

It was the height of the Depression but also the height of a labour

uprising. A wave of spectacular sit-down strikes engulfed the United States.

Two months earlier and just 110 kilometres away in Flint, Michigan, the

United Automobile Workers (UAW) had brought General Motors, the largest

corporation in the world, to its knees with a six-week factory occupation.

The Woolworth's �girls� demanded a 40% wage rise, an eight-hour work

day, free uniforms and laundering, seniority rights and that new employees

be hired through the union office. With 2800 stores in five countries,

Woolworth's was the McDonald's of the 1930s, a global behemoth, generating

exorbitant profits from exploitation of its young workers. Frank Woolworth,

the company's founder, put it succinctly: �We must have cheap help or we

cannot sell cheap goods.�

The �cheap help� looked at the wealthy owners of Woolworth's and saw

that these millionaires were rich because their workers were poor.

Fired by an indignant class consciousness, vigilant women strikers guarded

the doors while their comrades set up a strike committee, as well as food,

store clean-up, health, cheer-up, scrapbook and bed committees. But it

was the entertainment committee that was the busiest � teenage women know

how to party hard.

Two union organisers, both Marxists, cranked-up morale through solidarity

visits from teachers, auto workers, cooks, hotel employees, musicians and

other unionists. With more sit-down strikes beginning and a consumer boycott

threatened, Woolworth's caved in and conceded every one of the union's

demand.

The sit-down strike was a winner. By terminating the business of factory

or store, it choked off profits and made capitalists more reluctant to

call in police or strikebreakers because of the risk of damage to company

property. The example was contagious. Workers in department stores, shoe

stores, drug stores and restaurants successfully followed the Woolworth's

lead; for each sit-down strike, there were hundreds of other employers

who, when faced with the mere threat of an occupation, raised the white

flag.

It had not always been this positive. Howard Zinn

sombrely revisits the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 in which 26 mining men, their

wives and children were machine-gunned and incinerated to death on April

20. Ludlow was the central event in a 14-month coal strike in southern

Colorado which turned into armed class warfare with 66 dead.

Colorado coal-mining companies, headed by John D Rockefeller Jr, the

richest man in the world, declared war on the United Mine Workers (UMW)

organising drive and strike for better wages, hours and safety. Hundreds

of private security guards (and their �Death Special�, an armoured car

with a Gatling machine gun), Colorado police and the 1000-strong mounted

Colorado National Guard shot miners, raped women, abused children and tortured

prisoners. Their guns protected the scabs imported to break the strike.

The union defended itself with arms and solidarity. Meetings were held

and funds raised coast to coast. Train crews black-banned the movement

of strikebreakers. Four-hundred women from the Denver United Garment Workers

Union volunteered as nurses. One company of 82 soldiers of the US Army,

mobilised by President Woodrow Wilson to end the strike, mutinied and refused

to board a train that was to take them to the war zone.

But Rockefeller, through the weight of private and state arms, ground

the union to defeat after 14 months. The strike, though lost, was nevertheless

an inspiring struggle, and the UMW made a successful return to Colorado

in 1928.

The lessons from these strikes are relevant to

the three strikes from the 1990s which are the subject of Stephen Franklin's

Three Strikes. Decatur, Illinois, was the venue for three big, important

though defeated, strikes by agricultural processing workers, auto workers

and rubber workers against their companies' attempts to impose harsh new

contracts.

Three giant multinationals aggressively targeted their workers' wages,

working hours and health and pension benefits, which had been won through

decades of union struggle.

Caterpillar, the US-owned heavy machinery manufacturer, took on the

UAW. Bridgestone/Firestone, the Japanese-owned tyre manufacturer, attacked

the United Rubber Workers (URW). AE Staley, the British-owned soy and corn

processors, turned against the Allied Industrial Workers.

Each strike was a marathon (Caterpillar lasted 17 months, Bridgestone

27 months and Staley four years) because of the corporations' use of �permanent

replacement workers�. In the US, a corporation can sack its striking workers

and replace them with strikebreakers without breaching any law. The unemployed

and lower-paid non-union workers could be made to resent union workers

and their relatively high wages. When Caterpillar advertised for replacement

workers, it received 40,000 calls on the first day alone.

Even though many union members returned to work, panicked by the spectre

of losing jobs, houses or marriages, a large, solid core of Decatur union

members fought on with determination. �Road warriors� from the union locals

fanned out across the US and the globe to build solidarity and raise millions

of dollars in financial aid.

With the factories still running, the odds were stacked against the

unions, but it wasn't hopeless. It was, however, going to be harder to

win with a knife planted in your back by your own side. The leaderships

of the three unions, and the peak US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, hobbled

the strikes by diverting resources to �corporate campaigns�. However, the

�shareholder revolts� and �corporate disinvestments� did not materialise.

Coca-Cola stopped buying its sweeteners from Staley but this was just

a commercial decision. Thirty city governments resolved not to buy Bridgestone

tyres, but this was a poor substitute for rank and file organisation and

solidarity.

The URW did not adequately raise its employed members' dues, and the

construction and other unions failed to honour picket lines. The bureaucratic

machines that controlled the unions preferred to cooperate with management

and make concessions, while fostering political illusions in the administration

of US President Bill Clinton � which delivered a big fat zero. A proposal

for a federal government ban on contracts for firms which employed replacement

workers was allowed to lapse by a president in hock to his corporate paymasters.

The unions' top leaderships' political and industrial moderation helped

to scuttle the strikes. Up against powerful forces, and betrayed by their

own leaders, corporate greed won the day in Decatur as the three strikes

ended in demoralising defeat.

This makes a dismal appendix to a depressing story of union decline

in the US. The strength and ruthlessness of the US ruling class, and disastrous

union leadership strategies, has seen organised workers drop from 35% of

the US work force in the 1950s to just 13% (9% in the private sector) today.

As Zinn argues, however, labour history is even more important in times

of defeat. Workers and activists need to �look backward to look forward�

and recapture the �fighting spirit� of the sit-down strikers of the 1930s

and the young women of Woolworth's who fought and won. An unfavourable

balance of forces can't be wished away, but if the unions pitch truly,

it can be �three strikes and you're out� to the capitalist offensive.