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Feature
Story (continued) |
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Conversation
with
Ed Bruno
Labor
Party Organizer |
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| Free
to Speak ... Assemble ... Organize |
One of the reasons this paper resonates with
people is that it’s based on our own experience, as union
people, with the NLRA. And at this point, we really are the
world’s experts on the limitations of that law.
According to polls, 48 million people say they
would join a union today if they felt free to. But under the
current circumstances, they’d have to work in an appropriate
bargaining unit, in an occupation covered by the NLRA, and
have at least a majority of people in their workplace who also
want to join a union. That’s stupid, right? The only way we’ll
really be free to organize is if we wipe those conditions away —
if we say that people ought to be free to join a union any
time they care to, in any number, in any occupation.
'UNFOLDING HISTORY'
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"History
honors none above those who, in the past, have set
themselves against unjust laws, even unto the point of
rebellion. The Republic of the United States is founded
upon defiance of unjust law . . . . The American
Federation of Labor and its president have declared that
manifestly unjust decisions of courts must be defied,
and there is no disposition to recant."
—
AFL President Samuel Gompers, 1921 |
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One of the things we really need to do is
unfold the pieces of history that are available to us. As
early as 1897, the national leaders of the AFL were defying
injunctions and even going to jail. There were hundreds of
injunctions in those years, and the AFL folks responded with a
great upheaval of civil disobedience. There were mass sendoffs
as people went to jail and then mass welcoming backs. By the
1920s, officeholders like Fiorello LaGuardia were speaking at
these rallies. Now that’s political work.
We have to start giving some credit to our own
experiences. We already know what works and what doesn’t. We’ve
got to get back to the idea of having our own view and acting
on it.
One thing we might want to focus on is our
right to solidarity actions or secondary actions. Almost every
successful thing that happened in the CIO years was the
product of sympathy actions and sitdowns. The sitdowns were
never legal, but the sympathy actions were [before passage of
the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act in 1947]. And even earlier,
much of labor’s progress was made through solidarity actions
like refusal to handle and refusal to buy.
The worst thing Taft-Hartley did was to limit
unions to where they existed. So that the minute you try to
build union solidarity or cross-class solidarity or
international solidarity, it’s illegal. It kills organizing
in the process, but I think the main goal is to keep people
where they are.
Labor’s great breakthroughs in the 1930s
happened when the AFL began ordering people to defy
injunctions and threatened general strikes in San Francisco,
Toledo, Minneapolis. But it took the sitdowns to finally win
the battle. And the sitdowns were surrounded by huge sympathy
picketlines.
By the end of 1935, things were going nowhere.
Strikes were crushed and organizations were being driven out
of the plants. Union strategists must have been desperate to
figure out a breakthrough. They hit upon this sitdown stuff
almost by accident. They got the idea from France, where there
had been a flurry of plant occupations and sitdowns.
STRATEGIES
We should also remember that although we have
visions of millions, the committee that led the Flint sitdowns
was six people with a core group of 40 around them. About 200
people sat down in a complex of 40,000. Most GM workers in
Flint were either still going to work every day in other
complexes or were sitting at home. That’s not to make light
of the fact that this probably could only have happened in
times of social turmoil.
You might say that if there hadn’t been a
conscious application of a strategy that had the potential for
breaking through, there would have been no CIO. We need to be
thinking the same way now. What’s the breakthrough strategy
now? What is it in our current conditions and in our own world
that would break through?
Right now we have to get this paper into the
hands of people in the unions. We need to circulate it, talk
about it, and start to come up with some strategies of our
own.
Next: A Conversation
with Peter Kellman ->
<- Previous: Free to Speak, Assemble,
Organize
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