EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- America’s Labor Movement and the Post-War Social Contract -- September 27, 2022

 

America’s Labor Movement and the Post-War Social Contract

By Larry Romanoff, September 27^th, 2022

 

UAW leader Walter Reuther took a few minutes off from negotiating to speak at Cadillac Square, Sept. 4, 1961. Tony Spina, Detroit Free Press. Source

 

“In contrast to most other industrialised nations, neither the US government nor its corporations have ever held workers or employees in much regard, and the US never accepted the concept of labor unions. Unions were always denigrated in the media as a kind of dangerous socialism that would exploit workers, but it was actually North American capitalism that exploited workers while socialism that attempted to protect them.”

 

Thanks to the media, most Americans today still have this understanding backwards from reality. As we will see, there was a brief period after the Second World War during which an intense fear of social unrest produced a kind of "enlightened corporate self-interest" that resulted in a benign labor landscape, but that illusion was dispelled by the 1980s and The Great Transformation, with union membership fell by about 70%, largely through the harsh capitalist and legislative climate. The majority of American workers still wanted (and needed) labor unions, but the anti-union conspiracy was too powerful.

 

From almost its earliest days, The FBI infiltrated labor unions and installed corrupt officials in attempts to destroy them from the inside. This was done under the pretense of combating "labor racketeering", some of which actually existed, but the infiltrations were conducted primarily to undermine and destroy the unions.[1] When those attempts failed and labor organisers showed signs of being successful, they were either simply murdered or framed and convicted of crimes, and often executed. The US government has for all of its history acted with absolute disregard for the law, whenever the law became inconvenient to the purpose at hand. One of these purposes was the crushing of labor, where the government frequently not only fabricated criminal charges against union organisers but convicted them under laws that had never existed. In one famous case, labor organisers trying to create a mine workers union in Pennsylvania were charged by the state with murder and conspiracy. When these charges failed to hold, the organisers and about a dozen union members were hanged for “obstinacy”.