Dana Frank provides a necessary introduction to understanding political strikes

Photo from LAWCHA

The Labor and Working Class History Association has published a thorough and very helpful essay by labor scholar Dana Frank on political strikes. Sister Frank takes the current strike underway among graduate students at the University of Californmia as her point of departure. A link to the entire article is below.

UC Graduate Workers and the History of Political Strikes

On Wednesday, May 15, 79% of 48,000 graduate student workers at the University of California who cast their ballots voted to authorize a strike. Their demands include UC divestment from weapons manufacturers and contractors who profit from the Israeli war on Gaza, protection of campus free speech in the aftermath of police repression at UCLA and amnesty for those facing discipline for protesting. Members of the United Auto Workers, the graduate students have launched a sequence of selected strikes targeting different campuses. They began on Monday, May 20, with UC Santa Cruz, where 1,500 members have walked out, and where I taught labor history for 27 years. On May 28 graduate workers at UC Davis and UCLA joined them, and other campuses appear to be joining soon. This is a big strike, with big import for both the solidarity movement with Palestinians, and for the labor movement.

For some observers, the graduate workers’ objectives can appear far away from what are commonly understood to be the function of labor unions such as addressing concerns about pay, working conditions, or vacations. But what are known as “political strikes” have a long, creative, and often powerful history in the United States. Today’s UC strikes, smack in the middle of a national uprising protesting US support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, challenge us to think more flexibly about what a labor movement is, and can be, today–and its relationship to broader demands for social justice.

Members of the International Longshoremen’s International Union (ILWU) are famous, for example, for refusing to load cargo in solidarity with resistance movements overseas–to Franco’s Spain, to South Africa under Apartheid, to Chile under Pinochet. Most recently, on Juneteenth 2020 they joined Black Lives Matter in a mass national protest against racist police repression and shut down all the ports on the West Coast.

In many political strikes, union members have walked out as part of a broader national protest, as on Juneteenth. Some of these strikes have been officially sanctioned by unions; more often, workers simply walk out en masse. On May Day 2006 tens of thousands of Latinx and other workers simply skipped work to attend a national protest against a proposed repressive federal immigration law. Meatpacking plants shut down for the day rather than confront their workers. Port truckers in Long Beach and Los Angeles refused to load cargo. Over a million people came to demonstrations.

In 1963, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, made sure that March on Washington for Civil Rights took place on a Wednesday, not on a Saturday. That way, things would be shut down… but not in an obvious way. Government workers just couldn’t get to work.

Read the entire article here.

Robert Bruno and What Work Is---How do we think about work and workers?

From an essay by Robert Bruno on the Labor & Working-Class History Association website:

In my book, What Work Is, I assert that work has an enormous contradictory impact on the workers and society they build. Anthropologist Herbert Applebaum draws on a biological metaphor to centralize the importance of work to the individual and society. Work, he notes, “is like the spine which structures the way people live, how they make contact with material and social reality, and how they achieve status and self-esteem.”[1] There’s much that makes us human, but work—fully understood—is critical to our individual and social development. Society itself emanates from how we make, distribute, and use the products of our collective labor. Karl Marx stated it as an immutable law that “Labor … is the condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” It is an “eternal and natural necessity which mediates … life itself.”[2]

As the United States struggles with an unchartered and unprecedented change in how people will work and think about work, my book recommends a “future of work” that listens to what workers say, “work is.” The thesis of the book is that as we formulate new work structures, we should draw from what workers have appropriated from their work experiences. My intention is that we first learn from what workers can tell us about their present work to know how to design a future of what work should be.

The voices of workers should be prioritized in developing public policies and workplace practices that endeavor to make work more respectful of human life and harmonious with the natural and social world. What workers tell us about “what work is” should inform how leaders of political, business, labor, educational, media and cultural institutions think about the ubiquitous act of working for a living. The reality of work won’t be changed unless we recognize what a complicated, contradictory, glorious, and poetic experience work is. To change what our society does with work and to workers requires first understanding how workers experience their labor. Listening to voices from the point of production is the beginning of thinking differently about work.

Read the entire essay here.

Labor Historians & Academics Protest The Use Of Police To Quash Peaceful Campus Protests

On April 26, the Board of Directors of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) unanimously issued a statement condemning the use of police to quash peaceful campus protests. Since issuing that statement, we have been horrified to learn that a number of LAWCHA members have been arrested while engaged in peaceful protests and that at least one of those -- Annelise Orleck of Dartmouth -- was thrown to the ground and arrested on May 1 and has now been banned from the campus where she has taught for 34 years. In light of these disturbing developments and on behalf of LAWCHA, the Executive Committee has added the language in bold below to our original statement:

The elected board and officers of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), the majority of whose members work and study on college and university campuses, is alarmed by the recent deployment of uniformed officers to forcefully break up peaceful demonstrations on multiple campuses around the country. We strongly condemn the deployment of law enforcement officers to shut down and disperse nonviolent protests and we urge campus officials to respect the free speech rights of students, faculty, and staff. Furthermore, we demand that colleges and universities immediately rescind bans of faculty, students, or staff from their campuses as a result of their exercising rights to free speech and assembly.


This statement was unanimously approved by the LAWCHA Board of Directors

Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, President
Eileen Boris, University of California at Santa Barbara, Vice President
Cindy Hahamovitch, University of Georgia, Immediate Past President
Erik Gellman, University of North Carolina, Secretary
Liesl Orenic, Dominican University, Treasurer
Janine Giordano Drake, Indiana University, Bloomington, Board Member
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, Rutgers University, Board Member
Kim Phillips-Fein, Columbia University, Board Member
Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Rutgers University, Board Member
Colleen Woods, University of Maryland, Board Member
Natanya Duncan, Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History,
Queens College, CUNY, Board Member
David “Mac” Marquis, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of South Carolina, Board Member
Verónica Martinez-Matsuda, University of California, San Diego, Board Member
Samir Sonti, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, Board Member
Jane Berger, Moravian University, Board Member
Keona K. Ervin, Bowdoin, Board Member
Aimee Loiselle, Central Connecticut State University, Board Member
Gordon Mantler, George Washington University, Board Member
Joel Suarez, Harvard University, Board Member

Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross
Faith Bennett, UC Davis
Rebecca Jean Emigh, UCLA, Sociology
Emily E. LB. Twarog, University of Illinois
Omari Averette-Phillips, UC Davis
Paul Ortiz, University of Florida
Harry Targ, Purdue University. Retired
Joan Flores-Villalobos, University of Southern California
Nate Holdren, Drake University
Bill Barry
Alan Wierdak, University of Maryland
Tamar Carroll, Rochester Institute of Technology
Cathy Brigden, University of Tasmania
Dennis Deslippe, Franklin & Marshall College
Tom Alter, Texas State University
Laura Murphy, Dutchess Community College
Erik Loomis, University of Rhode Island
James Young, Pennsylvania Labor History Society/National Writers Union
David Brundage, University of California, Santa Cruz
Aaron Jesch, Washington State University Vancouver
Anne Lewis, UT Austin, TSEU-CWA 6186
Lois Helmbold, San Jose State U, emerita professor
Lorenzo Costaguta, University of Bristol
David Brody
Rosemary Feurer, Northern Illinois University
Greg Kealey, University of New Brunswick
Michael Pierce, University of Arkansas—UAEA/Local 965
Naomi R. Williams, Rutgers University
Anita Rupprecht, University of Brighton, UK
Lisa Phillips, Indiana State University
Thai Jones, Columbia University
Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan
Miriam Cohen, Vassar College
Jon Bekken, Albright College
Peter Rachleff, Macalester College (Emeritus)
Eladio Bobadilla, University of Pittsburgh
Brian Greenberg, Monmouth University
Peter Cole, Western Illinois University
Lane Windham, Georgetown University
Cristina Groeger, Lake Forest College
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Andrea Taylor
Ruth Needleman, Indiana University
Aaron Jaffe, The Juilliard School
Beth Robinson , Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Shannan Clark, Montclair State University
John Enyeart, Bucknell University
Eric Fure-Slocum, St. Olaf College (emeritus)
Rick Halpern, University of Toronto
Robert Bruno, University of Illinois
Michael Lansing, Augsburg University
Jeff Schuhrke, Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University
Priyanka Srivastava, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Greta de Jong, University of Nevada, Reno
David Vaught, Texas A&M University
Sean Ahern, UFT
Michael Damien Aguirre, University of Nevada, Reno
Ian Rocksborough-Smith, University of the Fraser Valley
William Jones, University of Minnesota (past LAWCHA president)
Jacob Dorman, The University of Nevada, Reno
Michael Honey, University of Washington (past LAWCHA president)
Julie Greene, University of Maryland (past LAWCHA president)
Miriam Frank, retired professor of Humanities at New York University
Dan Graff, University of Notre Dame
James Bearden, SUNY Geneseo
Barbara Walker, UNR
Donna Haverty-Stacke, Hunter College, CUNY
Maggie Gray, Adelphi University
Deborah Cohen, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Robert Woodrum, Perimeter College of Georgia State University
Christopher Martin, University of Northern Iowa, United Faculty AFT/AAUP
Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara
Joe Berry, retired U of IL and City College of SF
Elizabeth McKIllen, University of Maine
Mary Reynolds, Reflective Democracy Campaign
Arman Azimi, College of the Holy Cross
David Zonderman, NC State University
William Keach, Brown University
Alex Miller, University of Washington Tacoma
Jeannette Estruth, Bard College and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center
Kirsten Schultz, Seton Hall University
Edwin Rubel, University of Washington
Benjamin Goldfrank, Seton Hall University
Grace Reinke, University of New Orleans and United Campus Workers of Louisiana
Lynn Thomas, University of Washington
Raya Fidel, University of Washington
Dexter Arnold
Jana Lipman, Tulane University
Jacquelyn Hall , Emeritus UNC Chapel Hill (past LAWCHA president)
Leslie Bunnage, Seton Hall University
Margot Canaday, Princeton University
Rudi Batzell, Lake Forest College
Renata Keller, University of Nevada
Jennifer Brooks, Auburn University
James Kollros, retired
Emily Hobson, University of Nevada Reno
Kimberly Enderle, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Alyssa Ribeiro, Allegheny College
Jennifer Guglielmo, Smith College
Thomas Guglielmo, George Washington University
Shelton Stromquist, University of Iowa (past LAWCHA president)
Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University
Jillian Jacklin, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Some of what's new in labor history

 From the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA):

More interesting posts are up on the Labor Online blog to check out as April rolls along!

· Nelson Lichtenstein interviews Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff, co-authors of the article “Whence Automation: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept” published in Labor: Studies in Working Class History’s recent special issue (March 2024) on “Labor and Science.”

· Jacob Remes offers a compelling personal account of his experiences organizing with Contract Faculty United - United Auto Workers (Local 7902) – at New York University and connects to radical legacies from his family’s past.

· Jonathan Victor Baldoza reflects on photos from his recent article, “Science as Routine: Work and Labor in the Bureau of Science at Manila,” also from the recent special issue on labor and science from the journal. This excellent article will be available for free download for the next three months from the journal website.

· Robin Lindley interviews Harvey Schwartz, curator of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Oral History Collection, about a recent book on the former president of the union, “Big” Bob McEllrath, entitled: Labor Under Siege: Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era (2022).

· Julie Greene has recently assumed the editorship of Labor and was interviewed by Maia Silber in the latest LAWCHA newsletter. Labor Online has published an expanded version of that interview here.