Eugene Debs---Labor Day, 1904

Eugene Debs penned this message in 1904. The message speaks of many past labor struggles that built our modern labor movement and that still deserve study and attention so that we may place ourselves in our working-class lineage and build on the past and make a brighter future. 

Taken from The Indy Star

The workingman is the only man in whose presence I take off my hat. As I salute him, I honor myself.

The workingman—and this is the day to write him in capital letters—has given me what I have, made me what I am, and will make me what I hope to be; and I thank him for all, and above all for giving me eyes to see, a heart to feel and a voice to speak for the workingman.

Like the rough hewn stone from which the noble statue is chiseled by the hand of man, the Toiler is the rough—hewn bulk from which the perfect Man is being chiseled by the hand of God.

All the workingmen of the earth are necessary to the whole Workingman—and he alone will survive of all the human race.

Labor Day is a good day to rest the hands and give the brain a chance—to think about what has been, and is, and is yet to be.

The way has been long and weary and full of pain, and many have fallen by the wayside, but the Unconquerable Army of Labor is still on the march and as it rests on its arms today and casts a look ahead, it beholds upon the horizon the first glowing rays of the Social Sunrise.

Courage, comrades! The struggle must be won, for Peace will only come when she comes hand in hand with Freedom.

The right is with the labor movement and the gods of battle are with the Working Class.

The Socialist Party and the Trade Union Movement must be one today in celebration of Labor Day and pledge each other their mutual fidelity and support in every battle, economic and political, until the field is won and the Workingman is free. Forget not the past on Labor Day! Think of Homestead! Think of Latimer! Think of Buffalo! Think of Coeur d’Alene! Think of Croton Dam! Think of Chicago! Think of Virden! Think of Pana! Think of Leadville! Think of Cripple Creek! Think of Victor! Think of Telluride!

These are some of the bloody battles fought in the past in the war of the Workers for Industrial Freedom and Social Justice.

How many and how fierce and bloody shall be the battles of the future?

Comrades, this is the day for Workingmen to think of the Class Struggle and the Ballot—the day for Labor to clasp the hand of Labor and girdle the globe with the International Revolutionary Solidarity of the Working Class.

We are all one—all workers of all lands and climes. We know not color, nor creed, nor sex in the Labor Movement. We know only that our hearts throb with the same proletarian stroke, that we are keeping step with our class in the march to the goal and that the solidarity of Labor will vanquish slavery and Humanize the World.

Labor History: Sacco and Vanzetti, Coal Miners, A Strike, And You

 

The Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and BartolomeoVanzetti were executed in Massachusetts on August 23, 1927 for a hold up and theft and for killing a guard and a paymaster, crimes that they most likely did not commit. The two men were arrested shortly after the hold up and murders and were first sentenced in July of 1921. Appeals and international protests and interventions by prominent politicians, public figures, and legal scholars followed. The defense had an answer for every argument made by the prosecution, and it was clear that the international protests supporting the two men had an effect on the judges and the prosecution and those they consulted with. Still, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in April of 1927 and an advisory committee charged with reviewing aspects of the case by Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller let the verdict stand.

We tend to think of the 1920s as a time of social excesses, mass consumption or consumerism, jazz, flappers, and people flaunting Prohibition. What we do not learn, or what we overlook, is that the 1920s were also times of increasing exploitation of workers, racist and mean-spirited restrictions on immigration, violent outrages against people of color, political repression, and strike-breaking by employers and losses for many unions. Coal mining and steel-producing regions were living in depression conditions well before the stock market crash of 1929. The labor movement and the Left were both deeply divided, although there were moments during the 1920s when both movements showed remarkable creativity and sometimes united around common objectives. By the standards of today the international labor and Left movements were large and deeply rooted in working-class communities, but by the standards of the 1920s these movements were in crisis and were trying to find their bearings after the devastation of the First World War and the failed strike waves and repression that followed the war. Moreover, the generation that had founded the modern labor and Left movements in many countries---including the United States---was passing on and the new leaders of these movements had only known the conditions of intense class war, repression, a world war, and bitter anti-colonial and often failing democratic struggles. It was in this atmosphere that Italian and German fascism formed and that industrial production and consumerism in the United States were reconfigured in the United States. And it was in this environment that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, tried, and convicted. Innocent or guilty, the laws that prevail today would likely not have allowed either their convictions or their death sentences.

The cases of Sacco and Vanzetti might not be of great interest to working-class people in the United States today. What lessons could they hold for us after 97 years?

On August 8, 1927, the revolutionary Industrial Workersof the World (IWW) called a strike in Colorado’s southern coalfields to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Those coalfields employed thousands of mine workers, most of them employed by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Memories of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 that had taken place in those same southern Colorado coalfields were still fresh in the minds of people there. The IWW had seen better days and was suffering from internal divisions and isolation. Depression conditions were prevalent in the coalfields at the time. Employment in some mines was sporadic and the state had four or eight or more distinct coalfields that produced for different markets and worked under different conditions. Immigrants and immigrant communities were facing special attacks. The Ku Klux Klan was on the march as a mass organization and had infiltrated state and local law enforcement. A bloody regional conflict between rival gangs over bootlegging and car thefts was underway. CF&I seemed all-powerful. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) officially opposed the strike. 

And still the mine workers of southern Colorado struck.

Thousands of mine workers, most of them with roots in Italy or Mexico or Eastern Europe, walked out and stayed out for three days with the hope that their actions would help prevent the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists being held on death row 2000 miles away, and lead to improvments in their working and living conditions as well.

There was no strike fund or strike pay.
There were no lawyers ready to help.
Most of the strikers were not affiliated with any union.
Many of the strikers could have been deported for having joined the strike.
All the strikers knew that they could be blacklisted.
One of the leading strike activists was a young woman named Milka Sablich, or "Flaming Milka," who was known for her red hair and wearing red to the picket lines on the prairies and for being especially tough.

The "Sacco and Vanzetti strike," as it was called, shut down all of the major mines in the southern Colorado coalfields.

Can you imagine this?

Milka Sablich

The mine workers returned after three days, reorganized, and struck again in September and October for a long list of union demands. The strike spread, and for the first time mine workers in all of Colorado’s coalfields struck together for a common set of demands.

The strike faced repression. A mineworker and a boy who was watching an IWW demonstration were killed in Walsenburg. Six striking mineworkers were killed at the Columbine Mine in northern Colorado. Union halls were raided and destroyed by the police and company thugs and vigilantes kidnapped strikers and transported them over state lines and left them in the middle of nowhere. The Governor of New Mexico ordered troops to the New Mexico-Colorado state line. The Catholic Bishop in Denver was said to have decreed that no member of the IWW could receive a Church funeral, although local clergy seem to have disregarded this. Strikers and strike supporters were held without charges and were moved from jail to jail. Homes were raided. Martial law conditions were imposed, although martial law was never declared, and these conditions were enforced by the Colorado National Guard and a state police unit that was reassigned from enforcing Prohibtion laws to strike-breaking. This special unit often acted with violence and was perhaps infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan. Strikers and their supporters were blacklisted.

The IWW could not hold the strike together and state and company repression took a toll. The union was forced to the margins. The UMWA intervened and got a contract at the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company that shut the IWW out and gave the UMWA a base for future organizing. That contract and the UMWA’s later organizing helped bring some stability to the northern Colorado coal fields and helped steelworkers employed at the C&I-owned steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado to get a union contract years later. It also helped Josepine Roche, the progressive owner of Rocky Mountain Fuel, and her liberal cohort gain national attention and secured a place for her and some of those around her in President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. She became a major force behind the New Deal coal codes and she later served as an administrator of the UMWA’s Welfare and Pension Fund.

The Columbine Mine was owned by Rocky Mountain Fuel. Roche and her closest advisors denied being responsible for the deaths of the six who died there and the sixty or so people who were wounded there on November 21, 1927. She managed to survive charges that she and the management team under her were responsible for the violence and other charges that she interfered and prevented the families of those killed from receiving settlements for the deaths of their loved ones. Roche was forced from her position as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator in 1971 as militant mine workers and their families and allies fought for democratic control of the UMWA. To this day, I believe, there is no accurate account of Roche's relationship to the violence that occured at Columbine and its aftermath and her role as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator and her removal from that position.  

 

The IWW’s great organizer Sam Embree was hounded out of the union in the aftermath of the strike. He later became an organizer for the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. But before the strike was over the IWW opened an organizing campaign among western agricultural workers that had limited success. The mine workers’ strike and the campaign among the agricultural workers became foundational to Colorado’s Chicano movement of the 1960s.

The strike ran, more or less, from September or October of 1927 to February or March of 1928. For a brief time after the strike, Colorado mine workers were the highest paid mine workers in the world. Mine owners forced the workers to surrender their wage gains once the IWW was gone and the UMWA was tied up with trying to make the contract at Rocky Mountain Fuel work. 

Many of the strike's leaders and participants went on to make lasting contributions in politics, the labor movement, the Chicano movement, and Depression-era social movement organizing. They passed on what they learned in 1927-1928 to others who carried these lessons well into the 1960s. And so it is, I think, that Sacco and Vanzetti have given us lasting legacies, however indirect or difficult to trace these are.

I have been documenting the 1927-1928 Colorado mine workers’ strike and the legacies left by the strike’s participants and organizers since 1982. In the meantime, Leigh Campbell-Hale has come out with a worthyintroduction to the strike and Michael Robert Gonzalez has written his dissertation on the strike and has offered us a special look into the radical and ethic-communal origins of the strike. The book Slaughter in Serene gives an account of the violence that occured at the Columbine mine.

My hope is that we will read working-class history to place ourselves in our own history as collective owners of our destinies.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti had in his possession a draft of a leaflet when he was arrested that may still resonate with many of us today. It read:

Workers, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruit of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being?

From Our Oregon Working-Class History

Oregon, 1939...

Caption
Young mother, aged twenty-two, has one little girl three years old. Merrill, Klamath County, Oregon. In mobile unit of FSA (Farm Security Administration) camp. New baby expected in December. During this year she has worked with her husband in: strawberries (Helvetia, Oregon); cherries (Salem, Oregon); beans (West Stayton, Oregon); hops (Independence, Oregon). Is now in potato camp at the end of that season. "We haven't got a cent now and we've lost our car because we've helped some people out. It seems like it's taken every cent to eat off, that and traveling around."

Source:Farm Security Administration (Dorothea Lange photographer)

National Park Service awards grant to preserve Ludlow Massacre site

From the United Mine Workers of America, KXRM Colorado Springs. and Bob Rossi:

(TRINIDAD, Colo.) — The National Park Service (NPS) announced on Wednesday, July 10 awarded grants to eight recipients to help preserve battlefields and other sites of armed conflict, including the site of the Ludlow Massacre in Las Animas County.

“The diverse grant opportunities provided through the American Battlefield Protection Program help our preservation partners study and protect almost 400 years of conflict history,” said National Park Service Director Chuck Sams. “By supporting these localized efforts, all Americans gain the opportunity to learn from these conflicts and understand their impact on the foundation and growth of this country.”

According to NPS, one of the projects funded will support the development of a comprehensive preservation and interpretation plan for the Ludlow Tent Colony Site, where an armed conflict occurred between the United Mine Workers of America and the Colorado National Guard, known as the Colorado Coalfield War, or the “War of 1914.” This was one of many such conflicts at the time that took place in coal and other mining fields in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914 took the lives of at least 21 people, including women and children who were living in the Ludlow union Tent Colony after having been evicted from company-owned coal camps. The Tent Colony was one of many such worker refuges at the time. It is a must-see for union members and their families who visit Colorado.

The strikes that became the Colorado Coalfield War began in 1910, although it can be said that Coloado coal mine workers frequently engaged in strikes from the time that the state's coalfields began to open in the later decades of the 19th century to the early 1930s. For much of this time the mine workers were employed in competing coalfields and the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), most often associated with the Rockefeller interests in popular memory, and the railroads held a great advantage over the workers and their families and communities.

It was difficult to achieve unity between the mine workers, and the union hesitated to call a statewide strike in the 1910-1914 years. Colorado's coal mining communities spoke scores of languages and were quite diverse, even though forms of racial and ethnic segregation were in place. Different, and sometimes competing, microeconomies existed within the state's coalfields, and it was not always easy for mine workers and their communities to understand that mine workers had common interests despite the competitive arrangements that they had been forced into. Turnover was high, there was often competition for jobs, the companies controlled the police and the courts and exercised great influence over state politics, and company stores ripped off workers. Large numbers of mine workers and their families engaged in seasonal agricultural labor, ranching, and railroad work when the mines were not working. The 1910-1914 strikes and the drama and violence of those strikes reflected a deep and abiding anger among working-class people and a nearly-desperate attempt by those in power to continue on with semi-feudal economic and political relations.         

 

On April 20, 1914, National Guardsmen and gun thugs aligned with the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company attacked the Ludlow Tent Colony. The day fell on Greek Easter and workers at the Tent Colony were playing baseball. Louis Tikas, a popular leader of the mine worker insurgency in Southern Colorado, was brutally mudered by gun thugs when he sought to negotiate a truce. Most of those who died that day were suffocated or were burned to death as they sought shelter from the gunfire directed at them by the company gun thugs and National Guardsmen and as their tents caught fire and they were trapped in dugouts under their tents that they had used for safety and for storing their belongings. One of the dugouts survives at the Ludlow Memorial can can be seen by visitors.  

That terrible event provoked at least 10 days of continuous warfare in Colorado, with mine workers and their allies using sophisticated military maneuvers. President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal troops to disarm both sides and restore order. Mass blacklisting took place. The union was able to maintain a base in the Northern Colordo coalfields and a skeletal underground structure in the centeral and Southern coalfields, and unionism survived among some key workers at the huge CF&I steel mill and rail system in Pueblo.

The mine workers and steel workers continued to press for unionization and carried out important strikes in the aftermath of the First World War, despite facing heavy repression. The first coordinated statewide coal mine workers strike in Colorado occured in 1927 and 1928, when mine workers struck under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then became for a short time the highest paid coal mine workers in the world. The IWW was defeated, again through violence and blacklisting and company-dominated courts, and the United Mine Workers of America gained a foothold. The UMWA eventually came to represent Colorao's mine workers.

The UMWA was awarded $151,976.15 for the project.

A Important Interview With Labor Activist And Writer Jon Melrod

I am currently reading Jon Melrod's thought-provoking and educational book Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War (PM Press, 2022). I hope to review that book here soon. In the meantime, here is an inteviiew with Jon Melrod in which he takes up some of the main themes that he writes about and in which he does some important teaching on organizing and labor history. 

Note: this one comes with a language morning and a disclaimer that I am not endorsing the views expressed here about the Teamsters leadership and some other topics.
 

 

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) turned 119 years old today

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) was founded on today's date in Chicago in 1905. The original Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW read as follows:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.

The rapid gathering of wealth and the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands make the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class, because the trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars.

The trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

This was later amended to read

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same Industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars.

Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wages for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system." It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The change in language marked an evolution in the organization and changing times in the United States. In just a few years after the founding of the IWW a significant body of the union's members had come to feel confident in their rejection of political action by labor and in their sharpening criticism of other unions. Conservative, liberal, and revolutionary political action and craft, trade, and rival industrial unionisms were all rejected in favor of a revolutionary industrial unionism that hoped to unite the workers of the world in one international union that would not only organize workers by industry but that would also be prepared to take dramatic action, dispossess the capitalists through a general strike, and abolish the political state and replace it with the collective economic administration of production and distribution by these same industrial unions. These ideas and goals are most often referred to as revolutionary syndicalism, and these doctrines have appeared and found bases in most industrialized countries and labor movements. They have been, at least for a time, a necessary or inevitable part of our working-class experience.

I cannot think of a union that has received as much scholarly attention as has the IWW (see here and here for starters and see here for the best mapping done of the IWW). The IWW has existed more as a movement than it has as union, although the IWW took notable steps in establishing itself among hardrock and metal miners, textile workes, coal miners, lumber and sawmill workers, maritime and longshore workers, auto workers and metal workers, and agricultural workers in its early years. This included much organizing here in Oregon. The IWW not only punched way above its weight but has also had a tremendous and continuing effect on working-class culture.

Five factors worked against the IWW in the first twenty-five years of its existence, greatly inhibiting its chances of future growth and constraining what it could reasonably be expected to accomplish.

Employer and government opposition effectively crimialized the IWW for a time and nearly caused the union to fold during and immediately following the First World War and the union's wartime strikes. Perhaps hundreds of IWW members were martyred, and hundreds or thousands more were jailed or sent to prison. The opportunities to build a strong labor movement in the United States after the First World War were mostly lost, some of the most anti-labor and anti-immigrant and racist forces took power instead, and all progressive and labor groups paid a steep price for their collective failures. Large numbers of workers in the United States engaged in dramatic struggles in these years and needed an organization like the IWW that sought to build working-class solidarity across political, racial, ethnic, class, sectional, gender, craft, and trade differences, but the IWW's dogmatic rejection of political action and other forms of unionism and particular forms of struggles used by workers of color and rural workers helped isolate the organization.

The IWW's philosophy and practice led its members to reject collective bargaining and signing contracts in most situations, and led as well to a misplaced faith in a "militant minority" of workers being able to harness working-class spontaneity for the common good. There were no national or international strike funds, no strike pay, no dues check-off, and few lasting political friends. The door was opened to factionalism and splits which were often nearly deadly and always unprincipled. The IWW and other attempts to build radical unionism from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s lacked cohesion and unity. The IWW essentially ceded its space, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the more conservative, and better resourced and primed, Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Another point is relevant here. Syndicalism is, at its core, a belief in taking care of one's own (however that is defined) without much regard to politics, and often without regard to others. This can be conservative or revolutionary, and it shows up in the conservative or liberal building trades unions as much as it does among decidedly more liberal or radical unions. Many of the workers who the IWW most wanted to reach, or who the organization most needed without realizing it, were often essentally conservative but were prepared to use radical tactics like sabotage, wildcat strikes, and local or regional general strikes to keep what they had and do better and take care of one another in ways that were excusivist. For instance, hardrock miners in the western states who were first- or second-generation Irishmen and who were living relaively stable and upwardly-mobile lives maintained an industrial unionism that ran parallel to or crossed paths with the IWW and its radical tactics but that also often excluded later immigrant hardrock mine workers who did not have the skill set or the stability of the older and established workers. Different political, cultural, and work values were in play even when the later immigrants were Irish. What appeared to be radical and inclusive was not always so, and this says much about class-consciousness in the United States.

Just so, the workers who the IWW most needed and whose support was most necessary had a material and ideological interest in winning acceptance and inclusion, if not assimilation, and were often prepared to use radical tactics and strategies to achieve what were essentially liberal or conservative goals. It is not that that these workers were not truly radical or revolutionary, but that the struggles over the terrms and conditions and limits of acceptance and inclusion by women, people of color and immigrants in the United States are the stuff of revolution even when revolutionaries can't see this.   

Following from this, the IWW projects a daily life of class struggle, constant organizing and mobilizing against the bosses and anyone who appeares to take their side, and protest and strike after protest and strike until we all get it right and spontaneously arise as a class against capitalism. But what do we do when workers need to take breathers or the daily fight-back isn't winning or when political action is necessary? Can a union really survive without dues check-off and strike funds? And what about the lives and identities of workers away from work and those spaces in our lives where race, gender identity, ethnicity, political and cultural identities, religion, and our subjective histories intersect and don't intersect with our identities as workers and our class-consciousness? 

 

IWW longshore union leader Ben Fletcher 

For all of that, and for better and worse, the IWW has left its imprint on the labor movement. We still beneit from the many civil liberties and other court cases won by members of the IWW. Labor historians have a difficult time defining the IWW, but the union has been an essential part of American history and culture (see here). Many of the union's instincts and core values carry good weight even if the IWW's overall theory and practice and the substance of its eventual goals are lacking. The IWW's shortcomings are not solely the fault of the organization but often reflect the grim realities and contradictions of working-class life. The IWW still exists and is on an upward swing. It is attracting some very smart and capable young people.

    

Labor then and now: 90 years after the Minneapolis Teamsters' strikes

It's a great time to look back at 1934, to learn how a wide range of workers changed the course of history and to consider how today's workers might change this course themselves. 

By Peter Rachleff

Star Tribune: Minneapolis truckers' strike, 1934. Police and strikers battle in

 the Minneapolis Farmers Market district.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' strikes. These strikes changed the course of history and the lives of tens of thousands of working people. They transformed Minneapolis from one of the country's most notorious anti-union citadels into a "union town" and inspired labor organization from Fargo to Omaha and Duluth to St. Louis. The story of this transformation still resonates with the challenges faced by working women and men in 2024.

In the late 19th century a vibrant and diverse labor movement surged across the state of Minnesota. Its ranks included native-born and immigrant workers employed as flour millers and barrelmakers, railroad engineers, firemen, brakemen and track workers, garment workers and laundresses, horse and wagon drivers, building trades craftsmen, longshoremen and stevedores, skilled machinists and shop workers. They were affiliated with the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the railroad brotherhoods, the Teamsters and the American Railway Union, and they created cooperatives, mutual benefit societies and a broad-based movement for the eight-hour day. These workers participated in the Great Northern Railroad and Pullman strikes of 1894 and built political alliances with farmers. In the early 20th century, many of them took part in the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party, and they challenged some of the biggest businessmen in the U.S., including James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie and Charles Pillsbury.

But bankers, businessmen and their political representatives launched a powerful counteroffensive to regain control of their workplaces and secure their domination of the city and the state. The core of their strategy was to eliminate unions through a double-blacklist (a refusal to hire union members and a refusal to extend loans to employers who bargained with unions). They created a new organization with a slippery rhetorical name — the "Citizens' Alliance" — not only to implement their strategy but also to spin it as a defense of individual independence. Their effectiveness won them the accolades of the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Federation, Chambers of Commerce and employers' organizations across the country. Minneapolis became an icon of non-unionism.

The Citizens' Alliance's success was devastating not just for unions but also for working men and women. Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, workers were disciplined, fired and blacklisted at the whim of employers. Although productivity rose with the introduction of new modes of work organization and new technologies, wages lagged. Workers struggled to support their families and find economic security. And when workers organized to challenge the Citizens' Alliance, such as the St. Paul streetcar workers' strike of 1917 or the election of Socialist trade unionist Thomas Van Lear to the mayoralty of Minneapolis in that same year, businessmen trumpeted the ideology of wartime "loyalty" and leveraged state government to provide resources, such as the Public Safety Commission, to limit workers' gains. The reign of the Citizens' Alliance seemed untouchable, despite the establishment of the Farmer Labor Party in 1924, the crash of the national economy in 1929, the election of Floyd B. Olson as governor in 1930 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932.

Then in the winter of 1934, a small group of experienced, dedicated labor activists began to change the course of history. Several of them had been working in the city's coal yards, earning miserable wages for handling and delivering the coal that Minneapolitans used to heat their homes, apartments and businesses. Members of the 75-member Teamsters Local 574, they initiated a strike on Feb. 7 that spread within three hours to 65 of the city's 67 coal yards. They organized "inside" (warehouse and coal yards) and "outside" (drivers and helpers) workers together in an industrial strategy, and they ignored both the New Deal's weak labor board system and the cautious advice of the Teamsters' national leadership. They relied on cruising pickets that shut the entire industry in the midst of a cold snap. Two days later, the coal employers offered the union a settlement, and the strike ended. An estimated 3,000 trucking and warehouse workers signed up to join Local 574. The inspiration was spreading.

In May, Local 574 called a larger strike, all across the city's market district. Again, they linked inside and outside workers, ignored the weak mechanisms of the government labor board, and relied on cruising pickets. Activists built an impressive infrastructure — a rented garage as a strike headquarters from which mobile pickets could be dispatched; a soup kitchen and an infirmary, fully staffed by volunteers, many from the newly organized women's auxiliary; a "committee of 100," mostly stewards from individual shops and warehouses, to make key decisions for the union; a committee of the unemployed, not only to prevent strike-breaking but also to advocate for those without jobs; a network of farmers to bring food for strikers and their families. They also secured the support of other unions and the Central Labor Council. The strike, which lasted 10 days, revolved around control of the streets. Despite police violence, the roving pickets were effective, and on May 25, employers offered an agreement, which the union accepted.

The ink had hardly dried on the agreement, however, when employers began to violate its terms. More than 700 complaints of discrimination were logged in June and early July. On July 17, Local 574 renewed its strike. This time, there were more than 10,000 participants, while 35,000 other workers engaged in a sympathy strike. The union mobilized its resources, adding a new weapon, a daily strike bulletin (the first ever in the U.S.) which they called "The Organizer." Once again, control over the streets was central to the effectiveness of the strike and, this time, there was more violence, even deaths on both sides. One hundred thousand union members and sympathizers took part in a funeral procession for striker Henry Ness. The dispatch of the National Guard and the arrests and imprisonment of many union leaders could not bring the strike to an end. With pressure exerted by Roosevelt through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Citizens' Alliance finally yielded on Aug. 21, and employers were ordered to hold union elections, almost all of which ended in victories for Local 574 and the negotiation of collective bargaining contracts. This broke the more than two decades' reign of the Citizens' Alliance.

Here begins the story of Minneapolis' transformation into a "union town." Some 10,000 truck drivers, helpers, warehouse workers, coal heavers and other unskilled workers not only won substantial raises, but also got seniority provisions and a grievance procedure, both of which held a promise of justice in the workplace itself. Their defeat of the Citizens' Alliance and their success inspired other workers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, across Minnesota and the Midwest, that they, too, could organize and improve their work lives. Rank-and-file teamsters' participation in the strikes and their continuing participation in the life of the union gave them a new awareness of their class position, in contrast with employers and in solidarity with other workers. Their experiences also fueled their sense of their own capacity and power. They shared their new consciousness with their family members, their neighbors and other workers. They also embodied it in expressions of solidarity, from support for the women workers in the Strutwear Knitting strike a year later to the building of an interstate network of trucking workers, and the unionization of packinghouse workers, timber workers, iron miners and steelworkers from Lake Superior to the Iowa border and more. Minneapolis had become a "union town" and workers' activism there was becoming a rising tide to lift all boats.

This situation persisted for half a century, for two generations. It became normal for workers throughout the Midwestern economy to earn a living wage, to enjoy health care benefits, vacations and pensions, to gain access to easier assignments as their seniority grew, and to expect a safe workplace and to be treated respectfully on the job. This was especially true in unionized workplaces, but non-union employers felt pressure to provide similar conditions, as did all levels of government. It was not a labor paradise; workers still worked hard and often felt they deserved a larger share of the wealth they created. But many were able to buy cars and homes, send their children to college and expect to enjoy their retirement years.

This changed abruptly in the 1980s and 1990s. Employers closed plants and exported manufacturing jobs abroad. They reorganized work through outsourcing and subcontracting. They chipped away at benefits, then wages, then unionization itself. While legislatures and judges weakened workers' rights to picket, employers threatened those who still dared to strike with permanent replacement. The unionized cohort of the working class no longer enjoyed economic security, their ability to improve their own conditions was greatly diminished and, increasingly, their role as trendsetters for all workers faded. By the turn of the 21st century, Minneapolis could no longer be called a "union town." For that matter, neither could St. Paul or anywhere else in Minnesota and the Midwest.

But workers' situations have not simply deteriorated; they have changed. Immigrants play an increased role in the economy and are more vocal, visible and significant in the labor movement. Public employees, white-collar workers, retail, service and fast-food workers have come to the fore. Teachers and educational assistants, and health care workers, from doctors and nurses to personal care assistants, see that unionization enables them to provide the care that brought them into their occupations in the first place. Members of Generation Z, struggling for economic security since the recession of 2008-10, are bringing new energy into the labor movement. We are living in exciting times.

This year is a great time to look back at 1934, to learn how a wide range of workers changed the course of history, and to consider how today's workers might change this course themselves. A diverse group of activists, some of them descendants of the 1934 strikers, are organizing a series of events — an art exhibit, a picnic, film screenings and panel discussions — to curate a series of conversations between the past and the present. Join us! Please see rem34.ampmpls.com for details of activities.

Peter Rachleff is an emeritus professor of history at Macalester College and co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul.

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.

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.

A Tribute To Our Departed Union Brother Mike Sullivan

The following obituary and memorial for our departed Brother Mike Sullivan was written by Don McIntosh and appeared in a recent issue of the Norhwest Labor Press. It well and lovingly written and Mike is greatly missed.

Mike Sullivan, a tireless advocate for steel and paper mill workers and proponent of universal health care, died March 2, 2024, of congestive heart failure.

Born Feb. 2, 1947, in Chicago, Michael Patrick Sullivan was the fourth of five children, and grew up poor on the south side of Chicago. He was six when his father died. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and suffered hearing loss working on aircraft carrier decks.

After the service, he went to work at U.S. Steel in the Chicago area and trained to be a roll turner. He moved to Oregon in 1978 to take a job at Cascade Steel Rolling Mills in McMinnville, where he became a member of United Steel Workers Local 8378. He got active in the union, starting with the union safety committee, and within a few years was local union president. He also served as chair of the Marion-Polk-Yamhill Central Labor Council.

As a steel mill union and labor council leader, he was outspoken in politics and fought efforts to pass a sales tax in Oregon, on the grounds that it’s a regressive tax that falls heaviest on workers. He served as a delegate to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, but he took President Bill Clinton’s strong-arm passage of NAFTA in 1993 as a huge betrayal, and it soured him on Democrats. In 1996, he was part of an unsuccessful push to form a union-backed Labor Party. In 1999, he was one of hundreds of steelworkers protesting in Seattle against Clinton’s convening of a World Trade Organization summit.

He ran unsuccessfully for Yamhill County commissioner in 2004. The following year, he went to work for Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers as a lobbyist, where he remained until retiring in 2021.

Never a politician, instead he brought a blue collar bluntness to his political work. He had strong convictions, spoke his mind, and could be gruff and even cantankerous at times. But he was also an unwavering advocate for “womb to tomb” universal health care, free higher education, and union democracy, wanting members to have a voice in their union.

While on staff at the union, he earned a bachelor’s degree in labor history from the AFL-CIO’s National Labor College. For his course work, he did oral history interviews and wrote a paper about Local 8378’s 1975 strike at Cascade Steel Rolling Mills.

Sullivan passed his passion for unions and politics on to his three children. Both sons made their way into supporting roles in union-adjacent politics. Kevin Sullivan led Oregon Labor Candidate School, staffed the union-backed group Our Oregon, and now works on the political team for Oregon Education Association (OEA). Chad Sullivan is national field coordinator for the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions and previously worked for OEA, SEIU Local 503, and American Association of University Professors. And Sullivan’s daughter, Katie Shumway, was a teachers union steward before becoming a school principal.

Sullivan was preceded in death by his parents; his sister, Carol; brothers Roger and Tim; and his wife of 48 years, Gerry, who died last October. He’s survived by sister Patricia Strnad, daughter Katie Shumway, sons Chad and Kevin Sullivan, and grandchildren Aaron Shumway, Henry Sullivan, and Eleanor Sullivan.

A celebration of life will be held 4 p.m. Saturday, May 25, at the SEIU Local 49 Union Hall, 3536 SE 26th Ave., Portland. RSVP at https://bit.ly/4cCq51s

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Healthcare for All Oregon.

A quick lesson in how to build your union and win positive change in the process

 

Roberta Wood has made some outstanding contributions to the United Steelworkers and to the labor movement and to movements for social change over the years. The award and recognition that Sister Wood is receiving here is well-deserved. I have had the good fortune to have met her a few times and to have engaged with her writing. I'm reposting this video with the hope that our readers will give it a look-see, think carefully on what is being said here, and share it with others. I have two reasons for doing this.

First, I think that this video captures some important aspects of labor history and nails down some ideas about our history. Getting this is important to any kind of union organizing, union representation work, or even the routine tasks of what it takes to keep your union moving forward. Like Sister Wood says near the end of the video, our history is in the past, in the present, and in the future. I think that we need to ask ourselves if we're finding a place for ourselves in our history or not and what that place is. What do you want your union to do and what are you doing to make that real? How will the work that you're doing look five years from now or twenty years or fifty years from now?

Second, I also think that in this short video we get a good account of how things change in real time. Many young people coming into the labor movement accept that our unions are only there to improve our wages, hours and working conditions and that delivering those improvements is someone else's job. That kind of unionism is obsolete. It doesn't work and it won't last.

But there is also a body of people who think that our first problem is with our union leaders, and not the employers and companies who hold the purse strings and who own and control our labor. They believe that our unions have to be reformed and adopt their philosophy of "class struggle unionism" before progress can be made. They believe that strikes are the main or only ways forward. Their idea of labor history forms from over-emphasizing the role of certain factions within the labor movement and from either misunderstanding or not coming to terms with the inevitable push-and-pull that takes place in every workplace between workers and management and employers and so they never come to terms with the real labor history of the United States. They put forward a divisive and limiting set of tactics, not a strategy for making things better or winning real change, and they do so as if they have been freed from our specific North American labor history.   

There is another path forward besides what I just described. I believe that it works, and I believe that Sister Wood is teaching us that it works. The best organizing and the most secure wins won't come from closed-door unions that feel like the leaders are in a club, and it won't come from picking fights with people who might be won over to supporting the issues that most matter to working-class people. Dividing our ranks doesn't help anyone on our side of the fence.

The better path that I think Sister Wood is describing is for us to do the hard daily work of identifying issues that matter and issues of principle, like civil rights and inequities at work that undermine us, and figuring out how to win majorities to our side and directly involve people in taking action around those issues. It isn't about my great idea or yours, but about what those around us need and what we can help them accomplish. It's about building and presenting a united body of people willing to fight step by step every step of the way, including those we're trying to win over and sometimes reluctant union leaders, in order to take on our employers and win gains. There are allies, people on the fence, and die-hards all along the path. There are right times and wrong times to bring in outsiders and right and wrong times to raise new issues. Each group that we will encounter as we go along will have its own interests and concerns, and we have to understand what these are and why that is so. But at the end of the day it's all about winning concessions from our managers and our employers. 

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of the MPYCLC or the Oregon AFL-CIO. Other opinions from union members in our region are encouraged.  

Glamour, Travel, Sexism: When Flight Attendants Fought Back

I believe that this story ran in The New York Times under date of February 19, 2024 with the photograph that I added from the Association of Flight Attendants--CWA. It is certainly an inspiring story.

Decades ago, “stewardesses” earned less than men, couldn’t get married or gain weight, and had to retire at 32. A key figure in a landmark lawsuit looks back at a not-so-golden era.

In 1958, when Mary Pat Laffey Inman became a stewardess — as they were then called — for Northwest Airlines, she was 20 years old and the clock was already ticking. At 32, she would be forced to retire. That is, if she didn’t marry, get pregnant or even gain too much weight before that: All were grounds for termination. It was the golden age of aviation for everyone except, perhaps, the women serving in-flight meals to the nattily dressed passengers.

Six years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and female flight attendants began to join forces against sexism.

In 1970, Ms. Laffey Inman, a union leader and Northwest’s first female purser — the lead attendant on a flight — spearheaded a class-action suit, Laffey v. Northwest Airlines Inc., that resulted in the airline paying more than $30 million in damages and back wages in 1985. It also set the precedent for nondiscriminatory hiring of flight attendants across the industry. But even then, not everything changed: Flight attendants on some airlines were still subjected to “weigh-ins” into the 1990s. (Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008.)

Now, decades after the landmark decision, Ms. Laffey Inman, 86, is one of several former flight attendants featured in “Fly With Me,” an “American Experience” documentary that chronicles how women fought to overcome discrimination in the airline industry. It premieres on PBS on Feb. 20. The New York Times spoke to Ms. Laffey Inman about how she made history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired your career in the airline industry?

I was working at Montefiore Hospital, in Pittsburgh. I always wanted to travel, ever since I was a kid. As a flight attendant, I could travel — all expenses paid. I thought it was wonderful. Other stewardesses and I laugh about how lucky we were to be in the industry at that time. We would bid for three-day layovers in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo. A limo would be there to pick you up and take you to the hotel.

What was involved in training at the time?

Flight attendants had a six-week session where we learned about the airline and had emergency and safety training. We learned the commands to use in case of emergency. And we had grooming classes — women came and taught us how to put on our makeup and polish our fingernails.

Aside from keeping up appearances, how was sexism evident in the industry?

When I started, senior stewardesses talked about younger men being hired to be in charge of the aircraft and the crew, bypassing stewardesses who had been flying for quite a while. They discussed this in whispering tones, or sometimes not whisperings. It was always a bone of contention. Men were elected to positions that controlled the union, and they did the negotiating. Stewardesses could not really look at the job as a career because we had to quit when we got married or when we were 32. That was always in the back of your mind.

How did you become the first female purser?

In 1968, Northwest hired four men off the street to be pursers. I called the director of labor relations and said, “You must post this bid!” When they did, many women were intimidated, but I applied and got the job.

How were flight attendants’ duties different in the 1960s?

We had to work with military air contracts. In times of emergency, the U.S. military has a right to commandeer aircraft to be used on a military basis. We flew to Vietnam quite often during the Tet offensive in 1968. I was a purser, but I was new and didn’t have any seniority, so I was assigned to those flights. We’d bring 165 soldiers to Okinawa, then shuttle them to Vietnam and bring 165 back — hopefully. We got in and out of Vietnam as quickly as possible because there were missiles going back and forth.

Taking on a giant corporation is no easy feat, especially as young women in the 1960s.

We didn’t have a leg to stand on legally until the Civil Rights Act, which included discrimination based on gender. That was our renaissance.

What role did you play?

In 1967, I became the head of the union at Northwest, and negotiated the first nondiscriminatory contract with the airline. We could prove women flight attendants had equal skills and responsibilities. That’s when we brought back the stewardesses who were fired because they were over 32, or because they were overweight or because they were married.

How did you end up with a class-action lawsuit?

In 1969, negotiations for the next contract commenced. The negotiating committee was dominated by men. I had expected changes, but Northwest refused to include language that would treat women pursers the same way as male pursers. I talked to a labor lawyer, who said we had a case. Ultimately, 70 percent of the union signed on. The airline dragged it out for 15 years — took it to the Supreme Court twice, but the case was remanded back to the Federal District Court of Appeals, where Ruthie Bader Ginsburg was the judge who’d written the opinion in our favor.

At the time you filed the lawsuit, did you have any idea of the impact you would have on the industry — and on history?

No, I was just looking for equality in pay. I wasn’t thinking 40 or 50 years ahead. I was simply hoping every step on the judicial ladder would go our way.

As far as flying today, with the many reports of passengers behaving badly on flights and the stress that causes the crew, what do you think can be done to make flying better?

I’d like someone to pass a law to widen the seats. That’s one of the reasons there’s so much tension.

ReplyForward You can't react with an emoji to this message

International Working Women's Day---Friday, March 8

A woman coal miner in Appalachia. The photo likely

 comes from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Source unknown.

International Working Women's Day (IWWD), now more commonly known as International Women's Day, falls on March 8 every year. The day likely has its origins in the United States but is not celebrated here as an officially recognized holiday as it is elsewhere in the world. May Day also has its origins in the United States as a day for working-class protest and it is also not widely or legally observed here.

International Working Women's Day probably began in New York City in the middle of the nineteenth century as a day of protest organized by women working in the garment industry. It fell out of use and was revived by socialists in New York City in the early years of the twentieth century as garment workers---most of them women---began to organize into the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). The ILGWU was then attempting to become an industry-wide union of all garment workers employed in making women's clothing. The union existed in large part as a coalition of immigrant garment workers, most of them women, and their supporters. Among these supporters were feminists of the time, immigrant journalists and writers, reformers and socialists of various stripes. and people who were concerned with workplace safety and health and cleaning up the poor and immigrant urban neighborhoods. Opposed to them all were the garment manufacturers and the contractors they hired, most elected and appointed officials, the police, criminal gangs employed by the garment manufacturers to break strikes and manage the competitive garment industry, the landlords who owned the factory buildings, and most of the mainstream press.

Union labels from the ILGWU.*

 

Women socialists took up the cause of working women's rights internationally around the turn of the century, but it was the dramatic mass strike of garment workers in New York, known as the Uprising of the 20,000 (1909), and the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 that put IWWD on the calendars of the international labor movement. The main demands of the strike were for a 20-percent pay raise, a 52-hour workweek, extra pay for overtime, and a union shop in which every worker was a union member and the employers had to bargain with the union and agree on a contract, but the mostly young immigrant women who were the strike and union activists were hopeful and idealistic and wanted more. They faced outrageous attacks by thugs and police on their picket lines, unfriendly politicians and mainstream newspapers that supported the employers, and even some union officials who publicly doubted that they could win. Still, their determination won over socialists and reformers and large sections of the labor movement, many immigrant organizations and newspapers, and even many prominent wealthy women. The strikers were asserting themselves into history on behalf of all working women and immigrant communities whether they realized it or not.

Photo source unknown.

The main body of strike lasted three months and won many improvements, but it did not bring the total victory that many of the women had fought for. Still, the union had gained a generation of women activists and leaders and had shown that women could lead a mass strike and win advances that were crucial to their lives and to their collective advancement as working women and as immigrants. These lessons remain with us today. The strike set in motion a process for cleaning up factories and resolving disputes between workers and bosses, made progress in cleaning up poor and immigrant neighborhoods, and contributed to women winning the vote. Some factories held out by using thugs and police and the courts to avoid unionization.

One of the those companies was the Triangle Shirtwaist factory located in lower Manhattan. On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire that started on the top floors of the factory took the lives of at least 146 of the workers. The inherited story of the fire tells us that the factory owners had locked the factory's exits in order to stop workers from stealing or to stop them from leaving work early. Many of the facts surrounding the fire remain in dispute, but it is a fact that the firefighters who arrived to fight the fire did not have ladders tall enough to reach the upper floors of the 10-story building and that the fire caused the rails controlling the building's elevators to buckle and become inoperable. A newspaperman who happened to be present called in his account of the fire in real time and offered the following:

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.

The first ten thud-deads shocked me. I looked up-saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me-something that I didn't know was there-steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window-four screaming heads of girls waving their arms.

"Call the firemen," they screamed-scores of them. "Get a ladder," cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn't help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions.

"Here they come," we yelled. "Don't jump; stay there."

One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. I didn't notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces.

The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl's body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud, it seemed, as if there had been no net there. It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city.

I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that it had not occurred to me before to notice. Little details that the first shock had blinded me to. I looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell. I noticed that they did; they watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.

Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward-the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.

Thud-dead, thud-dead-together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.

We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud-dead came first.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.

I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking-flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.

The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls. . . .

The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

That was the garment industry's answer to immigrant women daring to assert themselves.

International Working Women's Day was widely observed in pre-war Western and Central Europe, and later in the Soviet Union and in China, but it gained international acceptance in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Somewhere along the way IWWD became International Women's Day (IWD) and the United Nations began marking IWD in 1975. The UN's General Assembly declared March 8 an officially designated day for women and world peace in 1977. Democratic and undemocratic governments now recognize the day, as do many multinational corporations, but IWWD (or IWD) is not an officially designated holiday in the United States, the place of its origins. Taking the "Working" out of the Day's name perhaps tamed the nature of the Day for some. It is up to us to reclaim it.
  

Photo from National Public Radio

* Many readers will not know what these are. The ILGWU (1900-1995) used the union label as a way of  letting consumers know that a garment was made by union-represented workers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. All garments produced by ILGWU members had to have the union label sewn in. ILGWU members received higher wages and better healthcare benefits than did non-union garment workers, and the ILGWU pension kept qualified garment workers out of poverty. The ILGWU union contracts set a good standard in the garment industry. Workplace safety remained a top concern for the union through its entire existence and the union again prioritized organizing immigrant workers in the late 1970s and 1980s.