FROM RAIL YARDS TO IVY HALLS

Old-style unionism may have faltered. But the past could give rise to new strategies for labor

Review essay by Burney Simpson

THE PULLMAN STRIKE AND THE CRISIS OF THE 1890s:
ESSAYS ON LABOR AND POLITICS
Edited by Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist and Nick Salvatore, 1999
University of Illinois Press

THE SECRET LIVES OF CITIZENS:
PURSUING THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE
Thomas Geoghegan, 1998
Pantheon Books

HIGH-TECH BETRAYAL:
WORKING AND ORGANIZING ON THE SHOP FLOOR
Victor G. Devinatz, 1999
Michigan State University Press

ACADEMIC KEYWORDS:
A DEVIL'S DICTIONARY FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, 1999
Rout ledge

The classic boxer pose is head-on, crouched, arms up, legs tensed, moving forward. It's aggressive and challenging. There is something very American about the pose: I will come to you and fight you and I will win.

Some 50 years ago, boxing was one of the most popular sports in the country. People knew the names of the champs of half a dozen weight divisions. They knew the top contenders, too. But the fight game began to take its fans for granted, and raw brutality fell from favor.

The American labor movement peaked around the same time. In the early 1950s, union membership included 42 percent of manufacturing workers and 87 percent of those in construction trades. In 1954, 35 percent of American workers were union members. Labor was an aggressive movement that won the eight-hour day. It picked fights and won victories. In 1946, the United Mine Workers took a giant step and won health and pension benefits. In 1950, the United Auto Workers struck Chrysler for 100 days and won a $100-a-month pension, unprecedented in its day. A new middle class was born.

It's been downhill since.

As paychecks got better, union leaders began to resemble management. The cars, cigars and waistlines got bigger. The rank-and-file got complacent, too. Hard-won benefits were taken for granted. Then Jimmy Hoffa denied ties to organized crime in televised testimony to Congress. A few years later he was in prison. Then he disappeared.

Questionable friends, a stodgy image and short-term thinking left

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unions flat-footed as America shifted from a manufacturing to a service economy. And though a leading union such as the Service Employees International Union jacked its organizing budget up from $20 million in 1995 to $60 million in 1998, the unionized share of the workforce — 14 percent in 1998 —continues to lag.

General Electric,Dekalb.

Several recent books on the history of labor and the rise and fall of unionism suggest a few new strategies. First, unions cannot thrive if they remain nearly all-white, all-male enclaves. And second, while they move more aggressively to hang on to their base, unions will need to move beyond the traditional steel, auto and rubber trades. These are interesting times for those who would organize — or reorganize —American workers. Indeed, union shops may soon encompass such diverse workplaces as Silicon Valley chip plants and university faculty lounges. Two events this past summer illustrate the point. While six old-line textile plants in North Carolina were voting to unionize, the American Medical Association was approving a call to doctors to consider unionizing. After all, it argued, these days many docs are just employees of HMOs. At the same time, aggressive organizing by the Service Employees International, which represents such workers as nurses, hospital and health care aides, public employees and janitors, managed to boost that union's membership by 64,000 in four years through 1998. And mainline unions are openly flexing political muscle again. The AFL-CIO backed President Bill Clinton — and backed that support with campaign dollars and foot soldiers. Further, union officials are considering new ways to capitalize on their 16 million members nationwide. One idea: Enlist members as enumerators for the 2000 Census on the theory that a more accurate count in minority and working class neighborhoods could mean more federal dollars for those communities where much of the membership lives.

But as unions search for ways to rebuild membership and influence, they might reconsider some past mistakes. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics, a collection edited by Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist and Nick Salvatore that details a turning point in union history, offers a few lessons. Though the 1894 strike against the Pullman Car Works in Chicago failed, it led to gains in union organizing nationwide, brought widespread public support to the labor movement and gave one of its leaders, Eugene Debs, a platform to run for president. The strikers did much that was right to bring most of the nation's rail traffic to a halt. But they made some serious miscalculations, a result of their own small-mindedness, or management manipulation.

Pullman was the quintessential company town. George Pullman, an industrialist railroad sleeping car builder, designed it to be a social experiment, with clean streets, parks, stores and homes with indoor plumbing.

Pullman offered better pay than his

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competitors, too. But he wasn't altruistic. He built his town several miles south of downtown Chicago to keep workers away from union influence. And because the company owned everything, workers' paychecks kept flowing back in rent payments and grocery charges.

Pullman's company also had a ready supply of cheap, eager labor in the largest influx of immigrants to that point. A census taken in 1892 found the workforce at the Pullman plant was nearly 70 percent immigrant, mostly from the Scandinavian countries, Germany and other parts of Europe.

Many spoke only the language of their homelands and knew little if any English, management's tongue. It was easy for Pullman and his foremen to use this barrier to make his workers suspicious of one another by giving favored ethnic groups bonuses or promotions.

But as dissatisfaction with working conditions at the plant grew, the common struggle to survive in a strange new country helped draw the workers together.

By 1885, individual craft unions had been formed at Pullman by car builders, cabinetmakers and blacksmiths. Some of these smaller unions conducted strikes. Still, no single event drew the groups together until the Depression of 1893 spread to the Midwest. Pullman decided to fire some workers and cut wages by a third without lowering rents or food prices. And the crafts, under the national umbrella of the American Railway Union, went on strike.

The walkout continued for most of the summer of 1894. At its peak it shut down rail shipping from Illinois to the West Coast. Eventually, President Grover Cleveland, siding with management, sent troops to break up disturbances. This allowed replacement workers to come and go without fear of retribution. The strike was broken.

Nevertheless, the action at Pullman was successful in several ways. It brought together workers from across much of the country, many of them foreign-born. The public supported the strikers, too, at least until reports of union vandalism and violence. In 1898, Congress authorized unionization of rail workers. And within the next decade membership in trade unions tripled.

But the strike also made clear a deep division between the virtually all-white American Railway Union and the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. The ingrained racism in the American Railway Union meant blacks were kept from joining. And when the strike began, the porters refused to walk. This was a tough blow because it meant the railroads would continue running in the East. Pullman managed to further inflame these tensions by bringing in blacks as replacement workers.

It took another 30 years for railway unions to make progress in opening up membership to blacks.

Racial and ethnic tension has long plagued the larger labor movement. And such divisions can still determine whether a factory will go union, a central point in High-Tech Betrayal: Working and Organizing on the Shop Floor, an account of a shortlived attempt to organize a medical equipment factory in 1983 on Chicago's North Side. Author Victor Devinatz, an associate professor of management at Illinois State University in Normal, dropped out of graduate school to work at the assembly plant. A major theme of his book is workers' inability to cross the boundaries of race and ethnicity.

Devinatz idealistically hoped to organize in a growing industry that unions had ignored. But he soon found himself in a multiethnic stew of distrust. He ties that distrust to Chicago's mayoral election that year.

Harold Washington went on to become the city's first black mayor, and history has smiled on his legacy. But during the campaign, the atmosphere in city and factory was anything but happy. Racist pamphlets and graffiti were common. Washington's white opponent used the theme, "Before it's too late." Devinatz recalls he was the only white person at the plant to wear a Washington campaign button.

Unlike Pullman's workers, these workers — mostly blacks, Latinos and Asian immigrants — pulled away from each other. Skin color proved to be a tougher barrier to cross than language differences.

The time was ripe for Washington's victory, but the timing was wrong for Devinatz. When he attempted to form a core group of black and Latino organizers, a black co-worker informed management. The owners contrived to fire Devinatz and the co-worker ended up with his job. To his dismay, Devinatz' Latino friends told him later he should never have trusted the black worker.

During his seven months at the factory, Devinatz would try to plant the union seed during casual conversations. But few wanted to listen. Again, his timing was unfortunate. Worker complacency was running high. The children and grandchildren of those who had won the great union victories took working conditions for granted. Devinatz writes of one: "Sam's comments did not seem atypical of those of many American workers — reflecting an almost complete lack of a trade union consciousness or any kind of a working class consciousness."

Devinatz's efforts may have been unsuccessful, but he has to be judged in the context of the day. The biggest unions were still clinging to the steel and rubber plants, while those industries were moving overseas. Workers in minimum-wage factory and warehouse jobs, and in the growing service sector, weren't considered worth the effort.

Meanwhile, "Reagan Democrats" helped elect a Republican president who allowed nonunion workers to replace the striking air traffic controllers. Whatever union solidarity remained failed to cancel flights.

A destructive cycle had set in for the union movement. It had lost its ability to bring workers together, or to demonstrate that it offered more than white-collar workers were already getting from management. Few workers would look beyond personal gain to collective power.

After bottoming out in the 1980s, can unions regain their strength? Two other recent books by Illinois-based authors try to point the way. One

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considers the future while the other takes a nostalgic look back.

In his The Secret Lives of Citizens:
Pursuing the Promise of American Life, labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan calls for a return to the progressive values of the 1930s New Deal, and a strong federal government that 'will give labor a prominent place at the table. But Geoghegan, who worked for President Jimmy Carter's administration in Washington before moving to Chicago in the early 1980s, offers this critique: The great problem of the New Deal was that it didn't include the South. In return for support early in his administration by Southern legislators. President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the region to remain union free. Labor has been hurt ever since, according to Geoghegan.

To save money, businesses moved south and workers followed. Population growth meant more legislative power in Washington, D.C., for conservative states. Pro-business politics, Geoghegan argues, enabled Reagan to overhaul the National Labor Relations Board and his successor. Bill Clinton, to push passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement against labor's wishes.

But Geoghegan's fixation on the South's rise as the cause of every step backward in the struggle between labor and management wears thin. (He goes so far as to wish the Civil War hadn't been fought to keep that region in the union.) Wringing hands over the losses of yesteryear won't get more votes or build a union local. What purpose can it serve to write off a third of the country, especially when that region continues to grow?

And it raises another question: Are progressives doomed to repeat the mistake they made when they ignored the decline of the manufacturing sector? One of the strengths of today's union leadership is the ability to see, or at least pretend to see, the South as an area filled with a thousand organizing possibilities.

Ending on a hopeful note, Geoghegan gives an account of a meeting near Chicago of labor and a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious mix of activists. The coalition, designed to cross racial and class lines and the borders of city and suburb, seeks to find a common response to problems in the area. The spirit is still there, writes Geoghegan. At least north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Authors Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt are more forward-looking. Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education argues universities present an opportunity for union organizers. Their book takes a broad look at the current state of academe, but includes several chapters on

THE UNDERGROUND LABOR FORCE One small-time southern Illinois hood managed to earn notoriety and a noose while working from home Review by Burney Simpson A KNIGHT OF ANOTHER SORT: PROHIBITION DAYS AND CHARLIE BIRGER Gary DeNeal, 1998 Southern Illinois University Press The image of the Illinois gangster is that of a gunman fighting for control in Chicago. During Prohibition, Al Capone and Bugs Moran made headlines selling liquor. Today, the 10 o'clock news likely leads with video of a lifeless teenager, allegedly a crack dealer, sprawled beneath a stained sheet on one of that city's street corners. But Chicago has never had a lock on bad guys willing to make a buck selling goods and services off-limits to the law abiding. Charlie Birger was a murderer, thief, pimp and bootlegger in southern Illinois who provided much comfort to the businessmen, coal miners and farmers of Williamson, Franklin and Saline counties during the first quarter of this century. His Shady Rest resort was a favored spot for illegal drink and bets on fighting dogs. Actually, the resort, midway between Harrisburg and Marion, was just a dressed-up log cabin with a roadside barbecue stand as a front. If Birger ever earned an honest day's pay, he supplemented it with more lucrative work. Gary DeNeal's A King of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger chronicles this small-time hood's sordid but fascinating life. Southern Illinois Press published this second edition, with new photos and other material, last year. DeNeal's research is extensive and the writing is hardnosed, colorful, and occasionally humorous. Birger's reputation for violent retribution was powerful, so much so that several of DeNeal's sources requested anonymity 70-some years after the gangster's death. But

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Birger also developed a reputation as a rural Robin Hood, giving away groceries and cash to folks down on their luck. And — a cost of doing business — he befriended local law enforcement, either with tips on the whereabouts of rival criminals, or with payoffs and services at his resort. Sothern Illinois bootlegger Charlie Birger(center,sitting on car roof) and his gang at their roadhouse,Shady Rest, in "Bloody Williamson" County in 1927. Along with the friendships, though, came enemies. First in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization of local businessmen and political leaders who grew tired of the corruption. The Klan quickly mounted successful raids on bootlegging operations. Soon, these vigilantes got out of hand, too. In 1924, a shootout in downtown Herrin between factions of the Klan and the gangs left six dead and helped cement the national reputation of "Bloody Williamson" County. Birger denied involvement and was never brought to trial. And the Klan was effectively finished as a public organization. But Birger's most enduring enemies were his business rivals. He began fortifying, leveling trees surrounding his cabin to keep a better eye on those who might try to sneak up. Members of the Shelton gang responded by using a single engine plane to drop three homemade bombs near the resort. Two were duds, but a third exploded, purportedly killing an eagle and Birger's pet bulldog. The gang wars inevitably escalated and Birger eventually was convicted for the murder of the mayor of West City. According to DeNeal, though, the gangster was responsible for committing or ordering the murder of many others. In 1928, Charlie Birger was led to the gallows in Benton. He wore a suit made by Al Capone's tailor. 

unionizing white-collar workers on campus.

Nelson and Watt contend that graduate students should be organized because they are doing more of the teaching at colleges and universities. They compare today's university towns to the Pullmans of old, with a single employer controlling the jobs and salaries of most of the residents. While tenured professors do more research, schools require graduate students to teach such nuts-and-bolts classes as freshman composition.

Further, such courses have become profit centers for colleges, according to Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Because virtually all undergrads must take composition, the barely minimum-wage grad student is teaching 200-plus students at a time. The return on expenses this represents for big universities helps pay the ever- increasing salary of the full-time research prof in a smaller discipline such as agriculture. The authors estimate the school makes $8,000 for each composition class taught by a grad student.

These academics present a strong argument for labor in the nontraditional halls of ivy. In fact, the United Auto Workers has already begun signing grad students at Yale and the Big 10 universities of Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa. Nelson argues the next challenge is the growing number of part-time teachers.

More than 100 years after the Pullman strike, labor is at another turning point. But those who want to relive past glories might remember the slow decline of the greatest boxer ever, Muhammad Ali.

As the years wore on and the legs lost speed, Ali resorted to a style of fighting he called "Rope-A-Dope."

The idea was pretty simple: Imitate a spider. He would hang in a corner with his back against the ropes, almost still (except for the occasional stutter step for the crowd), and wait for the latest hopeful to come to him. After a few rounds, the energetic contender would be frustrated and tired from trying to get the stubborn Ali into the center of the ring. For a second or two, the challenger would lose his concentration and let his arms down. Suddenly, the Ali of bygone days returned. He pounced on the guy, the punches connected, and the startled challenger backpeddled, swung, missed, tripped. There was still enough there to put the dazed youngster away. But Rope-A-Dope only tricked them for a few fights. The young guys caught on.

A reactive strategy never works for long. Pretty soon, a fighter has to get out there and throw some punches. 

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