AHC: Strengthen the US Trade Union movement

samcster94

Banned
In the 1970s a few unions start or buy radio stations when it's still relatively cheap.

The better stations make a sincere effort to tell the whole story, both the parts flattering to the union and those not! It's generally a regular radio station with a lot of music and a medium amount news, and the news geared toward labor issues. And the station journalists make a sincere effort to interview and bring on the air regular people who are affected by economic policy. Some of the regular people are just so-so speakers, but some are excellent and speak from the heart and give standard corporate PR types a real run for their money!

These dozen or so radio stations are available to be expanded when Reagan fires the air traffic controllers in August '81, and crucially, when corporate executives seem to take this as a signal that it's socially acceptable to wage war on unions.

And they can be expanded again with the rise of right-wing radio around (?) 1989, 1990, 1991 (?).
I am just trying to mention a working class left competing with Rush :)
 

dcharleos

Donor
As it says on the tin - how can you strengthen the U.S. Trade Union movement in a way that continues to the present day. While it's unlikely that Unions can achieve the dominance they do in some European countries, a solid goal would be having 30-40% worker enrollment in Unions, with no right to work laws on the books.

How can this be achieved? No Taft Hartley Act might be a good starting place.


We need to go back before Taft-Hartley, in my opinion, and avoid the First Red Scare. If you'll permit me an analogy, Taft-Hartley is Waterloo. By the time that Taft-Hartley is a consensus position--so uncontroversial it was passed over Truman's veto--the labor movement is already in a position of fatal weakness. If we snap our fingers and say the vote goes a different way, then the Act is brought up again in the next session of Congress, and it passes then.

The question is, then, how does left wing activism and the labor movement find itself in such a position of weakness to begin with? I would point to the First Red Scare as a grievous wound. About 600 activists were deported, thousands were arrested, Eugene Debs was arrested, Socialists were expelled from the New York Assembly. It totally destroyed the IWW. The strength of radicals within the movement never recovered, and consequently, when the Second Red Scare rolled around thirty years later, radicals were expelled from the Labor movement altogether, with the renunciation of Communism by union leaders required by Taft-Hartley and the expulsion of communists from within the CIO.

So, how do we avoid the First Red Scare? I don't think there's any way to avoid the Espionage or Sedition Acts, but those weren't strictly Red Scare laws, they were just laws that were used to great effect during the Red Scare. In my mind, there were three events that really whipped up hysteria: the 1919 anarchist mail bombing campaign, the Seattle General Strike, and the Boston Police Strike. The mail bombing campaign is an obvious cause for alarm. In the minds of those who were inclined to think of anarchists as dangerous people, it provided all the proof they needed to support their suspicions. The Seattle Strike was inspired by the successes of the Bolsheviks. While the strikers had a lot of reasons to strike, a communist influenced strike in the wake of a violent revolution in Russia, while American soldiers were in Russia killing communists, was a very impolitic decision on the part of the unions that organized it. It made foreign communists--and not the labor movement--seem like a powerful force in American society. A force that was obviously subversive, destructive, and evil. If that wasn't enough, the Police Strike called into question the social contract. It made mass lawlessness and chaos a vivid threat in the minds of millions of Americans.

Clearly, people felt that things were spinning out of control, and A. Mitchell Palmer was just the man to grab the wheel and correct course.

So first things first. The Seattle Strike began as a shipyard strike, and the shipyard owners were initially willing to negotiate. Then a man named Charles Piez, who was the head of the local War Shipping board, threatened to cancel his contracts with the shipyards if any raises were granted (the guy was a major league asshole). He accidentally sent his threat to the unions instead of the bosses, and hell ensued. Best way to avoid all of this is to have him keep his mouth shut. The strike is resolved quickly and amicably.

Then we have to butterfly away the bombing campaign. It was separated into two parts: the April bombing campaign, which was at least partly inspired by the reaction to the strike; and the June bombing campaign, which was far more serious. Both campaigns were enacted by followers of an anarchist named Galleani, who was never directly implicated in the attacks, but may have had some knowledge. Even though Galleani was himself an advocate of violence, its plausible enough that he could make it known that he did not think that 1919 was the right time to take violent action.

Avoiding the Police Strike is a lot trickier. The Boston Police were subject to abysmal working conditions, and the police commissioner who would have been inclined to alleviate them, Stephen O'Meara, died in December of 1918 after months of health problems. The strike took place in September of 1919, so that's a long time to posit a longer life. The commissioner who replaced him, Edward Curtis, was a reactionary asshole, and he refused to negotiate or even recognize the right of the police to bargain collectively. So the best bet is to imagine someone else getting the job, someone who is inclined to be more flexible. Who that might be is anyone's guess.

On the flipside, Calvin Cooldige, who was the Governor of Massachusetts at the time, rose to national prominence because of his handling of the Strike. Butterfly the strike and you might butterfly away his presidency.

No Red Scare, no deportation of hundreds (including such luminaries as Emma Goldman) no arrests of thousands of activists, the IWW might be strong enough to force the AFL to deal with them (and thus avoid the crack up in 1924). Debs probably get released from prison sooner, and may very well live longer.

I think that's a very good start to giving the US a strong labor movement.
 
UHC implemented sometime. Doesn't matter that much whether it's TR/FDR/Truman/LBJ/HHH/Nixon setting it up, get a developed nation-style healthcare system in place and you remove one BIG point of disputes/friction between unions and business, along with also one less thing for unions to spend their energies on -- they can spend more time on spreading pro-union messages/other things.
 
Avoid WW1.
It really is that simple, as pre-war level of US Union membership were on par with rest of the Anglosphere countries.
 
Yeah, I think this is the ticket. Taft-Hartley not happening through the scenario Magnolia Pol described will be a tremendous step to keeping unions in play. Any other bills/verdicts that could help keep Labor Unions vital?

Add to that that universal health care should occur so that workers wouldn't be burdened by high health care costs
 
Add to that that universal health care should occur so that workers wouldn't be burdened by high health care costs
Business too. Having to pay 2x or 3x -- benefits for workers, taxes to pay for poors/olds to get healthcare adds up pretty fast. This is before any costs from things like more illness plus businesses trying to secure more steady revenue streams to pay for ever-rising premiums or other things get factored in.
 
Part of the problem was the National Labor Relation Act setup in itself, guaranteed Union/Management relations would be bitterly adversarial, with the 1935 banning of the so called 'Tame' Unions funded in part by the Company, so no Worker's Councils like in Europe.

So some Unions that had been working in the '20s-early '30's were eliminated.

So by the '50s. some unions were getting toxic, like the UAW protecting low work standards, and the Teamsters and Longshoremen defining corruption by Organized Crime.

The NLRB sets the right of exclusive Union representation in the United States. That is, once a union is recognized by the NLRB to have the support of a majority of employees in a federally delineated "bargaining unit," the Union represents all covered workers, regardless of what the local employees desire for representation.
If a group of workers think, or know their local Union to be corrupt, they cannot invite in or organize a rival or different Union.

Thats one of the reasons that Unions started to represent fewer workers
 
like any top-down hierarchy. Yes, some really bad eggs and they really jump out at you.

but was this even 10% of unions? I don't think so.
Membership numbers is what to look at.

Senate Hearings found massive corruption in 15 Unions in the '50s. Doesn't seem like a lot, but they had high membership totals

The Worst of the lot, the Teamsters, as also one of the largest Unions, and it had been recently expelled by the AFL-CIO, along with The Bakery and Laundry Workers, as a means to slow Federal legislation.
Teamsters responded by electing Jimmy Hoffa and going their own corrupt way.
It would take another 15 years to get them and United Mine Workers cleaned up

Some like the Longshoremans, Still have the Mob in high places to this day. The nephew of Vinny the Chin still is Shop Steward with a $400k salary.
 

dcharleos

Donor
like any top-down hierarchy. Yes, some really bad eggs and they really jump out at you.

but was this even 10% of unions? I don't think so.

It's actually the opposite. The locals have almost all the power in US unions, which is why the pronouncements by leadership are so often ineffectual, and why they've often been prone to corruption. Its a lot easier to intimidate 200 guys than it is to intimidate 200,000.
 
I will argue that they were too successful. When you really have nothing left to fight for you start going after things that make no sense politically.
 
Teamsters responded by electing Jimmy Hoffa and going their own corrupt way.
It would take another 15 years to get them and United Mine Workers cleaned up
Off-hand, I'd say 15 years is probably the Vegas over-under! :p

Meaning, once the mob gets involved in a union, half the time you can clean it up in fifteen years or less, and half the time it takes even longer.
 
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29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was appointed by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone in 1924 to be acting director of the FBI (or simply, Bureau of Investigation) and later that year appointed full director.

J. Edgar's big thing was always subversives, especially Communists. And he had a dim view of the Civil Rights movement. Generally, he was not worth a damn on the subject of organized crime.

POD: Herbert Hoover (no relation!) or FDR take a chance, asks for the resignations of all executive departments as is standard practice, and appoint someone else to head the FBI. This person takes an interest in organized crime. Unions are cleaned up well before the 1950s, in large part by union officers seeing the writing on the wall and making determined efforts to clean themselves up.
 
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Three possibilities for pro-union labor law revision:

(1) Repeal of 14(b)--the section of the Taft-Hartley Act that authorized state "right-to-work" laws--did make it though the House in 1965, but there weren't nearly enough votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Basically, the only way you can get repeal is to have Dirksen decide not to filibuster. According to George Meany and his chief lobbyist Andy Biemiller, Dirksen offered "to call off his dogs on the 14(b) fight" if labor ended its oppostion to his proposed constitutional amendment to undermine the Supreme Court's one-person-one-vote decisions. Meany replied that much as he wanted 14(b) repealed, he did not want it *that* badly, and "the Senate Minority Leader and all his anti-labor stooges can filibuster until hell freezes over before I will agree to sell the people short for that kind of a deal." https://books.google.com/books?id=khPSAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA266 (BTW, according to that source, nineteen states had such laws at the time. But they were mostly in the South, Farm Belt, Rockies, etc--for a big northern or western industrial state to pass them in those days seemed unthinkable. For that reason, perhaps organized labor didn't attach as much importance to repeal as it should have. But I wouldn't second-guess Meany here; a repeal of 14(b) could always itself have been repealed, whereas it is very hard to repeal a consitutional amendment, Prohbition being the only exception.)

(2) In 1978 labor law revision almost passed. "The legislation, organized labor's No. 1 legislative priority, would have speeded up the decision-making process of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and made it easier for unions to organize workers and negotiate collective bargaining agreements"
https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal78-1238478 It got an almost filibuster-proof 58-42 vote in the Senate. It might have passed if Carter had not given the Panama Canal Treaty priority, which dissipated the momentum the bill got from easy passage in the House and gave the Chamber of Commerce and other opponents time to organize. http://www.d.umn.edu/~epeters5/MAPL5112/5112 Articles/Fink-Labor Law Revisions and the End of Postwar Labor Accord.pdf

(3) The Employee Free Choice Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Free_Choice_Act ("card check") in 2009 is another possibility. But it probably would not have passed even if the Obama administration had made it a priority, which it didn't.

At the same time, I have to say that I am skeptical that the passage of pro-union laws (at least in any form in which they were likely to pass) would have done much to arrest the delcine of labor unions. For one things the passage of such laws in a heavily Democratic Congress like that of 1965 or 1977 would not be a guarantee of backtracking by future, more anti-union Congresses. (In 1949, after Truman's victory and the Democrats' regaining control of Congress, many people thought Taft-Hartley would be repealed or at least severely modified. Not only did that *not* happen but a decade later, an *overwhelmingly Democratic* Congress voted to restrict unions still more with the Landrum-Griffin Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Reporting_and_Disclosure_Act_of_1959) For another, an unfavorable legal climate is only one reason for the decline of American labor unions; this decline has also been happening, though at a slower rate, in countries that have legislation more favorable to unions.

What about never having Taft-Hartley pass to begin with? Given the overwhelming margins with which it passed, I find that unlikely. Taft in OTL somewhat weakened Hartley's bill to make it acceptable to moderate Republicans like Irving Ives and therefore able to withstand a Truman veto. If the Republicans had a few fewer seats than in OTL he would weaken it a bit more but *some* veto-proof union-curbing law would probably be passed. Remember that even FDR saw his veto of Smith-Connally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith–Connally_Act overridden (yes, that was wartime, but it was the same combination of anti-union sentiment and a conservative Congress even if not as conservative as the 80th Congress of OTL). Besides, even if you (unrealisrically) assume that Truman could successfully veto *any* anti-union legislation, sooner or later there would be a president who would not veto it.
 
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We need to go back before Taft-Hartley, in my opinion, and avoid the First Red Scare. If you'll permit me an analogy, Taft-Hartley is Waterloo. By the time that Taft-Hartley is a consensus position--so uncontroversial it was passed over Truman's veto--the labor movement is already in a position of fatal weakness. If we snap our fingers and say the vote goes a different way, then the Act is brought up again in the next session of Congress, and it passes then.

The question is, then, how does left wing activism and the labor movement find itself in such a position of weakness to begin with? I would point to the First Red Scare as a grievous wound. About 600 activists were deported, thousands were arrested, Eugene Debs was arrested, Socialists were expelled from the New York Assembly. It totally destroyed the IWW. The strength of radicals within the movement never recovered, and consequently, when the Second Red Scare rolled around thirty years later, radicals were expelled from the Labor movement altogether, with the renunciation of Communism by union leaders required by Taft-Hartley and the expulsion of communists from within the CIO.

So, how do we avoid the First Red Scare? I don't think there's any way to avoid the Espionage or Sedition Acts, but those weren't strictly Red Scare laws, they were just laws that were used to great effect during the Red Scare. In my mind, there were three events that really whipped up hysteria: the 1919 anarchist mail bombing campaign, the Seattle General Strike, and the Boston Police Strike. The mail bombing campaign is an obvious cause for alarm. In the minds of those who were inclined to think of anarchists as dangerous people, it provided all the proof they needed to support their suspicions. The Seattle Strike was inspired by the successes of the Bolsheviks. While the strikers had a lot of reasons to strike, a communist influenced strike in the wake of a violent revolution in Russia, while American soldiers were in Russia killing communists, was a very impolitic decision on the part of the unions that organized it. It made foreign communists--and not the labor movement--seem like a powerful force in American society. A force that was obviously subversive, destructive, and evil. If that wasn't enough, the Police Strike called into question the social contract. It made mass lawlessness and chaos a vivid threat in the minds of millions of Americans.

Clearly, people felt that things were spinning out of control, and A. Mitchell Palmer was just the man to grab the wheel and correct course.

So first things first. The Seattle Strike began as a shipyard strike, and the shipyard owners were initially willing to negotiate. Then a man named Charles Piez, who was the head of the local War Shipping board, threatened to cancel his contracts with the shipyards if any raises were granted (the guy was a major league asshole). He accidentally sent his threat to the unions instead of the bosses, and hell ensued. Best way to avoid all of this is to have him keep his mouth shut. The strike is resolved quickly and amicably.

Then we have to butterfly away the bombing campaign. It was separated into two parts: the April bombing campaign, which was at least partly inspired by the reaction to the strike; and the June bombing campaign, which was far more serious. Both campaigns were enacted by followers of an anarchist named Galleani, who was never directly implicated in the attacks, but may have had some knowledge. Even though Galleani was himself an advocate of violence, its plausible enough that he could make it known that he did not think that 1919 was the right time to take violent action.

Avoiding the Police Strike is a lot trickier. The Boston Police were subject to abysmal working conditions, and the police commissioner who would have been inclined to alleviate them, Stephen O'Meara, died in December of 1918 after months of health problems. The strike took place in September of 1919, so that's a long time to posit a longer life. The commissioner who replaced him, Edward Curtis, was a reactionary asshole, and he refused to negotiate or even recognize the right of the police to bargain collectively. So the best bet is to imagine someone else getting the job, someone who is inclined to be more flexible. Who that might be is anyone's guess.

On the flipside, Calvin Cooldige, who was the Governor of Massachusetts at the time, rose to national prominence because of his handling of the Strike. Butterfly the strike and you might butterfly away his presidency.

No Red Scare, no deportation of hundreds (including such luminaries as Emma Goldman) no arrests of thousands of activists, the IWW might be strong enough to force the AFL to deal with them (and thus avoid the crack up in 1924). Debs probably get released from prison sooner, and may very well live longer.

I think that's a very good start to giving the US a strong labor movement.

This was an amazing post - thanks a lot for posting it. Could you expand more on what might occur after what you laid out happens?
 
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