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Making a Place for Labor History
When teaching about social movements in America, I ask my students how many of them had to take a U.S. labor history course in high school. For the last twenty-five years the answer has been the same. Not a one.
I ask the question to make a point about how we learn what's needed for social change to occur. If all we know about social change comes from celebrating the lives of Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr., we may think that change results mainly from individual moral heroism.
The study of labor history teaches a different lesson: change occurs through organized, persistent, collective action by ordinary people. It's not surprising that those with the biggest stake in preserving the status quo don't want that lesson taught.
But times might be changing. After twelve years of legislative efforts, the state of Wisconsin recently passed the Labor History in the Schools Bill, the first such law in the country. The new law makes labor history part of the state's standard social studies curriculum.
The purpose of the bill is to ensure that students learn about the roles played by workers, labor unions, and collective bargaining in the history of America. Every state ought to enact a version of this law. Students everywhere need to know their labor history.
Pro-union bumper stickers remind us that unions are the people who brought us the weekend. The rest of the story would include other benefits won by organized labor: pensions, workers' compensation, health plans, vacations, the eight-hour day, overtime pay, and many safety laws.
To take these benefits for granted is not simply a failure to appreciate how unions have helped us all. It is a failure to understand U.S. history. It is akin to taking for granted our independence from the British, with no knowledge of the Revolutionary War.
Promoting the study of labor history is not, in other words, a matter of being for or against unions. It's a matter of being for education. The present, as the saying goes, is incomprehensible without an understanding of the past.
For example, my students at North Carolina State University are often surprised to learn that ours is the least unionized state in the nation; that North Carolina is one of only two states that outlaw public sector collective bargaining; and that economic inequality is greater today than at any time since the Great Depression. They want to know how things got this way.
A good labor history course would answer this question.
Students would learn how southern textile workers in the late 1920s and early 1930s organized to resist exploitation by mill owners, and how mill owners, in collusion with police and politicians, used violence to quash strikes.
One legacy of this violence is a fear of unions, a fear that partly accounts for the low unionization rate in North Carolina. A study of labor history would reveal that violence associated with union organizing originated not with workers but with bosses afraid of losing power and profits.
Students would also learn how North Carolina's General Statute 95-98, which prohibits collective bargaining by public employees, grew out of 1950s anti-communist hysteria and fear that alliances between black and white workers would challenge the dominance of North Carolina's ruling white oligarchy.
Every state has its equivalent labor history stories that need to be told. Students should learn both the local stories and how these stories connect to national labor movements and international labor struggles. "Globalization" is a trendy topic these days among professional educators. But any teaching about globalization that fails to connect local, national, and international struggles for economic justice by working people is seriously incomplete.
To understand rising inequality in the United States, students would need to look at changes in union strength. Historically, strong unions have put a brake on inequality. Dramatic increases in inequality in the last thirty years are attributable largely to the success of big business in weakening unions.
Of course, labor history is not only about unions and protest. It's also about the history of work and changes in the economy. And so students would also learn how labor has changed because of changes in technology, corporate deregulation, and international trade policies.
Passing more laws like Wisconsin's won't be easy. I don't expect it to happen any time soon in North Carolina. But nor did I expect to see tobacco-rich North Carolina ban smoking in bars and restaurants, as it did earlier this year. All it takes for this kind of thing to happen, against the odds, is a critical mass of people who have learned the lessons of labor history.
16 Comments so far
Show AllWe manufacture nothing in US anymore, but BS (Bush Shadow) dancing: Kabuk? The hole county's a gawdam ghetto and we'd better get together and grow ourselves back to the garden (like we should have since the '60s).
Try to say something intelligent next time, would ya boysgramps - ok?
Like most other people, I learned absolutely nothing about labor history in high school, and I learned nothing about the history in college, either. Of course, I grew up in Iowa, in a very conservative, very religious community. And, today, the community has NOT changed much. Therefore, I doubt that labor history will be instituted into those schools anytime soon!
I began to learn about labor history on my own -- reading books and attending lectures, etc. Curiosity sparked my interest, but in addition, as a woman, I needed to know why I couldn't make ends meet even if I had, what looked like, a decent/good job. Therefore, if labor history is going to be taught, anywhere, the struggles of women and minorities need to be included. Our salaries are less than those of white men, and still are less -- by about 25 cents on the dollar, meaning that women earn about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. Some minority groups earn even less. When I was younger, I earned as much as 40% less -- no wonder I was poor, and running on the gerbil wheel with no relief in sight!
I am encouraged by the author's report -- that Wisconsin will begin teaching labor history in their school systems. But, who will write the books, and who will edit the books?
Maybe, A People's History might suffice!
"If you don't know history, it's like you were born yesterday." -- Howard Zinn
Yeah! Howard Zinn - a man among the sheeple.
Corporate media have engaged in a thirty year campaign to smear the labor movement. Most college grads can tell you who Jimmy Hoffa was and that he was the corrupt, mob-linked head of the Teamsters. How many can tell you about Robert Vesco? Or Armand Hammer? Or any number of capitalist criminals?
Remember...labor produces value. They are the people who do the actual work that makes an economy hum. Capitalists leach off this work-created value and since they derive no sense of pride from having actually produced something they recognize one value only...greed.
But greed as a value system can't survive. There is no such thing as enough.
For an amusing take on these ideas and the relative worth of the classes see Lina Wertmuller's film "Swept Away...by an Unusual Wind in August."
Among all the people alive in this world at this hour, how many are world famous, rich and powerful? What a rare human experience.
Among the most powerful people on this planet, how many have chosen anonymity over fame? Why? Very few know that they exist, yet their activities could be affecting the lives of us all, for better or for worse.
Are these people good or are they evil?
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
If teachers taught labor history the way they should they'd get tossed out of every private and most public schools in the Deep (ly Indoctrinated) South.
The weekend, pensions, workers' compensation, health plans, the eight hour day, overtime pay, and many safety laws - as the author mentions, these are all the result of union organizing, reforms which resulted in direct benefits for nonunion "at will" employees throughout the American economy that are taken for granted today as being simply the natural order of things. One might add to this list unemployment compensation, seniority as a factor in ordinary promotions within the employment heirarchy, minimum wage laws, and access to some sort of internal grievance process to review disciplinary sanctions and/or company discharge decisions.
A large number of smart, "progressive" American business corporations in the second half of the 20th Century voluntarily adopted versions of these collective bargaining-generated rules of the workplace as a mechanism for avoiding unionization altogether. Nonunion workers reaped, and continue to enjoy, the benefits of these largely self-serving, internal corporate reforms. It seems like the natural order of things within the American wage economy chiefly because the history of the labor movement in the United States has been so effectively marginalized and sanitized from what used to be the standard public schools' civics cirriculum.
What of course looms large on the horizon (courtesy of the 2008 banking/Wall Street economic convulsion) is the wake up jolt when that which was taken for granted gets abruptly taken away. For many ordinary, hard working Main Street Americans, suddenly being confronted with the arbitrary realities of what it means to be an "at-will employee" is a stark and jarring experience.
In most states, employment-at-will means essentially you can be jerked around, laid off, or fired for good reason, for bad reason, for any reason, or for no stated reason at all. You, of course, have an equal, equivalent right to quit anytime you want, for any reason you want. That's the symmetrical logic that supposedly makes at-will employment "fair."
As commentators on the English common law famously quipped, the rich man and the poor man, the King and the homeless beggar, are equally free and with equal rights to sleep outside under a bridge at night anytime they so choose.
Bill from Saginaw
Labor means people with a job and a steady income. They are the lucky ones. I read so much from progressive writers about "the workers." What about the poor? What about a growing part of the population, the self-employed? The self-employed are those that don't work for corporations as either a worker or an executive. The average factory worker in American makes $50,000 a year, a UAW worker earns something between that and $80,000. The workers in America are the upper middle class!!! They have representatives in Congress who insure they get their share and unfortunately at the same time protect the scumbag corporations who employ them. But what about the real needy? The incarcerated because of absurd drug laws, those without any steady job? What about the people who don't want to work for a scumbag corporation as either a worker or an executive? These are the people who need support today. The workers were exploited once and the unions saved them. But this isn't the 19th century. The workers in the US are the wealthy and the fortunate. Their unions are as much a part of the corrupt political system that is destroying the planet, waging war and curtailing our rights as are the corporations. Today the fight is between the free and independent and the corporatist, unionist state.
Some unions came under the influence of the Mafia because of employer goon squads and the unwillingness of banks to loan them funds. The Mafia, sadly, was their only source of muscle and funds and once you become involved it's very hard to disengage.
I agree that Americans have been vigorously ideologized to believe that education cures all economic ills and that being educated spells economic entitlement.
Against this religion, studying the history of organized labor is a necessary corrective.
But I wouldn't limit "labor history" to the history of organized labor, per se. It would be hard to deal with feminized labor with such a restrictive framework, for example.
With that caveat, I'm all for it.
This Wisconsin law isn't going to have any positive long term effect.
Most kids don't even pay attention in high school social studies classes. They're boring.
You think requiring kids to memorize even more facts and fill out more worksheets is going to internalize what labor wants?
Dream on.
The reality is that how most classrooms and schools are organized determines what kids learn.
Most are chalk and talk learning environments, where kids learn that the culture of the school is about following orders and memorizing facts for fill in the bubble tests.
Adding a few labor union oriented facts isn't going to change that.
You have to promote the democratization of schools and the classrooms. More hands on learning. More projects. More learning oriented around questions the students have generated. More portfolio and performance exhibition accountability and far less standardized testing. And more student participation in the decision making.
You democratize the school and the very ideals of the democratic unions will come to life. The students might even come to learn about unions but the knowledge will be constructed by them not dumped into their heads for an exam that is forgotten after the test.
As a life long tradesman/ Boilermaker, who for the last 20 years has run my own business,(the last 10 without "employees")
I can say that:
Rules of thumb...skills,ie:tradecraft can't be learned
without apprenticeship or "mentoring".......
All the rest is no more than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Virtually none get the concept of "Guilds".
Trade Unions are the sole expertise responsible for keeping your lights on, and water in your tap.
I've been a mentor, as well as involved with apprentices
for 40 years.
Some are dead... some carry on.
Before you talk about "gov't appointed bargaining units"as unions be aware... they are not the same as......
"Trade Unions" (which I again remind you) are the ones that keep your lights on, and your taps flowing,
If this situation is not addressed
there is no future.
You "can't take it with you" is only about the money...
The skill& ability dies .
Google&Wiki won't fill the gap.
A great book to help correct the ignorance is
"Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States" by Sharon Smith.
As a life long tradesman/ Boilermaker, who for the last 20 years has run my own business,(the last 10 without "employees")
I can say that:
Rules of thumb...skills,ie:tradecraft can't be learned
without apprenticeship or "mentoring".......
All the rest is no more than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Virtually none get the concept of "Guilds".
Trade Unions are the sole expertise responsible for keeping your lights on, and water in your tap.
I've been a mentor, as well as involved with apprentices
for 40 years.
Some are dead... some carry on.
Before you talk about "gov't appointed bargaining units"as unions be aware... they are not the same as......
"Trade Unions" (which I again remind you) are the ones that keep your lights on, and your taps flowing,
If this situation is not addressed
there is no future.
You "can't take it with you" is only about the money...
The skill& ability dies .
Google&Wiki won't fill the gap.