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Power to the Pictures

By David Moberg

One hundred years ago this June, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago. And at the end of July, the AFL-CIO celebrates its 50th anniversary. The IWW has only about 5,000 members now; the AFL-CIO about 13 million. But it’s the IWW that inspired this engrossing new short history, filled with stories of heroic efforts by… return to article

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    This article does an excellent job of portraying the side of the unionization fight conservatives love to forget: their use of force and violence as a mean of intimidation and coercion to prevent laborers from organizing to gain a better work environment. Anybody paying attention knows that the industrialists are the powerful and have always been, despite Sean Hannity’s griping about “big labor.” Organization is a threat to the wealthy economic elite, because when the masses start to talk to one another and think for themselves, they realize how much they are getting screwed over and decide to do something about it. That’s why the Taft-Hartley Act is so dangerous to blue-collar America.

    United States Posted by Bud on Jul 19, 2005 at 10:34 AM

    Bud,

    The irony for me is that it really isn’t conservative industrialists who employ violence and intimidation, it’s poor schlubs doing it to other poor schlubs.  I will never understand that mentality.  Even more ironic is that a significant minority of union members vote for conservatives.

    United States Posted by Lefty on Jul 20, 2005 at 7:22 AM

    Lefty,
    This is Bud, but I go by Liberal now. I see your point in that the conservative industrialists do not directly partake in the violence, but the people they employ are not like the workers in that they have the power of the state on their side. The state has historically sided with the industrialists while the unions have not had that luxury, and are always backtracking as a result. It is scary that union members vote Republican in the numbers they do. That is a testament to the GOP’s wedge issues and their appealing to these people’s cultural and social fears rather than their economic interests, which the Dems have unfortunately failed to do. The GOP gets the populace to think as consumers, not workers and so warps their economic perspective to side with big business.

    United States Posted by Liberal on Jul 20, 2005 at 12:21 PM

    Lefty could do with reading some labor history. Violence was an integral strategy against labour, including by the big boys - vide J D Rockefeller and the Ludlow massacre. Henry Ford had to be deposed because he couldn’t stand the idea of giving up his hired thugs. Try Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles; Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America; and Alan Wolfe’s The Seamy Side of Democracy. The WAgner Act moved the attack on labor from violent repression to the fields of law and propaganda. Wolfe’s Seamy Side has an interesting table on the use of the National Guard against domestic dissent. The NG is brought out against labor on a systematic basis until post-Wagner, when the NG is brought out against the black community and student and other political dissent (culminating in the NG’s glorious denouement at Kent State).

    Australia Posted by evanfj on Jul 22, 2005 at 3:24 PM

    I could have missed it, but I didn’t notice even the slightest mention of this important centenary during June. The allusions to a few recent works of sympathetic labor history in this piece are a genuine consolation. Still, my reaction to that opening paragraph was one of immediate loneliness.

    I could be wrong, but I fear the breakup of the AFC-CIO, a symptom of the long decline of the American labor movement, may not signal the beginning of a period of recovery.

    We in North America above the Rio Grande seem to be leading the developed countries in a policy of deliberate tiers-mondization. Deliberate not in the mind of the public, but in the minds of the elites that run the show. And the media blackout of this, the greatest story of the post Cold War period, is doing a fine job to facilitate the transformation.

    The MSM obsess about war in Iraq, torture at Gitmo, bombings in London, random searches in New York, and a multitude of related themes, giving so little space that it is barely noticed to the destruction of the American working class through neo-liberal policies in general and free trade in particularly.

    And when they look at domestic politics, make no mistake, the MSM share the values and so the focus of the Two Big Machines of the American ruling classes, locked in a battle over what interests them most of all: abortion.

    And so the Two Big Machines, regularly playing good cop/bad cop to the plebs cast permanently as the criminal suspect, appear in the roles of a rich couple quarreling over which author should get a foundation grant as the chauffer, wondering how big a pay cut he faces in what his employers say are “hard times”, waits outside in the cold.

    Talk about a Big Chill.

    United States Posted by Marcus Tullius Cicero on Aug 6, 2005 at 6:43 AM

    we need the wobblies more than ever to fight for the dispossessed and the little guy just trying to keep his/her head above water.  why don’t we live in a time when such organizations can grow and garner members? 

    the wobblies or any union cannot do it alone.  it requires the organization of the masses, and as one of the forum contributors, states, they too vote for conservatives and others detrimental to their well being. 

    thank you for the commemoration of this once great organization.  too bad that the IWW is little more than an historical memory and has no real vital force in the structure of modern labor and social change.

    United States Posted by emmbee on Sep 2, 2005 at 11:12 AM
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