Labor history, considering ethnicity and gender in a struggle for justice. Paternalism and anarchy. Structual inequality without individual culpability

1. Why do we celebrate labor on a day
different from the remainder of the
world?
Elliott Lauderdale

2. Labor history
considering ethnicity and gender in
a struggle for justice
Paternalism and anarchy
Structual inequality without
culpability

3. Daoist Zhuang Zi 3 C BCE
• "A petty thief is put in jail. A great
brigand becomes a ruler of a Nation.".'
• Henry David Thoreau an early US
anarchist.
• Zhuang Zi cited in - Murray N. Rothbard (1990) – Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change
Toward Laissez Faire* Journal of Libertarian Studies 9 (2), 46
http://web.archive.org/web/20081216214953/http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_3.pdf

4. Lowell System

5. Fighting excessive hours
In a letter to a friend in 1846, (Sarah ) Bagley [b. 1806
edited the labor newspaper The Voice of Industry.]
promoted the labor reform publication Factory Tracts
as representing the interests of those “who are not
willing to see our sex made into living machines to do
the bidding of the incorporated aristocrats and
reduced to a sum for their bodily services hardly
sufficient to keep soul and body together.” Although
the struggles of Bagley and other mill girls to achieve
legislation for a 10-hour day failed, Lowell’s textile
corporations did reduce the workday to 11 hours. “Mill
girls” Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP)

6. Boardinghouse for NE farmgirls

7. When an anti-slavery speaker came to Lowell in
1834, he drew an angry stone-throwing mob.
Mill owners and workers depended on Southern
cotton, and anyone who threatened the system
was unwelcome. Ever since Slater's cotton mill
was established in 1790 and the cotton gin
invented three years later, Southern cotton and
Northern textiles had had a reciprocal
relationship. The North's appetite for raw
cotton spurred increased cotton production and
the expansion of slavery. Lowell not only bought
Southern cotton, but it made"negro cloth" that
was sold to plantations.

8. 1840s Potato famine, Irish and
German, then Italian immigration
replaced striking women from N.E.
Job discrimination produces cheap labor,
Erie Canal, Chinese on the Transcontinental
Railroad, ethnicities as strikebreakers, 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act.
Native Am and Chinese denied citizenship

9. Uplifting Pineywoods people
(women) of Graniteville, NC (Jones,
AW, 222, 229) according to the Lowell
model) [total not = NH production,
10% in 1850 – 25% 1860 GA 50 mills]
and blacks or women

10. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and
foster such a [constructive, nonviolent ] tension that a
community which has constantly refused to negotiate is
forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the
issue that it can no longer be ignored.
…
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a
single gain in civil rights without determined legal and
nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that
privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up
their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded
us, groups tend to be more immoral that individuals.
…
This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must
come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that
"justice too long delayed is justice denied."

11. Racial Division of Labor
racial ideologies have been invoked to
justify the legal subordination of a
number of groups of wage earners .
(16) “We dislike them because we are
unjust to them.” By this he meant that
injustice preceded the ideology that
sought to justify it. (AW, 20)

12. May Day 1 May 1886
A general strike in many cities for the 8
hr work day, 600,000 in Chicago.
Haymarket Square a follow-up rally to
protest police shootings the day before
at McCormick Plant.
Peaceful demonstration breaking up
when police charged and bomb was
thrown 4 May.

13. Martyrs

14. Albert Parsons, a speaker, of Al and 7
tried and sentenced to death He and 3
others sang the Marseillaise before
they were hung 11 Nov 1887
Pardoned for the unfairness of their
trial. No evidence any labor
organization was responsible for bomb

15. Underline ideology against others
from contemporary papers
"bloody brutes", "red ruffians",
"dynamarchists", "bloody monsters",
"cowards", "cutthroats", "thieves",
"assassins", and "fiends“. NY Times:
hoodlums, bummers, riffraff, rabble,
looters, ruffians, rapscallions...idiots

16. Manipulating ideology
Labor Day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and
the Knights of Labor, who organized the first parade in New
York City. After the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred
in Chicago on May 4, 1886, U.S. President Grover
Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1
could become an opportunity to commemorate the affair.
Thus, in 1887, it was established as an official holiday in
September to support the Labor Day that the Knights favored.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070930082656/http://progre
ssivehistorians.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2041

17. in 1909-10, led by the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,
more than 20,000 workers struck
against sweatshops in New York

18. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/
2011/03/triangle-shirtwaist-factory-
fire-tragedy-turning-point-workers-
rights/
Lectures Frances Perkins, September 30,
1964
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
Workplace Issues Today
Catherwood ILR Library

19. 129 women and 17 men, mostly young
European immigrants who were locked
in died

20. A. Phillip Randolf , long time leader
of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters & Negro American Labor
Council (381 LiA) against dual
unions
Mobility allowed communication of
civil rights struggle around country

21. Bayard Ruskin w/ A. Phillip Randolf
other notables, plan DC march 1956

22. GRIGGS ET AL. v. DUKE POWER CO. No. 124
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 1971
401 U.S. 424; 91 S. Ct. 849; 1971 U.S. LEXIS 134; 28 L. Ed. 2d 158; 3 Fair
Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 175; 3 Empl. Prac. Dec. (CCH) P8137
On certiorari, the Supreme Court of the United States
reversed. In an opinion by Burger, Ch. J., expressing the
unanimous view of the court, it was held that the Civil Rights
Act prohibits an employer from requiring a high school
education or passing of a standardized general intelligence test
as a condition of employment in or transfer to jobs when (1)
neither standard is shown to be significantly related to
successful job performance, (2) both requirements operate to
disqualify Negroes at a substantially higher rate than white
applicants, and (3) the jobs in question formerly had been filled
only by white employees as part of a longstanding practice of
giving preference to whites.

23. Earlier this year, McCartin said, just before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was set to
introduce his bill to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public employees,
Walker told a meeting of his advisors: “This is the last time we meet before we drop
the bomb….Now it’s time to follow Reagan’s example.” PATCO 1981
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Organizing-Bargaining/Reagan-s-Union-Busting-in-PATCO-Strike-
Reverberates-Today

24. Twenty-five were killed and 55 injured in the fire, trapped behind locked fire
doors. Imperial Food 1991. 11 years no safety inspection.
Overregulation?

27. Elizabeth Warren on Gov Christie
keynote in Tampa
• And then about 30 years ago, our country moved
in a different direction. New leadership attacked
wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked
health care. They attacked unions. And now we
find ourselves in a very different world from the
one our parents and grandparents built. We are
now in a world in which the rich skim more off the
top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less
and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for
medical and scientific research — less to build a
future. http://elizabethwarren.com/blog/we-built-
it-together

28. Selected Bibliography
Dulles, Foser Rhea & Melvyn Dubofsky. ( 1984). Labor
in America. (LiA) Arlington Heights Ill: Harlan Davidson.
Illinois Labor History Society.
http://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/haymarket.html
Industrial Workers of the World. http://www.iww.org
/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday
Jones, Jacqueline. (1998). American Work: Four
Centuries of Black and White Labor. (AW) NY: Norton.
Reid Luhman. (2002).. Race and Ethnicity in the United
States. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt.
“Mill girls” Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP)
http://www.nps.gov/lowe/planyourvisit/upload/Agent
s_05.pdf