American Labor Then & Now PART 1 - In the Beginning

 

Today, in 2025 America, organized labor is under attack. It would seem that the end of the American Labor Movement may well be just beyond the horizon as this Trump Administration and GOP Legislators in the Congress and statehouses throughout the nation seek to destroy organized labor and legislate it out of existence. 

Those of us who have spent a life in labor have watched the steady descent and erosion of laws and protections of every kind. Like a set of stairs leading to some dark and foreboding basement, we have witnessed Republicans gain power and rapidly degrade the rights of workers, followed by Democratic administrations that do almost nothing to restore those rights. In short, when Republicans win, we always lose, and when Democrats win, we rarely get anything restored.  

Meanwhile, within the labor movement itself, we have multiple generations of labor leaders in Washington DC who only know labor as it has existed under the various laws of the land, and through the eyes of the legal teams they pay to advise them. Through their leadership, more often than not, the rank-and-file membership is organized under the law and into legally binding contracts, and largely taught their only salvation lies within those documents. A threat to those laws and those contracts is, therefore, a threat to the very existence of the movement itself. 

Now, in the direst of times for the house of labor, leadership is mostly reliant upon only those tools they have learned to wield. Some lobby those politicians who would choose to listen. Some pen strongly worded letters and file lawsuits. Some try and organize the workforce into weekend rallies. And some would seek to lay low in these most tumultuous times, and curry favor with the enemies of labor in desperate hope that their own kingdom might be spared at the peril of all others.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Under this leadership we have created entire generations of union members who only know the contract and the law. Those members are taught to assemble into miniature shop floor revolutions during organizing campaigns and maybe when the contract expires if union leadership is struggling to get from 3% to 3.25% that year. The other 98% of the time members are taught to defer to the contract, defer to the union leaders, quietly follow the rules, and don't forget to vote. 

Through our successes, we have organized an entire labor movement dependent upon its leadership, and leadership dependent wholly upon the outcome of the next election and the laws that followed. Their mantra for decades has been VOTE, LOBBY, VOTE, LOBBY, VOTE. They told workers to vote like their livelihoods depended upon it. When we won and gained almost nothing as a result, they told members to go out and vote again so we could achieve an ever-greater majority next time, and then, maybe, something would come of it. A workers utopia lay just ahead in the next election cycle if we won, and complete annihilation was certain to follow if we didn't. 

Labor became the only venture on the planet that would invest $50 million into something (an election cycle), get absolutely nothing out of it as a result, and then think it a wise business model to double down and invest $100 million into the next one. When they won, it was good to be a labor leader, hanging out with Presidents, golfing with Senators, drinking with Governors. When they lost, they could anticipate being attacked by every government agency on the planet, complete with investigations, subpoenas and indictments. 

To be certain, Democratic control would result in nuanced positive outcomes of labor board decisions and interpretations of the laws, and increased funding and staffing for agencies that protected workers and their rights, but no major advances were ever really made as a direct result of legislative beneficence. As we shall see in this series, a closer look at labor's gains reveals that nothing has ever been given to labor by anyone. Everything has always been bought and paid for by the sacrifices, blood, and pressure created by the workers themselves. And in times of tumult and unrest, it is the workers who have led the insurrections, with organized labor often running from behind to catch up and try and harness the winds of change. 

To imagine a labor movement independent of the laws and contracts contrived by capitalists and presided over by its leaders, we must first look to the past, because labor predates everything that most people bother to know about when and how it all began.  

Depiction of early American Shoemakers

American Labor Then & Now PART 1

Colonial Times - 1825

If you ask the average person on the street today when labor history in America began, they might say something along the lines of, "what is labor history?" Ask the average union member the same question and they might cite the date of the foundation of their own union, as in, "1903." 

The fact of the matter is that labor history is as old as the nation itself and even older than that. The first commonly known labor strike was waged by Polish craftsmen in Jamestown in 1619. In 1677, twelve car men were fined for striking in New York. In 1768 New York tailors went on strike. And in 1791, Philadelphia carpenters waged the first widely known strike for the 10-hour workday. 

Commonwealth v. Pullis 1806

In 1794, the Federal Society of Journeyman Cordwainers was formed in Philadelphia, marking the first known sustained trade union in the new world. These cordwainers (shoemakers so named due to a popular boot of the day) organized themselves throughout the city and sought to protect their wages from the rising threat of cheaper outside "scab" labor. In 1806, as Thomas Jefferson presided over the fledgling nation, the Cordwainers Union went on strike. 

The members were soon thereafter hauled into court, and with a federalist judge and prosecutor instructing the jury in regard to the sanctity of laissez-faire economics and unrestrained, free-market capitalism, and citing English common law forbidding worker collusion in pursuit of wage increases, the participants were found guilty and fined eight dollars each (several days wages at the time). 

The decision of the cordwainers case, named Commonwealth v. Pullis ruled that workers joining together to agitate for higher wages represented an illegal conspiracy. Other states followed suit with similar decisions and for 36 years, the Pullis decision held sway throughout the land and almost any combination of labor was regarded as an illegal conspiracy with prosecutions soon to follow. 

Pawtucket Strike of 1824

Pawtucket, Rhode Island was home to numerous cotton and weaving mills in the day owned by wealthy investors. American capitalism faced its first major economic crisis in the Panic of 1819. Inflation, debt from the War of 1812, and depleted reserves due to the Louisiana Purchase caused markets to collapse. The result was foreclosures, bank failures, unemployment, and a noted decline in both agriculture and manufacturing.  

Intent upon keeping profits high, mill owners announced a plan in 1824 to extend the workday by yet another hour, while reducing the workers lunch break time and simultaneously cutting wages by 25%. Workers, also hit by what was referred to as a general depression, refused to stand for it and on May 26th, 1824, over one hundred women walked out of the mills and despite all laws to the contrary, went on strike, where they were later joined by other textile workers and community members.

Groups of angry workers assembled outside the homes of millowners demanding a restoration of wages and rights. Then on June 1st, someone threw an incendiary device into Walcott's Mill, causing a fire. The fire was extinguished before destroying the mill, and the mill owners relented to the workers' demands, thus ending the strike. 

The "mill girls" were most often the young daughters of farmers, sent to the cities to earn wages in support of families back home. In their teens and early twenties, they were subject to every sort of degradation and abuse imaginable in the hands of the capitalists. They worked daylight hours, around 13 hours per day and six days a week. The average length of time a body could endure in the mills and the surrounding squalor of industrial cities was three years. At a time when the average age of death for a woman was around 40 years, mill girls were most commonly struck down while still in their twenties. 

"Their daughter leaves them, a plump, rosy-cheeked, strong and laughing girl, and in one year comes back to them - better clad, 'tis true, and with refined manners, and money for the discharge of their little debts, and for the supply of their wants, - but alas, how changed!" -Eliza Jane Cate   

To be continued...

A Beautiful Dream 2028

 

Some years ago, when I was working for an unnamed federal employee union, I had the occasion to visit a large California Social Security Administration office. There, I saw an older gentleman sitting alone eating his lunch in the breakroom. Having some time to kill before my next meeting, I sat down with him, and we began to talk.

Somehow, we got on the subject of politics, and he inquired about mine. "I am definitely not a Republican and I am not really a Democrat anymore either," I explained to him, "but something else, I suppose."

"Ah," he smiled knowingly, "a socialist."

"Perhaps," I replied, "but not in the traditional sense."

"The beautiful dream," he replied. 

He then explained to me about how he was from Vietnam. During the war, the Viet Cong had come to their little village early on and taught them about Communism and the bounty it would certainly deliver unto them. For their family, living hand to mouth, and struggling each day to merely survive, it was a powerful message. 

Later on, he said, the Viet Cong returned to their village and took his older brother away to fight in the war against the Americans. It would not be long before they would hear about his death from disease. After that, the Viet Cong returned many times to take what precious little food the villagers had. And after that, they came and murdered his family when they had nothing left to give. He himself had been left for dead, and he raised his right arm then to show that it was missing from the elbow down. Then he pulled back his button-down shirt a little so I could see the tops of still protruding scars.

"And then the Americans came," he said. "And they burned what was left of our village so the enemy couldn't use it anymore, and they took the survivors away, including me."

He genuinely smiled at me again as he rose to return to work and placed his one remaining hand upon my shoulder. "Still, though," he said. "It remains a beautiful dream, doesn't it?" 

I sat there thoughtfully until my next meeting, deeply moved by his words.

He is, after all, correct. Communist regimes have not provided a utopia or an answer to the woes of the masses. The revolutions have only served to depose oligarchs of the capitalist classes and replace them with oligarchs of the political classes.  

The Viet Nam war cost our own nation some 58,220 young service members and shattered the lives of countless others. We revere them now, and the sacrifices they made, whether we agree with the often-misguided principles of the war or not. 

History has proven that Communism is not the answer. But neither is untethered Capitalism. 

For as much we as a nation opine over the loss of American lives in any war (and we should), Viet Nam cost an average of 7,278 American lives each year for a period of eight years. It remains a grave national tragedy.

On other hand, under unrestrained Capitalism, things are decidedly worse than any conflict of the last 75 years. 

The American Journal of Public Heath estimates that between 35,327 and 44,789 Americans die each and every year due to a lack of health insurance coverage. The Harvard Medical School puts that number at 45,000 each year. 

For those of us fortunate enough to survive just this one aspect of unbridled Capitalism, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 100 million Americans have medical debt to the combined tune of $220 billion. 

And where on earth does all that money go? I will give you a hint. It does not go to doctors or nurses. In fact, if you look at that $220 billion number, it shrinks in comparison to the $95 billion in PROFITS that the US Health Insurance industry raked in during just the first half of 2024, or the $112 billion in PROFITS the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies walked away with in in 2022 alone. 

Meanwhile, Open Secrets shows that just one organization, The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, spent $31,720,000 lobbying Congress, while member companies made campaign contributions to both sides. 

So, for as much as outright Communism has been shown by history not to work, so too has supposed "free market" Capitalism. Something has to change and soon. 

And I know that right now, you are thinking, yeah but, we are watching the rise of despotism and the alt-right here in the United States so we are further away from socialized healthcare in this country than we have ever been before. Maybe now is not the best time to push further to the left. 

I would argue that now is precisely the time to push and push hard. Yesterday, on April 5th, 2005, we witnessed tens of thousands of Americans take to the streets in protest of Trump and Musk and DOGE. There is a real movement in the making. Populism is on the rise. And it will blow in whichever direction seems most likely to bust the constraints of the status quo. 

I recently had the occasion to watch three back-to-back documentaries about the January 6th rioters. I was expecting radical right-wing ideologues or outright Nazis and some were. What I saw instead, was that a solid 40% from among these three independent documentaries were self-proclaimed Obama voters before. They voted for Trump for the reason they voted for Obama. They wanted change. Real change. Radical change. 

They wanted a plan for radical change in the status quo and if it meant misguidedly blaming immigrants or trans people, they were willing to accept it. The alternative after all, was a Democratic party without a real plan for change, and a candidate who openly admitted she would do nothing to change the course of the last administration's policies, while moving ever further right of center and parading around with the Cheney family, while the toiling masses struggled to merely survive. 

It is the reason thousands pushed their way into the capitol demanding blood from Democrats and Republicans. It is also the same reason why Bernie drew over 30,000 people to a rally in Colorado this week, and tens of thousands protested around the nation yesterday. 

I know, if you've made it this far you likely think I am crazy and fail to appreciate the differences in the sides, and you might be right about the crazy part, but I am surrounded by GOPers here in Iowa and I talk to them every day so I am aware of the difference. The people long for a break in the establishment that they know is broken and dysfunctional, and if the left were able to muster anything that resembled an actual plan, the people would flock to it.   

It is not enough to despise Trump or rally in the streets or burn Tesla's, even if they do emit a pleasing colorful glow when lit a fire at night. The left, not the Democrats who are bought and paid for by the same billionaire class as the Republicans, but the left, needs a plan that does not entail the open embrace of Mao and Stalin. 

For the future is not completely bleak and without hope even now. The next individuals inline for real political ascent should have radical plans of action that are neither completely capitalist nor communist, but an amalgamation of political philosophies that work to provide real solutions to the nation's woes. 

We can have free markets and create a world where small businesses can thrive again, free of the suppression of monopoly rule by the Wal-Marts of the world. We can have retirement security by bolstering Social Security with tax dollars gained from fair taxation of the super-rich and large corporations. We can have affordable housing if we move to eliminate private equity firms from buying up all of the family properties and say to them to either sell their assets back to the open market or prepare to have them seized and sold at auction. 

And yes, we can have healthcare for all, like every other developed nation in the world if we federalize the healthcare system and pharmaceutical giants and the hospitals, while driving health insurance companies back into the stone ages, where they can exist to serve a few wealthy clients who choose to still employ them. And we can have small business family practices again, where doctors can make decisions about the care of their patients without corporate oversight and private insurer restrictions.

I say these things because I see so many younger people embracing the far-left ideals of failed states just as many are embracing the ideals of failed alt-right states, neither of which, I pray, ever come to complete fruition on American soils. But there does, however, remain hope for change and a departure from a failed two-party state where both sides have been equally corrupted.  

There is some form of a beautiful dream that is still alive and within reach, but we need work to create a vision of what exactly that dream is, because currently, there is only the nightmare and nearly all of America longs to be awakened from it. 

Thanks for reading,

Buzz