Episode 97- Nelson Lichtenstein: The Battle for Labor Rights, Dignity and A Living Wage

Nelson_Lichtenstein_Headshot_Riks_Mind_Podcast — Nelson Lichtenstein

Distinguished Professor of History, Director or the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara

Nelson Lichtenstein, the New Left, and Modern Labor Politics

Join us today for an interview with noted labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. He is the published author or editor of 16 books and is the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

I find you have a particular interest in labor history, and the best place to start an interview is at the beginning. How did you get into labor history? What was the journey to get there and actually study this?

This written interview has been edited for length and style. For the unedited version, please listen to Rik’s Mind Ep. 97.

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN: Well, that's a great good question. I do remember being interested in some of the famous big strikes of the thirties when I was a kid, I wasn't from a red-diaper-baby family, my parents weren't communists. I don't say [that], but they were. And they were kind of liberals who were in kind of Maryland. One was at one point they were both refugees.

My mother was a refugee from Mississippi. She found that she was white, but she found it absolutely oppressive. And my father was a refugee from Nazi Germany. So anyway, they got together. I really came out of the new left. I went to Berkeley in grad school during the heyday of the New Left, and you know, there was a thing there called the that, you know, the turn to the working class. That is when all of my comrades and friends - not all of them, a lot of them really - we decided to take industrial jobs in the Midwest. And a lot of people I knew spent anywhere from three years to 30 years in Detroit or Chicago.

I didn't do that. I did want to be an academic. But that was a powerful experience for me in the new left at Berkeley, in social movements. I was a big supporter of the farm workers, and so that was that was a very fond moment. I remember going down to the General Motors plant near Fremont and supporting the workers there. So that was a powerful moment for me, and I decided to begin to write about the history of labor.

Oh, that's fascinating. Could you kind of explain that to me, what you mean by the phrase “the new left”?

N.L.: Well, you know, the new, the students and the people who are against the Vietnam War coming out of the civil rights movement. I guess you wouldn't call Martin Luther King a new leftist, but a lot of his people who followed him and were younger, and it was a left that was it was not identified with the left of the thirties, which was often communist.

I feel like labor history is something that’s overshadowed. When I when I start thinking about labor history and people standing up for themselves, my mind goes back to right after the American Civil War. We had this pressing need as Americans to combine the East and the West through railroads and then other industries began expansion.

N.L.: I think your impression that you offered is right. When we think of the industrial workers in the 19th century - coal miners and steelworkers and railroads - then maybe we think about some violent clash.

The working class is not a not a bunch of coal miners or steelworkers anymore. That's obviously just not the case today. It's a very different world. But some of the fights, the conflicts, the issues of the late 19th century are very much with us today.

[In the 19th century] The state was run by the railroad magnates and their coal mining offspring. The southern West Virginia, which is where Blair Mountain is, which was a low wage, repressive area. It was undercutting the standards for coal mining, and coal mining in those days employed 600,000 workers and was a kind of one of the second or third biggest industries in the country.

It was vital, it was like the Silicon Valley of the day. It was it was a very important industry.

In southern West Virginia, the coal miners formed the United Mine Workers. They also formed more radical groups as well. And the coal mine operators brought in the Pinkertons, which were a kind of hired band of strike breaking thugs. The interesting thing was that the sometimes the local officials sided with the working class in the 19th century or early 20th century.

Blair Mountain stood between an area of strong union strength and an area where the Pinkertons and the anti-union forces were strong. In order to have an effective strike, you have to shut down the industry everywhere. The workers decided to sort of march over Blair Mountain. And in the process, the governor of the state and the local coal mine operators called on the U.S. government to send in armed troops. And it was a pitched battle between the coal miners and the U.S. Army for a while there.

Eventually the United Mine Workers did become a powerful union in West Virginia in the thirties. Steelworkers too, and West Virginia became a union state. And it was a powerful, pro-union working class. West Virginia [became] a solidly democratic state. It sent some very progressive people to Washington, even Jay Rockefeller. He was a senator from West Virginia, but he was a liberal.

Well, what happened in the last 40 years in West Virginia, is it became radically unionized. The mineworkers basically part ways because the industry was evaporating, and also because there were anti-union and hostility. So almost all coal that’s still mined in West Virginia is non-union. The steelworks closed down, the same too with the chemical plants. So now West Virginia is one of the most non-union states, and so naturally you get conservatives.

This is one of the lessons of unionism and non-unionism. You really can't have liberals without a strong union movement.

Well, and what makes you what makes you say that you can't have liberals without a without a strong union movement?

N.L.: What unions do is they change consciousness.

To formulate your ideas for most working people, you know, you're trying to pay the mortgage, you're raising kids. You know, you're living paycheck to paycheck. The world will seem sort of chaotic and unorganized in the absence of an organization.

You can have the church. Lots of people go to the church or you can have your Rotary Club or something, but a trade union is one institution that brings people together collectively to fight in their interest and to show them that if they want to win, they have to do it together.

The very act of working together collectively on your own behalf, I think, is educational in the most profound sense. And it teaches you things about doing things together.

I think that I've always found that the duality of the United States as one of the most individualistic cultures on the planet. And yet we do have a large segment of it that is very like collectivist and liberal.

I have friends that are in unions and that are deeply, deeply conservative, which I always thought was a little bit strange. And I kind of feel like that is maybe the direction the union unions are shifting. What are your thoughts on that?

N.L.: Americans are individualists. If you work for a boss - and most people do - they work for someone else. Your capacity to be an individualist is greatly constrained by the fact that some large segment of the day, you have to essentially do what the boss tells you, and you have to conform to what your employer wants you to do, even if you find it unjust.

Being in a union gives you a sense of security so that you can express yourself individually and you will not be penalized for it. The collective, the action of collectively getting together and forming an institution that can counter the bosses will actually make for greater individual individualism among its members.

What other aspects besides unions are you looking at in labor study or the history of labor?

N.L.: All people who study labor have to study capitalism, right? You can't study one without the other. You have to study what's in our business.

What do you have to study? Corporations. Companies, managers, capitalism. And we find that this is the terrain of struggle, as it were, like 50 or 100 years ago back in the Blair Mountain days.

The assumption was that we were going to have really big corporations that would be kind of like General Motors or U.S. Steel or, you know, a big or a collection of coal mines in under one company. And then the liberal reformers thought, okay, then you have a union with all the workers in that company.

We did have that for a while from the thirties and forties and fifties.

But what's happened in the last 40 or 40 odd years is that these big corporations, they've tended to sort of transform themselves. They've disaggregated themselves. So, if you're if you're a company, let's say Apple.

Where was that made? It's got Apple on the back. It's got a little apple. Okay. It's an apple. I bought it from Apple, right? I did. But where was it made and who made it made.

In China by slaves?

N.L.: That's right. Made in China by Foxconn. Foxconn employs a million workers. It is not owned by Apple. It's a supplier to Apple. Apple has a tremendous influence on how Foxconn functions. It determines the products it will produce, and the costs.

Apple is selling stuff. It's designing stuff. It creates apps. But the actual manufacture is in China because if, you know, General Motors didn't make any cars and all the cars are made by some other company so that, you know, we call that a supply chain or fissured employment and that's going on all the time.

When was the last time you had a had a hamburger at Burger King or McDonald's? I confess I like them. When I walk in there and I buy that hamburger, did I buy it from McDonald's? It says McDonald's on the front. Outside. It says McDonald's on that hamburger I bought.

No, I didn't buy it from McDonald's. I bought it from a McDonald's franchisee. Okay. He owns the building. He employs the workers. It was a separate legal entity from McDonald's, which is headquartered in Chicago and owns the copyright. It owns the symbols.

Who's the boss? That's the question. It's not McDonald's in Chicago, which has all the money. It's the local guy who owns the franchisee. Well, he may be barely making it. In fact, if you ask for a dollar more an hour, he might go bankrupt.

They are not a legal entity so that we call that fissured employment. So that's a changing capitalism and it makes it much more difficult for workers to organize. The people who created the labor laws in the 1930s didn't think about that and couldn't see it. But now we face that.

What are we going to do about that? For example, one of the big fights taking place right now is to force McDonald's in Chicago - big company - to be a joint employer with the local franchisee. And it's a big controversy because McDonald's wants to say not our problem.

Is a franchisee in favor of them becoming a player?

N.L.: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes they are because the franchisees, they feel oppressed as well. And the franchisees, they form their own associations and sometimes have taken McDonald's to court and whatnot. I remember once when I sort of first realized what was going on, I walked in some fast-food joint and it was messy. Stuff was lying around. I went up to the manager and asked “What's going on? Why is it so messy?” And he said, “Well, I'm really pissed off. I'm really pissed off at the regional manager, because they aren't giving me enough of a budget to hire the labor that I want, so therefore I can't hire people to clean up the place. So, I decided to let it get messy and the next time they come over and inspect, I'll just tell them the reason this looks so lousy is because you would not give me the budget.”

So, there was a conflict between the manager of that franchise and the big company. You know, I can replicate this [story] tons of times.

What other types of labor disputes are going on in the United States right now that maybe aren't a part of the narrative in the news media cycle?

N.L.: Lots of things are happening. I would say for working people in general, is that the resistance to forming new unions in new industries has been enormous, and therefore the union movement has in fact shrunk dramatically.

The most important thing is organizing. We see that now at Amazon, we see that at Delta Airlines, we see that in some of the Japanese run auto plants, which are not organized. We see that in lots and lots of places. Now we see in retail, everything from Apple stores to REI stores to other kinds of retail outlets, a kind organizing impulse is taking place. That is a new thing.

In other kinds of categories of workers, like museum people or journalists or various sorts of publishing people, we thought, no, they aren't interested in unionism. Well, now there's a big impulse that's happening.

The other thing is just raising wages. It used to be, oh, $15. You've heard of the campaign for $15, right? Well, really, $30. Now 30 bucks because 15 bucks isn't what it used to be.

And I'll make a prediction right now, 11 months from now, the largest strike in American history, in American history, for the last 50 years is going to take place. It's going to take place at United Parcel Service, where 325,000 workers who are organized by the Teamsters, and the Teamsters have just had a reformed leadership taking over. They will go on strike at UPS for higher wages and better conditions. And it will be the kind of strike we used to have 50 or 60 years ago.

From the warehouses to the truck drivers, we're going to have a titanic struggle in 11 months. I will tell you right now, it's not Blair Mountain. It won't be Blair Mountain, but it'll be it'll be big.

The number of strikes in America and including this year is many, many times smaller than we used to have three or four decades ago. I mean, just make that clear, we could go on about strike waves and all of it. But just if you just look at one of those charts or one of those graphs, it's just no comparison whatsoever.

Guest Bio

Nelson Lichtenstein is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1966 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Thereafter he worked in publishing in New York and taught at The Catholic University of America and at the University of Virginia before joining the UCSB faculty in 2001.

He is the author or editor of 16 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002, 2013 revised). His most recent books are Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (2016); The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (2015); The ILO From Geneva to the Pacific Rim (2015);The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009, 2010); The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2012); A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics and Labor (2013); and American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006). He has served on the editorial board of numerous journals and now is a member of the editorial board of the University of Illinois Press series in working-class history.

As director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, Lichtenstein and other UCSB faculty, including Alice O’Connor, Mary Furner, Eileen Boris and Stephen Weatherford, have created an interdisciplinary research and education initiative that hosts conferences and workshops that contribute to an understanding of the issues and ideas, past and present, illuminating the character of American capitalism and of the working class that sustains it. The Center administers an undergraduate minor in Labor Studies and a graduate-level Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy. Recent conferences, including “Beyond the New Deal Order” (2015), “The American Labor Movement: Crisis and Creativity” (2014), and “The Port Huron Statement at 50” (2012), are designed to probe historically resonate issues and help train a new generation of labor intellectuals.

Professor Lichtenstein has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, the University of California, and from the Fulbright Commission and the Oregon Center for the Humanities. In 2008 he was elected to the Society of American Historians and in 2012 the Sidney Hillman Foundation awarded him its Sol Stetin Award for lifetime achievement in labor history. His reviews and opinion pieces have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, American Prospect, and academic journals. Reporters often seek is comments when they write on labor, politics, and supply chain issues. You can find more about Nelson on his Twitter @NelsonLichtens1.