I’ve been thinking about that a lot since Addie Wyatt, the celebrated South Side Chicago labor leader died in March of this year. I read several of the obituaries about her, but none of them really explained the road she traveled to become an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, a founder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, an international vice-president of the United Food and Commercial Workers(UFCW) and a Time MagazinePerson of the Year (1975).

She was a very unique and talented person, but throughout her life, she had the solidarity of others to draw strength from. Great leaders need great people to work with them if they are to accomplish their goals. The obituaries I read in the mainstream media left out that she not only shaped social justice movements, but that she was shaped by them as well.  After reviewing her life and accomplishments, I don’t think Addie Wyatt would want to be remembered as a one woman show.

Faith and solidarity were her tools for greatness. The young Addie Wyatt found these tools within her family, at her church and in the harsh realities of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Born in Mississippi, she first lived on a quiet residential street near gardens, fields, chickens, hogs, and  fruit trees. Her dad was a tailor and her mom a teacher.

The Depression hit when Wyatt was still a small child and her parents heard that there were more opportunities in the North. It was a rumor that proved to be illusionary for the Wyatt family. When the family moved to  Chicago they found that work was scarce and and pay was rock-bottom. Housing and food were expensive so they had to rely on the solidarity of their extended family: staying with relatives and moving frequently. Her father would work for 50-60 hours a week when jobs were available, but still could not support his spouse and their 8 children.  He turned to alcohol in his anger and frustration, further complicating the family’s already perilous existence. Addie Wyatt grew closer to her mother and grandmother:

“They were loving women, they prayed together and they shared together and they raised us together. We had very little economic security. There were times when there was no money in the house. At the age of eight I started making little paper flowers and fiber glass flowers and sold them. I also made candy and wrapped it in little papers and sold it. I sometimes brought fifty cents or a dollar into the house. I know now this was like ten, twenty, or twenty five dollars, but I didn’t realize it then.”–Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

As a member of the Church of God, Wyatt came to know the importance of both faith and solidarity. Like many black churches then and now, faith in God also meant faith in the people around you, faith that as God’s children, they would come together in what Dr. King later called “a beloved community.” In practical terms, this meant pooling both material and spiritual resources to survive the ongoing economic calamity that was compounded by the entrenched racism of American society. Her particular church practiced an equality among men and women. Women were encouraged to be leaders in all aspects of church organization. Based on her family and church experience, Wyatt came to know the power of women’s leadership and solidarity. These experiences would later form a basis for her work in the labor and feminist movements.

After attending high school, getting married and having children, Addie Wyatt applied for a job at the Armour meat packing company as a typist. What she didn’t know at the time was that Armour did not hire black women for their front office. She was hired, but when she went to work on Monday, she was given a uniform and a cap and sent to the canning department. She joined the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) union after learning it was responsible for her benefits and grievance protection.

She stayed at Armour 3 years, was fired from a job at a hatpin factory for union organizing and then found a job at Illinois Meat in 1947. She was once again a member of  the UPWA, but reluctant to become deeply involved because of her church work and her community activism in her Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. But the UPWA was very unique and its leaders would soon recognize Wyatt’s strong character and leadership potential.

The meatpacking industry is not for the faint of heart. The work of slaughtering and dismembering large animals takes a toll on the human workers too. Upton Sinclair’s famous book The Jungle, written in 1905, exposed the brutal dangers of the work, the unsanitary conditions and the contempt that meatpacking owners had for their own workers. A strike for better wages was crushed in 1904 and  another was crushed in 1921. The big meatpackers used ethnic differences to divide workers. At first it was by nationality and language, but especially after 1921, when a large number of black strikebreakers were hired, the division came by color.

Typical early slaughterhouse 

Children of meatpackers search for food scraps

When the UPWA was born in the 1930’s during the depths of the Depression packinghouse organizers confronted the problem of ethnic and racial division head on. The communists, socialists, IWW members, independent labor militants, New Deal visionaries and class war hardened CIO evangelists had learned a hard lesson.

“The first accomplishment was the bonding together of different nationalities. They didn’t even speak to one another. At Squires we had the Irish, Italian, Greeks, Portuguese and others. It was through the organizing committee that they were approached They were hesitant at first, because the one didn’t trust the other…There was fear of being discharged to make room for one of the other group.” –William Hosford (UPWA member)

In Chicago, the situation was even more complicated. Ethnic and racial conflict in 1919 had led to a deadly race riot, a civil war instigated by whites between the black and white working class on Chicago’s South Side. Distrust ran deep after the blood that had flowed. During the 1930’s Black Chicago developed a well deserved reputation for social and political militancy in the struggle against white supremacy in the city. The communists were probably the best organized group pushing for multi-racial working class unity. When the UPWA established itself in the Chicago stockyards and huge meatpacking plants, black workers immediately became a dynamic and powerful force within the union. The slogan of the UPWA was “Negro and White, Unite and Fight,” showing how the rivalries among European ethnic groups were fading as they came to see themselves as “white people.”

Depression Era Chicago stockyards revolt

Much of the pressure on the meatpacking companies came from actions within the workplace using slowdowns, sit-ins and mass rallies. This culture of direct shop floor democracy was carried into the the organization of the union itself, and the UPWA became one of the most democratic unions within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the labor movement as a whole. Their democratic tradition was put to the test during the Red Scare of the Cold War that followed World War II. The CIO was torn apart through government repression and internal power struggles about the presence of  communists in the labor movement. The UPWA had communists among its leadership but emerged  with its militant democratic traditions largely intact.

UPWA mass meeting

The leadership of the UPWA knew that freedom is a constant struggle and undertook a unique strategy of encouraging leadership to come from the rank and file workers through labor education classes and regional conferences. Union leaders like the socialist Ralph Helstein and the communist Jesse Prosten were especially concerned about promoting people of color and women within the union. Racial and gender job discrimination in the industry was still a major problem and the owners liked it that way because of the bitterness and strife that it sowed. Discrimination meant division and divisions among the working class could be fatal to the union’s success.

Addie Wyatt attended one of the conferences in the early 1950’s and described it this way:

“At this conference we were told that our talents and skills were needed, and the leaders urged women and blacks and Spanish speaking people to become involved. Well this was a good sign to me because nowhere had I seen the picture that I saw at the union meeting, at the union conference — blacks, whites, Spanish speaking people, men and women, young and old meeting together, talking about their common problems. This was a very impressive sight. So I went back after that conference, recommending to the women that we ought to find a woman to run for vice president of our local union.”— Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

UPWA: Unity in diversity

No one wanted to take such a big step so Wyatt reluctantly agreed to run, sure that she would not win. Not only did she win, but when the president of the local resigned, she moved into the top spot as president. Now with a house full of kids and leadership of  her Altgeld Gardens community group, she was now head of a UPWA local with all of the heavy responsibilities of grievance handling and negotiating. Eighteen months later, she was hired by the UPWA to become a paid union staffer for District 1 which included responsibilities for a 5 state area.

Addie Wyatt, with her already formidable experience as a woman of faith and solidarity was now a leader in a union which took those values very seriously. The union leadership had faith that with dedicated  organizing, white workers could learn to abandon racism and that men could learn to respect and value their women co-workers. The union leadership believed that solidarity among working class people could bring about long overdue social changes and that the union’s job was not just to fight for better wages and working conditions, but to help build a better world. The union went beyond short term pragmatism and the model of business unionism favored by most of the US labor movement. The UPWA had a a moral vision and they were not afraid to share it.

Packinghouse workers had come a long way since the days of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. 

Of course some workers blissfully ignored the union’s brand of social unionism and others were openly hostile. It became one of Addie Wyatt’s jobs to uphold the union’s moral vision in her practical day to day work. She traveled to the predominantly white locals of Southern Illinois under the direction of Charlie Hayes, the first black UPWA midwest district director, and later a member of the US Congress.

In the those days of Jim Crow accommodations,  Wyatt could not always find restaurants or lodgings because of her color. She sometimes ate a dinner of crackers, cookies and lunch meat in her car. But her steadfast work representing the often suspicious and distrustful white workers made a difference. During a long bitter strike she traveled all over the region organizing soup kitchens and Christmas parties for the children. That made a huge difference. Straight forward and respectful, she was also no pushover and her persistence and patience was legendary. The walls of Jim Crow began to crack even in the Dixie-like conditions of Southern Illinois.

UPWA mobilization meeting

Wyatt was very sensitive to what would some have called the “triple jeopardy,” being black, female and working class:

“I find myself as a black woman oft times fighting on three fronts — the worker’s front, the black front and the female front — trying to overcome all of these pressures. And I got a three fold impact of all of these discriminations “isms.” Sometimes I think it’s much more difficult as a black woman, because we have to carry the burden of all these problems. It isn’t always easy for women, and especially for black women, because we have the white male, the white female and the black male all three looking down upon us, and we black women are on the bottom rung.”— from the interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

The UPWA did not confine its anti-discrimination efforts to the workplace. The union was one of the most fervent supporters of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 led by Dr. Martin Luther King and was the only union to take part in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Addie Wyatt was tasked with raising money for the bus boycott from the predominantly white locals in the Midwest.

While most unions were content with an anti-discrimination clause, the UPWA was pro-active and assertive, both for the practical necessity of multi-racial unity, but also because of its core moral vision. Although the Chicago locals with their large and militant black membership were a driving force in the union, the UPWA as a whole was majority white and white workers took part in the anti-discrimination efforts. Wyatt was appreciative of white support for the black freedom struggle:

“[W]hen you think in terms of the white people, there are decent white men and women. Had it not been for some of them we never would have broken through and come out of the degradation of slavery that we’ve come through.”–from the interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

Wyatt had the honor of meeting Dr. King personally when he came to Chicago to accept the donations that UPWA had collected for the Montgomery struggle. She reports that in private King had a great sense of humor and a relaxed unpretenious manner. He spoke at the 1957 UPWA national conference and Wyatt followed up with more invitations to speak.

Dr. King responded by saying,“Addie, I’m coming because you called me, and I know you wouldn’t be calling me for just anything. You know how busy I am.” Wyatt was later jailed in Selma for her part in the voting rights protests of 1965 where many people were badly beaten and Viola Liuzzo was murdered. She was with Dr. King when he came to Chicago in 1965-66 in his open housing campaign which was met with the contempt of Mayor Richard J. Daley and the rocks of white racist mobs.

 
Dr. King on the streets of Chicago

The UPWA mobilizations around racial discrimination inspired union women to take on gender discrimination. This was during the 1950‘s when feminism was supposedly “dead.” Black women were especially prominent in this effort. Although not as successful in fighting the entrenched sexism in the industry, women were able to make material gains, gain more confidence in their own power, change male attitudes and help to plant the seeds for the feminist revolution that would explode in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Wyatt was one of the leaders of this movement within the UPWA and as in the battle against racial discrimination, she took women’s concerns outside of the workplace and into the larger community. In 1961, President Kennedy, under pressure from women’s groups, created the Commission on the Status of American Women headed up by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt asked Wyatt to serve on the Labor Legislation Committee of the Commission. The Commission published a final report, but more importantly, brought women together  and established important connections that eventually led to the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.

Wyatt participated in the early meetings of NOW, but  not satisfied that the organization could adequately promote the interests of union women, went on to help found the Coalition of Labor Union Women(CLUW) in 1974. CLUW’s early years were difficult because of major disagreements among union women about how to move forward. Many of the more radical rank and file women objected to the domination by union staff people and officials like Wyatt. Coming out of the women’s liberation movement and the rank and file labor revolts of the time, they envisioned something that was (ironically) more like UPWA in its most militant period.

Wyatt’s work in the labor movement had become more difficult as well. Out of the  killing floors of the USA’s meatpacking industry had been born the UPWA, a working class organization for human rights that helped change the face of a nation. Although largely ignored by the history books, the work of Wyatt and the other UPWA activists was vitally important to the black freedom movement and later the women’s movement.

But by the 1960’s, the meatpacking industry was changing. The big companies were facing new competition as they deployed new technology.  The big plants in Chicago with their largely black workforce, the heart of the UPWA’s progressive base, were shut down. The union became more white, more rural and less numerous. The UPWA’s social mission needed dues money and activists and by 1968 the UPWA was in grave financial difficulty. A series of mergers with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the Retail Clerks union brought what remained of the UPWA  into the United Food and Commercial Workers. The old UPWA’s shop floor democracy and vibrant social mission became lost in the shuffle of union politics.

Then in the 1980’s, an all-out assault on packinghouse workers by the owners resulted in a bitter lost strike in one of the union’s flagship locals in Austin, Minnesota and was accompanied by severe concessions across the industry. Today with a largely immigrant workforce, conditions in some of the USA’s meatpacking plants are scarcely better than what Upton Sinclair described in his 1905 novel The Jungle.

Police use teargas in the tragic 1980′s Hormel strike in Austin MN

The United Packinghouse Workers of America was a brief and shining moment in American labor history, but it casts a light on where the labor movement stands today. Topdown narrow “pragmatic” business unionism  proved to be a poor defense against the corporate assaults on the working class that began in the late 1970’s. The UPWA social militancy couldn’t do it alone, but maybe they showed the broader labor movement the way to a better future.

Can US unions adopt a  democratic rank and file driven culture to overcome the cruel assaults on the US working class and help make a radical societal transformation? The grassroots working class revolt that began in Wisconsin last year and continued with the emergence of Occupy Wall Street suggest that may be a possibility.

Addie Wyatt retired from the United Food and Commercial Workers in 1984. She had seen both inspirational victories and heartbreaking defeats, had her personal triumphs and made her personal mistakes, but her faith and solidarity remained unshaken.

With her husband, she plunged full time into her work with the Vernon Park Church of God, a church with a social as well as a spiritual mission. The corporate assault on the working class had deeply wounded Chicago’s South Side with lost wages and lost jobs, causing mounting social ills. As usual, these wounds were felt most grievously among communities of color. When she and husband retired from the ministry, they then established a community center close to her home. In 2002 she reflected on her life’s work:

“We now have a family life community center where young people and seniors can come and interact with each other, where they can feel wanted, loved, and appreciated, and where they have an opportunity to express their Godgiven talents, and to know their purpose for being here, and to help others. That’s been a great joy which we have shared in the labor movement, in the women’s movement, in the civil rights movement, wherever we go, and I don’t separate them. We don’t, because it’s the total package that God has given us.”— from the interview with Joan McGann Morris

Wyatt had returned to her spiritual roots in Black Chicago, still living a life of faith and solidarity.

Addie Wyatt passed away on March 28, 2012.

Sources Consulted

The Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, 1924-2012 by Ronnie Reese

Addie L. Wyatt Biography at JRank

Video Oral History Interview with Addie L. Wyatt by Julieanna Richardson

Rev. Addie L. Wyatt Interview with Joan Morris

Addie Wyatt Interview with Elizabeth Balanoff

UFCW Commemorates Black History Month: Celebrating Our Own by Leilah

The King Philosophy by the King Center

Negro and White: Unite and Fight by Roger Horowitz

Out of the Jungle by Les Orear

The issue of closing mental health clinics first came up last fall during the protests surrounding Mayor Emanuel’s proposed budget, which also included slashing library services, privatization of neighborhood health clinics and layoffs of public employees. There was an hours long sit-in outside the Mayors office demanding that all mental health clinics remain open. Below is a video produced shortly after the fall round of protests.

Last Thursday night (April 12), a group of patients and mental health workers barricaded themselves inside the Woodlawn Mental Health Center on the South Side to protest its closure. Early the next morning on April 13, police used  tools to break through the door and arrested 23 people who were inside.

Inside the Woodlawn Clinic before the bust:

Outside of the Clinic before the bust:

Together with with Occupy Chicago, protestors than set up a small tent village outside the clinic to rally support and gain news coverage after months of being ignored. The protests are being led by Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), a 5 year old community group. The Mental Health movement is a member of STOP. Occupy Chicago has helped organize people and gather supplies to keep the tent city protest going. The tent city endured a couple of rough nights due to bad weather but is still holding strong.

At the Monday morning press conference clinic patients and mental health workers who had been arrested told of not being screened for possible mental health episodes, of having their medication denied to them and being ridiculed by jail personnel. One woman said that she was groped by a male officer in her vaginal area under the guise of being searched, a search that should only be conducted by a female officer.

There was fear expressed that if clinics are closed, there will be more police brutality toward mental patients, more drug addiction, more self-destructive behavior and more suicides as patients seek help elsewhere, a help that may not be forthcoming as many of these patients are indigent.

Later the group met with the  officials of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) who tried to reassure people that their needs would be taken care of by the CDPH “partner institutions”, as well as the remaining public clinics. This was met by deep skepticism by the Mental Health Movement activists who told of people already being turned away after referrals. One woman gave details about the understaffed Greater Lawn Mental Health Center whose workers cried when they had to turn away new patients.

The term “partner institutions” is just a gussied-up term for privatization, and private health care has no interest in patients that don’t generate a profit.

The Mental Health Movement issued a 23 page report last January with the help of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). I have quoted from that report below. For the full report, please go HERE.

Dumping Responsibility:The Case Against Closing CDPH Mental Health Clinics

• The city’s claimed cost savings are tiny and illusory. CDPH claims closing clinics will save $2 million—barely 1% of its $169 million annual budget. And this claim ignores the budgetary, societal and human costs of inevitable disruptions in patient care—including increased emergency room visits, hospitalization, police intervention and incarceration.
• CDPH should cut waste—including $1.67 million in new spending on upper management salaries, outside contracts, advertising and surveys. This amount should be used to sustain and improve city MH clinics.
• CDPH would transfer at least 1,100 Medicaid patients to private providers— effectively giving away federal reimbursement for their services. If this plan is budget-driven, it is illogical to turn away patients with the ability to pay.
• Closing six clinics will force 2,549 patients to travel to other city clinics or seek private care. There is no guarantee that private providers and hospitals will offer treatment regardless of ability to pay. The system’s more than 3,000 uninsured individuals are least likely to find private care since such providers already face shrinking budgets and reduced state funding.
• CDPH is rushing to close clinics in just eight weeks—despite having six months of funding in the budget and nothing but an outline of a plan for patient care. CDPH has circulated a list of private providers, but admits it has no formal agreements with or information regarding capacity, services and wait times from these agencies.

As I sat in on the meeting with the Department of Public Health this morning, I thought of my own struggles with depression, of being lost in that long dark tunnel of despair and on at least two occasions, wondering if I was going to come out alive. Fortunately I had access to some limited treatment, even though my health insurance didn’t cover it because it was a pre-existing condition. When people are in that kind of state, it’s difficult for them to fight their inner demons, much less ones with the power of the Mayor’s Office and the LaSalle Street financial barons. My heart goes out to the brave patients of the Woodlawn clinic.

But despite all of the facts presented and the personal stories told, the Mayor’s obsessive catering to the wealthy and his compulsive dissing of the working class goes on unabated. Mr. Mayor, don’t you think that’s a little crazy?

Faces of Chicago’s Mental Health Movement

Sources consulted: 

Rallying against mayor’s plan to close mental health facilities  by Kaley Fowler

Activists Set Up New Encampment At Clinic In Woodlawn  by aaroncynic

Southside Together Organizing for Power

Politics in Woodlawn: Occupation of the Mental Health Clinic by Ramsin Canon

Protesters Stage Sit-In Of Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic by aaroncynic

Dumping Responsibility: The Case Against Closing CDPH Mental Health Clinics by the Mental Health Movement and AFSCME Council 31

]]> http://www.blackandwhiteisgray.net/blog/2012/04/16/occupy-mental-health/feed/ 0 http://www.blackandwhiteisgray.net/blog/2012/04/05/occupy-transit-transit-workers-the-occupy-movement-team-up/ http://www.blackandwhiteisgray.net/blog/2012/04/05/occupy-transit-transit-workers-the-occupy-movement-team-up/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:50:48 +0000 Bobbosphere http://www.blackandwhiteisgray.net/blog/?p=2849 Calling mass transit “a genuine civil rights issue,” the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), which represents transit workers across the nation, joined with the Occupy Movement, community organizations and transit riders to demand a revitalization of our transit systems. Citing such problems as “older vehicles,  deferred maintenance and longer wait times for overcrowded buses and trains,” the ATU was also critical of service cuts and higher fares which have hit working class riders the hardest.

ATU national president Larry Hanley was inspired to ally ATU with the Occupy Movement when he learned of a proposal from Occupy Boston for a national day of protest around transit issues. Occupy Boston had issued this statement:

“In Boston and in cities around the country, our hard-won and necessary transportation systems are under attack. Their viability is being threatened by savage cuts and fare hikes in a calculated push toward privatization by corrupt and unresponsive politicians and their corporate benefactors.”

On April 4, the ATU led demonstrations in 15 American cities to draw attention to today’s transit crisis.

The ATU wants our mass transit systems to better serve the needs of poor people so that they can get to jobs and enter the mainstream of society. April 4 was the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination and ATU leaders made a point of calling public transit “a human right” and quoting from Dr King’s speeches. Dr. King began his career as a civil rights leader by leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott which sought public transit  equality for all people.

In Newark ATU leader Ray Greaves warned that $100 million in planned budget cuts will affect commuters who don’t use public transit because the cuts will put more cars on the road resulting in worse traffic jams as “gas prices are going through the roof.”

Here in Chicago between 75-100 ATU activists, Occupy Chicago members and transit riders gathered in front of the Chicago Transit Authority headquarters for a scheduled 6pm rally. As the CTA Green Line rumbled overhead every few minutes, ATU members passed out orange “Occupy Transit” T-shirts and signs supporting public transit.

ATU International Vice-president Javier Perez(photo on right) congratulated CTA workers for the excellent job they did in the 2011 blizzard, something even the Chicago Tribune acknowledged. But as Perez pointed out, the Tribune failed to mention that these were unionized employees. It seems that when unionized employees respond courageously and competently in emergencies, their union status is forgotten.

Perez went on to criticize the U.S. Congress for its ‘kick the can down the road” attitude toward transit funding. As an example he raised the issue of CTA maintenance employees who are forced to work in rat infested garages. At that point CTA workers raised a chorus of cheers. Perez made it clear that the ATU is tired of politicians and corporate leaders blaming public employees for city budget crises and he strongly stated his opposition to selling off public assets.

The issue of selling off public assets is a critical issue for Chicago public transit. Recently Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a massive 7 billion dollar package of infrastructure initiatives that had been largely cobbled together from previous proposals. What alarmed some longtime City Hall observers was Emanuel’s emphasis on “public-private” partnerships which they see as merely a back door method of privatization. Chicagoans are still reeling from the public-private leasing of the city’s parking meters which raised drastically parking rates while enriching Chicago Parking Meters LLC for the next 75 years. The Emanuel proposal includes private-public deals for transit infrastructure upgrades.

Members of Citizens Taking Action, a CTA riders organization, expressed their opposition to such deals in a leaflet passed out at the Occupy Transit rally. Charles Paddock, secretary of the group was quoted as saying:

”Public transit is a central municipal service, and we don’t put money into a fare box to make some guy rich. I foresee three things happening: loss of control by the city, increased or added fares and diminished service. You might want to add corruption on a scale never seen before. And once it’s done, there’s no going back. Sometimes these deals are for contracts lasting 99 years.”

A CTA rider makes her views clear

Jan Rodolfo of National Nurses United spoke passionately about how public transit connects us all, how it gets us to our jobs and school, how extended families are often spread across a distance and rely on public transit to come together. It also helps build communities and allows for different communities to connect.

“Public transportation is no less important than the veins and arteries that bring blood and oxygen to our bodies. And to say that we are going to cut off a neighborhood or a community is like cutting off circulation to a limb and that is totally unacceptable.”

 Jan Rolofo of National Nurses United

 Karen Louis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union echoed Rolofo’s concern about schools and education while pointing out that the thousands of transit workers have children in the Chicago Public Schools and that teachers and transit workers will always stand together.

Missing from the April 4 ATU message about public transit was how our dependence upon the automobile is an environmental disaster. Automobile pollution is deadly. A 2008 study done in Southern California showed that car pollution killed more people than car crashes. Public transit takes cars off of the road which makes a huge public health difference. This could improve even more as we move toward sustainable energy generation.  Indeed, sustainable public transit is crucial for limiting the dangers of climate change as well.

Hopefully ATU members will raise their voices at the upcoming April 22 Earth Day and show how their work is part of a liveable and breathable environment.

Probably the best known library of all time was located in Northern Africa. The great library at Alexandria in Egypt was, before its destruction, one of the ancient wonders of Mediterranean civilization. Containing thousands of scrolls, it was the Library of Congress for its day. Its destruction did not come in a single tragic fire, but several, and even historians can’t agree how many fires burned and who set them alight. There was also scroll deterioration plus the inevitable thefts and losses. For the Library of Alexandria, it was death by a thousand cuts.

How much information and imagination was lost? We’ll never know.

For the Chicago Public Library system, its deterioration is proceeding with a death by a thousand budget cuts, cuts coming from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office on the 5th floor of City Hall, following up on cuts made by his predecessor Hizzoner Richard M. Daley. Libraries are especially important in working class communities where people have less income and where educational opportunities are generally more limited.

Mayor Emanuel doesn’t think that Chicago’s working class deserves a great library system, even though working class people built the city that he  now rules. Rahm comes from the world of Wall Street where one’s worth is measured in stock options, derivatives, credit swaps and margin calls, not the blood, toil, tears, sweat and imagination it takes to build a great city.

Contrary to cheap and degrading media stereotypes, working class people do have an intellectual life and libraries are an important part of that. Adults check out books, take out DVD’s and do research. Kids go to story hours, check out books and do school projects.  Reading makes people smarter, stimulates their imagination and is an important form of recreation.

Libraries serve as community centers where local residents can hold meetings to explore their hobbies, discuss the latest books they are reading and plan social action around community issues. They serve as employment centers for people looking for jobs and for individuals who seek to improve their occupational skills. Libraries also do outreach to schools and other community institutions. They  provide shelter for the homeless.

Here is how one  librarian on Chicago’s impoverished  West Side describes their job:

I was the only librarian on staff in my branch and there were a lot of elementary school students there working on projects. I helped one boy find biographical information on Descartes. He had been looking at an article on Wikipedia and said he couldn’t really understand it. I showed him how to find kid-friendly articles in SIRS Discoverer. Another boy was in with his uncle and grandmother, doing a report on the seven continents. After working with them for a few minutes, I realized that the adults with him couldn’t read. I was able to help him find all the answers he needed in an almanac … I have helped people create resumes, fill out online job applications, find information about health and legal matters, search for jobs and apartments. I have suggested great age-appropriate kids’ books for parents who look around at all the children’s books and don’t know where to begin. As an avid reader, I find it easy to recommend books to adults who are simply looking for something interesting to read. And librarians are doing these same things every day in every neighborhood of Chicago. —from the Go Librarians 

Rahm’s attack on Chicago libraries came down in October of 2011. His cuts included reduction of library hours, the loss of 363 full-time positions, and the closing of libraries on Monday and Friday mornings for a grand total of 10 million dollars in “savings”.

Chicago library users and library workers began organizing immediately. On October 31, protestors gathered in front of the Mayor’s office for a massive story hour accompanied by singing and chants. Some of the parents, library workers and kids were in their Halloween costumes.The group  also delivered a petition to the Mayor.

The October 31 story hour and read-in

Stay-at-home mom Amber Cregar put it this way,” There’ll be no more programming for me and my child. It’ll just be a place that warehouses books and computers.”

Megan Russell, a library student, decried the cuts by saying, “The effect will be horrendous for both children and people that cannot afford Internet and cannot afford books.”

The October Mayors Office Protest

Girl Scout Troop 51178 joined the library protests at the West Side Roosevelt Branch  in November, holding their own Occupy-style demonstration outside of the library. Ten year old Girl Scout Charlotte Manier, who hopes to become a fashion designer, said this,”Our library has already cut hours. It would only be open a couple of hours a day if they cut anymore. A lot of kids depend on the library for research. Computers are fine, but they will never completely replace neighborhood libraries.”

Girl Scout Troop 51178

These actions were  followed up by January 2012 read-ins outside of branch libraries that were closed on Monday mornings. This action was supported by Occupy Chicago’s Labor Outreach Committee and many community groups. People driving by honked their horns in support. In communities where gang violence has spread fear among residents, libraries are islands of calm, a point that was made by library worker Norma Sotelo who said,”It’s a safe haven for people who don’t have much.”

AFSCME Local 1215, the union that represents the library staff, collected over 500 letters in support of libraries and delivered them to the Mayor’s Office on the morning of March 22, 2012. The Mayor had rescinded some of the worst cuts by then, but that is typical Rahm. He presents an outrageous proposal and then backs off a little to appear reasonable. How reasonable? Well, when a city aide came out to collect the letters, someone asked if the Mayor would actually see them. The aide answered,” Possibly.” Since Rahm does most of his listening to the financial barons of LaSalle Street, this came as no surprise to the assembled workers and their supporters. That’s democracy Chicago-style.

Reading of the Letters

 Service Employees add their support

The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees(AFSCME) has been instrumental in the battle to save Chicago’s public library system. Since that union represents Chicago library workers, it obviously wants to save its members’ jobs and improve their working conditions, but there is also a deeper purpose. Most people go into library work because they love reading and have a burning desire to share knowledge and imagination. They are workers on a mission, a mission for reading and study that has been part of the American labor movement since its earliest beginnings.

 City aide receives the letters. He later commented that the
Mayor might “possibly” look at them 

The pre-Civil War American labor movement called for free public education and supported the development of public libraries. Libraries that were designed to teach apprentice and  journeymen mechanics appeared as early as the 1820’s. The National Trades Union newspaper called upon its 1830‘s readers to use their leisure time to read books and to ensure that their families did the same. In 1834, a national trade union convention in NYC demanded the establishment of free public libraries “for the use and benefit of mechanics and workingmen.”

There were avid readers among the female mill workers in New England, one of whom remarked that she had come to work the mills of Lowell MA because of the town’s public library. Sarah Bagley, mill worker and founder of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association spoke of the reading rooms and lyceums (public lecture halls) that were available. The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association helped lead strikes and campaigns for the 10 hour day in the 1840’s. What good were lyceums and libraries if workers did not have the time and energy to listen and read?

After the abolition of slavery, freed African Americans demanded equal access to education. Slaves were normally prevented from learning to read so this included basic literacy classes. The newly formed Freedman’s Bureau(1865-1870) did its best to provide books and facilities for schools. Along with the efforts of Black Southerners themselves, schooling for black children in the South rose from 10% in 1870 to 40% in 1890. Actual public libraries were rare in the South until the 20th century and once established, were generally segregated.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland ( a former slave state), was something of an exception as it was open to all races from its beginning in 1886. The first library designed specifically for African- Americans living under Jim Crow was a 1904 small room in a segregated black school in Henderson, Kentucky. The segregated libraries for Black Southerners were usually not well-funded. It took the 1960′s civil rights movement and multiple sit-ins at all-white Jim Crow libraries before library services became available to all Americans on an equal basis.

The post Civil War period century saw a rapid expansion of public libraries. The National Labor Union called for the establishment of “workmen’s lyceums and free reading rooms” in 1866. The Chicago-based Workingman’s Advocate demanded a public library well in advance of  the the 1873  Chicago Public Library opening in an abandoned water tower. The labor movement played a significant role in getting public libraries for such cities as Buffalo NY and Washington DC.

When the fiercely anti-union steel magnate Andrew Carnegie began giving grants for public libraries, it opened up a debate within the 19th century labor movement that showed how libraries were part of the ongoing class conflict between capital and labor. Eugene Debs, the radical leader of the American Railway Union leader decried Carnegie’s efforts, calling them basically a PR stunt to clean up Carnegie’s bad image saying this:

“We want libraries and we will have them in glorious abundance when Capitalism is abolished and workingmen are no longer robbed by the philanthropic pirates of the Carnegie class. . . Then the library will be, as it should be, a noble temple dedicated to culture and symbolizing the virtues of the people”– quoted by Sparane

American Federation of Labor leader Sam Gompers was more welcoming:

“Yes, accept his [Carnegie’s] library, organize the workers, secure better conditions and, particularly, reduction in hours of labor, and then the workers will have the chance and leisure in which to read books” – quoted by Sparane

These differing views showed how libraries became contested terrain. Whose interests were they to serve? It’s true that spokespeople for the upper class  wanted libraries as a form of social control, hoping to avoid the class war they associated with Europe. The American Library Association even published a 1896 article that said:

“Laboring men could not discriminate between their own real interest and such sham reforms as are brought before them by their so-called labor leaders.” – quoted by Sparane

For labor leaders, libraries were essential to a democratic republic where working class people could gain knowledge and expand their imaginations so they could build a better society for themselves and their children. Librarians became involved  with the  Worker Education Movement of the 1920’s  which sought to do exactly that.  The first library union was started in 1916 at the Library of Congress, but large scale successful unionization of librarians did not begin until the  labor revolts of 1930’s and then really took off with the social upheavals of the 1960’s.

With the protections offered by unionization and civil service rules, librarians are in a better position to resist political attacks and irrational  censorship. They can then ensure that all members of the community have their library needs properly served.

Given today’s ongoing economic crisis, working class people, especially working class people of color, need libraries more than ever. Public education is under constant attack, as corporate interests work to reduce it to a vast rote-learning factory “measured” by testing companies with no real interest in imagination and critical thinking. Colleges and universities are viewed by corporate interests as little more than vocational training centers and product research labs. The increasingly monopolized mass media is well on its way to becoming a shotgun marriage of Big Money and Big Lies.

I’m trying not to sound too dramatic here, but library workers really are on the front-lines against this rising tide of ignorance, mediocrity and mendacity. Some will say that working class people no longer need libraries because they have the Internet. Well I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people are too poor to afford Internet access and broadband Internet connections are scarcer than hens’ teeth in rural areas and small towns. As for e-books, have you looked at the lending restrictions that many publishers slap on them? And what happens when the electricity gets cut off? At least people can read printed books by the light of day.

And guess what, how does one sift through all of those thousands of hits on a Google search? It’s nice to have a trained librarian nearby to help make sense of it all.

OK, so here’s my library story. As a child I lived in segregated working class Glenmont, Maryland until my parents moved to a “better” neighborhood when I hit my teens. It was the 1950‘s: virulent naked racism, social repression, male supremacy, ferocious religiosity, red-scare Cold War politics and a widespread public distrust of intellectuals who were derisively termed “eggheads”.

Every week I rode my bike down the sidewalk of Georgia Avenue toward the Wheaton Library 2 miles away. It wasn’t much to look at, just another dingy storefront in a nondescript suburban shopping strip, but it meant the world to me.

To the left as I entered the library were the science fiction shelves where the books of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac  Asimov, Andre Norton etc. took me on travels through space and time. I met beings from other worlds who made our minor human racial and ethnic differences seem so insignificant. Behind those sturdy wooden shelves were the science and nature books where I learned about evolution, ecology, relativity, atoms, molecules, stars and planets. Nearby was the history section with its Landmark Books: so much human history, so many freedom struggles, so many scientific and technical discoveries, so little time to read about them all. Next to that stretched the regular fiction section with its stories about sports, animals, sailors and adventures in places I could never visit on my bike or even in my parents’ Chevy when they took me on weekend excursions.

That crowded little branch library opened my eyes and mind to possibilities beyond the tract homes of Glenmont and the threadbare airless world of 1950’s  dominant culture with its intolerance and narrow view of humanity.

I later spent 25 years as a teacher in the working class neighborhoods of West Side and South Side Chicago. I know damned well how important libraries were to the students I taught. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants and like the immigrant Isaac Asimov whom I quoted at the beginning, they had their dreams too. Obviously some were less enthused about libraries than others, but I think that even those kids who didn’t like libraries very much, at least learned to respect their existence and importance. I have yet to see a single Chicago working class person pick up a sign and protest against libraries in their community.

Attacks on libraries are attacks on the minds of hard working decent people. So when Rahm Emanuel goes on the offensive against libraries, he’s getting on “the fightin’ side of me” (to quote Merle Haggard).

Rahm is famous for his incurable public potty mouth, so I’ll send him a message in a language that even he can understand, “Rahm, libraries are sacred spaces. Show some fucking respect.”

Sources Consulted

Library cuts threaten working class access to culture by Esme Choonara

Public Libraries and Social Class by John Pateman

Library Service to Unions:  A Historical Overview by Elizabeth Hubbard

Overdue Notice: Defend Our Libraries  by  Antonino D’Ambrosio

Library Quotes 

Encyclopedia of African American History Paul Finkelman, editor

Service to the Labor Community: A Pubic Library Perspective by Ann Sparanes

‘There’s a Ripple Effect’: A Chicago Librarian Speaks Out About Cutbacks by Joe M. and Kari Lydersen

Girl Scouts protest library cuts

Letters to Rahm Demand Restoration of Library Hours, Staff By Aaron Krager

Library lovers speak out for Chicago’s public libraries!

Patrons want Chicago library hours fully restored

Restore library hours and staff!

The Public Versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library  by Barbra Fister

How libraries help the unemployed by allpurposeguru

A march to the gates of the Republic Steel plant was scheduled to begin shortly. Workers at  Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland Steel and Bethlehem at Johnstown had been on strike for a week. Their goal was union recognition and a decent life in the middle of the worst depression this country has ever known. The strike was known as the “Little Steel” strike because the larger steel companies like US Steel had already peacefully agreed to recognize the SWOC and sign union contracts.

Marshall had come to the USA from Mexico in 1917 and was active in the Mexican-American civil rights movement and the communist organized Popular Front, a coalition of many organizations. A mother of 3, she mingled with the  kids cavorting about eating popsicles and women dressed in their Sunday best.

There were speeches, including the reading of a statement made by Chicago Mayor Kelly that the workers had the right to peacefully picket. Marshall planned to return to Hull House after the demonstration to oversee the play she was producing. She never made it.

When the rally ended people began walking across an open field toward the Republic Steel plant: men, women and children. Marshall first accompanied a young writer who had originally invited her, but she soon found herself with a group of singing women toward the front of the crowd. Some women had brought their children.

At around 4:30 pm, about 250 yards from the plant gates, they were met by phalanx of Chicago police who blocked their path. As the people behind her pressed forward, Marshall was pushed up against a cop named Higgins who called her dirty name. She heard a tense discussion between the police and SWOC organizers. Behind her marchers shouted,” Mayor Kelly said it was all right to picket.” The police were slapping their hands with their billy clubs. A cop pulled out his revolver.

She heard a sound like a thud behind her. Other accounts say that someone had tossed a tree branch. Then came the thunder of police gunfire. She turned and saw people lying on the ground, some with blood on their backs. She stood there stunned, not wanting to run across the backs of the dead and wounded.

What came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre had begun.

The shooting only lasted 15 seconds, but approximately 200 hundred rounds were fired.  Then the police came into the crowd swinging their clubs. Marshall was hit on the back of the head as she tried to flee through an opening where there were fewer club-swinging police.

Below is the testimony of Lupe Marshall given under oath to the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor chaired by Senator Robert La Follette

———————————-

Senator LA FOLLETTE. Were you successful in your efforts to get away from the police?

 Mrs. MARSHALL. No; I was not. After I evaded these policemen that were immediately in front of me . . . . I was aware that my head was bleeding. I noticed that my blouse was all stained with blood, and that sort of brought me to, and I started walking slowly toward the direction from which a policeman had just clubbed an individual, and this individual dragged himself a bit and tried to get up, when the policeman clubbed him again. He did that four times.

 Senator LA FOLLETTE. When he was on the ground?

 Mrs. MARSHALL. While he was trying to get up. Every time he tried to get up the policeman’s club came down on him. Then he took him by the foot and turned him over. When the man finally fell so he could not move, the policeman took him by the foot and turned him on his back, and started dragging him. As he turned over, I noticed that the man’s shirt was all blood stained here on the side, so I screamed at the policeman and said, “Don’t do that. Can’t you see he is terribly injured?” And at the moment I said that, somebody struck me from the back again and knocked me down. As I went down somebody kicked me on the side here, a policeman kicked me on the side here.

 Senator LA FOLLETTE. How can you be sure they were policemen?

 Mrs. MARSHALL. Well, I could see from the sides. I could not identify the particular policemen that did it, but I could see their uniforms, and I could see the edges, the ends of the clubs from the side of my eyes.

 Senator LA FOLLETTE. How much do you weigh, Mrs. Marshall?

 Mrs. MARSHALL. I weigh 92 pounds now. I weighed 97 when this happened.

 Senator LA FOLLETTE. And how tall are you?

 Mrs. MARSHALL. 4 feet 11.

 Senator LA FOLLETTE. Go ahead.

 Mrs. MARSHALL. So, after he kicked me I tried to get up, and they hit me three times across the back, and then somebody picked me up and took me to the patrol wagon. As we were walking along to the patrol wagon I noticed men lying all over the field. Some of them were motionless. Some were groaning, but nearly all of those that were lying down had their heads covered with blood, and their clothing was stained with blood. They took me to one patrol wagon, and as I was walking toward it the policeman is dragging me by the arm. As I was walking toward it, one man that I presumed was a newspaper reporter asked my name…

 Mrs. MARSHALL. …and I said “Lupe Marshall”, and I gave him my address as quickly as I could, and I was about to give him my telephone number when he twisted me around and he said, “Come on, get going!” And as we approached the patrol wagon I noticed that it was full, so they said, “No, we can’t get her in there.”

———————————-

An empty patrol wagon pulled up and Marshall was shoved in so hard that her face was smashed against the grating of the window at the front of the wagon. Then police began picking up the men lying on the ground, some of whom had obvious bullet wounds.  The cops tossed them into the patrol wagon like sacks of potatoes. Marshall got up and did what she could for the wounded in the police wagon. One man died in her arms despite her desperate ministrations. She became hysterical and screamed at the cop who was in the back of the wagon:

 “I hope you get the medal for this.” I said, “Your children and your wife must be very proud of you.” And he says, “I didn’t do that”, he says,“I wouldn’t do that. I am just doing here what I can for you now. I am trying to help you as much as I can. That is all I have to do, is to see that you get medical care now”, he says, “But I wouldn’t do that.” And as he said that I noticed the tears rolling down his eyes. —from the testimony of Lupe Marshal before the La Follette Committee”

 The cop and the social worker had found a common humanity amidst the horror of one-sided class war.

After a seemingly endless ride around the city, Lupe Marshall and the 16 wounded men she was tending made it to Burnside Hospital. When she arrived she told the shocked nurse on duty that more wounded could be expected. Since there were not enough doctors and nurses to handle the casualties, Marshall  grabbed a pitcher of water and some table napkins and applied compresses even as a cop tried to stop her. When she tried to telephone her family and the phone numbers from men in the police wagon, she was ordered to put down the phone.

A plainclothes detective from downtown arrived:

“I imagine it was from downtown, since that was the only place where they had detectives—came in, and made a terrible noise. He screamed at these policemen that were standing at the doorway there. He said, “Who the hell ordered this (such and such) shooting?” He swore at them, and the other fellows started to answer, but the policeman that had been advised to watch me—one policeman had been assigned to watch me—said, “Shut up your mug! They are not all dead yet”—and he went like this (indicating) to me, motioning to me.”—from the testimony of Lupe Marshal before the La Follette Committee

 Marshall was among the last to be treated. Her kindly doctor was concerned that the head injury may have been a bullet graze and not a police club wound. While waiting for X-Rays she was constantly harassed for more information despite her state of shock at what she had just experienced.

10 marchers were killed and 90 were injured, 30 of them by bullet wounds. About 15% of the wounded were  permanently disabled. The police officers had 32 minor injuries and 3 that required hospitalization. None of the police injuries were inflicted by the marchers, but by cops who tripped over obstacles, or were hurt in other ways amidst the confusion.

The deaths were also the beginning of the end for the Little Steel strike. The smaller towns of the Little Steel strike had became virtual fascist dictatorships with bloody repression meted out to anyone who resisted the companies.  If you lived through the the civil rights era of the 1960‘s, think Birmingham and Selma. When the SWOC realized that the strike had been defeated, members were told to go back to work without a contract. The total strike casualties were 18 dead workers and many hundreds injured, some seriously. Observers sympathetic to the SWOC asked if the new organization had really been prepared for the strike.

In those days before YouTube, FaceBook, blogging, online alternative media, Amy Goodman and Bill Moyers, it was much easier for the Little Steel companies to “control the narrative” that was presented to the public. In the wake of the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune described the peaceful march on Republic Steel as red rioters who had assaulted the police and “lusted for blood”. Other newspapers followed suit in blaming the strikers, even if in less lurid terms. Paramount Pictures had a cameraman that day who recorded nearly the whole event. That film was suppressed for many years to keep the truth from leaking out. Public opinion turned against the strikers.

Labor historian Les Orear & eyewitness Sam Evett
present some of that Paramount footage.

President Roosevelt commented on the Little Steel violence as a “plague on both your houses.” He said this even though the worst bloodshed came from the companies and their refusal to bargain  was a violation of the new National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935. A Coroner’s Jury declared the killings to be “justifable homicide”.

There was hardly a whisper of public criticism of Little Steel from Wall Street or even from US Steel which had peacefully agreed to work with the union. It was as if the captains of industry were waiting to see if the CIO might be crushed once and for all. It was a case of violent civil disobedience by Corporate America.

Little Steel was represented by Republic’s President Tom Girdler (photo on right). Girdler had a well deserved reputation for ruthless ambition. After taking over the ailing Republic Steel in 1925 he burned through the companies cash modernizing plants and introducing new technology. By buying up other companies and applying hard-nosed business tactics, he hoped to monopolize light steel manufacturing where Republic excelled and had his eye on heavy steel as well.

To prepare for the SWOC, Girdler amassed an arsenal including thousands of rounds of ammo, tear gas bombs, clubs, revolvers, automatic weapons and high powered rifles. There is no record of him hiring a team of high powered negotiators. He vowed,”I’ll go back to the farm and dig potatoes before I sign with the C.I.O.” After the news reached him of the Memorial Day Massacre at the Chicago gates of Republic Steel, he expressed no contrition and offered no condolences.

It was corporate gangsterism, worse than than the 1927 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre perpetrated by the Al Capone mob. The Memorial Day Massacre was the killing not of rival mobsters, but of American working people.The Capone mob’s violent exploits became the source of movies, TV shows and books. The Memorial Day Massacre is hardly remembered outside of labor circles. It seems that not all gangster legends are created equal.

Despite his staunchly anti-union “principles”, Girdler acquiesced to a collective bargaining agreement in 1942 that included back pay and vacation money for workers fired after the Little Steel strike. Girdler had been under pressure from the War Labor Board.  He also wanted Republic to get in on lucrative on government defense contracts. He remained with Republic Steel until his retirement in 1956.

 A World War II poster honoring Tom Girdler

What about Lupe Marshall, who showed so much courage during that terrible  Memorial Day, and who bravely testified before the La Follette Committee? She was charged with communism and faced deportation under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Marshall’s association with communists was no secret as the Communist Party was a prominent member of the Popular Front, a Depression era coalition that she belonged to and which met at Hull House during the those years. There is no evidence that she had done anything illegal or was a threat to national security, but it was the McCarthy period and any left-wing associations (former or present) were suspect.

Tom Girdler, the man who had declared war on American steel workers, continued to enjoy his life as a wealthy man. Lupe Marshall fled to Jamaica with the help of friends, becoming an  exile after over 30 years in the USA. She never returned and passed away in 1985.

After the Little Steel Strike, labor relations in the USA remained antagonistic, but have not resulted in such mass bloodshed again. Did Corporate America learn to put away the gun in its clashes with organized labor and those opposed  to corporate domination? Not really. US companies operating abroad continued to ally with gangster terrorism, supporting US government intervention against pro-labor governments and labor movements, especially in Latin America: Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Uruguay being some examples.

The campaign against communist Cuba after it nationalized US companies nearly touched off World War III.

Today US corporations continue to be charged of violent crimes. The Coca-Cola company has been implicated in the murder and torture of trade unionists in Columbia. Victims of Columbian rightwing paramilitary violence accuse the Drummond mining company of hiring death squad members to kill and torture. Drummond is now in US federal court facing these charges. Chiquita has admitted making payments to Columbian rightwing terrorists and is being sued by their victims in US federal court. Both Chevron and Shell have been cited for violent crimes  by residents of the Niger Delta in Nigeria who were protesting environmental destruction and labor abuses.

The international justice system has proven to be woefully inadequate for dealing with this type of crime. But then no one was ever prosecuted for the May 30, 1937 Chicago shootings either.

As I write these words, American citizens are becoming more alarmed by the militarization of our domestic police forces and the increasing power that corporations hold over our political process. Could we see more Memorial Day Massacres here in the USA? I would not dismiss the possibility.

Sources Consulted

The Mexicans in Chicago by Louise Kerr

Labor Rights are Civil Rights by Zaragosa Vargas

Latinas in the United States by Vicky Riuz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol

“The Man . . . Died on My Lap”: One Women Recalls the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937  Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor (1937)

Big Steel, Little Steel and the CIO by Benjamin Stolberg

Labor’s New Millions by Mary Heaton Vorse

The Memorial Day Massacre by Daniel J. Leab

Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 Offers Stark Reminder: Media Usually Side With Corporations, Police by Roger Bybee

Chicagoist Flashback: Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 by Chuck Sudo

The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937  (Video) edited by the Illinois History Society

The 1937 Memorial Day Massacre: ‘We don’t want fascism in America’ by Chris Mahin

Memorial Day Massacre by the Illinois Labor History Society

An Occurrence at Republic Steel By Howard Fast

They Remember Girdler by Howard Fast

His weapons are not guns or remotely piloted drones, but his laptop, his books and his videos. He is also a seasoned warrior, one with many years of experience. He’s even testified in Congress. Phillip Wilson (photo on right) runs the Labor Relations Institute. Its innocuous sounding name conceals its actual purpose. It is a “union avoidance consulting firm”. Labor activists use the term “unionbuster”, usually with several NSFW epithets attached to it.

Breaking unions or smashing organizing campaigns pushes down wages and reduces pensions, making it more difficult for people to buy products and services. This lack of spending holds back an already weak economic recovery and threatens to unleash what financial writers like to call a double dip recession. Even certified OnePercenter Fed Chair Ben Bernanke says this:

“The fundamentals that support spending continue to be weak: real household income and wealth were flat in 2011, and access to credit remained restricted for many potential borrowers. The job market remains far from normal.” from the Financial Times 2-29-12

Strong healthy unions raise wages and preserve pensions so that people buy the goods and services crucial to a sustained economy recovery.

Phillip Wilson’s firm and others like it provide advice and propaganda for employers to defeat union organizing drives, weaken existing union contracts and decertify unions when possible. He freely admits that his most powerful weapon is the “captive audience” meeting. He advises his clients to hold multiple mandatory meetings where employees must endure Wilson’s videos and his anti-union pitch. It’s not just the content that makes an impression.These forced attendance gatherings are a direct expression of the dictatorships that exist in most American workplaces.

Even the jargon employers use, like “my employees” or “our company family”, betray the language of servitude. Words like “my” and “our” are possessive pronouns, as if employers “own” workers. It is the language of totalitarian, not democratic values. And what about the term “captive audience”? Are workers prisoners of war? Caged people? Caged animals?

Because our professed values of freedom and democracy barely exist within the American workplace, Wilson’s 1984ish psychological warfare can be very effective. But don’t give Wilson too much credit. In the atmosphere of fear brought on by high unemployment, employers can threaten mass firings, move jobs elsewhere or stay put and bring in cheaper more desperate temps or contract employees. Employers can also illegally fire pro-union workers with relative impunity because our weak labor laws are only barely enforced.

Take the case of Tashawna Green  for example (photo on left with daughter).  She was fired from a Valley Stream, NY Target store for leading a union organizing drive to affiliate with United Food and Commercial Workers(UFCW) Local 1500. Green, a Jamaican born single mom was making $8 an hour with a work week under 20 hours. Green said that many of her co-workers were on food stamps.

Workers at Target reported that when they would ask for more hours, Target would ask them if they had friends who needed jobs.  Longtime Target workers also reported that supervisors have increased pressure to work faster with no corresponding raise in pay, resulting in unreasonable stress and exhaustion. Workplace stress is directly linked to many medical ailments, some of them fatal.

After the union drive began in 2011 the company resorted to intimidation tactics that the National Labor Relations Board(NLRB) later charged are illegal, including threatening to close the store if the workers voted for the union. According to Alvin Blyer of the NLRB:

“One rule prohibits off-duty employees from returning to non-work areas, such as store parking lots; another bans employees from wearing union paraphernalia; a third restricts employees from talking about working conditions on breaks or before or after work; and a final one prohibits workers from passing out literature to colleagues.” from Crain’s New York

When a powerful retail corporation dictates terms like this, you have to ask, what kind of freedom and democracy do we really have? What kind of “free market” is this anyway?

In this atmosphere of fear and intimidation workers finally decided to vote against unionization. Phillip Wilson and his colleagues in the union busting business would hail this as a great victory. A great victory over struggling working class people, many of them single moms with kids? A great victory over our struggling economic recovery because low pay means lower economy activity? Just how many more “great victories” like that can this nation afford?

Genuine economy recovery demands an extension of democracy into the workplace. Unions themselves need to embrace a more democratic culture if they are to reverse their downward spiral in membership. This is not an easy transition as most unions are organized in a top-down manner and many union leaders do not welcome rank and file activism they don’t control.

But change is happening. The Wisconsin Uprising and Occupy Wall Street have awoken a spirit of labor movement activism that is sweeping through America’s unions. But it goes beyond that. Although unions are the beating heart of the labor movement, the movement also includes immigrant rights organizations, feminist organizations, anti-racist organizations, human rights organizations, community organizations, global solidarity organizations, peace organizations, student organizations, eviro-organizations, religious organizations, business organizations, and a lot of individuals who simply want to do what is right.

This New American Labor Movement is still in its infancy but it has forged alliances the likes of which have not been seen in decades. An old union principle guides this new movement. Solidarity. Solidarity is not uniformity. Solidarity means finding common ground despite differences. Solidarity requires a deep commitment to stick together for social justice—come hell or high water.

In addition to raising working class incomes, a sustainable economic recovery will require massive changes in our tax policy and massive public investment in our aging physical infrastructure. It will require improving our public schools and investing in new cleaner, greener technology. It will mean dismantling our global military empire and moving into a peacetime economy. All of this will require far-reaching progressive legislation.

Despite the corporate attacks on unions, there are still nearly 15 million union members in the USA. They represent the true diversity of our nation in a way that the OnePercenters cannot. They can still bring considerable organized political power to lobby for progressive legislation and elect progressive candidates.

Unions also have considerable resources for organizing and supporting public demonstrations. This includes civil disobedience, a tactic that unions are slowly beginning to embrace again, largely because of the Occupy movement.

Chicago Federation of Labor sit-in Fall 2011

Unions also have the power to strike. We live in a brutally competitive market economy and The OnePercenters are largely immune from appeals to the heart. If you want to teach them some manners, they have to be hit in their wallets. Hard. Strikes can do that, but only if they have a chance of success. This requires that unions not only grow in membership but in active membership. The days when union members could treat their unions as a kind of insurance policy requiring nothing more than a regular dues payment are over.

The AFL-CIO has a new campaign called “Work Connects Us All”. Through a broad labor movement activists can meet people from the diversity of working class America to discuss and  plan a better future for us all. The labor movement is also global. The labor movement of one country cannot work in isolation, we have to form solidarity connections and steer the global economy into a more decent and humane future. It’s not just the USA that needs a sustainable economy, it’s the entire planet.

The stakes are high. Income inequality in the USA is the worst since the 1920’s. The income inequality of the 1920‘s grew partly because of the  savage union busting campaign that followed World War I. Phillip Wilson and his union-hating pals might regard this as a great victory. But what did this great union busting victory help bring on? How about the 1929 stock market crash, the collapse of the world economy, & the political chaos that fed nazism, fascism, militarism, stalinism. The grand finale was World War II.

My parents lived through the horrors of depression and global war.  From them I learned an important lesson. Never again.

Sources Consulted

The Labor Relations Institute Inc.

Union Avoidance: 5 Keys To Winning Your Union Election by Phillip Wilson

Do We Still Need Unions? Yes by Ezra Klein

Beyond the Weekend by American Rights at Work

Union-Busting Is Theft — a Weapon of Class Warfare from Above by Joshua Holland

Seeking living wages, benefits, Target workers weigh union by Steven Greenhouse

Target fires pro-union employee by Daniel Massey

A Former Target Team Leader Explains Hiring, Firing, and Staying Union-Free by Hamilton Nolan

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

“That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up — the harsh tide of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

“Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?

“Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the servants of your sex; regard us then as being placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.”

Abigail Adams to John Adams – March 31, 1776

It’s a shame that there is not a Nobel Prize for Obstetrics. For what could be more important than bringing new life into the world. Without new life, there would be no humanity. None of our human accomplishments, whether for good or for ill would have been possible.

Dr. Beatrice Tucker

But if there were a Nobel Prize for Obstetrics, Dr. Beatrice “Tucks” Tucker (photo on right) and her longtime partner Dr. Harry “Bennie” Benaron would have won one as leaders of the Chicago Maternity Center.

The Chicago Maternity Center grew out of the Maxwell Street Dispensary founded in 1895 by Dr. Joseph DeLee to provide free obstetrical care for indigent women while training doctors in the latest methods of safe delivery. Financial problems caused to DeLee to reorganize the Dispensary in 1931 and rename it the Chicago Maternity Center. From 1932 until its doors closed in 1973, the Chicago Maternity Center was one of finest obstetrical facilities on the planet.

Specializing in home births, its record of live births and live moms set a standard for delivering babies that can still surprise those unfamiliar with its work. Given that the USA now has one of the worst infant and maternal death rates in the developed world, maybe it’s time to step into the WayBack Machine and see how Drs. Tucker and Benaron got the job done.

The Chicago Maternity Center was not located on the grounds of a prestigious medical school like Harvard, Johns Hopkins or University of Chicago. It was not a wing of a world famous hospital or a clinic like Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic or Mt. Sinai. Instead the Maternity Center was located at 1336 South Newberry Street in the heart of Chicago’s West Side. When Dr. Beatrice Tucker became the Maternity Center director in 1932, West Side Chicago was a desperately poor immigrant working class community.

The diseases of urban poverty like tuberculosis, anemia, rickets, & syphilis stalked the lives of the residents. Housing was miserably hot in the summer and icy cold in the winter. There was unemployment, labor exploitation, malnutrition, street violence and domestic abuse. All of this combined into a perfect storm of mental and physical stress to further weaken human immune systems. Yet the dogged physicians, interns and nurses of the Center who went into these homes to deliver babies had better success rates than some of the finest private hospitals. Tucker respected the competent midwives and doctors that she met in the course of her work in the Chicago slums, but was contemptuous of those who did not share her passion for constant improvement. All patients deserved only the best.

West Side Chicago 1930's

What was Dr. Beatrice Tucker doing differently in what science writer Paul DeKruif called  the “Fight for Life” against the “mother murderers” of childbed fever, eclampsia and sudden hemorrhaging? To understand that one must know something about her personal and professional background.

Beatrice Tucker was born in 1897 to a family with a rebel father who practiced medicine without a license, quite competently according to Tucker. The family moved frequently, as the dad, armed with his medical books, managed to stay one step ahead of the various medical boards. From the age of six Tucker knew she wanted to be a doctor, a line of work where women were not welcome. With the active encouragement of her father, she entered Bradley University in Peoria, finished her B.S. at the University of Chicago and her MD from Chicago’s Rush University.

After working in both private practice and in public health, she decided to pursue her longtime interest in obstetrics at the age of 35. She was accepted into Dr Joseph DeLee’s obstetrics program at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. DeLee was probably the most well known obstetrician in the field.  DeLee accepted 12 students and after their basic training, chose one of them for a 3 year residency program. DeLee was a lonely and contradictory man, a Jew in a country rife with anti-semitism, a political conservative, but one who when questioned about the economics of maternal care would answer,”I will say only this: nothing compares in value with human life.”

Early in her training, DeLee told Tucker about his dislike of women in obstetrics and pointedly reminded her that she was the first in his program. He once made an insulting remark about her behind her back. Undeterred Tucker confronted him:

“You shouldn’t have talked like that. You don’t know what I can do…and until you do, you should not make any remarks in front of anybody.”

DeLee was a fierce critic of the poor state of obstetrics and was not popular with the medical establishment. He knew that general hospitals were places where the presence of disease microbes made birth  dangerous  and he advocated specialized maternity hospitals.  DeLee also believed in increased physician intervention into the birth process and was opposed to midwifery. Yet, he thought that poor women should have the best possible care when giving birth and opened the Maxwell Street Dispensary for that purpose. In 1931, when the University of Chicago ended its financial support, he spent his own funds to keep it open and renamed it the Chicago Maternity Center.

Although he preferred maternity hospitals, he recognized that home birth was the only realistic option for Chicago’s most impoverished. When Tucker had finished her residency DeLee convinced her to work at the Chicago Maternity Center by telling her this:

“Just because you’ve had three year’s training in obstetrics doesn’t mean you know it. If you go to the Maternity Center you will learn more about obstetrics and become a really fine specialist.”

Overcoming his general misogyny and recognizing her talent, he made her director of the Center in 1932. It is a sad fact that some of the most important advances in medical knowledge have been made in wartime. Under the class war conditions of Depression Era Chicago, this was true in the obstetrical “Fight for Life” as well.

Chicago Maternity Center on Newberry Street

In the depths of the Great Depression Dr. Tucker, along with her partner Dr. Benaron, developed the procedures that made the Center so successful. Using medical students, residents and nurses, they ran a combination of a clinic and a real life school of obstetrics. Students from Chicago-areas hospitals like Wesley, Memorial and Northwestern would come to the Center to do home births and learn about obstetrics on the front lines. Documentary filmmaker  Pare Lorentz made a highly dramatized film about The Maternity Center in 1940 called The Fight for Life based on the book by Paul DeKruif. Although she is listed as a consulant, no actress played Dr. Tucker in the film. Nobel Prize winning writer John Steinbeck worked on the script but was not credited.

The Film “The Fight for Life based on the book by Paul DeKruif

The Center had meticulous pre-natal procedures. When a woman came in for the first time, she was interviewed extensively and a baseline established for her general health. Her blood pressure and urine were tested for anomalies. She was advised to return to the Center on a regular basis and given nutritional and other instructions for maternal health. If she failed to show for an appointment, Center health workers would visit her at home. If there were any deviations in her baseline health, she was immediately counseled on her options. If necessary, she was taken to a hospital for an therapeutic abortion.

The health workers of the Maternity Center made themselves available day and night to all indigent patients, even ones who had not registered with the Center. For the docs and nurses still in training, this meant nerve jangling emergency cases where the margin of life and death could be minutes, even seconds. Tucker and Benaron were always on call for the complex ones and if the Center couldn’t handle them, it meant a trip to the hospital where Center workers would check on the woman’s condition and follow up on her.

But of course in the “Fight for Life”, death will sometimes win the battle. The Center would then do a rigorous post-mortem of their own procedures. Center workers took meticulous notes during the course of a delivery. Center workers would go over what had happened in an almost brutal self-examination. What could have been done differently? Where were the errors? It is said that doctors get to bury their mistakes along with the bodies of the dead. The Center did not believe in burying their mistakes, but in analyzing them and recording them. For the young trainees, this could be difficult, but Tucker and Benaron knew how important this was. They had made mistakes too.

Tucker and Benaron were patient with their trainees. Benaron put it this way,

”We never bawl them out for calling us when it was not necessary. Only when they fail to call us when they should have…When we’re humiliated by one of our mistakes, Dr DeLee always tells us–in his 45 years experience– that he’s made nearly every blunder possible in obstetrics.”— from The Fight for Life by Paul DeKruif

Hippocrates of Ancient Greece was supposed to have told physicians,”And first do no harm…”  This ancient wisdom was one of the secrets of the Center’s success.

Center health workers practiced a patient vigilance and a policy of as much non-intervention with the natural birth process as possible. They would arrive with their medical bags pre-packed and ready to work. Newspapers were spread across kitchen tables as they were the most sterile table covers available. They called this the “Island of Safety.” Whether the home was neat and clean, messy and dirty didn’t matter, a small zone hostile to infectious microbes was always established.

A Chicago Maternity Center home birth

Family members boiled water so the Center workers could scrub meticulously and ferociously before putting on gloves. Then came the long waits and the note-taking as the birth process proceeded to its conclusion. Center health workers stayed with the mom for a period of time after the birth, never rushing off prematurely. Home births (except for extreme medical emergencies) had another advantage. Hospitals could be impersonal, even cruel institutions:

“My first child was born in a Chicago suburban hospital. I wonder if the people who ran the place were actually human. My lips parched and cracked, but the nurses refused to even moisten them with a damp cloth. I was left alone all night in a a labor room. I felt exactly like a trapped animal and I am sure I would have committed suicide if I had the means. Never have I needed someone, anyone, as desperately as I did that night.”— from the book Lying-in: A History of Birth in America

Women reported being tied down for hours and subjected to frightening conversations among medical workers about difficult dangerous births and being ignored when they were in pain or when they needed a hand to hold. This type of treatment poured a flood of stress hormones into a woman’s body, making the birth process more dangerous and mentally stressful than necessary. The Maternity Center’s methods allowed for a woman to have family there to support her.

Tucker and Benaron set an example of calm compassionate caring for their Center medical workers. Their patients were human beings and deserved to be treated as such. The pseudo-science of eugenics was popular among the moneyed elite before the Nazi Holocaust made those ideas unpopular. Eugenicists questioned why any money or resources should be directed to the “subhuman” population who lived in the urban slums of cities like Chicago.The Center had no use for those ugly, racist class biased ideas. All patients deserved respect and all life was sacred. Period.

Chicago Maternity Center home birth

An example of this was a difficult case the Center had on a frigid winter morning described by De Kruif in his book The Fight for Life. A young black woman had given birth to a baby who was not breathing. The two young residents took the baby to another room to clear it’s windpipe of any foreign material and to blow the breath of life into it. After 15 minutes, success! Then the nurse arrived to tell them the woman was lying a pool of blood; hemorrhage had set in.

A quick call to the Center gets Tucker and Benaron on the case. After quickly introducing himself to the frightened father, Benaron collected blood from the dad and rushed to the lab to see if the dad’s blood-type matched the mom in case there was need of a transfusion. Tucker injected glucose and salt into the woman’s veins and her blood pressure rose and her vitals are looked better. The bleeding had stopped.

Then as Tucker looked at the woman’s eyes, she saw them change to a vacant stare. The pulse was almost gone. It was time for an emergency transfusion, but Tucker couldn’t find the vein because the woman’s blood pressure was so low. She took a scalpel, and exposed the vein. The husband’s life-giving blood was pumped into her body. The mother began to speak:

“‘Doctor! Save me! Save me for my babies!’ And then more faintly, you won’t let me die?’ These are the last words of this Negro woman who fought hanging on to harder and harder breathing, hoping her man’s blood might save her.’”

Benaron later said:

“When you hear a woman say that, you die too. Yes, she died. When we realized she was finally dead, Tucker and I dropped our instruments and began crying. The intern and the medical student and the nurse couldn’t keep their eyes dry either. We all just sat there and couldn’t stop crying.”

At the end of the record of pages for all the women who came to the Center was a message to the medical workers, “Tell what you might have done better and what to do next time”.  The two young men o had saved the woman’s baby, but had left the mom alone for too long. They learned a harsh heartbreaking lesson. From them Tucker and Benaron learned to improve their communication to Center medical workers. By 1938, the Center had a safety record for hemorrhaging deaths 10 times better than the national average.

With such a outstanding medical record, you might think that the Center received generous funding. You would be wrong. For years Dr. Tucker lived in the Center’s basement, at the mercy of Chicago’s weather extremes. There were bugs and rodents. DeLee had been a skillful fundraiser and she learned from him how to wheedle donations out of wealthy patrons. With donations in kind and as well as actual money, she was able to keep the Center alive, but dependent on medical schools for trainees. Still, there was medical equipment beyond the reach of the Center’s finances, equipment which could have saved more lives.

But by the 1960’s, home births attended by the Chicago Maternity Center were declining. The reasons for that were complex. Medical schools were losing interest in home births and began cutting off the flow of students. Midwifery was outlawed in Illinois. The underlying reason for the decline was economics. The home birth methods deployed by Dr. Tucker were not profitable. Her non-intervention into the birth process unless absolutely necessary meant long periods of medical workers sitting and observing. Medical care was becoming more corporatized with investments in buildings and equipment. Hospitals needed patients and home births meant empty beds. Medical intervention in the form of C-sections and other procedures increased dramatically. These brought in money whether or not they were medically necessary.

In 1972, a consortium of Chicago hospitals announced plans for the Prentiss Women’s Hospital along Chicago’s Lakefront. Chicago Maternity Center supporters were worried. The same hospitals that had cut back staff for the Maternity Center were involved in planning Prentiss. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union(CWLU) along with concerned community groups, medical activists and Dr. Tucker organized Women Act to Control Healthcare(WATCH) to save the Chicago Maternity Center. They held press conferences, attended Board meetings, and organized demonstrations. CWLU members Jennie Rohrer and Sue Davenport joined Kartemquin films to make a documentary to help save the Center.

Chicago Maternity Center Board members, most of whom were allied with powerful corporate families, insisted that the Center would be moved into Prentiss and that home births would be supported. They lied. The Chicago Maternity Center’s home birthing program was ended in 1973. The medical-industrial complex succeeded in destroying one of the finest birthing programs in the entire USA. Unlike  Tucks and Bennie, life was not sacred to them—only money.

Kartemquin finished the film too late to help save the Center, but their classic documentary The Chicago Maternity Center Story explains both the history and the economics in vivid detail. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in birth and obstetrics view it. It is now available on DVD.

Chicago Maternity Center from Jennifer Rohrer on Vimeo.

Dr. Tucker went into private practice until Dr. Benaron died in 1975. Tucker continued doing more home births, including the first child of two of my oldest friends in Chicago. She worked in public health and was a passionate activist for reproductive rights. You can see an interview with her late in her life as an extra feature on the The Chicago Maternity Center Story DVD. She was a great story teller with a lifetime worth of wit and wisdom. Tucker died just short of her 87th birthday in 1984.

Today a gleaming ultra-modern medical complex overlooks the Eisenhower Expressway not far from where the Chicago Maternity Center dispatched its medical workers. The Illinois Medical District is the largest medical center in the USA. Its gleaming towers are a testament to corporate medicine in all of its glory. You can take the Pink Line of the CTA from downtown Chicago and be there in a few minutes.

Just a short distance away from the Illinois Medical District are Chicago neighborhoods where the maternal and infant death rates are worse than in some 3rd World countries. There seems to be a historical amnesia about the medical advances that the Chicago Maternity Center made in its Fight for Life. Corporate profit has triumphed over the deeply personal and highly effective medical procedures practiced and taught by Dr. Tucker.

I was one of the nurses that worked there. I became familiar with the center as a student nurse and was employed there after graduating from nursing school. Dr. Tucker was a remarkable individual that truly believed in birth as a natural process, that involved the family as an integral part of the birthing experience. Birth was an incredible miracle not with the wailing, drugs and paternalism of the hospital experience that I saw in my OB experience. As a young nurse it was remarkable and as a young woman an eye opener to the beauty and miracle of birth. Thank you, Maternity Center and Dr. Beatrice Tucker.—-Mary Amari RN

Dr. Beatrice Tucker left us a legacy that cannot be measured in money because it represents the highest aspirations of the human spirit. It’s time we reclaimed that legacy and put it to work. Today.

————————————————————-

Sources Consulted

The Fight for Life by Paul DeKruif 1938 (Book)

The Fight for Life  1940 (Film)

“Recollections: An Interview with Dr. Beatrice Tucker” by  Diane Redleaf & Pat Kelleher from Health and Medicine, Winter/Spring 1983

Maternal Mortality of the Chicago Maternity Center by Beatrice E. Tucker, M.D., AND Harry B. Benaron, M.D. from the American Journal of Public Health, January 1939

Medicine: The Baby Commandos from Time Magazine (1954)

Birth on the Kitchen Table from Life Magazine (1972)

WATCH Demands by Women Act To Control Healthcare (1972)

The Chicago Maternity Center: 77 Years of home deliveries from Womankind (1972)

Lying-in: a history of childbirth in America by Richard and Dorothy Wertz (1989)

Tucks by Leon Carrow (2007)

The Chicago Maternity Center Story by Jenny Rohrer, Sue Davenport and Gordon Quinn 1976 (Film)

Fortnight on Maxwell Street by David Kerns (forthcoming novel about the Chicago Maternity Center)

 “Every day, I haul two or three loads that are overweight, possibly putting myself and others at risk. The truck could tip over. I’m afraid I might kill myself or someone else. Sometimes we’re carrying hazardous materials, and we don’t know it.”— Aynalem Moba, a 14-year port veteran.

 Aynalem Moba is not the only one speaking out.

Port of Seattle with trucks waiting for containers

 “The shipping and rail lines force us to use faulty equipment. One time I got a load that was 4-5,000 pounds overweight, and it was on a chassis that was insufficient for carrying heavy loads. The company told me to take it anyway. I was really nervous about it. All that extra weight puts a lot of wear and tear on the truck. It blew my wheel seal…It cost me $450. My truck is my livelihood. If it doesn’t work, I don’t work.” —Calvin Borders, a 13-year driver.

Maybe you’re think the truckers are exaggerating about the dangers. The Washington State Police don’t think so. They pulled 32% of the Port of Seattle rigs off the road for safety violations in 2010. After setting up a special unit to monitor unsafe trucks, they took 58% of the rigs off the road in 2011. The state police chief testified at the state legislature about dangerous trucks along with drivers who also testified.

The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology don’t think the dangers are exaggerated either. They estimate that 70%-85% of the airborne carcinogens in the Seattle area come from diesel soot. Diesel soot is linked to lung cancer, leukemia, nasal and liver cancers. Many of the port trucks were constructed before 1997 and emit 10 times the amount of diesel emissions that modern trucks do.

The truck fleet at the Port of Seattle is ancient and road weary. Breakdowns are frequent, which explains why the port is called “The Place Where Old Trucks Go To Die”. And of course, dying trucks can result in dead people. Conditions at other American ports in Los Angeles/Long Beach, New York/New Jersey, and Oakland are comparable.

Maybe you are asking yourself, “Aren’t there laws against this? Why doesn’t their union do something about it?” Well thanks to trucking deregulation, the decline of the once mighty teamsters union, and a clever scheme by the transportation bosses called “independent contracting”, it’s amazing what the port bosses and the companies they serve can get away with.

 The trucking industry was deregulated in 1980 under the Carter administration with support by both liberals and conservatives. Deregulation (called the Federal Motor Carrier Act of 1980) promised a free market utopia of lower rates, more competition leading to innovation and a decent living for workers in the transportation industry. While deregulation did lower rates, it also led to monopolization by a few large firms, serious highway safety problems, increased pollution and  a drastic reduction in the living standards of American truckers.

In the 1960’s drivers covered by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters(IBT) Master Freight Agreement were the monarchs of the road. But the seemingly invincible union was rotting from within. It was dominated by organized crime, financially corrupt and governed by violent intimidation. Jimmy Hoffa Sr., its charismatic leader, went to prison in 1967 and was assassinated in 1975 after his release, even as the federal government continued an anti-corruption investigation that it had begun in the 1950’s.

A rank and file group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union arose demanding that the union kick out the mob and institute democratic reforms. Because of its efforts and federal intervention, the union is reasonably clean today; but thousands of union teamsters have lost their jobs because deregulation drove scores of companies into bankruptcy.  Non-union labor spread throughout the industry forcing wages down even for the remaining union drivers. Like most drivers these days, the port truckers are not members of the teamsters union.

Deregulation also allowed trucking companies to operate trucks without employees. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. The port drivers are considered independent contractors NOT employees. According to David Bensman of Rutgers University:

• The quality of jobs for port truck drivers has decreased substantially since the Federal Motor Carrier Act was implemented in 1980.
• Drivers are on the job five days a week, from ten to twelve hours a day, earning an average annual income of $28,000 in 2008.
• As “independent contractors,” port truck drivers do not receive health care or any contributions to a retirement fund.
• Independent contractors are responsible for owning and maintaining their own trucks, which includes lease payments, fuel costs, tire repairs, truck maintenance, road licenses, taxes, insurance, tolls and traffic fines.”

The legal fiction that port drivers are independent businesspeople means that shipping companies do not have to follow state and federal labor laws. They don’t have financial liability in case of accidents. All of the vehicle purchase and maintenance must be done by the drivers—people who average less than $30,000 a year, many of whom have families to support. Most are people of color, many of them immigrants, adding an ugly racial caste to the whole scam.

Max Galvan,  a port driver in Southern California put its this way:

“What independence? They don’t let us haul for anyone else. They’ll fire you. Most companies make you sign a contract saying that you’ll only work for them. I went along with it because that’s just how things are done here at the ports…I’ve never negotiated the price of a single cargo load. Ever. It’s not something we port drivers can do. We don’t even know how much the retailer is paying for that load, so how can we negotiate? The company just tells us how much they are going to pay us, period.”

 Trucking deregulation has made a mockery of the whole idea of a free market. To say with a straight face that an immigrant trucker driver can negotiate on equal terms with a shipping giant like  Goldman Sachs’ SSA Marine is ludicrous. Workers who have spoken out against port injustices have been punished with job loss. What kind of freedom is that?

Despite what you may have heard from the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party or your local Tea Party, a free market requires rules to protect the public interest. That’s why competitive sports have rules. Imagine the mass casualties on the field and in the stands if rules were suspended at an NFL football game and all the refs and security guards were laid off. Decades of trucking deregulation have left us with aging fleets, inefficient port communications, more deadly pollution and impoverished stressed-out truck drivers.

Also, economies are complex and while some areas of an economy can benefit from more competition and fewer rules, that’s not true of all sectors, especially the transport sector. A market is not free when the strongest, most ruthless and best financed bullies terrorize everyone else. Freedom is not anarchy.

There are freedom fighters on the docks today, but you won’t find Republican presidential candidates  or Tea Party members in Revolutionary War costumes among them. Instead you will find people like Demeke “Yared” Meconnen, an Ethiopian immigrant who testified at the Washington State legislature about port abuses, was suspended for a week and then helped lead a walkout of port truckers that virtually shut down the Port of Seattle. Meconnen proudly wears a lapel button with the image of Dr. Martin Luther King and the message,”Into the Streets 2012”.

The port truckers may not have the global shipping companies on their side, but they have found friends among other port workers, community residents, environmental groups, Occupy activists, the teamsters union and liberal politicians.

Intermodel machine operator B.G. Lemmon, 26 year veteran at the Port of Seattle said this during a port shutdown:

 “It’s beginning to seem like a ghost town because all last week I didn’t see a single truck come through from the major cargo haulers at the port. Seattle Freight, Pacer, Western Ports, none of them! This does mean less work for some of us, but me and the guys here get it. We all work at the same port, handle the same freight containers, and want the same things for our families. It’s not right that we have dignity while they are treated like dirt,”… “If I were forced to take safety shortcuts, I’d grab my coworkers and walk off the job too. They’re making a huge sacrifice. Maybe their companies don’t respect them, but all of us here at the railroad sure as hell do.”

Demeke “Yared” Meconnen speaks out

As I write this on the evening of February 13 drivers are continuing their protest at the Port of Seattle. Hopefully port truckers will be able to finally organize themselves into a union and do what is necessary to reform the unacceptable conditions of their jobs. They need our help. There is a bill in Congress that would alleviate some of the worst abuses called The Clean Ports Act. That bill needs our support. But we also need to support the port drivers who are on the front lines of this struggle for justice.

Please take the Pledge to Support Good, Green Jobs and the Truck Drivers at America’s Ports! You can sign the pledge HERE.

You can also donate money to help the drivers and their families though these difficult times HERE.

Since these drivers deliver most of the goods that come into the USA from around the planet, there is a good chance that you have stuff in your homes that was once in one of their trucks. We owe them our thanks and heartfelt solidarity.

Sources Consulted:

The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports

Final Report: Puget Sound Air Toxics Evaluation by Puget Sound Clean Air Agency

Container trucks near Port of Seattle most dangerous in the state by Chris Ingalls, King5 News

Running on Empty: Trucking Deregulation & Economic Theory by Paul Stephen Dempsey, McGill University

Port Trucking Down the Low Road: A Sad Story of Deregulation by David Bensman, Rutgers University

The Big Rig by Rebecca Smith, Dr. David Bensman and Paul Alexander Marvy

On the Waterfront: Labor, environmentalists fighting trucking deregulation  by Kristopher Hanson, Long Beach Press-Telegram

Employers’ new ruse: “Independent contractors”  by  Andrew Leonard

Republicans are very good at confusing people about the economy. Our economic problems are variously blamed on immigrants, blacks, liberals, environmentalists, unions, China, Democrats, women, government regulation or whatever else is the GOP flavor of the week. Conspicuously absent from this are the very wealthy who actually dominate the US economy.

Republicans say that if we only stick to the tried and true policies of their dear departed Ronald Reagan, all will come up roses.  But it’s the 1% who get the blooms, the rest of us get the thorns.

When it comes to Republican economics, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement. Republican economics means millions of Americans fail to get adequate health care, adequate housing, adequate education, adequate retirement, adequate recreation and adequate…well, you can finish the list if you have a few hours to spare. 

What makes this saga even sadder, is that some Democrats have bought into this GOP economic calamity. Whether out of conviction, ignorance or to please their corporate sponsors they have left the rest of us embedded with the thorns, not the blooms. Democratic hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was no radical, would be appalled.

You can read the Republican battle plan for this economic blitzkrieg in Believe In America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth, a 160 page tome you can download for free. Now we all know that campaign literature bears only a passing resemblance to actual reality. Orwellian Newspeak is the coin of the campaign realm. But Romney is the candidate of the Republican establishment, itself a major representative for a large sector of Corporate America. So with careful study of how they want to mislead us, we can gain insight into ruling class thinking

In the Sherlock Holmes tale The Silver Blaze, there is the curious incident of the watchdog who failed to bark, leading Holmes to finally crack the case. Sometimes it is what is unsaid that is the most revealing. That is certainly true of Believe in America.

There is no mention of dismantling our vast expensive and immoral military empire, which is essentially a government subsidy to military contractors, energy companies and other global corporations who depend upon the cheap labor and resources of the developing world. Meanwhile it is the working class who fights the wars and suffers the deaths and injuries that inevitably come.

As for energy policy, there is worshipful adoration for the oil, coal, nuclear and gas industries; no mention however of BP and the Gulf of Mexico, Massey Energy and mine disasters, Fukushima radiation leaks, or Chesapeake Energy’s recent fracking blowout; no mention of the poisoning of the environment; the deaths caused by air and water pollution or the potential for an apocalypse of climate change. Alternative green energy sources  are dismissed as expensive, uncompetitive and undeserving of taxpayer support; no mention however of the epic subsidies doled out to oil, coal, nuclear and natural gas.

To deal with global trade, Romney wants to create a “Reagan Economic Zone” that would be a massive Free Trade Agreement(FTA). Not mentioned is how an FTA like  NAFTA brought severe poverty to rural Mexico and caused a mass migration to the USA, breaking up families and condemning those Mexican workers to low wage jobs under sweatshop conditions; no mention either about the loss of US jobs thanks to NAFTA.

Reagan’s support of Latin American terrorist death squads and military dictatorships to insure “free market” economies also goes unmentioned. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (signed by the USA) details  basic global labor standards, the “Reagan Economic Zone” is silent on those as well. Using the term “free markets” when workers are tossed into prison, tortured and even killed makes a mockery of both the word “free” and the word “market”.

Tax policy? Romney says cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations because well, “corporations are people”. No mention about how we are to fund social welfare, more important than ever as companies rid themselves of pensions, health plans, family time, sick leave and the other necessities of a civilized society.

Healthcare? Repeal Obamacare. There is no mention that the Affordable Care Act is based on the popular Massachusetts health plan created by none other Mitt Romney; no mention of the skyrocketing costs and bloated inefficiency of the health insurance industry, which kills thousands of Americans every year through brutal rationing of health care.

Regulatory policy?  Easy, slash regulation of Wall Street; no mention of how deregulation brought on the 2008 crash; robbing people of pensions, homes and jobs; no mention of how environmental regulation has prevented even greater ecological tragedy; no mention of how OSHA has helped save life and limb in the workplace.

Believe in America makes no mention of the vast disparity in wealth between the 1% and the working class; barely a mention of our racial and gender caste system that economically punishes people based on their color or the configuration of their reproductive organs.

When it comes to actual working class realities, the silences can be deafening. However there is one area of working class life where Romney is quite vocal. Unions, always a favorite whipping boy for economic failure, get a special flogging in Believe in America.

After a perfunctory paragraph about unions of the past, unions today are pilloried for harming competitiveness, driving up costs and being detrimental to job creation. Romney attacks the National Labor Relations Board for decisions that favor labor while ignoring those that have favored management. Even a minor decision that requires employers to put up posters advising workers of their legal rights stokes his ire. While he claims to be in favor of “competitiveness”, he vents rage at anything that might help the embattled US labor movement maintain its competitiveness in our so-called “free market” economy.

Romney seems offended that working class people aspire to a modest middle class lifestyle and is especially outraged at those who have achieved that status through union activity. It’s OK in Romney World for wealthy investors to organize companies to further their financial gain, but a mortal economic sin for working class people to organize unions to do the same.

Romney gushes over the so-called “right-to-work” states which place heavier restrictions on unions, where union organizing efforts meet a stonewall of employer resistance and even many working class people are anti-union. Concentrated in the American South, these states are also among the poorest in the nation with all of the attendant social problems. There has been significant job growth there as manufacturing companies seek out the cheapest labor and the most desperate people. These companies generally pay low wages while demanding expensive government subsidies and tax breaks. Working conditions can be brutal while worker health and safety takes a back seat.

But despite the many words Romney expends on labor issues there are still long silences. There is no mention of the predatory capitalists who descended on US manufacturing and instead of investing in new technology and engaging workers in planning a better future, simply skimmed off the profits until bankruptcy struck. There is no mention of company owners who simply skipped town to find cheaper labor in impoverished 3rd World countries so they could go back to the robber baron-style of labor relations popular in the 19th century.

There is no mention of how the labor movement has been the USA’s most successful anti-poverty program; no mention of how unions made deep concessions to help companies stay in business during economic crisis; no mention of the thousands of workers fired illegally for union organizing; no mention of the union role in fighting against racial, gender and other forms of discrimination on the job.

When you add up the words of Believe in America and its many silences, the true picture of Republican economic planning becomes clear. It is a picture of failure for the many and success for the few. The Republican idea of job creation is the Walmartization of America, low wage jobs with minimal benefits. Even the higher paying non-union manufacturing jobs brought in by companies like  BMW and Daimler are still low by the standards of the companys’ home countries. Unfunny jokes about the USA becoming Europe’s  Mexico are making the rounds.

Romney wants to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In his vision of a non-union low wage economy, how will workers retire or pay for medical care?  Already many Walmart workers depend upon public assistance programs like SNAP (formerly food stamps), housing subsidies, child health programs and Medicaid.

In Romney’s low wage America where taxes are slashed for the wealthy and the corporations, who will pay for schools, essential public services, infrastructure maintenance, parks and recreational facilities? How will we pay for environmental protection and cleanup? Public health programs? Food safety inspection? Workplace health and safety inspections? Corporate and government financial fraud audits?

Mitt Romney’s deregulated capitalism makes it too easy for the grifters, the thieves, the polluters and the labor exploiters to succeed in business. It rewards those who dismantled our manufacturing, polluted our nation, foreclosed our homes and damned near crashed the entire global economy in 2008.

This undercuts the honest fair-minded capitalists who have a sense of responsibility to their workers, their investors and to society as a whole. Being a capitalist should be seen as a serious social responsibility, not a smash and grab robbery as it is by the Mitt Romney’s of America.

Believe in America is the road to perdition: a red, white and blue environmentally blighted Mordor; dotted with grim sweatshops surrounded by decaying slums and ruled from the office towers and  fortress-like gated communities of the wealthy.

If economic failure is a requirement for Republicans, resistance is the requirement for the rest of us. For if we do not resist, we can  only say, “We did it to ourselves.”

Cartoon by Carol Simpson Cartoonwork- a partnership between Estelle Carol and Bob “Bobbosphere” Simpson

Sources consulted

Books

Believe In America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Failure by Design: The Story behind America’s Broken Economy by Josh Bivens

Articles

Orwellian from Wikipedia

Silver Blaze  from Wikipedia

Reagan’s legacy in Latin America marked by obsession, failure by Juan Prada

Mitt Romney’s Epic Health Care Journey: How He Flip-Flopped On Mandates by Benjy Sarlin

45,000 American deaths associated with lack of insurance by Madison Park

Unionbusting? That’s disgusting! from USAction

Dropping the Ax: Illegal Firings During Union Election Campaigns by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer

Germany turns out 5.5 million cars; U.S. only 2.7 million by Nicholas Maronese

Next Low-Wage Haven: USA by Jane Slaughter

Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs