Hi, and welcome back to part two of our double episode about the strike wave in the US during the Vietnam War. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I'd go back and listen to that.
First Alamatina Happenalta or the larger, very largile there Larchild child chi Alamatina.
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keeping people's history alive in these trying times. Learn more and sign up at patreon dot com slash working class history link. In the show notes, we left off last time about to talk about the mass strike of US postal workers in the US posts work for the United States Postal Service USPS and are employees of the federal government, and so they were and still are banned from striking.
Despite a Congressional commission recommending postal workers be given the right to collective bargaining in nineteen sixty eight, Congress itself rejected. Its workers got no pay increase at all from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty nine, while their union did nothing about it. This meant that, counting inflation, they had real pay cuts of nineteen point five percent over this time period. In early nineteen seventy, they were eventually offered
an increase of just five point four percent. Union members called for a ballot for strike action, which officials succeeded in delaying but ultimately couldn't prevent. A majority of workers voted to strike, and workers in New York City, without waiting for authorization from union officials, set up picket lines around post offices in the city.
It was a wildcast strike, never supported by the unions. It was the largest strike of postal workers and in fact the largest strike of public employees that there had ever been. It started in New York Wish a few locals that decided to go on strike, and then spread and became extremely widespread in New York, and then within days people from all over the country began calling in and said we're going out too, We're going out too, and it became a strike that involved hundreds of thousands
of people around the country. It grew out of near poverty conditions or actual poverty conditions that postal workers were facing, with many postal workers on welfare in order to get by and just thought a not read what was regarded as something that was acceptable if you were working. So the union completely opposed it ordered people to go back to work. They did not go back to work. Does National Guard was sent in. Ultimately, the United States Army
was sent in. Twenty five thousand troops occupied the post office in New York. There used to be an old saying, when they send the military end to force the miners back to work. You can't dig coal with bayonets, and so the postal workers adopted the slogan you can't sort mail with bayonets. And from what we were told, the army went into the post office and started slarting mail, but it's not clear that the mail was better sorted after they went to work than it was before they
went to work. There was not a successful military operation from the point of view of just getting the mail out.
This unsuccessful military operation in breaking the postal strike was mirroring the unsuccessful nature of US military intervention in Vietnam itself.
It might have been successful and that they got to troops into the post office, but it was not successful from the point of view getting the mail out of the post office. And there was essentially a fake settlement that was worked out between the union officials and the Postal service, and then the workers were told to go back to work and they didn't.
By this point, the striant could spread to over two hundred cities and towns across the country.
There became a complicated situation, and I don't want to go into all the details, but essentially there was a taskit arrangement that negotiations would not begin and tell the workers had gone back to work, but as soon as they went back to work, not only the Postal Service, but the President and both houses of the Congress agreed that they would make a major raise for postal workers and meet many of the other demands. And that's essentially
what happened. The postal workers went back to work, but they created an independent organization and told the union leadership, if you don't have this settled in a week or so, we're just going to go back out, and we have the organization to do it. So they went back into the post offices, and the Congress passed the legislation necessary to give them a raise put him on a decent footing for the future.
Congress awarded an immediate six percent pay increase to all government workers, with postal workers to receive an additional eight percent with a reorganization plan later.
It was not everything that they wanted, but it made a huge difference in the power of the postal workers.
There was a point at which the head of the Federal Employees Union AFGE said he was being overwhelmed by telegrams and calls from local unions all over the country who represented other government employees, saying, if the postal workers can do it, why can't we and demand that he called strikes for them, and that was part of the reason that management decided that the government decided it had to settle fast with the postal workers because damn thing
was really threatening to get out of control. One of the most vociferous locals, he said, for demanding a strike, was one that organized the logistics for the American war in Vietnam. Now that doesn't mean that workers were striking against the war, but it meant that the demands that they be patriotic and support the war had lost the power and credibility to direct their action.
In wartime, governments and national media typically denounce any kind of strike as an attack on the nation and say it's putting the troops, the war effort, and the country at risk. So any wartime strike is significant because it is seen and reported as an attack on the troops and the nation.
It's certainly true in the context of the Vietnam War is that the strikes were portrayed as unpatriotic, as undermining the war effort, partially directly if they know we were producing things that were needed. Also, because inflation and the economic conditions, high demand for labor meant that if people struck effectively on a large scale, they actually were able to win substantial wage increases, and that was something that
then the government blamed inflation on those ways increases. This in fact happened with the teams strikes that we'll probably
get to here. It wasn't just not producing what was needed for war, but also adding to inflation, and inflation was of course actually caused by the war, but something that was portrayed as itself interfering with a successful prosecution of the war, and the United States actually established wage and price controls in the latter stages of the Vietnam War as a way of trying to prevent eWays increases above inflation.
The next major dispute involved truck drivers in the Teamsters Union.
One of the most powerful of American unions was called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and they were usually known as the Teamsters Union. It went back to the era of people who hauled freight using horses, a team of horses, and so they were known as Teamsters, and they were a very powerful union throughout the country, a very essentialized union.
So the local groups had a lot of control and were both very important in terms of their numbers, but also very very important in the labor movement because their ability to tie up traffic to make the delivery of goods to factories difficult if they wanted to. Many many strikes were won by industrial workers, auto workers of other kinds of industrial workers because Teamsters refused to deliver across their picket lines. So they had a very important role
in the labor movement and in labor solidarity. The Teamsters union was another case where the trade union leadership had been in cooperation with management to very extreme extent. The head of the Teamsters said that the Teamsers will never tie up American Free with a nationwide strike for example.
This leadership then negotiated a new pay deal with management.
The union leadership negotiated a contract for the essentially the central part of the country that was where all afraid for the entire country was in there and going across there.
The agreement broke it between management and the union in nineteen seventy gave pay increases of one dollar ten an hour over thirty nine months.
The workers rejected it and began going out on strike and doing truckers blockades.
Drivers in sixteen cities, including to lead you know Columbus, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Saint Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, and others walked out on wildcat strike and set up mobile picket lines to intercept drivers at key locations, for example, at crossings of the Mississippi River.
Essentially, somebody would be come bringing a truckle on and they would pull the truck in front of them and say, essentially like roadblocks in a wartime situation. And then the workers who were driving the trucks through might say, yeah, I agree, this is great and enjoying them, or if they weren't crazy enough to do that, they might go back to their boss and said, oh, I can't go through there. They're threatening my life. You know, I'll never see my wife and choulder and again if you make
me go through that trucker's blockade. It was not clear exactly what the balance of intimidation and support was, but it was predominantly support as we could tell.
Still, that definitely was some violence. The New York Times reported that some trucks had rocks thrown at them, windows had been smashed, tires slashed, and air hose is severed. The mayor of Cleveland claimed that strike related violence had affected two thirds of all counties in Ohio.
The West Coast companies said we can't get our trucks through, and the entire travel between the West Coast and throughout the country was largely cut off. This is an old tactic in American labor. It used to be called a flying squadron. It came in with the coming in of cars in the nineteen twenties and thirties. So you'd have a highly mobile team of workers and somebody heard that
somebody was trying to break a strike. They would go to the location and put up a picket line, or you go and go and talk to people and say, you know, we're on strike, suaded them to join. And this was essentially a revival of rolling picket line strategy, and it was incredibly effective.
The United Press estimated that overall half a million people were off work because of the strike. The national head of the union told members to get back to work, as did the Federal Mediation Service. Trucking companies then started getting injunctions against the strike. Workers in Saint Louis ignored an injunction for a month. In California, strikers instead called
in saying that they were sick. Ten thousand strikers were fired, but workers responded demanding a full amnesty as well as ten days sick pay.
The ultimate response was that the National Guard was called up in dozens of counties in Ohio and elsewhere in the Middle West to try to break the strike.
Soldiers with helmets, trucks and m one rifles guarded roads, escorted trucks, and protected truck terminals. In some cases, strikers throwing rocks managed to repel police and National Guard troops.
It was very unsuccessful. The just were not able to get people to start driving again or to let the trucks go through, and it ended up with the union going back and negotiating a new contract with a several times as large a wage increase as had been negotiated previously, and then the truck drivers went back to work.
The strike ended up lasting twelve weeks and management had to accept a pay increase two thirds high than the one originally agreed to.
It was very much in violation of the federal wage guidelines, and the impact of it was that other workers immediately began making demands for a similar kind of wage increase, and you had within a year major increases in the average wages for the entire country basically because of workers who were involded by the Keemsers wildcats. So it's a
very interesting dynamic. Each of these is in some ways a unique situation, as most strike situations are, but certainly something that you could look at and learn some lessons from for the future.
In contrast to the unofficial wildcat strikes, in nineteen seventy, workers at General Motors took part in an official strike called by the United Auto Workers' Union.
The nineteen sixties is distinctive in that almost all the major strikes and labor struggles took place as wildcats and in opposition to union officialdom.
And there's one big exception which we haven't mentioned, which was the General Motors strike, and that was the situation in which it was just about universally recognized that the purpose of the strike was for the union and the company to not this out of the workers, get them to be less feisty by making them be on the street for a month or two. And it was essentially
a strike by unions and management against the workers. If this seems bizarre to you, you're right, but it's thoroughly documented in articles in the Wall Street Journal and a book called The Company in the Union at the Time that leaves no doubt that this is what was going on now.
The GM strike is an unusual one, but it served an important purpose both for General Motors Management and the UAW. For the workers, they wanted more money and better conditions, and especially given the other disputes which were taking place, felt that they could win them. The UAW wanted to
assert their control over the workers. More than ten percent of all agreements being made by UAW officials at the time were being rejected by rank and file members, and the recent death of the popular UAW leader Walter Royt had also resulted in increasing division within the union. For the company, they wanted to reassert control on the shop floor, and so they were happy for workers to blow off a bit of steam in a controlled fashion in order for workers to be able to get back to work
and follow orders from management thereafter. So the intention was to have a prolonged all out strike. As one UAW official admitted to the Wall Street Journal quote, the guys go out on strike expecting the moon. But after a few weeks of mounting bills and the wife raising hell about his hanging around the house all day watching TV while she works, the average worker tends to soften his
demands end quote. A strike would also unite different factions within the union behind their leadership against the common enemy management, So in September nineteen seventy, an all outstrike began of four hundred thousand GM workers across one hundred and fifty five different local bargaining units around the US. The union and management agreed that all local issues had to be resolved by the strike as well as the national ones in order to try to draw a line under all
of the turmoil nationwide. But while UAW officials thought they could reach a national agreement with management in around ten days, rank and file GM workers were refusing to settle their local agreements. The strike started dragging on, and so General Motors even loaned the UAW ten million dollars to help cover the costs of the ongoing dispute. After two months, it started to look like perhaps the union management plan was backfiring, as the workers were so determined that even
a long running strike wasn't demobilizing or demoralizing them. In the end, UAW leaders and GM management held secret meetings in which they agreed to just settle the national dispute, leaving many local issues unresolved, and so after sixty seven days, the strike inn did and workers won a thirteen percent
pay increase. Like the car industry, most of the other major disputes that happened at that time were also in predominantly male industries like mining and trucking, but women were deeply involved as well in these working class struggles.
The backstory here is that women flooded into the industry during World War two and then were largely pushed out again afterward, and there was an effort to return to the traditional male breadwinner concept of society and how the economy worked, But in fact it didn't happen. After they pushed back, they came back in larger numbers than By the mid nineteen fifties, there was a higher proportion of women in the workforce than there had been at the
end of World War Two. However, they were concentrated in a very small number of occupations that were overwhelmingly women's work. The largest number who came in went to world and clerical occupations in sales occupations, stores and all salers, and the traditional women's industries like the garment textel industries were in the clawing in terms of numbers, and there was huge discrimination against women in the heavy industry jobs that they had briefly filled but then been pushed out of.
So you had a growing number of women in the workforce, but concentrated in low wage jobs, but also in white collar jobs that didn't have traditions of labor organizing and resistance and didn't have in most cases the economic power that steel worker or garbage worker was believed to have. So you have also a labor movement that is almost entirely male in its leadership and not interested in most cases and organizing women workers. There are death and exceptions.
For example, hospital workers in New York, social workers and above all teachers both male and female, engaged in very militant strikes, lots of arrest, city ins, and so on, but on a local basis, because the industries were generally organized on a local basis.
For example, in July nineteen seventy, following a one day strike, fifteen thousand hospital workers in New York one pay increases of thirty dollars a week or twenty five percent, whichever was greater, and in November nineteen seventy three, around thirty thousand, mostly black and put a Rican hospital workers in New York walked out on strike, demanding the seven point five
percent pay increase they were contractually owed. Nixon's Cost of Living Council was trying to cap pay rises at five point five percent, and so they blocked the increase, even though the hospitals were happy to pay it. Strikers defied a federal injunction and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines until after eight days the government shifted and agreed
for them to receive a six percent increase. Both struggles were important in the development of unions which persist today, like the Service Employees International Union SDIU.
The forerunner to the large organizations of public employees. Service employees and teachers that we know today are back essentially the largest unions the largest numbers of workers in the labor movement, but it didn't manifest itself by and large in large strikes. However, the largest protests in American history was conducted by women, where we were at that time generally referred to as housewives, in the nineteen seventy three
consumer meat boycott. I've talked about the inflation of that era, and the biggest piece of inflation was in food, or one of the biggest, and that was largely concentrated in very, very large increases in the quest of meat.
The Nixon government had implemented price and wage controls, but he'd loosened them by this point, and Nixon had specifically stated that he didn't want price controls on food. Initially, the government advised people unhappy with the high cost of meat to instead eat fish, cheese, or just eat less. This predictably caused outrage.
The idea of boycotting meat sprang up in a thousand places. For example, one woman who got outraged about it just started calling random numbers in the phone book and asking people what they thought about the price of meat. And then when many as the women she talked to said it's terrible and my family won't talk to me because I can't feed the meat anymore, or whatever, it was, swell. He held a meeting in a local bowling alley. This was in Staten Island, but the same thing was happening
all over the country. No national organization, no call, no pre existing network beyond the very local level, and yet it became coordinated on a colossal national scale.
Thousands of women protested in the streets, picket lines were set up outside supermarkets, and The New York Times reported that quote in some stores, militant women snatched cuts of meat out of their neighbors shopping carts and restored them to the freezer bins end quote. But at the same time, the paper pointed out that quote, in general, no external pressure was used or needed to enforce the don't buy
movement end quote. Retailers reported that meat sales fell by fifty to sixty seven percent, and up to two hundred thousand meat workers were temporarily laid off.
There was a gallup pol that was done immediately afterwards that asked did you participate in the meatboycutt and twenty five percent of family said yes, which is about fifty million people at that time. So this is really not anything that I'm aware of in American history that compares to it. Richard Nixon, a free market Republican, actually declared a freeze on the price of meat, and that was supposed to stop the boycott.
On the eighth of April nineteen seventy three, Nixon was forced to reverse course and appear on TV to announce new price ceilings on beef, pork, and lamb to prevent them rising any further. The boycott was hailed by Time magazine as a quote triumph and the most successful boycott by women since Lysistrata, referring to the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women try to stop a war by boycotting sex.
While the boycott didn't reduce the price of meat as such, it had been going up by over five percent per month, and analysts predicted it would have just kept rising until at least July. So although The New York Times attempted to claim that the boycott had little impact, it does seem clear that it was successful in preventing prices rising further.
Boycott actually ended because it had made its point. It didn't have a vehicle to go forward and have some kind of continuing impact, and probably exhausted what could have been achieved with that tactic. But it put the economic problems of American families and put what women's responsibilities at that time largely were front and center in the national dialogue.
From all of these different disputes over the period of the Vietnam War. Jeremy thinks there are a lot of lessons we can take from them which are equally valid today.
Let's learn from it that the relations between rank and file workers and unions can become truly antagonistic. Clearly there are situations at the opposite pole, and even in the nineteen sixties, the campaigns by teachers and social workers and
hospital workers involved much more synergistic and positive relation. There are always going to be tensions in any organization between leadership and rank and file, but that shouldn't be confused with a situation where interests and practices have become completely opposed. There is a set of structural endemic problems with organized labor. I can only speak about the United States with any serious knowledge, and other places maybe different and similar in
various ways. But in the United States, the principal orientation of unions, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, has been to establish collective bargaining with their employers and to establish a stable bargaining relationship, and that has been reinforced by the rise of labor law starting in the nineteen thirties, which will use designed to allow workers to organize and bargain collectively, but also designed to create a
structure that limited the scent to which workers were able to act on their own pursue what they perceived of their interest as opposed to operating within a tightly defined
legal and institutional structure. And the reason that you get wildcat strikes and where you have workers opposing their union leaders is primarily because the unions, either because of their own structure and leadership, or because of governmental laws, regulations, institutions, policies, but for a variety of reasons, the unions are functioning in ways that workers don't perceive as following their interests, and they don't have an institutional handle electing new officials.
Things like that don't prove not to be effective as
a means of dealing with that situation. And when you get that kind of conflict of interest between workers and their concerns and the union leadership, official and institutional structure, then you get a situation where workers they either have to suck it up and accept the status quo or they find they have to organize themselves outside the union or quasi outside operate at one level of the union in order to oppose another level, make connections with workers
elsewhere that are distinct from the ones that are mediated through the union officials, and find ways that they can utilize what they still have, which is a degree of power over production, and use those things to meet the needs that are not being met or are even being opposed by the union.
So, in order to truly be able to assert our own interests, workers have to have our own forms of organization outside and beyond just the structures of union officialdom.
This is still the case today, as for example, during the teacher strikes in West Virginia in twenty eighteen, union leaders agreed to a terrible deal without consulting members, but rank and file teachers had set up their own communication and organization networks on Facebook in this case, and so were able to collectively decide to continue the strike until
they got an offer they were actually happy with. Some left groups often argue that these sorts of issues are just issues of leadership, and so by electing union leaders from their group or from other left groups, you can ensure members are adequately represented. But historically this is not what happened, as unions over this time period, such as the Auto Workers' Union, did have predominantly left leaderships, and the fundamental problems were the same.
That's what's frequently a problem in is by and large you didn't have pattern. You had a number of caucuses might be called rank and file caucuses or the Caucus for Democratic Union, that kind of thing that attempted to
address the situation by running candidates against union leadership. And they certainly in cases at least for a time, were able to have leaderships there were more effective on behalf of workers, but they were not able buy and large to break out of the fundamental limitations that the institutional and legal structure imposed.
So even with left leaderships, unions still had a situation where they had contracts with employers with no strike clauses. So wildcat strikes by workers breached these contracts, putting the union in financial and legal jeopardy and potentially jeopardizing relations between union officials and the corporations in discussions elsewhere about gaining union recognition in additional plants. In the US, most
unionized workplaces are union shops, known as closed shops. In the UK, union closed shops have been illegal for decades under European human rights laws, namely the right to freedom of association, now it's worth exploring the origins of the union shop in the US. They emerged during World War II, when employers and the US government wanted to ensure no strikes would take place. The unions, on the other hand, wanted stable dues paying memberships, and they didn't have this
at the time. Typically, many workers would join a union during a big dispute and pay their dues to local union reps, but over time they would lapse so as an example, in nineteen thirty seven, after a successful wave of sit down strikes in the auto industry, over eight thousand workers joined the UAW in Lansing. By the following year,
though only one thousand were still paying dues. Some unions would have representatives set up picket lines to try to collect dues from members, and often workers would even skip work on dues collection days to try to avoid paying. In the steel industry, absenteeism went up to twenty five percent on dues paying days. Also, initially, the Congress of Industrial Organizations the CIO Union Confederation agreed to a no
strike pledge to support the war effort. After the German invasion of Russia in nineteen forty one, the Communist Party and their affiliated union officials also became strong supporters of the no strike pledge. But then workers had no incentive to be union members because the unions had promised not to fight. Unions as organizations therefore had a big incentive
to support union shops with compulsory union membership. And as World War Two continued to try to ensure industrial peace and stop wildcat strikes, the National War Labour Board determined that only union shops quote would give labour officials the self confidence and firmness to deal with their members and enforce their contracts end quote, so they started being implemented on a wide scale through the introduction of so called
union security clauses in contracts with employers. While the union shop structure does strengthen workers in some obvious ways, like ensuring that no non union workers are available to scab on potential strikes, it does also give unions a sometimes problematic role in managing the workplace along with the employer. For example, it means that when workers breach union rules and take wildcat or unofficial industrial action, unions can and do discipline them, and in a union shop, expulsion from
the union means losing your job. This weapon was used many times against militant workers over this period. For example, in the US, in nineteen forty four, tire builders in Akron, Ohio walked out on strike in protest at a reduction in peace rates. The United Rubber Workers Union expelled seventy strikers and got them fired from their jobs. Then when other US union activists complain, they were expelled and fired
as well. So this is just one example of a way in which legal and contractual frameworks bind unions as organizations to management, and how it can result in negative
consequences for workers. From our current vantage point, at a time when levels of workplace struggles are at a generally very low level, it can be easy to forget that the interests of unions and their members may not be the same because often it's only in times of these really widespread, mass and intense struggles, like at the end of World War II and during the Vietnam War, that
these internal divisions really become apparent. So it's important to look back at times like this to learn lessons on how we can really begin to fight for our own interests.
One of the lessons we can learn from the Vietnam era is if we're going to starry a new labor movement, let's do it in a way that freeze us from some of those constrains, because we're going to have to act in ways that go outside institutional and leal constraints anyway,
as the teachers' strikes have shown us. If we're going to have anything but individual, isolated workers dominated by powerful employers, if we're going to have any kind of collective response and ability for workers collectively to affect their conditions, we're going to have to go outside through constraints of American labor law and the established institutional patterns of trade unions. By luck out, by luck out, and luck out out.
Well, that's it for this double episode. As always, we've got links to sources further reading, and eventually a transcript in the web page for this episode. We've also got a link where you can get hold of Jeremy's book Strike links in the show notes. We would highly recommend you get hold of this book because it's one of the best books ever written on the US workers movement in our opinion. It's available in our online store and you can get ten percent off it and anything else
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You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This improved episode was edited by Jesse French with original editing by Emma Cortland. Thanks for listening, Catch you next time.
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