In the nineteen sixties, as US bombs rained down on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, an anti war movement developed at home and amongst the troops, while workers began to ignore the calls for patriotism and war production and instead fought for better
pay and conditions. Wildcat strikes broke out in key industries like coal mining, truck driving, public transport, sanitation, and postal services, while women struggled against the rising cost of living in possibly the biggest protest movement to date in the United States. This is working class.
History Alamatina Apenalsaa or the larger, their larger, their largil child chow Alamatina.
Before we get started today, long term listeners may recall hearing an episode about the Vietnam War era strike wave before four, and they would be right. Our podcast episode eight was about this. However, like all of our earliest episodes, it was basically just raw audio from our interview, so the sound quality wasn't that great and there wasn't additional narrative to fill in gaps, explain context, and pull the
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Class History link in the show notes. This episode is part of a series we've produced about the Vietnam War. In our episode fourteen with Noam Chomsky, we talk about the geopolitics of the conflict and its human cost. In episodes ten to eleven, we talk about the gi resistance to the war, and in episodes forty three to forty six we look at the anti war movement in the US itself. This episode is a little bit different because we're looking at how US workers responded to the war at their jobs.
The American labor movement, overwhelmed supported the Vietnam War in the early stages the resolutions on the war, the statements by the afl CIO were unanimous or close to the unanimous in support of the war.
This is Jeremy Brecker, author of the Book's Strike, A History of mass strikes in the US, and really one of the best texts we've ever read on working class history in the US. We herghly recommend getting hold of the book, and it's available in our online store link in the show notes. The afl CIO he mentioned here is the main trade union compederation in the United States.
There was a Democratic president who was regarded as fundamentally pro labor, despite some quibbles, and they wanted to support President Kennedy. But more than that, they shared the worldview that the Vietnam War came out of.
People can argue about.
The details, what the broad perception was that the struggle against communism, with a struggle for freedom than any place that communism was advancing, it was essential for the United States to fight against it. Had no nuances about well, isn't there a nationalist to mention to the Vietnamese fighting from a liberation from colonialism. This was not part of a picture that people in labor official THEOM as in
other important positions in American society wanted to hear. Or they might say, yes, they're fighting French colonialism and we're supporting them in their struggle against it. So this is the general perception that the specific interests that war production was very much perceived as good for jobs.
And good for labor.
And then I think you can say that the American working class was very patriotic.
When World War two.
They had supported American democracy against fascism, and they felt that what the United States was doing in the world. Probably there was some small opposition from traditionally left wing unions like the West Coastline shoreman, the New York hospital workers in a few other places, but very very little and very isolated and not reaching beyond groups that had long term critique of Americans role in the world.
Well, that was the situation for the official organizations tasked with representing the working class. Different things were going on for workers at a grassroots level.
The nineteen sixties are often remembered and thought of as a period of revolt, but when nineteen sixties were started, we didn't know that we were going into the nineteen sixties and the early nineteen sixties both and there was the labor picture, and.
More broadly seemed very much like a continuation of the nineteen fifties, with the continuation of macr theism, of pressures for cultural conformity, and a working class that had a higher standard of living than it had ever had before, especially those who were in the mainstream central industries.
McCarthyism, named after US Senator Joseph McCarthy, refers to the wave of anti communist hysteria in the US in the nineteen fifties, when large numbers of left wingers were brought in front of Senate hearings and essentially purged from public life. This situation of conformity and improving living standards had some notable exceptions.
Obviously, many of these generalizations applied less to black workers, to women workers, to workers in marginalized industries in rural areas. But the general pattern, even for black workers who had made it into the central industries, was that these were good times, and that you could buy a house, which you'd never been able to do. Maybe your kid wouldn't have to work in the shop. Maybe your kid was going to be able to go to college and.
Have a nice white.
Collar job and could definitely take a vacation.
Maybe you could even buy a vacation cottage.
So well, though the discontents on the shop floor in the workplace remained strong, the overall ambience was shaped by the economic prosperity of the era and the continuation of a generally construtive cultural trend. In that context, you began getting what became to the student revolt or youth revolt.
It started with college students largely around a variety of issues, and gradually spread to become not so college centered, but really a generational polarization symbolized by many, many different things, the hippie values, hair styles, drug use, and above all a questioning of solid conservative cultural values that pre much pervaded American society, and that gradually spread on a generational basis.
Of that, the slogan don't trust anyone over thirty really encapsulated the attitude, and there was a converse attitude, also very widespread, of essentially don't trust anyone under thirty. That led to a generational polarization. There was a very important feature right through to the end of the nineteen sixties. The general conservatism and conformism of the nineteen fifties was marked by a general absence of social movements of all kinds.
But you have the beginning of the Black freedom movement, the civil rights movement in the Southern statesy of the United States. You have what was known as Jim Crow which was practically a form of serfdom. Jim Crow laws segregated school and public buses, and all the other institutions of the South. They shouldn't be considered that the black resistance to oppression spran from nowhere in nineteen fifty four.
In nineteen fifty five, but what you have is a sharp development of new forms, first through the Brown Versus Board of Education decision, which declared that separate but equal schools were inherently unequal and required that southern schools be integrated, and then the Montgomery bus boycott, in which the entire black population of Montgomery boycotted the public buses were over a year, demanding an end to the segregation of the buses.
And so after a year you had a new sense of ability to stand up.
To segregation in Jim Crow.
Following that, you have sit ins and then the freedom rides, and then getting into the sixties, you have the great civil disobedience campaigns, and so all of that became an inspiration for all the social movements that are so often referred to as the sixties.
This generalized feeling of rebellion, largely from the burgeoning civil rights movement, started to spread to workers on the shop floor.
As part of the pattern of growing discontent that's illustrated by the student movement and youth polarization the black movement. It's not widely recognized, but there is very much a parallel development among workers, especially among young workers, and it's manifested in a lot of different ways. Initially ones they were not so obvious. So, for example, you started having a lot of trade union leaderships being voted out of
office by opposition caucuses. You started finding an increase in wildcat strikes over what were sometimes called local issues or a grievances that trading in leadership was not interested in trying to address.
Wildcat strikes are strikes which are organized and undertaken directly by workers themselves, without the authorization of their unions.
And you can see quite amazing statistics about some of this. In the later sixties, some statistics got out from the General Motors that showed that there was something like five times as many hours lost to local issues and wildcat strikes as to national strikes. The various forms of just resistance to authority on the job, against specifically by young workers,
became more and more pervasive and began to be recognized. So, for example, General Motors built a planet at Lords Sound that was the modern state of the art plant, and they had a young workforce, and workers would walk out and they would retrieve order. Just became big news in the New York Times and widely recognized as a phenomenon, and it became increasingly the.
Case through the nineteen sixties across the US, as in Europe, young workers had become increasingly unruly. In many cases, people would just bunk off work regularly at general motors, their absentee rate, meaning the percentage of workers not at their posts each day, was two percent in nineteen sixty. By
nineteen seventy it had more than doubled. Five percent of workers were absent with no explanation most days, with ten percent absent every Monday and Friday at Lordstown, which we referenced in our episode eighty three talking about general labor in discipline, absentee hasn't reached twenty percent in summertime.
Friend of mine and I took a tour around the United States interviewing young workers and wrote a book about it, and in the stories we were told indicated a very high level of resistance, of people organizing themselves to get time off on the job, and quite an extensive use of sabotage, not blowing things up type sabotage, but for example, in one case, workers from fifty different parts of a plant, an auto plant, drew lots about who would stop production
when your number came up, You did something in your part that would stop work going forward where you were and hopefully also stop it for the rest of the plant. So this kind of formal resistance, which had of course always been there in factory settings became much more pervasive.
A typical reason for such sabotage would be as a protest against bosses trying to speed up the production line. So at Lordstown, for example, when management tried to speed up the production line, workers just decided to slow it down by ignoring one car in ten or twenty when it came past their station. Management complained to the press about this, with one stating quote, We've had cases of engine blocks passing forty men without them doing their work
end quote. All this was having an impact on the corporation's bottom lines. At GM, for example, their labor costs went up from being twenty nine percent of total sales income in nineteen sixty two to thirty three percent a decade later. With the pressures of war, corporations were also putting up prices. This is commonly referred to by governments and the media as inflation.
So at the same time you have a period where you have rising wages, but infletion rising at a much faster level than wages, so you have a very hard time of people keeping up with their bills, and that again adds to the pressure cooker, and that is also a result of very much as a Vietnam war. You know, there was a period when it was being blamed on the movement of the Anchovy and the Anchovs moved and therefore the fish didn't have anything to eat, so the
price of fish went up. And that was the cause of America's inflation.
I'm not kidding.
I saw it on television, but it gradually became clear that it was the result of the war, and especially because Lindon Johnson had decided that there was would not have any kind of tax increase or welfare state cuts while they were increasing war spending. And so the inflation got higher and higher and reached a crescendo by the end of the decade, and that put in normous economic pressures on workers.
For the leaderships of the trade unions, these unruly young workers, their wildcat strikes and their sabotage was a problem.
The official leadership of the labor movement was already quite seen. There was very little effort to bring younger workers into the structure of the labor movement, and there was growing hostility by the established labor leadership to these young troublemakers.
And they were making trouble for them. For one thing, they were undermining their fairly.
Cozy relationship with the employers, and this was all aggravated by the generational conflict that pervaded the society. So they were often regarded as just the youngsters with too much prison vinegar and no desire to work.
And this became compounded.
By more directly political issues as workers, especially younger workers, began turning against the Vietnam War, and as especially African American workers became a larger part of the workforce.
I remember interviewing young workers.
In Detroit and they said, well, we all work on the night shift because they form and go home and they'll bother us. I think that the idea was that this was a poor workforce. They didn't have any pride in their work, and they didn't have any pride in their union. And the only saying problem was there wasn't a lot you could do about it, because they needed the workers. There was a labor shortage that was part of the consequences and causes of the inflation, so they needed the warm bodies.
We hear from a number of these workers in Detroit in our podcast episode sixty one to sixty two about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As the war progressed, attitudes of many workers towards the war itself started to change significantly, as especially early on, the strikes taking place were not political strikes against the war as such.
Well initially they are definitely not anti war strikes, and the working class support for the war nineteen sixty three nineteen sixty five is actually very widespread, and sometimes there was militant.
Support for the war.
There were union led demonstrations occasional instances of violence against anti war protesters by so called hard hats, a term usually used for construction workers. This is not large scale mass violence, but there definitely were physical attacks on anti war demonstrators.
The most famous incidents of this was the so called hard Hat Riot of nineteen seventy. Here, a violent attack on anti war protesters was organized by the leader of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, Peter J. Brennan, a Democrat, in collaboration with the then Republican administration of Richard Nixon. He coordinated an assault by two hundred construction workers armed with clubs and steel toe capped boots on
young people in New York City. The workers chanted USA Love It or Leave It, and raided pace universities, smashing windows, beating up students, tearing down red cross and church flags. They injured seventy people, most of whom were hospitalized while police sat by and watched. Brennan was later rewarded by Nixon by being made Secretary of Labor.
As the war went on, and as we get into the nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight, there is a de change in public attitudes about the war and significant turning against the war, and a huge increase in the scale of the anti war movement, so that by nineteen seventy you're having demonstrations with so many
millions of people they couldn't even count them. Were so called moratoriums, which were incidently originally conceived as general strikes, although that was toned down a bit, but a lot of what was called confrontation politics, with demonstrations that screwed the edge of violence and a steady turning of population
again the war. This started first of all with students and then very rapidly with black mildern organizations like Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, which were one of the first to take a position against the war, and then that spread very much through the rest of the Black community, and the attitudes about the war were very much shaped by the military manpower policies that were used by the government and by the military, which were essentially in previous wars.
There was a strong sense.
Of pride that America's elite sent their sons to the war, and that the working class went to war, but also the elite went to war and shared the risks and the burdens. Vietnam was a very very different story, and primarily because of the student deferment policy of the draft.
Students who were at.
That time overwhelmingly people of middle class background and were deferred they didn't have to go, whereas working class people and especially poor and African American young people were drafted in huge numbers, and this had multiple effects. Originally fed
into the patriotism traditions. Well, my sons in Vietnam and I support the war, but over time this changed, first and very much in the black community, and then with other parts of the black leadership like Martin Luther King coming out against the war and taking a leading role and opposing it, and then general disillusionment by everybody, including the white working class, especially after the Tet Offensive.
The Tet Offensive was a major offensive operation by Vietnamese anti colonial forces in the Lunar New Year of nineteen sixty eight. Tactically, the offensive was a failure and the Vietnamese suffered huge losses, but politically it ended up being a significant victory. US military propaganda had been claiming that the war was nearly over and that the Vietnamese had
almost been defeated. This offensive showed that this was a lie, and it helped significantly turn public opinion against the war itself, including amongst US service personnel. Service members who knew what was really going on. Returning home also had an impact.
As all these working class kids who had gone to Vietnam began coming back. They had concluded that it was a shuck, and the veterans against the war, veterans who opposed the war, who were overwhelmingly working class, began telling their families and their communities, this is not what you heard. This is not about protecting them. This is about all kinds of horrible things that were doing to these people, and that had a powerful effect on working class communities.
And so by the time you get to the early nineteen seventies, you have overwhelming oppositions of the war among the majority is a population, and at certain points the opposition among working class people was actually greater than all groups except ethnic minorities. Now, the officialdom of the labor supported the war from the beginning and gradually began peeling off,
especially after nineteen sixty seven. Some means joined the anti war movement and formed the Labor Against the War, fairly broad alliance, but the official leadership continued to support the war, opposed Democratic candidates who opposed the war even though they had a traditional alliance with Democrats, and George me head of the AFLCIO, was still lobbying for financial support of the war after the last American troop had been withdrawed.
With this background, some really large and significant local and national industrial disputes began to break out.
Well, as you go from ninety sixty five to nineteen seventy, you're getting more and more economic pressures. Workers are falling farther and farther behind, and at the same time, the general the spirit of revolt that we associate with the
nineteen sixties was coming into its own. So what started out as small localized actions began to express themselves on a much larger scale, and because of the divisions between rank and file workers and unions and union officials, which were always there, they were greater or lesser extent, but became very, very pronounced by the time we get to the end of the nineteen sixties.
Because of that.
Many of the large strikes took the form of wildcat strikes, and the first really big one with tremendous impact was by postal workers.
Before we get to the Postal Workers strinth, numerous local strikes by mostly black workers. For example, in Memphis, Tennessee, in February nineteen sixty eight, mostly black sanitation workers walked out.
The Memphis strike is of course most famous because it was supported very visibly by doctor Martin Luther King and it was in the course of supporting it that he was assassinated after doing one of his great speeches, and it's remembered American history as part of the story of doctor king In. But it is a very fascinating confluence of organized labor and the black movement that illustrates a lot.
Of the themes of the time.
The Memphis sanitation workers had tried repeatedly to get a union. They had support from the state, county and municipal workers union asks me it's called, and were never, however, able to get a union due to the opposition of the government that employed them, and they had notoriously terrible conditions. They were almost all black. The conditions were, as you can imagine, unsanitary but also very unsafe, and the wages meant that workers were living in poverty, even for jobs
with last time overtime. And they hadn't been trying to organize the union. The government had refused repeatedly, and then two workers were killed in an accident in the course of doing their jobs, and that brought things to a head, and the workers decided they've had a meeting and decided that they would strike, and about fifteen hundred, almost entirely black workers struck. Garbage strikes are kind of special because a lot of times who perform public services when they
strike doesn't really have that big an impact. People will go on to about their business. With a garbage strike, it doesn't take very long before the fact that the society is dependent on its workers becomes very olfactorily apparent, and big piles of garbage were piling up on the streets of Memphis. The mayor of the city, however, refused to come to any kind of settlement, and it became the workers decided that they would have a sit in, and they had a sit in, and many of them
were arrested. And in the course of this, Martin Luther King was invited to come in and give a speech in support of them, which he did. And at that time he was in the course of organizing a poor People's campaign, which was an attempt to create an interracial movement of the poor that would build an encampment in Washington, DC and then would use that as a basis for challenging a wide range of the economic problems of all
poor people. And he decided that he should take part in the Memphis strike in a regular way as a basis for showing the idea that he was trying to promulgate of a interracial coalition that would challenge the economic problems.
Of poor people and poor workers. And when he first.
Came into town, actually he looked around and saw the situation and he said, well, what we're going to do is we're all going to go on strike. He didn't used the term general strike, but he had the concept of a general strike, all working people are going to support this and go out on strike, and that kind of died out, but the strike became a kind of
national cause, celebra and wider and wider group. For example, the clergy had originally stood very aloof from it, but one hundred and fifty local ministers came together and foreigned the ministry support operation for it, and similarly with other sectors, and then dig mass meetings with tens of thousands of people and seemingly to be an irresistible movement.
In addition to a pay increase, the other main demand of the strikers was the recognition of their union after me and as such the union supported the strike. One sixteen year old black boy, Larry Payne was shot and killed by police and four thousand National Guard troops were brought into the city, but the strikers held on.
And it was in that context the doctor King was assassinated. The strike continued, but the city was afraid that it was going to have massive riots and violent response and upheaval, and so were a lot of other people, including President Lindon Johnson, who set a top sub cabinet officer to hasten a lawn and the negotiationations, and quite rapidly the
city decided that it would negotiate. It recognized the union, it gave a substantial wage increase, and laid the basis for at least beginning to turn the sanitation worker job into something with a degree of dignity, respect and renumeration. However, once they reached the agreement, it then began dragging its feet, and the workers had to threaten to go out and strike again a few weeks later in order.
To force the city to keep its word.
But in fact, in the end it didn't make a huge change in the condition of the Memphis sanitation workers, and it had a huge impact to show both the black and to white workers that we really have something in common here. There's something that is not just a
raci issue. It's also a worker's issue with labor rights issue and at the same time, the special discrimin nation against African Americans that it's such a deep part of American life, is a fundamental aspect of where people can use the labor movement and use worker organization and worker stress and struggles to try to confront.
So that was an example of a dispute for union recognition. In these disputes, unions have a very concrete interest in supporting the workers because if the workers are successful in winning their demands, then they get a union contract and the union gets a pool of stable dues paying members. But where unions have recognition contracts, their interests aren't necessarily
the same. There, the economic interest is to maintain a stable relationship with the employer to continue getting paid their dues, which are pretty much always paid by the employer. As such, where recognition exists already, unions often had a different attitude to their members. For example, in Chicago, eighty percent of bus drivers were black, but the leadership of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union was entirely white and didn't heed the
concerns of black workers. Eventually, in August nineteen sixty eight, during the Democratic National Convention, black drivers went on a wildcat strike demanding fair representation in the union, but white scab drivers kept services running in the north side of the city, and after five days the strike faulted. Another unionized industry whether the union ignored the demands of the membership was coal mining.
In the coal industry, you had one of the most extreme cases of division and opposition between mineworkers and the union leadership.
Tony Boyle and the top leadership.
Of the coal Miners Union had effectively become agents of the coal operators and essentially forbade all strikes with no authorized strikes, even where there was a complete justification for it.
As an example of the attitude of the leadership of the United Mineworkers of America. His how how Tony Boyle, the union president, described union policy quote the UMWA will not abridge the rights of mine operators in running the mines. We follow the judgment of the coal operators right or wrong end quote. In nineteen sixty eight, seventy eight workers were killed in the Farmington mind disaster in West Virginia.
Boyle called it a quote unfortunate accident end quote, and rather than criticized the company, he claimed they had a good safety record, and he refused to meet with the families of the victims.
The coal miners become desperately alienated from it, and so you developed a very large wildcat strike way if where the miners would come out of the mine and spill their water, which was necessary for survival under mining type conditions, and that was the signal for a strike, and when they did that, all other miners would honor pickup lines. That was the kind of solidarity you had in my
work in that industry. The miners' greatest grievance was the growth of black lung disease, which was a terrible industrial illness that essentially made it impossible for its fixis to breeze.
And there was a group started largely by doctors called the Black Lung Association, and it started doing studies of miners with backglong and found out that it was incredibly more prevalent than people had thought, and began setting up procedures for treating it and for identifying cases at an earlier stage.
And the union did.
Nothing to support this, nothing to try to get workers protection against it, and eventually they had a wildcat strike they shut down the entire mining industry for West Virginia.
In February nineteen sixty nine, a single miner in Riley County spilled his water out on the ground in what was a traditional appeal to begin a strike. His coworkers all walked out with him, and within five days, forty two thousand of the state's forty four thousand coal miners were on strike and.
They were demanding legislation to provide protections and treatment for miners with black line or incipient black line.
They remained out for over three weeks until the state legislature passed a bill to compensate black lung victims.
And ultimately they won and laws put a fee on every kind of call that was mined and used that to put in technology to reduce the thread of black line and to allow miners who were developing it to get out of the mines and those who already had it to have some kind of decent retirement. This was
extremely unusual in the United States. Many countries have some traditions of general strikes and political United States strikes have overwhelmingly been around industry workplace waigs an hour type issues, but this shows that under certain conditions, American workers can strike around issues that are broader than that, and where the target is not just the immediate employer, but in this case, the state legislature and state government.
As an illustration of the depth of corruption in the UNWA, which was far worse than that of unions in most other countries. Not long after this wildcat strike, Boyle had another union official who ran against him in an election, Jock Yablonski, assassinated along with his wife and daughter, But rankompar action by MINUS themselves continued in the coming months
and years. For example, in early nineteen seventy, a small number of retired and disabled members of the UMW, some of them in wheelchairs, set up picket lines at coal mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. They pulled out nearly twenty thousand miners, demanding the reverse sort of proposed government cuts to federal research facilities, which we're trying to improve health and safety for miners. The next big strike was by postal workers.
The luck out, They luck out, They luck out out, Adijn guineas.
And that's all the time we've got for this episode. Join us in part two, where we talk about strikes by postal workers, carfactory workers, health workers, teamsters, and working class women's protests. Part two is available now for early listening for our supporters on Patreon. For everyone else, it'll be out next week. It's only support from you, our listeners,
which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon dot com slash Working Class History link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad free episodes, bonus episodes,
two exclusive podcast series, discounted merch, and more. If you can't spare the cash, please don't worry about it, but do instead tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five star review on your favorite podcast app. To learn more about the US labor movement and mass strikes in US history, check out Jeremy's brilliant book Strike. It's available in our online store and you can get ten percent off it and anything else using the discount
code wh podcast links in the show notes. See the web page for this episode for more information, sources, further reading, and eventually a transcript. Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Kusumano, and Nick Williams. Our theme tune is Bella Chow. Thanks for permission to use it from Disky del Solier. 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 and catch you next time. Monto be lii vero be lii