Showing posts with label LABOR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LABOR. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *Labor's Untold Story- Remember The Centralia Martyrs of 1919

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the Centralia Massacre of 1919.

Every Month Is Labor History Month


This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Friday, September 01, 2017

From The 10th Anniversary Archives-Sadly-LABOR DAY SCORECARD 2007

COMMENTARY

CONTINUING TOUGH TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT- AND THAT IS NO LIE

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!


This writer entered the blogosphere in February 2006 so this is the second Labor Day scorecard giving his take on the condition of American labor as we approach Labor Day. And it is not pretty. That, my brothers and sisters, says it all. There was little strike action this year. The only notable action was among the grossly overworked and underpaid naval shipbuilders down in anti-union bastion Mississippi in the spring and that hard fought fight was a draw, at best. Once again there is little to report in the way of unionization to organize labor’s potential strength. American workers continue to have a real decline in their paychecks. The difference between survival and not for most working families is the two job (or more) household. In short, the average family is working more hours to make ends meet. Real inflation in energy and food costs has put many up against the wall. Moreover the bust in the housing market has wrecked havoc on working people as the most important asset in many a household has taken a beating. Once again forget the Federal Reserve Bank’s definition of inflation- one fill up at the pump confounds that noise. One does not have to be a Marxist economist to know that something is desperately wrong when at the beginning of the 21st century with all the technological advances and productivity increases of the past period working people need to work more just to try to stay even. Even the more far-sighted bourgeois thinkers have trouble with that one. In any case, here are some comments on the labor year.

*The key, as it was last year, to a turn-around for American labor is the unionization of Wal-Mart and the South. The necessary class struggle politics that would make such drives successful would act as a huge impetus for other areas of the labor movement. This writer further argues that such struggles against such vicious enemies as Wal-Mart can be the catalyst for the organization of a workers party. Okay, okay let the writer dream a little, won’t you? What has happened this year on this issue is that more organizations have taken up the call for a boycott of Wal-Mart. That is all to the good and must be supported by militant leftists but it is only a very small beginning shot in the campaign (See archives, dated June 10, 2006). National and local unions have taken monies from their coffers not for such a worthy effort as union organizing at Wal-Mart but to support one or another bourgeois electoral candidate. Some things never change.

*The issue of immigration has surfaced strongly again this year, especially in presidential politics. Every militant leftist was supportive of the past May Day actions of the vast immigrant communities to not be pushed around, although one should also note that they were not nearly as extensive as in 2006. Immigration is a labor issue and key to the struggle against the race to the bottom. While May Day and other events were big moments unless there are links to the greater labor movement this very promising movement could fizzle. A central problem is the role of the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church in the organizing effort. I will deal with this question at a latter time but for now know this- these organizations are an obstruction to real progress on the immigration issue. (See archives, dated May 1, 2006)


*If one needed one more example of why the American labor movement is in the condition it is finds itself then yet another article this summer by John Sweeney, punitive President of the AFL-CIO, and therefore one of the titular heads of the organized labor movement brings that point home in gory detail. The gist of the article is that governmental agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board, have over the years (and here he means in reality the Bush years) bent over backwards to help the employers in their fight against unionization. Well, John, surprise, surprise. Needless to say this year his so-called friends in Congress were not able to pass simple legislation to formally, at least, protect the right to unionization, the so-called employees’ bill of rights. That was a non-starter from the get-go. No militant leftist, no forget that, no militant trade unionist has believed in the impartiality of governmental boards, agencies, courts, etc. since about 1936. Yes, that is right, since Roosevelt. Wake up. Again this brings up the question of the leadership of the labor movement. And I do not mean to turn it over to Andy Stein and his Change to Win Coalition. We may be, as some theorists imagine, a post-industrial society, but the conditions of labor seem more like the classic age of rapacious capitalist accumulation in the 19th century. We need a labor leadership based on a program of labor independence and struggle for worker rights- and we need it damn soon.


THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

Sunday, September 04, 2016

Thursday, September 09, 2010

*Labor Day 2010 Roundup- The Union Victory At Continental Airways-A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a James Cannon Internet Archives on line copy of his 1934 article, The Great Minneapolis Strikes..

Markin comment:

This linked Cannon article above is still one of the best places to draw some important lessons abut the way to conduct, and win, union organizing drives. Absolutely critical, as Cannon points out, is to conduct such actions from a political prospective and not just around the narrow question of union recognition and conditions of work. Given today's massive billion dollar corporate union-busting schemes this is merely the beginning of wisdom, working class wisdom.

******
The article below is a modern-day exposition, using the long hard-fought victory for union recognition at Continental Airways as the central focal point, of all the pitfalls (and countering wise moves, as well) that trade union militants confront today. From the concerted efforts of national and international capital to keep unions out, to the seeming never-ending historic role of the labor bureaucracy in letting organizing efforts twist in the wind, to the need for inclusive transnational industry-wide unions in the face of globalization and collusion among capitalists, nationally and internationally, the major issues get a workout. For any modern political trade unionist this article is a primer of what has to be worked through in order to revitalize the labor movement. Don't mourn, organize! Old Wobble songwriter Joe Hill had it right.

****************

Workers Vanguard No. 957
23 April 2010

Union Organizing Victory at Continental Airlines


Labor scored a victory on February 12, when it was announced that the nearly 8,000 Continental Airlines fleet service workers had voted to join the Teamsters, capping a 13-year organizing campaign that involved two other unions and five previous representation elections. These workers, mainly ramp and cargo agents who perform difficult, physically demanding labor for as little as $10 per hour, had been one of the largest non-union work groups in the airline industry. After almost a decade of mass layoffs, wage and benefit cuts and onerous work-rule changes, they again braved the company’s wrath to vote for the union, this time with success.

But the election victory is only a first step. Winning a contract is far from automatic. Over the years, in order to head off the unionization of the fleet service workers, the company did everything from issuing empty promises and holding mandatory anti-union workplace meetings to cultivating a network of spies and finks and selectively disciplining union activists. The same tactics will continue to be used against union supporters in order to intimidate the workforce and stonewall on contract negotiations. It is crucial for the Teamsters—and the other unions at Continental—to defend the new members.

This defense must go hand in hand with the fight against racist discrimination. At Continental, where fleet service workers are heavily black and Latino in many stations, it was not uncommon for anonymous propaganda retailing vicious slanders against the union and its supporters, at times laced with racist appeals, to be circulated throughout the workplace. Just before voting began in January, workers had to protest flyers smearing organizers as “pimps.” Meanwhile, hangman’s nooses recently turned up in the operations area of Newark airport, a union stronghold. The lynch rope embodies a program of white supremacy and violence against black people. The union must combat such provocations if it is to consolidate itself.

The success at Continental, however fragile, stands out against the wave of setbacks labor has suffered for many years, which has been made all the worse by the current sharp economic downturn. It is a testament to the determination and sacrifice of hundreds of volunteer organizers, who struggled together for years against lies and intimidation by the company. In addition to wanting to improve their lot, many were spurred on by chronic abuse from management and derision toward their “unskilled” labor, others by blatant favoritism on the job. By all accounts, the decisive factor in this election was the organizers’ efforts in traveling throughout the Continental system to unite workers at outlying stations behind the union.

Even as Continental was turning the screws on its fleet service workers, the carrier was able to keep them from organizing for so long in no small part because the leadership of the unions—whether the Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) or the Transport Workers Union (TWU)—steered clear of anything smacking of class struggle. One missed opportunity occurred in 2005, when the IAM-represented flight attendants at Continental voted to reject concessions, putting in jeopardy the company’s goal of wresting major givebacks from all its union workers. At the time, the Machinists were attempting to organize the fleet service workers, but there was no move to link the two causes. Instead, the IAM tops foisted a new concessionary deal on the flight attendants while allowing the organizing campaign to flounder.

Divisions along craft lines and between workers at different carriers, regional affiliates and “third party” subcontractors sap the strength of the many unions in the airline industry. Mergers, such as that of Delta and Northwest and the possible Continental-United combination, have given the bosses another opening to pit workers against each other in order to impose layoffs and cutbacks. Nonetheless, workers in the industry have enormous potential power, as air transport of both passengers and cargo is vital to a modern industrial economy. What is needed is a single industry-wide union that encompasses everyone from baggage handlers to pilots.

The disastrous consequences of this atomization were laid bare in the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) strike at Northwest Airlines in 2005. Not only did the leaders of the other unions refuse to shut down Northwest in solidarity with the AMFA union, but IAM officials criminally engaged in open strikebreaking under the pretext that the AMFA craft union had carried out raiding operations against the IAM. The strike went down to a bitter defeat, and all airline workers are now worse off.

It should hardly be news to union “leaders” that when unions scab on each other, labor loses. This was seen clearly when the PATCO air traffic controllers union was smashed in 1981 by Republican president Ronald Reagan, implementing plans drawn up by the Democratic Carter administration. Responsibility for the defeat lay squarely with the leaders of the IAM, Teamsters and other unions who refused to honor the picket lines and shut down the airports. The smashing of PATCO laid the groundwork for a quarter-century of givebacks and union-busting from which labor has yet to recover.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!

At Continental, the Teamsters also represent the mechanics, whose contract became amendable on the first day of 2009, shortly before the union kicked off its bid to organize the fleet service workers. During this time, the union tops sought to bring out both work groups together only for a few rallies outside Continental’s hubs in Houston, Newark and Cleveland. In speeches at these rallies, Teamsters president James Hoffa praised the virtues of supposed “allies” in the capitalist Democratic Party, outlining a legalistic response to the company’s anti-union dirty tricks. It is the reliance on the political agents and institutions of the class enemy—the calling card of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy as a whole—that has hastened the decline in union power.

An earlier TWU organizing rally for the Continental fleet service workers in Newark featured one local Democratic Party politician after another seeking votes in the 2008 elections. The union tops spent a whopping $450 million of union members’ dues money on the 2008 bourgeois elections. Upon coming to power, Barack Obama, a Wall Street Democrat, imposed harsh austerity measures on unions, beginning with the United Auto Workers. In 1978, Jimmy Carter pushed through the deregulation of the airline industry, which opened a new round in the carriers’ war on labor. Democrat Bill Clinton would later invoke the Railway Labor Act (RLA) 14 times to ban potential rail and airline strikes. Labor must break with the Democratic Party!

During the campaign at Continental, the Teamsters and 30 other unions began lobbying for a rule change proposed by the Obama appointees on the National Mediation Board (NMB) that would bring the union certification procedures for rail and airline workers in line with those in other industries. To win union recognition by NMB precedent today, the majority of an entire work group has to favor unionization, with absent ballots automatically counted as “no” votes; the change would make it a majority of those voting. We would support such a change, as companies like Continental and Delta pad their employee rosters to rig the vote.

But the union tops’ declaration that this would “level the playing field” is a lie. The reality is that the NMB, whatever its composition, is a capitalist government agency set up to impose “class peace” and bind the unions to the bourgeois order. Under government boards like the RLA, the deck will always be stacked in favor of the bosses. If the certification rules change, so will their anti-union tactics. The unions were built through hard class struggle in defiance of labor laws and, no less today, that is what is decisive. By accepting the framework of the RLA, the union bureaucrats are reduced to tinkering with the bosses’ rules in a losing game.

Saddled with a leadership wedded to the rule of capital, airline workers have taken it on the chin for years. Amid the wave of airline bankruptcies that followed the 11 September 2001 attacks, the bosses wrung billions in wage and benefit concessions from the unions and drastically chopped their employment levels. Continental first pioneered this form of union-busting back in 1983, when then-honcho Frank Lorenzo filed for Chapter 11 in order to tear up union contracts, shed jobs and slash pay. The bloodletting has continued to this day, as the airline bosses cite “low cost” competition, fuel prices and now the faltering economy to make the workers pay for the vicissitudes of capitalism.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of ground workers, from cleaners and baggage handlers to aircraft mechanics, are employees of largely non-union “third-party” subcontractors, and many domestic routes are now flown by regional affiliates, where workers typically earn far less. At the outset of the organizing campaign, there were 15,000 fleet service workers at Continental. After the union won certification, Continental announced plans to outsource 150 ramp jobs at seven stations serviced by its regional partners. The increasing use of subcontractors poses a broader task for the airline unions: organizing the unorganized throughout the industry, whether at the carriers or subcontractors, and winning equal pay for equal work, no matter the employer. But rather than fighting to organize the workers at the “third party” outfits, the union bureaucrats denounce these workers as “scabs.”

At a 2008 national summit on outsourcing, jointly sponsored by the Teamsters and the “Business Travel Coalition,” union leaders representing airline mechanics urged government officials to strengthen “war on terror” security measures at third-party repair stations. A taste of what this would mean in practice was shown by the government’s 2005 anti-immigrant raid on the non-union TIMCO maintenance facility in Greensboro, North Carolina, during which 27 mechanics were arrested and later deported. As well, the bureaucrats pushed increased U.S. government inspections and protectionist legislation directed at the overseas shops. It is in the vital interest of the labor movement to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Few industries are as conducive to coordinating joint struggle as air transport. But in his speeches to Continental workers, Hoffa promoted “save American jobs” chauvinism in support of a Congressional moratorium on foreign outsourcing. Whether by blaming mechanics abroad for jobs lost or railing against Mexican truckers, Hoffa & Co. poison the perspective of international labor solidarity. With the European flag carriers gunning for their unions, strikes have recently broken out in Britain, Germany and Italy. In March, the Teamsters and TWU made headlines for meeting with an official of the union representing British Airways flight attendants, shortly before they went on strike. But no labor action was taken in the U.S. to back up the strikers; the Teamsters did not mobilize its ground workers to refuse to work the arriving scab aircraft.

Despite the hard times, there are indications that airline workers are ready to test the waters. Those who remain at the major carriers are still heavily unionized and many are eager to restore what was lost over the last decade. At American Airlines, where nine union contracts are in mediation, the flight attendants and fleet service workers filed with the NMB for a release from talks, the first step in a long process to a potential strike under the RLA. As is typically the case, the request was denied. Other carriers, among them Continental, United, US Airways and Southwest, have also stalled for years on reaching agreements with their unions. What is necessary is for the unions to fight together in a common front against the bosses and their government.

Airline unions embody a strategic concentration of integrated union power in the “open shop” South, where a massive organizing drive is key for labor to regain its strength. In fact, with the victory at Houston-based Continental, the next major arena for organizing at the airlines is Atlanta-based Delta on the heels of its merger with Northwest. A large number of the non-union subcontractors in the industry are also headquartered in the South, where “right to work” laws have historically been enforced by racist terror. To organize the South will require a labor leadership that actively champions black rights and fights in the interests of all the oppressed.

The way forward is the forging of a class-struggle leadership committed to mobilizing union power independently of and in opposition to the capitalist politicians and government boards. It was just such a leadership, composed of Trotskyists and their sympathizers, that helped build the Teamsters into a powerful union. In 1934, these militants set out to organize every truck driver and warehouse worker industry-wide in Minneapolis. First to win union recognition and then a contract, the city’s proletariat and its allies were mobilized in mass strike action involving pitched battles with scabs, cops and the National Guard. In assessing the strikes, James P. Cannon, a founder and leader of American Trotskyism, noted:

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions....

“They prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”

—The History of American Trotskyism (1944)

The airline industry under capitalism is a paradigm of irrationality. The current air traffic control system is based on World War II-era radar technology. Many pilots are paid poverty-level wages, with some even living off food stamps. Critical maintenance inspections are routinely put off by the bosses, courting death and disaster. The contradiction between the inherently international character of the industry and how it is operated by nationally-based rival carriers is a crystalline example of the generalized anarchy of capitalist production for profit. To end this capitalist chaos requires a collectivized economy with centralized planning, which will come about only through socialist revolution. What’s needed is to build a workers party that, standing at the head of the exploited and oppressed, fights for the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of a workers government.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

*From The "Massachusetts Jobs With Justice" Website- Victory At Shaw's

Click on the headline to link to a Massachusetts Jobs With Justice Website entry- Victory At Shaw's.

Markin comment:

This was a tough battle and as we all know ratifying and signing a union contract is just an "armed truce" in the class struggle. Nevertheless the resolution of this many week old strike is a "victory" in the sense that the "fired" workers are back and the terms, given today's tough times, are not onerous. The struggle continues

Thursday, January 07, 2010

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Ralph Chaplin's "Solidarity Forever"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger performing "Solidarity Forever".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Solidarity Forever Lyrics- Ralph Chaplin

Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the union makes us strong

When the union's inspiration
through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.


They have taken untold millions
that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle
not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power;
gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.


In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies,
magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old
For the Union makes us strong.


This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)

Sunday, January 03, 2010

*From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- On The Early Concept Of The Labor Party In The United States

Click on the title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive's copy of his 1956 letter to historian Theodore Draper about key events in the early days of the American communist movement in the 1920s of which he was a central leader.

Markin comment:

This letter is mainly of interest to show the on-going struggle of our communist movement toward the creation of some kind of independent, mass workers party in this country. Of course, in the final analysis a revolutionary labor party committed to a communist program would be the easiest way to go about the problem, but history does not always work out that way.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Labor's Untold Story-Labor's World War II "No Strike" Pledge

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for World War II on the homefront (America) thta contains some information about labor. More,much more on this subject later.

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

*Labor's Untold Story-John L. Lewis And The Limits Of Trade Union (Sometimes)Militancy

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for "labor leader" and United Mineworkers Union President John L. Lewis. His career exemplifies the contradictions of the labor movement in America, as well as the perfidious role of the labor bureaucracy. If that story sounds familiar, well, it is from the likes of old Brother Lewis that they got their "skills".

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Monday, September 07, 2009

*Labor Day Scorecard- 2009-RIP

Click on title to link to UE site for information about one of the few highlights of the last year in labor- the Republic Window workers sit-in staged in order to get what they were owed from a company going out of business.

Markin comment:

Keep that sit-in idea in mind for the future. Otherwise, given the severe depression-like economic situation, including massive lay-offs in all branches of industry the labor situation over the last year has made that RIP in this entry's headline is more than a little too real. The class struggle continues but, hell, we are, and have, taken it on the chin for far too long. We must preserve the working class, at least long enough to struggle for a society that will get rid of classes, in the face of these economic efforts to turn it to dust. That said- follow Joe Hill's advice. "Don't Mourn, Organize!".

The only other newsworthy labor struggle, although it now seems in the far distant past, was the hard fought Boeing strike in the late Fall of 2008. Some information on that struggle is posted below.

Commentary

October 20, 2008

Here is a little update (as of October 10) on the situation with the Boeing strikers from "Workers Vanguard". With the presidential campaign sucking all of the air out of the political universe this important strike is getting short shrift by the major media. I also have listened to a more recent interview with striking workers whose spirits are still high and who fully expect to continue on the lines until Christmas or later, if they have to. The call for a total shutdown of Boeing, creation of one company-wide union and more acts of solidarity on the lines by other unions are called for now. Again, Victory to the Boeing Strikers!


****

IAM Boeing Strikers Hold Firm

OCTOBER 6—Against the backdrop of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, the monthlong strike by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) against Boeing has rippled across the globe. Already the aerospace giant has missed delivery of more than 30 commercial aircraft, forcing airlines internationally to postpone the launch of new service. Many of its thousands of parts suppliers, some as far away as Japan, have slowed or stopped production. With Boeing the nation’s largest exporter, the effects of the strike could be felt well beyond the aerospace industry.

This strike, like any labor battle, is a confrontation between the capitalist bosses and the working class. Having raked in $4 billion in the last year alone, Boeing hopes to further jack up its massive profits by forcing a giveback contract on the union with no restrictions on the bosses’ ability to outsource work. Boeing is targeting new-hires, threatening to eliminate their pensions and retiree medical benefits altogether, and similarly wants to cut off survivor benefits. Its wage proposal is grossly inadequate, with more than 4,000 IAM members currently earning less than $30,000 a year because of a tiered wage structure.

But the Machinists remain firmly resolved to stay out and are in a position to win. The aircraft manufacturer had been scurrying to build planes in the face of volatile oil prices, slowing economies and a shakeout among the companies that finance aviation sales. The strike at Boeing points the way toward unleashing the social power of the working class at a time when the economic crisis, including the bipartisan federal bailout of Wall Street, threatens working people with yet another big hit in the pocketbook.

A victorious IAM Boeing strike could reverberate throughout the labor movement. Recognizing the Machinists’ struggle as their own, members of other unions have joined the picket lines, with union pilots at Alaska Airlines refusing to fly a new 737 from Boeing Field to Sea-Tac airport. In marked contrast to the bureaucrats’ plans to keep pickets small, a number of IAM members are putting in extra duty on the picket lines. However, other workers at Boeing are going into the plants. As a result, Boeing has sent out ten planes to customers during the strike, and engineers have continued to prepare the 787 Dreamliner for ground tests. Workers Vanguard supporters were told by Machinists on Seattle-area picket lines that the engineers, whose union is in contract negotiations with Boeing, and Teamsters are “required” by contract to work. The unions should carry out joint negotiations and strike action as a first step to forming one industrial union. “No-strike” contract clauses are examples of earlier sellouts by the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which swears off hard class struggle, substituting for it the lie of a partnership between labor and capital. All Boeing workers would be in a stronger position if they followed the union principle: picket lines mean don’t cross!

Many striking workers expressed concerns about outsourcing and job security. The response of the IAM tops has been to try to pit workers here against those overseas through protectionist campaigns to keep “our jobs” in the U.S., which fuel bigotry toward foreign, especially Asian, and immigrant workers. This chauvinist poison also is the stock in trade of the capitalist Democratic Party. As a norm, the capitalists will move to exploit cheaper labor where it is available. What is necessary is a head-on struggle against the bosses. This includes forging a fighting alliance of Boeing workers internationally and launching a serious drive to organize Boeing’s non-union suppliers in the U.S. To unlock labor’s power, there must be a political struggle within the unions for a class-struggle leadership to replace the bureaucrats who chain workers to the Democratic Party. Victory to the IAM Boeing strike!

******

Markin Commentary-On The Ending Of The Boeing Strike

News has come in that the IBM machinists who have been strike against Boeing for the past several weeks have ratified their new contract. Let’s face it, the way we should look at any labor contract settlement short of workers state power is as an armed truce. Whether the contract can be called a victory, a standoff or a defeat depends on the specific circumstances surrounding the contract. From initial appearances this contract looks like at least a standoff, if not a small victory especially on the question of outsourcing. In today’s dismay labor market and with the general economy in a tailspin this is to the good. A favorable combination of Boeing’s backlog of orders for its new line of airplanes, its huge profits and the union rank and file’s willingness to go on strike for an extended period to get a decent contract helped. That willingness to struggle on the union’s part is the key lesson we militants can take away from these proceedings. Of course, as always with any labor contract we come back to that question of the armed truce mentioned above. That will determine the ultimate value of this deal. Forward.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

*Why Marxist Support The Employee Free Choice Act- The View From The Labor Left

Click on title to link to AFL-CIO web site for more information about this campaign. All labor can agree on the need to support this issue. And see, for all those who thought I was an inveterate 'dual unionist' I can play nice with the AFL-CIO-when they are right.

Commentary

Frankly, the Employee Fair Choice Act (EFCA), as written, is not a piece of legislation that a workers party representative in the United States Congress (if we had one) would fight to enact. Our proposal would, obviously, be infinitely more labor-friendly. That said, we are nevertheless very, very interested in seeing legislation passed that makes it easier for labor organizations to unionize the unorganized. Thus, we critically support the current legislation with the caveat that we are not in favor of its included arbitration language , binding or otherwise, for the simple reason that as we organize mass unions we may very well want to take our fight to the ‘streets’.

I pass on the following entry “Why Marxists Support The EFCA” from “Workers Vanguard” that may be of interest to the radical public. I place myself in political solidarity with many of the points made there.Two points should be noted in reading the article. Read the part about the petition campaign around this issue supported by the two labor federations carefully (the critically supportable AFL-CIO one and the not supportable Change To Win Federation one). Secondly, remember our labor history- we have had our victories won, few and far between as they have been, mainly in the streets and in the plants not in the courts or the governmental offices. The backrooms of those institutions are where we have suffered many of our defeats. Take up the fight for this legislation in that spirit. Organize the unorganized! Organize the South! Organize Wal-Mart!

Guest Commentary

Workers Vanguard No. 929
30 January 2009

Organize the Unorganized!

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!

Why Marxists Support the EFCA

No Reliance on the Capitalist State


With Democrat Barack Obama in the White House, union officials, having invested $450 million to put him and other Democrats into office, are now eager for “payback.” At the top of their wish list is passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), also known as the “card-check bill,” which would provide for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to recognize a union without a certification election when a majority of employees at a workplace sign union authorization cards. This long-stalled bill to ease union organizing is “the most important issue that we have,” according to AFL-CIO head John Sweeney.

Notwithstanding a slight upswing in union membership in the first half of last year, the strength of the unions has been on the wane for decades. As of 2007, unions represented 7.5 percent of the nation’s private sector workforce, with the total union membership rate hovering around 12.1 percent, down from 35 percent in the 1950s. With the recession deepening, the capitalist ruling class is moving rapidly to attempt to further gut the unions, beginning with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Revitalizing the labor movement is all the more necessary as the bosses try to make working people pay for this crisis.

Dead set on keeping the unions out, conservative politicians, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and others, including large employers that have engaged in union-busting like Wal-Mart, have launched a counteroffensive against the EFCA. The headline of a New York Times (9 January) article noted, “Bill Easing Unionizing Is Under Heavy Attack.” Indeed, in 2008, business groups spent a combined $50 million on anti-EFCA ads and are now gearing up to spend an additional $200 million in the coming months. With the bosses engaged in an all-out propaganda offensive against it and the unions waging a major campaign to have it enacted, the EFCA represents a referendum on unionization.

Even though it contains an arbitration clause that we oppose, we support the EFCA, as it allows workers to organize and form unions through a streamlined card-check system, bypassing the prolonged balloting process. At the same time, the EFCA in its current form contains a contradiction. Disputes over the first contract at a newly organized worksite could be referred to government arbitrators if after 90 days of negotiations either the union or the employer invokes the option of federal mediation and then at least 30 days of mediation fail to produce an agreement. We oppose the arbitration provision because it is a form of government intervention into the unions’ disputes with the bosses. While the purpose of such a provision is to curtail class struggle, there are no legal prohibitions in the EFCA to prevent strike action during this four-month period.

Both partisans and opponents of the bill claim that its passage will bring millions of unorganized workers into the unions. In reality, the balance of forces in struggle will ultimately determine the success or failure of any unionization campaign. To the extent that the EFCA affords the possibility of strengthening the working class by organizing unions, workers should make use of it. But at the same time workers must beware the EFCA’s pitfalls and not rely on it or the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the capitalist class. Last month, workers at the Smithfield Foods hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, voted to unionize after a more than 15-year organizing battle. Union officials credited a court-imposed “neutrality” agreement for the success, while the company spokesman claimed the result shows “that the union can win without a card check.” In fact, the key was the combativity of the workers, who engaged in walkouts and other protests to win union recognition (see “UFCW Organizes Smithfield Plant,” WV No. 927, 2 January).

In 1981, the government smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in the most massive union-busting attack since before the CIO was founded in 1935. That strike could have been won, but the union tops refused to call out airline workers to shut down the airports. As we wrote in “Labor’s Gotta Play Hardball to Win” (WV No. 349, 2 March 1984): “No decisive gain of labor was ever won in a courtroom or by an act of Congress. Everything the workers movement has won of value has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in hard-fought struggle, on the picket lines, in plant occupations. What counts is power.” For a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized!

Break with the Democrats!

Labor is on the ropes, and the criminal policies of the union tops are in no small part responsible. These misleaders have squandered the fighting strength of the unions by shackling them to the bosses’ state, especially through the instrument of the Democratic Party. At every turn, the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class” demonstrate their allegiance to the rule of capital, promoting “cooperation” with the employers and policing the workforce on the bosses’ behalf. Meanwhile, this bureaucratic layer enjoys access to privileges and perks.

The labor bureaucrats long ago renounced the class-struggle methods that originally built the unions: mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts. This refusal to carry out a hard-fought battle to organize the unorganized is now a dagger aimed at the unions. In the auto industry, the government’s proposed bailout requires the UAW to agree to slash its wages and benefits to the levels of its counterparts in the large and growing number of non-union, mainly foreign-owned plants in the U.S. Even more, the government has reserved the right to revoke the loans to the automakers if the UAW were to strike at any time. In the face of this declaration of war, the UAW tops readily rolled over.

Worried about the dramatic drop in union membership and corresponding declines in union economic and political power, the sellouts atop the unions are at the same time committed to playing by the bosses’ rules. That’s why their primary recourse is to pressure the government to modify those rules. But capitalist “labor law” is ultimately designed to hold the unions captive to the bourgeois order. The war chest wasted on electing representatives of the class enemy last year was never considered by the union tops for strike funds or organizing drives. One-quarter million union members were mobilized for voter turnout, not to build picket lines or engage in strikes.

Obama’s support for the EFCA was a major selling point for the union tops. He was a cosponsor of the bill in the Senate in 2007 when it was common knowledge that the EFCA would not survive a Bush veto. The EFCA passed the House in a symbolic party-line vote, but was filibustered in the Senate. The backing this bill received from Obama and other Democrats was in the service of undermining class struggle while providing a means to increase the number of dues-paying union members, representing in the Democrats’ eyes more money and manpower for future election campaigns under the watch of the pro-capitalist labor tops. Although Democrats posture as “friends of labor,” their goal is the same as the Republicans: advancing the interests of capital.

But different sections of the bourgeoisie do not always agree. One ranking Chamber of Commerce official has promised “Armageddon” in the battle over the EFCA, which the founder of Home Depot referred to as “the demise of civilization.” Businesses have lined up blue-chip lobbying firms to block it and legal scholars to prove that it is unconstitutional. In the face of this opposition and the economic crisis, the new administration has dropped hints that it intends to hold off on the EFCA and is open to watering it down. When asked about the bill during her Labor Secretary confirmation hearing on January 9, Hilda Solis would not commit to supporting a specific method for union certification. A week later, Obama said of the EFCA in an interview with the Washington Post (15 January): “I will certainly listen to all parties involved, including from labor and the business community, which I know considers this the devil incarnate. I will listen to all parties involved and see if there are ways that we can bring those parties together and restore some balance.”

The labor tops are so beholden to the Democratic administration that some are now second-guessing whether to push right away for the EFCA for fear of alienating Obama. Recently, Obama’s transition team signaled that it would prefer dealing with a single labor federation, as opposed to both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition, which split apart three and a half years ago. In response, the presidents of 12 of the nation’s largest unions immediately jumped into talks to reunite the American labor movement. There are no principled differences between the two federations; their basic strategy is class collaboration, not class struggle. What the labor movement desperately needs is a new, class-struggle leadership.

Binding Arbitration Is a Trap!

In addition to opposing card checks, the bosses are outraged by the arbitration clause in the EFCA, as they cringe at the thought of someone else dictating the terms of employment. Stonewalling on first-contract negotiations after a union is recognized is one common means for employers to derail organizing drives. It is, in fact, the labor tops who wrote the arbitration clause into the EFCA as a means to “guarantee” a first contract without having to engage in struggle.

In his essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940), written at the time of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Trotsky observed: “In the United States the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state, and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.” From Trotsky’s time through today, the slavish dependence of the trade-union officials on state arbitration of labor disputes has only grown deeper.

Tailing right behind the bureaucrats are left groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Demonstrating fully their willingness to accept the capitalist state as a “neutral” arbiter in the class struggle, the ISO applauds the EFCA’s arbitration clause as a means to “speed up negotiation of a first union contract” (Socialist Worker online, 30 March 2007). Binding arbitration is a trap meant to head off strikes and leave workers with no say in the outcome of the negotiations. It is no accident that the dispute over the last contract for New York City transit workers, which sparked a powerful three-day strike in 2005, ended up in arbitration after angry union members rejected the sellout strike settlement.

In “What’s In Store in the Obama Era?” (Socialist Worker online, 20 January), ISO leader Lance Selfa takes stock of the “full-out opposition” to the EFCA, adding: “As this opposition arises, it will put Obama and the Democrats to the test.” At bottom, the aim of the ISO is little more than that of the union tops: to resurrect Democratic Party liberalism and to make Obama “fight.” We say: Break with the Democrats! For a workers party!

The EFCA and the Working Class

A coalition of 500 business associations has started to run ads seeking to discredit the EFCA as “undemocratic” for taking away the “secret ballot.” The truth is that certification elections are commonly drawn out for months or even years, including when Democrats sit on the labor boards, giving the bosses time to intimidate and terrorize pro-union workers. Employers fire workers in a quarter of all organizing campaigns, threaten workers with plant closings or outsourcing in half and employ mandatory one-on-one anti-union meetings in two-thirds of unionization drives. All these tactics are illegal, but the bosses almost always get away with it or receive a slap on the wrist from the NLRB. From 1999 to 2007, 86,000 workers filed charges over anti-union firings—few ever get their jobs back.

This union-busting is often backed up by the forces of the bosses’ state and racist reaction. Historically, organizing in the open shop South meant confrontations with county sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1995, an organizing drive at a Perdue poultry plant in Dothan, Alabama, failed after a KKK-style cross-burning at the plant. Shortly before an unsuccessful 1997 certification vote at Smithfield in Tar Heel, “N----r go home” was painted on the side of the union trailer. Recently, anti-immigrant workplace raids by la migra, such as at Agriprocessors in Iowa, have helped break up union organizing campaigns. There will be no effective defense against union-busting unless the labor movement becomes a powerful champion of black rights and takes up the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

The reformists in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have actually lined up with the Chamber of Commerce and its ilk in advocating NLRB-run elections over card-checks as “the most effective way for workers to express what they want regarding unionization” (Militant, 9 April 2007). The SWP goes so far as to put a positive spin on union-busting, writing, “Winning such a vote in face of company intimidation efforts means the rank-and-file has become convinced, through its involvement in the struggle, of the need to organize.”

In practice, today most workers gain union recognition through card checks. About 300,000 workers joined unions through card checks in 2007 whereas some 60,000 workers gained membership through elections. Normally for a company to respect the card check, it demands of the union concessions, including sweetheart contracts and “neutrality” agreements where the union foregoes the right to attack or even criticize the company. For the union bureaucrats, such compromises are business as usual.

To broaden support for the EFCA, the two main labor federations have circulated petitions within the unions. The AFL-CIO petition states: “This crucial legislation will protect workers’ freedom to choose a union and bargain, without management intimidation.” The third, and final, provision of the EFCA would increase the penalties for “unfair labor practices” by the bosses. But it is a dangerous illusion to think that the EFCA would safeguard union organizing efforts against employer interference. The union-busting industry of lawyers, spies and security goons rakes in $4 billion annually. If the rules for union certification were to change, so would their tactics. Already there is movement to make it easier to decertify the unions.

The fundamental purpose of the labor boards is never that of enforcing the rights of workers but rather maintaining “labor peace,” which entails preventing strikes or settling them quickly if they break out. These government boards are in effect strikebreaking agencies even if they occasionally rule against the bosses. Moreover, the EFCA will not prevent employers from unleashing their panoply of union-busting laws and tactics against labor struggle.

While the AFL-CIO petition also speaks of the “middle class,” a term meant to blur the line between labor and capital, union militants could sign it and note their objections. Change to Win’s petition obliterates this line by stating that the EFCA is “about preserving the American Dream and ensuring that the economy works for all of us.” This is a lie about and support for capitalism, and should not be signed. In fact, the capitalist system is based on the exploitation of the wage slave, as Karl Marx explained in Wage-Labour and Capital (1849): “A rapid increase of capital is equivalent to a rapid increase of profit. Profit can only increase rapidly if the price of labour, if relative wages, decrease just as rapidly.”

Trotskyists and the 1935 Wagner Act

Especially since the days of the New Deal, the trade-union bureaucracy has perpetuated the myth that the right to organize was won as the result of the passage of liberal labor legislation. Enacted at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) supposedly “guaranteed” the “right to organize and bargain collectively” in its Section 7(a), added as a sop to the craft AFL leadership. Seizing on it, labor organizers urged workers that “the President wants you to join the union.” Intersecting the biggest strike wave since the early ’20s, these organizing drives met with a tremendous response, with many taking these promises as good coin. However, the open shop was not smashed, and in most industries NIRA government/company codes were drawn up that simply ratified existing conditions. As a result of the failure by the AFL tops to strike against such codes, tens of thousands of workers deserted the unions they had only recently joined.

In 1934, three victorious citywide organizing strikes set the stage for the rise of CIO industrial unionism: one led by Communists in San Francisco, the Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, and a general strike led by left-wing socialists in Toledo. The Trotskyists in Minneapolis mobilized the city’s proletariat and its allies in mass struggle, including pitched battles with scabs, cops and National Guard troops. In assessing the strikes, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt’s Labor Board; they weren’t fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal ‘friend of labor’ president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis win a few cents more an hour. They weren’t deluded even by the fact that there was at that time in Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Governor, presumed to be on the side of the workers.”

Intent on preventing the new wave of labor organizing from falling under the control of union militants and “reds,” the Roosevelt administration moved quickly to set up a government-sanctioned mechanism to subordinate the unions to the capitalist state. The result was the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, hailed by union officials as the “Magna Carta of Labor” to this day. The EFCA, like most other federal labor laws, is written as an amendment to the Wagner Act, which established the NLRB and the framework for sweeping federal regulation of labor relations and empowered the government to carve out bargaining jurisdictions and run certification elections.

During the last big push by the union tops for labor law reform some three decades ago, we wrote: “Trotskyists opposed the Wagner Act as a threat to labor’s ability to strike” (“California Farm Labor Bill Threatens Right to Strike,” WV No. 128, 8 October 1976). In fact, as far as we know, the Trotskyists neither explicitly supported nor opposed the Wagner Act. An October 1935 New International article by John West (James Burnham) argued:

“Marxists must be vigilant with respect to it [the Wagner Act]. An attitude of simple denunciation of the Bill as a strike-breaker is not sufficient, and would serve only to confuse union workers and to isolate the Marxists. It must be connected with the lessons of Section 7a, which might be summarized: Take anything it offers, but never depend on it; depend only on independent class activity.”

Section 9(c) of the Wagner Act provided that the NLRB could certify unions by relying on a secret ballot election or “any other suitable method.” One commonly used “other suitable method” at first was card checks. But actually organizing required the mobilization of millions in militant class struggle, sparked by the 1936-37 Flint sit-down auto strikes. The CIO tops, including social democrats and Stalinists, betrayed the evident opportunity to forge an independent workers party by tying the unions to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and the New Deal.

By the late 1930s, the NLRB was less and less willing to grant card-check recognition. In the wake of the post-World War II strike wave, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes, allowed states to pass “right to work” laws and demanded loyalty oaths from union officials. A majority of Congressional Democrats voted for this union-busting law. The new provisions were used in short order to strangle strikes and purge militants and “reds” from the unions. This law, as well as later NLRB and court rulings, also made card-check recognition far more difficult. Belying the trade-union bureaucrats’ nominal opposition to Taft-Hartley, an AFL-CIO fact sheet on the EFCA states, “just as the NLRB is required to seek a federal court injunction against a union whenever there is reasonable cause to believe the union has violated the secondary boycott prohibitions in the [Taft-Hartley] act, the NLRB must seek a federal court injunction against an employer whenever there is reasonable cause to believe the employer has discharged or discriminated against employees…during an organizing or first contract drive.”

In the 1930s, the thousands of militants who considered themselves communists propelled the great industrial union organizing drives forward. Motivated by their ideals of building a society where those who labor rule, they knew that spiking the bosses’ attacks on black people and immigrants was crucial. The fight to organize the unorganized could be the crucible in which a revolutionary workers party is forged. Such a party is indispensable to uniting the working class and leading it in the revolutionary overthrow of the bosses’ rule.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

FDR And The New Deal- The Last Gasp The Last Time

DVD REVIEW

FDR: American Experience, four part series, PBS, 1994


The economic news of the past several months has created a virtual cottage industry of commentators whose comparative references to the Great Depression of the 1930’s has made it almost a commonplace. Also common are comparisons of the tasks that confronted the subject of this documentary, the 32nd President of The United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR), and those that confront the 2008 election victor the President-elect Barack Obama, who seemingly has that same kind of broad mandate as FDR did to make major economic moves. Thus, as is my habit, I went scurrying to find a suitable documentary that would refresh my memory about the decisive role that FDR played back then as the last gasp “savior” of the American capitalist economic system.

An added impetus to do that search was the recent passing of the legendary oral historian, Studs Terkel, whose bread and butter was to capture the memories of the generation that was most influenced by FDR’s policies and whose oral histories have been the subject of many reviews of late by this writer. A biographic refresher on FDR thus seemed to be written in the stars. I found, for a quick overview of this subject, the perfect place to start is this American Experience four- part production on the life, loves, trials, tribulations and influence of this seminal American bourgeois politician.

That said, if one is looking for an in-depth analysis of the role that FDR played in saving the capitalist system in America in the 1930’s, or the concurrent rise of the imperial presidency under his guidance, or the increased role of the federal government through its various executive agencies or the role of his “brain trust” (Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickles, etc.) in formulating policy then one should, and eventually must, look elsewhere. However, if one wants to capture visually the sense of the times and FDR’s (and of his wife Eleanor’s, who is worthy of separate series in her own right) influence on them then this is the right address.

As is almost universally the case with American Experience productions one gets a technically very competent piece of work that moreover gets a boost here from the always welcome grave narrative skills of David McCullough, who as a historian in his own right has a grasp of the sense of such things. Of course, as always with PBS you get more than the necessary share of “talking heads” commentators who give their take on the meaning of each signpost in the long FDR trail to the presidency and beyond. Of note here is the commentary of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin whose recent book on the Lincoln presidency “Team Of Rivals” has received much notice in the lead-up to the Obamiad.

And what are those signposts of FDR’s life that might have given an inkling that he was up to the task of the times? Other than the question of class (in his case upper class, old New York money) FDR’s appetite to be president is not an unfamiliar one, if somewhat unusual from someone of that New York set at the turn of the 20th century. Except for this little twist in FDR’s case- when one’s relative, if a distant one, was an idolized Teddy Roosevelt who was President as he entered into manhood. That, at least as presented in this film, is a key source of FDR’s presidential “fire in the belly” drive.

The unfolding of the saga of FDR’s “fire in the belly” ambitions takes up the first two parts of the series. Here we find out the early family history, the various schoolboy pursuits, the private schools, the obligatory Ivy League education (Harvard), the courtship of the sublime distant cousin (and Teddy favorite) Eleanor, his first stab at elective office in New York, his apprenticeship in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson presidency, his little extramarital love affairs, his selection as Vice Presidential candidate in 1920, the seemingly political career-ending bout with polio and the fight against its physical restrictions, the successful efforts to hide this from the public, thereafter the successful return to politics as Governor of New York and, finally, the nomination and election as the 32nd President of The United States. Plenty of material for thought here.

But that is only prelude. FDR faced a capitalist system that had like today 'lost', although for different specific reasons, its moorings and was in need of deep repair (or overthrow). It is not unfair, I do not believe, to say as I have said in the headline of this entry that FDR’s effort was the last gasp effort of capitalism to survive (although his fellow capitalists and their intellectual, political and media hangers-on shortsightedly called him a “traitor to his class”). The most glaring contrast in the whole documentary is that between an overwhelmed President Hoover’s abject defeatism and FDR’s strident confidence (a like comparison could be made, at least of the defeated presidential part, with the current Bush).

Although we now know that the ultimate way out of that Great Depression was World War II in 1933 FDR applied, piecemeal and as triage, a whole series of economic programs to jump start the system, most famously the National Recovery Act (NRA, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). FDR’s first two terms were basically a fight to find ways, virtually any ways to keep the economy moving and get people back to work. He was running out of time and the public’s patience when the rumblings of WWII came on to the horizon in Europe.

The hard-bitten fight by FDR to get America into the European War against a public opinion that was essentially isolationist, mainly as a result of the WWI experience, takes up the last part of the series. The various efforts to surreptitiously aid England are highlighted here, including the various visits by and with British war time leader Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the fight to get America militarily mobilized including imposition of a military draft, the various conferences of the Big Three (the Soviet Union being the third) to carve up the post-war world and FDR’s final illness round out the story. In our house when I was a kid the mere mention of the name FDR was said, by one and all, with some reverence for his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression and for guiding it to victory in war. For a long time this writer has not had that youthful reverence but if you want to see why my parents and why I as a youth whispered that name with reverence watch here.