In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- From "Boston IndyMedia"-The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill

The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill
by anonymous
(No verified email address) 05 Jul 2011

July 5, 2011

Review, The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon, by William M. Adler

Review by Richard Myers

Big Bill Haywood used to call revolutionary industrial unionism, the organizing philosophy of the Industrial Workers of the World, “socialism with its working clothes on.” Writing for the International Socialist Review from his prison cell, Joe Hill offered an example of such hands-on belief. Hill had recently arrived in Utah from the docks of California where many of the jobs were temporary. Therefore it was “to the interest of the workers ‘to make the job last’ as long as possible,” Hill wrote in his article, “How to Make Work for the Unemployed.”

Joe continued,

"The writer and three others got orders to load up five box cars with shingles. When we commenced the work we found, to our surprise, that every shingle bundle had been cut open. That is, the little strip of sheet iron that holds the shingles tightly together in a bundle, had been cut with a knife or a pair of shears, on every bundle in the pile—about three thousand bundles in all.

"When the boss came around we notified him about the accident and, after exhausting his supply of profanity, he ordered us to get the shingle press and re-bundle the whole batch. It took the four of us ten whole days to put that shingle pile into shape again. And our wages for that time, at the rate of 32c per hour, amounted to $134.00. By adding the loss on account of delay in shipment, the “holding money” for the five box cars, etc., we found that the company’s profit for that day had been reduced about $300.

"So there you are. In less than half an hour time somebody had created ten days’ work for four men who would have been otherwise unemployed, and at the same time cut a big chunk off the boss’s profit. No lives were lost, no property was destroyed, there were no law suits, nothing that would drain the resources of the organized workers. But there WERE results. That’s all."

Joe Hill didn’t mention how the “accident” occurred, nor who the “somebody” was that created all of this extra work. He simply observed that it was a practical means of redistributing capitalist profit among workers, and thereby recommended such circumstances to others. It is little wonder that capitalist interests in Utah saw merit in executing Hill when they had the opportunity.

Joe Hill was a writer, a musician, a song writer, and a cartoonist. His wit was sharp, his intelligence keen, and his working class life, if typical of his time, was also exemplary. Yet in some circles, Joe Hill’s legacy has been shadowed by some level of doubt. The popular union activist – arguably the best known union icon of all time – was, after all, convicted of murder, and was subsequently executed by the state of Utah in 1915.

Biographers researching Joe Hill list numerous ways in which his trial was flawed: the judge short-circuited the jury selection process, assigning hand-picked jurors to the case in spite of defense objections. Jury instructions delivered by the judge mis-characterized Utah’s laws of evidence. Any attempt to introduce evidence that might have exonerated Joe Hill was routinely ruled out of order. Evidence that didn’t fit the facts was made to fit by prosecution attorneys given leeway to lead witnesses.

Angered that his trial had become a farce, Hill fired his first set of attorneys. The judge essentially countermanded Hill’s decision, ordering those same attorneys to remain on the case. The inability to manage his own defense caused Joe Hill a considerable amount of consternation throughout the trial, which ultimately resulted in a guilty verdict.

Hill likewise faced a stacked deck on appeal. The appeals court judges made up the pardons board as well, in essence reviewing their own decisions. Irritated by widespread criticism of the trial (including two inquiries from the president of the United States), the pardons board itself became a source of “malicious and deceitful” falsehoods about the condemned prisoner.

William M. Adler’s excellent new book, The Man Who Never Died, recounts considerable new information about the life and legacy of Joe Hill. Adler spent five years walking the ground, poking into dark places, discovering long-hidden truths. He traveled to Sweden to meet Joe’s family and research his childhood. Adler then followed Joe to America, to California and Canada, through his brief role in the Mexican Revolution, and subsequently, to the bitter end in Utah.

Like much of North America at the time, Utah was experiencing labor discontent. The Industrial Workers of the World had won a strike by railroad construction workers in the summer of 1913, and business leaders vowed that it wouldn’t happen again. Joe Hill arrived a short time later, and within a year, the popular Wobbly troubadour would be condemned to death.

Joe Hill was convicted largely on the basis of a gunshot wound he sustained the same night that a Salt Lake City grocer and his son were murdered in their store. Joe’s off-the-record explanation attributed the gunshot to a dispute over a woman.

In the aftermath of the two murders, Utah authorities arrested a hard-bitten criminal, a consummate con artist and thug known to have been engaged in a notorious and violent crime wave throughout the region. Magnus Olson did time in Folsom State Prison in California, the Nevada State Penitentiary, and at least seven other lockups during his fifty year crime spree. While the Salt Lake City police took Olson into custody on suspicion related to the grocery store shootings, they were thrown off by his artful lying and his routine use of pseudonyms. In spite of some incriminating evidence, they failed to identify Olson as the notorious wanted criminal, and they let him go.

Ironically, when they arrested Joe Hill (who resembled Olson) for the crime, Utah authorities suspected that Olson (under a different name) was the murderer. For a time they even believed Hill and Olson to be the same man. Having failed to sort out the real identities of their detainees, Utah authorities eventually settled on the union agitator as their trophy prisoner. After all, Hill’s gunshot wound seemed persuasive enough for a conviction, and they tailored their case to that one, unalterable fact.

Was the real Olson a more likely perpetrator of the grocery store murders than Joe Hill? Adler notes that during a career of some five decades, Olson “burglarized homes, retail stores, and boxcars; he blew safes, robbed banks, stole cars, committed assault and arson, and in all likelihood, had committed murder.” Adler’s painstaking research places Olson in the Salt Lake City area at the time of the murders, and most probably, in the very neighborhood where the murders occurred. The murdered grocer – a former police officer – had been attacked before, and believed that he was being targeted. Olson had a reputation for violent revenge against his adversaries, a probable motive which nicely dovetailed with the crime for which Joe Hill would die. Joe Hill was newly arrived in Utah, and no motive was established for Hill as perpetrator. In spite of uncertainty whether either of two assailants at the grocery store had been fired upon, let alone wounded, Hill’s gunshot injury was all the evidence necessary to convict him, in the view of prosecutors.

But what of Joe Hill’s alibi that he’d been shot over a woman, a person whose identity was never officially revealed to the court? Adler identifies Hilda Erickson, of Hill’s host family in Utah, as his secret love interest. Joe’s unofficial – yet far from unnoticed – sweetheart, Hilda must have been much on the minds of onlookers throughout Joe Hill’s trial. She visited Joe through the prison bars every Sunday, yet at Joe’s direction, they were careful to prevent anyone from overhearing their conversations. When Hill, facing death, was allowed a private meeting with associates, Hilda was among the few people he saw. Hilda later stood vigil at the prison when Joe was executed, and she was one of the pall bearers at his funeral.

Moving Joe Hill’s secret romantic saga from conjecture to historical record, Adler’s book includes a sensational discovery, a letter penned by Hilda Erickson describing what had happened many years before, and her account confirms Joe Hill’s ostensible alibi. She had been the sweetheart of Joe’s friend and fellow Swedish immigrant, Otto Appelquist (who had arrived in Utah before Joe). Hilda broke off that engagement after Joe arrived, leaving Otto and Joe to become rivals for her attention. One day Erickson returned to her family’s home (where the two men were boarding) to discover that Joe had a bullet wound, while Otto was making excuses for leaving – for good, as it turned out. Otto Appelquist had shot Joe in a fit of jealousy, then regretted the deed, immediately carrying Joe to a doctor. Perhaps fearful of arrest for the shooting and uncertain whether Joe would survive, Otto left at two in the morning (to find work, he had declared), and never returned. The doctor would later turn Joe in after hearing of the grocery store murders – and a sizeable reward.

Why didn’t Hilda voluntarily step forward when her testimony might have saved Joe Hill? She was just twenty years old, and there is some indication that Joe Hill advised her not to. He probably sought to shield her from publicity – an instinctive reaction for the Swede with roots in his family’s experiences in their homeland. Ever the idealist, Joe Hill may also have sought to avoid testimony that might endanger his friend, countryman, and fellow worker, Otto.

At first, Joe was convinced that Utah couldn’t convict him because he was innocent. Utah society had sought to throw off its reputation for frontier justice, and it was almost possible to believe that the rule of law meant something. Somewhat surprisingly, Joe Hill accepted implicitly the legal principle that a defendant would not be considered guilty for not testifying, and he overvalued the judicial aphorism of innocent until proven guilty.

Utah courts routinely disregarded both of these principles in the Joe Hill case. Throughout the trial it became increasingly apparent that the Utah system of justice concerned itself more with expunging a perceived evil than with justice. A prominent union man had been accused of a heinous crime, and evidence to the contrary simply wasn’t to be considered. Joe Hill realized too late the danger he was in.

The circumstances of Joe Hill’s trial in Utah – a union man accused of murder, and fighting for his life – may be put into perspective by briefly examining another murder which occurred during, and as a direct result of the trial. Inveighing against injustice, twenty-five year old Ray Horton – president of Salt Lake City’s IWW branch – publicly cursed the imperative that causes some men to wear a badge. For his vocal audacity, Horton was abruptly shot by an onlooker, and then received two more bullets in the back as he staggered away. The killer, a retired lawman, was initially jailed for first degree murder, but was held for only one day. Upon his release, the killer was hailed as a hero at the Salt Lake City Elks Club, with a luncheon in his honor. Newspapers editorialized that this cold blooded murder was justified because Horton – a union man exercising free speech – was asking for it.

That a union man in Utah may be killed with impunity for his attitude seemed to likewise play a role in Hill’s pardons board hearing. One cannot say that Joe Hill had no chance whatsoever to save his own life. His pride and his contempt for a flawed process played a significant role in his fate. As implacable as Utah justice seemed for a union man, one has the sense from the recorded pardons board discussion that even at that late date, Joe Hill might have derailed his imminent execution if he threw himself upon the mercy of the court, explaining at long last how he had been wounded by a gunshot. The board dangled a pardon or a commutation before him, but Hill insisted that wasn’t good enough, calling such a possibility “humiliating.” In response to entreaties to testify, Hill promised the pardons board that he would offer them the full story, if he was granted a new trial. The pardons board declared it had no authority to order a new trial. Having embraced the slogan “New Trial or Bust” before his many supporters, Hill told the pardons board, “If I can’t have a new trial, I don’t want anything.”

Equally stubborn in its own way, the pardons board determined that Hill would either “eat crow” (as Hill described it) in the manner that they demanded – tell all with contrition before the pardons board, with no guarantees that it would make any difference – or die.

Adler explains why Joe Hill may have seen martyrdom as a noble and worthwhile cause. Joe Hill was too idealistic, too stubborn, too proud to give them the satisfaction of breaking him. Joe Hill told the pardons board, “Gentlemen, the cause I stand for, that of a fair and honest trial, is worth more than human life – much more than mine.” In his estimation they hadn’t proved him guilty; why should he be required to prove himself innocent?

The Joe Hill that shines through this work is idealistic, unselfish, proud, impulsive, principled, protective, stubborn, and at times, a little naïve in the face of implacable authority. That the governments and courts of Salt Lake City and the state of Utah should prove themselves as intransigent and unprincipled as the captains of industry about whom he’d so often sloganeered, may have caught Joe by surprise. Having discovered the truth of the matter, he dedicated his very being to the principle that justice must prevail, that sacrifice for such a cause was a worthwhile endeavor. In spite of incarceration and a capital sentence, Joe Hill managed to the very end to exercise some measure of control over his own life. And, to the extent he was able, over his death.

Adler’s prose is first rate, his analysis of history impeccable. He draws conclusions where appropriate, and presents an honest account, yet allows the reader to put together the final pieces of the puzzle.

At the end, do we know for certain who committed the grocery store murders? No. But we have a narrative which clearly demonstrates: Joe Hill never fit the profile of a cold blooded killer, while another man detained momentarily for the same crime did fit such a profile, in spades. The other man was released to continue his life of crime. Olsen later became a henchman of the notorious Al Capone in Chicago, while Joe Hill, the union man who left a rich legacy in song and wrote articles for socialist publications, was sent to his death. Hill’s funeral in that same city, attended by some thirty thousand, would help to launch the legend that is Joe Hill.

As Joe told his supporters at the last, they weren’t to mourn in his name. They were to organize.

William Adler photo by Randy Nelson

William M. Adler has written for many national and regional magazines, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and the Texas Observer. In addition to The Man Who Never Died, he has authored two other books of narrative nonfiction: Land of Opportunity (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), an intimate look at the rise and fall of a crack cocaine empire, and Mollie’s Job (Scribner, 2000), which follows the flight of a single factory job from the U.S. to Mexico over the course of fifty years. His work explores the intersection of individual lives and the larger forces of their times, and it describes the gap between American ideals and American realities. Adler lives with his wife and son in Denver, Colorado.

The book The Man Who Never Died by William M. Adler will be available August 30, 2011, for $30. For tour dates, music samples, and a photo gallery, please see http://themanwhoneverdied.com .

Richard Myers is a writer, author, and union activist in Denver, Colorado.

This work is in the public domain

Via "Boston IndyMedia"- Occupy Wall Street: Protesters arrested 900--Bankers 0. We are the 1%

Markin comment:

Some good point here, although short on program to fight the labor bureaucracy. Damn, I wish we had more leftists inside the unions to lead that fight.

Occupy Wall Street: Protesters arrested 900--Bankers 0. We are the 1%
by Richard Mellor
Email: we_know_whats_up (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) 06 Oct 2011

The Labor hierarchy is concerned about the influence the Occupy movement might have on the Unions' rank and file and will enter the Occupy movement in order to temper it, derail it and send it in to the Democratic Party as they did with the Madison events. The Occupy movement should beware the hierarchy and Labor's "official" representatives and welcome the rank and file worker.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is spreading and already showing results in that it is pushing Obama and the Democrats to make more public statements about increasing taxes on the rich. As we said, the OWS movement will have an effect on the 2012 elections here in the US.

We have also argued on this bloghttp://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/ that given the stifling bureaucratic grip the Labor hierarchy has on the trade Union apparatus, it would be most likely that resistance to the capitalist offensive from workers and youth would arise outside of these structures and this is what we are witnessing.

The fact that Unions like Local 100 in New York City are openly supporting the movement is extremely positive. In response to the OWS movement Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO said that the Union movement “will open our union halls and community centers as well as our arms and our hearts to those with the courage to stand up and demand a better America.”

The Labor hierarchy is extremely concerned about these developments. Steven Greenhouse and Cara Buckley writing in today’s New York Times reveal the level of concern atop organized Labor. They describe how Stuart Applebaum, the president of the retail and department store arm of the UFCW has cut off a visit to Tunisia after receiving a “flurry” of e mails and phone calls about the spreading occupation movement. Applebaum was in Tunisia according to the NYT, “advising the fledgling labor movement there.”

Considering the dismal failure of the Union hierarchy’s policies here at home one would have to question what advice a person like Stuart Applebaum could give to Tunisians about Labor struggles. For those of us with some history of struggle in these organizations the answer is pretty clear; he is there to ensure that Tunisian Unions develop along AFL-CIO lines; bureaucratic business-friendly organization with pro market policies. He is there representing the interests of US capitalism.

According to the Times Applebaum recalls asking one of the callers from back home about the movement here. Who is behind the movement? Is it “hippies” “troublemakers” and whether it will “quickly fade”

Some of the young people involved in the Occupy movement may not remember the shutting down of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. This took the US capitalist class and the Labor hierarchy completely by surprise. The Unions had a strong presence there and a section of Labor’s rank and file were influenced by the militancy and courage of the youth as opposed to the prayer and candlelight vigils that are the official strategy of the bureaucracy. This influence on their members’ worried the Labor hierarchy and in movement that followed the aftermath of the Seattle events, they sent in to that movement its full time staff in order to temper the movement it and direct it in to the Democratic party where it would be rendered harmless.

Trade Union leaders have complained that the OWS movement gets lots of press yet they turn out many more people like the 100,000 in the rally in Washington. But the 1% that the OWS movement talks about are confident that the trade Union leaders will not threaten their privileges, that Labor’s ranks will remain firmly under their control and any movement from below that threatens their policies and wants to democratize the movement will be suppressed. Both the Labor leaders and the Democratic Party fear this movement will get out of hand and will seek to control it.

The rank and file of organized Labor has been betrayed time and time again through the policies of leaders like Applebaum and Trumka. Applebaum says that the OWS movement is “Reaching a lot of people and exciting a lot of people that the labor movement has been struggling to reach for years.”

It is not accurate to say that the Labor movement has been “trying”. The hierarchy doesn’t even try to reach their own members never mind the millions of workers outside the ranks of organized Labor. (Look under “Labor” or “Public Sector” on this blog to read examples of this). When rank and file Union members have attempted to resist the bosses’ offensive, the heads of organized Labor, from the UAW to the public sector Unions and folks like Trumka have moved against them, have suppressed any movement from below that threatens their relationship with the employers that is based on cooperation and Labor peace. Many a rank and file Union activist like this author can relate to the local leader who said that if her international fought the bosses as hard as they fought upstart locals or militancy within their ranks she’d be in good shape.

If we buy in to Applebaum’s argument that the hierarchy has been “trying” to reach people then we can only come to the conclusion that the rank and file in the Unions and the millions outside of organized Labor are to blame. The AFL-CIO leadership has been carrying out campaigns that have been a disastrous failure. They had 100,000 workers on the streets in Madison and what did they do with them? Hey sent them home and told them to get involved in an electoral campaign to elect candidates from the other Wall Street party. In that struggle, the entire AFL-CIO leadership supported concessions.

So while it is very positive the Unions are becoming involved we need to be clear that there is a significant difference between the rank and file of organized Labor and its leadership who will try to control and disarm the OWS movement. Who should be welcomed in to the movement as representatives of organized Labor is not the lawyers, full time staffers and paid professional and other hangers on who help the present Union hierarchy maintain control of the movement and continue their business as usual polices but the rank and file member, the worker, the dues payer of the Labor organization. When “official” representatives of organized Labor become more involved as they will, the General Assemblies should ask if they are rank and file dues paying members and if they were elected by their co-workers or from their local Union halls.

All unemployed workers, shift workers those who have time and resources should, as those resources allow, join the Wall Street Occupy movement and help it grow stronger. It has a great slogan that hits the nail right on the head: We are the 99%------they are the 1%. The movement demands that the banks and the rich pay, all workers can support this. Those of us that support this blog offer for discussion to all workers in the movement some demands that we think would appeal to the vast majority of working class people.

We are against the dictatorship of the profit addicted corporations over American society.
We are for at least a $15.00 minimum wage or a $5.00 wage increase for all whichever is the greater.
We are for equal pay for equal work.
We are for jobs for all
We are for free education and free healthcare for all.
We are against racism and for working class unity.
We are for the building of a working peoples' party to end the monopoly of American politics by the bosses' parties, the Republicans and the Democrats.
See also:
http://www.weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com

Photos/Video-April 4 Labor Rally,Boston, On Anniv. Of Martin Luther King's Assassination

Click on the headline to link to Photos/Video-April 4 Labor Rally,Boston, On Anniv. Of Martin Luther King's Assassination by Michael Borkson

*Labor's Untold Story- The Unemployed Councils In Washington State In The 1930s- A Case Study

Click on title to link to site that discusses the history of the unemployed councils in Washington state in the 1930s. This is merely a taste of what is available on this subject. The unemployed councils actually drove much of the early work in the great Toledo Auto-Lite Strike of 1934. More on this later as I get better sources. Needless to say the fate of the unemployed is a current (in 2009) pressing issue which a look a history can cast a light on.


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.

*Outsourcing For Fun And Profit- A Film Review Of "Outsourced"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Outsourced".

DVD Review

Outsourced, starring Josh Hamilton, directed by John Jeffcoat, 2006

Okay, it was bound to happen, right? After all the gnashing of teeth about the lost of American jobs to other countries, after all the India-China bashing as the symbol of those loses and after all the strident, if fruitless, lambasting of those facts by every yahoo politician and cretin-like labor bureaucrat we were bound to get out of Hollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter) a comedic take on this phenomenon. And, given the political ethos of these times, a little ‘lesson’ in multi-culturalism to boot.

It may be unfair to lay the vagaries of the world labor market and the current phase of capitalist “globalization” on a simple film, and I won’t, at least not much because this was actually an entertaining film on its own terms, but its subtext (nice weasel word, right?) does fit in rather nicely about the state of the still fervent “outsourcing” strategy that virtually every large corporation in America (and elsewhere) has hit upon in order tot reduce (and reduce significantly) their wage bills, particularly administrative costs and the price of unskilled and semi-skilled labor.

A quick sketch of the plot is in order. An American telemarketing corporation in order to cut those high administrative costs fires it’s American–centered order-taking staff and out sources to the highly skilled but cheap wage Indian labor market. A middle level executive, the star of the film, Josh Hamilton, is called upon to bring the Indians up to speed and the twists and turns of the plot turn around the struggle to get the Indians to conform to the Taylor productivity speed up system well-known in American business circles. The faults and follies of this transformation drive the, sometimes understated, comedy of the film. Along the way, naturally, said executive gets an up close and personal lesson in multiculturalism from a very fetching Indian love interest.

But here is the point for our purposes-in the end, and I am really giving nothing away here, the Indian employees in their turn are fired so that the corporation can set up shop in the even cheaper Chinese labor market. In short, the race to the bottom continues on its merry way unabated. It is that unabated condition that I will finish up with. I’ve mentioned those cretin-like labor bureaucrats above who have “belly-ached” about the flight of jobs to other countries without lifting finger one to organize labor internationally to drive wages up and make the flight of jobs out much less attractive . Hell, they haven’t, at least since the great wave of industrial unionism led by the CIO drives of the 1930’s, done anything to organize labor in the cheap-labor American south or, and here is the real crime, Wal-mart. This is hardly the end of the discussion. Let’s leave it at this for now- organize globally and think locally. Thinking the other way around gets us no place- American, Indian or Chinese.

*"Hard Times Come Again No More"- The Songs Of The "First Wave" Great Depression Of The 1930's- In Honor Of "Apple Annie" and "Pencil Slim"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Kate And Anna McGarrigle, Friends And Family Performing Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More".

CD REVIEWS

Hard Times Come Again No More: Early American Rural Songs Of Hard Times And Hardships, various artists, Volumes One and Two, Yazoo Records, 1998

This review covers both volumes of this two-part CD set.

Yes, I am aware that the 1930’s Great Depression was not the first depression that this country had faced but it was the first in which the United States, as a world power anointed by its successes in World War I, created worldwide economic chaos in its wake. However we will leave aside economic history and concentrate on today’s impeding great depression, as the daily news most painfully reminds us seems to be coming. Today I want to discuss what to do about that eventually in the short haul. Obviously, in the long haul we have to fight for a more rational system based on production (and distribution) for need, not for profit. In the meantime what are all of our fellow unemployed to do- right now! Well, now we do have to look back at history, and at least with a little tongue-in-cheek. Back in the 1930’s its seems that on every corner of every town and village one found an “Apple Annie” selling her apples for a nickel to survive or a “Pencil Slim” hawking his pencils for spare change. Tough times indeed. And to while away that long lonely, sometimes empty-handed, vigil many times they sang songs to get attention.

This brings us to the two volume CD set under review that contains some forty-six songs, almost solely from the rural southern part of the United States. The set features themes of hard times, harder times and then the merely desperate ones. For poor blacks and whites alike. The milieu covered in this set appears to be away from the Mississippi Delta that created the country blues and rather are songs from places like Arkansas (that takes a beating in a couple of songs here that will not sit well with Chamber of Commerce-types), North Carolina and Georgia. The jobs, or lack of jobs complained of, run from small unsuccessful tenant farming and sharecropping fighting off the boll weevil and, as several songs make clear, the Boll Weevil landlord or his agents to cheap labor in the textile mills. The instruments used, to my ear, include simple guitar (especially whatever odd-stringed one , as usual, Joe Williams has concocted on “Providence Helps The Poor People”), fiddles galore (a staple of country music and a real plus when, as here, some of the vocals, are reedy), mandolin, washboard, harmonica and whatever else could make noise cheaply with what was at hand.

Clearly with forty- six songs to choose from the quality, even on a Yazoo production that prides itself on both inclusiveness and getting the best sounds possible (and excellent liner notes as well), is uneven. However the following stand out here; obviously the Joe Williams tune mentioned above; Sleepy John Estes on “Down South Blues”; Blind Blake on “No Dough Blues”; Blind Lemon Jefferson on the classic “One Dime Blues” (if you could have put his voice together with Etta Baker’s guitar version you would have an incredible sound on that one); Mississippi John Hurt on “Blue Harvest Blues”; and The Graham Brothers on the title track “Hard Times Come Again No More” (an old Stephen Foster tune from the 1840’s so there is nothing new about hard times).

All of those names above have been mentioned before in this space and reflect their then emergence as country performers. However there is a second layer of performers here that intrigue me and bear further listening. Of that group The Bentley Boys on the now well-known “Down On Penny’s Farm” sticks out (a song, by the way, that Bob Dylan used as an idea for his early “Talking New York Blues”). Another is Blind Alfred Reed on “How Can A Poor Man Stand” as is the great guitarist Barbecue Bob on “We Sure Got Hard Times”. There are not many women on these CDs but Samantha Bumgarner is fine on “Georgia Blues”. The real sleeper on this whole compilation however is Elder Curry & His Congregation whooping it up on a gospelly “Hard Times”. Okay, so now you have the songs that you can sing on those lonely street corners. Now all you need is some apples or pencils. Hard times come again no more, indeed.

HOW CAN A POOR MAN STAND SUCH TIMES AND LIVE ?

Blind Alfred Reed - 1929

There once was a time when everything was cheap,
But now prices nearly puts a man to sleep.
When we pay our grocery bill,
We just feel like making our will --
I remember when dry goods were cheap as dirt,
We could take two bits and buy a dandy shirt.
Now we pay three bucks or more,
Maybe get a shirt that another man wore --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?
Well, I used to trade with a man by the name of Gray,
Flour was fifty cents for a twenty-four pound bag.
Now it's a dollar and a half beside,
Just like a-skinning off a flea for the hide --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Oh, the schools we have today ain't worth a cent,
But they see to it that every child is sent.
If we don't send everyday,
We have a heavy fine to pay --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Prohibition's good if 'tis conducted right,
There's no sense in shooting a man 'til he shows flight.
Officers kill without a cause,
They complain about funny laws --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Most all preachers preach for gold and not for souls,
That's what keeps a poor man always in a hole.
We can hardly get our breath,
Taxed and schooled and preached to death --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Oh, it's time for every man to be awake,
We pay fifty cents a pound when we ask for steak.
When we get our package home,
A little wad of paper with gristle and a bone --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Well, the doctor comes around with a face all bright,
And he says in a little while you'll be all right.
All he gives is a humbug pill,
A dose of dope and a great big bill --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Hard Times Come Again No More

(Stephen Collins Foster)

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count it's many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh, hard times come again no more

Chorus
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times come again no more
Many days you have lingered
Around my cabin door
Oh hard times come again no more

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say;
Oh, hard times come again no more

Chorus

There's a pale sorrowed maiden who toils her life away
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day
Oh, hard times come again no more

Chorus

'Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave
'Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
'Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh, hard times come again no more

Chorus

*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.

BOYCOTT WAL-MART!

COMMENTARY

THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM MUST STOP HERE!

SUPPORT THE BOYCOTT- UNIONIZE WAL-MART

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

This writer has just received news that the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers (MFT) has voted to support the Wal-Mart boycott. Thus, the MFT joins a growing number of other unions and union federations nationally and internationally in support of this first step in the struggle to organize Wal-Mart. Every militant is obliged to and must support this boycott as a first step in the struggle against this greedy mega-corporation. To list the egregious labor practices of this corporation is like reading pages from the history relating the sweatshop conditions of the American labor movement at the turn of the 20th century. Whatever piddling savings one might receive by shopping at Wal-Mart is negated by the degradation of its labor force. It is high time for the labor movement to move on this outfit and move hard. The race to the bottom stops here.

Whatever the practical effect of the boycott it can only be a first step in the ultimate union organization of Wal-Mart. A boycott is not enough! A consumer boycott, as has been shown by past practices, is only as effective as the diffuse shopping public is aware of it. In general, a consumer boycott has little or no effect at all. In any case it is not decisive. There is no short-cut to effective organization at the point of production and, particularly in the case of Wal-Mart, distribution. The leadership of the organized American labor movement (now centered in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Coalition) has chiefly used to the tactic of boycott to avoid the hard struggle to unionize the workforce. In the final analysis only organization in the field will bring unionization.

To organize Wal-Mart means there must be the will to organize Wal-Mart. It is necessary to go all out to win once the decision has been made to organize this monster along industrial lines, like the automobile industry in the 1930’s. Previous local efforts (such as in Quebec and Texas) to organize particular stores have shown that this strategy (or lack of strategy) has been a failure. Wal-Mart is just too big and powerful to be taken on piecemeal. This writer has seen estimates that the number of field organizers necessary to effectively organize Wal-Mart is at least 3000. Militants must call on the organized labor movement to fund and sent out that number en masse. The time is now.

Those even slightly familiar with the Wal-Mart operation know that the corporation has a fleet of at least 7000 trucks to transport and deliver goods to its various locations. This should make every militant salivate at the prospect of organizing that fleet. Militants must demand that the Teamsters International Union organize the fleet. Know this, if the trucks, the key to the distribution process are unionized that is a very powerful argument in the workers favor if a showdown with other parts of the Wal-Mart workforce is necessary. This writer suggests that militants read Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power by Farrell Dobbs; a central organizer of the successful Teamster union drives in Minneapolis and later over the road drivers in the 1930’s. (These books have been reviewed elsewhere in this space, (see April 2006 archives.) One thing is sure, if it took practically a civil war to bring the relatively loosely organized trucking company bosses to their knees in the 1930’s it will be 1000 times harder to do so against this monolithic giant. But the victory will be sweeter.

I mentioned above the need to fund field organizers, and plenty of them, and other support staff. Unlike the 1930’s the organized labor movement has no lack of funds for such an operation today. However, what is necessary is the political will to organize and fight rather rely someone else’s good will. The great lesson from the 1930’s is that you win on the streets, not in the White House or courthouse. Organized labor’s support for the failed Kerry Democratic presidential campaign wasted millions of dollars. Instead of using funds to support bourgeois candidates, mainly so-called Democratic Party ‘friends of labor’, through COPE and other PAC’s for minimal or no returns use the funds to organize Wal-Mart (and the South, while we are at it). That is the real way to use union money.

SUPPORT THE CALL TO ORGANIZE WAL-MART NOW!

NO MONEY FOR POLITICANS-USE THE FUNDS FOR THE ORGANIZING DRIVE AT WAL-MART!

BRING MOTIONS TO YOUR UNION CALLING FOR SUPPORT OF THE WAL-MART BOYCOTT!

BRING MOTIONS TO CALLING ON YOUR UNION TO SUPPORT AN ORGANIZING DRIVE OF WAL-MART!


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!
FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/