Dear John,
When I was growing up, my father used to tell us how as a little boy he was carried on his father’s shoulders to a rally where Eugene V. Debs was speaking. My grandfather was a worker on the Rock Island Railroad and Debs was a founder of the American Railway Union. Later, my father was a union organizer for the then CIO in Detroit. We were always told in my house that “If you cross a picket line, don’t bother to come home.” Saying someone was a scab was the worst kind of insult. My brother continued the tradition working for United Farm Workers founder Ceasar Chavez from 1968-1971.
In those years, organized labor was an indisputably important force in American politics and society. No one doubted that; it was simply a part of how America worked. But as Reaganomics and trickle-down economics began to transform our economy in the 1980s, the demonization and suppression of organized labor was one of the primary weapons of assault on America’s middle class.
I remember riding in a car with a friend in the 1980s, when we saw a picket line in front of the store where we were headed.
“Oh,” I said. “We can’t go in. There’s a picket line.”
”No, that’s okay,” said my friend. “You can just go around it.”
I stared at her in disbelief, realizing that she honestly didn’t know what she had just said. It wasn’t simply that she hadn’t been raised in a home like mine. It was that the United States had changed. She had not grown up in an America where the rights of workers were considered sacrosanct. She simply had no understanding, really, of why labor was important in any larger sense.
Yet, now, there is a revitalization of labor. And not a moment too soon. Just as organized labor was established in the late 1880s as a response to the first Gilded Age lasting from 1880 to 1990, today we are living in a new Gilded Age and it has spurred an awakening of the sleeping giant of organized labor. Forces of unfettered capital must be met by an equally powerful counterforce, or capitalism becomes a weapon used to exploit and suppress working people. You don’t have to be a Marxist (I am not) to realize that that’s simply the way it is.
