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By Bruce Bostick
Unemployed Councils cropped up across the country in the 1930s during the Great Depression and again in the 1980s after the mass layoffs in the steel industry. I was a part of the effort to start up such a council in Lorain, Ohio.
Our Lorain Communist Party club played the key role in establishing and running a storefront coalition grouping, the Unemployed Crisis Center, that won benefits for workers and positively affected how organized labor and public officials treated the unemployed. We were able to concretely help thousands of unemployed workers and, as a side benefit, we recruited new folks to the CPUSA.
We also suffered some major setbacks. Hopefully, I’m able to pass on here some lessons we learned.
We had re-established our CP club in Lorain as a steel club, in 1970, with some younger workers on the one hand and George Edwards, the only veteran member left from an earlier period of glory....
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