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I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he
-Alfred Hayes
There are many versions of this song, one by Joan Baez used in the movie of Hill’s life is especially moving, but there is only one definitive recording and that is the one sung by Paul Robeson, whose other-worldly deep bass voice seems to come from a higher place.
I thought about Robeson and Joe Hill and a lot of others when I checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics– which I do every Labor Day weekend. In this climate of BS and raucous indignation that reminds me of a flock of ravens fighting over road kill, some of us sometimes seek the solidity of numbers to provide perspective.
Current Union Statistics
In late January of this year the BLS issued one of its periodic reports on union membership. For those who bothered to read it or even managed to catch the small box-like articles that a few newspapers printed about the report, it made for sobering reading. In America these days, press releases tend to fall from the air like dead leaves, most of them so dry and desiccated that their words sound like feet scuffling across a late October forest floor littered with Summers past.
The release from the Bureau on January 21, 2011 seemed yet another nondescript addition to this pile, right down to its generic format and matter-of-fact headline, probably written by a staff member buried deep amidst dozens of coffin-like cubicles who had grabbed a piece of stationary and filled in some boiler plate prose from the network hard drive.
In 2010, the union membership rate–the percent of wage and salary workers who were
members of a union–was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers be-
longing to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million. In 1983, the first year for
which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 per-
cent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.
The language may sound dry, but like a forest littered with dead leaves they have the power to become a conflagration if someone touches a match to them. They point to a serious American crisis, one that for many may kill the American Dream and this nation’s ideal of a level laying field.
The release “highlights” state:
• The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).
• Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate at 37.1 percent.
• Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.
What the press release refers to as “highlights,” record one of the most dramatic shifts in American culture, economics and politics since the beginnings of the union movement during the industrialization of the 19th century. Nowhere in these numbers can you find the old stereotypical union member–a blue collar worker in a steel mill, mine or automotive plant. Instead the new union worker is a teacher, a government bureaucrat, a police officer. The BLS also pointed out,
Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.3 percent. This group includes workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Private sector industries with high unionization rates included transportation and utilities (21.8 percent), telecommunications (15.8 percent), and construction (13.1 percent). In 2010, low unionization rates occurred in agriculture and related industries (1.6 percent) and in financial activities (2.0 percent).
The conventional arguments for this immense shift state that industrial workers are no longer interested in unions or that the economy has changed to a service, technology-driven environment far different from the one that spawned the old craft unions that were the heart of Samuel Gompers’ original AFL. Yet the unions themselves point out that independent surveys and data show most workers would join a union if they could. One reason may be that BLS stats from that January press release show union workers:
In 2010, among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $917, while those who were not represented by unions had median weekly earnings of $717.
The difference of $200 a month is more than all the tax increases, stimulus packages and trickle-down economics that have passed for public policy since the dawn of this new century.
Why the Decline?
A major force preventing brother and sister workers from joining a union lies with the GOP Counterrevolution, which has identified busting the unions as a major priority. After all bust the unions and you’ve carved the heart out of the Democratic Party just like one of those gory scenes in a Mel Gibson movie. How have they done this?
Mainly they have made it harder to form a union. A September 2000 report by a respected international organization makes this nation sound like a third world plantation. In Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards, which was based on an 18-month survey, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says that in the United States, “workers’ freedom of association is violated routinely, protections for workers forming unions are inadequate and enforcement of existing laws are much too weak.” The report’s online introduction lays out the grim realities of American workers:
A culture of near-impunity has taken shape in much of U.S. labor law and practice. All that awaits an employer determined to get rid of a worker who tries to form a union is a years-later reinstatement order the worker is likely to decline and a modest back-pay award. For many employers, it is a small price to pay to destroy a workers’ organizing effort by firing its leaders.
But the Democrats and so-called progressives have not been much friendlier. The Obama Administration has done little to straighten out the abuses of labor law and so-called progressives have all but forgotten working class America while they pursue their various crusades (one great example was when they ran a millionaire business owner despised by organized labor against Joe Leiberman).
The result of this assault is that union membership in the private sector is the lowest since 1900. Karl Rove, who has stated he wants to take this country back to the days of William McKinley, no doubt is smiling at these statistics. But anyone who knows their history has to find the idea of returning organized labor to the McKinley era frightening. Most of us vaguely remember those times as an era of labor strife. We may remember the Homestead Strike and a few other events, but I’ll bet my mortgage no one reading this has heard of the far more deadly, more vicious Lattimer Massacre.
Lattimer
Most of the account that follows comes from Michael Novak’s, The Guns of Lattimer (highly recommended–but hard to find) and a web site maintained by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.The sanitized history many of us received in school, never mentioned such events, for they would destroy the myth of the robber barons as people whose worst sin was manipulating money. But people died so that you and I might enjoy the right to organize and some of those people died in the Lattimer massacre.
Lattimer was a company town built in 1869 in the midst of the Pennsylvania coal fields. Lattimer founder Ariovistus Pardee and his son Calvin, two of the wealthiest people in the United States at the time, rented the houses to the workers, sold them whatever they needed through the infamous “company store” and literally controlled the lives of those who toiled long hours underground as if they had been slaves or prisoners in a gulag labor camp.
The strike that prompted the march from Harwood to Lattimer began when mine superintendent Gomer Jones, whom one local mine official described as “the worst slave driver who ever set foot in the coal region,” beat a miner with an axe handle, setting off a series of strikes that escalated into a larger and more dangerous struggle about wages, working conditions and a newly-passed Pennsylvania law taxing foreign-born miners. The mournful sounds of breaker whistles announcing another mine had joined the strike echoed across the hills until more than 5,000 men had walked away from their jobs, some symbolically carrying “miner’s needles,” the slender metal rods used to tamp dynamite.
In the coal country strikers would besiege any mines still operating to call out their workers. Lattimer was one of the last holdouts, but those miners told the union they would join their comrades if asked. To lead the Lattimer mission, the United Mine Workers selected the Harwood miners, who were mostly Slavs new to America, for what would be their first union action. Although many did not understand English, organizers felt it would be an easy assignment because of the invitation from the Lattimer miners, in contrast to more combative sieges that required a delicate dance between miners, strikers and mine officials.
Over 300 left Harwood, some of them with that nervous cockiness that accompanies a first mission. As they marched through the town of Cranberry on the way to Lattimer others joined them, raising their spirits. At the center of a blurred photograph of the march is a man wearing a white shirt and a derby hat sitting at an angle that betrays his old country ways. He carries a tattered American flag mounted on a newly-cut sapling stripped of its branches. Behind him one marcher clutches a wooden club. It would be no use because they were marching into a trap.
Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin was enjoying the vices of Atlantic City when he received an urgent message from the mine owners to return immediately to quell the strike. Martin recruited 150 “deputies” from local business and professional men along with seasoned mine enforcers, then broke out the owners’ gifts to them—fresh-from-the-factory repeating Winchesters and enough three-inch long armor-piercing bullets to fill their sixteen-shot magazines multiple times.
The “deputies” formed a line on both sides of the road leading into Lattimer. If the Harwood miners’ mission was clear so was that of the deputies: to halt the march and prevent more miners from striking. When the strikers crested the hill outside Lattimer, the adrenaline must have started pumping at the sight of the deputies lining the road in a V formation holding those brand new rifles.
Anticipating violence, mothers pulled their children out of school. Like a bell setting off a heavyweight fight, the mine whistle shrieked as the marchers neared the deputies. Martin held up one hand in a signal to stop as he ordered the strikers to disperse. In the scuffle that broke out when the sheriff grabbed for the flag he drew his sidearm.
What lit the fuse is still not clear, but some heard an audible click as Martin’s revolver misfired, followed by a volley from the deputies. The guidon bearer fell quickly, his last words the Slavik invocation to God, “O Joj! Joj! Joj!” Witnesses reported the shooting lasted from a minute and a half to four minutes, but the sound of deputies reloading to shoot fleeing strikers in the back would forever haunt witnesses.
In less time than it takes to listen to a CD track, an estimated nineteen marchers died and thirty-six were wounded in what has become known as the Lattimer Massacre. No one really knows the real number of casualties because many were treated by mine families rather than the company doctors or local hospitals.
A twenty-seven day courtroom drama that riveted the nation ended with the acquittal of Martin and the deputies. Some reactions to the verdict contained thinly-veiled threats of further violence. The Carpenter wrote, “It is the coal operators and corporations that should be blamed…They have ‘sowed the wind’ now let them ‘reap the whirlwind.’” Railway Age, the industry’s trade journal, warned:
The longer the real American people plays and palters with the spirit of anarchy and insurrection which the leaders are so loud to proclaim with their mouths and which their poor befooled followers—the Poles and Slavs and Lithuanians and Magyars, who do not know what the riot act means—pay for with their lives, the worse will be the reckoning when it comes, and the greater the bloodshed; for that bloodshed there must be, many times more than has yet been spilt at Hazleton, there can only be a matter of question.
The Century provided a different perspective in an article that saw outside agitators and “ignorant, hulking Slovaks and Polacks, and the brawny, cunning Italians” as the cause in what was little more than a diatribe against foreigners. For The Century’s writer, Lattimer symbolized, “The problem of enacting and enforcing laws which will keep undesirable immigrants out of this country.”
In 1972, Pennsylvania erected a monument to the massacre which reads:
It was not a battle because they were not aggressive,
nor were they defensive because they had no weapons
of any kind and were simply shot down like so many
worthless objects, each of the licensed life-takers
trying to outdo the others in butchery.
Actor Jack Palance, who worked the Lattimer mines as a youth and maintained a house there after he became famous, thought about making a movie about the Massacre, but never was able to put it together.
Joe Hill
Five years after the Lattimer Massacre, Joe Hill emigrated to America, becoming an organizer and song writer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was executed by firing squad on Nov. 19, 1915 in a trial that is still the subject of rumor and speculation.
A new biography by William Adler has uncovered a letter that indicates Hill was probably not guilty. According to a New York Times story last week:
Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.
- Joe Hill
Labor Day Today
The point of Lattimer and the death of Joe Hill rests on that little-noted statistic, that union membership is now what it was in 1900. We have had no Lattimer Massacres, but what we have had is perhaps as deplorable: workers in America, as Human Rights Watch pointed out, now face a tilted playing field unless the Democratic Party or some other group reaffirms the values of Liberal America. The Republican Party threatens to pick off workers one-by-one, figuratively shot in the back, just like those who died at Lattimer.
When you are disabled and in pain there are nights the combination of drugs, sleep medicines and pain itself results in some bizarre dreams. One night as I was drafting this post, I found myself in what I took to be a basement full of file drawers. The labels on the front of them said something about the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thinking they were full of more reports and press releases like those above I pulled open a drawer. What I saw were bare feet with a tag on one toe, like in a morgue. In a frenzy I pulled open drawer after drawer. Each held another body. Outside I could hear the sound of gunshots.
NOTE:
Some of the above material is from my forthcoming book and is strictly copyrighted.
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