Staley Captures Corporate War on Unions (book says it started with R Reagan)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/_i_Staley_i_Captures_Corporate_War_on_Unions_6814.html

by Randy Shaw‚ Apr. 16‚ 2009

After President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union in 1981, corporate America got a White House Seal of Approval for union busting, shifting manufacturing jobs overseas, and reducing wages and benefits at home. The nation’s heartland became the epicenter of the corporate war on blue-collar unionized workers. In the early1990’s, Decatur, Illinois alone saw three unions battling employers seeking to destroy longstanding worker gains. The most combative of these struggles was at the A.E. Staley corn processing plant. The Staley fight became a gripping story of worker resistance to the takeover of their longtime family-owned company by a foreign owner committed to breaking the union at all costs. The Staley campaign shows how United States labor laws reward vicious, anti-union employers, and how worker solidarity alone is not enough to prevail. Although the Staley campaign includes vital lessons for labor activists, it took Steven Ashby and C.J. Hawking’s powerful new book, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement, to revive, and fully bring to life, this historic campaign.

While many attribute declining unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States to shifting work overseas, another major factor was the corporate war against organized labor that hit full steam in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Workers at the Staley plant in Decatur, Illinois were at the epicenter of these attacks. The London-based Tate & Lyle Corporation acquired Staley in 1988, and almost immediately sought to eliminate all of the gains that the unionized workforce had achieved over the past four decades. A company vice-president even told the union in 1992, “We are going to hit you hard all at once, rather than have people pissed off for several contracts and years.”

This book is about worker resistance to these attacks. Although the Staley workers had not previously viewed themselves as activists, and their union, the Allied Industrial Workers Local 837, was not part of a powerful international, the company’s aggressive tactics forced the workers to create a national grassroots resistance campaign that engaged millions of supporters across the nation.

The Staley workers faced a fundamental problem: what are workers options after their employer has locked them out for refusing to agree to a terrible contract? United States labor law does not require employers to agree to a fair deal, and they can bargain forever so long as they don’t blatantly act in “bad faith.”

Cesar Chavez and the UFW responded to such employer-worker imbalance by launching an international grape boycott to force growers to sign contracts. The union used vegetable boycotts for a similar end, and combined this with building a grassroots political force that resulted in California’s 1975 enactment of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. In a later successful campaign against J.P. Stevens, textile workers combined a national product boycott with a “corporate campaign” targeting corporations and banks with financial relationships to the anti-union textile giant.

FULL story at link.

[liberal N proud]

1. Personal experience says it started with Reagan

Oh the great raygun.
I went more than a 1 1/2 without a job

[pleah]

2. K&R

[dcsmart]

3. here is another excellent book (K & R for the post)

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/product_info.php?products_id=1598


Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States
by Sharon Smith

This accessible, critical history of the U.S. labor movement examines the hidden history of workers’ resistance from the nineteenth century to the present. Workers in the U.S. have a rich tradition of fighting back which remains largely hidden. Subterranean Fire brings that history to light and reveals its lessons for today.

The title is taken from the inspiring words of August Spies, a U.S. radical and labor activist executed during the fight for the eight-hour day. He said, “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.” These words remain fundamentally true today, as Sharon Smith demonstrates by tracing the legacy of worker’s struggle from August Spies’ days to the present.

About the Author

Sharon smith is the author of Women and Socialism, as well as many articles on women’s liberation and the U.S. working class.



Reviews

“A veteran worker-intellectual brilliantly addresses the crisis of the labor movement, skewering those who believe that renewal can come from the top down, and encouraging those who are fighting to rebuild it from the bottom up.”
--Mike Davis, author, Prisoners of the American Dream and City of Quartz

“In urgent prose, Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire reminds us that the ruling class’s grip on power is not absolute, but a tenuous toehold on a shaky edifice that is ready to crumble when the right kind of popular pressure is applied. Times of crisis are also opportunities for revolutionary change. The time for action is now; Sharon Smith has written a roadmap for how to achieve a more just future. The rest is up to us.”
--Jeffrey St. Clair, coeditor CounterPunch, author, Grand Theft Pentagon

“This book is a timely and valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of the U.S. labor movement. At a time when it seems like the labor movement is paralyzed by the onslaught of globalization, Smith reminds us of the rich history of workers’ struggles in the U.S., and how labor has rebounded from similar impasses to win important gains. A truly inspiring book!”
--Deepa Kumar, author, Outside of the Box: Labor and the Media in the Age of Globalization, and professor, Rutgers University
Text

[RufusTFirefly]

4. K & R

A shame the book's so expensive though. I'd like to read it.

[nichomachus]

5. It started way earlier than that

The corporatists had been trying to kill the unions since theb'30s. After the failure of Prescott Bush's Business Plot in 1934, the corporatists had to go underground, as they did during WW2. After the war, they took advantage of the Red Scare that was gripping the country -- if you didn't live through it, you don't understand how pervasive that was.

They got their chance with the passage of Taft-Hartley. That act allowed unions to continue, but required them to purge any members who had any connection, past or present, with socialism or Communism. Many of the union leaders had flirted with at least socialism -- and were duly tossed out. Sometime, this was nothing more than attending a meeting or having friends who were socialists. This was also the time when socialism and communism because inextricably linked in the minds of many Americans.

The problem for the unions was that many of these lefties who got tossed out were the organizers and leaders who were the heart and soul of the union movement. This left a power vacuum, which was quickly filled in many cases by opportunists and gangsters.

Then, as the post-war prosperity took hold, many middle-class American workers forgot how they got to where they were from the old days of back-breaking mill work at scab wages. A constant drumbeat of propaganda -- aided by the corporate-compliant media -- convinces them that unions were corrupt (in fairness, some were) and that they were unnecessary and just stole money from workers.

So, by the time the idiot Reagan came along, the anti-union sentiment was ripe for the picking. Reagan was just the guy who flipped the switch -- not that he had anything remarkable going for him. Middle Americans who were now doing OK because of the work unions had done back in the '20s. '30s, and '40s forgot their history and became "Reagan Democrats."

Unfortunately, this anti-union propaganda still is effective, preventing large numbers of American workers from seeing how their lives would be better with union representation.

[RufusTFirefly]

6. Indeed. The Academy Awards originated as a thinly veiled union-busting tool

That was in 1927.
Originally, you couldn't win an Oscar if you were a member of a union.