26 minute read
How the Decline of Labor Threatens Our Nation’s Future
(Martha’s Vineyard Men’s Group, August 7, 2013)
my thesIs today Is suggested By the tItle of my talk. It Is my belief that the decline—or even worse, the demise—of the American labor movement would inflict a devastating blow to protecting and advancing the fundamental values of equality, democracy, and a decent standard of living for all in our society.
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To me, today’s labor movement is the only entity in our society that brings together, on an ongoing basis, members of all classes, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, religions, occupations, and sexual orientations for the common purpose of advancing the American way of life for all. From the Hollywood, TV, and Broadway idols of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists47 and of Actors’ Equity; to the members of the National Football League Players Association; to the teachers, police officers, and firefighters; to the janitors, food workers, health-care workers,
47. Martha Vineyard’s own James Cagney was a founding member and served as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
sanitation workers, and farm laborers who are members of American unions—they are united in the common purpose of advancing and bettering the working lives and beyond for all Americans.
Indeed, for me, after more than a half century of representing working people and their unions, I believe the nation’s fate ultimately remains tied to the situation of our workers and the labor movement, which has been their most steadfast champion from the early days of the republic, when the law treated unions as a criminal conspiracy, through the Industrial Age and now into an age of scientific and technological advance. For surely, a principal measure of a nation’s health is the material and physical well-being of its people taken individually and as a whole, the conditions under which they are employed, and how our leaders have proceeded either to advance or to undermine workers’ concerns and interests—namely, what was once known as the “labor question.” Further, for at least the last seventy-five years, the labor movement has posed a key countervailing challenge to unbridled corporate power and the increased concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. So how it is doing impacts us all!
Regrettably, however, at present both workers and the labor movement are in a period of serious decline and retreat, so that the notion that they can advance their cause and improve the working conditions of American workers as vigorously as they have in the past has been called seriously into doubt, with resultant adverse consequences for almost all—that is, for the 99 percent, which I propose briefly to describe this morning. Further, Labor’s decline has occurred during the greatest increase in American history of the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, which events I believe to be related.
Presently, the perennial specter that some have viewed pejoratively as Big Labor has been morphed into significantly smaller Labor. Hence, whereas in the early 1950s, 40 percent of privatesector workers were union members, today only 6.9 percent are in
unions. Owing to the growth of public-sector unionism over the same period, overall union membership today stands at 11.8 percent. These figures vary by state and region, with the South being the region lowest in union density—and correspondingly, the region with the lowest wages. Indeed, as in the past, the South continues to attract industry on this basis.
How Labor came to be in such a diminished position is attributable to the decline of manufacturing; the growth of outsourcing, globalization, and deregulation; the use of millions of “just-in-time” part-time, temporary, and casual employees; increased employer resistance to unionization; and continuing struggles in Congress, in the courts, before agencies, and in the media. Also, I would be remiss if I failed to state that a degree of ineptitude on the part of Labor has contributed to its present diminished condition.
The late nineteenth century through the early twentieth saw the bloody Homestead, Pennsylvania, Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike in 1894, the Lawrence Textile and Paterson Silk Strikes of 1912 and 1913, and many others, in which workers sought to assert their rights and improve their employment conditions but were crushed by the physical and economic might of employers, who were often supported by the courts and the state. However, the need for achieving labor stability and equity, both before and during World War I, and the idealism of the Progressive Era caused a significant rethinking by some of how to improve industrial and labor relations during the period.
Accordingly, high-minded and farsighted thinkers, such as then Boston-based public-interest lawyer Louis Brandeis, envisioned a regime of employee-employer relations in which workers and employers reasoned together to achieve fair and enlightened policies and practices in the workplace that would be to the mutual advantage of both, with workers enjoying the fruits of their increased productivity. Indeed, Brandeis is a father of modern-day mediation, arbitration, and collective bargaining, having been the principal
architect and implementer of the Protocols of Peace, which ended the strike of sixty thousand mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers in New York City in 1911. Brandeis’s Supreme Court sponsor, President Woodrow Wilson, also saw protecting workers’ rights to be essential, cabling Congress from Versailles in 1919 that there must be “full recognition of the right of those who work, in whatever rank, to participate in some organic way in every decision which directly affects their welfare.”48 (Sounds a lot like codetermination in Germany today!) And FDR, of course, declared in 1936 that if he were a factory worker, the first thing he’d do would be to go out and join a union.
Depression year 1935 was a critical moment in American labor history (aside from being the year of my birth). It also was the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, which, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers (and a Republican, by the way), broke away from the craft union–dominated American Federation of Labor (AF of L). The CIO went on to organize the workers in major industries such as steel, auto, and rubber.
The second major development in 1935 was the enactment by Congress of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), or the Wagner Act, which gave workers the federally protected right to organize, bargain with their employers over wages and other employment conditions, and strike in support of their demands, free from employer interference, restraint, or coercion. And it established the presently beleaguered National Labor Relations Board to ensure employer compliance with the law.
In 1937, two years after the enactment of the Wagner Act, the Supreme Court, in a highly controversial 5–4 ruling in the Jones
48. 1919 May 20, WWP15771, Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum, Staunton, Virginia.
& Laughlin Steel case, upheld its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause. The opinion was written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who was joined by Associate Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Owen Roberts (of “a switch in time that saved nine” fame). Most relevant is the following observation in the Supreme Court’s opinion:
Long ago we stated the reason for labor organizations. We said they were organized out of the necessities of the situation; that a single employee was helpless in dealing with an employer; that he was dependent ordinarily on his daily wage for the maintenance of himself and family; that, if the employer refused to pay him the wages that he thought fair, he was nevertheless unable to leave the employ and resist arbitrary and unfair treatment; that union was essential to give laborers opportunity to deal on an equality with their employer.
I believe this observation to be as valid today as it was the day it was announced.
As for the four dissenters in Jones & Laughlin Steel (I’m reminded of an old labor song “What did Jones and Laughlin steal? Pittsburgh!”), in an opinion written by Associate Justice Clark McReynolds (he’s the jurist who never said a word to Brandeis during their more than two decades together on the Supreme Court and refused to sit next to him for a Court photo), they declared that employers have an absolute constitutional and property right to decide whom they may hire and fire, free from governmental interference. So the minority would have declared the Wagner Act unconstitutional.
After a period of pre–World War II intense union organizing during the Depression, union no-strike pledges during the war, and major strikes during the postwar period, a business-dominated Republican–Southern Democrat coalition in Congress struck back at Labor by enacting the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over President
Truman’s veto. It seriously undermined Labor’s rights and powers derived from the Wagner Act in several significant respects, including giving states the power to outlaw the union shop by enacting the Orwellian-named “right-to-work” laws. The so-called right-to-work struggle continues to this day in several states, including in the former union strongholds of Michigan and Indiana. To give the devils their due, they play upon the idyllic conservative-libertarian myth that Americans will be able to succeed at pursuing their own Horatio Alger–like American dream, unassisted by their fellow workers or government.
Twelve years after Taft-Hartley, in 1959, during the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Congress targeted Labor again, on the heels of hearings by a Senate committee investigating labor-management corruption. In the Landrum-Griffin Act, Congress severely limited Labor’s right to picket, to refuse to handle struck goods, and to engage in so-called secondary boycotts, thereby undermining many of Labor’s traditional and most effective economic weapons—notwithstanding that these matters were entirely unrelated to corruption. It was pure and simple union busting!
Another employer ploy in the struggle has been their ability to discharge employees for union activity with impunity, subject to a mild slap on the wrist from the National Labor Relations Board. Signing a union card is often viewed as committing economic suicide.
A major event in American labor history occurred in 1970, although it is hardly remembered today. At a time when Congress was considering reforming the postal service to make it more efficient and businesslike, it was withholding long-delayed statutory pay increases from seriously underpaid postal workers in order to coerce their unions into supporting the reforms. In response, a quarter of a million postal workers, about half the postal workforce, engaged in a nationwide “wildcat” strike, which shut down the postal service for more than a week. At that time, as is the case today, strikes
by federal employees were illegal and subjected strikers to fines, imprisonment, and job loss. President Nixon called out the National Guard to deliver the mail, to no avail, and he threatened retaliation unless the workers returned to work. There were hard-liners in the White House who proposed treating the strike as an insurrection (as had been the case with the Pullman Strike), but cooler heads, such as then Labor Secretary George Shultz and Assistant Secretary Willie J. Usery, prevailed in deciding to treat it as a labor dispute. (Or was it simply a recognition of raw worker power?) While the postal workers’ creed declares that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” the mistreatment by the government of these normally loyal civil servants caused them to stop making deliveries.
In the end, the postal strike was settled in the Nixon White House, with the postal workers receiving a substantial raise, and the enactment of the Postal Reorganization Act gave them privatesector-style collective bargaining rights—without the right to strike but with final and binding neutral arbitration instead. I was deeply involved in achieving the 1970 postal settlement, and one essential lesson for me was that American workers can be pushed only so hard before they explode and push back with all their might. Sometimes they have said, “Enough is enough!” So watch out Walmart, as well as the fast-food industry in general!
By the way, Walmart is the nation’s largest private employer, with about 1.5 million employees, who are major consumers of food stamps and Medicaid. In 1913 Henry Ford doubled the wages of his employees to a then incredible five dollars a day in the hope that they could afford to buy his cars. Today, in contrast, Walmart keeps its employees’ wages so low that they qualify for public assistance. Thus, amazingly, the public is subsidizing the nation’s major low-wage employer, as well as many others. So, it is Walmart who is the real “Welfare Queen!” Incidentally, its CEO, Mike Duke, earns
more than $23 million a year, which is at least a thousand times the median $23,000 per year earned by Walmart employees. In other words, Mr. Duke earns about as much in two hours as some Walmart workers earn in a year. And the family of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton (who died in 1992), is the richest family on earth. It owns 48 percent of Walmart and has a combined net worth of $115 billion, and growing, with the help of, and at the expense of, Walmart’s employees worldwide.
On August 23, 1971, not long after the postal settlement, a memorandum was sent by Lewis Powell, then a Richmond, Virginia, corporate lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, to the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell also then served on a dozen corporate boards. His 1971 memo49 is often referred to by some as the Powell Manifesto. You shall soon see why. In it Powell described how in his view “the American economic system” (meaning capitalism) was “under broad attack.” Powell saw the challenge coming from voices of the Old and New Left, “the college campuses, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and the politicians.” Among the leaders of the assault on corporate America, Powell specifically identified Ralph Nader, Charles Reich, William Kunstler, and Herbert Marcuse. (Would it surprise you to learn that Marcuse was one of my favorite professors at Brandeis?) In the face of these challenges, Powell accused corporate America of “appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring the problem.”
He then asked (borrowing from Tolstoy and Lenin), “What specifically should be done?” (In fact, however, this question goes all the way back to Luke 3:10–14 in the New Testament [NIV]: “‘What should we do then?’ the crowd asked. John answered,
49. “The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy,” Greenpeace, available at https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/ the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/.
‘Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.’”) But such sharing was not on Lewis Powell’s agenda for corporate America. Instead, he urged business leaders to establish think tanks of intellectuals to counter the anti-corporate academics, monitor textbooks to assure that business was treated fairly, and achieve balance among college faculties through corporate influence. And so they did!
As to the media, Powell declared that “the national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” As to politics, Powell opined that while it was “still Marxist doctrine that the ‘capitalist’ countries are controlled by big business, . . . every business executive knows [that] few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders.”
Powell also urged big business to increase its influence on the Supreme Court, citing the American Civil Liberties Union by way of comparison. Of course, Powell’s nomination to the Supreme Court by President Nixon two months later was a step in the “right” direction, as were the subsequent Republican appointments of Chief Justices Rehnquist and Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito [and now Trump’s Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett]. Compare these appointments with Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose father had been blackballed from the railroads for union activity; Justice William Brennan, whose father had been an officer of the brewery workers’ union in New Jersey; Justice Hugo Black, who had represented employees in workers’ compensation cases in Alabama and, as a senator, had advocated a thirty-hour workweek; Justice William Douglas, who grew up with the “Wobblies” in the Pacific Northwest; Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who had been general counsel of the CIO and the United Steelworkers; and Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had long advocated for Black workers and unions.
Indeed, Justice Powell authored the opinion for a 5–4 Supreme Court majority in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978), awarding corporations new First Amendment rights. That decision was an important stepping stone to the Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United (also Orwellian), establishing a corporation’s right to make unlimited independent political expenditures. The pro-corporate and employer tilt of the Supreme Court, continuing up to its just completed term, has been well documented.50 When Chief Justice Roberts testified during his confirmation hearing that being a justice was as simple as calling balls and strikes, he neglected to mention that when corporations were pitching, his strike zone reached from his neck to his ankles.
Finally, in his 1971 memo, Powell told business that it was urgent that it turn the entire situation around to save the “system.” He concluded by declaring that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.” As the history of the last forty years demonstrates, Powell’s “call to arms” was taken to heart by American business. Powell’s “wake-up call” has resulted in an enormous increase in corporate power and influence in Congress, the White House, the courts, and the state legislatures.
In 1981, ten years after Powell’s screed, President Reagan, in contrast to Nixon, fired eleven thousand striking federal air traffic controllers and made it stick. Over twenty years later, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan declared these discharges to be Reagan’s most important domestic initiative because they “gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and fire workers.”
50. See Erwin Chemerinsky, “Justice for Big Business,” The New York Times, July 1, 2013; Adam Liptak, “Roberts Pulls Supreme Court to the Right Step by Step,” The New York Times, June 27, 2013; Adam Liptak, “Pro-Business Decisions Are Defining This Supreme Court,” The New York Times, June 10, 2013; Linda Greenhouse, “The Real John Roberts Emerges,” The New York Times, June 29, 2013.
Of course, Greenspan knows that in advanced industrial countries other than the U.S., nonunion employees are protected under law against discharge except for just cause. They are not “employees at will,” as they remain here under the ancient common law.
You may have seen the bumper sticker that says, “Unions: The Folks That Brought You the Weekend.” This may be contrasted with that old employer slogan, “If You Don’t Come In on Sunday, Don’t Come In on Monday.” Indeed, aside from its role in improving wages, conditions, and benefits for its members through collective bargaining, and thereby building the now-eroding middle class, Labor historically has been the leading political force supporting economic and social legislation that has benefited all Americans. Among the many laws that Labor helped enact have been increases in the minimum wage; Title VII, which bans almost all forms of discrimination in employment (there is no ban in the private sector on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or political beliefs or affiliation, however); the Age Discrimination in Employment Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); the Equal Pay Act; the Family and Medical Leave Act; and the WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act). Thus the weakening of Labor is having the effect of diminishing the nation’s ability to achieve other statutory advances on a federal and local level, such as paid sick leave, which the public generally favors but most employers oppose; indeed, 80 percent of low-wage workers do not enjoy a single paid sick day. And it is making it possible for business to roll back gains previously achieved and frustrate such advances as a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage. Also, a weakened labor movement will have an adverse impact upon political campaigns and “get out the vote” efforts.
Another significant aspect of the impact of unions and collective bargaining upon employment conditions in the nonunion sector has been the extent that nonunion employers have had to
approximate union-established standards to help keep unions from organizing their enterprises. A typical case is that of unionized UPS, with its 350,000 employees in the U.S. whose Teamster contract has caused its nonunion competitor, FedEx, with its 300,000 employees, to attempt to be somewhat competitive regarding wages and benefits. So, to the extent that the unionized sector is diminished, it has an adverse impact on nonunion wages.
For example, the extent of unionization in a local labor market significantly impacts overall wages and conditions. Accordingly, housekeepers and maids in hotels in highly unionized New York City and San Francisco earn about $20 an hour, in moderately unionized Chicago and Los Angeles about $15 an hour, but in nonunion cities such as Phoenix, they barely earn the minimum wage of $7.25. So much for equal pay for equal work! Clearly in an environment in which good jobs are scarce, unions are weak, and millions are unemployed, the downward pressure on wages is unrelenting. Is it any wonder that there is a “secret singing” among employers when unemployment is high and unions are disappearing?
Another development that I attribute to the decline of unions is the growing phenomenon known as “wage theft.”51 Incredible as it may seem, thousands of unscrupulous employers, not satisfied with paying the working poor minimum or minimal wages, have devised devious schemes to reduce workers’ wages further by illegally depriving them of pay they are entitled to receive under law. For example, employees are frequently clocked out after forty hours and are not paid for their overtime hours, are paid less than minimum wage, are treated as independent contractors or exempt supervisors instead of being treated as employees covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act (though
51. See Kim Bobo, Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It (New York: New Press, 2012).
they are so covered), so that employers don’t pay them time and a half for overtime or pay the employers’ share of Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, Medicare, or other taxes. And incredibly, in cases in which I have been involved, the federal government, which is charged with enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act, has itself paid out in excess of $1 billion in FLSA back wages and damages over the last thirty years. As Brandeis once said, “When government is a lawbreaker, respect for law declines.”
Even closer to home, the phenomenon of illegally employing unpaid interns, who should be paid at least the minimum wage, is rampant in many industries and has been estimated to affect at least a half million workers. These interns are reluctant to complain, or sue, for fear of discharge, blacklisting, and other forms of retaliation.
Further, in my view, when workers are not paid for their efforts, their time is being stolen in addition to their monetary compensation, which as we know from our own lives may well be of even greater value to them than cash. Isn’t this why the affluent pay others to perform many tasks for them—namely, to buy “free time.” So wage theft is also time theft!
Billions of dollars are stolen from the paychecks of workers annually while the U.S. Department of Labor’s enforcement apparatus is perennially underfunded and sometimes sequestered. As to private FLSA cases filed in the federal courts, in 2008, 5,302 were filed. In 2013, 7,764 such actions had been filed by May. Such cases may also be brought in state courts. Each case may involve multiple plaintiffs.
Trust me, where unions are in the picture, there is no wage theft, because employees are not on their own. They are able collectively to combat employer abuses. On the other hand, to avoid unionization or other collective actions, many nonunion employers expressly prohibit their employees from discussing their compensation or
terms of employment among themselves, which, by the way, is an unfair labor practice under the National Labor Relations Act.52
Further, the Supreme Court has been highly active recently in limiting class actions alleging broad employer abuses, making it virtually impossible for individual employees to afford to vindicate their rights in court. Clearly, the scales of justice are heavily tipped in favor of the rich and powerful. Litigation is often a game of the financial staying power of the litigants, somewhat like poker. For the employers, their mercenaries no longer wear brass knuckles. Instead, they tote briefcases!
Also, many employers are currently requiring employees to agree as a condition of employment to waive their right to participate in class actions against their employer. This, of course, constitutes the modern version of the outlawed “yellow dog” contract, in which employees agreed as a condition of employment never to join a union. Divide and conquer has always been a popular employer motto. As Jay Gould once said, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
As if direct employer purloining of employee pay were not egregious enough, to me the failure of Congress to raise the minimum wage to reasonable or decent levels for more than four years is a clear form of wage theft. The minimum wage for tipped employees has been $2.13 an hour since 1991 as a result of intense lobbying by the National Restaurant Association.
As to the general federal minimum wage, it has been $7.25 for more than four years. In 1968, the real value in today’s dollars of the minimum wage (then $1.60) was $10.65, so the increase to $9.00, proposed by President Obama, would bring it nowhere near the 1968 standard. Since 1968, average U.S. labor productivity has
52. I have a very unfunny comic book for you in English and Spanish, which will help you better understand the wage theft phenomenon: https://issuu.com/ interfaithworkerjustice/docs/wagetheftcomicbook/2.
risen by 135 percent. Thus, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, if, since 1968, the minimum wage had increased to reflect inflation and the increase in productivity, the minimum wage would be $22.00. This is one reflection of how far behind minimum-wage workers have fallen in income.53 Also, an increase in the minimum wage to $10.00 an hour would support greater demand by 40 million workers for basics in the economy.54
The point I have been trying to make is that unions have been a vital force and have played a critical role in building our middle class and our nation, bringing a modicum of fairness to the workplace, and advancing many of our most cherished values, and that the union busting and bashing that has gone on has served only to silence the collective democratic voice of working people and bring them to their knees and into a condition of rank subservience and servitude. I believe this effort to be a self-defeating and a selfinflicted wound that can only serve to undermine the beliefs and values that we support as a great nation and people, and to increase the degree of inequality.
It should be recalled that in May 1933, a few months after Hitler took power (and five years before Kristallnacht), his first repressive measures were to ban all unions, arrest their leaders, occupy their offices, and ban strikes.55 I am not suggesting that we should anticipate such a putsch here, but rather it is simply to say that unions are a fundamental bulwark of democracy, equality, and a free society that
53. See Mark Bittman, “Fast Food, Low Pay,” New York Times Opinionator, July 25, 2013, available at https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/fast-foodlow-pay/. The data included in the foregoing text comes from a statement from economists attached to the Bittman column.
54. Our minimum wage is significantly below that of France, England, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, and the Netherlands.
55. In contrast to 1933, in Germany today, major manufacturing industries are thriving, with substantial union participation imposed under law, including equal union-management representation on corporate boards.
deserve to be supported by all. In my view, their slow diminution or demise will be to the ultimate detriment of our society and its people, and those who dislike unions’ occasional disruptive impact should consider their overall progressive historical contribution to our national well-being before either joining those who seek to crush them or merely standing by indifferently. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said in his 1949 book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom: “Class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier to class domination.” Or as Brandeis put it: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Finally, let me assure you that American Labor will not go down without a fight. First, over the last ten years, it has developed a doorto-door campaign known as Working America, which has enlisted into its ranks more than 3 million union supporters who are not in unions but would join them if they could. These people are working shoulder to shoulder with regular union members to advance worker and community interests. They are involved in many progressive campaigns in their communities. And in the next five years, Working America will expand from being on the ground in twenty states to being active in all fifty.
Also, the AFL-CIO, under the leadership of its president, Richard Trumka, has begun a dialogue with its allies who are in the public interest, consumer, student, senior, feminist, academic, environmental, civil rights and liberties, LGBT, Latino, Black, and other minority communities to resolve past differences and to forge a new and broader coalition and partnership in order to build a new and better America together. The AFL-CIO will be meeting in convention in Los Angeles September 8–11 to chart with its friends and allies a new course for workers in America’s future. Stay tuned!
Let me close by quoting Eugene Victor Debs, who said this from his prison cell during the Pullman Strike of 1894:
Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but, notwithstanding all this . . . [Labor] is today the most vital potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thralldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as the setting of the sun.56
56. “Labor Quote of the Day: Eugene Debs,” Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO, available at http://www.dclabor.org/home/labor-quote-of-the-day-eugene-debs.
