Monday, September 3, 1984

A Comeback for Economic Royalists

They Scorn Unions; Do They Scorn Our Standard of Living?

By Robert S. McElvaine

The scene is an auto-parts plant in Toledo, Ohio. It is late May. A bitter strike is in progress and the company has hired armed guards to protect the strikebreakers. Guns, ammunition and tear gas have been stockpiled inside the plant. The strikers and their supporters begin to hold mass meetings at the factory gate. Special deputies are hired. One of them grabs an old man from the crowd of strike sympathizers and beats him "unmercifully" (according to a witness' later account).

Open warfare ensues: 1,500 strikebreakers are stranded in the plant for 15 hours. The crowd smashes every window in the factory and tries to ram the doors. Many people are seriously injured.

The next morning 900 Ohio national guardsmen arrive and evacuate the strikebreakers. All remains quiet until the afternoon, when a huge crowd again forms at the plant gates. The guardsmen hurl tear-gas bombs at the workers, and the battle is on again. As the pickets surge forward the militia opens fire, killing two men and wounding 15. The battle rages on into the night.

This occurred in 1934 at the Auto-lite factory, but, except for the deaths, the scene comes close to describing a bitter labor confrontation at AP Parts Co. last May. Precisely 50 years ago Toledo was, as it has been this year, center stage in a momentous struggle between labor and employees.

More is involved here than historical coincidence. Americans would do well on this Labor Day to recall what was happening 50 years ago. The Toledo battle of 1934 was the opening salvo in a labor war that by year's end involved nearly 1.5 million workers in more than 1,800 strikes.

As the national mood moved leftward over the next few years, the labor contest continued. In 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, protecting the rights of workers to organize and changing the role of government in labor disputes from that of ally of management to active neutral. That fall John L. Lewis led a group of unionists in launching the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). Its leaders soon had difficulty in keeping up with their followers, who were using the new tactic of sit-down strikes to unionize the nation's mass-production industries. Early in 1937 General Motors surrendered to a successful sit-down and recognized the United Auto Workers. A few weeks later U.S. Steel capitulated, without a strike, to the CIO steelworkers' organizing committee.

The rise of mass-production unionism did more to lift American industrial workers into the middle class than did any single New Deal program. As noted not long ago by House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neil, Jr., working people have been helped so much by Democratic reforms that some of them can now afford to be Republicans. It might be added that workers have benefitted so much from unions that some of them now think that they can afford to be anti-union.

It is the fashion these days to denigrate unions. Without them, business leaders like to argue, we could compete not only with the Japanese but also with the South Koreans, the Mexicans and the Indonesians. Maybe so. But do we really desire to bring American standards of living down to the level endured by most workers in those countries?

Unions are not always right; their positions do not always coincide with the common good. But this nation is far better off with reasonably strong unions than it was half a century ago without them. Unions have helped bring about a distribution of income that is less unbalanced than it was in the 1930s. Better wages for working people have meant more purchasing power in their hands, hence stimulating demand and helping to keep the economy out of severe depression since the 1930s.

In the years following the rise of the CIO, American businessmen learned to live with unions, if not to like them. Those whom F.D.R. called economic royalists found that they could survive as economic parliamentarians. And, on the whole, they have done much more than survive--they have prospered in the post-World War II years.

Much of this may sound like the standard Labor Day rhetoric. In truth, union leaders have been known to cry wolf when in fact they were facing no great difficulties. It is different today. The problems facing both unions and workers are very serious. Among them are the two-tier system in which workers with seniority continue to receive benefits that are denied to the newly hired, court approval of the use of bankruptcy laws to abrogate union contracts, and movement of the economy away from high-paying industrial jobs to low-paying technical and assembly jobs.

On the surface the issues facing labor today appear quite different from those of half a century ago. Then unionism was a pioneer force, changing attitudes as well as laws; today it seems to be battling just to hold ground, if not actually declining. But in one sense the issues are the same, with as much significance in 1984 as in 1934: whether workers will be able to protect their interests against employers who desire to dictate to them.

Many employers across the nation, letting their spleens overrule their minds and hearts, seem determined to destroy organized labor by taking advantage of high unemployment and the most anti-union Administration since Calvin Coolidge's. In short, they want to become economic royalists again. Such is the prescription for bringing back the "golden age" of the 1920s that President Reagan so fondly recalls. What he fails to remember is what happened to the "Coolidge Prosperity" in 1929.

Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss. His most recent book is "The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941" (Times Books).