JUSTICE, EQUALITY AND A DECENT LIFE
After 150 Years, Bay Area Working Families Fight for the Same Goals
By David Bacon
Truthout, 4/21/11
http://truthout.org/one-hundred-and-fifty-years-after-general-strike-bay-area-workers-still-fighting-justice
In the hundred and fifty year history of workers in the San
Francisco Bay Area, the watershed event was one that happened 75
years ago - the San Francisco general strike. That year sailors,
longshoremen and other maritime workers shut down all the ports on
the west coast, trying to form a union and end favoritism, low wages,
and grueling 10- and 12-hour days. Shipowners deployed tanks and
guns on the waterfront, and tried to break the strike.
At the peak of this bitter labor war, police fired into
crowds of strikers, killing two union activists. Then workers shut
down the entire city in a general strike, and for four days nothing
moved in San Francisco. The strike gave workers a sense of power
described in a verse in the union song Solidarity Forever: "Without
our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn."
The strike marked the end of a period in which, for seventy
years, the efforts of workers to form unions were met with violence
and firings. By the end of the 1930s, the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union was one of the strongest in the nation, workers
had a hiring hall instead of a humiliating shapeup in which they had
to beg for jobs, and workers on both sides of the bay were busy
building other unions, as well as political organizations that
eventually elected mayors and sent pro-worker candidates to Congress.
The strike marked the beginning of our modern labor movement.
One product of the rising power of unions was the development
of the workers compensation system to ensure that injured and sick
workers would receive enough compensation from employers to survive.
While California had passed its first workers' compensation
law, the Compensation Act, in 1911, participation by employers was at
first voluntary, and only became compulsory two years later.
Establishment of the system was both a reaction to the high level of
workplace injuries at the turn of the century, and a product of the
Progressive movement that sought to limit the power of large
corporations. The state established its own compensation fund in
1914, to offer a system with costs lowered by removing insurance
corporations and their profits. At the height of the Depression, 18
private insurance corporations went bankrupt, while the state fund
continued to pay injured workers.
The 1930s and 40s was a high point in the power of industrial
and manual laborers. By that time, trucks had replaced the
horse-drawn wagons that employed the area's first Teamsters.
Assembly workers labored in huge factories churning out automobiles
and electrical equipment, construction workers built the bridges that
span the bay, and thousands of sailors and other marine workers
sailed out on ships that packed the wharves.
The unions of the 30s ended the worst conditions that
prevailed in the previous 70 years - 10 hour days and six day weeks,
job conditions that could sicken and kill, wages that could barely
feed a family, and constant fear of getting unfairly fired. The
changes won by the unions of the 30s and 40s created an economic base
for many working families to buy homes and send their children to
college. The state responded by creating a system of universities
and community colleges and, by the end of World War 2 promised that
any working-class kid who graduated high school would find a place in
one of them. The nation's first employer-paid medical plan began in
the Richmond shipyards.
Belonging to a union gave workers from diverse backgrounds a
common shared culture, with its own labor songs and activities built
around the hall, from sports and fishing, to dancing, eating and
other social activities.
Still, in the 30s and 40s, the Bay Area's workforce was
rigidly divided by race and sex. A color line prevented African
Americans from getting skilled jobs in construction, industry and
public services like fire and police. Women could work in some jobs,
but were kept out of the best-paying ones. The general strike made
one of the first cracks in that wall, when striking longshoremen
promised that if African Americans supported the effort, they'd force
shipping companies to abandon the color line on the docks.
The promise was kept, and today people of color are a
majority of the bay's dockworkers. Meanwhile, wartime work in the
shipyards drew many African Americans from homes in the south to new
communities in California. Black families living in West Oakland and
San Francisco's Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods shared a
vibrant cultural life, with its clubs incubating jazz and bebop,
while the promise of employment gave a new generation a sense of
security.
But it wasn't until the civil rights movement of the 1960s
that the color line came down in most areas, as a result of
affirmative action decrees affecting jobs from building sites to fire
houses. Demonstrations and active protest won women many gains as
well. The reality today, however, is still that most women and
workers of color earn less, and are unemployed more, than the
workforce in general. Equality remains very much a work in progress.
Immigration too transformed jobs and industries. European
immigrants and their descendents made up the workforce in the best
jobs in the Bay Area's budding economy of the late 1800s, in
construction, transport, and industry. Meanwhile immigrants from
China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines drained the San Joaquin
delta, developed the agriculture that became the base of the state's
economy, laid the railroad tracks, served the meals and washed the
clothes.
Immigration status caused few problems for those from Europe,
but workers from Asia and Latin America faced continuing raids and
deportations, especially when unemployment rose. While today these
immigrants make up a growing section of the workforce in many areas,
inequality based on immigration status, with rising raids and
deportations, remains as well.
With the cold war of the 1950s and 60s, however, many things
changed for Bay Area workers. Among those changes was an increasing
question about the adequacy of the workers compensation system. One
case that highlighted the doubts was that of Marco Vela.
Vela began working in the Johns-Manville asbestos factory in
Pittsburg, CA, in 1935. In 1959 the company began medical
examinations to detect lung disease. A company doctor did a chest
x-ray and found indications of asbestosis. But no one told Vela. In
1962 the same thing happened, and again in 1965. In 1968 Vela's
x-ray showed a "ground glass" appearance. But the company again told
him he was fine, even though he'd begun to cough and couldn't catch
his breath. Later that year he was hospitalized, and never went back
to the plant.
Vela's case became a symbol of the failure of the existing
system of occupational safety and health, and helped win passage of
the Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed by President Nixon.
But Vela's case and that of other asbestosis victims also showed the
limitations of the workers' compensation system. Christopher Boggs
voices the common assertion that employers will clean up dangerous
workplaces in order to avoid higher compensation premiums. "Human
capital (the value of the employee) became a driving force behind the
push for a system of protection," he says, adding that "recognition
of the value of employees and other events between 1900 and 1911
helped spur the movement towards a social system of workers'
compensation."
Yet higher compensation insurance premium costs didn't
dissuade Johns Manville from maintaining a carcinogenic workplace, or
from lying to its workers. Vela and his coworkers had to win the
right to sue Johns Manville to enforce its liability and to win
adequate compensation.
The radical political culture that built the unions of the
previous decade came under attack during the Cold War. Suddenly
workers needed to prove their loyalty to sail on a ship or teach in a
school, and those who failed the tests, or refused to buckle under to
them, found themselves out of a job and blacklisted. Many unions
became more conservative in response, and lost much of the vibrant
culture that made them a part of workers' lives. Others fought hard,
kept their leaders from being deported, as was tried with ILWU
President Harry Bridges and cannery union leader Lucio Bernabe. They
won court cases protecting political rights, and kept pushing for
better conditions for workers.
But changes in technology changed the workplace greatly in
the following decades, and affected the power of unions as well. On
the docks, the union was as strong as ever, but the number of
longshore workers fell to less than a 10th of what it was during the
general strike, as huge container cranes replaced the old hook and
cargo net. Similar technological changes affected factory workers.
Beginning in the 1970s, large employers moved production overseas,
and most of the big factories of the Bay Area began to close.
Wrenching dislocation and unemployment devastated working families,
as the old industrial base shrank to a small fraction of what it had
been. In cities like Oakland and Richmond, which had been healthy
working class communities, neighborhoods, especially African American
ones, were devastated by the consequences -- permanent unemployment,
poverty and drug use.
New industries arose at the same time, although not in the
former industrial centers, but in areas like the South Bay.
Burgeoning semiconductor and computer plants created job
opportunities for a whole new wave of immigrants, mostly from the
Asian Pacific rim. San Francisco and the East Bay experienced an
explosion of service industry jobs - clerical workers in the new
glass and steel office towers, hospital workers in the healthcare
industry, and retail workers in the malls that took the place of the
old downtown shopping districts.
But these new jobs were not the same as the ones they
replaced. The wages were generally lower, benefits fewer, employment
much more temporary, and overwhelmingly, the employers were very
hostile to unions. Beginning in the 1980s, therefore, the labor
movement had to almost begin again from scratch, helping a new
generation of workers to understand the advantages of being
organized, which the general strike had made so clear to a generation
before.
The development of high tech industry also posed new
challenges to efforts to protect workers' safety and health.
Although the industry had a clean image, with no smokestacks belching
visible pollution, the use of highly toxic solvents and other
chemicals led to large waves of injured and poisoned workers. Often
workers charged that the synergistic effects of exposure to many
chemicals at once made them so sensitive that they could not even
walk down the detergent aisle in a supermarket without painful
reactions. Studies, even those by industry, documented a large
increase in birth defects among workers in semiconductor plants.
The system of workers compensation was often inadequate in
analyzing these dangers and assuring workers of adequate compensation
and treatment. Some affected workers organized a Disabled Workers
United group to press for banning some chemicals, and liability by
the industry for causing the injuries. They viewed the workers
compensation system as overly favorable towards employers because it
was hard to collect benefits for chemical exposure, and it insulated
employers from liability.
At the same time, laws passed under worker pressure, designed
to encourage union organizing and protect public benefits like
unemployment insurance and Social Security, came under attack from a
wave of conservative administrations in Sacramento and Washington.
Overtime pay, won through generations of strikes and protest, was
stripped from six million workers nationally. As a result, while Bay
Area unions included over a third of all workers in the 1950s, today
they represent less than half that.
As unions struggled with this new environment, however, many
workers did win new rights. The farmworkers movement, beginning in
the 1960s, established the right of the state's poorest workers to
form unions and achieve a decent standard of living. The union ended
abuses like the infamous short-handled hoe, exposure to dangerous
pesticides, and the lack of bathrooms and drinking water in the
fields. During the period of its greatest strength in the 1970s and
early 1980s, the wage of a union farm worker was at least double the
minimum wage, the highest level it's ever achieved.
The movement of rural workers was strongly supported by urban
workers through the boycotts of struck fruits and vegetables. In the
rural areas of California, Chicanos, Mexicans and Filipinos were able
to end discrimination in schools and public services. The United
Farm Workers, in turn, helped revitalize the fighting spirit of other
unions, and help them relearn the organizing tactics of a social
movement.
Public workers, denied the right to organize and strike
through the 30s and 40s, became some of the most active and numerous
members of the labor movement by the 1980s. When teachers and nurses
began forming unions in the 50s, they had to quit their jobs in
protest in order to force public agencies to bargain. Today,
legislation sets salary minimums in the classroom and protects the
right to organize, while in hospitals workers have won new laws
establishing minimum staffing levels, protecting both jobs and
patients.
That has made public worker unions a target for the political
right, which seeks to reduce union strength even further by attacking
the area where the labor movement now is strongest. The most severe
economic crisis since the Depression has become the pretext for
slashing education, public services and employment, while taxes paid
by corporations and the wealthy continue to decline.
The growing costs of the workers' compensation insurance
system became the subject of intense debate in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, and competing "reform" bills were put forward by
Democrats and Republicans. During the years when unions held more
power in Sacramento, they proposed reforms to try to hold down costs
while protecting the right of workers to adequate compensation. When
unions lost power, reforms passed that disqualified thousands of
workers from benefits. The continued survival of the workers
compensation system as one that can provide adequate benefits to
injured and sick workers is more clearly than ever tied to the size
and strength of the labor movement.
Workers of a century ago would find the Bay Area a very
different place. New industries have replaced old ones. Unions are
more legally accepted, but have to fight just as hard. Worker
protections and benefits have been legally recognized, but are being
attacked. Race and sex discrimination is still a fact of life, but
the fight to end it has scored important victories.
And that's what the veterans of the general strike would
recognize most clearly. The world needs the labor of today's workers
as much as it needed that of workers in an earlier era. And the
effort by the Bay Area's working people to win power, equality and
better lives for their families is still going on, as hot and hard as
ever. Their answer to those problems - to get organized in strong
and democratic unions - is the same one working families seek today.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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