Louis,
According to an account I saw in the Washington
Post, Ronald Reagan's conversion to militant anti-
communism came out of a fight with Harry Bridges
over his effort to get control of the unions in Hollywood.
About this time Reagan became an FBI informant.
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, March 05, 2001 2:02 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:8664] The wages of anticommunism
>NY Times, March 5, 2001
>
>Hard Feelings Outlast a Divisive 20-Month Strike at Domino Sugar
>
>By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
>
>Bobby Horn should in theory be rejoicing that the 20-month strike at Domino
>Sugar is finally over, but instead he is so disgusted that last week he
>joined a group of workers who descended on their union's leaders to give
>them a piece of their minds.
>
>After piling into two minivans that carried them from the immense refinery,
>on the Brooklyn waterfront, to the union hall several miles south, the 12
>angry workers shouted and screamed that while they were mad at the company,
>they were even madder at their union, the International Longshoremen's
>Association. "We lost the strike," said Mr. Horn, a mechanic who has worked
>at Domino for nearly half his 54 years. "Our union didn't support us. They
>didn't help us in any way."
>
>Mr. Horn is angry that the union did not provide strike benefits and did
>little to rally support from the labor movement. He is also furious that
>the union's national president, John Bowers, never visited the workers on
>the picket line in what was one of the longest, hardest fought strikes in
>New York in decades.
>
>"I always thought the I.L.A. was a real powerful union," Mr. Horn said. "I
>guess we all learn."
>
>The Domino dispute was a classic labor standoff, pitting a few hundred
>tenacious workers, eager to hold on to the benefits and protections they
>had won over decades, against Tate & Lyle, the multinational company that
>acquired Domino in 1988 and was intent on cutting costs and workers to keep
>an aging refinery competitive.
>
>While Mr. Horn and many strikers attribute their loss to the lack of
>support from their parent union, some labor experts say the die was cast
>against the strikers from the day the walkout began, June 15, 1999. With
>few resources other than their own grit, the 286 unionized workers took on
>a multibillion-dollar corporation not known for backing down in its fights
>with unions. And the strikers had just one strategist and none of the
>elaborate war plans that many unions develop before a successful strike.
>
>"They began their strike in a traditional fashion and not thinking through
>the consequences and without the artillery to back it up," said Greg
>Tarpinian, president of Labor Research Associates, a New York consulting
>group. "Some fights are lost the day they begin because of the balance of
>forces. Valiance is important but it does not always mean victory."
>
>Leaders of the national longshoremen's union, meanwhile, insist that they
>did everything they could to help. A spokesman, Jim McNamara, said the
>union "offered financial support throughout the months and years." But the
>strikers said the parent union contributed only about $200,000 to support
>the strikers, who each lost an average of $50,000 in wages.
>
>The contract that the workers ultimately approved, 56 to 48, was not much
>different from one that workers overwhelmingly rejected just before the
>strike started. It weakens seniority rights, reduces the number of holidays
>and sick days and gives management the freedom to contract out work and cut
>the work force by 110 people, or two-fifths.
>
>Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/05/nyregion/05DOMI.html
>
>===
>The New York Times
>
>March 31, 1990, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
>
>Harry Bridges, Docks Leader, Dies at 88
>
>Harry Bridges, a leading figure in America's 20th-century labor movement
>who organized the West Coast longshoremen in the 1930's, died of emphysema
>yesterday at his home in San Francisco, the longshoremen's union reported.
>He was 88 years old.
>
>The Australian-born Mr. Bridges, who entered this country by jumping ship
>in 1920, was an unyielding unionist at a time when dock strikes could still
>cripple segments of the economy. He was labeled a Communist by Congress,
>which sought to deport him as an ''undesirable alien.''
>
>Mr. Bridges, who never lost his Australian accent, came to the San
>Francisco docks in 1922, when stevedores reported for the ''shape-up''
>before sunrise to be picked for work or sent away. Continuous hefting of
>cases and the steady pull of the longshoreman's hook left one hand like a
>claw for the rest of his life.
>
>His passion for union organization and growing militancy came to the fore
>in 1933 when he led a group of organizers to establish a longshoremen's
>local on the San Francisco docks. In six weeks, most dock workers had
>signed up for the new International Longshoremen's Association local, which
>demanded wages higher than the prevailing $10.45 a week, coast-wide
>recognition and a 30-hour week.
>
>Mediation failed and the I.L.A. struck in May 1934. On July 5, the police
>charged a picket line in which two people were killed and a hundred
>injured. Martial law was declared. A general strike followed, stopping most
>industries for three days. The Pullout From the Old A.F.L. Mr. Bridges
>pulled his I.L.A. local out of the American Federation of Labor in 1937 and
>took it into what was to become John L. Lewis's militant Congress of
>Industrial Organizations, He also reorganized his own union, renamed the
>International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, independent of
I.L.A.
>
>Antagonism between the rival organizations persisted for years, with Mr.
>Bridges denouncing the I.L.A. for ''corrupt'' dock-work practices and the
>I.L.A. shunning him as a ''Communist,'' though he denied ever having joined
>the Communist Party.
>
>===
>
>Journal of Commerce, January 6, 1992, Monday
>
>LABOR LEADER VOWS TO FIGHT WATERFRONT "BLACKLIST' PLAN
>
>Waterfront labor leader John Bowers said he will "go to the Supreme Court"
>to fight a management group's plan that would ban certain union members
>from working on New York and New Jersey docks.
>
>The plan would end the management group's role in a waterfront civil
>racketeering case brought by the U.S. Justice Department nearly two years
>ago against six New York International Longshoremen's Association locals
>and their leaders. Most parts of that case already have been settled, with
>mixed results or the government.
>
>Under the proposed settlement between the Justice Department and the New
>York Shipping Association, the government would prepare a list of
>individuals found to be members of an organized crime group or to have
>aided and abetted a felony in the Port of New York and New Jersey. People
>on the list would be banned from waterfront work even if they have not been
>convicted of any crime.
>
>"Before they deprive men of a living, I want to know what they mean by
>association" with organized crime members, said Mr. Bowers, ILA president,
>in his office in downtown Manhattan.
>
>The ILA claims the proposed settlement violates its contract with the
>shipping association. U.S. District Court Judge Leonard B. Sand in New York
>has blocked union efforts to have an arbitrator decide whether the
>settlement is a contract violation. ILA lawyers have appealed Judge Sand's
>decision and will make oral arguments to an appeals court later this month.
>
>Mr. Bowers said he hopes the entire case will soon be behind the ILA. He,
>himself, was one of the main targets of the suit when it was first brought
>nearly two years ago.
>
>Mr. Bowers claimed vindication when he only had to make minor concessions
>in his settlement.
>
>However, the ILA's general organizer, Anthony Pimpinella, agreed to step
>down as part of his settlement. Mr. Bowers said a new organizer has not
>been chosen yet, but he wants whoever it is to work in New York. "I need
>somebody here," he said.
>
>With the case behind him, Mr. Bower said he hopes "to start concentrating
>on the membership" rather than litigation. 1992 "has got to be better than"
>1991 for the union, he said.
>
>The labor leader took particular pride in seeing the end of the Soviet
>Union. The ILA lost $ 11 million from a lawsuit filed by shipping
>companies, stemming from the union's refusal to work Soviet ships after the
>1979 invasion of Afghanistan. "Our defense was that our membership did not
>want to work cargo that came from forced slave-labor," said Mr. Bowers in a
>statement.
>
>The "court said we were wrong (but) the Russian people said we were right"
>in their rejection of communism, said Mr. Bowers.
>
>"Eleven million dollars is not a small amount of money to lose fighting for
>what we believe in, but it was worth it," he said.
>
>The ILA plans on initiating a drug and alcohol testing program this year,
>but the details are still being worked out with management, Mr. Bowers
said.
>
>===
>
>Monthly Review, February 2001
>
>About the Workers and For the Workers
>by Michael D. Yates
>
>Paul Le Blanc is what might be called an "organic labor intellectual."
>Labor historian and theoretician of the labor movement, Selig Perlman,
>condemned the role of intellectuals in the US labor movement. They were
>outsiders, guilty of leading workers astray in pursuit of utopian (that is,
>communist) visions. Perlman did not believe that people from the working
>class who became intellectuals would be taken in by the likes of Marx and
>Engels. Labor's real, "home-grown" or "organic" intellectuals, were
>pragmatic, accepting of capitalism and content to win for workers as much
>as they could gain within its framework. But Perlman was profoundly wrong.
>Le Blanc and many others before him were "home-grown," but they were
>radical too. And, in alliance with radical "outsiders," they were critical
>to the building of the labor movement. The truth is that the heart of every
>labor movement beats with a radical pulse, and while the pragmatists (like
>John L. Lewis or the young Samuel Gompers) sometimes achieved much, they
>almost always did so in periods of radical ferment.
>
>Full review: http://www.monthlyreview.org/201yates.htm
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
>
>
