LABOR
Who Gets Solidarity?
Three new books examine the evolution of “labor” in Chicago through the twentieth century BY SAM JOYCE
“L
abor,” in the Chicago context, is often spoken of as a singular entity. Headlines from the Tribune’s archive illustrate this use: “labor steps up,” “labor needs to,” “Big Labor’s expectations.” Even the Weekly isn’t immune: our story last year about the 125th anniversary of the Pullman strike was titled “Remembering Labor’s History.” Three recent Chicago-focused books complicate that usage, reminding us that the collection of unions we call organized labor has evolved through history. Who has the right to be a part of the labor movement has often been a contentious question. Union leaders often disagreed, sometimes violently, with each other and with their membership about the direction of the labor movement, and these conflicts shaped what we now simply refer to as “labor.” The Ordeal of the Jungle, from David Bates, an assistant professor of history at Concordia University Chicago in the west suburbs, chronicles the Chicago Federation of Labor’s efforts to build a multiracial coalition in the stockyards of 1910s Chicago. The Long Deep Grudge, by labor historian and activist Toni Gilpin, is a project both academic and personal: Gilpin is the daughter of a Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) organizer and wrote her PhD thesis on the union, later adapting that thesis into her book. Living and Dying on the Factory Floor, a memoir by University of Illinois at Chicago urban planning and policy professor emeritus David Ranney, paints a grimmer and more personal picture of labor, discussing his time working in factories on Chicago’s Southeast Side between 1976 and 1982. The books focus on different industries and periods of time; the FE got started more than a decade after the epilogue of Bates’s book, and winked out of history more than two decades before Ranney left the University of Iowa for the Southeast Side. But each highlights different approaches to a fundamental question that continues to 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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dog the labor movement: how to convince workers, divided by lines of race and ethnicity, that they have a common interest worth fighting for?
T
he Ordeal of the Jungle, first chronologically, investigates the Chicago Federation of Labor’s (CFL) attempt to solve that age-old problem. Through archival documents chronicling the perspectives of union leaders and rank and file workers, as well as their opponents, Bates documents the impact of race on efforts to organize Chicago’s great steel plants and stockyards in the late 1910s. The CFL seems to have genuinely wanted to organize a union that included both Black and white workers, and made substantial progress toward that goal. Bates quotes CFL attorney Frank Walsh proclaiming that “the white man’s unions are going to show that they are as loyal to the rights of the [B]lack man as they are to a white man.” Bates, however, takes care to demonstrate that this was not just the product of a newfound concern for civil rights: his first chapter recounts a 1904 stockyards strike that came to be defined by "violent reprisals" against Black strikebreakers, despite as much as eightyfive percent of strikebreakers being white. Uniting stockyard workers across racial lines would break down what Walsh called “the last barrier in [the stockyard bosses’] defense against the American working men.” Over the objections of the American Federation of Labor, its parent organization, which objected to any organization that included unskilled workers, the CFL organized the packing workers, Black and white, under the banner of the Stockyards Labor Council (SLC). But the organization of the SLC would ultimately prove to be its undoing. Unskilled workers were organized by “neighborhood-based organizations,” which Bates describes as “local unions with ties to
the workers’ ethnic and ward communities.” These neighborhoods allowed the CFL to move beyond the traditional boundaries of craft unionism, uniting workers across their specific units in the stockyards. They also allowed the union to expand its presence beyond the shop floor: Local 651, the union representing workers from the Black Belt, also opened a cooperative store in the neighborhood to strengthen ties between workers and the community. By organizing workers along neighborhood boundaries, however, the CFL had effectively created a segregated union. Although Local 651 was theoretically equal to any other neighborhood local, it represented a segregated Black neighborhood—now part of Bronzeville— and quickly became known as Colored Local 651. The union was soon considered a “Jim Crow local,” a reputation that, first and foremost, undermined its efforts to organize Black workers. Packing bosses were more than happy to exploit this reputation in order to subvert the union’s organizing efforts. The packers sponsored Black community institutions such as the Wabash Avenue YMCA, hired Black “agitators” to promote anti-union sentiment among workers, and possibly sponsored the creation of a rival labor union, all with the goal of making sure that, despite the CFL’s efforts, the Black workforce would remain largely non-union. Tensions came to a head with the race riot of 1919. Many Chicagoans are familiar with the story of Eugene Williams,who swam across an invisible line dividing what was then the 29th Street Beach and was stoned and drowned by white beachgoers. This sparked more than a week of racial violence, which ended in thirty-eight dead and more than five hundred injured. Following the riot, Black workers (still mostly non-union) went back to the stockyards under the eye of police and state militiamen, provoking ire—and a wildcat strike—among white union members, who harbored both racial
resentments and bitter memories of past instances of police violence against striking union workers. Black workers were largely happy to have police protection after the riots, and were pushed away from unions by the CFL’s eventual support for the wildcat strike. In 1920, the CFL estimated that “the percentage of the organized colored workers has been very insignificant.” By the early 1920s, the CFL’s efforts to organize Chicago’s industrial workers had collapsed. A steel strike in 1919 and a stockyards strike in 1921-22 followed a familiar pattern: white workers went on strike, bosses broke the strike with Black strikebreakers, and the result was a defeat for the union. In the stockyards, the eight-hour day was lengthened to ten hours, and both steel and packing would remain effectively non-union professions into the 1930s. Bates concludes by contrasting the CFL’s failures with the success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which successfully pursued a campaign of interracial organizing in Chicago’s steel mills and packinghouses in the 1930s. The CIO, Bates writes, “viewed civil rights and racial justice as a central part of its mission,” which resulted in a successful interracial union (with some help from the federal government).
B
eyond the stockyards, only two other Chicago companies employed more than a thousand Black workers during the CFL’s first interracial organizing campaign: Sears, Roebuck and Co., and International Harvester. The progressive, interracial union movement that failed to take root in 1910s Chicago would find considerably more success through an organizing campaign at the latter, the subject of Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge. The book draws its title from Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make, and its telling of the history of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers (FE) begins at the focal point of Chicago’s labor history: Haymarket. The road that led to the Haymarket massacre began with a campaign for an eight-hour day at the McCormick Reaper Works, which would eventually become International Harvester (IH). That history would inspire the men who eventually organized an independent union at IH in the 1930s; banners bearing the last words of anarchist leader August Spies, executed following the events at Haymarket, proclaimed that the “time when our silence is more powerful than the voices
