WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today’s show seeks to strike through the mask of the normative history of so-called progress as it’s been written and taught to children. A tale told in which the struggles of the workers of the USA are nearly disappeared. The working class not only toils for the profit of the owning class, it has to overcome continual depredation and great violence at the hands of those capitalist owners who often unleash state police power against them.
Our opening song is the unofficial anthem of Labor, “Solidarity Forever,” sung by Leonard Cohen at a sound check in Birmingham in the UK in 1979. If the chorus, meant to be triumphant, seems wistful, perhaps that’s appropriate as this was recorded on the cusp of US President Ronald Reagan’s firing of nearly 12,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 all but destroying the power of unions in the US.
“Solidarity Forever” was written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin. In an essay from 1968 titled “Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever,” Chaplin says that
What hung precariously in the balance at the time “Solidarity Forever” was written was first a choice between political action at the ballot box and direct action at the point of production for the attainment of immediate objectives, and secondly a choice between armed insurrection and the general strike as a means of putting “the parasite and outmoded capitalist system in its place”. It was as simple as that.
My guest today, live via Skype, is historian Erik Loomis. Loomis has written A History of America in Ten Strikes, published by The New Press, challenging all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.
Loomis focuses on the necessity of government supporting workers’ rights for there to be any Union movement. Literally, the state has to protect the worker and their rights – The right to strike, the right to sit down, the right to slow down, the right to have a voice in their very lives…it only happens in the US if the power of the State, that is the force of law, is utilized in the service of those workers’ rights.
Unionism is a shell of what it once was and eighty years after an historic labor victory via an illegal sit-down strike at the GM plant in Flint, Michigan, made possible by a New Deal Governor, we are faced with a Flint whose people have been poisoned and their lives destroyed by a right wing Oligarchical Governor in service to Big Business and White Supremacy.
What can be done? How can we be in Solidarity today? Erik Loomis points us to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for an answer.
But we’ll begin with the most despicable aspect of US Labor History, slavery, to show how people, a working class, can, must, resist being defined as the means to an owner’s ends.
GUEST
Erik Loomis is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on labor and environmental issues past and present. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The New Republic. The author of Out of Sight (The New Press) and Empire of Timber.
RELATED
“Why Strikes Matter” by Erik Loomis
“The Flint sit-down strike, 1936-1937” by Jeremy Brecher
Flint activists still waiting as governor escapes fallout of water crisis (The Guardian)
“Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever” by Ralph Chaplin
Undermining Zinctown: The Feminist Socialism of Salt of the Earth (Interchange)
MUSIC
“Solidarity Forever” performed by Leonard Cohen, written by Ralph Chaplin.
“Julie” by Rhiannon Giddens
“Sit Down” performed by the Manhattan Chorus, written by Maurice Sugar.
“Commonwealth of Toil” performed by Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland, written by Ralph Chaplin.
“Take ‘Em Down” by the Dropkick Murphys
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer and Studio Engineer: Wes Martin
