IS GOVERNMENT-REGULATED LABOR FREE OR SLAVE LABOR?

By Edwin Cooney

As Americans observe the situation in Wisconsin between newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker, and traditionally Democratic-supported public service unions, the question that must be answered is which position is in our long-term best interest?

From the end of the Nineteenth Century through much of the Twentieth Century, history was bedecked with labor strife. I say “strife” because much of the time the general public (which had little interest in the issues between management and labor) found the inconvenience of a strike irksome and the political ideology of the strikers threatening. Space here doesn’t permit a comprehensive history of labor vs. management but even the highlights are fascinating.

The first industrial strike in America occurred in Lynn, Massachusetts on Washington’s Birthday in 1860. The strikers were local shoemakers (both men and women) who, in the wake of a supply and demand bottleneck that forced wages as low as fifty cents a day, struck in protest. Ironically, one of their most prominent supporters was someone who was first to be elected a Republican president: Abraham Lincoln. He asserted, counter to many of his GOP successors, that even contentious wage labor was morally superior to slave labor.

“I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to labor whether you pay them or not. I like a system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.”

Although employers eventually prevailed in that strike, the union movement did not die.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland and his pugnatious Attorney General Richard Olny (who had investments in railroad stocks) sent troops to Chicago to break the strike against the Pullman Company. Cleveland insisted that because the strike was inhibiting the mail, he was obliged to make sure that a single letter was delivered if it took the whole United States Army to deliver it. President Cleveland, who had run as a friend of Labor, nevertheless offered a sop to his working man constituency by approving the annual celebration we call Labor Day.

Ever so gradually and agonizingly, the American worker’s right to strike grew. Theodore Roosevelt became the second GOP president to befriend labor by dramatically involving himself in the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike. He insisted that management must recognize the right of the union to strike. He was unsuccessful in that, but the strike was successfully mediated so that the winter of 1902-03 wasn’t a disaster above the Mason/Dixen line. (Note: TR was never a favorite of the GOP establishment!)

Insofar as the public was concerned, management initially had the advantage since most people dislike any change in the status quo. However, the tide turned in favor of unions during the “Great Depression.”

As 1920s prosperity was replaced by unemployment along with massive farm and home foreclosures -- the result of insensitive and irresponsible practices of American capitalism -- the rise of unions became increasingly popular and productive down on “main street”.

If modern rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats have been consistent on any issue, it has been on issues affecting labor. FDR signed the Wagner Act guaranteeing the rights of labor to strike and President Truman tried to veto the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which sought to put the brakes on labor. However, the Republican Congress passed Taft-Hartley over Harry Truman’s veto.
Today, nearly eighty years after FDR’s struggle with those he called “economic royalists,” a comparatively prosperous America is far less grateful to unions than it once was.

Since the 1981 inauguration of President Reagan, the year in which he successfully hogtied the Air Traffic Controller’s union, the workforce represented by unions has dropped from 30% to 11%. Most manufacturing jobs have moved overseas where labor is much cheaper. The competence, reputation and even patriotism of government employees and especially public school educators have been under attack by determined modern anti-New Deal politicians. Additionally, there is the inevitable force of human nature which, in the absence of immediate need for unionism, remembers labor’s sins and shrugs off its rewards by the age-old question: “What, Mr. Union Leader, have you done for me lately?”

In Wisconsin, we seem to have an unconquerable force—Governor Walker--meeting an immovable object, public service unions. Governor Walker and his legislative majority in both houses want to control public worker’s wages, benefits and the union itself. Union leaders insist that they are willing to compromise on wages and benefits, but they say that the union’s legitimate business is absolutely not the governor’s business.

If the need to control the high costs of public employees is compelling in a time of high deficits and taxes, is it not also vital to insure the right of American workers to have something to say about the wages they make and the conditions under which they work? Stripped of union protection is American labor free or slave?

We already know what Abraham Lincoln thought and felt. What say you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY