Bernie Sanders, Organized Labor & the Use of Force

Striking mill workers facing off with National Guardsmen in Greenville, S.C., in 1934. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

by Thomas Neuburger

     Power concedes nothing without a demand. 
     —Frederick Douglass

One of the things I worry about in the coming election is not just whether a progressive will be elected, but whether enough of a progressive will be elected. I've written about that previously — see "Thoughts on Warren and Sanders: How Much Change Is Needed in 2021?" — but there's a lot more to say on the subject.

One example of Sanders' more aggressive-progressive approach to both policy and process was recently captured in, interestingly, the New York Times, and by, also interestingly, former Hillary Clinton supporter Jamelle Bouie. (For an example of Bouie's 2016 Clintonism, see "Bernie Sanders' Scorched Earth Run Against Hillary Clinton Is a Mistake").

And yet Bouie is onto something — that the fight against a radically entrenched, radically anti-worker establishment must be engaged with force, not negotiation or the use of insider leverage alone.

That argument makes itself. To quote the great Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And more often than not, that demand must be backed by enough force to make the demand impossible to ignore. It must be accompanied by an "offer that can't be refused."

From Bouie's article on Sanders' needed radicalism, here's his retelling of the turbulent, violently repressed yet successful labor strikes of the 1930s. Consider the force these labor actions represent, and consider if anything less would have worked. Also consider how far labor leaders are today from anything like these approaches.

First, Bouie discusses Sanders' radical labor proposals (emphasis mine):

The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders

His plan to enhance workplace democracy puts the strike back where it belongs: at the center of political power.

... [T]he most important parts of Sanders’s plan have to do with striking and other powerful levers. He would give federal employees the right to strike and ban the permanent replacement of any striking workers. He would also end the prohibition on secondary boycotts, which keeps workers from pressuring “neutral” employers — like suppliers and other service providers — in the course of an action against their “primary” employer. This prohibition closes an important avenue for collaboration among workers. Lifting the restriction would open new paths for collective action.

This push to enhance workers’ freedom to strike is more consequential than it might look at first glance. Conflict was the engine of labor reform in the 1930s. And mass strikes and picketing, in particular, pushed the federal government to act.

In the post-war era, labor has been successively hobbled by these restriction, each encoded into law. Then Bowie tells the story of the mass strikes of the mid-1930s that forced passage of the Roosevelt-era pro-labor laws in the first place.

It's an amazing, inspiring, impossible-to-believe-in-today's-environment tale:

In 1934, the historian Irving Bernstein writes in “The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941,” “there were 1856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers, by far the highest count in both categories in many years.” In that year, nearly five years into the Great Depression, “labor’s mood was despair compounded with hope.”

The despair was self-explanatory. The hope came from the growing conviction that workers had to act of their own accord — to, Bernstein wrote, “take matters into their own hands and demonstrate their collective power to recalcitrant employers through the strike.” And strike they did.

In Toledo, Ohio, for example, workers demanding union recognition organized a strike against Electric Auto-Lite, an automobile parts manufacturer, and its related firms. When Auto-Lite and its partners hired strikebreakers and kept their factories open, the union worked with the American Workers Party, a small, radical political party that organized jobless workers to keep them from breaking strikes.

Together, unionists and labor radicals led mass pickets against Auto-Lite. Thousands of workers, employed and unemployed, surrounded the plant. Fighting broke out when a strikebreaker attacked a striker. The police and company guards attacked, and a battle ensued. The National Guard arrived and the fighting continued. In their attempt to break the siege and evacuate the strikebreakers, troops killed two strikers and injured more than a dozen others. After a week of violence, Auto-Lite agreed to close the factory. The next month, after additional mass protests and the threat of a general strike, the company backed down, recognizing the union and agreeing to rehire the strikers.

Mass pickets appeared elsewhere in the country. Late that summer, the United Textile Workers of America called a national strike, demanding union recognition and a shorter workweek. Hundreds of thousands of workers formed pickets at mills as far north as Maine and as far south as Alabama. “This strike now in progress,” Joseph Shaplen reported in The New York Times, “is obviously a mass movement.”

The strike was most active in North and South Carolina, where strikers closed hundreds of plants. “Moving with the speed and force of a mechanized army,” Shaplen wrote in a Sept. 4, 1934, report, “thousands of pickets in trucks and automobiles scurried the countryside in the Carolinas, visiting mill towns and villages and compelling the closing of the plants.” He continued: “The growing mass character of the picketing operations is rapidly assuming the appearance of military efficiency and precision and is something entirely new in the history of American labor struggles.”

Of course, the reaction to the Auto-Lite strike from those in power was violence:

Mill owners and management responded with private militiamen and armed strikebreakers, all backed by state and local authorities. A police officer killed a picketer in Augusta, Ga. In one South Carolina mill town, sheriff’s deputies fired on picketers, killing seven. In Rhode Island, armed state troopers — equipped with machine guns — drove a crowd of 600 strikers from a mill that refused to close. And during a confrontation in Burlington, N.C., soldiers bayoneted several picketers.

Bayonets, machine guns, the arsenal of the State in defense of ... I have to say it ... capital and its owners. This is what labor, working people, always face when they resist the wishes of wealth.

Finally, the Roosevelt administration capitulated to the strikers: "The strike ended when the Board of Inquiry for the Cotton Textile Industry, established by President Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the strike, issued its report, which recommended a federal study of work conditions and pay." The unions' leaders declared a victory and ended the strike — to the great and bitter disappointment of the striking workers, I might add, since even under Roosevelt workers didn't trust government to ultimately side with them when the final report was issued.

There were many other strikes in 1934; it was a turbulent year:

The year saw many other monumental strikes. After the San Francisco police killed four workers in a confrontation with striking longshoremen and their allies, local unions announced a general strike. More than 150,000 workers left their jobs, paralyzing the city. And in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in solidarity with a Teamsters strike in the city.

It was this widespread labor struggle — as well as an overwhelming victory for New Deal Democrats in the 1934 midterms — that created new space for political action in 1935. Senator Robert Wagner of New York introduced a labor bill that would give workers “the right to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Facing re-election and eager to shore up support from labor, Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act that summer.

That's how the National Labor Relations Act got passed — not because labor asked, or negotiated, or leveraged deals with insiders, cleverly and carefully trading one thing for another. The law was passed because FDR had two choices — do what Hoover had done and call out the army (thus risking his support in the 1936 election), or give in to labor's demands because those demands were backed by a force — constant and national strikes — that no one could ignore.

Sanders' radical plan, which is curiously and academically called his "theory of change," is plainly and simply the massive use of force — the wielding of his multi-million-person mailing list to mobilize anti-establishment resistance and demand that his policies be passed.

These days, given how entrenched insiders are in their force-defended world, I don't trust anything but outside force to dethrone them. Let us negotiate with them after we've given them no other choice, not before. For example, consider what a nationwide general strike would do today to the balance of power in the U.S.

Any course of action — any "theory of change" — that doesn't depend primarily on force is doomed, I fear, to fail. And if it does fail, I also fear for the fragile, pre-revolutionary nation it attempted to save.