Obama front-paged Newport News - Now check out this shipyard's little-known union history

Eddie Coppedge and Oscar Pretlow, two of the men who helped lead the USWA unionization effort, talking union on the company gate in 1978.


Today President Obama traveled to Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia to make the point that the sequester will hurt real people, and cost real jobs.

Yet nowhere in the media coverage did I see mention of the workers' union, USWA Local 8888 - - or it's storied history.


The 19,000 welders, painters, inspectors, mechanics and other who formed a union with the Steelworkers in 1978 at the Newport News shipyard overthrew a company-controlled union that had been in place for nearly forty years. They achieved this as part of a workforce that was half white, half black, and increasingly female. Through a union, they sought economic security in deeply insecure times. The Civil Rights movement greased the wheels of their victory. Their insurgency had been started up by four African-American men who were dissatisfied with the pace of ending discrimination at the shipyard under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It was driven home by increasing numbers of African-American and female workers who believed they should have an equal access to the best jobs in the shipyard and who turned to the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to help them secure that right.

Tenneco, Inc - - the conglomerate that had owned the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock company for ten years - - refused to honor the workers election victory. But the workers did not wait for the law to slowly churn out justice. They struck their Navy contractor employer for 82 days in order to force the company to recognize their union, even as the governor’s guardsmen met them with dogs on the picket lines and the city police stormed the union hall, beating strikers with abandon.

The photo at the top of this blog shows one of the workers being beaten up by the local police in 1979 during the strike- - the officer in the middle is the chief of police.

USWA Local 8888 went on to build a mixed-race, mixed-gender local union that mobilized its members to shake up local and state politics, and which remains an active progressive presence today.

And in the event that there is a sequester, the Newport News workers will have a union to help them make sure that any layoffs or cuts are done fairly. Cold comfort, perhaps, but they are in a lot better situation than the millions of workers who will be hit who do not have a union.

Today I heard from David, a union member for 25 years. He told me that he appreciated my article "If Not Unions, Then What?" (posted below), and he asked:

However, what would your argument be in regards to our companies (allowing for higher wages, benefits, etc.) competing in a global economy? Nay sayers will contend that unions can and have rendered US companies less competitive, particularly when competing with emerging economies.


Below is my answer to David's question. Does anyone else have answers to David's important question?

You raise an important question, which has to do with profitability in a globalized economy.
I believe that history has much to teach us here.

Before the 1930s, workers and their unions were never able to achieve much lasting power. This was a period when the economy was becomeing nationalized, but much of the economic power and regulation was still at the state level.

Beginning in the 1930s and with FDR's New Deal, our nation got the first widespread national regulations of the economy. As part of that, workers won federal government backing for their unions through the Wagner Act.

From 1945 to 1973, the US economy expanded greatly - - everyone did well, employers and workers, because there was so much to go around. Unions made sure that employers shared that wealth.

After 1973 the US began to enter a globalizing economy, and global competition increased - - so there was less to go around. US employers were increasingly free to source their labor anywhere in the world. This, of course, pitted US workers against lower-wage workers around the world. Just as the economy shifted from a state-level to a national one at the turn of the 20th century, now the economy is shifting from a national to a global one at the turn of the 21st century. We are still in the middle of this shift. But, yet again, we do not have the legal structure we need to guarantee workers' rights. In this case, we now need a global legal structure.

What I have described above is not a union issue - - it's a larger economic issue. When the media and elites blame unions for driving companies overseas, in fact they are using unions as a scapegoat for much deeper economic structural issues. ALL U.S. workers have faced decreased wages and benefits in a globalized economy, even as their productivity has continued to rise. And as the US economy has globalized, workers' interests have been absent from the larger global legal framework. This is a key factor to today's shocking levels of economic inequality.

Allow me to reframe your question a bit. Perhaps the question for us as union members isn't - "how can our unionized companies compete in a globalized economy?" The question is "how can workers re-shape the global economy to meet workers' needs instead of those of corporations?" Our globe is in the early stages of building a framework for new rules to govern corporations on a world-wide scale. Right now, corporations clearly have the upper hand. We can demand a global economy which lifts all boats. However, like everything else, it won't happen unless we make it happen.

We must call on the WTO to honor workers' rights, we must insist that the US sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights (which defends' workers' freedom of association) and we must insist that all nations follow it. Meanwhile, we need to build global alliances with other workers.

I realize that these are not short-term answers. But I don't see any way for union members to win in the global marketplace under the current rules. We have to re-build power, ultimately, in new ways.

.... Then What?

In order to imagine a world in which working men and women have more power over global corporations, we have to step out of NOW and envision the NEW. An article in the New York Times that ran yesterday gave me one little tool to help me do that.

It's an article about young people and politics in Montana called, In Montana, Young, Liberal and Open to Big Government.
Basically, even in this very RED state, young people are reading between the tea party lines, and rejecting a future in which they have no security. They know they don't have good jobs right now. They know they've been essentially screwed over by a new economic structure that values corporate profit over the richness of people's own lives.

The article is narrowly focused on whether these young people will be a new caucus for the Dems. That's good, I guess, and important.

But that's not the little tool that I found in this article.

The tool is simply this: the stuff of which movements are built - - the people - - are changing in this nation. The article reports that "young voters believe that it is more important to create jobs, have affordable access to health care and develop 'a world-class education system,' according to the Institute of Politics at Harvard" than to lower the deficit.

Young people get it that we need a solid safety net. That's pretty hopeful!

So this leaves us with the question of how can we nurture and develop these instincts, and set the stage for building institutional power. What do you think are ways to build on young people's beliefs?

If not unions, then what?

If not unions, then what?

Opinion Editorial in Baltimore Sun:


Membership in organized labor, a tremendous force for ensuring broad prosperity, is at a 93-year low

January 28, 2013| By Lane Windham

You wouldn't know it from our nation's debate over Obamacare, but the U.S. has had government-supported health care for nearly 80 years. Not only that, but our nation bolsters a retirement level well beyond the thin safety net provided by Social Security, and it even ensures Americans a path to a family-supporting wage. And, no, I have not mistaken the U.S. for a socialist European nation.

Our government assures us these broad economic benefits by guaranteeing our right to form a labor union. Those among us who join a union — or who get a job with a company that matches the higher wages and benefits offered by its unionized competitors — effectively win a more robust social safety net through government-sanctioned collective bargaining. Thus, the U.S. has long relied on unions to do the kind of economic redistribution work which is shouldered by governments in other nations.

However, our nation is about to lose this leveling tool. We learned this month that the nation's rate of unionization is at a 93-year low. Only 11.3 percent of America's workers belong to a union, including a mere 6.6 percent of private-sector workers. In Maryland, union membership used to be above the national average, but in 2012 it fell below average to 10.6 percent. Much of the media coverage around this drop in union membership asks what this means for labor's future. The larger question, however, is what it means for America's future — how will our nation temper the inequities of today's new, global economy if we can no longer rely on unions to do that work for us?

Unions have long served as economic equalizers. From 1947 to 1972, the U.S. economy was the undisputed economic world leader, and our nation used unions to ensure that we spread that wealth around. Once union membership started falling, the income divide grew. Since 1973 the drop in union membership accounts for a full third of the growth of wage inequality among men, according to a recent study by scholars at Harvard and the University of Washington. Today, the income gap is larger than anything we've seen since before the Great Depression.

In fact, it was during the Great Depression that our nation struck a grand compromise to finally soften for its citizens the harshness of industrial capitalism. It was a bargain that had been in the works since the late 19th century, and we hammered out the details throughout the post-World War II period. America's citizens never got the kinds of universal health care programs, job insurance or wage guarantees that benefited European workers. Instead, we won very basic economic security through Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Plus we won the government's assurance that if we voted in a union election, the government would give legal backing to our efforts to win greater economic security from our employers.

However, too few of us were ever able to grab onto this economic life boat. It turns out that it is difficult to form a union, and employers have shrewdly upped their resistance over the decades. Employers routinely fire, harass and threaten workers who want to form unions, and U.S. labor law is too weak to stop them, according to Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University. In fact, in 2000 Human Rights Watch declared that U.S. workers have effectively lost the freedom to form a union. However, labor law reform does not seem to be in the Obama administration forecast for the second term.

So, if not unions, then what's the new plan? What's the new institutional framework we will use to balance people's needs with those of corporations? If we're going to effectively scrap our nation's method of broad economic redistribution, what will we replace it with? A near 100-year low in unionization rates isn't just labor's problem. It's a problem for anyone who does not want to see U.S. economic inequality shred our nation's social fabric.

Lane Windham is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her email is lanewindham@gmail.com.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-28/news/bs-ed-unions-20130128_1_union-membership-labor-union-income-gap

Welcome to Working Class Progress, a blog space which is dedicated to conversations and ideas about the direction of our movement for economic and social justice.

We all know that we are at a critical moment. Inequality is rising, union membership is shrinking, and the corporations are writing the rules for the new global economy. It seems like we've been hunkered down in defense for years. We worry about our children's future.

Remember that we've been fighting this battle for over 150 years. When working men and women faced a new industrial capitalism in the 19th cnentury, we began the fight to shape the economy and our society and our lives. Did we win safe workplaces because the sweatshops naturally evolved? No, we won them because we marched and demanded laws to ensure health and safety. Were manufacturing jobs just naturally good jobs? No, working people made them good jobs by causing enough trouble that the government guaranteed our right to bargain collectively with employers.

We're at a new stage in the battle. Yet again, we face a new kind of capitalism - - one that is global in reach and driven by retail and finance. Yet there is nothing inherent in the new capitalism which precludes working-class power. No natural law says retail and service jobs cannot be good jobs, that global interconnectedness means class disparity, nor that broad economic security is unattainable today.

The tools that we used to win power in the old capitalism will not serve us well today. Industrial unions, 20th century labor law, even the current form of collective bargaining - - these are all institutions which must evolve. We shouldn't just toss them out the window, but we must question our assumptions, and ask what kinds of tools and directions we need in order to shape corporate power today.

I don't have the answer. Neither do you. And we may never know the answer in our life time. But it's time we had the conversation.

I look forward to hearing from you through Working Class Progress as we build ideas and analysis together for the future.