Download - A RENEGADE UNION: ORGANIZING IN THE SERVICE AND DISTRIBUTIVE INDUSTRIES, SOME LESSONS FROM THE PAST

A RENEGADE UNION: ORGANIZING IN THESERVICE AND DISTRIBUTIVE INDUSTRIES,SOME LESSONS FROM THE PASTwusa_383 177..195

Lisa Phillips

This article examines the history of labor organizing in the service, distribution, and processing industries.It examines Local/District 65’s (Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union) efforts to find a “home”for its differing “orientation” as it targeted low-wage distribution, processing, and service workers, moreoften Black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish, in New York who worked in small, largely “invisible,” 10–20-personshops, using what it called a “catchall” or area-based organizing strategy. The union’s history helps us betterunderstand the challenges the contemporary labor movement faces organizing in the Wal-Mart era aslow-wage service, distribution, and processing (warehouse) jobs become the norm.

Organizing in the service and distribution industries presents several chal-lenges, not the least of which is the lack of examples from the past. This articlelooks at one union’s attempts to organize in the service, distribution, and “pro-cessing” (i.e., warehouse processing) industries from the 1930s through the1960s. The men and women of Local 65, of the Retail, Wholesale, and Depart-ment Store Union (RWDSU), focused on improving the lives of the largely“invisible” people who worked in small, from ten- to forty-person warehousesand wholesale shops throughout New York City. Throughout its history, the first30 years of which will be touched upon here, the union’s members sustained avirulent critique of the ways in which the American dream consistently fell short.We can learn a great deal from Local 65’s history as labor unions, like the ServiceEmployees International Union (SEIU), the Union of Needle Trades, Indus-trial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), and the Hotel Employees and Restau-rant Employees (HERE), and worker centers continue to launch campaigns forbetter pay and working conditions for low-wage workers who work outside themanufacturing sector, now where most people in the U.S. work.1

Local 65’s Origins

Five men, all Jewish immigrants, organized what would later become Local65 in 1933. They worked as salesclerks at H. Eckstein and Sons WholesaleMerchant in the heart of New York City’s Jewish Lower East side. They sold,

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WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 15 · June 2012 · pp. 177–195© 2012 The Authors

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society © 2012 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

packed, and delivered underwear, pajamas, and other garments to retailers acrossthe city sometimes for 12–16 hours a day, including Friday nights and Saturdaymornings (the traditional Jewish period of rest). The Eckstein Brothers wantedthem to sell as much as they could, as quickly as they could, for as little moneyas possible so that the business would make a profit.2

None of the five were happy. They had no control over their workday. Theyearned too little to support either themselves or their families, making anabysmal US$10–13 per week, and it was next to impossible to find a better job.3

To compare, Jacob Riis described the horrible conditions endured by men, cloakmakers, who sewed by the piece in tenements on Hester Street, just around thecorner from Eckstein’s, for US$7–12 per week some 40 years earlier whilewomen pieceworkers earned US$3–6 per week.4 The working conditions weresimilar if not identical in all the wholesale shops on Orchard St. and nearby onBroadway. A few of the men tried to get out of sales, but, as Jewish immigrants,they faced the brick wall of anti-Semitism when they left the Lower East Side.Like so many, the five faced a Depression-era context that rendered themrelatively powerless over the conditions they found themselves in. The onlything they could do was to keep their feet planted, band together, and to forcethe Eckstein Brothers to make some changes by organizing a labor union.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt encouraged men like Arthur Osman,who would go on to become Local 65’s first president, to organize labor unionsas a way to get the struggling U.S. economy moving again, if only PresidentObama had done the same when he took office after the economic crisis of 2008.Roosevelt hoped the new labor unions would negotiate contracts that guaran-teed higher hourly wages and stable workweeks. The idea, later legitimized byCambridge economist John Maynard Keynes, was that people would spend theirnew earnings on goods and services, spur economic growth, and lead the countryout of the Depression.

While Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) did not imme-diately lead the country out of the Depression, it did spur the growth ofhundreds of new labor unions, known as the National Recovery Administrationor “NRA babies” (the NRA was charged with enforcing the NIRA), some ofwhich were responsible for the tremendous growth of the middle class duringand after World War II. The unions most people are familiar with, the UnitedAuto Workers (UAW), the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), the elec-trical workers’ unions, along with hundreds of other less well-known unions likeLocal 65, emerged within this pro-labor context and, as a bloc, pushed bigbusiness to negotiate favorable contracts and to alter people’s assumptions aboutwhat companies should provide employees.5

With a pro-labor president and subsequent pro-labor legislation in place,over the 15-year period 1933–1948, labor unions grew to represent over onethird of American workers, reaching a postwar peak of 35 percent. The standardof living rose dramatically. The 40-hour workweek, a living wage, health insur-ance, retirement benefits, paid holidays and sick days, and overtime pay, allprovided by large corporations like General Motors and General Electric,

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became the standard by which all employers were judged. The contracts unionsnegotiated, especially in the mass production industries, enabled hundreds ofthousands of workers and their families to move up to “middle-class” status atleast until the 1970s when the manufacturing giants began to take advantage ofnew legislation that permitted them to move their operations to other parts ofthe world to avoid these contracts, and where people in the new locations wouldbegin again the arduous process of organizing labor unions to counteract thealmost total control the company sought to exert over their lives.6

Distribution and Service Workers Organize in the Shadows of theCongress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) Unions

During that “golden age,” however, people who worked outside of massproduction in service, distribution, and processing jobs or in agricultural settingsstruggled to attain something remotely close to a “middle-class” standard ofliving. As we continue to uncover their stories, a non-factory-based image ofwork, working conditions, equality, and inequality comes into view, one that, notsurprisingly, increasingly resembles the new, deteriorating, “norm” of the earlytwenty-first century, as increased numbers of people slip out of the middle class.7

Their stories, then as now, are also as much about failure as success. Fromthe perspective of the early twenty-first century, it seems more remarkable thatpeople ever succeeded in changing the attitudes and assumptions that sur-rounded their jobs and determined their economic worth. The UAW, theUSWA, and other mass production unions collectively upended the societalvalues associated with factory-based, unskilled work. These jobs became respect-able and were in high demand only after they commanded high wages, regularhours, and benefits.8 And yet that success now seems like an aberration, book-ended by the uneven success of unions like the Knights of Labor, the IndustrialWorkers of the World (IWW), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America(ACWA), the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), and theHERE during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and the similarlyuneven success of their early twenty-first century successors, all organizingoutside the manufacturing sector. The challenge union organizers face is toreorient people’s thinking toward the idea that clerks, warehouse workers, hotelworkers, janitors and other service and distributive workers deserve a good wage,just as the UAW and other unions in manufacturing did for assembly-lineworkers in the mid-twentieth century.

The types of jobs Local 65 organized were and still are low wage, unstable,and dominated by people of color, some U.S. citizens, some recent immigrants,and some here illegally. Does that mean Local 65 failed? Well, yes. Much of thatfailure is due to the larger context within which Local 65 operated during its60-year history, one that continually rebuffed union members’ attempts to bringlow-wage workers into the American middle class. Some of it too has to do withLocal 65 itself, especially its presidents, Arthur Osman and David Livingston,who failed to allow the hundreds of talented organizers, men, women, Black,

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white, Jewish, and Puerto Rican, from taking the lead in local campaigns andfrom having a greater influence in how the union operated.

And yet, despite its overall failure, Local 65’s story is compelling. Local 65was one of the few unions that purposefully organized “the poor” in “dead-end”jobs, and, while it did not fundamentally change the economic system thatcontinued (and continues) to produce dead-end, low-wage jobs, it tried to bytaking on the “system” directly. It won small wage increases and some jobstability for its members. It created a union-sponsored health insurance plan andpension fund to provide low-wage workers with the stability that their employerswere unwilling or unable to provide. It also used its hiring hall to break downemployers’ assumptions (and corresponding differential pay scales) about whichjobs should best be filled by “Negroes,” Jews, women, and recent immigrants. Itsapproach was reminiscent of the Knights of Labor’s “workingmen’s” campaignsof the 1870s and 1880s or the IWW’s campaigns of the early 1900s that soughtto raise the overall status of the impoverished members of the working class byorganizing on an area basis rather than on trade or skill level. The labormovement from the late nineteenth century to the current day has never beenable to reconcile the tension between organizing by on a class-wide basis or byskill level, craft, or occupation.9

“Catch-All” or Area Organizing

It was in the late 1937 that Local 65 adopted an “area” organizing strategyand, at the same time, decided to try to “catch-all” of the lowest paid workers inthe city, regardless of job type or a worker’s gender, ethnicity, religion, or race.The SEIU argued successfully, at least until the 2009 controversy, that “density”drives worked better than “occupation-based” organizing drives in the servicesector of the economy in which its locals were organizing. Organizers in LosAngeles’ garment center adopted geographically oriented drives in the 1990s,designed to emphasize a “worker-centered” strategy rather than organizingaround a person’s occupation. In New York’s garment district in the 1930s,Local 65 first targeted all the workers in the small wholesale shops (clerks,sweepers, and errand boys) on Orchard St., several blocks east of Broadway, theneventually took on all of the Lower East side. With a foothold in the wholesaleshops, Local 65’s organizers next targeted the poorly paid people who worked inthe small warehouses where the wholesale merchandise was packaged (again,regardless of the type of job they did). As Arthur Osman explained, Local 65organized the people “nobody else wanted” or, to be more precise, no “otherunion” wanted.10

Local 65’s strategies left it in direct opposition to two of the largest unionsorganizing in the garment industry at the time: the ILGWU, the ACWA, andthe Teamsters and various smaller CIO locals; all of which adhered to a moreoccupationally driven or industry-oriented style of organizing. Osman arguedthat the labor movement as it emerged in the 1930s organized “jobs not people.”None of organized labor’s labels fit the messenger boy, the sweeper, the woman


who sorted and packed the merchandise, the man who drove or carted it fromthe twenty-person warehouse to the small wholesale shop a few blocks away, orthe clerk who stocked the shelves and sold the items. The difference for Osman,David Livingston (Local 65’s second president), and Local 65’s organizers wasthat, at least in the union’s early years, they targeted the people in “dead-end”jobs rather than the specific job itself. Names like Local 65 of the “Lower EastSide” or the “Everybody With a Dead-End Job” union would have betterdescribed it. Instead, Osman called Local 65 a “catchall” union arguing that onlythe number fit.11

There were simply few, if any, unions in New York in the 1930s that werededicated solely to organizing the people Local 65 targeted. The AmericanFederation of Labor’s (AFL) Retail Clerks International Protective Associationfocused on organizing retail rather than on wholesale clerks. The drivers Local65 organized drove for small warehouses, too small to warrant the attention ofthe Teamsters Union. The ILGWU and the ACWA came closest. They orga-nized the men and women who sewed some of the garments Osman sold, someskilled “cutters,” others who worked by the piece, and still others who worked incommercial laundries. But neither the ILGWU nor the ACWA focused on thesmall wholesale shops or warehouses where the garments were packed and sold.The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) mostclosely resembled Local 65 in its politics and emphasis on warehouses, but it washeadquartered on the West Coast. Longshoremen in New York were organizedby the AFL’s International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA). As its nameindicates, the ILA made no direct attempt to organize warehouses and was “asconservative as its West Coast descendant, the ILWU, was radical.”12

Social Revolution: Local 65’s Organizers Attack the “For-Profit” System

Local 65’s organizing strategies were derived directly from personal expe-rience. All of the union’s original organizers were subjected to anti-Semitism,were exploited by their bosses, and suffered from underemployment. Osman inparticular developed an interpretation of capitalism that provided the philo-sophical underpinnings of the union’s hundreds of campaigns. In Osman’s view,the “for-profit” motive put pressure on employers to not only cut costs but tojustify doing so by dehumanizing their employees to the point that, as nothingmore than “animals,” they existed for the sole purpose of producing wealth fortheir bosses, the “owners” of the business. The sting of that realization propelledOsman toward a radical, Marxist-inspired critique of capitalism. The Commu-nist Party, at least in the 1930s, offered him a way out of the Eckstein trap anda route toward self-respect through hard day-to-day union organizing. Notsurprisingly, people have recently begun pushing the AFL–CIO to move to the“left” and adopt a more aggressive, class-based critique, and the new OccupyWall Street Movement seems to be inspiring a nation-wide class-based critique,the likes of which has not occurred in the U.S. since the Great Depression.13


Armed with a Marxist understanding of the labor conditions that surroundedthem, Osman, Livingston, and the union’s team of organizers engineered cam-paigns that directly confronted what they identified as the consequences of the“for-profit” economic system: the continual un- and underemployment of asignificant proportion of the population, particularly racial and ethnic minori-ties. Not only did they target underemployed Black and Puerto Rican workersbut also used the union’s hiring hall to “adjust” local employers’ typical hiringpolicies to confront racial and economic discrimination; they purposefullyrecruited in areas of the city where people were unemployed at high rates, andthey created a union culture that celebrated its members’ racial, ethnic, andreligious differences. Local 65’s interpretation of the for-profit system, and itsattempts to organize the poorest workers in the city, had the effect of exposingthe work conditions experienced by people working in small 10–30-personwholesale shops and warehouses throughout New York, the underbelly of theindustrial and skilled jobs more typically targeted in this period by other unions.

Osman and the union’s early organizers were certainly not the only peoplewho thought of union organizing as a way to foment a social revolution.14 Peoplewho, like Osman, had been attracted to Communism were organizing unionsthroughout the country. In New York, Michael Quill (who headed the TransportWorkers Union), Nicholas Carnes (who organized department store workers),and Leon Davis (who organized pharmacists and drug store workers), amongmany others, were attracted not just to Communism but, recalled Davis, also tothe idea that they could change the social, economic, and political order throughunion organizing.15 Electrical workers in St. Louis and Schenectady, farm andfactory workers in Alabama, tobacco stemmers in North Carolina, mine workersin New Mexico, cannery workers in California, meatpackers in Chicago, anddock and warehouse workers on the West Coast were all attracted to commu-nism in the 1930s because it helped explain their circumstances and offered thema route to attain some power relative to their employers.16 Even A. PhilipRandolph, the famous civil rights activist and anti-Communist, allied brieflywith the Communists in the mid-1930s when he headed the National NegroCongress.17 Some stayed in the Party, others left; still, others, like Randolph,would go on to denounce the Party vehemently.

Building Camaraderie Through an “Oppositional Identity”

Using its “catch-all” and “area” organizing strategies, the union went froma small wholesale dry goods workers’ union with 1000 members in 1937 to a15,000-member union in 1941 that negotiated hundreds of contracts coveringworkers in small wholesale shops and warehouses. Union members “65ers”sewed, “processed,” and sold cardboard boxes, fountain pens, cosmetics, under-wear, bathrobes, toys, and a whole slew of “miscellaneous” products in small10–50-person shops not only on the lower east side but also, by 1941, inmidtown, uptown in Harlem, in Brooklyn and the Bronx. While one “65er”might work in a wholesale shop like H. Eckstein and Sons on Orchard Street on


New York’s lower east side selling long underwear, pajamas, and other types ofclothing, stocking shelves, packaging orders, sweeping the store, typing orders,or delivering messages, other “65ers” worked in the small- to medium-sizedwarehouses that supplied the wholesale shops processing clothing, shoes,buttons, and other dry goods to get them ready for delivery. Still, others workedin the corrugated “paper”-processing warehouses that supplied boxes to thewholesalers and warehouses and others in the union’s “needle-processing” divi-sion sewed garments, some of which eventually made their way to the shelves atH. Eckstein and Sons.

The union faced the enormous challenge of building camaraderie among itsdisparate members, most of whom did not work at the same place, see each otheron a regular basis, or live near one another. They were socially divided by racial,gender, ethnic, and religious differences. A seemingly impossible task, Local 65attempted to build a common identity by creating a left-oriented politicalculture that went far beyond “simple bread-and-butter” wages and hours cam-paigns and engaged its members in political discussions (albeit usually one sided)about racial inequality, the relationship between labor and capital, and war(Local 65 was a very vocal opponent of the Vietnam War). The union activelyengaged in local political campaigns in New York and expected its members notonly to vote themselves but also to campaign for the union’s preferred candi-dates. Local 65’s union hall was each “65er’s” second home. Members went tothe headquarters on Astor Place near Greenwich Village to play cards, take in ashow, sign up to play on one of the union’s sports teams, get their eyes checkedor see a doctor, take classes, and pay their union dues each week. As Moe Foner,who worked for the union from 1949 to 1950, recalled, “that building wasrocking seven days and nights every week.”18

Local 65’s alternative vision, or what one historian calls an “oppositionalidentity,” was the glue that held 65ers together. It represented a type of orga-nizing that differed significantly from industrially based organizing drives thatdrew on workers’ shared experiences on the job. Because 65ers, as they werecalled, did not work together, their Local 65-centered identity was all they had.Local 65’s organizers consciously set out to help its members create that identityby first setting up a union hall then making it as central as possible to members’lives. Camaraderie was based on Local 65’s members’ shared understanding ofthe world around them, an understanding they developed as a result of beingeducated both formally and informally at the union hall. From that base, Local65’s members launched campaigns to raise wages, improve work conditions,desegregate local shops and warehouses, campaign for pro-labor politicians, andorganize civil rights rallies and marches.19

Cold War Losses

The tensions caused by the Cold War proved impossible for the AFL andCIO to resolve. In one of the most controversial decisions made by the labormovement in the twentieth century, the CIO purged Communist-led unions


from its ranks in 1948. By 1955, it merged with the AFL, a squeaky-clean versionof its former self. Most of the left-led “Communist” unions, including Local 65,survived the split but spent the first 15 years of the Cold War scrambling forresources and legitimacy. Between 1946 and 1954, Local 65 merged with severaldifferent unions, formed what it hoped would be a third labor federation in theDistributive, Processing, and Office (DPO) Workers of America, and finallycame back to the RWDSU–CIO in 1954 after a massive “reorganization” ren-dered it a “clean” bill of health as well. Arthur Osman stepped down as presidentof the union and went into semi-exile within the RWDSU’s hierarchy so that itcould prove that it had rid itself of its “Communist” element.

Despite the chaos and instability, Local, now District 65, managed tosupport organizing drives in New York, the surrounding boroughs, and NewJersey, and it took on new organizing in parts of the South, West, and Midwestas it took over some of the former Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural (FTA)Workers locals. What gets lost in the Cold War story are Local/District 65’scontinued attempts throughout the “dark years” to constitute a federation oflocals that focused on organizing “poor” people who worked in the distributiveindustry (and who remained peripheral to the workers in the mass productionindustry whose rubber, steel, and auto workers’ unions had become the founda-tion of the CIO).

Re-merging with the CIO in 1954 meant that the liberal, more mainstream,that is, “anti-Communist” CIO’s vision of racial and gender equality predomi-nated.20 Without the Communist left, a sustained attempt to combat the insti-tutional structures that promoted racial discrimination and segregation slowed.The “for-profit” system was rarely criticized in the early 1960s for its depen-dence upon cheap sources of labor, kept cheap by the continued use of wagescales that divided people by race, gender, and/or ethnicity. District 65 contin-ued to push the labor movement to take a more radical approach, but anticom-munist liberalism prevailed, a philosophy that emphasized inclusion in thesystem itself rather than a critique of capitalism’s structural limitations.

Jobs and Economic Equality for Low-Wage Workers inthe Civil Rights Era

By the early 1960s, the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) and the little known Negro American Labor Council(NALC), led by A. Phillip Randolph and District 65’s Cleveland Robinson,combined their efforts to organize one of the more famous demonstrations ofthe mid-twentieth century for black equality: the 1963 March on Washingtonfor Jobs and Freedom. The March, which has become so readily identified withMartin Luther King, Jr. and the push for civil rights, was the brainchild of theNALC. The NALC originally intended that the March be “for the purpose ofjobs for our people in government and in industry.”21

The time seemed right if not overdue. Charles McDew, the chairman of theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote a letter calling upon the


NALC to do something about the high rates of Negro unemployment. McDewwrote about the shock he and members of Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee (SNCC) felt upon learning that the unemployment rate for Negroesstood at 20 percent. He commiserated with Randolph about the unenviableposition members of the civil rights movement were in “begging for an end torace bias in trade union and in industry when, in fact, there are no jobs!” McDewcalled upon the NALC to “initiate broadly based action to do something aboutthe problem of Negro unemployment.” Randolph was able to respond that,indeed, the NALC was at that moment preparing for a March for Jobs onWashington in the next few months.22

Randolph made a clear distinction between the more labor-oriented NALCand the more civil rights-oriented organizations working for political gains in thisera. He fully intended that the March emphasize the push for “economic” rightsas well as “civil” rights. In March, the NALC issued a press release announcingthat at its upcoming board meeting, it was scheduled to discuss a “Negro JobRights March and Mobilization on Washington, DC.” The release emphasizedthat an “economic disaster hangs over the heads of Negroes with joblessness ofblack workers mounting to frightfully higher levels month after month, with noprospects of relief in sight.” The demonstration intended to highlight thedepression-like conditions experienced by Negroes across the country and to “stirorganized labor to press for major public works programs to provide jobs now.”23

The organizing committee, with representatives from the NAACP, the NationalUrban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian LeadershipConference (SCLC), SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Womendecided to call the demonstration “The Emancipation March for Jobs.”24

Because Martin Luther King, Jr. so captured the spirit of the civil rightsmovement at that 1963 march, the demonstration has since become closelyassociated with the southern civil rights movement, even though it was orga-nized by black trade unionists at District 65’s headquarters in New York whowanted to draw attention to the high rates of un- and underemployment blackAmericans experienced. King’s own continued critique of the capitalist systemhas too been largely ignored until very recently with the publication of his more“radical” speeches. King had long championed labor unions’ fight for “eco-nomic” equality. He spoke each year at Local/District 65’s headquarters andclearly thought the fight for better jobs was central to the freedom struggle.From the mid-1950s, Montgomery Bus Boycott to his 1966 participation in the“Poor People’s Movement” based in northern, urban, and racially segregatedChicago, and until his death, during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’Strike, King did not separate economic and civil rights the way historians andour collective memories have.25

King was able to capture the turmoil that was occurring across the countryin the wake of Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks’ arrest, the Little Rock Nine’sattempts to go to school without being mobbed, college students who werebeaten while trying to eat lunch at the local five and dime and continue to presssoutherners to desegregate. Until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the


nation’s collective focus remained squarely on desegregation, overshadowingwhat were concurrent efforts by King and others to draw attention to un- andunderemployment and economic inequality. Perhaps our collective memory hasglossed over the economic component of the March on Washington, so centralto its organizers, because it is difficult for Americans to reconcile their belief inthe American capitalist system with its by-products: the continual exploitation ofpeople, more often than not, of color, recent immigrants, and women. By 1966,3 years after the March, A. Philip Randolph expressed concern about the lack ofan economic agenda in the civil rights movement.

A New Beginning for Processing, Distribution, and Service Workers?The Alliance for Labor Action (ALA)

By the late 1960s, however, the focus on economic inequality, as part of anation-wide discussion, seemed to be returning, giving distributive workers achance to tap into a national movement. In 1969, District 65 decided, yet again,that the RWDSU–AFL–CIO was hindering its efforts to organize poor workersin the “distributive” trades. As it had in 1948, District 65 disaffiliated from theRWDSU–AFL–CIO. At issue, yet again, was District 65’s “differing orienta-tion.” At Local 26’s headquarters in Suffolk, Virginia (a former FTA localreinvigorated and then maintained by District 65 that organized peanut plants,including Planters), District 65 and eleven RWDSU locals voted to disaffiliateand together become the National Council, Distributive Workers of America(NCDWA). The NCDWA, with Cleveland Robinson as president, claimed40,000 members “scattered in 15 states and as far as Los Angeles and Phoenix”and pledged to “extend our hands to those who have seen the doors of oppor-tunity slammed in their faces” especially to “black Americans, Mexican Ameri-cans, poor whites, and the American Indians.”26

The move came at the same time that UAW broke from the AFL–CIO toform the ALA with which the NCDWA, and other “renegade” unions, imme-diately affiliated. The ALA, another attempt at a third labor federation repre-senting low-wage workers, intended to launch a “national drive to organize poorpeople in great numbers,” particularly “the millions of workers throughout thecountry who work in small plants and aren’t in any industry or union.” TheExecutive Council of the AFL–CIO considered the proposed ALA a “dualorganization” and threatened to suspend any of its affiliates who joined orsupported the organization. For over 35 years, Local/District 65 had been tryingto find a home through which to best fight against an economic system thatproduced low-wage, dead-end jobs more often filled by racial and ethnic minori-ties and immigrants, the ALA seemed finally to be an umbrella organization withwhich District 65 might fit!27

The affiliation with the ALA was the best, and unfortunately shortest, ofLocal 65’s 35 years of attempts to become a part of a labor movement that wasoriented toward organizing the lowest paid of American workers. The labormovement was in a completely different position by 1969. No longer embroiled


in anti-Communist disputes and able to bring 15 years of civil rights protest tobear on the “plight” of poor workers, at least one of the AFL–CIO’s founda-tional unions was ready to try and push George Meany and the labor movementin a more radical direction. By 1968, Walter Reuther convinced Frank Fitzsim-mons, “caretaker” of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (in JimmyHoffa’s absence), that the two should leave the AFL–CIO behind.

Walter Reuther had taken stances both in favor of civil rights and against theVietnam War, and had attempted to have the UAW join the InternationalConference of Free Trade Unions directly (as opposed to virtually through theUAW’s affiliation with the AFL–CIO) as a way to add his own voice to theorganization. Fitzsimmons too had taken left-leaning stances on civil rights andthe Vietnam War, and was attempting to bring some respectability back to theTeamsters in the wake of Jimmy Hoffa’s corruption scandals. The two hugeunions, then, found themselves outside the AFL–CIO fold, with two multi-million member unions, and with similar political perspectives. Under Reuther’sdirection, the two unions formally broke from the AFL–CIO and joined forcesbecoming what historian Nelson Lichtenstein calls “outcast trade unions” as aresult. During exploratory talks in the spring and summer of 1968, Fitzsimmonsexclaimed, “By God, I predict within six months the AFL-CIO will be comingto us asking how to restructure the American labor movement.”28

Almost immediately, District 65 began negotiations with Reuther and theALA to bring both District 65 and its NCDWA into the new labor federation.District 65/NCDWA was one of several smaller, “progressive,” unions targetedby Reuther as a potential ALA affiliate.29 The ALA offered the NCDWA/District 65 a much stronger financial base from which to organize than had theDPO 15 years earlier and an all-important like-minded organizational approachdesigned to target lower paid, less stable, workers. The ALA also tried to recruitthe larger American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, theUnited Farm Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Elec-trical Workers, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union,Hospital Workers Local 1199, the International Chemical Workers, and the Oil,Chemical, and Atomic Workers. Reuther’s hope was that the ALA, severalmillion strong and with foundational unions that already tended to organizeoutside what had become traditional industrially oriented and skill-based boundsmight launch a “national drive to organize poor people in great numbers,”particularly “the millions of workers throughout the country who work in smallplants and aren’t in any industry or union.”30

While negotiating a merger with the ALA, District 65 and the NCDWA(technically independent having disaffiliated from the RWDSU–AFL–CIO butnot yet having merged with the ALA), and one of its locals, 1199B (a spin-off ofLocal 1199 headquartered in New York City) was engaged in a southern versionof the spectacular 1959 New York Hospital Workers’ Strike in May of 1969,Walter Reuther marched through the streets with SCLC’s Ralph Abernathy,Andrew Young, to protest the city’s insistence on paying hospital workers underthe Federal minimum wage of US$1.60 per hour. The ALA contributed


US$10,000 to the strike, and the AFL–CIO countered with US$25,000 in aneffort to bring Local 1199B back into the AFL–CIO to which the ALA coun-tered with another US$25,000. The strike ended after 4 months, but within daysof having reached an agreement with Local 1199B-NCDWA, Charleston’sblack community was “aroused” again when the hospital refused to hire back 22of the striking workers.31

In typical District 65 fashion, the NCDWA then organized much smaller,but numerous, concurrent drives in the area. Also, in Charleston, the NCDWAsupported the 200 employees of the Charleston Sanitation, Waterworks, andEngineering Department who walked off the job in August of 1969 after stallednegotiations with the mayor of Charleston who refused to raise the wages of the“mature men, fathers and grandfathers, some with 30 to 35 years of service withthe city,” whose take home pay ranged from US$45 to US$62 per week. Like theCharleston Hospital Workers, the striking municipal workers gained the quicksupport of Ralph Abernathy and the SCLC whose convention was held inCharleston during the strike. To avoid negotiating with the striking workers andthe NCDWA, the mayor transferred white workers from the Parks Departmentto drive the city’s garbage trucks and brought in prisoners to pick up trashcans.The NCDWA also supported 150 “non-professional workers,” mostly women,on strike at the Louise Obici Hospital in Suffolk, Virginia and 75 men in nearbyMackey’s, North Carolina who worked for the Williams Lumber Company bysending support payments of US$15 per week to the each striking worker. Italso, in August of 1969, supported the fifty workers on strike in Newport News,Virginia at a “laundry and nursery.” In his report to Pat Greenhouse (vice-president of the UAW), Cleveland Robinson wrote, “Under normal circum-stances, workers who go out on strike can be expected to hold out on their ownfor some time because of their income and preparations and so on. In these cases,however, we are learning the harsh, cold facts, relative to the conditions of suchworkers and the true meaning of poverty. Sad to say, there are not enough of usin the labor movement who really understand it.”32

At least now, however, Robinson could write Reuther and Greenhouse andanticipate (and get) both financial and philosophical support. Within months,however, Walter Reuther would die in a plane crash, and the ALA swiftlycollapsed. It would cease to exist altogether by 1972. After what looked like apromising start, the ALA’s short existence and buttressed by the longer historyof Local/District 65 and the NCDWA reveals a long, protracted struggle withinthe labor movement over “orientation.” Working to organize the “poor” is acompletely different struggle than organizing on a plant-by-plant, business-by-business, and occupationally driven basis. It requires a different mindset: one lessoriented toward bringing a “big” corporation to the bargaining table and onemore oriented toward bringing small, 25- to 50- to 100-person plants, ware-houses, and offices in an “area” into a conglomerate (hodge-podge) labor unionthat represents “workers” of all kinds rather than “autoworkers,” “teachers,”“electrical workers,” “waitresses,” and so on. And yet the wall-to-wall, densityapproach, the one responsible for the biggest upsurge in the labor movement


since the 1970s under the SEIU banner, lends itself to a decentralized organizingstructure and the tendency for inordinate amounts of power to accumulate at theexecutive levels. The very decentralization that enables workers to organize theirown “grass roots” drives and to thrive in the absence of any kind of hierarchyseems to also enable the people who “lead” them to preside unchecked. The verylow-wage workers the movement is designed to benefit are then further removedfrom positions of power and quickly “disaffected” once again.

An Early Twenty-First Century Version of a Similar Struggle

In the early part of the twenty-first century, the SEIU, UNITE, and HEREare among the higher profile unions that continue to try and organize low-wageworkers. Eerily similar, the labor movement was torn apart in 2009 by the sameissues that drove a wedge between “left-led” unions and the “mainstream” CIOduring the height of the Cold War 60 years earlier. The reinvigorated SEIU hadbeen hailed as the hope of the new labor movement. Its organizers were savvy,better able to respond to people working in the “modern” workforce, to bringwomen, men of all backgrounds, and skill levels together than had than the“traditional” AFL–CIO. It offered its members a combination of civil andeconomic rights-based change through effective union organizing. The SEIUbrought “justice to janitors” while UNITE–HERE organized hotel serviceworkers (“maids”) in high-profile campaigns at the same time. In as dramatic amove as the CIO’s break from the AFL in 1936–1938, the SEIU joinedUNITE–HERE and together the “Change to Win” (CTW) coalition led fivemillion workers out of the AFL–CIO in 2005 in a bold attempt to go it alone and“really” organize, the spark so many of us had hoped would lead us back to acountry in which 35 percent of the population (or more) belonged to laborunions. We hoped the country’s wealth would finally be “redistributed” out ofthe bank accounts of the corporate elite through the efforts of strong, reinvigo-rated labor movement.

Also depressingly similar, the few people in the country who cared to thinkabout the problems people trapped in low-wage jobs face turned on each other.Members of key labor unions like the California Nurses Association (CNA) andthe United Health Care Workers (UHW) criticized CTW and the SEIU forengaging in “corporate unionism,” arguing that the SEIU’s phenomenal growthwas attributable mostly to the deals the SEIU cut with corporate business leadersto bring in more palatable locals that would accept “less” of everything (wages,benefits, and fewer workplace protections). The SEIU, its critics argued, offeredits members a weak voice in exchange for a cut of the dues each member waspaying and the stability that rested in a multi-million member union. AndyStern, the SEIU’s president, responded by not engaging in open discussion and,similar to the CIO of the Cold War era, squashed the criticism by putting theUHW into “trusteeship.” Much of the UHW then broke away and formed theNational Union of Healthcare Workers. After being poised to make a realdifference in the political, social, and economic landscape, the labor movement


was, just as it had been in 1948 and 1950, off on the sidelines embroiled ininterunion disputes over how radical or left an approach the labor movementshould take while antilabor voices took center stage and won important politicalvictories during the 2010 midterm elections.33

Part of the controversy between the CNA and the SEIU involved, notsurprisingly, who and how to organize. The CNA, representing registerednurses, argued that a more craft-based organizing approach would benefit them.The larger SEIU, to which they belonged at the time, advocated, like Local 65,a more wall-to-wall approach. An increase in sheer numbers, in “density,” theSEIU argued, was crucial to putting labor back in the political game. An increasein numbers would give labor some more clout in the “beltway,” more of a voicewith which to raise the standards associated with service sector work, which, bythe early twenty-first century, had far eclipsed the manufacturing or factory jobsstill associated with the “typical” labor union in most Americans’ minds.

If the labor movement is to succeed in raising the standards associated withlow-wage service, distribution, and processing work, it needs something like theALA, an umbrella organization that will aggressively push the dialogue to theleft, keep focused on low-wage workers, and engage in robust area or “catchall”organizing drives that focus less on people’s “skill” levels, trades, or occupations.Some kind of new ALA then needs to take on Wal-Mart and other retailers, largeand small, all now a part of a very centralized Wal-Mart-driven network thatcontrols the distribution, processing, and service sectors of the economy, a verytall order indeed, but what choice do we have?34 Low-wage, temporary work hasbecome the new norm among in the U.S., Europe, and throughout Asia.35 Astrong labor movement is our only way out.

Lisa Phillips is an Assistant Professor History at Indiana State University whereshe teaches U.S. Labor, Women’s, and African-American History. She holds aPhD in history from Rutgers University. A “first-generation” college student,she grew up in Chicago in a working-class family. Her grandparents worked atMcCormick Harvester, the Ford Motor plant, and at the Cracker Jack factory,and her grandfather was a long-time organizer for the UAW. She is active in theLabor and Working Class History Association and the American Association ofUniversity Professors, which is now organizing against higher education reformin Indiana. Address correspondence to Lisa Phillips, PhD, Assistant Professor,Department of History, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809, USA.Telephone: 011-812-237-2706. E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1. All of the published work on Local/District 65 focuses on its efforts to organize among department storeand clerical workers, and less on its attempts to organize racial and ethnic minorities and/or warehouse andother service workers, especially those employed in what were considered menial positions, see DanielOpler, For All White Collar Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York City’s Department Store Unions(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007); Minna Ziskind, “Labor Conflict in the Suburbs: Orga-nizing Retail in Metropolitan New York, 1954–1958” International Journal of Labor and Working Class


History 64 (2003): 55–73 and “Citizenship, Consumerism, and Gender: A Study of District 65, 1945–1960”(Ph.D Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001) and John Hoerr, We Can’t Eat Prestige: The WomenWho Organized Harvard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). For analyses of early twenty-firstcentury attempts to organize in the service sector, see Ruth Milkman, LA Stories: Immigrant Workersand the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage, 2006) and Steven Henry Lopez,Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Story of the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004); for more on Local/District 65’s history see Lisa Phillips, A Renegade Union: LaborRadicalism and Interracial Organizing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

2. For descriptions of the climb up from pushcart peddler to clerk to shop owner to big business owner, seeIrving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1976), chap. 5 “Slum and Shop” andAmy Zimmerman’s account of her great-grandfather’s and great uncles, the Eckstein’s, rise up on OrchardStreet in “From Peddlars to Panini: The Anatomy of Orchard Street,” in The Suburbanization of New York,ed. Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 53–62.

3. See Howe’s descriptions of work on the Lower East Side, including wage rates, in World of Our Fathers,p. 157.

4. Karen Pastorello, A Power Among Them: Bessie Abromowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgam-ated Clothing Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), chap. 6 for statistics on laundryworkers’ wages and the ACWA’s campaigns to organize them; for wage rates and the Riis description, seeGus Tyler, Look for the Union Label: A History of the International Ladies Garment Workers (Armonk,NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 23–4. For more on the ILGWU, see Alice Kessler-Harris’s classic, “Whereare the Organized Women Workers,” and other essays in Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 2007). Kessler-Harris describes one woman’s reluctance to join the ILGWU, even though“$6 a week was not enough to pay, the Lord helps me out,” see “Where are the Organized WomenWorkers,” p. 32.

5. On the impact of section 7a on the growth of CIO-affiliated unions, see Robert Zieger, The CIO,1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 17–8.

6. For a description of organized labor’s impact on raising the standard of living in the postwar period, seeNelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2002), especially chapters 2 and 3; see Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt, for statistics and an analysisof the impact of deindustrialization on union organizing and on the standard of living and on the SEIU’srecent work organizing service workers in Pittsburgh. Kim Phillips-Fein has written extensively about theways in which pro-business forces slowly and methodically dismantled New Deal initiatives that supportedunion organization, see Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W.Norton, 2010). Jefferson Cowie traces the ways in which pro-business legislation encouraged U.S.corporations like RCA to close plants in the U.S. and move to Mexico in search of non-union, “cheap”labor further weakening union’s ability to wage campaigns for improved working conditions here in theU.S., see Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 2001). See alsothe essays in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed. American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in theTwentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) for analyses of how Americans’thinking shifted toward a pro-corporate mentality over the course of the twentieth century.

7. There are too many histories of unionization efforts outside the factory-oriented mass production indus-tries to list. I include here examples that directly address the ways in which people had to overcome thesocietal assumptions associated with the work they did in order to make gains. See Kathleen M. Barry,Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); DorothySue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1992); Tony Gilpin et al. On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers’ Strike at YaleUniversity, 1984–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Michael Honey, Going Down JerichoRoad: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007) onsanitation workers; Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and theCalifornia Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987) andZaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican-American Workers in Twentieth Century America(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) on Mexican American men and women who grew, har-vested, and processed foodstuffs; see Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Strugglefor Democracy in the Mid Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)and Rosemary Feurer, “The Nutpickers’ Union, 1933–1934: Crossing the Boundaries of Community andWorkplace,” pp. 27–50 in Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early


1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996) on African American women who, like Mexican-American men and women, also worked as agricultural “processors” in the south and midwest.

8. Alice Kessler-Harris has written extensively about the ways in which societal assumptions are embeddedin the wages people earn and in economic policy and its enforcement, see A Woman’s Wage (Lexington:The University of Kentucky Press, 1990) and In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for EconomicCitizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford, 2001).

9. For classics on the Knights of Labor and the IWW, see Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knightsof Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) and Melvyn Dubofsky, We ShallBe All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), abridged version(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

10. Interview with Arthur Osman by Herbert Hill on July 12, 1968 in New York City, housed as part of theOral History Collection, Blacks in the Labor Movement, at the Walter P. Reuther Archives of Labor andUrban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, p. 19; writing about what organizing strategiesbest confront global capitalism, Fenando Gapasin argues, “Leverage campaigns could be designed to takeadvantage of where capital is structurally vulnerable to organizing. At a minimum it would suggest thatgeographic-wide organizing across jurisdictional lines could be advantageous,” see his “The AFL-CIO’sRoad to Union City: A Bold Plan to Move Unions to the Left,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor ofSociety 13 (September 2010), pp. 429–30.

11. Hill interview with Osman, July 12, 1968, pp. 7, 13–4; Hill interview with Livingston, p. 2; Fennell,“Union’s Inspiration,” p. 29.

12. Howard Kimeldorf, Reds of Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 14. For the ILGWU’s basic organizing philosophies,see Gus Tyler, Look for the Union Label: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), p. 286.

13. See Gapasin, “The AFL-CIO’s Road to Union City,” pp. 425–32.

14. Hill interview with Osman, July 12, 1968, pp. 1–2; interview of David Livingston (Local 65’s secondpresident after Osman) by Herbert Hill on April 1, 1969 in David Livingston’s office at 13 Astor Place andhoused as part of the Oral History Collection, Blacks in the Labor Movement, at the Walter P. ReutherArchives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan [hereafter “Hill inter-view with Livingston”], pp. 4, 10.

15. See also Leon Fink’s Interview with Leon Davis, June 13, 1979, National Union of Hospital and Health CareEmployees, Local 1199, Records, 1938–1972 housed at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documen-tation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, collection5680oh, box 1, ff 19 “Leon Davis V,” pp. 1–2. Joshua Freeman explains that there existed numerous“discontent groups,” or budding unionists, in the NYC transit industry that would likely not have formedthe successful Transport Workers Unions without the organizing efforts of the Communist Party; seeJoshua B. Freeman, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (New York:Oxford, 1989), pp. 41–2; for organizing efforts in the department stores in New York, see Opler, WhiteCollar Unionism; for the beginnings of Local 1199 and the pharmacists’ union, see Leon Fink and BrianGreenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union, Local 1199 (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 20–1.

16. See Robin D. G. Kelley’s seminal work, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) and Hosea Hudson and Nell Irvin Painter, TheNarrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); MichaelHoney, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1993); Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses,1904–1954 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) and Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite andFight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1997); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) and more recent work by Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionismin the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Randi Storch, Red Chicago: AmericanCommunism at its Grass Roots (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

17. For more on Randolph and the NNC, see Erik Gellman, “Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National NegroCongress, 1936–1947,” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2006); Thomas Sugrue describes theinfluence of the Communist Party on black civil rights activists including of course Du Bois and Langston


Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralphe Bunche, Bayard Rustin, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, andDorothy Height all of whom, he says, “found themselves in the Communist orbit in the 1930s,” seeSugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: RandomHouse, 2008), p. 23. Recent scholarship is examining the radical elements of the civil rights movement, seeGlenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).

18. Hoerr, We Can’t Eat Prestige, p. 60.

19. See Paul Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Political Culture in the UnitedStates (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Judy Kaplan and Lynn Shapiro, Red Diapers:Growing Up in the Communist Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) for examples of howCommunist organizers created tight-knit social networks around a left-oriented understanding of theworld and a specific political agenda.

20. Ibid., p. 93.

21. Form letter, L. Joseph Overton to “Dear,” n.d., Richard Parrish Additions, box 1, folder 3, pp. 1–2.

22. Letters, McDew to Randolph, January 21, 1963 and Randolph to McDew, February 19, 1963, RichardParrish Additions box 2, folder 8.

23. Press release, “NALC Ponders Negro Jobs Rights March and Mobilization on Washington,” n.d., RichardParrish Additions box 3, folder 13.

24. “Meeting on Emancipation March on Washington,” April 10, 1963, Richard Parrish Additions box 3, folder2, pp. 1–3.

25. Martin Luther King, Jr. with Michael Honey, “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).

26. “Black Leader Elected as New Union Head,” Daily World, June 3, 1969, p. 5, Cleveland Robinson Papers(part of the District 65 collection), Box 5, Folder 11; “District 65 Votes Disaffiliation from RSDWU-AFL-CIO,” News from District 65 RWDSU/AFL-CIO, Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 5 Folder 11.

27. “Declaration of Purpose,” District 65 Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 10, folder 15; Gene Grove, “Some-thing New in the House of Labor, reprinted from the Chicago Sunday Times), March 30, 1970,” District65 Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 5, Folder 11.

28. Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man, pp. 430–2.

29. Ibid; David Livingston to Walter Reuther, March 7, 1969, District 65, Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box2, Folder 5.

30. Alliance for Labor Action, Statement of Purposes and Objectives and Constitution, May 26–27, 1969,District 65, Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.

31. Cleveland Robinson and Frank Brown to Walter Reuther, August 20, 1969, District 65 ClevelandRobinson Papers, Box 1, Folder 15; “Dist. 65 reaching 90% of $100 pay floor goal,” Daily World, October30, 1969, p.7, District 65 Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 2 Folder 5.

32. Cleveland Robinson and Frank Brown to Walter Reuther, August 20, 1969, District 65 ClevelandRobinson Papers, Box 1, Folder 15; Cleveland Robinson to Pat Greenhouse, August 22, 1969, District 65Cleveland Robinson Papers, Box 1, Folder 15.

33. Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), pp. 5–11.

34. See Nelson Lichtenstein, Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New York: New Press,2006) and The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2009).

35. See Marcello Pedaci, “The Flexibility Trap: Temporary Jobs and Precarity as a Disciplinary Mechanism,”Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 13 ( June 2010), pp. 245–62.

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