Labor History symposium: Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom

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Notes

Notes

1. Labor force data was taken from the Thirteenth Census of the United States 1910: Population, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1913). Trade union membership data is from Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1924), Table 2, p. 33, and Table 20, pp. 98–99. Wolman gives a total number of 2.1 million trade unionists in 1910, of whom 76,000 were female.

2. Sterling Spero and Abraham Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Atheneum, 1969 [1931]), Table 1, pp. 76–78, 80. The miners’ estimate comes from [W.E.B. Du Bois], The Negro American Artisan (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1912), p. 83. The remaining figures are from French E. Wolfe, Admission to American Trade Unions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1912), pp. 123–4, n. 4. I, too, would urge that this estimate be used cautiously. A thorough study of the original sources is required before any definitive conclusions can be reached.

3. For example, one wishes that he had paid more attention to ‘white’ trade unionists like the Indiana cigar maker quoted in The Negro American Artisan, pp. 83–4, noting: ‘No true trade unionist will object to the Negro belonging to a labor union. … All the men whom I have heard object to the Negro joining a labor union or refusing to work with a Negro, were in all cases men who did not understand or comprehend the first principles of the so-called ‘labor question’. … This objection to the Negro in unions is not only ridiculous but is criminal and is born of hatred, jealousy and ignorance. … [Further], [t]his clap trap about race superiority is silly. If the white man is so much superior to the Negro in a given calling or in all industrial pursuits he need fear nothing from his Negro competitor. … [I]n those unions where Negroes are admitted to membership and are given and guaranteed all privileges with any other member, … they make loyal and trustworthy union men.’ Nor is his the only such voice in this valuable contemporary report.

4. F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 25.

1. Wilson, When Work Disappears. See Bernstein, ‘Roots of the Underclass’.

2. Moreno, Black Americans, 278.

3. Opportunity 7 (1929): 381–2, in Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, vol. VI, 345.

4. It is surprising that Zieger did not make more of this point. He reacted rather sharply to my claim that A. Philip Randolph's atheism posed a problem for ordinary black workers, who tended to be more religious. For Jobs and Freedom opens with these remarkable sentences: ‘I still have a hard time confessing that I didn’t stay for Dr King's speech. As far as I was concerned, civil rights was a matter of politics and morality, not religion’ (p. 1).

5. My personal education story parallels my personal experience with organized labor. A child of two public school teachers who attended public schools K through PhD, I now teach at a college that accepts no public funds and I home-school my own children.

6. Lieberman, The Teacher Unions, ix.

7. Economists disagree as to whether unionization increased teacher income – Lieberman, The Teacher Unions. Moreover, it is often remarked that unionization turned teaching from a high-prestige, low-paying profession to a low-prestige, high-paying profession. Frum, How We Got Here, 140.

8. Horowitz, ‘The Strange Case of S.E.I.U.’.

1. Quoted in Simons, Class and Color, 44.

2. Alexander, ‘Race, Class Loyalty.’

3. Van der Walt, ‘The First Globalization’, 237–43.

4. Pouget, ‘What is the Trade Union?’

5. Douglass, All Power, 10.

6. Johns, ‘Trade Union’, 753–4.

7. Van der Walt, ‘Anarchism and Syndicalism in South Africa’, 483–90, 551–60.

8. Pouget, ‘What is the Trade Union?,’ 66–8, 71–3.

9. Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 280.

10. Salerno, Red November, 6.

11. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 391–2.

12. Alexander, Workers, War, 84–5.

13. Ibid., 38–40.

14. Ibid., 80–5.

15. Walker and Weinbren, 2000 Casualties, parts VIII and IX.

16. Alexander, Workers, War, 125–6.

17. Buhlungu, ‘COSATU battle’, 16.

18. Pouget, ‘What is the Trade Union?’, 73.

19. Lynd, ‘Radicals’, 30.

1. Journal of Labor Research 25, no. 3 (Summer 2004); Richard B. Freeman, ‘What Do Unions Do?–The 2004 M-Brane Stringtwister Edition’, Journal of Labor Research 26, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 641–68. See also Toke Aidt and Zafiris Tzannatos, Unions and Collective Bargaining: Economic Effects in a Global Environment (Washington: The World Bank, 2002), 23–27.