With the background of the Vietnam war, rising prices and stagnant wages, workers in the US began to ignore calls to support the war effort and keep working, and instead launch a wave of wildcat strikes in key industries, while women homeworkers fought for lower prices. We tell the story of these struggles in this double podcast episode.

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This is an improved, re-edited version of our original episode 8. In conversation with Jeremy Brecher, author of the excellent book, Strike!, we learn about the support for the war from union officials, the responses from the rank-and-file, and lessons we can learn from them today.

In part 1, we look at the historical background, the positions of the official labour organisations, the growth of the 1960s counterculture, and strikes by mostly Black sanitation workers and bus drivers, and a national wildcat strike of coal miners.

Episodes

  • E99: Vietnam war strike wave, part 1 – historical background, the positions of the official labour organisations, the growth of the 1960s counterculture, and strikes by mostly Black sanitation workers and bus drivers, and a national wildcat strike of coal miners.

E99: Vietnam War strike wave, part 1 – Working Class History

  • E100: Vietnam war strike wave, part 2 – strikes by postal workers, Teamsters, hospital workers and auto workers, and protests by women homeworkers.

E100: Vietnam War strike wave, part 2 – Working Class History

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Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
  • Edited by Jesse French, with original editing by Emma Courtland.
  • Episode graphic: Postal workers on wildcat strike, 1970. Courtesy APWUcommunications/Wikimedia Commons CC SA 3.0
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

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Transcript

Part 1

In the 1960s, as US bombs rained down on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, an anti-war movement developed at home and amongst the troops, while workers began to ignore the calls for patriotism and war production, and fought for better pay and conditions. Wildcat strikes broke out in key industries, like coal mining, truck driving, public transport, sanitation and postal services, while women struggled against the rising costs of living in possibly the biggest protest movement to date in the United States. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Now, before we get started today, long-term listeners may recall hearing an episode about the mine wars war-era strike wave before, and they would be right. Our podcast episode 8 was about this. However, like all of our earliest episodes, it was basically raw audio from our interview so the sound quality wasn’t great, and there wasn’t narrative to fill in any gaps, explain context and pull the story together. In addition to working on new episodes, we are also going back over our earliest episodes to re-edit and release them in the new, narrative format we use for all of our later episodes. So we hope you enjoy this improved and expanded episode.

Before we get on to the topic at hand, just a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patrons can listen to both parts of this double episode now. As we record this, we’ve got a bit under 900 patrons. If we could get to 1200 patrons, this would really help us cover our costs, made our project sustainable for the long-term, and be able to fund production of additional episodes in the future. So if you can, please join our community and help keep our collective history of struggle alive! Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

This episode is part of a series we have produced about the Vietnam War. In our episode 14, with Noam Chomsky, we talk about the geopolitics of the conflict and its human cost, in episodes 10-11 we talk about the GI resistance to the war, and in episodes 43-46 we look at the anti-war movement in the US itself.

This episode is a little bit different, because we are looking at how US workers responded to the war, at work.

Jeremy Brecher: The American labour movement overwhelmingly supported the Vietnam War in the early stages. There were resolutions on the war and the statements by the AFL-CIO were unanimous or close to unanimous in support of the war.

This is Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!, a history of mass strikes in the US, and one of the best books we have ever read on working-class history in the country. We heartily recommend getting hold of the book, which is available in our online store, link in the show notes.

The AFL-CIO is the main trade union confederation in the United States.

There was a Democratic President who was regarded as fundamentally pro-labour, despite some quibbles and they wanted to support President Kennedy. More than that, they shared the world view that the Vietnam War came out of. People can argue about the details but the broad perception was that the struggle against communism was a struggle for freedom; that any place that communism was advancing, it was essential for the United States to fight against it. There were no nuances, like, ‘Well, isn’t there a nationalist dimension to the Vietnamese fighting for the liberation from colonialism.’ This was not part of a picture that people in labour officialdom, as in other important positions in American society, wanted to hear. They might say, ‘Yes, they’re fighting French colonialism and we’re supporting them in their struggle against it.’ This is the general perception.

There’s a specific interest that war production was very much perceived as good for jobs and good for labour. I think you can say then that the American working class was very patriotic. They had won World War II and they had supported American democracy against fascism. They felt that what the United States was doing in the world was probably good. There was some small opposition from traditionally left-wing unions, like the West Coast longshoremen, the New York hospital workers and a few other places but very, very little and very isolated and not reaching beyond groups that had a long-term critique of America’s role in the world.

While that was the situation for the official organisations tasked with representing the working class, different things were going on for workers at a grassroots level.

The 1960s are often remembered and thought of as a period of revolt but when the 1960s started, we didn’t know that we were going into the 1960s. The early 1960s, both in terms of the labour picture and more broadly, seemed very much like a continuation of the 1950s with the continuation of McCarthyism and of pressures for cultural conformity and a working class that had a higher standard of living than it had ever had before, especially those who were in the mainstream, central industries.

McCarthyism, named after US Senator Joseph McCarthy, refers to the wave of anti-communist hysteria in the US in the 1950s, when large numbers of left-wingers were brought in front of Senate hearings and essentially purged from public life.

This situation of conformity and improving living standards had some notable exceptions.

Obviously, many of these generalisations apply less to Black workers, to women workers and to workers in marginalised industries and rural areas but the general pattern, even for Black workers who had made it into the central industries, was that these were good times. You could buy a house which you’d never been able to do. Maybe your kid wouldn’t have to work in the shop and maybe your kid was going to be able to go to college and have a nice white-collar job. You could definitely take a vacation and maybe you could even buy a vacation cottage.

Although the discontents on the shop floor and in the workplace remained strong, their overall ambience was shaped by the economic prosperity of the era and the continuation of a generally conservative cultural trend. In that context, you begin getting what became the student revolt or youth revolt.

It started with college students, largely, around a variety of issues and gradually spread to become not so college-centred but really a generational polarisation. It was symbolised by many, many different things; the hippie values; hairstyles; drug use; and above all, a questioning of solid, conservative, cultural values that pretty much pervaded American society. That gradually spread on a generational basis, so that the slogan ‘Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30’ really encapsulated the attitude. There was a converse attitude which was also very widespread of essentially ‘Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30’ that led to a generational polarisation. It was a very important feature right through to the end of the 1960s.

The general conservatism and conformism of the 1950s was marked by a general absence of social movements of all kinds but you have the beginning of the Black freedom movement, the civil rights movement. In the southern states of the United States, you have what was known as Jim Crow which was practically a form of serfdom. Jim Crow laws segregated schools, public buses and all the other institutions of the South and it shouldn’t be considered that the Black resistance to oppression sprang from nowhere in 1954 and 1955. What you have is a sharp development of new forms. First through the Brown versus Board of Education decision which declared that separate but equal schools were inherently unequal and required that Southern schools be integrated and then the Montgomery bus boycott in which the entire Black population of Montgomery boycotted the public buses for over a year, demanding an end to the segregation of the buses.

After a year, you had a new sense of ability to stand up to segregation and Jim Crow. Following that, you have sit-ins, and then freedom rides, and then getting into the ’60s you have great civil disobedience campaigns. All of that became an inspiration for all the social movements that are so often referred to as the ’60s.

This generalised feeling of rebellion, largely from the burgeoning civil rights movement, started to spread to workers on the shopfloor.

As part of the pattern of growing discontent, that’s illustrated by the student movement, youth polarisation and the Black movement, it’s not widely recognised but there is very much a parallel development among workers, especially among young workers. It’s manifested in a lot of different ways and initially, ones that were not so obvious. For example, you started having a lot of trade union leaderships being voted out of office by opposition caucuses. You started finding an increase in wildcat strikes over what were sometimes called ‘local issues’ or grievances that the trade union leadership was not interested in trying to address.

Wildcat strikes are strikes which are organised and undertaken directly by workers themselves, without the authorisation of their unions.

You can see quite amazing statistics about some of this. In the later ’60s, some statistics got out from General Motors that showed that there was something like five times as many hours lost to local issues and wildcat strikes as to national strikes. The various forms of resistance to authority on the job, specifically by young workers, became more and more pervasive and began to be recognised. For example, General Motors built a plant at Lordstown with a modern, state-of-the-art plant and they hired a young workforce. Workers would walk out and they would refuse orders. It just became big news in the New York Times and widely recognised as a phenomenon and it became increasingly the case through the 1960s.

Across the US, as in Europe, young workers had become increasingly unruly. In many cases, people would just bunk off work regularly. At General Motors, their absentee rate – meaning the percentage of workers not at their posts each day – was 2% in 1960. By 1970 it had more than doubled. 5% of workers were absent with no explanation most days, with 10% absent every Monday and Friday. At Lordstown, which we referenced in our episode 83, talking about general labour indiscipline, absenteeism reached 20% in summertime.

A friend of mine and I took a tour around the United States interviewing young workers and wrote a book about it. The stories we were told indicated a very high level of resistance and of people organising themselves to get time off on the job and quite an extensive use of sabotage. It wasn’t blowing things up type sabotage but, for example, in one case, workers from 50 different parts of an auto plant drew lots about who would stop production. When your number came up, you did something in your part that would stop work going forward where you were and hopefully, also stop it for the rest of the plant. It was this kind of form of resistance which had, of course, always been there in factory settings but it became much more pervasive.

A typical reason for such sabotage would be as a protest against bosses trying to speed up the production line. So at Lordstown, for example, when management tried to speed up the production line, workers just decided to slow it down, by ignoring one car in 10 or 20 when it came past their station. Management complained to the press about this, with one stating: “we’ve had cases of engine blocks passing 40 men without them doing their work.”

All this was having an impact on the corporations’ bottom lines. At GM, for example, their labour costs went up from being 29.5% of total sales income in 1962 to 33% a decade later.

With the pressures of war, corporations were also putting up prices – this is commonly referred to by governments and the media as “inflation”.

At the same time, you have a period where you have rising wages but inflation rising at a much faster level than wages. You have a very hard time with people keeping up with their bills and that, again, adds to the pressure cooker and that is also a result, very much, of the Vietnam War. There was a period when it was being blamed on the ‘movement of the anchovy’. The anchovies moved and therefore, the fish didn’t have anything to eat, so the price of fish went up and that was the cause of America’s inflation. I’m not kidding. I saw it on television [laughter].

But it gradually became clear that it was the result of the war and especially because Lyndon Johnson had decided he would not have any kind of tax increase or welfare state cuts while they were increasing war spending. Therefore, inflation got higher and higher and reached a crescendo by the end of the decade which put enormous economic pressures on workers.

For the leaderships of the trade unions, these unruly young workers, their wildcat strikes and their sabotage, was a problem.

The official leadership of the labour movement was already quite senior. There was very little effort to bring younger workers into the structure of the labour movement. There was growing hostility by the established labour leadership to these young trouble-makers. They were making trouble for them, for one thing, and they were undermining their fairly cosy relationship with the employers. This was all aggravated by the generational conflict that pervaded the society, so they were often regarded as youngsters with too much piss and vinegar and no desire to work. This became compounded by more directly political issues as workers, especially younger workers, began turning against the Vietnam War and especially as African American workers became a larger part of the workforce. I remember interviewing young workers in Detroit and they said, ‘We all work on the nightshift because the foremen go home and don’t bother us.’ [Laughter]. This was a poor workforce and they didn’t have any pride in their work and they didn’t have any pride in their union. The only problem was there wasn’t a lot they could do about it because they needed the workers. There was a labour shortage that was part of the consequences and causes of the inflation, so they needed the warm bodies.

We hear from a number of these workers in Detroit in our podcast episodes 61-62, about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

As the war progressed, attitudes of many workers towards the war itself started to change significantly. As, especially early on, the strikes taking place were not political strikes against the war as such.

Initially, they are definitely not anti-war strikes and the working-class support for the war, in 1963-1965, is actually very widespread. Sometimes, there was militant support for the war. There were union-led demonstrations and occasional instances of violence against anti-war protesters by, so-called, ‘hard hats’, a term usually used for construction workers. This was not large scale mass violence but there definitely were physical attacks on anti-war demonstrators.

The most famous incidence of this was the so-called “hard hat riot” of 1970. Here, a violent attack on anti-war protesters was organised by leader of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, Peter J Brennan, a Democrat. In collaboration with the then-Republican administration of Richard Nixon, he coordinated an assault by 200 construction workers armed with clubs and steel toe capped boots on young people in New York City. The workers chanted “USA… Love it or leave it!”, and raided the Pace University, smashing windows, beating up students, tearing down Red Cross and church flags. They injured 70 people, most of whom were hospitalised, while police sat by and watched. Brennan was later rewarded by Nixon by being made secretary of labour.

As the war went on and as we get into 1966-1968, there is a deep change in public attitudes about the war, a significant turning against the war and a huge increase in the scale of the anti-war movement. By 1970, you’re having demonstrations with so many millions of people that I couldn’t even count them. They were the so-called ‘moratoriums’ which were, incidentally, originally conceived as general strikes, although, that was toned down a bit.

There was a lot of what was called confrontation politics with demonstrations that skirted the edge of violence and a steady turning of the population against the war. This started, first of all, with students and then very rapidly with Black, militant organisations like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee which was one of the first to take a position against the war. That spread very much through the rest of the Black community.

The attitudes about the war were very much shaped by the military manpower policies that were used by the government and by the military. Essentially, with previous wars, there was a strong sense of pride that America’s elite sent their sons to the war and that the working class went to war but also the elite went to war and shared the risks and the burdens. Vietnam was a very, very different story.

Primarily because of the student deferment policy of the draft, students who were at that time overwhelmingly people of a middle-class background were deferred. They didn’t have to go. Whereas, working-class people and especially poor and African American young people were drafted in huge numbers. This had multiple effects. Originally, it fed into the patriotism traditions, like, ‘My son’s in Vietnam and I support the war,’ but over time, this changed. This happened first very much in the Black community and then with other parts of the Black leadership, like Martin Luther King, coming out against the war and taking a leading role in opposing it. There was then general disillusionment by everybody, including the white working class, especially after the Tet Offensive.

The Tet Offensive was a major offensive operation by Vietnamese anti-colonial forces in the lunar New Year of 1968. Tactically, the offensive was a failure, and they suffered huge losses. But politically it ended up being a significant victory. US military propaganda had been claiming that the war was nearly over, and the Vietnamese had almost been defeated. The offensive showed this was a lie, and helped significantly turn public opinion against the war itself, including amongst US service personnel.

Service members who knew what was really going on returning home also had an impact.

As all these working-class kids, who had gone to Vietnam, began coming back, they had concluded that it was a shuck and veterans who opposed the war, who were overwhelmingly working-class, began telling their families and their communities, ‘This is not what you heard. This is not about protecting them. This is about all kinds of horrible things that we’re doing to these people.’ That had a powerful effect on working-class communities. By the time you get to the early 1970s, you have overwhelming opposition to the war among the majority of the population. At certain points, the opposition among working-class people was actually greater than all groups, except ethnic minorities. The officialdom of the labour movement supported the war from the beginning and gradually began peeling off, especially after 1967. Some unions joined the anti-war movement and formed Labour Against the War which was a fairly broad alliance. However, the official leadership continued to support the war, opposed Democratic candidates who opposed the war, even though they had a traditional alliance with Democrats and George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, was still lobbying for financial support of the war after the last American troop had been withdrawn.

With this background, some really large and significant local and national industrial disputes began to break out.

As you go from 1965 to 1970, you’re getting more and more economic pressures and workers are falling farther and farther behind. At the same time, the general spirit of revolt that we associate with the 1960s was coming into its own. What started out as small, localised actions, they began to express themselves on a much larger scale and because of divisions between rank and file workers and unions and union officials, which are always there to a greater or lesser extent, they became very, very pronounced by the time we get to the end of the 1960s. Because of that, many of the large strikes took the form of wildcat strikes. The first really big one, with tremendous impact, was by the postal workers.

Now, before we get to the postal workers’ strike, then, there were numerous local strikes by mostly Black workers. For example, in Memphis, Tennessee, in February 1968, mostly Black sanitation workers walked out.

The Memphis strike is, of course, most famous because it was supported very visibly by Dr. Martin Luther King and it was in the course of supporting it that he was assassinated after giving one of his great speeches. It’s remembered in American history as part of the story of Dr. King. It is a very fascinating confluence of organised labour and the Black movement that illustrates a lot of the themes of the time.

The Memphis sanitation workers had repeatedly tried to get a union. They had support from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) but they were never, however, able to get a union due to the opposition of the government that employed them. They had notoriously terrible conditions. They were almost all Black and the conditions were, as you can imagine, unsanitary but also very unsafe and the wages meant that workers were living in poverty, even for jobs with lots of overtime. They had been trying to organise the union and the government had refused repeated but then two workers were killed in an accident in the course of doing their jobs. That brought things to a head and the workers had a meeting and decided that they would strike and about 1,500 almost entirely Black workers struck.

Garbage strikes are kind of special because a lot of times, for workers who perform public services, it doesn’t really have that big an impact and people will go on with their business. With a garbage strike, it doesn’t take very long before the fact that the society is dependent on its workers becomes very olfactorily apparent as big piles of garbage were piling up on the streets of Memphis. The mayor of the city, however, refused to come to any kind of settlement and workers decided that they would have a sit-in. They had a sit-in and many of them were arrested.

In the course of this, Martin Luther King was invited to come in and give a speech in support of them which he did and, at that time, he was in the course of organising the Poor People’s Campaign which was an attempt to create an interracial movement of the poor that would build on an encampment in Washington D.C. and then would use that as a basis for challenging a wide range of the economic problems of all poor people. He decided that he should take part in the Memphis strike in a regular way as a basis for showing the idea that he was trying to promulgate of an interracial coalition that would challenge the economic problems of poor people and poor workers.

When he first came into town, he looked around and saw the situation and said, ‘What we’re going to do is we’re all going to go on strike.’ He didn’t use the term ‘general strike’ but he had the concept of a general strike and said, ‘All working people are going to support this and go out on strike.’ That kind of died out but the strike became a national cause célèbre for wider and wider groups.

For example, the clergy had originally stood very aloof from it but 150 local ministers came together and formed a ministerial support operation for it and similarly, with other sectors. There were big, mass meetings with tens of thousands of people and seemingly to be an irresistible movement.

In addition to a pay increase, the other main demand of the strikers was for recognition of their union, AFSCME, and as such, the union supported the strike.

One 16-year-old Black boy, Larry Payne, was shot and killed by police, and 4000 National Guard troops were brought into the city. But the strikers held on.

It was in that context that Dr. King was assassinated. The strike continued but the city was afraid that it was going to have massive riots, a violent response and upheaval and so were a lot of other people, including President Lyndon Johnson who sent a top sub-cabinet officer to hasten along the negotiations. Quite rapidly, the city decided it would negotiate and it recognised the union. It gave a substantial wage increase and laid the basis for, at least, beginning to turn the sanitation worker job into something with a degree of dignity, respect and remuneration.

However, once they reached the agreement, it then began dragging its feet and the workers had to threaten to go out on strike again a few weeks later in order to force the city to keep its word. In fact, in the end, it did make a huge change in the condition of the Memphis sanitation workers and it had a huge impact to show both to Black and to white workers that they really had something in common.

It wasn’t just a race issue but also a workers’ issue and labour rights’ issue and, at the same time, the special discrimination against African Americans that was such a deep part of American life was a fundamental aspect of what people could use – the labour movement – and use worker organisations and workers’ strikes and struggles to try to confront.

So that was an example of a dispute for union recognition. In these disputes, unions have a very concrete interest in supporting the workers, because if the workers are successful in winning their demands, then they get a union contract, and the union gets a pool of stable, dues-paying members.

But where unions have recognition contracts, their interests aren’t necessarily the same. Their economic interest is to maintain a stable relationship with the employer to continue getting paid their dues, which are pretty much always paid by the employer. As such, where recognition exists already, unions often had a different attitude to their members. For example, in Chicago, 80% of bus drivers were Black, but the leadership of the Amalgamated Transit Workers union was entirely white, and did not heed the concerns of Black workers.

Eventually, in August, during the Democratic National Convention, Black drivers went on a wildcat strike, demanding fair representation in the union. But white scab drivers kept services running in the north side of the city, and after five days, the strike faltered.

Another unionised industry, where the union ignored the demands of the membership, was coal mining.

In the coal industry, you had one of the most extreme cases of division and opposition between mineworkers and the union leadership. Tony Boyle and the top leadership of the coal miners’ union had effectively become agents of the coal operators and, essentially, forbade all strikes and wouldn’t authorise strikes even where there was the complete justification for it.

As an example of the attitude of the leadership of the United Mine Workers of America, here’s how Tony Boyle, the union president, described union policy:

“The UMWA will not abridge the rights of mine operators in running the mines. We follow the judgment of the coal operators, right or wrong.”

In 1968, 78 workers were killed in the Farmington mine disaster in West Virginia. Boyle called it “an unfortunate accident”, and rather than criticise the company, he claimed they had a good safety record. And he refused to meet with the families of the victims.

The coal miners become desperately alienated from it and so there developed a very large wildcat strike wave where the miners would come out of the mine and spill their water which was necessary for survival under mining type conditions. That was the signal for a strike and when they did that, all other miners would honour picket lines. That was the kind of solidarity you had among workers in that industry.

The miners’ greatest grievance was the growth of black lung disease which was a terrible industrial illness that essentially made it impossible for its victims to breathe. There was a group, started largely by doctors, called the Black Lung Association and it started doing studies of miners with black lung and found out that it was incredibly more prevalent than people had thought. It began setting up procedures for treating it and for identifying cases at an earlier stage. The union did nothing to support this and nothing to try to get workers’ protection against it. Eventually, they had a wildcat strike and shut down the entire mining industry for West Virginia.

In February 1969, a single miner in Raleigh County spilled his water out on the ground, in what was a traditional appeal to begin a strike. His co-workers all walked out with him, and within 5 days, 42,000 of the state’s 44,000 coal miners were on strike.

I believe they were out for more than a month and they were demanding legislation to provide protections and treatment for miners with black lung or incipient black lung.

They remained out for over three weeks until the state legislature passed a bill to compensate black lung victims.

Ultimately, they won and the laws put a fee on every ton of coal that was mined and used that to put in technology to reduce the threat of black lung, and to allow miners who were developing it to get out of the mines, and those who already had it to have some kind of decent retirement. This was extremely unusual in the United States.

Many countries have some traditions of general strikes and political strikes. The United States’ strikes have overwhelmingly been around industry workplace, wage an hour type issues but this shows that under certain conditions, American workers can strike around issues that are broader than that and where the target is not just the immediate employer but, in this case, the state legislature and state government.

As an illustration of the depth of corruption in the UMWA, which was far worse than that of unions in most other countries, not long after this wildcat strike, Boyle had another union official who ran against him in an election, Jock Yablonski, assassinated along with his wife and daughter.

But rank-and-file action by miners themselves continued in the coming months and years, for example in early 1970, a small number of retired and disabled members of the UMW, some of them in wheelchairs, set up picket lines at coal mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. They pulled out nearly 20,000 miners, demanding the reversal of proposed government cuts to federal research facilities which were trying to improve health and safety for miners.

The next big strike was by postal workers.

[Outro music]

That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 2 where we talk about strikes by postal workers, car factory workers, health workers, Teamsters and working-class women’s protests.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, two exclusive podcast series, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

To learn more about the US labour movement and mass strikes in US history, check out Jeremy’s fantastic book, Strike! It’s available in our online store and you can get 10% off it and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Links in the show notes.

See the webpage for this episode for more information, sources, further reading, and eventually a transcript.

Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, Nick Williams, and Old Norm.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This improved episode was edited by Jesse French, with original editing by Emma Courtland.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

Part 2

Hi and welcome back to part 2 of our double episode about the strike wave in the US during the Vietnam War. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I would go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

Before we get onto the main episodes, we thought that it was worth making a bit of an announcement because this is our 100th episode! Which seems like quite a milestone. And one that is impossible because of support from you, our listeners, on Patreon. We don’t have wealthy backers, or get funding from any political party or government. All of our work is funded by you. In return, patrons get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. As we’re recording this, we’ve got just under 900 patrons. If we could get up to 1200 patrons, this would really help us cover our costs, made our project sustainable for the long-term, and help us fund production of more regular episodes. So if you can, please consider joining our community, and keep people’s history alive in these trying times! Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

We left off last time about to talk about the mass strike of postal workers.

In the US, posties work for the United States Postal Service (USPS), and are employees of the federal government, and so were – and still are – banned from striking. Despite a congressional commission recommending postal workers be given the right to collective bargaining in 1968, Congress itself rejected it. Postal workers got no pay increase at all from 1967 to 1969, while their union did nothing about it. This meant that, counting inflation, they had real pay cuts of 19.5% over this time period. In early 1970, they were eventually offered an increase of just 5.4%.

Union members called for a ballot for strike action, which officials succeeded in delaying, but ultimately couldn’t prevent. A majority of workers voted to strike, and workers in New York City, without waiting for authorisation from union officials, set up picket lines around post offices in the city.

It was a wildcat strike and never supported by the unions. It was the largest strike of postal workers and, in fact, the largest strike of public employees that there had ever been. It started in New York with a few locals that decided to go on strike and then spread and became extremely widespread in New York. Within days, people from all over the country began calling in and saying, ‘We’re going out too. We’re going out too,’ and it became a strike that involved hundreds of thousands of people around the country. It grew out of near poverty conditions or actual poverty conditions that postal workers were facing, with many postal workers on welfare in order to get by which was regarded as something unacceptable if you were working.

The union completely opposed it and order people to go back to work but they did not go back to work. The National Guard was sent in and ultimately, the United States Army was sent in and 25,000 troops occupied the post office in New York. There used to be an old saying when they sent the military in to force the miners back to work ‘you can’t dig coal with bayonets’ and so the postal workers adopted the slogan ‘You Can’t Sort Mail With Bayonets’. From what we were told, the army went into the post office and started sorting mail but it’s not clear that the mail was better sorted after they went to work than it was before they went to work. It was not a successful military operation from the point of view of just getting the mail out.

This unsuccessful military operation in breaking the postal strike was mirroring the unsuccessful nature of US military intervention in Vietnam itself.

Yes, yeah. It might have been successful in that they got the troops into the post office but it was not successful from the point of view of getting the mail out of the post office. Essentially, there was a fake settlement that was worked out between the union officials and the postal service. The workers were told to go back to work and they didn’t.

By this point, the strike had spread to over 200 cities and towns across the country.

There then developed a complicated situation and I don’t want to go into the details but essentially, there was a tacit arrangement that negotiations would not begin until the workers had gone back to work but as soon as they went back to work, not only the postal service but the President and both houses of the Congress agreed that they would make a major raise for postal workers and meet many of the other demands. That’s essentially what happened. The postal workers went back to work but they created an independent organisation and told the union leadership, ‘If you don’t have this settled in a week or so, we’re just going to go back out and we have the organisation to do it.’ They went back into the post offices and Congress passed the legislation necessary to give them a raise and that put them on a decent footing for the future.

Congress awarded an immediate 6% pay increase to all government workers, with postal workers to receive an additional 8% with a reorganisation plan later.

It was not everything that they wanted but it made a huge difference in the power of the postal workers. There was a point at which the head of the federal employees’ union, AFGE, said he was being overwhelmed by telegrams and calls from local unions all over the country, who represented other government employees, saying, ‘If the postal workers can do it, why can’t we?’ and demanding that he call strikes for them. That was part of the reason that management and the government decided it had to settle fast with the postal workers because the damn thing was really threatening to get out of control.

One of the most vociferous locals, he said, for demanding a strike was one that organised the logistics for the American war in Vietnam. That doesn’t mean that workers were striking against the war but it meant that the demands that they be patriotic and support the war had lost the power and credibility to direct their action.

In wartime, governments and national media typically denounce any kind of strike as an attack on the nation and say that it’s putting the troops, the war effort and the country at risk. So any wartime strike is significant, because it is seen and reported as an attack on the troops and the nation.

It’s certainly true, in the context of the Vietnam War, that the strikes were portrayed as unpatriotic and undermining the war effort by partially directly if they were producing things that were needed and also because inflation, the economic conditions and a high demand for labour meant that if people struck effectively on a large scale, they were actually able to win substantial wage increases. Those wage increases were then something that the government blamed inflation on. This, in fact, happened with the Teamsters’ strikes that we’ll probably get to here. It wasn’t just not producing what was needed for war but also adding to inflation and inflation was, of course, actually caused by the war but something that was portrayed as itself interfering with the successful prosecution of the war. The United States actually established wage and price controls in the latter stages of the Vietnam War as a way of trying to prevent wage increases above inflation.

The next major dispute involved truck drivers, in the Teamsters union.

One of the most powerful of American unions was called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and they were usually known as the Teamsters’ Union. It went back to the era when people hauled freight using a team of horses and so they were known as ‘teamsters’. They were a very powerful union throughout the country and a very decentralised union. The local groups had a lot of control and were very important in terms of their numbers but also very, very important in the labour movement because of their ability to tie up traffic and to make the delivery of goods to factories difficult if they wanted to. Many, many strikes were won by auto workers and other kinds of industrial workers because Teamsters refused to deliver across their picket line and so they had a very important role in the labour movement and in labour solidarity.

The Teamsters’ Union was another case where the trade union leadership had been in cooperation with management to a very extreme extent [laughter]. The head of the Teamsters said, ‘The Teamsters will never tie up American trade with a nationwide strike,’ for example.

This leadership then negotiated a new pay deal with management.

The union leadership negotiated a contract for, essentially, the central part of the country that was where all the freight for the entire country was in there and going across there.

The agreement brokered between management and the union in 1970 gave pay increases of $1.10 per hour over 39 months.

The workers rejected it and began going out on strike and doing truckers’ blockades.

Drivers in 16 cities include Toledo, Columbus, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, and others walked out on wildcat strike and set up mobile picket lines to intercept drivers at key locations, for example at crossings of the Mississippi River.

Essentially, somebody would be bringing a truck along and they would pull the truck in front of them like roadblocks in a wartime situation. The workers who were driving the trucks through might say, ‘Yeah, I agree with you. This is great,’ and join them or if they weren’t courageous enough to do that, they might go back to their boss and say, ‘I can’t go through there. They’re threatening my life. I’ll never see my wife and children again if you make me go through that truckers’ blockade.’ It wasn’t clear exactly what the balance of intimidation and support was but it was predominantly supported as far you could tell.

Still, there definitely was some violence. The New York Times reported that some trucks had rocks thrown at them, windows had been smashed, tyres slashed and air hoses severed. The Mayor of Cleveland claimed that strike-related violence had affected two thirds of all counties in Ohio.

The West Coast companies said, ‘We can’t get our trucks through,’ and the entire traffic between the West Coast and the rest of the country was largely cut off. This is an old tactic in American labour and it used to be called a ‘flying squadron’ and it came in with the introduction of cars in the 1920s and ’30s. You’d have a highly mobile team of workers and if somebody heard that somebody was trying to break a strike, they would go to the location and put up a picket line or they would go and talk to people and say, ‘Don’t you know that we’re on strike,’ and persuade them to join. This was essentially a revival of the roving picket line strategy and it was incredibly effective.

The United Press estimated that, overall, half a million people were off work because of the strike. The national head of the union told members to get back to work, as did the Federal Mediation Service.

Trucking companies then started getting injunctions against the strike. Workers in St Louis ignored an injunction for a month; in California, strikers instead called in saying they were sick. 10,000 strikers were fired, but workers responded demanding a full amnesty, as well as 10 days’ sick pay.

The ultimate response was that the National Guard was called up in dozens of counties in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest to try to break the strike.

Soldiers with helmets, trucks, and M1 rifles guarded roads, escorted trucks, and protected truck terminals. In some cases, strikers throwing rocks managed to repel police and National Guard troops.

It was very unsuccessful and they were just not able to get people to start driving again or to let the trucks go through. It ended up with the union going back and negotiating a new contract with several times as large a wage increase as had been negotiated previously. The truck drivers then went back to work.

The strike ended up lasting 12 weeks, and management had to accept a pay increase two-thirds higher than the one originally agreed to.

It was very much in violation of the federal wage guidelines and the impact of it was that other workers immediately began making demands for a similar kind of wage increase. Within a year, you had major increases in the average wages for the entire country, basically, because of workers who were emboldened by the Teamsters’ wildcats. It was a very interesting dynamic. Each of these is, in some ways, a unique situation as most strike situations are but certainly something that you could look at and learn some lessons from for the future.

In contrast to the unofficial, wildcat strikes, in 1970, workers at General Motors took part in an official strike called by the United Auto Workers union.

The 1960s is distinctive in that almost all the major strikes and labour struggles took place as wildcats and in opposition to union officialdom. There’s one big exception, which we haven’t mentioned, which was the General Motors’ strike and that was a situation in which it was just about universally recognised that the purpose of the strike was for the union and the company to knock this wind out of the workers to get them to be less feisty by making them be on the street for a month or two. It was essentially a strike by unions and management against the workers [laughter]. If this seems bizarre to you, you’re right but it’s thoroughly documented in articles in the Wall Street Journal and a book called The Company and the Union at the time which leaves no doubt that this was what was going on.

Now the GM strike is an unusual one. But it served an important purpose, both for General Motors management, and the UAW.

For the workers, they wanted more money, and better conditions, and especially given the other disputes which were taking place, felt that they could win them.

The UAW wanted to assert their control over the workers – more than 10% of all agreements being made by UAW officials at the time were being rejected by rank-and-file members. And the recent death of the popular UAW leader, Walter Reuther, had also resulted in increasing division within the union.

For the company, they wanted to reassert control on the shop floor, and so they were happy for workers to blow off a bit of steam in a controlled fashion, in order for workers to be able to get back to work and follow orders from management thereafter.

So the intention was to have a prolonged, all-out strike. As one UAW official admitted to the Wall Street Journal:

“The guys go out on strike expecting the moon. But after a few weeks of mounting bills and the wife raising hell about his hanging around the house all day watching TV while she works, the average worker tends to soften his demands.”

A strike would also unite different factions within the union behind their leadership against a common “enemy”: management.

So, in September 1970, an all-out strike began, of 400,000 GM workers across 155 different local bargaining units around the US. The union and management agreed that all local issues had to be resolved by the strike, as well as the national ones, in order to try to draw a line under all of the turmoil nationwide.

But while UAW officials thought they could reach a national agreement with management in around 10 days, rank-and-file GM workers were refusing to settle their local agreements.

The strike started dragging on, and so General Motors even loaned the UAW $10 million to help cover the costs of the ongoing dispute. After two months, it started to look like perhaps the union-management plan was backfiring, as workers were so determined that even a long-running strike wasn’t demobilising them.

In the end, UAW leaders and GM management held secret meetings, in which they agreed to just settle the national dispute, leaving many local issues unresolved. And so after 67 days the strike ended, and workers won a 13% pay increase.

Like the car industry, most of the other major disputes that happened at this time were also in predominantly male industries, like mining, and trucking. But women were deeply involved as well in these working-class struggles.

The backstory here is that women flooded into industry during World War II and then were largely pushed out again afterwards. There was an effort to return to the traditional male breadwinner concept of society and how the economy worked but, in fact, it didn’t happen. After they pushed back, they came back in larger numbers and by the mid-1950s, there was a higher proportion of women in the workforce than there had been at the end of World War II. However, they were concentrated in a very small number of occupations that were overwhelmingly women’s work. The largest number who came in went to work in clerical occupations, in sales occupations, stores and wholesalers. The traditional women’s industries, like the garment and textile industries, were in decline in terms of numbers. There was huge discrimination against women in the heavy industry jobs that they had briefly filled but then been pushed out of. You had a growing number of women in the workforce but concentrated in low wage jobs but also in white-collar jobs that didn’t have traditions of labour organising and resistance and, in most cases, didn’t have the economic power that a steelworker or a garbage worker was believed to have. You have also a labour movement that is almost entirely male in its leadership and not interested, in most cases, in organising women workers. There are definite exceptions. For example, hospital workers in New York, social workers and above all, teachers, both male and female, were engaged in very militant strikes and lot of sit-ins but on a local basis because the industries were generally organised on a local basis.

For example, in July 1970, following a one-day strike, 15,000 hospital workers in New York won pay increases of $30 a week, or 25%, whichever was greater.

And in November 1973, around 30,000 mostly Black and Puerto Rican hospital workers in New York walked out on strike demanding the 7.5% pay increase they were contractually owed. Nixon’s Cost of Living Council was trying to cap rises at 5.5%, and so blocked the increase, even though the hospitals were happy to pay it. Strikers defied a federal injunction, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, until after 8 days, the government shifted and agreed for them to receive a 6% increase.

The struggles were important in the development of unions which persist today, like the Service Employees International Union, SEIU.

Nonetheless, They were the forerunner to the large organisations of public service employees and teachers that we know, today, are the largest unions with the largest numbers of workers in the labour movement. It didn’t manifest itself, by and large, in large strikes. However, the largest protest in American history was conducted by women who were, at that time, generally referred to as ‘housewives’ in the 1973 consumer meat boycott. I’ve talked about the inflation of that era and the biggest piece of inflation was in food or one of the biggest. That was largely concentrated in very large increases in the cost of meat.

The Nixon government had implemented price and wage controls, but he had loosened them by this point and Nixon had specifically stated that he didn’t want price controls on food.

Initially, the government advised people unhappy with the high cost of meat to instead eat fish, cheese, or just eat less. This, predictably, caused outrage.

The idea of boycotting meat sprang up in a thousand places. For example, one woman who got outraged about it just started calling random numbers in the phonebook and asking people what they thought about the price of meat. Many of the women she talked to said, ‘It’s terrible. My family won’t talk to me because I can’t feed them meat anymore.’ They held a meeting in a local bowling alley in Staten Island but the same thing was happening all over the country. There was no national organisation, no call and no pre-existing network beyond the very local level and yet it became coordinated on a colossal national scale.

Thousands of women protested in the streets, picket lines were set up outside supermarkets, and the New York Times reported that, quote: “in some stores militant women snatched cuts of meat out of their neighbours’ shopping carts and restored them to the freezer bins”. But at the same time they pointed out that, quote: “in general no external pressure was used – or needed – to enforce the ‘don’t buy’movement.”

Retailers reported that meat sales fell by 50 to 67%, and up to 200,000 meat workers were temporarily laid off.

There was a Gallup poll that was done immediately afterwards that asked, ‘Did you participate in the meat boycott?’ and 25% of families said yes which was about 50 million people at that time. There’s not really anything, that I’m aware of, in American history that compares to it.

Richard Nixon, a free-market Republican, actually declared a freeze on the price of meat and that was supposed to stop the boycott.

On April 8, 1973, Nixon was forced to reverse course, and appear on TV to announce new price ceilings on beef, pork, and lamb, to prevent them rising any further.

The boycott was hailed by Time magazine as a “triumph”, and the quote “most successful boycott by women since Lysistrata” – referring to the ancient Greek comedy, Lysistrata, in which women try to stop a war by boycotting sex.

While the boycott didn’t reduce the price of meat as such, it had been going up by over 5% per month, and analysts predicted it would have kept rising at least until July, so although the New York Times attempted to claim the boycott had “little impact” it does seem clear that it was successful in preventing prices rising further.

The boycott actually ended because it had made its point. It didn’t have a vehicle to go forward and have some kind of continuing impact and probably exhausted what could have been achieved with that tactic but it put the economic problems of American families and put what women’s responsibilities were at that time front and centre in the national dialogue.

From all of these different disputes over the period of the Vietnam war, Jeremy thinks there are a lot of lessons we can take from them which are equally valid today.

Let’s learn from it that the relations between rank-and-file workers and unions can become truly antagonistic. Clearly, there are situations at the opposite pole and even in the 1960s, the campaigns by teachers, social workers and hospital workers involved a much more synergistic and positive relationship. There are always going to be tensions in any organisation between the leadership and the rank and file but that shouldn’t be confused with a situation where interests and practices have become completely opposed. There is a set of structural endemic problems with organised labour.

I can only speak about the United States with any serious knowledge and other places may be different in various ways. In the United States, the principal orientation of unions, starting from the beginning of the 20th century, has been to establish collective bargaining with their employers and to establish a stable bargaining relationship. That has been reinforced by the rise of labour law starting in the 1930s which was designed to allow workers to organise and bargain collectively but also designed to create a structure that limited the extent to which workers were able to act on their own and pursue what they perceived as their interests as opposed to operating within a tightly defined legal and institutional structure.

The reason that you get wildcat strikes and where you have workers opposing their union leaders is primarily because unions, either because of their own structure and leadership or because of governmental laws, regulations, institutions and policies or a variety of reasons, the unions are functioning in ways that workers don’t perceive as following their interests and they don’t have an institutional handle on electing new officials. Things like that prove not to be effective as a means of dealing with that situation.

When you get that kind of conflict of interests between workers and their concerns and the union leadership officialdom and institutional structure, then you get a situation where workers either have to suck it up and accept the status quo or they find they have to organise themselves outside the union or quasi-outside. They do this by operating at one level of the union in order to oppose another level, make connections with workers elsewhere that are distinct from the ones that are mediated through the union officials, find ways that they can utilise what they still have which is a degree of power over production and use those things to meet the needs that are not being met or are even being opposed by the union.

So in order to truly to be able to assert their own interests, workers had to have their own forms of organisation, outside and beyond just the structures of union officialdom.

This is still the case today. As, for example, during the teachers’ strike in West Virginia in 2018, union leaders agreed to a terrible deal without consulting members. But rank-and-file teachers had set up their own communication and organisation networks, on Facebook, and so were able to collectively decide to continue the strike until they got an offer they were actually happy with.

Some left groups often argue that these sorts of issues are just issues of leadership, and so by electing union leaders from their group, or from the left, you can ensure members are adequately represented. But historically, this is not what happened, as unions over this time period, such as the autoworkers union, did have predominantly left leaderships, and the fundamental problems were the same.

That was frequently a problem. By and large, you didn’t have a pattern. You had a number of caucuses that might be called rank and file caucuses, like a caucus for a democratic union and that kind of thing, that attempted to address the situation by running candidates against union leadership. In cases, at least for a time, they were able to have leaderships that were more effective on behalf of workers but they were not able, by and large, to break out of the fundamental limitations that the institutional and legal structure imposed.

So, even with left leaderships, unions still had a situation where they had contracts with employers, with no strike clauses, so wildcat strikes by workers breached these contracts, putting the union in financial and legal jeopardy – and potentially jeopardising relations between union officials and the corporations in discussions elsewhere about gaining union recognition in additional plants.

In the US, most unionised workplaces are union shops, known as closed shops in the UK, where union closed shops have been illegal for decades, under European human rights laws – namely the right to freedom of association.

Now it’s worth exploring the origins of the union shop in the US. They emerged during World War II, when employers and the US government wanted to ensure no strikes would take place. The unions, on the other hand, wanted stable, dues-paying memberships. And they did not have this at the time. Typically, many workers would join a union during a big dispute, and pay their dues to local union reps. But over time, they would lapse. So, as an example, in 1937, after a successful wave of sitdown strikes in the auto industry, over 8000 workers joined the United Auto Workers union in Lansing. By the following year, only 1000 were still paying dues. Some unions would have representatives set up picket lines to try to collect dues from members – and often, workers would even skip work on dues collection days to try to avoid paying. In the steel industry, absenteeism went up to 25% on dues paying days.

Initially, the Congress of Industrial Organisations, the CIO union confederation, agreed to a no-strike pledge, to support the war effort. After the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the Communist Party, and their union officials, also became strong supporters of the no-strike pledge. But then workers had no incentive to be union members, because the unions had promised not to fight.

Unions as organisations, therefore, had a big incentive to support union shops, with compulsory union membership. And as World War II continued, to try to ensure industrial peace, and stop wildcat strikes, the National War Labour Board determined that only union shops: “would give labour officials the ‘self-confidence’ and ‘firmness’ to deal with their members and enforce their contracts”. So the started being implemented on a wide scale through the introduction of “union security clauses” in contracts with employers.

While the union shop structure does strengthen workers in some obvious ways, like ensuring no non-union workers are available to scab on potential strikes, it does also give unions a sometimes-problematic role in managing the workplace, along with the employer. For example, it means that when workers breach union rules and take wildcat or unofficial industrial action, unions can and do discipline them, and in a union shop, expulsion from the union means losing your job.

This weapon was used against militant workers many times over this time period. For example, in the US, 1944, tyre-builders in Akron, Ohio, walkout on strike in protest at a reduction in piece rates. The United Rubber Workers union expelled 70 strikers, and got them fired from their jobs. Then, when other union activists complained, they were expelled and fired as well.

So this is just one example of a way in which legal and contractual frameworks bind unions, as bureaucratic organisations, to management, and how it can result in negative consequences for workers.

From our current vantage point, at a time when levels of workplace struggles are at a generally very low-level, it can be easy to forget that the interests of unions and their members may not be the same. Because it’s often only in times of really widespread, mass, intense struggles, like the end of World War II, and during the Vietnam war era, that these internal divisions really become apparent.

So it’s important to look back at times like this to learn lessons on how we can really begin to fight for our own interests.

One of the lessons we can learn from the Vietnam era is if we’re going to start a new labour movement, let’s do it in a way that frees us from some of those constraints because we’re going to have to act in ways that go outside institutional and legal constraints anyway, as the teachers’ strikes have shown us. If we’re going to have anything but individual, isolated workers dominated by powerful employers and we’re going to have any kind of collective response and ability for workers collectively to affect their conditions, we’re going to have to go outside the constraints of American labour law and the established institutional patterns of trade unions.

[Outro music]

Well, that’s it for this double episode. As always we’ve got links to sources, further reading and to get hold of Jeremy’s book Strike in the show notes below. We would highly recommend that book as it is one of the best books ever written on the US workers’ movement, in our opinion. It’s available in our online store and you can get 10% off it and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST.

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This improved episode was edited by Jesse French, with original editing by Emma Courtland.

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