On this Labor Day, while we celebrate the gains of the Labor Movement in the United States, it is also critical to assess the state of that movement today as we face many of the conditions that led to a surge in labor power during the early 20th century. In his new book, “Unions, Race and Popular Democracy,” labor expert Dr. Kim Scipes compares two labor organizing committees that formed in the Midwest, one by the steelworkers and another by the meatpackers. Scipes joins Clearing the FOG to discuss the differences between top-down trade unions and grassroots industrial unions and how Social Justice Unionism confronted White Supremacy and won victories for all workers.
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Margaret Flowers:
You’re listening to Clearing the FOG: Speaking truth to expose the forces of greed with Margaret Flowers. This week for Labor Day, I spoke with Dr. Kim Scipes. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Sociology who taught at Purdue University Northwest and he specializes in labor. He has a new book called, “Unions, Race and Popular Democracy.” It’s out on Cornell University Press. He looks at a period when there were two different labor organizing committees in the Midwest: the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and the meatpackers’ Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee and how they were organized differently and what came out of those differences. His book contains a lot of lessons for the labor movement today.
Kim argues that we haven’t had a labor movement since the mid 20th century and looks at what are some of the issues within the Labor movement and ways that workers organized around those issues. He advocates something called “social justice unionism” and he defines this as unions that also get involved in their community. So, they’re not just fighting for their own rights within the workplace and defending each other but they’re also doing that for the community as well and building a bigger, broader movement that takes on big issues like white supremacy and racism and building a more democratic society. So, lots of lessons in the book for all of us and particularly workers in the United States.
We’ll go right to the interview with Dr. Kim Scipes. Kim is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology retired who taught at the Westville Campus of Purdue University Northwest. And prior to that he held a number of careers, including in the US Marines where he became ‘consciously political’. I like that term. He specializes in labor, both domestically and around the world, and is currently a member of the national writers Union AFL-CIO. He’s a co-founder of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations, which is a project to educate trade unionists about the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO. He’s written hundreds of articles and a number of books. His newest book is “Unions, Race and Popular Democracy,” which can be found at Cornell University Press. Kim, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me today.
Kim Scipes:
Glad to be here, Margaret.
Margaret Flowers:
So, before we get into talking about your new book, which I’m excited to do, could you tell me a little bit about what that meant to become consciously political during your time in the military?
Kim Scipes:
Okay. I was an avionics technician. I worked on communications and navigation equipment for A4 aircraft, and they made me work on some equipment that I was just totally not prepared for, and so one night, I threw a 75-pound radio up against the cement brick wall and somehow they figured they had to do something with me. And it just happens at that time that the Marine Corps was torn heavily by racism. We had had a race riot at every single major Marine base in the world by 1971 except for ours at Yuma, Arizona. And the commanding general decided to set up this phony program, they call the “human relations program,” staffed it with a couple of Black Marines and myself. And I don’t know why I was chosen. It certainly wasn’t for my technical skills, but anyway, I was chosen. And the first day I walked into work, my Gunnery Sergeant handed me a two-foot stack of some of the most radical black revolutionary politics of the 1960s. You know, “Die, Nigger, Die,” “Soul on Ice,” “Blood in My Eye,” all this stuff, just incredible stuff. And he said, “If you’re going to be any use to us, you’ve got to know what’s going on with the young Black Marine. So take this back to your barracks and read this. And when you finish, come back and we’ll go to work.” And for 18 months, my official duty was fighting white supremacy and racism while in the Marine Corps.
It was pretty intense at times. I mean, there were death threats against me and the others. If you remember the old Life Magazines, those big thick photojournalistic magazines. I used to have to put those inside my shirt because we were standing in chow lines and we were literally all trained killers and I was afraid somebody might try to stick me while I’m standing in the chow line. So it got to be pretty heavy duty stuff. So that process of reading and thinking about the stuff., now, I come from a very conservative family but it wasn’t racist. So, I was able to read the stuff and it really made sense to me in doing this work. And then later came the “Pentagon Papers.” which I read on active duty and that was it. I was not going to Vietnam, if they gave me orders. Fortunately, they never forced me on that. I finished out my four years and got out and went to college. But it was this process of fighting the white supremacy and racism and then reading the Pentagon Papers that did it for me. And I turned over, as we call it, and have been fighting for a better world ever since.
Margaret Flowers:
Well, that’s fantastic that you were able to get that education in Black Liberation during your time in the military.
Kim Scipes:
Yeah, not too many marines got that kind of training.
Margaret Flowers:
No, I often think of the US military as a very racist institution. I mean, one of the main tactics is to train soldiers in seeing other populations as less than human. I mean, how else are you able to kill them?
Kim Scipes:
Well, that was part of the training, but one of the things they taught us as far as each other was that there were no white Marines. There were no Black Marines. We were all green Marines. And so supposedly, we were working in a meritocracy, a very strict one, but it’s still a meritocracy, and that we’d be treated the same. Well, what I found out through that 18 months of duty was that, no, they weren’t treating us equal. They were mistreating Blacks in particular, but they also were attacking young whites who were marijuana users. If you got caught with a seed of marijuana, you got a bad discharge So we worked both to defend the Blacks and make sure they were treated fairly and we did that with young white Marines as well. So it was a pretty heavy duty18 months, and back then I had to pull out Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs in order to get my head back together, just to be able to make it another day.
Margaret Flowers:
So, last week, I interviewed Professor Richard Wolff. We talked about the federal debt, austerity, the risk of economic crises. And part of that conversation was about the New Deal Era, those programs under Roosevelt and the movement, including the labor movement and the socialist movement, that really made those programs possible. So when I heard about your book, “Unions, Race and Popular Democracy,” this seemed like an excellent follow-up because I’m hoping there’s some good lessons in here that we can learn. And you take on racism and white supremacy within the labor movement in that book.
To start out, before we get into some of that history, can you tell listeners a little bit about your thoughts on the current state of Labor in the United States?
Kim Scipes:
Well, as you’ll see in it, this will probably only make a real sense once you read the book, but I argue that we have not had a labor movement since 1949. When they expelled the Left. They expelled something like 750,000 to a million workers out of the CIO, not the AFL, the CIO. And that just tore apart the labor movement. Since then, we’ve only had a trade union movement and the difference is a labor movement looks out for all working people where a trade union movement only looks for members of their unions to protect. And then over time, we see the uselessness of the trade union movement in many ways, and since about 1981, it’s been an absolute failure in my opinion. So I’m very critical of where we are and hoping to get people, through reading my book at least, to think about some things in ways that we don’t normally do that.
Margaret Flowers:
Right. And I mean, it does feel like people are trying to make efforts right now, but in terms of our union numbers, we’re pretty low. Is that correct?
Kim Scipes:
Yeah. We’re under 10 %, both private and public spheres. Yet we were over 33% in private workers in the early 50s, I think about ‘53, ‘54. So we’ve gone far beyond that, but worse than that, there’s no vision. There’s no way out, nothing. The leadership absolutely sucks. In fact, they’re not giving leadership at all and they’ve done nothing to stand up for Trump. It’s been an absolute disaster and disgrace as far as I’m concerned.
Margaret Flowers:
Yeah. And even within the struggle around artificial intelligence, I understand there’s a lot of division within the unions, some who see it as an opportunity for jobs. Others who see it as destroying jobs.
Kim Scipes:
Yeah, there’s some real differences. I mean the building trades will build anything that’s possible and that provides jobs for their people and I understand that. But, what are the impacts? What’s going to be left? Very few jobs are going to be permanent, full-time and the bigger problem, especially about these hyperscale data centers, they’re adding to the emissions that are leading to climate change and we just had what they call the Derecho tear through this region. I’m in Northwest Indiana and Gary, to my knowledge, parts of Gary are still without power like weeks later.
Margaret Flowers:
But the data center is not. So can you explain for the listeners about the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. How does that differ from the AFL?
Kim Scipes:
The AFL was started in 1886 under a man named Samuel Gompers. And it was a very conservative and racist outfit in general. Gompers did not like Blacks. He didn’t like immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. He didn’t like women, at least not as trade union members. And that was the union movement that we had. It was based on crafts or occupation. So, like plumbers had their own union. Pipefitters had theirs. Carpenters had theirs and things like this, that’s called craft unionism.
When the Depression hit in ‘29, the AFL was just staggered. They didn’t have a clue and John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, he started advocating for industrial unionism. This makes sense where everybody in an industry is in the same union, despite what their particular occupation was, and Lewis was head of an industrial union himself. The Mine Workers covered everybody in mining. So anyway, Lewis is pushing for industrial unionism. He thought that was the only way to really challenge these big corporate behemoths like U. S. Steel and Armor and Swift Meatpacking companies, things like that. And in 1935 at the conference in Atlantic City, their national conference, Ray Hutchison of the Carpenters made some smartass remark and Lewis turned around and knocked him on his ass. Boom.
Anyway, so after that, Lewis got together some people and they decided to form the committee for industrial organization. So they were remaining within the AFL, but they wanted to try to build industrial unions. And they say they did that and stayed in the AFL till 1938, when the AFL threw them out. So the CIO became a separate what we call “Labor Center.” So you had two labor centers in the US – one, the AFL, two, the CIO. Generally speaking, the AFL was craft union-based, while the CIO was industrial based. So those were generalities. They didn’t hold in every case.
Anyway, the CIO was headed by a bunch of young, eager, mostly men that were eager to try to build these unions and stuff. And so it emerged after 1938 and was sort of challenging the AFL and stuff like that. And they went on competing. Now, my book doesn’t focus on that. That’s pretty well-known, the competition between the AFL and the CIO. Generally speaking, the AFL was seen as being more conservative of the two and the myth that’s out there is the CIO was a monolithic Labor Center, that all their unions were in agreement, that they were progressive. It was anti-racist. Now, that is true in some cases, but it’s not true in all. And this is where my book gets together is that I looked – Now, by the way, this is located in Chicago and Northwest Indiana and to maybe solve some geographical confusion, I want to point out that a lot of people see Lake Michigan on a map, the great lake that hangs down and they think Chicago is at the bottom of the of the lake. It is not. It’s on the side. If you’re looking at a map, it is on the left side. But it’s Gary Indiana which is at the southern point of Lake Michigan. Okay, so, this area I’m covering is Chicago and Northwest Indiana, okay.
Now, what I did was through looking at this, I found out that interestingly, besides Chicago, having an incredible place in US Labor history, it was also the site that overlapped two industries, steel and meatpacking. So, steel was located to the East of Chicago, making it the Western Terminus, and packing was out West, so Chicago was the Eastern Terminus. So they overlapped. So what I did was a comparative historical study of unionism in steel and meatpacking in Chicago and Northwest Indiana between the years of 1933 and 1955, basically the CIO years. And what I found was that the conceptualization, the ideas of what type of trade unionism qualitatively differed. They were not the same. The steelworkers built their power in the workplace and they were just concerned with the workplace. And I’ll step back in a minute to lead this up, but I just want to lay this out for right now. But the packinghouse workers took a much broader viewpoint. They built power in the workplace, not only to take care of things for the workers in the workplace, but also in their communities that they lived in and a much broader, stronger trade unionism. The narrow, what I call ‘business unionism’ of the steel workers versus the much broader and progressive packinghouse workers.
Now, one of the things that I did to test this out to see if I’m on the right track, I decided to see how they each dealt with the same problem because if they’re different conceptions, I assume that they would have a different type of behavior facing a common problem. So the problem I chose was white supremacy and racism and what I found was the steelworkers basically ignored this. They allowed the companies, which had placed workers in the hottest most dangerous positions, to maintain that. And even after the union came in, it didn’t challenge the occupational segregation that was endemic in the steel industry. The packinghouse workers, on the other hand, attacked white supremacy and racism dead on. So in 1939 in racist segregated Chicago, out of 14 local packinghouse unions, eight were headed by African Americans.
Margaret Flowers:
That would be unheard of I think during that time, is that correct?
Kim Scipes:
Oh absolutely. The packinghouse workers were the single best union as far as fighting racism within the CIO or, for that matter, the AFL as well. They weren’t quite as good as dealing with male supremacy, but they were excellent on white supremacy and racism.
Margaret Flowers:
So, this is the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, SWOC, and the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, PWOC. These are grassroots movements. Can you talk a little bit about what they really formed out of?
Kim Scipes:
Well, here’s the thing, before the CIO you had activists emerge that were trying to organize in different areas. So, in steel, you actually had an independent union before the CIO, much less the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. There was a union at South Works, which if people know Chicago at all, if you cross the Calumet River on the Southeast side of the city, on the North Bank of the Calumet River was South Works. And that was one of the two largest steel mills in the world and a guy named George Patterson had organized a union. They had over 3,000 workers in 1934.
This was before the CIO. It’s because Lewis didn’t punch Hutchison in the mouth until October 1935, to keep it real. So, you had that. In the Packinghouse workers, you also had people that were organizing. They had had a strong packinghouse workers union in the stockyards during World War One. It got busted in 1922 and they hadn’t had anything since. But they still had some remnants of activists from that period. They had people from the Amalgamated Butchers that were trying to do things. You had some black packinghouse workers that were doing something. And you had a group of communists led by a man named Herbert March who were also organizing the socket. So you had these different efforts going on for about three or four years. And then in 1937, once steel settled in 1937 with the US Steel and Steel Workers Organizing Committee. And, by the way, the local at South Works, which they labeled Local 65, was the first union to join the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. The absolute first. Operations in Chicago were ahead of everywhere else, as far as steel was concerned. It was true in packinghouses as well.
So, once steel signed, the packinghouse workers went to a guy named Van Bittner, who was the Western District director of Steel Workers Organizing Committee, SWOC, asked him for his support and he didn’t have any money to give them, but he gave them his name eventually. And they organized PWOC, The Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. And interestingly, they were put under the same Van Bittner. So, he headed both SWOC and PWOC for a while.
Now, the other interesting thing about this, and this is what makes this study so compelling, is that the workforces were almost exactly the same. So, they were composed of white ethnic workers from Eastern and Southern Europe. They were composed of African Americans brought in from the rural South and some Mexicans. So that means they had the same immigration histories, same languages, same religions and same cultures in general, etc. One union decided to tackle white supremacy and racism and the other did not. And that’s where that follows up.
So you have these two unions and industries that are actually much closer in composition than most people think, but you had these two unions organized at basically the same time under the exact same leadership, same workforces, and yet they took two very divergent paths forward and this is what I’m trying to unravel. Where’d this come from? How did this happen? And that’s what I show in the book.
Margaret Flowers:
And how it impacted the union, the labor movement, I think.
Kim Scipes:
Well, it wasn’t so much. I mean, I’m sure others were watching, but as far as really strong organizing, this was what was happening particularly in Chicago.
Margaret Flowers:
So how did PWOC, what methods did they use to really try to target white supremacy and racism in the workplace?
Kim Scipes:
Yeah, well, what they did from the beginning, and Herbert March, a member of the AL Front, Communists, was very clear on this. He says, “From the inception, we saw this as a union of blacks and whites. So it’s not like us whites getting paternalistic and saying, ‘Come on you poor little black brothers and sisters, come join us.’ No, from the beginning, they were seen as equals.” And one of the things that was happening among black workers in general – now, remember, you had the biggest race riot in the country in 1919, in Chicago. Over 300 people were killed, both black and white. So, you had this tremendous amount of racial antagonism that existed that they had to overcome. Now, first they had to overcome the divisions within the different white ethnic groups of the Croatians and the Serbs and the Lithuanians, etc. That had to be worked out and that largely got worked out through the Depression and aftermath of that. But then they had to tackle the racial issue because what the bosses would do is they would bring workers, and this happened in both steel and meatpacking, is that they would come and they would divide them up by ethnic groups and they’d put them into different departments and they’d play them off of each other. So they might pay the white steelworkers, say, five cents an hour extra over what they paid the Blacks or whatever. But they tell the whites, “You’ve got to keep production up to maintain this difference, otherwise, we’ll give it to the Blacks or we’ll give it to whoever.” So the company is playing this racial stuff viciously. And, in the packinghouse workers, they decided to confront that.
Now, also one byproduct of the 1922 strike was that in previous strikes in Chicago, and there had been several, they would bring Blacks in, they would recruit Blacks to work in the field to scab. And then once the strike was over, they got rid of the scabs and gave the white strikers back their jobs, if they would refuse to join the union. Well after the ‘22 strike, they kept the Blacks in the position. So they had loaded up the killing floor. So this is where when a steer is brought up the ramp and knocked in the head and you’re getting links put on his legs and he’s hoisted in the air and then knocked out if he’s not totally knocked out. And then you take an ax and just literally cut him down his back. That’s the cutting room floor, and that’s a place where workers had a lot of power. And the bosses put Black workers in the cutting rooms and in the killing room floors, and that was done consciously. That was done to try to keep any labor projects from developing.
Well over time, these black workers got just as tired and pissed off about being mistreated as the whites did and when they found some whites such as March, but also interestingly some of the white workers from the ‘22 strike also they understood that they had to confront the white supremacy and racism. And so you had these white workers that showed that they were willing to work on that basis, and that’s what they built their union. And they built it worker by worker, department by department. There was no, somebody gives a big speech and everybody says, “Praise Jesus,” and signs up, but they had to go worker by worker and that’s how they built that packinghouse worker union. And so, for example, when workers would get mistreated why they’d shut down all the killing floors, because they were killing beef and hogs and sheep in Chicago and they would just shut down the floors and said, “No, that’s it. You got to straighten this out.” But they would also use that power to help white workers as well.
There was a guy named Walter Strabawa, a Polish worker who got caught cooking meat on the steam steam pipes that went through his department and they were going to fire him. And the workers just said, “No, we are stopping all work until this man is restored to office,” and he was. And so they built it through actually standing together and creating strong efforts so that the bosses couldn’t divide and conquer.
Margaret Flowers:
So, you also write about the importance of what you call ‘social justice unionism.’ Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Kim Scipes:
So basically what I found, they had two conceptualizations of trade unionism. One is a ‘business unionism,’ which I mentioned earlier, and this basically looked at building workers’ power on the shop floor to address issues on the shop floor, including wages and seniority and stuff like that, okay? But that’s a very narrow type of unionism. And in the steelworkers, see once my guy, George Patterson, he had gotten fired by US Steel and Steel Workers Organizing Committee did not defend him. But they did take him over and give him a job, but under Van Bittner and Van Bittner, you’ll hear his name several times today probably, was very authoritarian. He was a racist. He was just generally an asshole but he would have been put in power by Phil Murray. And so Bittner was a very top-down control freak and he wanted to control everything. So the business unionism was narrow in scope and it was a very top-down organization.
Now, on the other hand is what I call ‘social justice unionism.’ And this idea, which the packing house workers exemplified, they saw building workers’ power on the shop floor to not only benefit workers in the workplace, but also in the communities in which they lived. And one of the things to do this, like I said, they took on the white supremacy and racism, which the steelworkers never did. In fact, steel didn’t have to confront that problem until 1974, when they got sued, along with the eight steel companies, for their racism. But that’s a little later down the line. But the packinghouse workers, I’ll give you an example. In 1954, I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but the Chicago Housing Authority, the public housing in Chicago, was only for whites. Blacks could not move in. But in ‘54/’55, after a second wave of Blacks came up from the South, which was larger actually than their original movement during World War One in 1916. The after-WWII transformation was even greater. So you had Blacks coming in and they started to demand to be able to live in public housing. And on the Southeast side, there was a place called Trumbull Park and a Black family got in there and there was about six months of rioting. They tried to force them out, but the packinghouse workers used to take their members to the Trumbull Park homes, and go door to door and talk to neighbors and say, “No, the Blacks have be able to get into public housing just like you can.” And eventually that changed the whole policy of the Chicago Housing Authority, where it could not be based on segregated housing, and broke down the whole segregated, but the packinghouse workers were instrumental in that. So this is their view of the world, much broader and much larger than the business unionism. So yeah, let me stop there.
Margaret Flowers:
Yeah. So that reminds me of the Chicago Teachers Union, in recent history, has been taking on community issues as well.
Kim Scipes:
Yes, very much, same type of thing. This, what I’m talking about is in the ‘30s. ‘40s and early ‘50s, right? So long before this new wave that we see starting in about 2010 with the Chicago Teachers Union. But the same type of idea. This larger idea that trade unionism needs to be about more than just your place at work and you getting a bigger paycheck and stuff like that. We’ve got to see ourselves as part of a larger community and try to do things and that 2012 Chicago Teachers strike is a perfect example of this where they were fighting for schools that the students deserve.
Margaret Flowers:
Right. Well, divide and conquer is an age-old tactic that’s been used to weaken movements and so you know, if we want to have successes, we really have to build and grow and have solidarity. So this is really important. You also call your book, “Unions, Race and Popular Democracy,” can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?
Kim Scipes:
Okay. Well we’re taught basically that there’s only one kind of democracy: the one person one vote. If you’re going to be affected, you have a right to express your opinion and stuff like that. In reality, there are two different types of democracy. That democracy I describe, the ‘one person one vote’ is a bottom-up or popular democracy. The other version, the fancy name is ‘polyarchal democracy’ is a top-down type of democracy, which means that the leaders get to sort of set the parameters of the discussion. They decide who can run for office, things like that, and only then can the members vote. So, in other words, that was the model that the steelworkers carried out. They weren’t the first to develop it, but they carried it out. And so their whole thing was a very top-down type of trade unionism.
So, the popular democracy is the bottom up. The one person one vote. I mean the packinghouse workers, who exemplified this, were really clear that, for example, there’s a quote in the book where they say, “There’s no, ‘I’ll let the business union business agent take care of it.’” No, workers themselves, they were the source of power from the bottom up. They made the decisions and the administration, the staff, worked for them and this was carried out throughout their whole history, which was really pretty amazing in how they did it. It took a little while to get it together, but they finally figured it out and their model of democracy and taking care of each other was extremely advanced.
So, after the war, when you have the Taft-Hartley Act come in, first of all, Phil Murray and most of the leaders of the CIO decided not to fight that. And so, you ended up having purges in a lot of unions. Well, the Packinghouse Union, I’ve only been able to find one person who got purged because of Taft-Hartley, which meant you had to certify you were not a member of the Communist Party. Well Herbert March was a member of the Communist Party. He was out front, had been for 20 years and he wouldn’t sign it. And so they had to remove him, although he just shifted from being district director to working for the Packinghouse Local 347 in Armor and he worked on staff for another 10 years or so. So they took care of each other and they worked together. And they had this larger vision, I mean, for example in 1953, they forced Armor to desegregate their plants in Birmingham, Alabama, and that was two years before Rosa Parks made her move in Montgomery. They also supported Dr. King and the Montgomery Improvement Association early on. They sent them like $3,000. They were fighting racism and fighting a number of cases around the death penalty against Blacks, things like this. They were out there in ways that no other union was. It’s an exemplary union and there’s been a couple of good books out by them, but they were written by academics. And so for many academics, once they get the book done and they put it on their CV, they go on. Well, as a result, nobody knows about these books. And so I’m bringing them back and trying to utilize them and build off of them. And so we’ve got some great stuff. The steelworkers stuff, by the way, I’ll say this is the first academic study of the United Steelworkers in the Chicago/Northwest Indiana area ever. So I’m very proud of them. I’m breaking all kinds of brand new ground in there.
Margaret Flowers:
Right. And it feels like the unions of that time, there was more militancy, I think, than what we see right now.
Kim Scipes:
Well, it depends on the union. In the packinghouse workers, yeah, they fought and they were willing to fight to protect each other and fight the bosses. The steelworkers, on the other hand, no, they were controlled. Once George Patterson got fired, Van Bittner put the word out. “No, we’re not going to be good boys.” And because it was basically men at the time. And I’ll give you a perfect example of that. On Memorial Day, 1937 there was a rally. There had been a strike, it was what we now know as ‘The Little Steel Strike.’ There’s a really good book on it by a guy named Ahmed White, but his stuff on Chicago’s not as good as Pittsburgh. But anyway, there was a picket line of protesters and workers. People marched across the prairie to try to go to the picket line, to try to talk to these guys, to get them to come out of Republic Steel and somebody threw something. We don’t know who or whatever but the police pulled out their guns and started killing people. They killed ten men. They wounded at least one woman and a young child, beat the hell out of all kinds of people. I think about 90 different people beat the hell out of them, and that’s called the ‘Memorial Day Massacre’ and it was terrible and yet a month and a half, two months later after that, Nicholas Fontaccio who was the Chicago district director of SWOT had a meeting with upper management in Inland steel, which was a different steel mill. And in front of management, he told his activists, “We will have no problems in this Mill. You will not look for problems. You’ll only deal with problems if somebody comes to you first….” And I found this, it was a transcription from this meeting that was typed out. So there’s no way of misunderstanding, but it was the most blatant case of class collaboration I’ve never seen. It was just vehement and that’s in the book too. So, the steel worker leaders in this region, as I think largely throughout the steelworkers, perhaps not all, but they wanted to control the workforce. They wanted the workforce to move only when they said so and that they did everything they could to keep from allowing worker uprisings on the shop floor and stuff like that. And that still happened against their wishes but they tried to do that in some cases. Now that brings me to a very interesting thing that I don’t think anybody knows about. In 1937, so there’s organizing going on. The company was called Carnegie Illinois. It was a subsidiary of US Steel in this area. And a black man named Claude Barnett approached the company and said, “I’ll do a survey for you with the black steel workers.” And basically Barnett was against the union. He was anti-union, and he sold the company on him doing a survey so they would know whether the black workers were likely to strike if there was a CIO picket line thrown up and a strike. And so he and his people got together and did surveys from something like 459 black steel workers, which is approximately a quarter of all the black steel workers with the mill as far as I can figure out that time. And they interviewed them. And what was really interesting is they said the workers were very reluctant to tell them what they were really thinking. So, even there’d be cases where there’s a union newspaper wide open on the table because they’d come to people’s homes and they said, “I don’t know anything about the union.”
So anyway, what the survey did, and I’ve got most of the results, I don’t have the final numbers but I”ve got a series of reports that went to US Steel and the long and the short of it was basically US Steel decided they didn’t think that the Blacks would stand with them this time like they did in 1919. And so that was one of the reasons that US Steel signed with SWOC. So there was never any strike or anything like this. So what’s happening? Well, a couple of months before you had the sit-down strikes in Flint Michigan with UAW. Now, that was where they had militant strikes and it was very, very hard and thought out. Steel had nothing comparable, still had nothing complex. So basically Myron Taylor, the president of US Steel, met with John L Lewis behind his people. He didn’t even tell Phil Murray, the head of SWOC, that this was happening until the deal was done. And basically Melvin Taylor signed an agreement with John L Lewis to recognize SWOC. Now, here’s another thing that’s interesting. So that agreement was signed on March 2nd, 1937. So the Taylor-Lewis agreement was March 2nd of 1937. And all the labor historians see that as the crucial document. What they don’t know is that there was a subsequent contract that was worse that was signed on March 17th, 1937. So only a few days later. Lewis was not involved with that and it actually put more restrictions on workers than did the original contract. So, I found that actual contract and so the stuff that I’m telling people is all stuff I found in the Chicago Historical Society, and I’ve been through all their archives. So I’ve got stuff that’s backed up and I’ve seen the documents that a lot of this stuff that I’m reporting on.
Margaret Flowers:
So just to close up. What are what are some of the lessons? We are living in a similar kind of period. There’s been a real attack on unions and workers. We have tremendous debt, austerity, repression. What are your thoughts on what folks should be thinking about and working on today?
Kim Scipes:
Okay? First of all, I think business unionism is dead and stinking. I think that any new effort is to build this social justice unionism so you have a larger vision than just taking care of trade union members, that you try to take care of working people in general. And it’s a necessity because in most cases, we can’t win strikes without support from the community. But one of the things that happens is that unions want that support but they’re never there to be with the community. They have to work with the community. They have to take the community on and I think this is a crucial thing.
The other thing I think that is crucial is that we have to include everybody. Now there’s a lot of going back and forth about trans people and are they legitimate or whatever? As I learned from visiting the KMU in the Philippines, which I’ve been studying for 40 years, trans people are incorporated in the union just like everybody else, women are, etc. And so, our unions today have to fight any type of oppression. Now, sometimes that might be racial, sometimes that might not be, but they’ve got to fight oppression. So they’ve got to see themselves as much more than just asking for more. They’ve got to have this larger vision and I suggest some things. And one of the things I noted is, and it needs much more thinking than I’ve been able to give it so far, but it’s what I call ‘community-based organization unionization’ where maybe you have a relatively small town. I live in Michigan City, Indiana. It’s about 30,000 people. If you had a major place that was unionized such as some of our casinos which are, that they would get together with activists in the city, and try to organize every single workplace in the city. And so that if things got so bad that say, 70% of the workforce would go out, these workers would join with them.
I think there’s things that we’ve got to look at and in the book, at the very back of the book, I have an epilogue where I get into this and I talk about the case of the Union of All Workers in Minnesota. I’m trying to think of the town real quick. It’s the one where P9 was located in the 80s, if you remember that struggle. Anyway, there was a whole network across the Upper Midwest of unions doing this kind of stuff and there’s things we can learn from them. So I’m not trying to try put things in a sack or say this is the way to do it. I’m saying these are some things to look at. Workers today need to use their experiences to build unions like this. And for those that are in business unionism, today, I argue, they have to start working within their union, organizing within their union to turn their union from a business union into a social justice union.
So I have a lot of ideas. Hopefully, I get some thinking going and people start looking at this and talking about this because this is not being talked about today. If you go to Labor Notes, for example, which I just did, the Labor Notes Conference in June. There was no discussion, basically it’s “We need a more militant business union.” I’m convinced business unionism, like I say, is dead and stinking in all but a few places and if we want to build a union movement that can be strong, that can support working people across the country, that can fight for people, that will resist fascists like Trump and people like that, we need to build a social justice unionism. And that’s what I’m hoping people take out of the book.
Margaret Flowers:
Thank you. I think that’s critical. The way that we need to get out of this, we’ve got to be organized and in solidarity and ready to take action to protect our rights. So it’s a really great time for this book and you’re the person to write it. So thank you so much for doing that and thank you for joining me.
Kim Scipes:
Well, you’re more than welcome. I’ve enjoyed it very much and I hope people will get the book, you can get it pretty widely. It’s on Amazon and it’s supposed to be in Barnes and Noble and Walmart, even, get your independent bookstores to order it. But people need to get out there. Look at it, read it, think about what I’m saying. If you think I’m right, great. If you think I’m wrong, raise questions. Get in touch with me. I’m pretty available on the internet. And I look forward to hearing from people.
Margaret Flowers:
Great, thank you so much.
Kim Scipes:
Okay, thank you Margaret.
Guest:
Dr. Kim Scipes is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology (retired, with Honors) and taught on the Westville Campus of Purdue University Northwest from 2004 to 2022 and the Hammond campus from 2020 to 2022, following different careers as a printing press operator (with over nine years in the printing trades), high school teacher, web publisher and secretary. He also served four years in the US Marine Corps (1969-73), attaining the rank of Sergeant and an Honorable Discharge. While in the Marine Corps, fortunately staying in the United States during his time in the Marines, he became consciously political and “turned around” while on active duty.
He obtained his Bachelor’s Degree from Florida State University (1975), his Master’s from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands (1991) and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2003.
He specializes in labor, both domestically and around the world and is currently a member of the National Writers Union, AFL-CIO. He has been opening night and plenary speaker at global conferences in Canada, Germany, South Africa and Vietnam. Dr. Scipes has published widely in the United States and in 11 different countries around the world: he has published over 300 articles and book reviews for peer-reviewed, specialty and activist publications, in addition to five books. Since April 13, 2024, he has included major public presentations in his count. (See publications.) His book about the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines in on-line for free in its entirety: the link is below the books on his publications page.
He taught a range of interesting courses, taking a global approach and from a macro sociological perspective. Dr. Scipes has been engaged professionally at the global, national and local levels.
