Dray: Unions not ready to lay down and die

Philip Dray is the author of "There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America."

The approaching 100th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist fire on March 25 compels reflection on the tremendous distance the cause of working people in America has come.

That 1911 tragedy in a Lower East Side garment sweatshop claimed 147 lives, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some of whom leaped to their deaths to the street nine floors below. Public outrage led to the formation of the New York Factory Investigating Commission, which worked with the state legislature to pass new laws governing workplace safety -- a model for the nation.

The disaster also helped overturn the long-prevalent notion that government had no business meddling in the affairs of private business regarding issues of health, sanitation and worker safety.

And it served as an emotional touchstone for a generation of reformers, some of whom worked with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to craft the labor and social reforms of the New Deal, including the guaranteed right of collective bargaining, which has been under siege today in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere across the nation.

"President Roosevelt wants you to join the union!" United Mine Workers chief John L. Lewis crowed to his men, once it became clear that at long last American workers had a president who understood the importance to society of labor stability and worker dignity.

The Triangle fire was no aberration -- mine cave-ins and railroad work killed and maimed thousands annually -- but the risk of bodily harm was only one concern facing American workers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The workday might last 10, 12 or 14 hours; pay rarely approached a living wage; and most workplaces lacked procedures for airing worker grievances. Meanwhile, labor organizing was met with hostility from Capitol, legislatures and the courts, or undermined from within by corporate-sponsored spies. Governors did not hesitate to call on police, militia or even federal troops to put down local labor unrest.

Against this backdrop, the historic attainments of organized labor -- the eight-hour day and five-day week, health benefits, vacation and sick pay, collective bargaining, and improved workplace safety -- are all that much more remarkable.

The concept of collective bargaining emerged at the turn of the last century, part of a larger reform movement aimed at quelling the harmful cycle of walkouts and violence associated with infamous labor struggles.

In the Pullman Strike of 1894, Eugene Debs and his American Railway Union ground the nation's railroads to a halt. President Grover Cleveland dispatched federal troops to put down strikers in the nation's rail yards with club and bayonet while his administration won sweeping anti-union injunctions that put Debs and other labor leaders behind bars.

In the strike's aftermath, however, investigating commissions and leading reformers articulated the desire to erect a new framework, one that would bring fairness to dealings between labor and management, reduce the influence of radicals in labor's ranks, increase worker retention and limit strikes. These ideals guided President Theodore Roosevelt in resolving a potentially devastating coal strike in 1902, and were embraced by Boston attorney and labor reformer Louis Brandeis, who was instrumental in ending the massive New York City garment strike of 1910.

The Triangle factory did not join Brandeis' "Protocols of Peace," an innovative agreement among garment makers and their employees signed only a year before the fire. And it's troubling that as we mark that fire's centenary, we are also witnessing the desecration of the reforms Brandeis fathered and optimistically termed "the spirit of get-together."

Labor's seminal victory came in 1935, with the National Labor Relations Act. It guaranteed unions the right to organize without fear of retribution or firings, the doing away of phony "company unions," the obligation of employers to recognize duly elected union spokesmen as legitimate workers' representatives, and to bargain collectively. Once it became clear the legislation would withstand constitutional challenge -- and following the 1937 strike orchestrated by the United Auto Workers -- both General Motors and U.S. Steel capitulated to the new collective bargaining regime.

Other firms followed suit. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law. During these years, the social safety net long petitioned for by labor, including unemployment insurance and Social Security, was also established.

Such reforms, along with the economic impact of World War II, ushered in the greatest era of prosperity in America's history. And it was broadly shared, thanks in part to the leveling economic influence of unions, whose membership rose to 35 percent of private sector workers.

There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor since World War II -- the dwindling of large urban industrial centers; anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act, which curtailed some of what unions had won in the 1930s; and the tainting of unions as radical or corrupt.

Unions have always had an image problem in America, for as organizations go they are uniquely threatening -- they are, after all, not a church choir or a book club, but groups devoted to social and economic parity, armed with the weapon of the strike. They are a collective activist entity in a nation that prizes the individual.

And unions have not failed to make their own problems. Many grew complacent about the recruitment of new members, or neglected potential alliances with women and minority workers. Some adopted an executive style of leadership alienating to rank-and-file workers and the public. These days, union membership has shrunk to a fraction of its 1950s level. While about 36 percent of public service workers are unionized, in the private sector it's less than 7 percent.

Thirty years ago labor was dealt an especially painful blow when President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 federal air traffic controllers rather than negotiate with them. Labor has ever since rued its inability to coalesce in opposition to Reagan's actions. That's why it is heartening to see not only unions defending collective bargaining today, but opinion polls indicating that a majority of Americans also believe it is an essential right.

Labor may be greatly diminished and its future unclear. But we need look no farther than the recent protests to be reminded that there is something universal and renewable in the willingness of workers to organize -- and to insist upon their worth. It's the same spirit that rose from the ashes of the Triangle shirtwaist factory a century ago.