I did a search for this particular article and didn't find any diary on it. If however I missed it let me know and I'll delete this.
James Straub, in the Monthly Review, wrote a fantastic article on Ohio, it's past history as a bastion of unionization and democratic progressivism(sp?) and it's current tilt right. You can find the article
here. I highly recommend reading it.
Mr. Straub does a quick run down on the union movement and how much of it arose from violent struggles in Ohio, as the workers of the time fought vicious battles against capitalists to get their fair share of the economic pie...
Across the state in Akron, widespread tax fraud by property-holders cut the city's revenue base so drastically that public schools were forced to close their doors, while the city's huge rubber companies protected their multimillion-dollar annual profits by enforcing wage cuts with the outright violent terrorization of their workers.
Such draconian expressions of top-down class war confronted local workers who had previously tried union organization and strikes, only to fail bitterly. However, growing radical movements in both cities refused to cry uncle. In Toledo, socialist organizers were key in mobilizing large crowds of thousands of unemployed to join picketers on strike outside an auto plant--battling the National Guard and trapping scab workers inside the factory. Meanwhile, in Akron, a strike of rubber workers resulted in the spontaneous invention of the "sit-down" strike, where workers occupied their factory, thus threatening the bosses with the destruction of expensive equipment in the event of violence. In both Toledo and Akron, such tactics--support from mass crowds and "sit-down" factory occupation--heralded their use in hundreds of successive labor battles.
Notice how the workers fought against vicious, violent onslaughts by the capitalists? Notice how socialist organizers were even able to get the unemployed to help in their struggle? Imagine that today? HAH!!!
The article states that the job losses in Ohio have actually helped the turds, ironically. How? The evangelical churches have stepped in to take over the old New Deal programs that use to help the poor and displaced..
The economic catastrophes of the 1980s laid waste not just to the seeds of a new labor left, but also to Ohio's cities and industrial areas. In Cleveland, where the labor-left politician Dennis Kucinich had become the youngest mayor in America, plant shutdowns and white flight destroyed the city's resource base, causing social chaos easily blamed on the radical kid mayor. The local banking elite, eager for a confrontation with Kucinich, ordered him to privatize the city's electric utility. He refused, and the banks called his bluff by calling the city's loans into default. In the ensuing economic meltdown, Kucinich lost his reelection bid, making local government safe for capitalism again.
Ohio's cities, manufacturing industries, and unions have been on life support ever since. The old interlocking forms of New Deal social democracy--urban machine/social safety net/unionized mass-production industry--are on a terminal slide to extinction. As all over America, they are gradually being replaced by a new comprehensive social organization--nonunion Wal-Mart jobs/antisocial exurban sprawl/hyper-individualist consumerism--whose value system is as oriented towards the Republican right as the old New Deal was to FDR Democrats. In this equation, the role of ideological prime movers has switched: just as left-wing CIO unions used to be the instigators and organizers of the discontent that created the rest of the social structure, now it is the equally (but oppositely) ideological evangelical churches that stoke the fires of blue-collar anger in Ohio. Wal-Mart has replaced the steel companies as the state's largest employer; the sprawling exurbs of Columbus and Cincinnati have replaced Cleveland as its fastest growing areas; and the Assemblies of God and Church of the Nazarene are the new Steelworkers and Autoworkers.
The author also provides a prescription on how future unionization may help turn the tide in Ohio and elsewhere.
This is a fantastic article and I urge everyone that reads this diary to read it.