Many people chafe at the corporate powers that control some of our governments and much of our lives. Some dare to imagine how to spark a nationwide or worldwide challenge to their authority.
International unions could lead that challenge. A recent, but too-rare example was the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shutting down the Port of Oakland for a day in sympathy with the local Occupy movement.
Others simply condemn unions for not doing this more. But an accurate assessment requires understanding a little-known legal barrier: the outlawing of solidarity by the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act.
If we want unions actively participating in widespread opposition to goods produced under slave labor conditions, we need to understand how to circumvent, or even change these laws.
The story of the Taft-Hartley law began when Labor union growth exploded in the early 1930s. Millions of workers joined unions, battled police and troops, and won militant strikes.
Before the Taft-Hartley Act, empowered workers were able to negotiate contract protections that allowed them to refuse to handle non-union goods.
Unions used this tactic to organize almost all significant employers in large cities outside the South. A company might try and run a non-union grocery, but the dry goods wouldn’t be delivered unless a union clerk received the shipment.
You might distill non-union liquor, but no union bartender would stock your product. You might try and operate a non-union hotel, but no union plumber would repair your building’s hot water boiler.
In other words, millions of workers stuck together in solidarity, and refused to handle non-union goods, to pressure companies into recognizing unions for their workers and paying better wages.
This powerful tactic rankled employers. Their lawyers wrote a prohibition against solidarity, which they called a “secondary boycott” into the Taft-Hartley Act. The corporations shoveled campaign contributions into the pockets of Midwest Republicans and Southern Democrats, who passed the law in 1948 over President Truman’s veto.
The new law meant, for instance, that even though the Kohler plumbing supply company was on strike soon afterwards, the Kohler workers could no longer ask union plumbers to refuse to install Kohler products.
Even political solidarity strikes were outlawed. The Longshore (ILA) workers on the East Coast unanimously refused to unload Soviet products after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1980. The Federal Courts punished the union and forced the workers back on the job, ruling the ILA workers could not refuse to do business with the freight shippers, when their beef was with Russia.
More recently, during the 1985 Hormel Strike, hundreds of strikers picketed Hormel’s bank. The federal National Labor Relations Board declared that tactic illegal, because the bank was a so-called "secondary" or neutral employer and the mass picketing prevented folks from doing business with the bank.
Clever workers can dodge secondary boycott charges. During the Coors boycott of the 1970s, teamster organizers and gay activists, including the legendary Howard Wallace, went from bar-to-bar in the San Francisco Castro District to lobby union bartenders to boycott Coors. In response, the bartenders didn’t refuse to handle Coors beer; they just didn’t order it because demand was "low." Heh.
The West Coast Longshore Union (ILWU) has repeatedly evaded secondary boycott charges even after waging one-day strikes that supported political protests. Their contract allows their members not to cross picket lines when that would subject them to physical danger.
So when the college students and hippies picketed the arrival of a South African ship at the San Francisco docks in the mid-1980s, the ILWU workers said with smirks, ”Oh, we’re too afraid of those students to cross their line and unload those Apartheid-produced goods," and left those South African goods on shipboard. Generally the ILWU honors political picket lines for just a day, otherwise employer and police retaliation would follow.
You may also see, for instance, unions leafleting some Starbucks to alert consumers that the workers at the PacTiv paper company, who make Starbucks’ paper cups, haven’t gotten a new contract. That’s called an “informational picket.”
Those leaflets will also say something like “Nothing herein shall be interpreted as a request for any person or entity to refuse to do business with Starbucks.” Lawyers crafted that verbiage to avoid secondary boycott charges.
The problem is we need determined solidarity and widespread action to break the haughty power of corporate bosses like the Koch Brothers or international companies like Wal-Mart, whose suppliers oppress workers in China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, and whose store clerks earn starvation wages from Oakland to Uganda and in 26 countries all told.
Because of the Taft-Hartley Act, union solidarity, such as refusing to handle products from Koch, or Wal-Mart suppliers, would be illegal.
.
The outlawing of solidarity was just one of several anti labor provisions in the Taft-Hartley Act. The law also legalized employers’ anti-union campaigns, drove militant leftists out of unions, allowed States to outlaw all-union shops, and provided for injunctions against strikes, among other clauses.
Congress even strengthened the anti-solidarity law in 1959. Despite many sessions of democratic majorities in Congress coupled with Democratic presidents, Congress hasn’t passed any pro-union legislation of consequence in 80 years.
In my opinion, the first step on the road to progressive action is labor law reform that would remove or reduce the legal obstacles against solidarity, to strengthen unions.
Corporations always hated and feared secondary boycotts. I’ll leave you with an example why, which is the Pullman Strike, one of the biggest national insurrections in United States history. We'll need a version of this solidarity worldwide, to shed the corporate collar.
George Pullman was a railroad magnate, who owned a “company town” where many of his workers lived under surveillance, paid inflated rents and even had to pay to use the library.
He manufactured the Pullman cars, which were railroad cars with fancy sitting rooms and bedrooms where the wealthy could ride the railroads in seclusion and luxury. During the 1894 recession, he slashed his already-paltry wages by 50%. One mechanic received a check for seven cents for 120 hours’ work.
“God Himself could not have stopped the workers from striking,” said one account. First the 4000 workers in Pullman town, near Chicago, struck. Then their brothers and sisters in Kentucky and St. Louis downed their tools.
The union workers at the other railroads had a plan to help the Pullman workers. They would refuse to hook up a Pullman car to any train of any other railroad company. If the switchmen were fired for that refusal, every other worker in the shop would walk out.
At noon one day, the railroad workers unhooked all the Pullman cars from every train. The railroads complained, another five thousand workers struck, and 15 railroads were thus paralyzed.
The workers were careful to keep the mail trains moving, but the US Attorney Generals began issuing arrest warrants. Now forty thousand workers struck. Then another eighty- five thousand left their jobs.
Working class crowds in railroad towns mobbed the stations when they heard that a train with a hated Pullman car might arrive. Mobs in Chicago set fire to Pullman cars. Anti-union Governors in 20 states called out their militias and the US dispatched 12,000 regular troops. Many militia and some troops refused to attack the strikers. But other troops fired into the crowds. Even in small rural towns, angry mobs stormed railroad stations to thwart movement of the odious Pullman cars.
Troops tried to force railroad workers at gun and bayonet point to hook up the despised Pullman cars. Eventually the military force, and federal prosecutions broke the strike, but the railroad workers reorganized and their unions remained strong.
A version of this type of solidarity worldwide, against the worst of the worldwide corporations, would benefit millions, especially the least among us.
Here are some links to additional information about Taft-Hartley and secondary boycotts:
A scholarly article about Longshore boycotts:
http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/...
A discussion of a beer boycott;
http://www.hrpolicy.org/...
An article about the outlawing of picketing the Hormel bank:
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/...
My favorite, some historic anti-Taft-Hartley literature:
http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/...