A High-Water Mark for U.S. Labor Unions
JANUARY 21 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of what some consider the high-water mark for organized labor in the U.S. It was on that 1946 day that 750,000 members of the United Steel Workers walked out of almost every major steel plant in the country, starting the largest single strike in U.S. history.
The steel strike was only part of a huge proletarian offensive against employers going on at the same time. On the same day the Steel Workers struck, 30,000 members of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers walked off the job to back up their demand for a big raise in pay at International Harvester’s 11 factories.
And that wasn’t all, because there were already major strikes in progress at General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse, Western Union, American Telephone and Telegraph, the American Tobacco Company, and all of the major meat-packing companies in the U.S.
All told, the total number of striking workers in the U.S. on that day was nearly 1.7 million – some three percent of the civilian labor force – a number that has never been surpassed. Virtually all the major strikes at the time were successful, providing workers with substantially higher pay, benefits and job security.
The success of unions in the aftermath of World War 2 continued for more than 17 months, until it ran into stiff political opposition, when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which eliminated many of the rights that workers and their unions had obtained as a result of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. https://libcom.org/article/chapter-6-postscript-war-and-post-war-strike-wave
The Night the U.S. Air Force Almost Nuked North Carolina
JANUARY 23 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of the crash of a U.S. Air Force bomber that had been carrying two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs until the bomber broke up in mid-air, allowing both bombs to fall through the open air until they both hit the ground 50 miles east of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Each of the bombs was 260 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. One of the bombs was later discovered to have automatically gone through every step but one of its pre-detonation sequence.
Had the detonators completed the last step, the bomb would have exploded. Hundreds, if not thousands of people would have been killed immediately and highly radioactive fallout could have caused death and injury in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, at the very least.
Soon after the 1961 accident, the Air Force disclosed that the two H-bombs had fallen to earth, but insisted that there had been no chance of either of them exploding. It was not until 52 years later that the military released documents, requested under the Freedom of Information Act, that revealed the truth, which was that if a single electrical switch had malfunctioned, one of the bombs would have created the most deadly nuclear mishap ever. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
A Massive Protest Was Cancelled, But Not Before It Had Great Success
JANUARY 25 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY of the announcement of a plan for a massive protest march demanding an end to racist employment discrimination and an end to the racial segregation of the armed forces of the U.S. The March on Washington was projected to take place in five months, on July 1, 1941.
The leaders of the proposed March on Washington Movement or MOWM, as it was widely known, were A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, A. J. Muste and Bayard Rustin. Randolph was the radical president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a labor union with membership that was almost entirely Black, not because the union discriminated, but due to their employer's notorious hiring practices. Walter White was the long-time head of the NAACP. Muste was the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and had decades of experience as a radical labor organizer. Rustin, who was decades younger than the other three, was an experienced, radical anti-racist organizer.
As it happened, the march was called off at the last minute, but it was cancelled as a result of a deal between the organizers and the White House. The agreement came about because just the threat of the demonstration produced a welcome sea-change in the struggle against racial and ethnic employment discrimination in the U.S, which is widely considered to be a major turning point that might otherwise have taken years to bring about. Here’s why.
During the six months before January 1941 the German army was brutally occupying most of Europe and the Japanese army was doing the same throughout the industrialized part of China. The U.S. was still at peace and would remain so for another year.
But the likelihood that the U.S. would soon be drawn into World War 2 was growing fast. Government and industry and a large portion of the general public had started to prepare for that eventuality. Congress had appropriated funds to pay for more than 60,000 new military planes (many more planes than the number of pilots in the U.S.), and for enough new ships to enlarge the U.S. Navy by 70 percent. The number of soldiers and sailors and bases for them mushroomed at the same time, thanks to the institution of the first peacetime military conscription in U.S. history.
As a result of the huge sums being spent on armaments and other war preparations, the U.S. economy was booming, bringing an end to the deepest depression the U.S. had ever experienced. But the benefits of the industrial expansion were, of course, not evenly distributed among workers, because racist (and to a lesser extent, ethnic) discrimination in employment was the rule and not the exception in almost every industry. African-Americans were the last hired, and if they were hired at all, it was usually for the worst-paid jobs. At the same time, German-Americans and Italian-Americans were experiencing explicit employment discrimination because the nations from whence they or their ancestors came were the enemy, or at least the enemy in waiting.
That was the context for the unveiling of the MOWN, a plan for a march and demonstration with at least a hundred thousand participants demanding racial integration of the armed forces and an end to employment discrimination.
Faced with the virtual certainty of that many fired-up anti-racists making an unprecedentedly massive demonstration in the streets of Washington, the Roosevelt administration decided to try to head them off by giving in, at least in part. Less than a week before the planned march, after extensive discussions with the MOWN organizers, the White House issued an Executive Order that prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination in the U.S. defense industry, the first federal action promoting equal employment opportunity.
The march organizers did not achieve one of their main goals, which was to end the segregation of the U.S. armed forces (that would not happen for another seven years), but knowing that they had achieved a great deal, they called the demonstration off. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/march-washington-movement-1941-1947/
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