Between the Knights of Labor’s founding in 1869 and its convention in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886, the local press and political leadership condemned it for opening its doors to all races and sneered at its recruitment of both skilled and non-skilled workers--from coal miners and turpentine workers to dockworkers. Its membership eventually reached an estimated 700,000.
Although the bloody Haymarket Affair in Chicago the same year as that Richmond convention would bring a death blow to the future of the Knights of Labor, the all-inclusive union would go on to help inspire the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, in 1905 and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Workers in the 1930s.
Before its demise it gained considerable success in the allegedly anti-union South, joining with, for example, the New Orleans-based Central Trades and Labor Assembly, also a bi-racial organization with up to 10,000 members.
The Knights of Labor spirit today can perhaps even be felt in the creation of the modern-day Labor South organization. Not to be confused with this decade-plus-old blog, the Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies is a North Carolina-based, region-wide organization that seeks to grow the labor movement through education, training, and organizing. Apprenticeships, training certification, independent courses in labor history and organizing, and media and union collaboration are all included in the organization’s plans and goals.
“Through independent study courses, students can gain a deeper understanding of how the labor rights movement has impacted their local community and how it continues to do so,” Labor South director Melinda Wiggins says.
This writer has long lamented the absence of labor history in U.S. history courses. As a (now retired) professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi for more than 30 years, I made sure my Media History students knew all about the 1886 Haymarket Affair as well as other landmark moments of labor history such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1911 and the textile strikes in North Carolina in the late 1920s and 1930s. I didn’t preach. I did what a teacher is supposed to do: teach.
Other efforts are underway in these troubling times that pose a challenge to the neoliberal, corporate-controlled world modern capitalism has created. A nascent Labor Party has been founded, a People’s Party as well. The Southern Workers Assembly in North Carolina is also gaining momentum.
Certainly the times are calling for such efforts. Despite President Trump’s campaign appeals to the working class, his administration has proven an enemy of workers. He has gutted the National Labor Relations Board, nominating Morgan Lewis attorney Crystal Carey to serve as NLRB General Counsel. Morgan Lewis is one of the nation’s most vicious union-busting law firms. He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and NLRB Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox.
Trump’s erstwhile buddy Elon Musk has even gone to court claiming the NLRB is unconstitutional.
Trump has stripped 800,000 federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.
As for the economy, Trump’s first administration authorized tax cuts in 2017 with 82 percent of the cuts aimed at the nation’s top 1 percent. In his current administration he wants another $4 trillion in tax cuts. Guess who benefits?
The people of the United States are watching. A recent Gallup poll showed 68 percent of Americans support labor unions. That’s a number you’d think would impress hapless national Democrats, yet their soothsayers keep telling their candidates to go moderate, not left. In other words, more lip service than action regarding labor unions.
Despite his miserable, war-mongering foreign politics, former President Biden was something of a modern-day Democratic exception on labor. He did try in several ways to live up to his boast of being the “most pro-union” president in the nation’s history. In a recent edition of the publication International Union Rights, writer John Logan calls attention to Biden’s pro-labor appointments to the NLRB, his bailout of the Teamsters’ pension funds, and his appearance on a United Auto Workers picket line.
Donald Trump and his crowd will never appear on a picket line unless it’s to bust some strikers’ heads. As Labor South and other organizations try to educate people about who’s on their side and who’s not, maybe enough will realize their side, if united, has the power to throw the bums out.
