From: Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed and How they Fail (Pantheon, 1977) CHAPTER 3 The Industrial Workers' Movement The experience of labor unions in the United States is the historical bedrock on which the organizer's credo is grounded. As organizers recount this history, factory workers finally organized into large, stable organizations after many bloody travails, and were then able to exert influence in the factory. Moreover, organization was said to have yielded influence in politics as well. The large voting numbers and financial resources which the unions accumulated presumably gave working people a measure of political power. To be sure, some believers in the credo are disappointed in the way unions have used their power, blaming an oligarchical leadership for a narrow preoccupation with wages and hours and for the avoidance of more fundamental economic and political issues. However, the belief that working people were able to gain both economic and electoral power through organization still holds firm. It is this belief that suggests to organizers the model other powerless groups should follow. But on closer historical scrutiny, the bedrock turns out to be sand. Factory workers had their greatest influence and were able to extract their most substantial concessions from government during the early years of the Great Depression before they were organized into unions. Their power was not rooted in organization, but in their capacity to disrupt the economy. For the most part strikes, demonstrations, and sit-downs spread during the mid-1930s despite existing unions rather than because of them. Since these disorders occurred at a time of widespread political instability, threatened political leaders were forced to respond with placating concessions. One of these concessions was protection by government of the right toThe Industrial Workers' Movement organize. Afterwards, union membership rose, largely because government supported unionization. But once organized, the political influence of workers declined. The unions not only failed to win new victories from government commensurate with the victories of unorganized workers during the 1930s, but those already won were whittled away. Before we go on to offer our explanation of why industrial workers became a political force during the depression, we need to say a little about their lack of force before the depression. The State Against Labor When industrial workers band together they have power in their dealings with capital, or so it would seem. Their power is of course the disruptive power of the strike. If workers withhold their labor, production is halted and profits dwindle, and employers are pressured into making concessions. Moreover, as economic concentration proceeds, and the scale of enterprises and their interpenetration in-creases, the power of labor ought to increase as well. Not only do large-scale enterprises facilitate collective action among workers, but the impact of strikes is more severe, reverberating throughout an interdependent and concentrated economy. All this may seem to be true in principle, but in historical fact it has not been. Between the onset of rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and the Great Depression, the history of strikes in mass production industries was largely a history of failure.' The explanation of this failure has preoccupied students of labor history. The interpretations which have resulted tend to fasten on divisions in the American working class which inhibited the solidarity necessary for effective strike action :2 the corrosive effect of the business cycle on labor unity; deep status and ethnic conflicts among 1 Gutman points out that not all strikes were defeated, and he cites information collected by the New Jersey Bureau of Labor Statistics on 890 New Jersey industrial disputes between 1881 and 1889 showing that strikers won over half the recorded disputes (48). But during these and succeeding years, the largest industrial confrontations were defeated, as in the major railroad, mining, and steel strikes. 2 One of the most influential of these interpretations can be found in Selig Perlman. More radical analysts score Perlman for his defense of the bread-and-butter trade unionism that has emerged in the United States, but they do not take major exception to his analysis of the factors accounting for the historic lack of class consciousness.Poor People's Movements workers; the divisive effects of the promise and reality of upward mobility; and the oligarchical and exclusionary character of such unions as did exist. We will briefly review each of these explanations, for we think they help to explain the weakness of strike power. There can be no doubt that solidarity was essential to the effectiveness of strikes, for without it striking workers were easily replaced and production was easily continued. And there can be no doubt that American workers were divided. These divisions had their roots in features of the American economy and in the characteristics of the American working population, as well as in deliberate practices of employers designed to exacerbate divisions in order to turn workers against each other. With this review made, however, we will go on to argue that divisiveness among American workers fails to account adequately for the defeat of labor struggles. In instance after instance, worker struggles did not collapse from lack of internal unity; they were smashed by the coercive power of the state. First and most obviously worker solidarity was influenced by market conditions. Workers could join together in strikes and slowdowns more readily when business prospered and when the demand for labor was strong. But during periods of depression, men and women were laid off, wages were cut, and hours were lengthened. Defensive strikes and riots sometimes erupted during depressions, but they usually had little effect. Not only did employers find it easier to resist strikes when trade was slow and there was less to be lost by halting production, but with jobs scarce, workers were forced to undersell each other in the scramble for employment. Workers' associations which emerged during boom times were unable to resist these forces; they were usually simply wiped out when the market fell.,Second, solidarity was also inhibited because the American working population was fragmented by intense