What is to be Done?
by Wendy Hazard
Divided We Fall: The Story Of The Paperworkers' Union And The Future Of
Labor
by Peter Kellman
Apex Press. 194 pages. $29.95
In 1987, International Paper, the richest paper company in the world and the
largest landowner in the United States, achieved record profits. That same
year, IP management demanded that its employees take a cut in pay, sacrifice
hundreds of jobs, and give up Christmas holidays and overtime pay for work
on Sundays. Company spokesmen insisted that IP had to take these actions to
remain "competitive" in the global economy. Few were fooled. It was the
Reagan-era of union busting, and IP had launched a frontal assault on paper
workers and their unions.
In June, 1987 International Paper Company's workers in Jay, Maine went on
strike for workplace justice and fairness. Peter Kellman was at the center
of the year-long struggle. A former construction worker, shoe worker, local
union president, and peace activist, Kellman grew up in Sanford, Maine and
has become one of Maine's most important labor spokesmen. Since the Jay
strike, his skills as an organizer and strategist have become the stuff of
legend. Labor historian, Jack Getman, the author of The Betrayal Of Local
14, an important study of the Jay strike, describes Kellman as a man "whose
own story is worthy of a novel — a man who could turn a routine strike into
a crusade, marked by rallies, marches and emotional meetings." In 1987,
Kellman was hired by the AFL-CIO to work with the 1,250 striking paper
workers of Local 14 of the United Paperworkers International Union
(UPIU).Over the course of many months, he helped transform that struggle
into an important chapter in labor history.
The story of the strike, the efforts of the Local 14 workers to maintain
solidarity and mobilize support in their communities and in the country, and
the central role that Kellman played throughout the long struggle is ably
told in Getman's book. So too is the story of IP's campaign to crush the
strike, and the failure of the UPIU to support Local 14, or to protect the
thousands of workers who ultimately lost their jobs to "replacement
workers." Now, Peter Kellman has written his own book about the Jay strike.
Divided We Fall is a very different kind of book than Getman's. It is a
passionate and polemical work that sets the Jay strike and its outcome
within the larger context of U.S.labor history, and tackles head-on, the
most perplexing and enduring question in American labor history: — What is it
that keeps workers in the United States from building a genuine
working-class movement?'
Kellman insists that the answer to that question lies not in the external
forces arrayed against the working class, but in its failure to sustain
unity within its own ranks. In part, he sees that failure as due to the
difficulty that American workers have had in keeping their own history and
the story of their struggles alive. For Divided We Fall, Kellman has
carefully researched the history of labor struggles in Maine, from the late
19th century to the recent past. Using oral histories, local newspaper
coverage of past strikes, and the State of Maine's annual reports of the
Bureau of Industrial and Labor Relations, he has resurfaced the origins of
the first paper worker unions in Maine, the failed strikes of 1908 and 1921,
and most importantly, a victory in 1910, when workers, using lessons learned
from the failure of the 1908 strike, unified a grass roots movement, went on
strike to protect their jobs and their right to organize, and convinced the
leadership and members of two national unions to combine forces to build
solidarity among their ranks throughout New England. In 1910, International
Paper Company used the threat of force and the political power it wielded in
the state and on the national level to crush the strike. But workers held
fast and won an important victory. The lessons of that history need to be
remembered, because, Kellman writes, "If workers do not learn from their
losses and pass on and celebrate their victories, their struggles become a
hopeless whirlpool of defeat. Their destiny — will be to repeat the mistakes
of the past over and over again."
Kellman is also deeply critical of the bureaucratic structures that
characterize organized labor today. He argues that large national unions,
including UPIU and the AFL-CIO that depend on the Federal government for
protection, have opted for accommodation with industry, and "they turned
their backs on the union that based its power on community support‹the type
of union that once played a part in every aspect of working class life." He
explains that the structure and character of the big unions took shape with
the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935 the act that
assured the Federal government's protection of workers' rights to organize,
to strike and to bargain collectively with management. But while the NLRA
provided unions the protection to grow and exercise a stronger voice in
national politics, Kellman argues that those gains were soon compromised by
Big Labor's growing bureaucratic structure and its unwillingness to support
the militancy of its locals. The efforts of Local 14 during the 1987 88
strike are a case in point. Kellman maintains that like the striking paper
workers in 1910, the workers in Jay organized community support at the grass
roots level, with picket lines, parades, emotional mass meetings, and
political outreach to state officials. They won broad sympathy around the
state and the nation also, when they raised awareness of the dangerous
working conditions in the mill, and IP's reckless pollution of the
Androscoggin River. They then hoped for the backing of the UPIU and AFL-CIO,
a commitment to help organize unions around the country, and a national
boycott of IP goods. That support from the top never materialized. Instead,
the leadership of UPIU brokered a "Peace Accord" with International Paper
that settled for a few fines for environmental damage. Replacement "scab"
workers kept their jobs and accepted the deep cuts in wages and benefits
that went with them.
For Kellman, one of the greatest failings of organized labor has been its
unwillingness to fight against the use of replacement workers during a
strike. In tracing the history of the labor movement, he reminds us that
while the NLRA protected workers' rights to organize, bargain collectively
and to strike when necessary for fairness and justice, those rights have
been undermined by a series of court decisions that have upheld the right of
employers to hire replacement workers to keep their factories open and
operating during a strike. The result, Kellman writes, is that "The NLRA
maintains that workers have a right to strike, but the company has the right
to permanently replace them the next day. Under that definition, the right
to strike is often little more than the right to risk or sacrifice your
job." The striking workers in Jay took the risk and paid the price while the
leadership of the national union stood by, with folded arms.
With a tip of his hat to Vladimir Illych Lenin, Kellman concludes his book
with a chapter entitled, "So What is to Be Done?" His remedies include
tackling the unconstitutionality of the laws that undermine workers'
abilities to fight for fair wages and safe working conditions on an equal
footing with corporate management. He advocates also, the formation of a
Labor Party in the U.S. that will champion the rights of workers, fight for
health care as a "human right," and maintain that worker representation in
all labor disputes is guaranteed under the 1st amendment right to free
speech and assembly, the 13th amendment that ended involuntary servitude,
and the 14th amendment that insures all Americans equal protection under the
law. It is a powerful argument, and Kellman's book deserves a wide audience,
especially today when the jobs of workers in America, and the safety and
well-being of workers around the world are threatened by the forces of
globalization.
Back to Peace Talk Index, Autumn, 2004