Well, yes! The disappearance of almost 275,000 people from employment in Illinois’ manufacturing sector between January 1998 and December 2007 presents a truly alarming situation (see accompanying BLS graph). Perhaps the jobs have vanished due to changes in technology or fashion, or maybe they have moved to another part of the country. Another grim possibility is that they have been “outsourced” beyond our borders.
We must ask ourselves why our political and civic leaders, our news media and our citizenry, have not been focused on this threat to blue-collar incomes? Indeed, why have the folks in our universities whose jobs it is to study these matters seem to have shut their eyes to such unpleasant realities? On the other hand, we have heard a lot of public concern in recent weeks that the long-running prosperity of the mortgage lenders, real estate tycoons, and stock market gamblers is now danger – a situation that could and should have been predicted.
“OK”, someone may say, “But this sounds like current events, not labor history!”
Maybe so, but there is a clear resemblance to a historical period, the examination of which might clarify our understanding of these current events and even guide our search for wise policies to deal with a bad state of affairs.
This writer recalls personal experience with the Great Depression. I can clearly remember hearing speeches on the radio by President Hoover in the early 1930s to the effect that the economy would soon right itself and the return of prosperity was “just around the corner.” Echoes of that deceptive illusion are heard today, as when President Bush addresses the subject of the economy.
Now, we are told that all those factories that have been closed and jobs eliminated are not a problem because of all the new jobs that have been created. But what kinds of new jobs and in what industries? In financial services? In Wal-Mart stores selling imported toys from places where wages are low, and where patriotic American capitalists have invested in new factories and the latest technology?
In the 1920s, American industry lead a counter-attack against the Labor Movement which had been somewhat successful in improving blue-collar wages and working conditions during the previous decade. A propaganda attack was launched against the “Closed Shop” and the idea of collective bargaining as being somehow un-American. In its place, the industrialists offered something they called The American Plan, which consisted of welfare capitalism such as company sponsored baseball teams and various “representation” plans through which workers might filter their grievances through “Representatives” elected by employees to meet on a periodic basis with departmental superintendents. Needless to say, the plant superintendent always had the last word; most often, it was “No”.
Also, the 1920s were marked by a public infatuation with the stock market which rose ever higher until the bubble burst in 1929. At that time, the diagnosis was “over production”, which was to say that buying power of the working class could not keep up with the rising prices of goods and services. When all those products found no buyers, the layoffs, quite naturally, followed and continued to follow, thus deepening the Depression.
On the political front, the Democrats took the presidency and control of the Congress in 1932. President Franklin D Roosevelt (whose name has scarcely been mentioned in the last twenty years in polite society) moved quickly to create a federally required bank deposit insurance program, thus bringing to a halt the “run on the bank” phenomenon that was wiping out personal deposits. This was the beginning of the New Deal, which developed into a series of governmental actions including the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act. The latter required employers to cease supporting their company unions and start collectively bargaining toward a union contract when a majority of employees so requested, and the former set minimum wages and the overtime threshold at forty hours per week.
The election year of 2008 provides an opportunity to take a lesson from history by putting folks in charge who will put the needs of regular people at the foundation of the economy. Could it be time for a New Deal for the twenty-first century, one that would reverse the outsourcing of jobs and rebuild a truly national prosperity?
The Illinois Labor History Society
28 E. Jackson, Chicago, IL 60604
Phone: (312) 663-4107