“The Labor Movement: Honoring Our Legacy and Organizing Our Future”
Intro/Acknowledgements
Thank you, Valerie [Braman] for that kind and generous introduction. It’s an honor to be here in State College and to deliver this year’s Philip Murray Memorial Labor Lecture.
And I want to thank Elaine Farndale and Mary Bellman for inviting me here tonight, and to the School of Labor and Employment Relations and the United Steelworkers of America for sponsoring this annual lecture series, and to everyone whose work makes it possible.
This lecture is special to me. I am a proud Steelworker. I got my start in local 3911 at Reynolds aluminum on the South Side of Chicago.
And nearly 25 years ago, I accepted a job at the Steelworkers International and moved to Pittsburgh. And one of my roles when I first came to Pittsburgh was in the Education and Membership Department where I conducted training sessions to fellow Steelworkers members on labor history.
I did that work for four years and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it because the labor movement has such a rich history.
Labor and the History of the U.S.
And as the folks in this labor education program know, the history of work and the history of the labor movement is our nation’s history. They’re intertwined. They can’t be separated.
Much of this country was built by forced labor, by the labor of enslaved people, by exploited labor, by immigrant labor on lands that were stolen or wheedled or given away.
The rights of women and people of color and immigrants and marginalized communities are often tied to the struggle of discrimination or exploitation in the workplace and the full participation in our democracy.
The conflicts and concessions between workers and heads of industry and tycoons…the disruption of technology and innovation and its adaptation and adoption…the effects of trade and economic policy on workers here and abroad…of working people trying to get a fair return on their work from the class of concentrated wealth and power is core to the history of this nation.
Penn State does such a great job teaching and sharing this history. It was one of the first universities to establish a labor education program. And its labor education program has worked closely with unions and providing education programs for union members in this great state ever since.
Philip Murray
And if you want to do a deep dive on the United Steelworkers and the United Mine Workers, you don’t have to go far because the historical records of both of those unions are housed right here at Penn State.
And the history of the United Mine Workers and the United Steelworkers cannot be told without telling the story of Philip Murray. He is the bridge between the two unions.
Murray was born in Scotland to Irish Catholic parents. His father was a coal miner and local union official. His mother was a weaver at a cotton mill but who died when Philip was a toddler. His father remarried and had a bunch of children and so as the oldest boy, Philip followed his father into the coal mines at the age of 10 to help support the family.
When Philip was 16, he and his father went to America in search of steadier work and higher wages in the coal mines of Southwestern Pennsylvania. And that’s what they found and after a year of working and saving money, they were able to bring their entire family to America.
The mines were nonunion and Murray quickly learned how helpless and alone he was to remedy job inequities. When he thought he was being cheated on his day’s work by management, he fought back and was fired. And as a result, he and his parents and siblings were thrown out of their home and into the street
That experience left a mark. “If a coal miner is alone,” he would later recall, “…and has no organization to defend him. He has nowhere to go. The individual cannot protect himself.”
Murray didn’t want to go it alone anymore. He joined the United Mine Workers of America and before he turned the age of 20, he was elected president of a union local. He took a correspondence course in science and math, and his good work with the Local over the next several years caught the attention of the leaders of the Mine Workers at the national level and he rose through the ranks.
Lewis and Murray and UMWA
When the fiery and combative John L. Lewis was elevated to the presidency of the Mine Workers in 1920, he appointed the 33-year-old Murray as his vice president, and he would be Lewis’s right-hand man of the largest union in North America for the next two decades.
They complemented each other. Lewis would come into a situation and stir everything up and Murray would come in after him and smooth everything out—and together they achieved what they set out to achieve—which was to build lasting power for workers.
But that proved difficult those first years when Lewis and Murray took the reins of the union. There was a lot of in-fighting and challenges to their authority by district leaders and some of those leaders went rogue. It was like a season of Game of Thrones. Mine operators broke agreements with the union and the Coolidge and Hoover administrations were unwilling to step in and solve these disputes, even though both presidents had the support of the union.
The country was in the midst of the Great Depression and the Mine Workers union was in shambles.
That changed in the summer of 1932 when Lewis and Murray backed the Democratic candidate for president, and they found a friend. FDR and the assistance of his New Deal helped put the union and the nation’s workers back on their feet. He signed a law soon after taking office that allowed employees the right to form unions and then in 1935, FDR signed the Wagner Act—also known as the National Labor Relations Act—giving workers the right to bargain collectively.
CIO and SWOC
The ground was prepped for organizing workers in industries and sectors that were either ignored or proved too challenging for the American Federation of Labor.
The leaders of industrial unions seized the opportunity and led an insurgent movement within the AFL that resulted in the formation of an organizing committee called the Committee for Industrial Organization. John L. Lewis was its first president, and one of his main aims was to organize workers in the steel industry. Lewis appointed Murray to lead that campaign through the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which was formed in Pittsburgh in June of 1936.
So we have Philip Murray leading a committee to organize steelworkers, which was within a committee led by John L. Lewis to organize industrial unions, which was within the American Federation of Labor. The leaders of the AFL saw the CIO as something of a fox in the hen house and tried to dissolve it, which only made it more attractive to workers eager to organize.
And with the CIO’s help that’s what workers were doing. They offered support to workers in the rubber industry who went on strike and would later become members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.
The United Electrical Union organized General Electric and its 600,000 workers.
Another CIO union, the United Auto Workers, won recognition at General Motors after the now famous Flint sit-down strike.
Murray led SWOC in its battles with Big Steel, and signed a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel, the nation’s largest steel producer, in March of 1937. Other steel producers followed suit though the Little Steel companies like Bethlehem and Inland Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube resisted unionization efforts for a few more years.
And in some cases their resistance turned tragic. At Republic Steel in Chicago, steel workers went on strike for a 40-hour week and a fair wage…and were beaten with billy clubs and gunned down. Ten dead. A hundred hospitalized. For standing up for the right to a better workplace and a better life.
Violence and bloodshed was a risk workers took. It was a tumultuous time. The CIO broke away from the AFL in 1938, which seemed inevitable from the very beginning, and changed its name to Congress of Industrial Organizations.
And the leaders of the CIO were starting to drift apart. They had differing opinions on how to approach organizing Little Steel, and they had differing opinions about the president of the United States. John Lewis grew more and more critical of FDR and as the election of 1940 approached, Lewis endorsed Wendell Willkie, the Republican challenger, while Murray and most of the other CIO officers remained loyal to Roosevelt.
Lewis promised to step down as the head of the CIO if FDR was reelected to a third term, which of course he was. And at the November 1940 CIO Convention, Murray was nominated to lead the CIO, which he accepted with some hesitation and became the CIO’s second president.
Now, keep in mind that Lewis was still the president of the Mine Workers, and Murray his vice president. But now Murray was leading a federation of unions which included the Mine Workers. This transition of power did not go well, and the two men became further estranged. Their battles became increasingly public.
In January 1942, Lewis tried to remove Murray from leadership of the Mine Workers. Murray resisted but he saw the writing on the wall and in 1942 when SWOC disbanded to become the United Steelworkers of America, Philip Murray became its first president and would lead the Steelworkers and the CIO through World War II and the early years of the Cold War until his death in 1952.
Murray led the transformation of industrial unions into a stable and powerful organization. His strong relationship with FDR forged an alliance between the industrial unions and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. And he was critical in mending the CIO’s relationship with the larger and older American Federation of Labor, and in many ways he was the bridge that allowed the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations to merge in 1955, three years after his death, as the AFL-CIO.
Redmond’s Story
As Philip Murray did, I too followed my father into his line of work.
He was born in the Mississippi Delta, the child of sharecroppers. My mother was too. And in 1952, my parents made their way North like so many other Black families seeking to build a better life—the Great Migration—and settled in the South Side of Chicago.
But that better life for them and their growing family took faith, hard work and a little luck. My father took every kind of job he could find. He pumped gas, was a janitor. He stocked shelves at the supermarket. He hauled scrap metal.
My mother was a domestic worker. She woke up every day at the crack of dawn and took three buses to the far suburbs to clean houses and cook food. And every night she would sit at the foot of her bed and soak her feet and read her Bible.
No complaints. No excuses.
My three brothers and I grew up poor. Social assistance programs helped us get by. Food from food stamps. Healthcare from the free clinic. My momma shopped at Goodwill.
But that changed when my dad caught a break and got a good union job at the Reynolds aluminum mill. Suddenly we had more security. More opportunity. More prosperity.
That union job lifted my family out of poverty. And my parents were able to build a solid middle-class life.
My brothers and I saw the power of holding a union card…of working under a collective bargaining agreement…of linking arms with your sisters and brothers and siblings for the greater good and a better life.
We saw how good union jobs at factories and mills—industrial jobs like the one my father had—built the Black middle class and built vibrant communities across the Midwest and Northeast.
Now, I didn’t intend to follow my father into the aluminum mill. I intended to play football for the University of Wisconsin and had a scholarship to do so, but I injured my knee pretty good in high school and it was never the same. I tried to hide it but the coaches saw I couldn’t run during the summer workouts and had to pull my scholarship and I went back to Chicago because my family didn’t have the money to pay for college.
My dad was pretty busted up about it. I had to console him on the drive back from Madison.
I ended up taking a few courses at Chicago State and found out how much I didn’t know. Reynolds had a summer work program for college kids and so I did that and at the end of the summer I knew I wanted to work there full-time and so I did and I got involved with the union—USW Local 3911—and that set me on my path.
In just two generations my family went from Mississippi sharecroppers to impoverished on the South Side of Chicago to me becoming the highest ranking African American in the history of the American labor movement.
That’s the power of a union job. That’s the difference unions can make.
Today’s Labor Movement
And I want everyone to experience the transformative power of a good, union job—the power of working under a collective bargaining agreement, which is the single-most powerful tool to make sure all workers are included. It levels the playing field. It makes sure that workplaces are diverse and accessible. That there is equity in hiring practices. In pay and advancement opportunities. And that workers gain the skills needed for the jobs of today, and the jobs of tomorrow.
My generation—and your parents and grandparents—could make it in America because of the labor movement. For the quarter century after World War II, our economy grew steadily, and everybody—the rich, the poor, the middle class—saw their livelihoods increase at about the same rate. It was a time when a third of the workforce belonged to unions—and set the standard for the entire economy—Americans reaped the rewards of working harder and smarter.
But corporate-friendly trade and economic policies and weakening labor laws have made it more difficult for workers to organize. Today only a tenth of the workforce belongs to unions. And as the density of unions decreased, income inequality increased. It’s out of control. And now unimaginable wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that as your generation faces greater economic uncertainty…that your generation is turning to the labor movement as the solution to low wages and unsafe workplaces, to discrimination and inequality.
And every day America is taking notice of how workers are taking a stand against greed for an opportunity for a better workplace and a better life.
Last year alone a half a million workers took to the streets and went on strike.
Almost a million unionized workers won double-digit wage increases…taking on major corporations for a fair share of their record profits.
Writers and actors took on Hollywood to make sure they had a say in their craft, and that AI was used responsibly.
And workers at coffee shops and cannabis shops…at museums and orchestras are finding out the difference a union makes. Even attorneys are organizing.
Doctors and pharmacists are turning to organized labor.
As are graduate student workers and postdoc researchers at campuses and all across the country. And they’re voting to unionize by overwhelming margins, even as some universities engage in bitter anti-union campaigns.
Duke University fought graduate students tooth and nail their freedom to join together in a union. And yet, despite the university’s efforts, nearly 90% of those graduate student workers voted for unionization.
Now look, all workers deserve the right to choose whether or not to unionize without interference. But I find it especially odd when progressive organizations or faith-based healthcare systems or institutions of higher learning—entities that profess academic freedom…entities that share our vision of shared prosperity—should choose to ruin their reputations by not allowing for a neutral and free and fair election process that respects the rights of workers to make this decision for themselves.
The problem is that many companies and institutions view unions as adversaries. It doesn’t have to be that way.
In fact, Philip Murray believed unions should share both profits and responsibility with industry. His vision was that through collective bargaining, “management and labor could devise improved production practices that increase social income.”
Unions can be a stabilizing force. For the individual. For the company. For the country. For the world.
And for your generation especially. Young workers need the support of the labor movement now more than ever. And we are committed to being right there, working alongside you to build a country that is fair and where you can reach your best and fullest potential.
But more than that, the labor movement needs you—as members, as activists and as leaders.
Your generation can—and must—lead the way.
To continue to push our diverse and inclusive labor movement forward.
To show the country and the world that no matter where we come from or where we’re going. No matter the color of our skin or the language we speak or our age or gender or religion or who we choose to love…the labor movement is the place where everyone is welcome…where workers can stand together and march together and fight together in pursuit of the greater good.
Through the strength of our solidarity, we can overcome the longest odds and together build a society that is just and fair, and a future that works for all of us.
That’s what the labor movement is all about. That’s our history. And that’s the legacy we carry forward.
Thank you.
