In our final installment of the Melville House Live Book project before the holiday break — the series will resume on January 5 — Kari Lydersen talks to a labor historian to help contextualize the takeover of Republic Windows & Doors ….

Chicago, December 22, 2008 — James Wolfinger is a professor of history and labor education at DePaul University in Chicago, and the author of Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love.
He took the time to answer some questions regarding the historical and future context of the Republic Windows & Doors occupation.

Q: How do you see this occupation fitting into labor and organizing history? Do you think it’s true this tactic has not been used much in decades, as has been widely reported, and if so why do you think that’s the case?

A: In some ways events at Republic do call to mind the sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s. Those job actions, like this one, were largely at industrial plants in the urban North and often relied on immigrant, or second generation, workers with some backing from organized labor. They weren’t exactly the same though: the earlier sit-downs were concerned with organizing and union recognition, whereas this one is more focused on severance pay at a plant that has closed. Still, the issue of workers’ rights and the use of direct action, the occupation of the shop floor, highlights the similarities between the two eras. Another profitable analogy can be drawn to the sit-ins of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In that case, African Americans took direct, non-violent action to force businesses and the government to respect their legal rights. As with those black protesters, workers at Republic were demanding that a business and the government respect rights that were already legally theirs.

Probably the most common strike tactic in the U.S. is the picket line, an attempt to call attention to workers’ grievances and their employer’s practices. Sit-downs are uncommon, especially because the Supreme Court ruled them illegal in 1939. A larger contextual issue has to do with the nature of union activism, particularly since the 1930s. There are always exceptions to a broad story, but labor scholars have for the most part found unions since World War II to be increasingly bureaucratized, removed from their rank and file members, and reluctant to engage in militant activities. Part of this has to do with unions’ no strike pledge during the war, part with unions becoming constituents (some say a “special interest”) in the Democratic party, part with the purge of left-wing unions during the Cold War. So sit-downs are rare in part because of legal issues, but also because of the reluctance of unions to engage in the tactic. If, however, you think of sit-ins beyond the labor context, you will find them to be quite common: at diners and other places of public accommodation during the civil rights movement, at women’s clinics to protest abortion, and so on.

Q: Do you expect to see more actions of this type in the future, as more factories are likely to close and it gets harder and harder for laid off workers to find new jobs?

A: Perhaps. Historians are good at knowing about and making sense of the past. We’re no better than the rest of the public at divining the future. That said, we may see more of these actions in the future, and the activism itself is an important barometer of the vitality of the labor movement. But it’s an open question as to how effective these actions might be. Political support and media exposure are vital to the success of such job actions, as is the climate of public opinion in the communities where plants are located. Here in Chicago, the workers at Republic benefited from a favorable environment on all these fronts. If a sit-in took place in the deep South where unions are generally treated as anathema, as dangerous interlopers, then the outcome would have probably been far different. More, this sit-in was a defensive action, one that tried to secure severance and vacation pay for workers at a company that had closed. There has been some talk of continuing operations at the plant as a worker-owned enterprise, but I haven’t seen much on how this might happen. As long as American public policy and globalization encourage deindustrialization in the U.S., I’m not sure how effective sit-ins will be in solidifying good-paying working-class jobs.

Q: Do you think union organizers or labor history educators will be key to nurturing and facilitating a movement of sit-ins or other direct action strategies in defense of jobs and/or unpaid wages and other workers’ rights issues?

A: I think they can help. Labor scholars through such organizations as the Labor and Working Class History Association and the United Association for Labor Education routinely hold conferences that deal not just with academic issues but also with contemporary questions surrounding organizing, public policy, and politics. And organizers for such unions as the SEIU have been getting increasingly involved in campaigns that bring new populations into organized labor while paying attention to issues of race, gender, and immigration status. A new administration in Washington may also help with labor activism if it liberalizes the NLRB and makes it easier for workers to organize by passing the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act). But while all this help matters, all three groups are supporters of a working-class activism that has to come from the grassroots, from the workers themselves. The nationwide rallying cry of “Si se puede!” –picked up and Anglicized by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the recent campaign–speaks not only to the Hispanic influence in America’s working class, but also to the notion that it’s the people who can bring about social change.

Q: You’ve written a book on race and politics in Philadelphia. To what extent do you think race might have played a role in the Republic Windows story? Do you think the fact that the vast majority of workers were Latino immigrants or African American had any bearing on the situation, and do you think race has much to do with contemporary labor struggles in general?

A: From the reporting on Republic that I’ve read, I don’t see race/ethnicity as a key part of this story. That’s not to dismiss how those issues shape the kinds of work people often do in our society; it’s just that it’s not apparent the company behaved the way it did because of the makeup of its workforce. In the larger context, though, labor scholars have routinely documented the way race, ethnicity, and gender continue to shape the labor market. Books such as Ruth Milkman’s L.A. Story and Roger Waldinger and Michael Lichter’s How the Other Half Works are two recent works that make clear that the U.S. still has a segmented labor market where certain people are “appropriate” for certain kinds of jobs. It should be noted that Milkman’s work also makes it clear that contrary to popular perception Latino workers are open to union organizing campaigns. Their immigration status, education level, facility with the English language, and other issues do not make it less likely for them to join unions. In fact, Milkman found that Hispanics’ community ties and outsider status often made them good candidates for joining a union. So in some respects it’s quite possible that the Hispanic background of many Republic workers made their show of solidarity more likely.

Q: Any recommended reading for people interested in this issue?

A: I’d recommend a couple books when you think about sit-downs as well as Latinos in the current labor market. Sidney Fine’s Sit-Down is the primary scholarly treatment of this kind of job action. Leon Fink’s much more recent Maya of Morganton uses oral histories, journalism, and archival research to analyze labor organizing in a poultry plant in North Carolina. And you might also take a look at my article “The Strange Career of Frank Murphy: Conservatives, State Level Politics, and the End of the New Deal,” The Historian 65 (Dec. 2002), which examines the Flint sit-down strikes and how conservatives used liberal support of those work stoppages to tar progressive politicians as “Communist” and drive them from office in the 1930s.

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