Shopping for the American Way

Reviewed by Helen Wheatley
Free Press contributor

World War I had been kind to Seattle, as the federal government poured money into the shipyards to build up the American merchant marine. The city grew quickly, and demand for labor was insatiable. Young men who had eked out a living through seasonal labor throughout the region suddenly found themselves at the center of the action as they gained permanent, full-time work in the shipyards. For the first time, Seattle's economy was anchored by a large-scale industry that employed thousands of workers in AFL unions.

Many of the men who went to work in the shipyards came from a more radical tradition than the AFL. They came from jobs in agriculture, lumber and mining where the more militant Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, had organized. They brought their radicalism into the conservative AFL, pulling Seattle's mainstream labor movement far to the left of its national representation. The shipyards became the focal point of a strong and political working class culture. Frank quotes one worker who described the atmosphere at the shipyards:

What men and what talk! Recall the long, long rows of outdoor toilets with no doors. To sit there for 20 minutes or longer was the usual procedure. (I think of it as the coffee break.) The conversation and the essays on the walls were a commentary on working class spirit. They did not hesitate to express their opinions of the ships, wages, bosses, fellow workers and government.

They argued over trade unionism versus the ideal of One Big Union of all workers; and they sometimes argued over the tactics of racial exclusion versus inclusion. Seattle's International Longshoremen's Association had admitted African-American members in 1916 as a way to avoid the threat of scabbing; but many Seattle workers in the service industries, such as the Waitresses Union, were adamant about keeping up the color barrier against blacks and Asians. Gender barriers in the union movement fell to a small degree. The barber's local admitted "lady barbers," much to the displeasure of the national leadership (which eventually forced the local to kick the women out again). Traditionally female occupations, such as candy makers, became unionized for the first time.

"The streets of Seattle seethed with working-class political culture" during the war years, says Frank. "By 1918 as many as 10,000 workers gathered every Sunday to hear public debates in which nationally known leftist speakers participated," and "hundreds of soap boxers preached on street corners and at plant gates to anyone who would listen." Workers' publications of all sorts "flooded the city," led above all by The Seattle Union Record, owned by the Central Labor Council and union locals and printed with the motto "Published for Principle and Not for Profit."

ORGANIZE SHOPS; ORGANIZE SHOPPERS
An important part of that culture was a movement toward producers' and consumers' cooperatives. With their newfound strength and money, the unionists dared to imagine the creation of a broader working class movement which would gain control over its own economic life through co-ops. As in other parts of the country, many in Seattle sought an alliance of farmers and labor that would cut out the capitalist middleman. This was realized to some degree through the creation of the Cooperative Food Products Association (CFPA), which developed several grocery branches and stalls, a slaughterhouse, a bakery, and a distribution system for dairy products. Its organizers dreamed of purchasing a steam trawler and setting up a cooperative salmon cannery. The Seattle Consumers' Cooperative Association also set up several grocery branches throughout the city and embraced a number of producers' cooperatives, such as a cooperative coal and fuel yard and a tailors' cooperative. In addition to these two large umbrella co-ops, there were numerous smaller co-ops, from groceries and bakeries to restauraunts to auto mechanics or printers.

For a short time, the co-ops did well. Good economic times meant that unions had plenty of money to invest in them, and inflation encouraged working-class families to embrace the idea of cutting out the retailer. Unionists saw the tactical importance of co-ops during the General Strike of 1919, when union families cut off from credit by retail grocers turned to the CFPA, their "strike relief store." When workers who had supported the strike found themselves locked out, some were able to find alternative employment in the cooperative producers' associations. Barbers started their own producers' cooperatives in this way, as did some locked out cleaners and dyers, who established a very successful laundry cooperative in Queen Anne. Organizers in the service trades found that the threat of cooperatives could force employers to open up to unionization.

Why didn't the movement last? Frank finds plenty of structural weaknesses. The cooperative movement, as well as the union movement, was male-directed and "replicated the sexual division in the overall Seattle labor force," with women restricted to low-paying, subordinate positions. Aside from creating a Women's Exchange within the CFPA, women played no role in cooperative policy, despite their importance as consumers. In addition to this blindness to women's concerns, the unionists also tended to define their movement as a white one, excluding non-whites from membership and then attacking businesses that employed African- or Asian-Americans as "unfair to labor." Large sectors of the working class therefore had little incentive to participate in the building of this labor-led movement.

Only a few cooperatives embraced the idea that they should not show profits like capitalist businesses, and Frank finds the pursuit of profit to be a dangerous crack in the edifice of the movement. Cooperativism quickly gave way to "labor capitalism." She provides an example of this with the Deep Sea Salvage Company, a dubious enterprise that promised to recover ships at the bottom of the Alaska Channel that were supposedly laden with gold rush treasure. "A cooperative corporation created out of the brain of a workingman, financed by workingmen for workingmen and their families. It's going to create a new crop of millionaires. You can be one of them," announced the advertisements in the Union Record. In fact, she argues, many of the leaders of the cooperative movement, including people involved in the Union Record, had interests in "workers" enterprises that were really for profit. These included savings and loans and even an investment brokerage. When the businesses failed they often took with them the savings of trusting and idealistic workers. As the true nature of these "labor capitalist" businesses came to light, many people became disillusioned. An untrustworthy leadership had irreparably degraded the meaning of cooperativism.

Frank also points out that even the most earnest cooperatives were prone to making bad business decisions. And they tended to be in just the kinds of businesses with low start-up costs that were subject to high failure rates and strong competition. The timing of the movement-on the cusp of the 1920s era of mass consumerism-didn't help either.

DEFENSIVE BOYCOTTS
On the production side, the union movement after 1919 was hit hard by an anti-labor counterattack. The success of the unionization drive during the war and of the General Strike in 1919 prompted Seattle employers to form the Associated Industries, which went to work on an aggressive open shop drive. Under "the American Plan" promoted by a national business campaign, employers would work to contain inflation and maintain the higher wages gained during the war, but they would resist the closed shop. AFL locals and the Central Labor Council found themselves on the defensive, while the end of federal funding to the shipping industry undermined the strongest element within the Seattle labor movement. Seattle also felt the effects of the national anti-Red campaign. The Seattle district attorney used the Centralia Massacre as an excuse to raid the offices of the Union Record and throw its editor, treasurer and the president of the board of directors into jail for violating the Espionage Act. The massacre (in which American Legionnaires attacked an IWW meeting, leading to the shooting of four legionnaires and the lynching of Wobbly Wesley Everest) brought the tension between conservative and radical unionists to a head, as many AFL locals purged IWW supporters from their ranks. Finally, the AFL turned on its own Northwestern locals when they toyed with the idea of rejecting trade unionism and embracing an industrial-union model.

As the labor movement lost its radical members and its ability to carry out strikes and other actions at "the point of production," as the Wobblies would have it, the struggle shifted to new grounds. The idea of a working class union of producer and consumer persisted, but was watered down to the less risky and demanding use of the boycott. Unionists had used the boycott successfully against small, consumer-oriented businesses in Seattle such as "scab" restaurants. The Union Record, angered by the DA's attack and the withdrawal of advertising from department stores that spearheaded the open shop drive, called for a boycott on Christmas shopping at department stores. (Frank Waterhouse of the Bon Marche was president of the anti-union Associated Industries.) This planted the idea for the biggest campaign Seattle had ever seen up to that time: a union boycott of the Bon Marche in 1920.

When the strength of the shipyards faded, the more conservative building trades once again moved to the center of the Seattle labor movement. The Building Trades Council, which proclaimed that "labor made the Bon Marche what it is today" by building and patronizing it, was angered to learn that non-union labor was employed to construct its McDermott building downtown. The Council called for the boycott, with the backing of the Central Labor Council and many AFL locals. Supporters hoped that the boycott might bring back the spirit of solidarity that had buoyed Seattle a year before, proclaiming that it would help to unionize exploited female clerks and would challenge what they claimed were profiteering tactics by the department store. (Frank observes that the more immediate effect for female clerks would be layoffs.) But the divisions within the movement made this impossible. Those in the Building Trades did not heed the complaints of politically weaker locals, such as the candy makers, who pointed out that a boycott would undermine their own hard-won unionization within the Bon.

Even worse, the unions found that many consumers did not observe boycotts. Frank argues that the trade union conservatism of the AFL undermined its own efforts to win solidarity from others in the working class-including the wives of union members. For one thing, she argues, displacing the struggle from the shop floor to the department store placed the burden squarely on the shoulders of women. The unions had helped to create this situation thanks to their own pressure against wage-earning women in favor of the "family wage" ideal. Men earned the money, but women had to spend it wisely, and the boycott cut into their ability to accomplish their own work. Frank argues that the shift to consumer tactics constituted a kind of "speedup" for union wives. Although they imagined only a subservient role for women in which they sacrificed their own comfort as worker-consumers, unionists were surprised when women lost interest in supporting their movement. Meanwhile, women activists and wage earners whom the union movement also expected to jump to their service were instead engaged in their own lonely political struggle for a minimum wage and protective legislation for women.

Another problem with the boycott was that the structure of trade unionism undermined solidarity. This was first revealed by the clash between the building trades workers and unionized Bon workers; and it ultimately unravelled the boycott when those same building trades workers lost interest with the completion of the McDermott building. The building trades had asked the Central labor Council to drop other boycotts and concentrate on the Bon Marche, yet now that the building was finished they had nothing to gain. Frank quotes William Kennedy of the janitors' union:

They start a thing with great enthusiasm, and they forget all about it. When the Bon Marche was first placed on the unfair list, there was great enthusiasm. They weren't going to leave a stone unturned in making the boycott a success. But since then we don't seem to get any action. The janitors and the watchmen are the only ones who are keeping the fight up.

Frank points out the the building trades had by this time worked out their own agreement with the Associated Industries. "In February and March, they had needed solidarity. Now they did not. The janitors could push the Bon Marche all they wanted, but the building trades did not have to care. In this instance internal power dynamics demarcated the skilled and the unskilled, the building trades versus the janitors, clerks, and waitresses, with women in the unskilled camp." The janitors were truly left to twist slowly in the wind, as the Central Labor Council would not lose face by calling off the boycott without a victory.

A SEPARATE PEACE
The behavior of the building trades foreshadowed the fate of the entire union movement in the 1920s, as a depression early in the decade sent other trade unions scrambling to make their separate peace with employers. It is here that Frank locates the genesis of union labelism as a weak and corrupted vestige of the once-promising alliance of working class workers and consumers. She links the emergence of this form of pressure to the rise of union leaders such as Seattle laundry truck driver Dave Beck, who ultimately became the head the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 1950s. According to Frank, Beck was an innovator in the new style of AFL leadership, based on the idea of partnership between workers and bosses. Employers who honored the union contract were promised employees who would do the same, and the union would serve to keep the workers from striking or otherwise violating the agreements worked out by business and the union leadership. Employers also gained the comfort of protection by unions, who cracked down on new or scab businesses that might threaten the employer-union relationship. "The key," she argues, "was stability."

Union labelism became a part of this system. If workers (and their wives) respected the union label, then union employers were guaranteed a large market while employees were guaranteed the survival of their employer. This was a far cry from the cooperative movement that had seen producers' and consumers' cooperatives as a source of autonomy from capitalism rather than a capitulation to it. Labelism encouraged complacency. Referring to the fate of the Cigar Makers International Union, she observes, "They only rarely organized the unorganized; instead, they asked other unions to look for the label." And, Frank argues, labelism only reinforced the racist and sexist exclusionism that had long marred the labor movement. The label was said to promote the "American standard of living," in overt contrast to "low Asiatic living standards." "White laundries" were proclaimed "fair to labor." "All Jap Groceries" were proclaimed scab. Black musicians, pressured by these tactics into joining the musicians' union, found themselves segregated into a separate local controlled and disciplined by members of the white local. (White women musicians in that local also found themselves discriminated against, until they organized themselves in self-protection.)

Workers and their wives found themselves isolated from decision making and called upon only to "do their duty" and honor the union label. If they didn't, they faced sanctions by their own unions. Little wonder, argues Frank, that the labor movement in Seattle was beset by a "contagion of indifference" in the 1920s.

"The union label...was eminently successful from the leadership's point of view. It had two faces: one a smile to the employers, the other a scowl to the rank and file. As long as the local-market industries that their locals represented prospered economically, the city's employers could smile back...Similarly, the rank and file ignored the scowl, paid their dues money, and took their paychecks home. They didn't, though, spend them on union-label hats."

Ultimately, many Seattle merchants decided that they could win working-class patronage without the union label. Ernst Hardware was one of these. Queried by the Union Record in 1922, Ernst answered sarcastically, "We should worry about your paper, which we don't like; your people come in here and spend their money anyhow."

Frank explains that her interest in Seattle's story comes out of her own generational experience. "By the time I took up labor history in 1980 the labor movement itself had entered a period of dramatic decline, as employers' demands for concessions and a hostile government combined to devastate many US trade unions. For many in my intellectual generation, while we continue to take inspiration from stories of past victories, our questions also concern defeat." Less than inspired by the picture of "Lee Iaccoca and Owen Beiber [standing] side by side looking like twins on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, symbolizing the Auto Workers' New partnership with Management," or by "buy American" campaigns that scarcely veil their anti-Asianism, Frank suggests that it is time for a new vision of working class solidarity.

"Those of us who support a democratic, militant labor movement as a step on the road to economic democracy still face the AFL's legacy of conservative business unionism,"" she argues. "Working people's purchasing power is real, and institution building an essential part of any movement for fundamental social change." But before that power can be unleashed, it is time to address the racism, sexism, and narrow definitions of working class concerns that have broken solidarity in the past and pushed the traditional labor movement into a narrow alliance with employers, sanctified by the empty protectionist ritual of union label shopping.

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