1960-1980 - Labor in the Age of Non-Conformity
By the 1960s, the average working American white ethnic male was the ordinary employee in factory and in office. Twenty million strong, he formed the bulk of the nation's working force. He made five to ten thousand dollars a year; had a wife and two children; owned a house in town — between the ghetto and the suburbs, or perhaps in a low-cost subdivision on the urban fringe; and he owed plenty in installment debts on his car and appliances.
The average white working man had no capital, no stocks, no real estate holdings except for his home to leave his children. Despite the gains hammered out by his union, his job security was far from complete. Layoffs, reductions, automation, and plant relocation remained the invisible witches at every christening. He founds his tax burden is heavy; his neighborhood services, poor; his national image, tarnished; and his political clout, diminishing.
Thus his tension in the face of the aspiring black minority. He noted his place on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. He saw the movement of black families as a threat to his home values. He reads about rising crime rates in city streets and felt this was a direct challenge to his family. He thought the busing of his children to unfamiliar and perhaps inferior schools would blight their chance for a sound education. He saw only one destination for the minority movement — his job.
The worker-student collaboration that surfaced in France in the spring of 1968 seemed remote from the American scene. Labor officials such as George Meany and Jay Lovestone have taken more "hawkish" positions than the Johnson administration, and the AFL-CIO was known to be working closely with government agencies in such projects as the surreptitious combating of leftism in affiliated Latin American unions.
With notable exceptions, rank-and-file American workingmen have not supported the peace movement, either because they felt that the war was necessary and justified or because they disliked the style of the most colorful protesters, or because they were outside the institutions where an anti-war consensus was allowed and encouraged, or because they had friends or relations in the service whom they felt they had to "support" by supporting the war, or simply because they had in a fundamental way become the most conservative of political actors — they tended to follow the lead of government, especially if the government was supported by the unions.
Workingmen, like businessmen, were made uneasy by such side effects of the war as inflation and high taxes, but they were largely indifferent to arguments couched in terms of disillusionment with the Cold War or violations in international law. To the degree that the peace movement emphasized disarmament, sympathy with foreign guerrillas, and self-consciously anti-bourgeois styles of protest, it actually drove the labor movement away. The confusion of many workers was revealed by the finding that some of them who had supported Robert Kennedy in the 1968 primary elections intended to vote for George Wallace in November 1968.
Albert Shanker (1928-1997) is known mainly for his successful struggle to obtain collective bargaining for teachers. As a labor leader, he had few rivals in a career that spanned forty years. A “quicksilver intellect” with an “ironwill in battle,” Shanker built large and powerful city, state, and national unions of teachers and other public employees. During his period of active leadership, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) grew from a membership of 65,000 in 1960 to nearly one million teachers, school employees, professors, public employees, and other professionals in 1997, making it one of the largest affiliates of the AFL-CIO.
Shanker believed that the union movement had to be involved in U.S. foreign policy debates since union members had such a key stake in their outcome. He frequently used his “Where We Stand” column and the union’s publications to educate members and others on human rights issues, to give support to dissidents and democratic forces struggling against dictatorship, and to advocate on foreign and defense policy issues. On foreign policy, he developed a reputation as a hard-liner, or hawk, similar to that of the AFL-CIO. His views were part of what Rick Kahlenberg called Shanker’s “tough liberalism.”
Former AFT vice president Herb Magidson describes Shanker’s views as “muscular liberal internationalism,” meaning the advocacy of a strong defense against freedom’s enemies and the use of American power to foster freedom and democratic change. Shanker advocated these views in both political parties, but mostly the Democratic Party, which shared his prolabor and liberal principles and where he had more influence.
Shanker led several more significant union actions, including a bruising series of strikes in 1967 and 1968. In 1967, a 14-day strike was called over school improvement and professional policy issues, including an intervention and support plan for high-poverty schools, smaller class sizes, and the ability of teachers to remove disruptive students from classes. In 1968, the union carried out three racially polarizing strikes, lasting a total of 36 days, to protect the due process rights of teachers who had been fired solely due to their race by a new black-led, decentralized local school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville.
These strikes had a significant cost. In both cases, Shanker was imprisoned for 15 days for violating New York State law barring public employees from striking. Judges imposed a heavy fine on the union and rescinded automatic dues collection (forcing memberby-member collection). Worse for Shanker — although he enjoyed the continued support of major civil rights leaders, including Randolph and Rustin — his relationship with a significant segment of the African-American community was severely damaged, something he worked for years to repair. These events gained Shanker an international reputation and a degree of notoriety. Some considered him a dangerous militant, immortalized in Woody Allen’s movie “Sleeper” as the man who had caused a fictional apocalypse by getting hold of a nuclear bomb.
In 1971, Shanker negotiated the first merger agreement between AFT and NEA state organizations. The new organization, called NYSUT (New York State United Teachers), elected Shanker as co-president. The national NEA still did not consider itself a union. But the AFT’s success had pressured some state organizations to change. Shanker hoped the New York merger would start a waterfall, leading to overall merger.
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