Labor History News

Labor History Association Annual Meeting May 19th
By Joan Cavanagh, Archivist/ Director

Calling all members and friends of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association! This year's annual conference and meeting will occur on Sunday, May 19th from 1:30-4:30pm at the Council/ Teachers Building, 267 Chapel Street in New Haven. The Augusta Lewis Troup Pass It On Awards will be presented to the HealthBridge District 1199/ SEIU strikers and to former State Senator Ed Gomes. A panel discussion about health care workers in the new economy will feature labor history professors Troy Rondinone and Virginia Metaxas and long time labor movement activist Steve Thornton. The event will include music by LHA's own troubadour Frank Panzarella, with refreshments and time for socializing.

District 1199/ SEIU workers successfully challenged the HealthBridge nursing homes' CEO Daniel Straus, who stripped 700 workers of their pension and health insurance, and slashed other benefits. The CNAs, housekeepers, dietary and maintenance employees went on strike in July 2012 rather than accept the illegal cuts. They returned to work in March of 2013 after an administrative judge ordered HealthBridge to take them back with all benefits intact.

Troup Honoree Gomes was an employee and union activist at Bridgeport's Carpenter Steel, an International Representative of District 1 for the United Steelworkers of America, a City Council member in Bridgeport, and a state senator who served on the Labor and Public Employees Committee and as co-chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Collective Bargaining.

Professor Rondinone, LHA Board member and Recording Secretary and Southern Connecticut State University's resident labor historian, will moderate the panel discussion. Mr. Thornton, a Hartford resident who has been active in the labor movement for 35 years, will discuss the community/ labor coalition that successfully fought the privatization of Waterbury Hospital. Professor Metaxas, the author of Occupational Therapy: the First 30 Years and Poor Mothers and Babies: a Social History of Childbirth and Child Care Hospitals in Nineteenth-Century New York City, as well as numerous journal articles on various subjects, will provide historical background on health care workers.

The event is free to current members, with a suggested donation of $10 or whatever you can afford or wish to donate to all others.

Did you or a family member or friend ever work at the old Winchester Repeating Arms plant? LHA is producing an exhibit, "Our Community at Winchester: an Elm City Story," for a pre-opening in June at the Winpisinger Center for Education and Technology in Hollywood, Maryland to be followed by a gala opening event in October at Gateway Community College in New Haven. To help tell the story, we're seeking artifacts of all sorts - tools, products, photographs, and other memorabilia. We particularly want to illustrate the other products that Winchester made: "Yes, they made guns, but did you know what else they made?" We also want to illustrate workers' experiences on the job, as well as community connections. Please contact joan@laborhistory.org or call (203) 777 2756 ext. 2 and leave a message.

The documentary is largely an oral history of those who lived the story in Honea Path, but it puts the events in their larger context as part of a little-known strike of Southern Textile Workers in the middle of the Great Depression. In his remarks, Southern Connecticut State University professor of history Troy Rondinone pointed out that expected support from the Roosevelt administration for the strikers wasn’t forthcoming, and that the President’s agenda was considerably less pro-labor than commonly believed, then or now.  Anthony Riccio, author of several books, including the well-known Italian American Experience in New Haven, compared the event to the much more successful Northern garment workers strikes in 1933, which began in

New Haven. In both cases, he said, the strikes were led by strong, determined women.

Time did not permit the showing of a 15 minute short, filmed in 1995, where the survivors of the strike teamed up with Frank Beacham, the Mayor’s grandson, who learned of his grandfather’s treachery only by watching the documentary, to erect a monument in the town to those who were killed. It is a moving coda to the story, and is also on the “Uprising” DVD, which is owned by the library and can be checked out by patrons for home viewing. We strongly recommend that you do so!

 

By Steve Kass                                                                                         

Greater New Haven Labor History Association Executive Board Member

“The history of the American labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land….America is a living testimonial to what free men and women organized into free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life….we ought to be proud of it.”                                                          

Hubert H. Humphrey, Former Vice President

According to a poll by the independent Hart research, 54 percent of adults said they know just a little or don’t know much about unions. They said their chief sources of knowledge were personal experience (37 percent), people in unions (26 percent) and the media (25 percent). Significantly, learning in school was not even mentioned.

The implications of the research are clear. To a very large degree, Americans are uninformed or misinformed about union, the labor movement and the role that workers have played, and do play, in our nation’s economic, political and cultural life.

For these reasons the Greater New Haven Labor History Association (GNHLHA) is proposing legislation requiring the teaching of labor history in Connecticut public schools. The legislation specifically calls for “the teaching of organized labor, the collective bargaining process, and existing legal protections in the workplace in Connecticut public school classrooms.” The purpose of the legislation is to get labor’s untold story told.

This legislative proposal follows the lead of the Wisconsin labor history association that organized the first in the nation passing of historic legislation in 2009. Similar legislation is being presented in other states across the country.

Unfortunately, apathy and indifference are at the center of young people’s lack of understanding the role of unions and labor history. Students have simply been taught little or no labor history. Because of this fact, generations of workers don’t have a basic understanding about the historical role that unions played in helping to create the middle class. They don’t know that it was unions that helped give American society the weekend, minimum wages, health care benefits, social security, Medicare, 40-hour work week and unemployment insurance.

Most people don’t remember or know how important the labor movement was in pushing Depression-era politicians to pass legislation that systematizes the basic features of American work wage earners now take for granted.

In the face of such depressing news, the GNHLHA hopes to turn around young people’s knowledge of unions and labor history in Connecticut. Academic standards and curriculum resources such as textbooks have historically ignored or been deficient in their treatment of workers and the labor movement. Significantly, many teachers want to cover this history in their classrooms, but there are few written curriculum standards by local and state educational institutions to encourage the teaching of this material. An excellent website for labor curriculum is labor-studies.org/(American Labor Studies Center).

 “Our sons and daughters deserve to know that the fruits of our labor were not handed down to us by those in power but rather won by the efforts of extraordinary people who sacrificed to produce a better life for all of us.”

Ken Germanson, president of the Wisconsin Labor History Society

Next Steps:

After a successful introduction of the Teaching Labor History in the Connecticut Public Schools into the 2012 state legislative process, the GNHLHA is preparing to present the same bill again in next year’s longer session. Last year, testimony was present by ten unions statewide with support from the Connecticut AFL-CIO in a public hearing with the legislature’s education committee.

The emphasis next year will be on generating publicity for the legislation, organizing legislative support, introducing a pilot project for teaching labor history in the public schools, and training teachers in using curriculum resources.

If you are interested in serving on the GNHLHA legislative task force, contact SteveKass@sbcglobal.net.

GNHLHA recently learned that a grant proposal submitted in 2011 to finish production of the exhibit, “Our Community at Winchester: An Elm City Story” has borne fruit. We have just received a generous donation from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers that provides the funds needed to complete the exhibit, and we look forward to an early spring opening at a venue as yet to be determined. (We have one in mind, not yet confirmed.) Stay tuned for more details and more information.

It’s not too late to get your Winchester story recorded, or to contribute your artifacts, photographs or other types of memorabilia to the exhibit. If you have materials that you’d like to submit, or a story that you would like to share, please contact joan@laborhistory.org or call (203) 777-2756 ext.2.

Historical Notes

“THE MOLLIES”

By Troy Rondinone

Of the many legends of American Labor History, few strike a more defiant pose than the mysterious Molly Maguires.  Haunting the sleep of many a Gilded Age mining capitalist, the Mollies brought terror to the coal fields, beating and even assassinating scabs, destroying company property, and causing general mayhem. Acquiring their name from an Irish rebel woman who “blackened her face and under her petticoat carried a pistol strapped to each of her stout thighs,” the Molly Maguires were made up of Irish American miners who imported anti-British vigilantism to America.

Then again, there may never have been any such group.

Historians cannot be sure whether a coherent, secret group of outlaws calling itself the Molly Maguires was ever real, or whether it was a product of the fevered imagination of coal mine operators bent on breaking unionism in the coal fields.

What is clear is that in the 1870s, violence was rife in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal country, as miners and owners battled over working conditions in a very dangerous period of labor history. Thousands of workers perished in these years from cave-ins, gas explosions, black lung disease, and assorted other calamities. One miners’ union, the Workers Benevolent Association (WBA), fought to reduce the back-breaking labor required of miners and increase their benefits and overall safety.  The WBA successfully established a miners’ hospital in Schuylkill, PA, provided benefits to widows, and even helped get safety legislation passed. 

Coal baron Frank Gowen was determined to crush the WBA. In 1873 he placed a mole in the miners’ union, and eventually the mole, a man named James McParlan, testified that the Mollies had indeed infiltrated the union and were responsible for numerous murders. Despite the fact that no real evidence connected any of the accused miners to any crimes, twenty men went to their deaths at the gallows. The Philadelphia Inquirer praised the executions as the death of “the most relentless combination of assassins that had been known in American history.”  

Today there is a plaque in the old Schuylkill County prison yard commemorating the largest mass execution of the Mollies (which took place on June 21, 1877). The plaque ends by describing how historians now believe that “the trials and executions were part of a repression directed against a fledgling mineworker’s union of that historic period.”  The plaque only took a little over a century to go up.

                                    

 

SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, December 15th, 2012: New Haven Public Library
Community Room, 1:30-4:30pm,
“THE UPRISING OF ‘34”-- Film showing and discussion led by Anthony Riccio and Troy
Rondinone

This remarkable documentary by the late George Stoney and his former student, Judith Helfand,
depicts the events of the Southern Textile Strike of 1934. It includes a powerful section about
a horrific event at Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina, where the mayor who was
also superintendent of the mill organized gunmen to fire their weapons at the striking workers,
killing seven men. According to Frank Beacham, the grandson of the mayor/ mill owner, “when
I was growing up in Honea Path during the 1960s, the subject of the mill violence was taboo…I
learned the truth about Honea Path’s history in 1994 from a rough-cut of Stoney’s film.”

Join us for a powerful film and a discussion of its implications today!

The Labor History Association joined the greater New Haven community in welcoming Gateway Community College to its beautiful new downtown location on August 29, 2012. GNHLHA had an information table at the opening ceremony and set up three panels of our upcoming exhibit, "Our Community at Winchester: an Elm City Story" in the Gateway art gallery. We look forward to an ongoing partnership between GNHLHA and GCC.