Two great leaders born on this date and laid to rest in Springfield

Happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln and John L. Lewis! Both historic leaders were born February 12 and both currently reside in Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois.

Everyone knows about Lincoln, of course, but it's odd that Springfield often overlooks the local connection to the most important labor leader in American history. Lewis idolized Lincoln and lived in Springfield while he lobbied the legislature on labor issues.

The AFL-CIO website describes how Lewis helped form many of the nation's largest unions.

President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1920 until 1960 and founding president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), John Llewellyn Lewis was the dominant voice shaping the labor movement in the 1930s. The CIO owed its existence in large measure to Lewis, who was a tireless and effective advocate of industrial unionism and of government assistance in organizing basic industry.

Saul Alinsky's biography of Lewis is a classic of movement organizing literature.


This must be why everyone will be out partying today with beads and such, right?

Is Romney's anti-unionism rooted in his religion?

It's difficult to talk about Mitt Romney's religion. He belongs to one of the most misunderstood and historically persecuted religions in America. Mormons have been subjected to years of misleading hate campaigns, sometimes conducted by the same evangelical Protestant leaders who are now supporting Romney for President. Most of the criticisms I've seen are based on misconceptions.

It's probably best to leave the subject alone. But, then Romney had to say something silly like implying that Obama would take "God" off money and out of the pledge. That sounds like an open invitation from Romney to discuss his religious beliefs, and having been raised Mormon, I have some insights I could share.

Romney attacked Chicago teachers today claiming that, "teachers unions have too often made plain that their interests conflict with those of our children." I'm sure teachers will have plenty to say about that, so I'll focus on the topic of Mormonism and the labor movement.

The fact that Romney is a millionaire venture capitalist who enjoys laying off workers and shipping jobs overseas is probably reason enough for him to be anti-union. However, he may also be influenced by the long-standing hostility his church has toward the labor movement.

This essay from the Utah History Encyclopedia recounts the Mormon church's opposition to unions going back to the late 19th century, and later support of right-to-work laws. The concept of "free agency" is interpreted by Mormon leaders to mean that a person should be free to work at any job without being forced to join a union. In the 1940's an Apostle of the church represented the leadership's position by calling closed union shops "Satan's club and therefore destructive of human rights."

When Congress considered a bill to overturn state right-to-work laws in 1965, Church President David O. McKay sent a letter to all Mormon members of Congress. He publicly stated that "state right-to-work laws should be maintained inviolate."

Curiously, most Mormons don't interpret "free agency" in the same way on the issue of reproductive choice for women.

Modern Mormon leaders say less about politics publicly than did their counterparts in history, but as a former leading lay clergyman, Romney must be familiar with the church's attitude toward unions. The official stance of the church is reinforced by the Mormon culture of the Mountain West that's strongly anti-union. Whether based on his predatory business dealings or religious background, it's clear what sort of approach a Romney Presidency would take toward working people.

I noticed that Mitt Romney made his claim about taking God off money while campaigning with Pat Robertson. Robertson's 700 Club and Christian Broadcasting Network have long distributed misleading hate literature offensive to Mormons that call the religion a non-Christian cult. Romney spoke earlier this year at Liberty University where a course on Western religion describes Mormonism as a cult, along with Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists.

I've seen no mention of Romney correcting Pat Robertson or Liberty University about their anti-Mormon campaigns. I find it difficult to understand how a man can have so little self-respect that he fails to defend his own faith while embracing religious bigots. I guess that's part of running for President.

A Labor Day message from Disney: the Nazis are winning.

Sometimes it's interesting to watch the old World War II propaganda films. Labor Day makes me think of how Nazi Germany was portrayed in a 1943 Disney Donald Duck cartoon.





It's starts with their offensive song about racial superiority and uber-patriotism. The interesting part is how Disney portrays living in Hitler's Germany.

Of course, there's unquestioning obedience to the leader, which is common in any authoritarian government. Then Donald Duck gets up at dawn, works like a dog all day with tiny breaks, no vacation days, and he gets home just in time to fall asleep exhausted. The announcer informs Nazi workers that it's their privilege to work 48 hours a day for the Fuhrer until they die. He's made to work overtime while production is sped up even more. It's a living hell of non-stop work that only goes faster and faster until Donald finally goes mad.

I guess in 1943 that was something that clearly separated America from Nazi Germany. I'm not so sure they could make that cartoon today.

Rapidly since the 1980's, the productivity of the American worker has gone up while real wages go down. Business economists celebrate that, but it means people are working a lot harder for less pay. Benefits keep getting cut too. Germans today get a standard six weeks paid vacation every year. Americans are lucky to get any paid vacation days at all.

Unions that won many battles to shorten the work day, get paid vacation, sick time, healthcare, reasonable breaks and reasonable workloads have been beaten back to a small slice of the private sector workforce. Those benefits are being taken away.

Benefits used to be better in the public sector but those are under attack too. Koch-brothers front groups like the Illinois Policy Institute are going after public employee pensions and other benefits.

The same political forces are attacking unions, public employees, Medicare, Social Security, and any government regulation that might benefit workers in any way. It took 60 years, but Disney's version of Nazi Germany is making a comeback in America.
Happy Labor Day!

Springfield 2-26 American Dream rally news and pictures.

I'm posting the news articles, blogs and links to photos I've found so far from Saturday's rally at the Illinois Capitol building. Please let me know if you've seen any I missed.

A Quad City Times article mentioned at least 50 car pooling from Bloomington and estimates the crowd at 500-700. Some people thought it was over 1,000.

The St. Louis Beacon headline downplays the crowd size but includes a good set of pictures.

WICS TV news has a good video online with clips from several attendees.

The articles I've seen cover it as a union rally without mentioning other groups represented such as NAACP and Sierra Club. There's no coverage from Springfield's State Journal-Register so far, although they always seem to have reporters available for Tea Party rallies.

The candidates and elected officials who attended included Sheila Stocks-Smith, Chris Boyster, Mike Ziri, Sam Cahnman, and Michael Higgins. Bill Houlihan spoke for Senator Dick Durbin.

The Illinois Education Association blog has pictures plus a video of IEA President Ken Swanson's speech.





My friend Alan put a few pictures on flickr.







I stole a few that Wes King put on facebook.

An attack on public employees is an attack on the environment

I was asked to speak for the Sierra Club at the rally to save the American Dream held on the steps of the Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois in solidarity with Wisconsin public employees. The large crowd was fired up from previous speakers so I was glad to have very enthusiastic response. Here's the text of my speech from the February 26 rally.


(Springfield NAACP President Teresa Haley on the left introduced speakers.)

I’m here to say a few words as Chair of the Illinois Sierra Club about why Sierra Club and other environmental groups are supporting these rallies across the nation. But I’m also here because I’ve been a union member and organizer. And because my dad was a state employee in AFSCME Council 31 from before I was born until he retired.

I know what the right to organize means for a workplace. I know that those politicians who try to take away our right to organize are the same ones who would take away our right to clean air and clean water. Those who would unfairly apply budget cuts to public employees are the same forces attempting to gut environmental protections.

I know that an organized workplace that protects the safety of its workers is more likely to protect the safety of the environment and the community they work in. It's no coincidence that non-union coal mines with poor safety records are usually the same mines with poor environmental records.

The Sierra Club knows we don’t have to choose between a healthy environment and good union jobs. Auto plants in Michigan and Illinois are reopening to build fuel efficient cars and hybrids. Illinois fields that cover abandoned coal mines are now growing wind farms that are providing the good union jobs of our energy future. America's economy is being rebuilt on a foundation of green union jobs.

Public employees in Wisconsin, Illinois and all 50 states are working to protect your environment through EPA, the Department of Natural Resources and other agencies. They work to protect natural areas and prevent corporate polluters from dumping toxins in our communities. Well trained professionals protected from retaliation are better empowered to stand up for clean air and water. An attack on public employees is an attack on the environment.

The Sierra Club stands today with our brothers and sisters in the labor movement in support of an American Dream that protects the right to organize, the right to a safe workplace, and the right to a healthy community.

Labor and the Nation

Happy Labor Day!

The red-baiting and retirement of Van Jones remind me that labor unions were always the first target of McCarthy style campaigns. Unions became very strong after the 1930's and conservative corporate leaders knew they had to fight back. Red-baiting has divided and crippled the labor movement throughout its entire history but it was taken to new levels in the 50's.

I ran across a 1937 speech titled "Labor and the Nation" by John L. Lewis, probably the most significant single person in the history of organized labor. He helped push anarchists and radicals out of the United Mine Workers in his early career so he was no friend of communism.

What strikes me about the speech is how little the players and tactics have changed since the 1930's, although things are less violent today. His comments remind me of the astroturf polluter rallies against climate change legislation and the organized sabotage of health care forums.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and similar groups representing industry and financial interests, are rendering a disservice to the American people in their attempts to frustrate the organization of labor and in their refusal to accept collective bargaining as one of our economic institutions.

These groups are encouraging a systematic organization of vigilante groups to fight unionization under the sham pretext of local interests. They equip these vigilantes with tin hats, wooden clubs, gas masks and lethal weapons and train them in the arts of brutality and oppression. They bring in snoops, finks, hatchet gangs and Chowderhead Cohens to infest their plants and disturb the communities.

Fascist organizations have been launched and financed under the shabby pretext that the C.I.O. movement is communistic. The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands.

No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political and social life of our nation.

Lewis may have been too quick to drive radicals out of the union, but he understood how accusations of communist infiltration were used to advance a corporate agenda. His comments even foreshadow how coal and oil interests are trying to frighten farmers today with the same style of propaganda they used to divide farmers from labor 70 years ago.

Labor has suffered just as our farm population has suffered from a viciously unequal distribution of the national income. In the exploitation of both classes of workers has been the source of panic and depression, and upon the economic welfare of both rests the best assurance of a sound and permanent prosperity.

In this connection let me call attention to the propaganda which some of our industrialists are carrying on among the farmers. By pamphlets in the milk cans or attached to machinery and in countless other ways of direct and indirect approach, the farmers of the nation are being told that the increased price of farm machinery and farm supplies is due to the rising wage level brought about by the Committee for Industrial Organization. And yet it is the industrial millions of this country who constitute the substantial market for all agricultural products.

It's funny how relevant speeches from American history are to modern issues. Then it was breaking up monopolies, forming unions, or getting social security. Today it's climate change, health care, and getting back the right to organize. But it's always about whether government should be a tool to serve the interests of powerful business leaders or a tool in the hands of the people to create a more fair and just economy. It's all the same struggle.

May Day Celebrated

Springfield celebrated the first annual Haymarket Festival with a concert in Douglas Park on May First. It looked cloudy but rain didn't stop the bands or speakers.

Retired SEIU organizer, Al Piper, gave some historical background about labor history, the Haymarket riot and how it lead to May 1st being celebrated internationally as labor day. He mentioned Springfield's role as burial place and one-time home to labor legend John L. Lewis. It's disappointing that our city does so little to recognize our connection to one of the most important figures in American history.



(The Springfield festival was more peaceful than the original)

I caught the last song of Tom Irwin's show, heard another great set by local jam-grass band, the Reel Channel Cats, and heard Gypsy Collabo get going. I skipped out before the Sarah Schneider Band got started, even though she's on of my local favorites, because it got pretty cold.

The other speaker was a UIS professor who gave a predictable speech about Obama not being liberal enough along with some cliche lines from a middle-class Marxist perspective.

Incidentally, you may remember that Pat Quinn said he would model himself after Governor John Altgeld, who pardoned the falsely convicted Haymarket anarchists.

It was a fun event that managed to attract an age-diverse audience (not an easy thing to do in Springfield) so I hope it happens again next year.

The Bread and Roses Strike

Those who aren't familiar with the title of July's Liberty Brew & View movie should read about the original bread and roses strike. Any union organizing drive will focus on different issues related to wages, benefits, and working conditions, but they're always fundamentally about demanding respect.





After the movie we're lucky to have special guest speaker Al Piper, from the Service Employees International Union. You can download this flier to let people know about the movie.

Happy Labor Day Virden

I hope everyone is enjoying their labor day weekend!

Unfortunately, the out of work miners at the recently closed coal mine in nearby Virden won't be doing much celebrating this weekend. The mine closure reminded me that one of the bloodier episodes in Illinois labor history happened in Virden.

I found two articles worth reading online at the NIU Library website.



It was an important episode in the struggle to establish unions in Illinois coal mines and the miners who died there in 1898 are buried in the Miner's cemetery at Mt. Olive along with Mother Jones.

Memorial Day Massacre

I spent Memorial Day weekend in Chicago where I got to see the parade. A highlight was the float with some of the original Tuskegee airmen. I also saw the movie Bug, which deserves an Oscar nomination for best picture. I took a book on labor movement history and by complete coincidence the next chapter was on the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre, which I read while in Chicago on Memorial Day weekend.

Seventy years ago today, 10 demonstrators were killed and many more wounded by police attempting to break up a steelworkers strike. Workers striking for better pay and working conditions being attacked by the authorities is hardly a unique event in American history, but this may have been the first time such an event was captured on film.

Dick Meister recently wrote an article on the massacre and the newsreel that Paramount Pictures never release to the public. The article tells of the reaction of a US Senate committee that did see the film:

The committee found that strikers and their families, while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as they massed in front of the South Chicago plant operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally peaceful. But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago and other cities with plants operated by Republic and two other members of the "Little Steel" alliance that also were struck. For as the committee concluded, the police had been "loosed ... to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways" at the companies' behest. The companies even supplied them with weapons and ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than $40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the entire country.

Its easy to understand why Paramount executives didn't want to incite the public by showing the footage. Years later, news coverage of police brutality against civil rights protesters opened the eyes of Americans to the brutality of segregation and rallied more people in support of Martin Luther King. I wonder if this film would have had a similar affect in 1937. Its an interesting event to read about so follow one of the links above if you're so inclined.

Clean Car Bill Passes Illinois House Committee

Yesterday I attended a hearing on the Illinois Clean Car bill in the Illinois House Environmental Health Committee. The bill would cause Illinois to join 13 other states that have adopted the California "Pavley Law" standards for reducing car emissions beyond the minimum federal requirement.

One of the speakers in favor of the bill was Jack Darin, Illinois Director of the Sierra Club, who chaired a working group appointed by the Governor which is making the reccomendation to adopt the California standards.

Automobiles are the second largest source of pollutants that cause global warming after coal power plants. The California standards would reduce those emissions as well as other pollutants that cause asthma and other health problems. Its expected that much of the reduction would come through increased fuel efficiency, which means car buyers will spend less on gas.

The automobile manufacturers brought in some of their big guns from California, D.C. and Chicago to lobby against the bill. Their main spokesperson was the ironically named Steven Douglas (we were short distance from the Stephen A. Douglas statue on the Capitol lawn) from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The Alliance is a joint project of the major car manufactures and they send Steven from California to all over the country to lobby against government interference in their right to pollute the planet we all live on.

I thought Steve was mostly full of crap but never more so than on his points about consumer choice and electric cars. Perhaps most annoyingly, he made some ridiculous statements about the high cost of electric cars and their limited driving range. Having just watched the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car, I know that the technology exists to make affordable zero emissions electric cars that have a reasonable driving range. The Tesla would be my dream all-electric car, just in case anyone wants to know what to buy me for Christmas.



The most shocking part of the film was that the car companies refused to let the owners of electric cars in California renew their leases. They took electric cars away from consumers who wanted them and had them all demolished. That pretty well sums up the auto-manufacturer's' commitment to consumer choice when it comes to clean cars.

Still, Steve asserted that it was Clean Car regulations that would limit consumer choice in his unlikely scenario that consumers will soon be rushing to purchase higher mileage vehicles, when finally given a choice, as gas prices surpass $3.00 per gallon.

I was very happy to see two Representatives, Mike Boland and Elaine Nekritz, make the same point about consumer choice which I wrote about in a previous blog post. They both spoke of their desire to buy an American, union-made car that gets great gas mileage, such as a hybrid. Nekrtiz said that she could only find one car that met her criteria of being green and American made. American car companies are not giving consumers good choices and the UAW is not representing its membership well when they support company efforts to resist providing a product that consumers want.

The other argument of the car manufacturers' is that they don't have the ability to meet the regulations. Historically, that's an argument that is always made, yet they somehow find a way to meet whatever requirements are passed without the doomsday scenarios coming to fruition. And historically, the car manufacturers do no more than they are required to do. One thing I do appreciate from the testimony of the opponents is that I gained an appreciation for how complex this issue is, so I plan on doing more research.

The bill passed committee on a 7-5 vote. I didn't write down how each member voted so I'll post that information when the transcript is available on the House website.