My first lesson on the struggle of American workers occurred when I was 11, five years before I even had a job.
I was in seventh grade at St. Bernadette School in Evergreen Park, when I smelled something fishy about our geography book.
Not the whole book, which I didn’t fully read except for portions where I needed to find the answers to homework questions. Though not a huge fan of geography, I did enjoy the feature at the end of each chapter, which was a comic strip with eight to 12 panels on the bottom half of the page. Not a lighthearted comic strip like “Donald Duck” or “Little Lulu,” but one drawn in black and white with caricatures and text that told a story about a place here or in a foreign country. An example might be eight drawings showing what happens on an Australian sheep farm that leads to wool production for the clothing industry. They were visual geography lessons for reluctant readers like me.
What caught my attention was just a single page that I can still visualize today, half a century later, depicting laborers in a way I sensed was unfair. On the last page in the chapter about Russia, which in the 1960s was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, the comic strip illustrated the evils of communism.
Sister Carol had already warned that we would have to become martyrs if conquered by Russia, since communists were atheists and didn’t allow religion. A picture she showed us of a sainted martyr tied to a tree and shot full of arrows had me pretty worked up.
Specifically, this comic strip told a story about how communism is born in factories when troublemakers try to organize workers. The first panel showed a man with a villainous smile passing out leaflets to three or four people with work gloves and helmets. In the second row came a workers’ strike, with a panel showing a mob with torches and picket signs. By the end of the strip, the strikers had shut down the country, raising a flag with a hammer and sickle over a government building.
I was befuddled. Sister Carol had given us the impression that if Russia invaded the United States, it would be like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. But the geography book indicated it would start as an inside job, and that workers forming unions would lead to a communist takeover.
I was also upset since my Polish grandfather was a machinist, and my Irish grandpa a truck driver. My uncles and cousins worked in factories, some already having joined unions. How could they be commies? They were good people. Catholics, even. And they had no particular love for Russians.
But I was a child and did not understand until much later how and why corporations and whole industries, which included the publishers of our textbook conducted propaganda campaigns against unions, connecting organized labor with the fear of communism that had been stoked in the McCarthy era and sustained through the Cold War.
The wealthy and powerful were sending a message that the employer class were the heroes of the American economy because smart executives formed partnerships and merged with other corporations to gain strength in numbers and raise more capital. These employers negotiated for the best deal and highest profits for their stakeholders; they stood firm and withheld their product until their price was met.
Yet, when workers wanted to exercise the exact same rights to organize for strength in numbers, they were portrayed as ungrateful, greedy and bullying.
A century-long campaign to besmirch and squash labor, from the Red Scare in World War I and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, to President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981 and rich corporations crushing the Employees’ Free Choice Act in 2009, has led to today’s status quo in which the richest 1% have most of the money, property and power in the United States. This has turned our so-called democratic republic upside down.
But it’s still possible to turn it right side up again with passage of the Protect the Right to Organize Act pending in Congress. Citizens can email and urge their local members of Congress to vote yes for this legislation, which will ease workers’ ability to establish unions, negotiate for better wages and demand improved working conditions.
The PRO Act is a long-overdue bill to help counteract the historical, shameful effort to disparage and extinguish the rights and dignity of workers. And there’s no better time to renew advocacy for the American workers than now.
David McGrath is a former member of the United Retail Workers, Chicago Teachers Union and National Education Association. He is also an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and the author of “South Siders.”
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