The year 2023 has been a consequential one for the labor movement in the US. President Biden signed a bill in late-2022 to block the then-impending national rail strike, which was partially enacted to protest slipping safety standards. The following February, the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio dominated the news cycle and was one of many derailments that occurred across the country following Congress’ measure against the strike.
The year has held a thick tension between workers and the ruling class. Striking workers have advocated for smarter safety measures, better hours, and fairer pay. And as they play a vital role in our economy and overall way of life, they approach arguments from a moral high ground. Aside from ever-developing theory and direct action, the labor movement is built on the principle that value is derived chiefly from workers. Therefore, a worker paid out of accordance with the capital they generate is being exploited.
In the American gamut of exploitation, the nation’s highest crime is slavery. Famously, civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois referred to the Civil War as a general strike, noting that hundreds of thousands enslaved people ceased work while some joined the Union Army. As the Emancipation Proclamation jump-started a large-scale Black labor movement – with some essentially on strike and others taking up arms in fighting corporate-supported Confederate forces – the narrative of slavery’s abolition is rarely contextualized as vital to the larger labor movement, despite a non-theoretical connection.
Slavery represents unchecked power held by the country’s economic elite; it perpetuates a system instituting full ownership of working bodies to the point of dehumanization. It exhibits the sad truth that, while freedom has been withheld from marginalized people, there has always been a free market in the United States. Many slaveholders defended the implementation of slavery as an economic right, similarly to how government and corporate leaders of today have defended outsourcing work to countries with less stringent labor laws. In this sense, the freedom of the market has always eclipsed the freedom of the individual.
While solidarity with white workers brought Black workers onto the union stage, such as during the Great Strike of 1877, by 1894 the movement was fractured among poor whites and the new generation of freed Black folk. Due to exclusion from unions, such as Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union, Black workers were hired as strikebreakers by companies such as the Pullman Company. America’s first recognized Black-led labor union came in the form of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925.
Led by Asa Phillip Randolph, the group advocated for the rights of more than 18,000 Black railway workers of the Pullman Company to combat racialized exploitation. After 12 years of tireless work, Randolph established a contract with the Pullman Company offering unprecedented benefits for the BSCP.
Despite previously acting as another obstacle to the advancement of Black people in the United States, the organized labor movement later established itself as an ally to the civil rights movement. With over 400,000 Black workers unionized by the early 1940s, the civil rights movement had successfully integrated with the labor movement. During World War II, Black Americans were segregated within the armed forces. Therefore, they were largely excluded from the economic fortune enjoyed by white workers in defense and military production. Accordingly, Randolph organized for 10,000 Black Americans to march on Washington, D.C. in what was considered one of the most significant displays of Black solidarity at the time.
Eventually pushing then-President Franklin Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, effectively banning “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origins,” Randolph’s efforts led to direct transformative change for the Black community of the United States.
The Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), established in the wake of Executive Order 8802 to collect information and investigate complaints, was dissolved before the war was over. While Randolph failed in salvaging the committee – even lobbying within congress but failing to keep it operational – his work laid the political groundwork for the labor movement to cross a racial divide. Later, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination in workplaces was outlawed.
As leaders like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr. all embraced the ideals of leftism during the most transformative years of the civil rights movement, politics centered on the working class was key in the progression of a revolutionary mindset. The labor movement of the US has incrementally afforded rights to the working class in tandem with accomplishments in social justice.
The country is currently in the midst of the resurgence of a modern labor movement. At the cross-section between labor sectors including transportation, defense manufacturing, arts & entertainment, and the medical field, consequential strike efforts have emerged in the midst of a devastating bout of inflation. Labor Day commemorates not only our workers, but the revolutionary spirit which defends their humanity in a capitalist system.