Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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2. Labor Offensive From Below<br />
Citizenship in the Empire had very real but still<br />
limited meaning so long as many white workers remained<br />
"industrial slaves" of the corporations. The increasing<br />
centralization of monopoly capitalism repeated aspects of<br />
feudalism on a higher level. Both inside and outside the<br />
factory gates the settler workers were subject to heightened<br />
regimentation. During the 1920s it was not unusual for the<br />
persistent speed-up by management to double production<br />
per worker, even without taking mechanization into account.<br />
At Ford, perhaps the most extreme of the industrial<br />
despots, every tenth employee was also a company<br />
spy. Workers overheard making resentful remarks would<br />
be beaten up right on the production line by the everpresent<br />
guards. (7) In the U.S. Steel plants at Homestead,<br />
Pa. the constant spying gave rise to a common saying: "If<br />
you want to talk in Homestead, you must talk to<br />
yourself." (8)<br />
The Depression and the massive unemployment<br />
only threw more power into corporate hands. Not only<br />
were wages cut almost everywhere, but many companies<br />
laid off experienced workers and replaced them with<br />
newcomers at a fraction of the old wages. Ford Motor<br />
Company, which advertised that it was the highest paying<br />
company in the U.S., allegedly paid production workers a<br />
minimum of $7 per day (with inflation less than it paid in<br />
1914). On the contrary, some thousands of Euro-American<br />
Ford employees in the '30s found their pay down as low as<br />
$1.40 per day; that was roughly what Afrikan women<br />
domestics had earned in Chicago. (9) It takes no genius to<br />
see that settler workers would not passively accept being<br />
reduced to a colonial wage. Companies in Detroit, Pittsburgh,<br />
etc. advertised widely in the South for workers,<br />
wishing even larger pools of jobless to intimidate and<br />
discipline their employees.<br />
The A.F.L. unions were not only loyal to imperialism,<br />
but in their weakened state heavily dependent on<br />
enjoying the continued favors of individual corporations<br />
by opposing any real struggle. It was for that reason that<br />
the old Amalgamated Association had betrayed the 1919<br />
steel strike. In that same year A.F.L. President Gompers<br />
77 actually told the U.S. Senate that Prohibition was a