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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4. The CIO's Integration & Imperialist Labor<br />
Policy<br />
The CIO played an important role for U.S. imperialism<br />
in disorganizing and placing under supervision<br />
the nationally oppressed. For the first time masses of Third<br />
World workers were allowed and even conscripted into the<br />
settler trade unions. This was the result of a historic arrangement<br />
between the U.S. Empire and nationally oppressed<br />
workers in the industrial North.<br />
On one side, this limited "unity" ensured that<br />
Third World workers didn't oppose the new, settler industrial<br />
unions, and were safely absorbed as "minorities"<br />
under tight settler control. On the other side, hungry Third<br />
World proletarians gained significant income advances<br />
and hopes of job security and advancement. It was an arrangement<br />
struck out of need on both sides, but one in<br />
which the Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy made only tactical<br />
concessions while strengthening their hegemony over<br />
the Empire's labor market.<br />
So while the old A.F.L. craft unions had controlled<br />
Third World labor by driving us out of the labor<br />
market, by excluding us from the craft unions or by confining<br />
us to small, "seg" locals, the new CIO could only<br />
control us by absorbing us into their settler unions. The<br />
imperialists had decided that they needed colonial labor in<br />
certain industries. Euro-Amerikan labor could not,<br />
therefore, drive the nationally oppressed away in the old<br />
manner. The colonial proletarians could only be controlled<br />
by disorganizing them - separating their economic struggles<br />
from the national struggles of their peoples, separating<br />
them from other Third World proletarians around the<br />
world, absorbing them as "brothers" of settler unionism,<br />
and placing them under the leadership of the Euro-<br />
Amerikan labor aristocracy. The new integration was the<br />
old segregation on a higher level, the unity of opposites in<br />
everyday life.<br />
We can see how this all worked by reviewing the<br />
CIO's relationship to Afrikan workers. Large Afrikan<br />
refugee communities had formed in the major Northern industrial<br />
centers. Well over one million refugees had fled<br />
Northwards in just the time between 1910-1924, and new<br />
thousands came every month. They were an irritating<br />
presence to the settler North; each refugee community was<br />
a foreign body in a white metropolis. Like a grain of sand<br />
in an oyster. And just as the oyster eases its irritation by<br />
encasing the foreign element in a hard, smooth coating of<br />
pearl, settler Amerika encapsulated Afrikan workers in the<br />
hard, white layer of the CIO.<br />
Despite the "race riots" and the hostility of Euro-<br />
Amerikans the Afrikan refugees streamed to the North in<br />
the early years of the century. After all, even the troubles<br />
of the North seemed like lesser evils to those fleeing the terroristic<br />
conditions of the occupied National Territory.<br />
Many had little choice, escaping the revived Ku Klux Klan.<br />
Increasingly forced off the land, barred from the new factories<br />
in the South, Afrikans were held down by the terroristic<br />
control of their daily lives. 85<br />
Each night found the Illinois Central railroad wending<br />
its way Northward through Louisiana, Mississippi<br />
and Tennessee, following the Mississippi River up to the<br />
"Promised Land" of Gary or Chicago. Instead of<br />
sharecropping or seasonal farm labor for "Mr. John,"<br />
Afrikan men during World War I might get hired for the<br />
"elite" Chicago jobs as laborers at Argo Corn Starch or<br />
International Harvester. Each week the Chicago Defender,<br />
in the '20s the most widely-read "race" newspaper even in<br />
the South, urged its readers to forsake hellish Mississippi<br />
and come Northward to "freedom." One man remembers<br />
the long, Mississippi nights tossing and turning in bed,<br />
dreaming about the fabled North: "You could not rest in<br />
your bed at night for Chicago."<br />
The refugee communities were really small New<br />
Afrikan cities, where the taut rope of settler domination<br />
had been partially loosened. Spear's Black Chicago says:<br />
"In the rural South, Negroes were dependent upon white<br />
landowners in an almost feudal sense. Personal supervision<br />
and personal responsibility permeated almost every<br />
aspect of life ... In the factories and yards (of the North) on<br />
the other hand, the relationship with the 'boss' was formal<br />
and impersonal, and supervision limited to working<br />
hours." (31)<br />
While there was less individual restriction, Afrikan<br />
refugees were under tight control as a national group. The<br />
free bourgeois labor market of Euro-Amerikans didn't<br />
really exist for Afrikans. Their employment was not individual,<br />
not private. They got work only when a company<br />
consciously decided to use Afrikan labor as a group. So<br />
that Afrikan labor in the industrial North still existed<br />
under colonial conditions, driven into specific workplaces<br />
and specific jobs.<br />
Afrikans were understood by the companies as<br />
dynamite - extremely useful and potentially very<br />
dangerous. Their use in Northern industry was the start,<br />
though little understood at the time, of gradually bringing<br />
the new European immigrants up from proletarians to real<br />
settlers. Imperialism was gradually releasing the "Hunky"<br />
and "Dago" from laboring at the very bottom of the factories.<br />
Now even more Euro-Amerikans were being pushed<br />
upward into the ranks of skilled workers and supervisors.<br />
And if the Afrikan workers were paid more than their<br />
usual colonial wages in the South, they still earned less<br />
than "white man's wages." Even the newest European immigrant<br />
on the all-white production lines could look at the<br />
Afrikan laborers and know his new-found privileges as a<br />
settler.<br />
The ca~italists also knew that too many Afrikans<br />
might turn a useful and super-profitable tool into a<br />
dangerous force. Afrikan labor was used only in a controlled<br />
way, with heavy restrictions placed upon it. One Indiana<br />
steel mill superintendent in the 1920s said: "When<br />
we got (up to 10% Black) employees, I said, 'No more colored<br />
without discussion. ' I got the colored pastors to send