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