Archive for September 2011
Labor Day 2011: The Lessons of the Past
Remarks by Bob Zieger (University of Florida, emeritus) at the annual Labor Day Breakfast, Sept. 3, 2011, sponsored by the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, Gainesville.
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has recently said that “nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future.”
As a historian, however, I do think that the past can continue to instruct us.
Let me bring you back to the year 1935 and the founding of the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CIO existed as a separate organization between that year and 1955 when it merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO. Many historians see the formation and struggles of the CIO to build industrial unions as the single most important episode in the history of American labor.
Much has changed since the 1930s. Then the “typical” worker dug coal, poured steel, or assembled automobiles. Today she is a health care worker, a retail clerk, a school teacher.
But there’s an old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Billy Bragg bids us to remember “the lessons of the past.” What are the lessons that the rise of the CIO holds for us? Read the rest of this entry »
