When Corporate PR Meets Social History

File this under “while you were on summer vacation.”  The Newberry Library released a fascinating photo collection under the deceptively plain title “Daily Life Along the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.” It is a selection of some 3,000 black and white photographs taken by Russell Lee and Esther Bubley in 1948. Both Lee and Bubley are more well known for their role in the New Deal Farm Security Administration photo collections, much of which is available online.  In this case they were promoting a folksy identity for fairly large corporation with deep roots in the Midwest, rather than reform of the American political economy.

A handful of these pictures were published in the volume Granger Country, written and compiled by then Newberry Library president Stanley Pargelis and Chicago newspaperman Lloyd Lewis.  The rest languished in the stacks of the Newberry until a few years ago when Newberry archivist Martha Briggs, librarian Hjordis Halvorson, and others secured funding to scan a selection.

The CB&Q collections makes for an interesting companion to the much larger Charles Cushman collection at Indian University (14,000 color slides by an amateur photographer). It is much more focused, as you would expect from two professional photographers who were escorted around the railway system by Pargelis and CB&Q PR employees.  There are series of “daily life” shots that focus on particular towns, workshops, and farms.  One series documents life on a family farm in north central Illinois, including a trip to Chicago by the farm wife (on the CB&Q, of course) to shop at Marshall Field’s.

A good number of the shots have a formulaic feel of corporate publicity, but there are some real gems, too.

I’m struck by the image above, of two women rail shop workers in Havelock, Nebraska.  What a story these two must have.  Their body language suggests the bonds of women working in an intensely male environment–likely as not the only women on the shop floor.  Were these two “Rosie the Riveters” who held on to their wartime jobs?  The woman who looks into the camera is wearing a wedding ring.  Is her husband working there too?  Unemployed?  Gone?

The collection is also rich in describing the work processes of a large railroad at a moment when rail travel was still quite common.  There are quite a few shots documenting work in roundhouses, loading and unloading freight and passengers, and cleaning passenger trains.  There are also a few shots of the pre-computer information technologies used by railways to set freight rates (agent with rate books and a phone), and keep track of individual train cars across their sprawling continental networks.

Like the Cushman collection, the CB&Q collection documents a peculiar moment in U.S. history.   Historian Eric Sandweiss writes that Cushman’s images captured a landscape and built environment frozen in time by the Great Depression.  Among other things, the Depression ground to a halt the massive construction boom of the 1920s.  True, the New Deal would sponsor a wide array of public works including housing and roads.  But compared to the phenomenal growth of the post-World War II period, the 1930s saw relatively little in the way of urban transformation, and much of the building during the war was temporary housing.  So the immediate postwar years are interesting in that they retained much of the feeling of scarcity held over from depression and war.  The take-off was still just over the horizon.

Unfortunately, the collection is housed within CONTENTdm in such a way that makes it impossible to easily integrate into blog posts.  No doubt this is to protect the Library’s intellectual property.  But if any of my old colleagues at the Newberry are reading, you can see that it’s easy enough to grab a low-res image from the site.  So why not facilitate blog integration?  Put the images up on Flickr?  Similarly, to save image links in Delicious or Zotero, you have to go and grab a separate “reference link” by clicking on a nearly-hidden link at the bottom left of the images catalog page.  On the plus side, CONTENTdm provides a way to save your “favorites.”  But for me, I’m more interested in saving my favorites centrally, along with my other citations.

Despite these gripes, I’m thrilled that this collection is out, and I salute the Newberry librarians and archivists who worked hard to preserve it, catalog it, and made it accessible.

Joe Worker Arrives Online

In the last days of my tenure at the University of Illinois, I spent several hours digging through vertical files in the library of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.  Because of changes in professors’ interests–generally away from collective bargaining–and space considerations, the bulky and little used file cabinets were slated for removal.  Not sure if the files would be destroyed or stored out of reach, I wanted to at least assess what might be lost.

And that’s where I found the wonderful, full-color comic book “Joe Worker and the Story of Labor” produced by the CIO Research and Education Department in 1948.  Through the good graces of Betsy Kruger at the UIUC Library, the entire booklet is now available for free download at the Internet Archive.  You can read about it here, and download it here.  UIUC has uploaded a few other similar pamphlets from the CIO, like How Big is Big Business, and I’m still looking forward to the scanning of the CIO’s comic book on the “Bible and the Working Man.”

From the first page, above panels depicting Elamites and Chaldians trading racial slurs:  “The trick of setting worker against worker started way back.  The idea was to keep common men of different tribes and tongues divided and enslaved.  King Nimrod of Anciet Babylonia tried this, but it didn’t work–he even lost his own kingdom.  The centuries have taught Labor the great lesson–only in union is there strength.  So today all American workers, native born and foreign, Christian and Jew, White and Negro, together march forward.”

Polish with everything

Dateline Chicago, Huey’s Hot Dogs, Balmoral and Clark.  Love it.

Back to the Heartland

With my adopted state in financial collapse, what better time for a tour of the Midwest?!

It was a hell of a trip.  With an 8 AM departure, we decided to get a hotel at the airport last night.  You know, just take the hotel shuttle in the morning.  After two shuttles passed by all filled up, we flagged a taxi for the mile-long trip to the terminal … which had moved because Northwest has merged with Delta.  Then, safely through the curbside check-in we hiked to the end of the longest TSA security line I have ever seen.  So long, in fact, that we were diverted to the next terminal over.  Then after clearing security we had to run about a half a mile through an underground tunnel back to the right terminal.  All this before 8 AM, all this before two flights.  All the while cajoling two small children to alternatively hurry up, wait, and remain seated for extended periods.  I do believe that LAX is the worst airport I’ve ever used.

But that’s all behind us now and we find ourselves in the congenial environs of the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Well, actually a Holiday Inn, but I’ll take it.

A fair chunk of history has passed since I last posted on May Day.  Chrysler and GM went through bankrupcy in record time.  My kids turned five.  And the State of California virtually defaulted while its action-hero governor sat in his jacuzzi smoking stoggies. Now here we are again in the so-called Heartland.  What impressions after a few hours?  It’s nice to have *a little* humidity.  Things are very green here.  The beer selection is amazing.

One of my projects for this trip is to return to a sideline interest on the genealogy of “heartland” as a regional identifier for the Midwest.  I’ve taken my other blog “Global Heartland” down, so I won’t direct you there.  The original nugget of research was based on a review of electronic newspaper databases that found a huge jump in the use of the term “heartland” in the 1980s and 1990s.  In other words, the region only became the Heartland in the wake of the ravages of globalization.  I hope to post a few commentaries on the topic as we traverse the region, talk to people, and sit in archives.

More later…depending on internet access.

May Day: Stakeholders vs. Shareholders

In 1885 the group of labor unions that would later become the American Federation of Labor boldly declared that as of May 1st 1886, eight hours would constitute a day’s labor. This was at a time when 12 and 14 hour days were the norm for wage earners. And to the surprise of many, working people across the U.S. organized themselves and walked out of their factories to make that declaration a reality. Some succeeded. Most did not. It would be another 52 years before the Fair Labor Standards Act mandated the 8 hour day, overtime, and the minimum wage for most wage workers (with significant exceptions).

We’re on the far side of that history now.  The 8 hour day, the 40 hour week and the steady job are not even part of most workers’ living memory.  Most young workers (say under 30) are intimately familiar with what used to be called “nonstandard” work arrangements, self-funded health insurance and pensions, and a do-it-yourself approach to the labor market.  The current economic crisis, now more than a year old, has simply brought the ugly reality of contemporary work into the narrow focus, and short attention span, of the mainstream media.  The rise and fall of the 8 hour day was a long arc.  It took half a century to win the 8 hour day, and another 70 years to bring us to our own dismal days.

It is our distance from that long crisis of capitalism (or series of crises) that makes possible the return of May Day.  As some have noted, the when Republicans call Obama a “socialist,” the result is an increase in the number of people identifying as “socialists.”  They don’t even bother with “communist,” and their recent forays into “fascist” likely won’t fly either.  We’re in a new era.  Not a particularly nice era.  But a generational shift in personnel and in language.  If our political economy moves along through a series of crises, then we’re in a new form of crisis. And we’ve yet to see what forms of organizing, and what rhetorical appeals, really have traction.

One word to look for is “stakeholder.”  Without any legal definition, stakeholder implies a claim to participation in decision making and in a share of the benefits of society.  It conjures a world of competing legitimate interests, and implies negotiation and compromise.  If you look at the language of the union haters decrying the Chrysler and GM deals you can see their underlying argument is usually that workers don’t deserve high wages because they are lazy.  Shareholders, on the other hand are exempt from the charge of laziness frankly because they have money.  The argument of May Day, and the language of stakeholding, is that everyone deserves to make a decent living by virtue of living in a society.  Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will.  There are only 24 hours in a day, and so many years in a life.  The eight hour movement sought to claw back some portion of that for people to decide on their own.

The language of stakeholding isn’t perfect.  It can be used as a cover for enforced cooperation (“we’re all in this together”) and one-sided “partnerships” between labor and management.  But it has several advantages. Because it is not a legal term, its content has to be defined, and redefined, in actual processes of organizing and negotiation.  It can transcend citizenship and legal status, as in: people working and living in a particular situation, whether they’re legally permitted to or not, are all stakeholders and should be consulted.  It’s not too far from how collective bargaining actually works, when it works.  And, strategically, it has favor with and leverage on our popular President.  So let’s watch for talk of stakeholding as we go forward and try to make opportunities out of our latest crisis.

Fake news more informative than real news

In these days of newspaper bankruptcies, one frequently hears the complaint that the younger generation doesn’t read newspapers and is therefore less informed than their elders.  The other day I heard a laid-off journalist on NPR turning that last supposition on its head.  Far from uninformed, the youngsters are better informed because they take their news from many, many sources and understand that a writer’s political position influences content.  And he likened the Daily Show to high quality editorial page material.

Audiences’ turn away from “objective reporting” to partisan sources and fake news (i.e., Daily Show, Colbert, and the Onion), was a sign that they were aware that our media system had been captured (or if you prefer, manipulated) by and for fairly specific political and economic interests.  And even as the press shakes off the torpor of the Bush years, fake news remains one of the few places in which “journalists” can get across in plain words what is happening to our economy.

This clip from the humor paper/site The Onion, Autoworkers Compete to Keep Jobs, Livelihoods on New Reality Show, is a good example (for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to embed it, sorry).  In all the reporting about the auto bailout, the gnashing of teeth about “nationalization,” “socialism,” and the allegedly lush life led by autoworkers and their fat benefits, little ink is spilled (digitally or in analog) detailing the grim facts for hourly employees at the Big Three.  Best case scenario:  10s of thousands lose their jobs, those remaining work harder for lower wages and fewer benefits, and one generation of working people is pitted against another.  Not a pretty sight.  The only thing to add is that the worker-against-worker competition has also spread to the white collar workforce in the industry.

Thanks to Michael M. for sending the clip along.

Bankers can’t build cars

Let’s just call it “fair and balanced.”  Yes, GM’s debtholders are crying to the media and the government that the offer they’re getting is not “reasonable” is “absurd,” and “amounts to using taxpayer money to show political favoritism of one creditor over another,” according to a report on Bloomberg.com.

That last one really made me laugh.  These people apparently believe their own rhetoric.  Political favoritism?  Who’s been on the receiving end of that for the last, say 150 years?  Bloomberg quotes an analyst saying, “You have a gun being put to your head saying that if you don’t take this, we have something that’s even worse for you.”  My heart goes out to them.  Their situation sounds remarkably similar to that of the unions who were asked to cut members’ pay, cull the workforce by a third, various work rule changes, and take stock instead of cash for their pensions.

Why should bondholders lose their shirt while the government gets a majority stake?  Perhaps because they made a bad investment, and continued to dump money into a poorly managed company.  So now they’re losing most of their investment. Last time I checked, the champions of capitalism said that’s how “The Market” works.  The government for its part appears to have made its continuing investment contingent on an actually viable business plan.  Is that socialism? Or smart business?

Did the UAW get a better deal than the bondholders?  Yes and no.  In addition to the bedrock capitalist principle mentioned above, it’s worth pointing out that GM was contractually obligated to pump something like $50 $20 billion into the Voluntary Employee Benefit Association (VEBA) that will relieve the corporation of its pension and retiree health care obligations.  Instead of cash, they’re getting GM stock.  The union-haters out there cry that those benefits are ridiculous and should be zeroed out.  That’s a fine opinion, as long as you don’t dress it up on fairness to non union workers or the moral rectitude of the free market.  Instead this is just some misguided desire to drive peoples’ wages and benefits down for no good reason.  It’s just mean spirited.

Unlike our great American bankers, the government (and likely GM management) seem to understand that you need autoworkers to build cars.  That is why the UAW may be getting an allegedly “good” deal.

Update:  The Washington Post reports Tuesday morning that the Treasury and Chrysler reached a deal with the company’s major debtholders for a stock swap.  If the deal holds it leaves the UAW as the majority shareholder via the union’s VEBA.

Monday, Monday

A few brief notes on the GM announcement and press conference and the auto bailout in general:

From the NY Times live blog

• After restructuring, GM will be 89% owned by the U.S. government and the UAW via the union’s VEBA (health care trust fund).  Feds to own about 50%.
• Bondholders are likely holding out in part because they hold credit default swaps that pay out in case of a GM bankruptcy.

That seems to suggest bankruptcy is going to happen and GM will be majority owned by the government with a minority stake by the UAW.  Very interesting.

…Update…  Now that I’ve dropped the kids off at school, I cant return to this.  A few thoughts about negotiations are rebounding in my head.  One glaringly obvious fact is the different way the financial and auto industries are being handled.  But I also wonder if we aren’t getting a preview here of things to come if the insolvency of CitiGroup becomes too difficult to paper over.

What’s happening with GM and even more so with Chrysler this week is the end game of multiparty negotiations. Now that the UAW and CAW have agreed to what’s been demanded, the bondholders remain as the only holdouts.  The bondholders are all big banks (esp. JP Morgan Chase), pension funds, and hedge funds.  The negotiations have been pretty classic back and forth with the debtholders going for the maximum they can get, naturally.

In the case of Chrysler, we’ll know by Friday.  Fiat is slated to get a 25-35% stake in return for management and engines for small cars.  The facts that Fiat is not paying cash, and that the government pegged Chrysler’s survival to an alliance seems to put them in a strong position.  One issue appears to be that the UAW extracted as a condition of approving its divestment that Daimler agreed to pay $1 billion to Chrysler if it went into bankruptcy and defaulted on its pensions.  According to the NY Times, the government “reached an agreement” about this and other tax issues with Daimler, whatever that means.  So the banks are hanging in the breeze, the last to come to the table and seemingly holding few bargaining chips since their investment is essentially worth nothing if Chrysler liquidates.

The question about credit default swaps that came up at the GM news conferences adds a twist.  If bondholders do indeed have swaps as insurance, who is going to pay out the swaps if either company goes bust?  If it’s AIG, that means it’s you and me (since AIG is 80% owned by the government).

For the UAW, this has to be an excruciating moment.  The Canadian Auto Workers, historically much more militant and less inclined to concession bargaining, caved in saying the negotiations were “torturous and unfair” and they chose to “life to fight another day.”  In other words, the choice was agree or face bankruptcy and potential wipe out of pensions and contracts.  That the unions are on board ahead of time means (I hope) that they got the government(s) to commit to protecting their contracts and pensions.

At GM, the UAW appears to have agreed to a large minority stake in a company that is planning to fire about a third of their working membership.  No doubt those laid off will be disproportionately high seniority workers, accelerating the downward trend of auto workers’ pay and finalizing the equalization of labor costs between the Big Three and the transplants. The level of trust between rank and file UAW members and their international representatives is not necessarily high.  How with a union ownership stake effect that?

But as bad as it is, imagine the damage if this had gone down under Bush.  Right into bankruptcy court.  Contracts abrogated, pensions shunted off on the taxpayer.  It’s too soon to tell what will happen with the UAW.  Likely as not, they’ve done all they could.  But it may be time for a merger with the United Steel Workers.  Certainly, the Task Force is following the example of the USW in the ISG and other deals.  Those deals have their able critics, but in the words of the CAW, the union lived to fight another day.

History in the Mix

We’ve all been watching and reading the denunciations, from the right and the left, of Wall Street and Obama’s alleged complicity in enriching the rich.  History has become something of a motif in these “debates.”  For instance, conservatives claim that the New Deal had no impact, or made the Depression worse.  (Don’t let facts get in your way, folks.)  And more recently, we have a series of allegedly grassroots anti-tax “Tea Parties” that aim to harken back to the American Revolution.  (Contrary to MSM belief, evidence points to these “tea parties” being a premeditated astro turf project).

On the left there is the implication that Obama is failing to take the kind of bold actions that FDR took in the 1930s.  Here it’s worth recalling that many of Roosevelt’s early actions were largely symbolic, or repackaged extensions of Hoover policies.  The boldest moves toward regulation, especially the National Recovery Act had complex impacts, often empowering employers more than workers.  Many left wingers considered Roosevelt a tool of big business, or worse, an American fascist.  It was the “Second New Deal,” beginning in 1935, that brought us an effective labor law, and the famous public works of the WPA. (And it was the war that ended the Depression).

For your enjoyment, I offer this little ditty from the July 1933 issue of the New Pioneer, the Communist Party’s youth magazine.

The Spirit of ‘33

We celebrate July the Fouth
With patriotic glory–
But have we got enough to eat?
Oh, that’s another story!

Yankee Doodle, fight to win
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until a workers’ land we’re in
Yankee Doodle dandy

Our President, old Franklin D.
So busy with his new deal,
Forgetting the forgotten man,
Is helping bankers to steal.

Yankee Doodle, march right on,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until the long hard fight is won,
Yankee Doodle dandy

Morgan won’t pay income tax,
He hasn’t any money–
Will they put him into jail?
Come on, don’t be funny!

Yankee Doodle, shout on high,
Yankee Doodle dandy
We’re in this fight until we die
Yankee Doodle dandy

The bosses are in quite a mess,
They can’t find a solution–
Workers know the answer, though–
The answer’s Revolution!

Yankee Doodle, let ‘er go,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Here’s your friend and there’s your foe
Yankee Doodle dandy

by Sim Slim.

Here’s hoping Rush Limbaugh will pick this one up!  You can see an image of the page on my Flickr photostream.

You ought to give Iowa a try…

Justice moves slowly.  But in this case it was worth the wait.  In August 2007, an Iowa district court ruled the state’s Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.  Today, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld that ruling and same-sex marriage will begin in Iowa in three weeks.

To quote the court:

Therefore, with respect to the subject and purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons.  Plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, just like heterosexual couples.  Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities, just as it does for heterosexual couples.  Society benefits, for example, from providing same-sex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children and the power to make health care and end-of-life decisions for loved ones, just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples.

The decision explicitly moves to the forefront the distinction between civil and religious marriage.  After considering, and rejecting, each of the arguments against same-sex marriage the court turns to the “unspoken” argument, namely religion.  It was left unspoken because it is not constitutionally valid:  “Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them.  The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions.  Instead, the statute declares, ‘Marriage is a civil contract’ and then regulates that civil contract.” (p. 65).

The state is also required to protect the freedom of religion.  But there are religious people on both sides of the issue, the court writes.  Therefore, the state is obliged to avoid establishing any particular religious belief.

A religious denomination can still define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and a marriage ceremony performed by a minister, priest, rabbi, or other person ordained or designated as a leader of the person’s religious faith does not lose its meaning as a sacrament or other religious institution.  The sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the same meaning as those celebrated in the past.  The only difference is civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.  This result is what our constitution requires. (pp. 66-67)

And so, the battle returns to the streets.  As they did in California, those opposed to same-sex marriage will organize and campaign.  The difference, as I understand it, is that it will take much longer (perhaps 2 years or more) to get a constitutional amendment before the voters.  So far, the forces of reaction have done pretty well in these battles.  Have the marriage-equality forces learned their lesson in California?  At least in this case, the separation of church and state is up front in the debate.  That may win some libertarians. Time is on the the side of marriage equality.  That’s no guarantee.  But it does give some breathing space.

The right wing will want this before the voters in a major election year.  If it’s on the ballot in 2010, Obama may be tempted to avoid too much commitment.  It’s a state issue, as they say.  But I think marriage equality forces can make it easier for Obama to lend a hand.  They can be united.  They can be strategic, and they can do real organizing.  There is enough time to begin with low key dialogue and outreach.  If they begin that process now, prepare for the inevitable ballot issue, they can give Obama enough cover to come in and lend a hand.  The Prez respects organizing.  For once, let’s have the left do a better job organizing than the right.

Some links:

Des Moines Register Story and Editorial

In These Times

Focus on the Family doesn’t like it.