| |||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
After a certain amount of wandering around, Hapgood ended up playing a not insignificant role in the massive mine workers strike of 1922 from the base of Somerset County, PA, where he mostly provided assistance to miners and their families, including fund raising and creating public sympathy through writing articles for progressive publications. He became known in Progressive circles and developed friendships with any number of reformers. In addition, he became lifelong friends with John Brophy, a miner, working class intellectual, and UMW labor official. The capitulation of John Lewis, the head of the UMW, to the mine owners was disconcerting to the idealistic Hapgood, bringing home the facts that a union could be a personal fiefdom and that a just cause could be crushed.
The author suggests that this book should be required reading for not only college students taking on summer jobs with unions but also for those running those programs. They need to know, as Hapgood found out, that organizational demands of unions trump worker empowerment every time. The post-WWII labor framework rested on government sanctioned administrative processes, not worker activism. Though the radical politics of Hapgood placed him even further outside labor officialdom, he suppressed his idealism sufficiently to work on the CIO organizing drives of the mid-1930s, re-uniting with Lewis, and even became a regional director for the CIO in the later 1940s. But he was purged from his position in 1948 in the anti-Communist hysteria of the times. He was a longtime member of the socialist party, but had many friends in the CP.
Worker democracy is a constant theme of the book, but it is only vaguely identified. At times it seems to be worker voice within unions and at others within workplaces, although the extent of any empowerment in not made clear. The labor contracts that are generally negotiated under the NLRA legalistic framework are at least as restraining of workers as they are of giving workers any power. In fact, bargaining over wages and working conditions leaves employers free to make all general business decisions regardless of any harm to their workforces. It is hard to conceive of worker democracy as anything less than co-management.
Hapgood had few moments where he felt as though he really belonged to the working class and could make a difference. His life was a series of frustrations, which led to alcohol abuse over the last fifteen years of is life. He also had a complicated romantic affair with the labor radical Rose Posetta, which only added to his problems. He died at the early age of forty-nine in 1949.
Although Hapgood was not overly happy with the results of his efforts in the labor movement, it is difficult to even imagine students of the modern era being able to find the opportunities to immerse themselves in workers' struggles as did Hapgood. The political climate is so anti-labor and conservative that the mere fact of union survival is a precarious proposition. Perhaps we need some labor activists to come forward with the courage of a Powers Hapgood.
After a certain amount of wandering around, Hapgood ended up playing a not insignificant role in the massive mine workers strike of 1922 from the base of Somerset County, PA, where he mostly provided assistance to miners and their families, including fund raising and creating public sympathy through writing articles for progressive publications. He became known in Progressive circles and developed friendships with any number of reformers. In addition, he became lifelong friends with John Brophy, a miner, working class intellectual, and UMW labor official. The capitulation of John Lewis, the head of the UMW, to the mine owners was disconcerting to the idealistic Hapgood, bringing home the facts that a union could be a personal fiefdom and that a just cause could be crushed.
The author suggests that this book should be required reading for not only college students taking on summer jobs with unions but also for those running those programs. They need to know, as Hapgood found out, that organizational demands of unions trump worker empowerment every time. The post-WWII labor framework rested on government sanctioned administrative processes, not worker activism. Though the radical politics of Hapgood placed him even further outside labor officialdom, he suppressed his idealism sufficiently to work on the CIO organizing drives of the mid-1930s, re-uniting with Lewis, and even became a regional director for the CIO in the later 1940s. But he was purged from his position in 1948 in the anti-Communist hysteria of the times. He was a longtime member of the socialist party, but had many friends in the CP.
Worker democracy is a constant theme of the book, but it is only vaguely identified. At times it seems to be worker voice within unions and at others within workplaces, although the extent of any empowerment in not made clear. The labor contracts that are generally negotiated under the NLRA legalistic framework are at least as restraining of workers as they are of giving workers any power. In fact, bargaining over wages and working conditions leaves employers free to make all general business decisions regardless of any harm to their workforces. It is hard to conceive of worker democracy as anything less than co-management.
Hapgood had few moments where he felt as though he really belonged to the working class and could make a difference. His life was a series of frustrations, which led to alcohol abuse over the last fifteen years of is life. He also had a complicated romantic affair with the labor radical Rose Posetta, which only added to his problems. He died at the early age of forty-nine in 1949.
Although Hapgood was not overly happy with the results of his efforts in the labor movement, it is difficult to even imagine students of the modern era being able to find the opportunities to immerse themselves in workers' struggles as did Hapgood. The political climate is so anti-labor and conservative that the mere fact of union survival is a precarious proposition. Perhaps we need some labor activists to come forward with the courage of a Powers Hapgood.
|
