LaborFest

4 days ago

Man at Work Collection housed at the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering
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Masterworks from the Grohmann Museum – Google Arts & Culture

artsandculture.google.com

A selection of exceptionally beautiful and important paintings from the Man at Work Collection housed at the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Book on Coit Tower murals offers lessons on contemporary conversations about public art
datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/coit-tower-murals-robert-cherny-19844998

Brandon Yu November 4, 2024Updated: November 7, 2024, 11:24 am
S.F. State professor Robert W. Cherny has a new book, “The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco,” out Tuesday, Nov. 12. Photo: Sarah Cherny/University of Illinois Press
In 2017, the retired historian Robert W. Cherny found himself unwittingly thrust into the maelstrom of a national controversy.

Amid a public battle over whether a series of murals — some of which depicted America’s history of slavery and its genocide of Indigenous peoples — at George Washington High School ought to be removed and destroyed, Cherny had been called to take part in the San Francisco school board’s discussions. He had written a book on Victor Arnautoff, the late artist behind the murals, and could offer perspective on Arnautoff’s intent behind the works. When he did at the meetings, he was met with heated resistance.

“My book came out the same year that that whole thing erupted,” Cherny, a professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University, told the Chronicle. “And I was absolutely in the middle of it.”

The controversy, which received significant national media attention and ultimately ended with the murals staying intact, still baffles Cherny to this day. But it also, in some ways, led him to and foreshadowed the ideas in his latest book, “The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco.”

Shortly before Arnautoff created the works at George Washington High in the mid-1930s, he had been the technical director of and one of the artists behind the Coit Tower murals, the sprawling works that adorn the inside of the iconic building. Cherny’s book details their creation, and also their own strikingly similar brush with controversy and calls for destruction.

An officially designated San Francisco landmark and part of the National Register of Historic Places, the Coit Tower murals were created over several months in 1933 and 1934 by a group commissioned through the Public Works of Art Project, a Depression-era federal initiative meant to employ artists and help democratize art as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

“It produced just an incredible outpouring of public art,” Cherny said of the initiative. “That’s a key part of it: that the art was supposed to be in places where members of the public could easily see it, and it was supposed to be art that members of the public could easily relate to.”

The Coit Tower murals, in particular, became one of the crowning achievements of New Deal art. Featuring 28 murals created by some two dozen local artists, the project provides an immersive tableau of Depression-era life, depicting everything from agricultural labor to city living, the San Francisco harbor to the Chronicle newsroom.

“Just about anything you can think about, whether it’s work life or recreation life, is depicted there,” said organizer Jon Golinger, a friend of Cherny’s who spearheaded the efforts that resulted in the city’s restoration of the Coit Tower murals in 2014. “And that’s by design. The artists were given a theme of California life.”

Cherny’s book, though, also focuses on the controversy that the murals were plunged into after politicians and the media seized upon small portions of the murals that the artist Clifford Wight had painted. The outcry predominantly circled around a hammer and sickle image that, facing accusations of Communist propaganda, was ultimately removed.

At the time, San Francisco was caught up “in the middle of this enormous waterfront strike and then a general strike with all kinds of allegations that Communists were behind the strikes,” Cherny said. “Without that strike and without the accompanying red scare, some of (the mural’s imagery) would probably have just coasted right through, and nobody would’ve particularly noticed it.”

The uproar, reignited more than once across the years amid subsequent red scares, is just one iteration of an evergreen issue regarding public art, including Arnautoff’s murals at George Washington High School. Cherny noted that seeing the controversy over the Coit Tower murals with a sense of distance can offer a more clear-eyed lesson about contemporary responses to public art.

“Those controversies now seem something that tells us more about the time that the controversy took place than it tells us about the art,” he said. In that sense, Cherny adds, “art has to be understood as this kind of a historic artifact that is going to tell us interesting things about the time in which it was created and perhaps about ourselves today. But if we destroy it, it can never have that function.”
datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/coit-tower-murals-robert-cherny-19844998
The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco
By Robert W. Cherny
(University of Illinois Press; 216 pages; $22.95)

If not with Wight’s portions at Coit Tower, it’s a stance that, despite a messy battle in public, ultimately prevailed at George Washington High School, where Arnautoff’s murals remain untouched.

“The best of public art is not designed to make your eyes glaze over,” Golinger said. “It’s designed to make you think, and sometimes that might make you sad, might make you happy or laugh, but also could make you mad. And if it’s making you mad, it’s because it’s showing you reality, at least through the artist’s eyes.”

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer. … See MoreSee Less

Book on Coit Tower murals offers lessons on contemporary conversations about public art

datebook.sfchronicle.com

Robert W. Cherny’s new book details the history of the Coit Tower murals and its connection to the more recent national controversy at George Washington High School.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

How a Refuge on Rails Inspired Jazz Classics For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the railroad, particularly the elegant Pullman sleeping car, provided a “home away from home.”
www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/travel/armstrong-jazz-singers-trains-pullman.html?searchResultPosition=1

How a Refuge on Rails Inspired Jazz Classics For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the railroad, particularly the elegant Pullman sleeping car, provided a “home away from home.”

By Larry Tye
Oct. 28, 2024
Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.

In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.

In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.

“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”
ImageA man wearing a suit walks down the aisle of a train car. Two mean wearing suits are seated on one side, and another man is sleeping, lying down on a train seat.
Duke Ellington’s band members on a train in 1941. In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms.Credit…Otto F. Hess Collection / New York Public Library
The Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.”

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That the Pullman porters loved these jazzmen was a bonus, and the musicians grew to reciprocate that affection, playing their pianos, clarinets and trumpets late into the night in the closed capsule of the club car. The porters saw it as a quiet nod to them each time the Basie band queued up railroad-friendly tunes like “Midnight Freight,” “9:20 Special” and “Night Train.” Or when Armstrong played “Farewell to Storyville,” “Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train” and and the Ellington orchestra set toes tapping with “Choo-Choo,” “The Old Circus Train Turnaround Blues” or the last of which blends blaring saxophones and a singular trumpet to make listeners feel, as well as hear, the train hurtling down the tracks.

(Ellington’s signature song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was about the subway, not the railroad, and was composed by his protégé, Billy Strayhorn, not Duke.)

Armstrong said the greeting he got from the trainmen when he was leaving New Orleans for Chicago made him cherish them forever.

“All the Pullman porters and waiters recognized me because they had seen me playing on the tailgate wagons to advertise dances, or ‘balls’ as we used to call them. They all hollered at me saying, ‘Where you goin’, ‘Dipper?’,” Armstrong wrote in “Satchmo,” his second memoir.

He also knew that on return trips to his native Louisiana, unless he was renting his own carriages, he, like other African American people, would likely be banished to what he called the “James Crow cars.” These were the train compartments that were just behind the coal-stoked engine, with noxious fumes, limited seating, and no heaters, wash basins, flush toilets, water coolers, dining options or even a cushion to rest upon.

By contrast, arriving by Pullman — especially when the bands had prearranged to have their coaches park on a sidetrack during their full stay — meant a safe haven to return to after and even between performances. There’d be a warm meal waiting, along with a freshly laundered bed, friendly Black faces eager for the lowdown on that night’s activities and, when the bandsman was accompanied by a lady, the same discretion porters showed the fussy Brahmins of Boston and the fierce Goliaths of Wall Street during their lonely nights crossing the continent.

“On arrival in a city, the cars were parked on a convenient track, and connections were made for water, steam, sanitation and ice. This was our home away from home,” Ellington recalled in “Music is My Mistress.”

“Many observers would say, ‘Why, that’s the way the President travels!’ It automatically gained us respect,” he continued, “and removed the threat and anticipation of trouble.”

Two women dressed in fashionable coats stand on the platform of a train station in front of train car with the words “1st Class Pullman” painted on the side.
In the elegant Pullman sleeping cars, jazz musicians were served by fellow African Americans. They were provided the same service afforded wealthy white passengers and could truly relax while on the road.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To appreciate these jazzmen’s embrace of the Pullman experience, consider what the Armstrong band endured during a private bus tour through the South in 1931. According to a contemporaneous account in the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal, Armstrong and his mates refused the bus company’s reasonable request to change vehicles so theirs could be repaired, and “exhibited” six pistols to make their point, at which time the police carted them to jail. But the actual problem was twofold — the station master had decided the band’s shiny new Greyhound was “too nice” for the musicians, and that the wife of the band’s white manager was riding with them, violating more Southern mores.

“You’re in Memphis now,” one arresting officer said, “and we need some cotton-pickers.” A second, pointing to the Black musician sitting with the white woman, egged on his partner: “Why don’t you shoot him in the leg?” After everyone was booked, a third constable warned, “You ain’t gonna come down to Memphis and try to run Memphis — we’ll kill all you.”

So many were their challenges that, in later years, the bandleaders referred to themselves as the first Freedom Riders, a reference to the Black and white activists who, in 1961, protested the segregation of interstate buses by riding side-by-side through the separate and unjust South, with some nearly dying for their troubles.

By that time World War II had yielded to the Cold War, and big bands switched mostly to air travel for domestic flights and a combination of air and sea for international trips.

But these musical legends held onto their emotional bonds to the railroad. It evoked a warm nostalgia for their early days on the road, and always tied them to the history of Black freedom and locomotion. Trains figured in African-American spirituals, fueled the Great Migration and, in an earlier time, inspired enslaved peoples to dream of escaping north.

Duke would sit next to the window in his private sleeper in what appeared to be a trance, according to a 1944 profile in The New Yorker. He would stare for hours at telephone poles, listening to the metallic rhythm of the wheels, delighting as “the firemen play blues on the engine whistle — big, smeary things like a goddamn woman singing in the night.” All of which, he added, made him “a train freak,” as he demonstrated in his 1950 recording of “Build That Railroad:”

Larry Tye is an author whose latest book, “The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America,” looks at how these three maestros wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution. … See MoreSee Less

How a Refuge on Rails Inspired Jazz Classics

www.nytimes.com

For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the railroad, particularly the elegant Pullman sleeping…

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Resistance to a Backlash: Maryland Public Employees On Strike, 1968-1974
cosmonautmag.com/2024/11/resistance-to-a-backlash-maryland-public-employees-on-strike-1968-1974/
November 1, 2024

Emily Fox argues that a series of illegal strikes by Maryland state public employees between 1968 and 1974 provide key historical insight into the rise and fall of militant public sector unionism in the United States.

Picketers during the 1970 Garrett County, Maryland Road Workers Strike. (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)
Introduction
In 1935, employees of private companies in the US won the right to strike as part of a set of collective bargaining rights granted through the Wagner Act. Yet public employees across the country were denied that same basic labor right. Today, elected officials are completely within their rights to fire and replace people picking up garbage, fixing state roads, working in state hospitals, conducting public transit, and providing public services for the state if they choose to go on strike.

But in 1968, sanitation workers in Baltimore went on strike anyway, defying the mayor’s threat to fire them and disqualify their union from a recognition election. After just four days on strike, not only did AFSCME Local 44 end up winning union recognition, but they also won an increase in wages. When the Baltimore legislature passed a bill granting collective bargaining rights for city employees, public unions were confident that the no-strike clause included in the bill was meaningless. Robert Hastings, a representative from AFSCME international, said about the Baltimore law with certainty, “The fiat on the right to strike will not stop one.”1

Hastings was wrong. Without legal protections for public employees on strike, elected officials were able to get away with firing workers and punishing unions once the political context changed. In 1968, AFSCME Local 44 owed their success to the civil rights movement and the way they connected the demands of sanitation workers to racial justice. However, by the mid-1970s, the civil rights movement was nowhere near as strong. Conservatives had created an atmosphere, facilitated by the fiscal crisis and racial division, that was hostile to both public provision of services and public employees. The loss experienced by Baltimore striking public sector workers in 1974 is emblematic of this backlash.

Until recently, the history of public employee organizing has been largely ignored by scholars, particularly the history of public employees in Maryland.2 However, historians are beginning to take notice. In 2021, a historian Jane Berger published the book A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement, which focuses on AFSCME’s representation of African American workers in Baltimore and their collaboration with Black civil rights groups. She aptly shows how AFSCME’s large Black membership, and its association with both civil rights unrest and government spending on public services made their union specifically a target for the conservative, racialized backlash in the mid 1970s.3

This article charts the development of public employee organizing and the backlash to it in Maryland during the years 1968 to 1974. It begins with the sanitation strike in 1968, which demonstrates the immense success Maryland public employees experienced through their collaboration with the civil rights movement. Then, I describe the failed Baltimore municipal strike of 1974, and analyze how it was associated with the national backlash against public services and public employees. I argue that the success of public employee unions in Maryland greatly depended on the surrounding political context. Finally, I discuss the Garrett County Workers strike of 1970. Largely forgotten until recently, it was the longest public employee strike in US history, and demonstrates an example of how Maryland workers across urban-rural and racial divides united in the face of a hostile political context.

Sanitation Workers in Baltimore: 1968
Maryland public sector workers’ first ever successful strike was in April 1968. Almost two thousand municipal sanitation and sewer workers walked off the job, demanding higher wages and union recognition with AFSCME Local 44, the union for Baltimore city workers. This strike represents the immunity public sector unions felt to laws prohibiting strikes in the 1960s, and sparked the public employee union movement in Maryland. The story also shows how crucial the civil rights movement was to securing wins for public sector workers by defining the strike as a racial issue.

Baltimore’s last experience with a strike had been in 1953, when sanitation workers, school janitors, street cleaners, and other manual workers stayed home from work for fifteen days. Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. refused to concede to their union’s demands and threatened to fire the workers if they did not end their strike. The strikers retreated, returning to their work, and their affiliate union at the time, the Teamsters, lost their certification. With that, the mayor successfully broke the strike. For the more than 10 years that followed, there was no strike activity. It wasn’t until 1964 when AFSCME started organizing city workers that a strike again became possible.4

In 1968, the Mayor of Baltimore was Thomas D’Alesandro III, the son of D’Alesandro Jr.. On the first day of the sanitation workers’ strike on September 5, 1968, he used the same strategies his father had. He threatened to disqualify AFSCME from a future union election, suspended dues check-off for members of the union, and issued an injunction against the workers, and he threatened to arrest the leaders of the strike. This time, the striking workers would not back down, even as the streets filled with garbage. Instead of returning to work, garbage collectors picketed city hall with signs that read, “Injunctions don’t collect garbage,” and threatened to escalate the strike by including workers from other city departments.5 One day later, 300 sewer workers and 150 highway workers joined the strike. The number of employees on the picket line reached 1,750.6 A majority of the workers were African American. Like the famous strike in Memphis, sanitation workers carried signs saying “I Am a Man,” showing that they were not simply after higher wages, but also dignity and respect.7

At the time, AFSCME was working closely with civil rights groups across the country, who saw the connection between economic inequality in the US and racial injustice. Just three months before the ‘68 strike in Baltimore, the Poor People’s Campaign, which was organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), held a rally in Washington D.C. and encouraged members of AFSCME nationwide to go on strike. “You can stop this city if you want to. You have the power,” said Rev. Andrew Young, then executive director of the SCLC, to a crowd of African American union members.8

Ernest Crofoot, the Executive Director of AFSCME Council 67, the association of Maryland county and municipal unions, and Jerry Wurf, the president of AFSCME’s international union attended the rally and took that message to Baltimore.9 And, stop the city they did. Three months later, almost 2,000 workers were on strike and the streets of Baltimore were piled with uncollected, rotting garbage. When the mayor and his associate met with striking workers at City Hall, they proposed that the sanitation workers go back to work and “give the Mayor a chance to give you justice.” The city officials had to leave the room quickly after the crowd of striking sanitation workers shouted them down.10

While the workers were militant and devoted to their cause, what ultimately won the strike for AFSCME in 1968 was their ability to link their struggle to the civil rights movement. The mayor sought to define the strike as solely an union recognition issue, but on September 7, two days into the strike, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and the Urban League, held a meeting and decided to come out in support of the strikers. The groups planned to fight the injunction in court, join the sanitation workers on the picket line, raise funds for the strikers and their families, and develop new strike tactics. The public support from civil rights groups lent broader overtones of racial justice to a strike that had previously appeared to be a question of economics and union jurisdiction.11

The two unions with whom AFSCME was competing at the time, the Laborer’s International Union (LIU) and Classified Municipal Employee Association (CMEA), had committed to crossing the picket line. However, after these unions learned of civil rights groups’ endorsement of the strikers, they reluctantly advised their members to stay home. The mayor also began to worry that his hardline response to the strike could harm his record on civil rights in an increasingly African American city.12 He frantically met with five civil rights leaders the next day in an effort to dispel what he called “racial overtones.” At a press conference, the city solicitor declared “race has no place in this issue. Unfortunately one of the unions injected race in an effort to support its cause.” In response, P. J. Ciampa, AFSCME Maryland’s Executive Director, remarked: “We have not injected a racial issue, we have taken the mask off it.”13

On the morning of September 9, the strike was over and the sanitation workers had won. City officials and union leaders had spent the entire night bargaining and the result was an agreement by the city to double the raise for city workers, restore dues-checkoff for AFSCME Local 44, and re-qualify them for the upcoming union election, which they would go on to win along with a collective bargaining bill. Members of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and civil rights leaders were also present at the negotiations and played a crucial role in serving as intermediaries between the rival unions and the city.14

Baltimore’s strike in 1968 was characteristic of the invincibility many public sector unions felt during that decade. After just four days on strike, Mayor D’Alesandro’s injunction, threat to fire the workers, and decertification of dues checkoff vanished into thin air. The attitude of public employee unions during this time can be summed up by Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO’s secretary treasurer, who announced at the time: “the only ‘illegal’ strike is an unsuccessful one by a very weak union.”15 Thus, union leaders were not worried that Baltimore’s municipal collective bargaining bill did not allow them the right to strike.

Baltimore’s Changing Political Context: The 1974 Strike
AFSCME’s invincibility to strike laws in the 1960s relied on a favorable political context, but this environment did not last. While their association with the civil rights movement helped them win their strike in 1968, it also placed a target on their back for conservatives. By the mid 1970s, they didn’t win strikes any more. As unemployment and inflation both increased, an increasing proportion of workers’ wages were diminished. As a result, public sector militancy in Baltimore and nationwide only increased. The number of US public employee strikes reached historic highs in the mid-1970s. In 1958, there were 15 government employee strikes in the US; by 1975, that number hit 478.16 While in 1968, it was politically risky for elected officials to take action against striking sanitation workers, public sector unions essentially became a political punching bag a decade later. The strikes launched by public sector unions in 1974 demonstrate the rapidly changing political atmosphere that public sector unions were forced to confront.

Four months before AFSCME went on strike in 1974, members of the Public School Teachers Association (PTSA) and the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) launched a dramatic month-long strike. About 84% of Baltimore city’s students and teachers were absent from classes between February 3rd and March 5th, 1974, demanding an 11% raise, along with other grievances.17 The PTSA leadership was put under pressure to end the strike when the city hit the union with heavy fines. For every day the illegal strike continued, the PTSA was required to pay a whopping $15,000/day, as well as $1,000/day for its president Karl Boone. Afraid of the fines and for the future of its union, the PTSA leadership decided to undermine the members and end the strike with an agreement by the city to raise wages a mere 0.5%.18 Arthur Milburn, an athletic director at Edmondson high school who continued to strike, concisely summed up the feeling of the teachers: “I gave up so much for so little.”19 In August of that year, both BTU and PTSA would go on to lose collective bargaining rights due to their facilitation of the illegal strike.20

AFSCME city employees were supportive of their fellow government workers throughout the teachers’ strike. They even threatened to take workers off the job in other sectors to put more pressure on the city government for the teachers’ wage demands. As Ernest Crofoot, an AFSCME official, explained, “If we get the same kind of offers from the city the teachers have, we may all be in the same bucket, real quick.”21 Indeed, later that year, the same meager raises that the teachers had won were presented to the city employees represented by AFSCME. The contracts were initially unanimously approved by 700 members of AFSCME Local 44. Despite this, a group of sanitation workers staged a wildcat strike in opposition to wage increases they deemed too low; the cost of living had risen by 10%, but they were being offered a 6% wage increase.22

Initially when union members walked out on July 1, 1974, Raymond Clarke, president of AFSCME Local 44 and former sanitation worker, encouraged the strikers to return to work, as the union had already voted for the contract. Despite his intervention, the protests continued. Accusing their local president of selling out the members by agreeing to the contract, striking workers hung an effigy of Mr. Clarke. The union leadership quickly reversed its tact and held another vote on the contract. This time the contract was voted down. The local, state, and national AFSCME then came out in full endorsement of the strike.23

By July 9, 1974, nine days after the strike began, 3,000 city employees across departments were off the job, including highway workers, sewer workers, parks and recreation workers, and zookeepers.24 One group of state workers also on strike were 300 city jail guards, who left the inmates supervised by a skeleton crew of jail administrators. As a result, incarcerated people could not attend their trials at the city courts, and jail residents formed an “Inmates Council” to oppose the striking jail guards. On July 13, the Inmates’ Council filed a class action lawsuit against AFSCME Local 44 and the city government for violating their due process, neglecting their medical treatment, and leaving them in unsanitary conditions.25 One of the inmates, Vaughn Thomas, declared, “We can govern ourselves.”26 The next day, 84 people incarcerated in juvenile detention took four supervisors hostage and stole their keys, opening cell gates. State police were sent in to help quell the revolt, since the city police were also on strike.27 AFSCME Local 1195, the union for Baltimore police officers, had also rejected the city’s offer and walked off their jobs on July 12. The Baltimore Sun reported citywide looting and arson in the days that followed.

Finally, after fifteen dramatic days in Baltimore, leaders of AFSCME, under threat of imprisonment if the strike did not end, and city leaders agreed to give the workers a 19.25% raise over two years. Consequences for the two unions were severe, though. The police commissioner fired all of the striking officers, leaving the leadership of AFSCME Local 1195 permanently defunct. The city fined AFSCME Local 44 $90,000.28 Mayor Schaefer also maintained that he would cut jobs and public services to account for the wage increase. He promised that he would take a harsher stance in the future on illegal strikes.29

Unlike 1968, civil rights groups were nowhere to be found at the negotiations. Instead, sanitation workers negotiated alongside the majority white police union. AFSCME leaders had insisted on this to ensure that raises were not unfairly distributed between their white and black members.30However, this also meant they had lost this targeted political and racial angle that they once had, when the civil rights movement was still strong.

Weeks later, the AFL-CIO withdrew their support for Governor Mandel’s re-election campaign for retaliating against striking AFSCME members in Baltimore. The governor called their bluff. He accused Jerry Wurf, who was becoming increasingly politically unpopular, of being “irresponsible,” and fired back that Wurf could “keep his support and his endorsement too.” Replacements for striking workers were already on the way.31 Later that year, Mandel won his re-election by a landslide, without AFSCME’s support.

Anatomy of a Backlash
The 1974 strike was not just a turning point for Baltimore state workers, but public sector unions nationwide. Conservatives used what happened in Baltimore to scaremonger about the havoc public unions would wreak on the country. The fiscal crisis and a federal response of budget cuts helped facilitate this backlash. Austerity that trickled down to the states meant allocation of the city budget was a zero-sum game, where public sector wages and services were pitted against taxpayer dollars.32 Conservatives also included public sector union strikes in their racialized, anti-Communist propaganda campaign about cracking down on welfare and urban crime.

The fiscal crisis that started in the 1970s and the federal government’s response was a death-dealing blow to public unions. As Joseph McCartin has pointed out, while private employers who fired and replaced striking workers could be accused of placing profits ahead of worker’s rights, government officials could protect themselves from these accusations by claiming fiscal responsibility.33 State and local government budgets grew tight as the flow of federal dollars decreased, and governors and mayors could argue that there was only so much money to go around when workers demanded wages consistent with the cost of living. Bringing up an increase in taxes to fund wage demands of striking workers was sure to alienate at least some of the public. Worse, conservatives blamed public sector unions for worsening “stagflation” — inflation and unemployment — by demanding higher wages, greedily prioritizing their own special interest above the interest of the economy.34 They were an easy scapegoat for politicians who wanted to shift the blame away from their own macroeconomic policies.

The backlash was not just an economic one; it was a racial one as well. Most people have heard of the caricature of the “welfare queen,” a lazy, specifically African American woman who is using up taxpayer dollars to buy luxury items. On the other side of that were welfare providers, many of whom were also black women and who were represented by AFSCME in Baltimore.35 During the 1960s, civil rights organizers in Baltimore had prioritized moving African Americans into government employment, as they had just recently achieved more equitable hiring laws. As a result, AFSCME’s members in Baltimore were disproportionately Black and female.36 By 1970, half of Black male college graduates and more than 60 percent of college educated Black women were public employees, compared with 35 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women.37Public employees were therefore included in the target groups for conservatives’ racialized scaremongering, alongside welfare recipients.

The chaos that ensued in the 1974 municipal strike in Baltimore only played into the white middle class fears that conservatives had provoked. Spiro Agnew, the former governor of Maryland, was now the Vice President of the United States. He had run on a “tough on crime” campaign ripe with “dog whistle” politics that appealed to white Americans’ racial hatred. Known for his crackdown on city uprisings after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, he used his national prominence to characterize Baltimore as a violent and fearful city filled with African American derelicts and criminals.38 Seeing police officers and jail guards, normally the bastions of protection against these groups, walking off the job in Baltimore was perfect fodder for right-wingers who were looking for any chance they could to siphon white voters away from unions and the Democratic Party. Commercial looting, jail revolts, and rotting garbage in the streets confirmed the fears of the white middle and upper class. The workers they had once associated with Martin Luther King Jr were now associated with urban degeneration, criminal activities, and even revolutionary Communism. Elected officials, including in Baltimore, worried their cities would continue to be stripped of their tax base as white flight to the suburbs persisted. Allowing public unions to continue their militant actions and win illegal strikes did not help facilitate the perception of “law and order” that mayors wanted in order to keep white people in the city.

Ralph de Toledano, the founder of the magazine National Review, was a leading crusader against public employee unions and the Democratic mayors who he claimed allowed AFSCME to “let our cities burn.”39 He used the 1974 strike in Baltimore specifically to stoke fears nationwide, publishing op-eds about AFSCME Maryland in places as far as Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he argued that Jerry Wurf was being influenced by revolutionary socialism. Asserting that public employee unions were “what Lenin called a ‘strategic minority,’” he argued that AFSCME’s strikes were impactful, “not only because its members are involved in a vital civil function but also because they can bring organized pressure on the level of political power.”40 AFSCME had become too powerful. Not only did they want to burn down cities, but they also wanted to take your tax dollars to advance socialism.

During this time, AFSCME aimed to pass a National Public Employee Relations Act (NPERA), which would have created a collective bargaining framework similar to the NLRA for public sector workers.41 The 1974 strike, along with other chaotic strikes across the country, helped make AFSCME into a political pariah. Now, harsh treatment of public sector unions was an indication of an elected official’s commitment to fiscal responsibility, law and order, and anti-Communism. With that, the window of opportunity for public sector workers had closed.

Garrett County Road Workers Strike of 1970
The target audience for this backlash were people like the residents of Garrett County, Maryland. The westernmost county in Maryland, it was close to 100% white, overwhelmingly Republican, and cherished tradition and “family values.” It also happened to be the location of the longest public employee strike in US history.

Road maintenance workers, who were members of the Garrett County Road Employees Association (GCREA), formed in 1957, approached AFSCME in 1969, one year after the sanitation workers’ strike in 1968.42 Many of the road workers were eligible for food stamps and public assistance despite their status as public employees. Though they worked alongside state employees, the salaries the county men received were drastically lower.43 Seeing a connection between the struggles of the sanitation workers and their own, they believed their prospects to improve workplace conditions with professional organizers and negotiators from AFSCME would be better. Though they already had their own union, they launched a campaign to affiliate as AFSCME Local 1834. However, two out of the three Republican county commissioners refused to recognize AFSCME: Hubert Friend and Ross Sines.44

Though the county had previously recognized the GCREA, they refused to recognize AFSCME, arguing that they were protecting Garrett County from the “outside influence” of union bureaucracy in Baltimore and Washington.45 When AFSCME in Baltimore planned a car caravan on June 6th, 1970 to express support and deliver food to striking workers, some residents were upset by the appearance of African Americans in Garrett County. The area was close to entirely white. The county commissioners of the strike tried to use AFSCME’s association with Black Baltimoreans against the Garrett County road workers.46 Mr. Sines, one of the anti-union commissioners, told a reporter at one point, “Put in your paper there was colored here,” referring to the black AFSCME officials who came to support the strikers.47 He was aiming to stoke racial resentment to lose the workers sympathy from the public.

The road workers faced stiff opposition from the commissioners, who fired them all two weeks after the strike began in April. Regardless, they were militantly devoted to their cause. Their strike had a 100% participation rate. Even the 5 out of 139 workers who were not union members, stayed home from work.48

Militancy only grew. In June, after two months on strike, the road workers began setting off dynamite at the anti-union county commissioners’ homes. They also bombed the roads, aiming to exacerbate the need for their own re-employment.49 When non-union employees were brought in to replace the striking workers in August 1970, there was a tense face-off between two huge crowds of men. Union members carried bats, whittled sticks, and another brought a .22 revolver. The local union president said of the confrontation, “You ever see a bunch of wild hillbillies? Well, you are going to see some this morning.”50 Fearing violence, the commissioners backed down on sending replacements temporarily.51

For more than seven months, the anti-union commissioners never backed down, maintaining that Garrett County residents were opposed to AFSCME and opposed to the strike. But in the elections in the fall of 1970, Garrett County residents voted them out.52 The new commissioners, all three Democrats, recognized AFSCME immediately and gave the striking workers their jobs back.53 The election of these Democrats was unique for Garrett County, which has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since the Civil War.54

This strike is not just significant because it was the longest public employee strike in US history. Garrett County residents were the kinds of people the conservatives who facilitated the backlash to public employee unions tried to appeal to. Instead of being scared away by public employee strikes in Baltimore, Garrett County residents saw connections between the problems faced by the Baltimore sanitation workers and their own. As an open letter written by the Garrett workers union declared in response to their opposition, “Hitler’s tactics will not work in this day and—we’ll prove it to you on election day, September 15… We resent your implications that we are simple-minded folk. We know what is going on in today’s world. It is people like you, Commissioners Sines and Friend and the mere handful of your misguided, non-thinking followers who are behind the times—way, way behind.”55

Conclusion
In 1968, one of the main reasons public employees were able to win illegal strikes was because the civil rights movement was still strong. They worked closely with racial equity groups when sanitation workers went on strike, and elected officials worried that firing and replacing their workers could result in political fallout. But by 1974, the civil rights movement had declined, and conservatives were able to use the chaotic events of that year’s strike to associate public employee unions with urban crime. The fiscal crisis only furthered an atmosphere of scarcity that was ripe for racial animosity and anti-Communist scaremongering.

The story of the Garrett County strike is important to tell as an example of when attempts at racial scaremongering failed and class solidarity prevailed. Conservatives used the atmosphere of scarcity to push propaganda which claimed that if Black people’s material conditions were improving, then whites must be losing. Garrett County workers refused to play in the racial zero sum game and saw how everyone could benefit from workers’ rights and public services. Their story shows that an alternative was available to the backlash: class solidarity, which trumped racialized fear mongering.

Until recently, the 1970 Garrett County road workers strike had been largely forgotten, even though it was the longest lasting public employee strike in US history. In July 2021, the first commemoration of the strike took place, after residents of Garrett County petitioned the state for almost a decade to put up a historical road marker. One of the people who was crucial to bringing this history back to light was Len Shindel, a Garrett county resident and longtime union activist. In the Garrett County Republican story covering the marker’s commencement ceremony he was quoted as saying, “Let’s never forget the precious truths they left us with — that the only way to improve the lives of working families is to support one another and to defeat those who would manipulate us into hating on other working people. That is how we will honor their legacy.”56 … See MoreSee Less

Resistance to a Backlash: Maryland Public Employees On Strike, 1968-1974 – Cosmonaut

cosmonautmag.com

Emily Fox argues that a series of illegal strikes by Maryland state public employees between 1968 and 1974 provide key historical insight into the rise and fall of militant public sector unionism in t…

LaborFest

3 weeks ago

‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop
In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?
www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/movies/youth-hard-times-review-working-till-they-drop.html?searchResul…

A man playing a guitar on a sleeper bus.
Wang Bing’s second entry in his “Youth” trilogy depicts the migrants who trek to Huzhou City, China.Credit…Icarus Films
By Nicolas Rapold
Oct. 31, 2024
Youth (Hard Times)NYT Critic’s PickDirected by Wang BingDocumentaryNot Rated3h 47m
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Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairs, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.

It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.

“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.

Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.

Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”

Getting paid is a grueling scrimp, as workers huddle together to bargain with their boss for pennies more per a piece of apparel. One manager goes into hiding after a street fight, leaving bills unpaid and prompting landlords to cut electricity to kick out workers.

Tucked amid these sequences are hovering threats to solidarity and survival: harrowing stories of police brutality, incongruously told by a worker curled up with his blaring laptop. He asks a question that could be asked around the world: When you have no rights, what good is money?

End credits explain dryly that Zhili’s young laborers make children’s clothes (mostly for the domestic market). By then, Wang has concluded his second “Youth” film as he did the first, with workers back in the airy green countryside. It’s not necessarily a happy ending, based on what we have seen and learned, but it feels like home and a rest — for now.

Youth (Hard Times)
Not rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 47 minutes. In theaters. … See MoreSee Less

‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop

www.nytimes.com

In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?

LaborFest

3 weeks ago

Nov 20204 UK Historical Materialism Conference
www.historicalmaterialism.org/event/twenty-first-annual-historical-materialism-london-conference/
TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE

COUNTERING THE PLAGUE: FORCES OF REACTION AND WAR AND HOW TO FIGHT THEM

7th Nov 2024 12:00 – 10th Nov 2024 7:00
SOAS, Russell Square, Central London
COUNTERING THE PLAGUE:

FORCES OF REACTION AND WAR AND HOW TO FIGHT THEM

7–10 NOVEMBER 2024

SOAS, Russell Square, Central London
For inquiries contact: conference@historicalmaterialism.org
DRAFT PROGRAMME

You can download draft programme here … See MoreSee Less

Twenty-First Annual Conference – Historical Materialism

www.historicalmaterialism.org

Countering the Plague: Forces of Reaction and War and How to Fight Them 7–10 November 2024 Registration is open and Draft Programme is out SOAS, Russell Square, Central London For inquiries contact:…

LaborFest

4 weeks ago

Inmate Labor Tests the Limits on ‘Involuntary Servitude’ A work-release program for Alabama prisoners provides labor for corporations and income for the state. Lawsuits are challenging its constitutionality.
www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/business/economy/prison-labor-alabama-hyundai.html
By Talmon Joseph SmithPhotographs by Audra Melton
Reporting from Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala.

Oct. 26, 2024
In the back of a nondescript industrial park on the outskirts of Montgomery, Ala., past the corner of Eastern Boulevard and Plantation Way, there is a manufacturing plant run by Ju-Young, a car-part supplier for Hyundai. On a Tuesday in May, about half of the workers there — roughly 20 — were prisoners.
Listen to this article with reporter commentary
They were contracted to the company by the Alabama Department of Corrections as part of a “work-release” day labor program for inmates who, according to the state, have shown enough trustworthiness to work outside prison walls, alongside free citizens.

The inmates bused there by the state make up just one crop of the thousands of imprisoned people sent to work for private businesses — who risk disciplinary action if they refuse.

Sitting against a chain-link fence under the shade of a tree in the company parking lot, commiserating over small talk and cigarettes with fellow assembly workers, one of the imprisoned men, Carlos Anderson, argued that his predicament was simple. He could work a 40-hour week, at $12 an hour — and keep a small fraction of that after the state charges transportation and laundry fees, and takes a 40 percent cut of pretax wages — or he could face working for nothing at the prison.

Under Alabama prison rules, there are thin lines between work incentives, forced labor and “involuntary servitude” — which reforms to the Alabama Constitution in 2022 banned. From the viewpoint of Mr. Anderson and more than a dozen other Alabama inmates interviewed by The New York Times, the ultimate message, in practice, is straightforward: Do this, or else.

“You have no choice,” said Mr. Anderson, 43, who has served 15 years of a 20-year felony sentence for a marijuana trafficking conviction in 2009, and has been contracted out to Ju-Young for about a year.

“If you don’t,” he added, “they’re going to send you on back to the camp and you get rolled up with a disciplinary charge” — like denial of parole, having “good time” revoked, which prolongs incarceration, or being made to work without pay at prison facilities.

The men hanging out with Mr. Anderson in the parking lot — who live with him up the road at a low-security corrections facility for work-release-eligible inmates — nodded in agreement. Most declined to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation.

An employee at the Ju-Young plant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Anderson’s description of the work environment for inmates, including the implicit threat of punishment, was correct. Representatives of Ju-Young did not respond to requests for comment.
ImageA road leading up to a building with metal siding with a large yellow excavator beside it.
The manufacturing plant run by Ju-Young, a car-part supplier for Hyundai, on the outskirts of Montgomery, Ala.
Work-release inmates housed at the lower-security camps generally live in fear of being sent back to the state’s more dangerous medium- and high-security prisons. The U.S. Justice Department sued the Alabama Department of Corrections in 2020, accusing it of unsafe conditions of confinement, failing to protect prisoners from violence, excessive force by guards, overcrowding and understaffing. A trial is expected to begin in May.

Qualifying for the lower-security prison facilities is a ticket out. And the nominal hourly wage is comparable to what the plant pays outside workers. Yet life on work-release has its own trade-offs. And the incentive system for all parties involved is clear.

Businesses get laborers who cannot organize for better pay or conditions and cannot quit without risking a greater loss of their freedom.

The Department of Corrections’ 40 percent cut of work-release workers’ pretax gross earnings — which it says is meant “to assist in defraying the cost” of incarceration — gives an estimated $450 million annual boost to state coffers, on top of the taxpayer dollars allocated to the prison system. This helps shore up the fiscal budget of the low-tax state.

Kelly Betts, a representative of the Department of Corrections, said, “The work-release programs are instrumental to the success of inmates preparing for release back into the community.”

But critics say the system perpetuates the racist legacy of “convict leasing,” which lasted in Alabama from 1875 until 1928. It forced state prisoners to do uncompensated work for private companies, which then kicked back lease payment fees to the state.

‘It’s an Illusion of Choice’

For centuries, a penal exception clause in the U.S. Constitution has played a substantial role in labor markets and prison networks. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That language became the legal foundation for “convict leasing” systems across Alabama and the nation, which have been technically eliminated since the end of the Jim Crow era in the 1960s.

Prison labor, however, remains common, from California to Texas to New York, with various rules and regulation regarding pay. Across the country, state and federal prisoners earn 13 to 52 cents per hour on average, producing about $11 billion worth of goods and services each year, according to an estimate from the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Unpaid labor for inmates is still allowed in Alabama and a few other states. In Alabama, unpaid internal prison work can be assigned to those who have not qualified for or been assigned to work-release: yard work, janitorial services, cooking and laundry duty. Some inmates work for state and local entities, at tasks like road maintenance, for about $2 a day — the rate Alabama set for prison laborers in 1927.

“I don’t think we have gotten rid of convict leasing,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist and the director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School. “The very nature of people profiting from prisoners is related to convict leasing. It’s an illusion of choice — there’s no real consent that they can offer.”
Image
Six people sitting and standing near a cement staircase in a parking lot outside a building as another person climbs the stairs between them.
Taking a break outside the Ju-Young plant.
During the 2022 election cycle, Alabama was one of four states that tightened their bans on involuntary servitude to remove exceptions for convicts. It is now banned without qualification.

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But that has not ended the legal and philosophical battle over inmate labor.

A lawsuit filed in May by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing people incarcerated in Alabama prisons, argued that inmates were “forced by the State of Alabama to labor against their will” and that the new state ban on involuntary servitude has rendered the current prison labor system unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs requested the nullification of an executive order and a bill signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2023, saying it was “in defiance of the newly ratified constitution.” The two measures collectively tightened definitions of “good time” violations, clarified the Department of Corrections’ authority to directly revoke good-time credits for “refusal to work,” paid or unpaid, and roughly doubled the time it takes for a prisoner to build such credits.

The executive order followed an informal labor strike inside the state prison system that ended shortly after nonprofits working with the prisoners reported that strikers were facing retaliation. (The prison laborers had various demands, including the establishment of parole criteria that would mandate release from prison if met.)

In a motion in June to dismiss the lawsuit, an assistant attorney general for Alabama said unpaid labor at prison facilities constituted “mandatory chores,” reasserting that “slavery and involuntary servitude do not exist” in the state’s prison system.

“True, prisoners may have some privileges temporarily suspended for shirking their duties,” the motion said, “but the law is clear that the threat of losing a privilege does not transform normal housekeeping work into involuntary servitude.”

On Aug. 1, a judge granted the dismissal, ruling that “the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction due to sovereign immunity” — a legal doctrine that protects governments from lawsuits without their consent.

“Our clients intend to appeal the dismissal order,” said Emily Early, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group filed a notice of appeal in the Alabama Civil Court of Appeals on Sept. 9.

Separately, the center joined in sending a complaint to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Sept. 30 that requests “immediate attention” to the “coercion” of imprisoned U.S. laborers and that calls on the body to “investigate, and visit, the Alabama Department of Corrections and Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections.”

A ‘Question for Debate’

Several legal scholars worry that broad applications of “sovereign immunity” doctrines could make constitutional law subservient to the will of states’ governors. But some lawyers and criminologists believe that “modern slavery” arguments about prison labor remain a stretch.

“It seems like a question for debate rather than one where you caught someone doing something illegal,” said Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation.

Characterizing prison work as forced labor is wrongheaded, he said, because most inmates who qualify for paid work earn that classification based on positive credits for behavior. “In other words, it’s a privilege,” he said, better than some of the other alternatives behind bars.
“And from the perspective of the inmate,” he added, “if they don’t do it, they’re going to get nothing.”
Image
Two people walk toward a wooden building with trees around it, seen from across a street.
A low-security facility outside Montgomery, Ala., where work-release inmates are housed.
Mr. Bushway’s view is widely held among lawyers and judges throughout the country, which is why the legal path remains unclear for those who hoped that Alabama’s constitutional change would prompt immediate labor reforms.

The state court’s reasoning in its August ruling, for instance, may not bode well for a separate federal lawsuit against Alabama filed in December.

The plaintiffs in that case — current and former inmates, labor unions and a civil rights group — seek an injunction that would end “forced labor,” release inmates who they say have met parole qualifications, and require the state to end wage garnishments, allowing workers to keep what they earn working in the prison system.
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The labor union plaintiffs — the Union of Southern Service Workers, the Service Employees International Union and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union — argue that the use of prison labor also undermined the legal right of unions to bargain and organize workers.

Specifically, they argue in the lawsuit that union organizing drives at corporations using prison labor were stymied by prison labor “because work-release employees could not enter into binding contracts” like free colleagues who work by their side. And they add that “not being able to represent all workers” at a given plant or other workplace depresses wages and working conditions and harms the interests of union members.

The state has moved to dismiss the federal lawsuit. A judge’s decision is pending. The Department of Corrections said it did not comment on ongoing litigation.

According to the federal lawsuit, over 100 public agencies and about 575 companies in Alabama have used imprisoned people for labor since 2018.

Along with food processors, auto parts companies are among the most prominent users of work-release prison labor in the state.

Ju-Young, which makes fenders for Hyundai Motors, is not the automaker’s only supplier reliant on prison labor. Another is SL Alabama, in Elba, which provides Hyundai with “lamp systems” — parts for high beams, brake lights and taillights.

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, as many as 83 state inmates have worked for SL Alabama, with at least 53 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year. As many as 97 Alabama inmates worked for Ju-Young between Jan. 1, 2018, and Sept. 7, 2023, the lawsuit said, with at least 61 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year.

The Department of Corrections declined to provide The Times with its own estimate.

An Injury Toll

Mark Anthony Miller, 58, has served 20 years of a life sentence triggered by a “three strikes” law — for felony charges including marijuana possession, burglary and receiving stolen property. He is a contract worker for Ju-Young. Assigned to handle heavy machinery and objects, he was injured on the job in the spring, and says he now can’t sleep on his back.

“If you get hurt out here, you’re screwed,” Mr. Miller said, speaking on his break near the parking lot of a Ju-Young plant. Usually injured prisoners are told, by either correctional staff members or plant supervisors, to “get back out there and be quiet,” he said. Two other inmates, standing nearby while on their break, agreed.

Civil rights groups argue that a lack of proper medical care is common in the Alabama Department of Corrections system.

Thirty-seven Alabama inmates (not including Mr. Miller) filed an unsuccessful motion in 2022 to join the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state prison system regarding unsafe conditions. They asserted that after the 2022 prison labor strike, inmates “became subjected to limited food provision, both in quantity and quality, and change in medication” and “medical equipment policy.”

The judge ruled that adding litigation over medical and food issues, which were not central to the 2020 lawsuit, would “unduly delay” the proceedings.

Hyundai and its suppliers faced previous scrutiny from the U.S. government over labor practices — though for child labor, not prison labor violations. In 2022, the Department of Labor ruled that three of Hyundai’s direct suppliers, including SL Alabama, had violated child labor provisions.

Still, the tension between the Alabama Constitution and Hyundai’s indirect use of prison labor has created an awkward balancing act for the company — which says in its mission statement, “We partner with like-minded suppliers to help us grow.”

Regarding the lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of Alabama prison labor, a spokesman for Hyundai told The New York Times that “while Hyundai is not a party to the lawsuits, we are aware of the allegations,” adding: “Hyundai does not condone or tolerate violations of labor law. Consistent with the standards and values to which we hold ourselves as a company, we mandate that our suppliers and business partners strictly adhere to the law, and we take reports of alleged violations very seriously.”

The spokesman added that it was against company policy to employ prison labor directly but said that “employment decisions are up to the suppliers as long as they adhere to the law and our supplier code of conduct.”

That Hyundai code of conduct dictates that “suppliers should ensure that they do not source raw materials, parts or components for their manufacturing process that are in turn manufactured, at any point in their supply chain, directly or indirectly, with the use of forced labor.”

The company spokesman declined to comment on whether Ju-Young or SL Alabama might be in violation of that internal code in the company’s view, or whether the labor of work-release inmates constituted “forced labor.” But he added that Hyundai planned to avoid prison labor in the supply chain for its “metaplant” in Georgia for electric vehicles and E.V. batteries, which was announced in 2022 and began production this month.

Like Ju-Young, SL Alabama did not respond to requests for comment.
Image
A white bus driving down a dirt road leading toward a building with metal siding.
A Department of Corrections bus picks up inmates from the Ju-Young plant at the end of their workday.
In a statement, the White House declined to comment in detail on pending legal cases, but expressed concern about Alabama’s prison labor networks as they were presented in the state and federal lawsuits.

“These reports are alarming and we strongly condemn any use of involuntary labor,” a White House spokeswoman said.

Incentives and Alternatives

Mr. Bushway, the economist and criminologist at RAND, said a demonstrated history of reliable work in prison can help “lead to better outcomes” including improved employment prospects if they are released.

But he added that “there is a potential for corruption and abuse.”

He noted that Alabama had a multimillion-dollar economic incentive to keep inmates working and earning the state a 40 percent share of their gross pay, and a possible disincentive to grant parole to those up for release.

The upside for private companies is also not lost on the imprisoned.

“It’s beneficial for the employer, for sure,” said George Garth, 41, an inmate who works in quality control for Ju-Young. “Whatever they put you on, you’re pretty much stuck on.”

Mr. Garth dislikes the system but said that at times he felt fortunate because “guys in the facility” — those without work-release status — “make nothing at all.” He has served 14 years on a robbery conviction and is due for release in 2030.

Will Tucker, the Southern director at Jobs to Move America in Birmingham — a pro-labor group that has been documenting the prison labor system — concedes that prison labor is not without nuance, and says his group is in favor of reforming it, not banning it.

Several reform groups agree that expanding options for prisoners could make for a more humane system. More choices between work and participation in education and rehabilitative programs could be offered to eligible inmates in some states, for instance.

But broadly, Mr. Tucker argues, the for-profit system in most jurisdictions using work-release programs, in which “corporations get access to a labor force that is easy to coerce,” is an inappropriate “sweetheart deal for employers.”

The companies contracting prison labor “should commit to hiring practices with strong protections against exploitation,” he said.

What that would look like in practice underscores some of the social tensions surrounding prison labor. Unwinding a profitable enterprise at taxpayer expense tends to be unpopular in any state.

In 2022, the California Department of Finance announced that paying minimum wage to inmates would cost taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion a year. Elected officials balked. A proposal to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime failed in the State Senate.

It was a reminder of the struggle communities across America have as they balance competing concerns: the allocation of public money, cost savings for consumers and companies, and the ideals encoded — with some exceptions — in the law.

Read by Talmon Joseph Smith
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
Talmon Joseph Smith is a Times economics reporter, based in New York. More about Talmon Joseph Smith … See MoreSee Less

Alabama Prison Labor Program Faces Legal Challenges

www.nytimes.com

A work-release program for Alabama prisoners provides labor for corporations and income for the state. Lawsuits are challenging its constitutionality.