TruthToTell May 16: LABOR’S UNTOLD STORIES: History Belies Successes – Audio Below-Video in Archive.
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Many of us know and understand the struggles working people fought when corporations and managers abused their workers, the 100-year effort to improve wages and working conditions, to organize craftsmen and laborers, the police-supported thugs hired to prevent them from it. We know how labor unions that emerged from all that conflict gave us the 8-hour day, the 40-hour week, paid vacations, toilets at the work site, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, holidays off – all of it union-made.
But other stories lie underneath all of those successes, stories that provided hope, but have failed to fulfill their promise.
Monday night (May 16), the next in a long line of presentations on Labor’s Untold Stories organized by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, a panel of speakers on discrimination in and against union workers and workers of color and the birth and work of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). The panel will present at Rondo Community Library in St. Paul at 7:00PM. And we have
Labor pioneers in the Twin Cities pushed for similar laws in Minnesota, including the late Katie McWatt of the old North Central Voters League, A. Philip Randolph, the St. Paul Urban League and one of its activists, Monsignor John J. Gilligan of St. Mark’s Parish.
Thus do the issues of race, class and labor merge once again into a classic untold story – because we do not openly discuss those discomfiting matters in this state or this nation. We want to believe it never happens, that race and class don’t matter, especially when we have human rights commissions and civil rights commissions and fair employment practices commissions and employment discrimination rulings and settlements and all the rest. Still, the pathology of racism and classicism plague our society and our labor unions.
TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with Twin Cities and national labor activists, scholars and writers to discover some of Labor’s Untold Stories.
MAHMOUD EL-KATI – Professor Emeritus of History, Macalester College, Essayist, Speaker, Honoree of Macalester’s Mahmoud El-Kati Distinguished Lectureship in American Studies and Author, Haiti: The Hidden Truth (2010)
ANDREW E. KERSTEN – Professor of History, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay; Author, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-1946 (Illinois, 2000) and Clarence Darrow – an American Iconoclast (Kersten will be reading and signing his Darrow book at Common Good Books in St. Paul at 7:30PM Tuesday evening)
TOM BEER – Retired Business Agent and Political Director, AFSCME Council #6 (Minnesota); Labor Union Director, Paul Wellstone 2002 re-election campaign; co-author of biographical article on Very Rev. Msgr. John Gilligan (to be published soon)