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of historians conference talkinh historians. but one of the things we like to do on american history tv is not only learn about into. some of the issues we face. joining us now is professor joseph university versity. professor, what do you teach at georgetown? hi, peter. thank you for having me. atu.s. generally present in theh century. but my specialty is u.s. labor and class history. how long have charge? i got there in 1999. prior to prior to that, i taught in upstate new york at the state university of new york's campus of geneseo, outside rochester. and when and why did you get interested in? working class history. a great question.

know i would have this interest when i went to college, i thought i'd be a doctor. i studied chemistry and i was pre-med, but i happened to have a with a wonderfuld nick salvats working on a book then about eugene andtoa union leader and h century. he his course was mesmerizing for me. and i took for another course after that. and were just electives. but i started to find myself working and i just became so interested ily changed what i wanted to do and i wanted to be like this, guy who is teaching me this stuff to life a history that was really my family's background. but i had never fully known. i grew up in a in a city upstate new york called troy. and my my family had been, you

know immigrants and workers in th city in the 19th century, i'd heard my grandparents telling stories about working lives when they were young and now all of a]-me to understand that their history was part of american and that i could help teach■e÷more common . that's really what attracted to this work. what kind work did your my great grandmother was a collar worr.ç was known as a cit that. they madoscollars that some of r viewers might noticed in the td stuff like that. so i had people in the family wo that industry. i had a grandfather who was a baker and. i had one who worked in the arsenal which is across the the hudson river from troy. and what are believe. so they>ç had varied backgrounds

in their work and i often found it fascinating to to talk to them about their and and here i was now learning that you this was a■jf study and know i really wanted to ands of people like them. so professor mccartin we're talking about the working class in america. yes. what's your working definition? youno think, is composed of people who wage to to live. and what that means in the 21st century is a lot different from what it meant. andgrandparents age today, i nus and, you know, workers 't so in, who aren't necessarily re also e primarily, you know, earn th thr

wage, by the sweat of paychecks. so not necessarily laborno]ct necessarily. i will say that in the field i teach in the history of the labor movement is an important component oft.we call the organization labor a working class history. so it's both the movement which in unions but but not only that most, american workers have never been in unions. so that would be a too narrow a way to understand the working class experience. and you, the president of the and working class history associatio which is what that's an organized nation of scholars who are interested in kinds of t have just been discussing. it was formed in 1998. have about 500 members who are scattered at universities, mostly around the country but not only■ at univ■aersi!zes.

we have independ scholars. we have people who teach interested this subject. we also have people who are connected to the labor movement, who do worker, for example, and things that. we have a journal that's called labor studies working history where scholars about thisin history gets published in a simplistic way. yeah. d you consider your organization be pro simplistic , but i would sayji that, you kno, it's complicated than that because while we're most of the scholars who are in the field are sympathetic to the union view ourselves as scholars first andlooking at this movement, we might be quite sympatheticooking at it we eye that that is called.

if somebody were aspiring to be in the c-suite and be a ceo. yeah. would they find value in. oh, absolutely. and i would samostudents aspireo going in theand i think it's ale important for people who rise to positions influence as■)k/ey und things, workers taught business, schools or. if somebody is taking a say, a master's in business administration and an mba. but i find that it's very valuable for have people working for them to a long historical process of evolved and we can learn a lot from how absolutely. well, let's break this down into the two parts labor and working

class. yeah. at what point? in our history before, labor unions did the working class ever get organized or have protests or or have a meaningful presence? reat question. and, youworking on the revisiona textbook i do we about even in the 17th centuryw in the 1600s, you had workers like fishermen in maine in a work stoppage to improve then kind conditions that they were working under. there's no formal union yet. we tou enslaved. people in that period ao coengaf collective action to try to get better treatment on formal unions. ■nthere is something about the working experience because it's usually a collective experience

that it inculcates in the people who do work whether th be fishermen, whether they were enslaved whether they were shoemakers or cobblers or sestabout the experience that te people who do it to recognize a collect tivity of in sometimes their interest exactly the same as the people who employ them. and that there is from time to time a need for them express themselves collectively. so that impulse is older than our country. but the union movement itself almost arose simultaneous with with the country. see in the 1790s, which unions f what were callede donors, that was a term that they used for■g shoemak and some of the first unions were formed by what we're c cou.

the system was in those days that started as an apprentice and a craft, a young boy because these were all male at that time, usually the age 12 to 15 or 16. at that point. you became a journeyman and what you were then is kind of an assistant to the master or learning to the trade. but a journeyman was inat becaue from one master to another to pick u you aspects of the craft that one master knew, that another didn't know. after a while. and already by the 1790, some crafts, like shoemaking, were starting to see that progression. you start as an apprentice, you become a journeyman, then you set up your own shop that people weren't reallye to set up their own shop. and so they wentwould become masters to realizing, no,

we're,robably going to be working for somebody else for the rest of our lives. it's at that moment that they start to well, if that's the case we need to like make these jobs sustainable foryou know the learned by the chord winners. in portland when more formal or modern unions came along? yes, because the more formal and modern kind of grew out of that experience. and i should say at the beginning when chord winners attempt to to come together to make demands. they wanted a certain pricee nud turn out, for example, from their masters viewed under our law and common law as a criminal that to make a collective demand on the master like trying to restrain free trade.

and so they guilty of criminal conspiracy at times, but yet they pioneered this of of bargaining is really what it was. and that's what unions ultimately sort of evolved from, grew from. while, this practice ■ legitimacy. and then finally, but not really the 20th century actually with the wagner act in 1935,id cleart said it's illegal for workersjd organize and to bargain before, legal gray zone, but there were unions before, 1934 where a lawyer. yes, but but those unions had to develop in spaces where. workers were strong enough that employers couldn't try use the law to break them or undermine them. and that's what led to the

d thetion of the first union american federation of labor. and it was composed craft unions by that time. it was called the shoe union. and then there others like the machinists, the carpenter was the cigar makers actually was was an important union inrollin■ founder of the afl was samuel gompers and that was how he made he was a roller and developed an effective of cigar makers that of became a cornerstone of tfed. give us the time that fell was being formed and tell us a little bit about mr. gompers. so who, arrived in the us during the civil of the 1860s. he arrived in 63, he came from london. his family were were dutch

immigrants to london. however, they were of dutch jewish origin. they settled in london, worked there foa ti. sam came over when he was a teenager, got employed in the cigar trade in new york city in the 1860s and seventies, became very active in organizing cigar makers formed a8? union in the 1870s, the afl itself is founded. in 1886 cio. we always associate cio with a. that's right. how do you connect to. eat question. so cio stands for congress of organizations and where the was it was a federation of kraft workers like cigar makers and carpenters. the cio would be a federation. industrial wor auto

steelworkers who worked in big production factories. the cio was formed in the 1930s and 1935 and in response to the fact that the afl because it was composed of kraft workerseally have enough in or belief that you organize mass production workers. the people who really yeah that they had to make a different kind mo. i'm thinking about some times in labor history. yeah, united mine workers strike :nuaw sue ford. i believe that was in the 1920s, right■v right. what impact did those have on the working class labor. those wereuge. the sit down strike that occurred in the autoy. and it began before new years in

1936, building into the 1937 transformed the whole union movement. workers occupied their plant in flint, michigan. and that was really when the cio movement really took off the united workers who starteden die impactful? the united me works 1890, theit important president was a guy named john mitchell, who rose to the presidency by the turn ofe e largest union in theted states in the early 20th century, but it also became of the fountainhead for the emergence of an industrial union movement in the u.s. later in the century it produced a figure named john l. lewis, came to leadership of the union around wor■;jxld war . and lewis was the founder really of the congress of industrial organizations in the 1930. so the mind works wahe most impf

the first part of the 20th century, not only because it organizes massive indtry, produp and a vision that would then on orgizfactories. and we're talking about tens of thousandof workers. oh, indeed, yeah. at its height, the mine workers coul-pd■u call out on strike. hundreds of thousands people, as happened 1919, right after the war, for example. and by the time the cio in the 1930s to organize auto workers,te in the industrial union movement that now numbers in t millions. is it wages is it safety? what are the issues led to the creation unions? yeah. wages, safety. trying to discrimination by the employer. you were kwn sympathetic

to the union, for example, you could be blacklisted. and so things. now, earlier in our coersation, you referred to the wagner act of 1835. yeah. how it that a cio affiliated union like the united mine workers could form with hundreds of thousands of people. of thousands of people. that's a th point. the cio was started in 35. couldn't have been started without the wagnerde it possiblm aial union because it really forbid from doing some of the things they'v. blacklisting workers, for example, it gave workers a right to form a?= union. once workers had that right, they really seized in a vigorous betweenn the middle of the depression, they start to

completed until the end of world war two. i would say who was mr. wagner? robert wagner was a senator from new york, and he was a longtime progress the things that got him interested in issues of that hee new york legislature at the time of theist fire, which happened in 11. new york city, where a sweatshop perished. and he was so shocked and moved by that. he became increasingly interested in labor issues when he got to washington as a u.s. senator. this was a prime interest for him. the new deal roosevelt in the great depression, a context where he ■could push forward some aggressive legislation protectinght to organize. and so he seized it. henry ford.

yeah. $5 a day. yes workers flocked toj did. but when the union tried to come in to ford. yeah, he resists the absolute. but henry ford was a kind of a labor class hero, wasn't he? well, you k beginning of his off the $5 wage. ye quite. that started in 1914. he wasother employers wereing, t he had conditions about that. you had to allow his social workers your house. they wanted to know what you were reading. they wanted to weren't in the union. he did not believe that his system was workers having a collective bargaining voice, so he resisted thatd it wasn't until, you know, the u.s. entered was getting moe pressure from the government. government didn't want labor disputes during the war and it

basically pushed industry and to come to agreements so ford basically stepped back and allowedorkers to organize unions. t0s, about a third of the workforce. yeah. labor, membership right. today it's about 10%. that's. there'd been a massive falloff. a number of things came. you're right that in 1952, 35% of all nonfarm were in unions. so why that went down? part of it had to do with where those were ro%ong. production factories. those factories continuously decreased employment in the postwar e. so the auto plants didn't require as many workers in becw technologies, etc. same true in st was change in i. it the fact that we be service .

unions always had a more diic their for a variety of reasons. buconsider is the size of generl motors or steel. if you could organize, boom, you had a large movement to say as today fast food workers at a mcdonald's or something like that i■e difficult they're so dispersed often they're not directly for mcdonald's or more so there's a scattering of employers much more difficult so changes in industry were important. i think thing was that we're still by the labor lawwas written in the 1930s and foiet 1935, it was amended by called tcally i'n

changed and and workgk we have gig employment often getting jobs like say driving uber are not being categorized as workers even. so how do you negotiate with uber when labor law as it's currently characterizes you as a independentomebody who's workinr this company? now, what was thet? the taft-hartley act was an effort by people who thought that the wagner act had gone too far and had given labor too many rights. so robert taft of ohio. robert taft, son of the president. william howard taft, who had also been a supreme court justice chief justice, the taft-hartley act. first of all, gaveainst unions g

exercise their free speech to try persuade workers not to form unions. now, how that often operates is that employers it's perfectly legal on your work time for the employer. say, everybody, meeting and. then the meeting is all■souldn'? why union would be a match for and employer has the power to do that in a way the union can't really effectively counteract. they don't have the a for examp. so we're still operating by things. the taft-hartley acted many years ago. there have been efforts over the years to amend labor law. but every significant effort amend the law has died with a senate filibuster because you need days 60 votes to bring a bill to to theloor of the us

senate and nobody who's wanted to andle to get those votes. so given our modern society gig workers, as you say, yeah, what would be aíx labor law, in your view? well, i think r gig workers to collectively bargain woui've tar drivers and, lyft drivers, and often they don't actually what wage they're getting out of the fare you're you're being shown that you them when you ■qride, they have to bear their own costs for a lot of the things that theyun do. they don't have an ability to come together as a group and say to, well, actually we need x, y and z to make this job sustainable for. us final question. yeah. you beginning our conversation eugene debs. ah know eugene debs today? eugene debs was in ways a

prophet i think because some of the things that he argued for the late 19th and early 20th century■ organize, which he was callingwagner that he was callia system that would be something like what we have under social security that he was calling for for a faireristribution of wealth in the country. and i think as we look around america years, you know, and especially in these right now, ou you look at the overall numbers is the seem good but a lot ofnot really working r them. and i think you could say that over the past generation the fruits of our growth haven't been broadlyh to counteract that feeling. the strike traffic controllers in 1981, did that

ure labor unions or definitely. and that's a subject i actually wrote a book about called collision courseimportant. ronald reagan wasdent of the air traffic controllers were federal employees. they di'49 to strike, but they were so frustrated with their inability eir employer, federal aviation administration, to with a lot of the issues that they had on their job that they ultimately felt like the only way we're going to get attention to these issues is to strike. of course, they made a fatal ■mistake. they not only struck. but w■zhen reagan said you have8 hours to return to work, they decide to wait them out. they didn't think that the airlines operate with them not working. about 70% of them actually stayed warning.

if you don't return to work, i fire you. reagan did fire them and it th era a more, you know,'j retreat mode r the union movement, but which might be to an end. in recent years, what we've seeing most recently. well, joseph mccartin of georgetown university troy, new york. that's right. thank you for tying

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