Milwaukee's Forty-Year War On Unions

[Scuba]

http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/01/187978/milwaukees-forty-year-war-unions

For generations, Milwaukee boasted of a large, unionized, blue-collar middle class. It was a place to put down roots and raise a family. Neighborhood culture was often defined by industrial bowling leagues and neighborhood taverns owned by former factory workers seeking to be “their own boss” and escape assembly line drudgery.

While highly segregated, economic inequality was at historic lows. Milwaukeeans enjoyed the nation’s second highest median household income in 1969. The black poverty rate was twenty-two percent lower than the US average in 1970, and African American median family income was nineteen percent higher than the US African American median.

...

All of this changed in 1975 with the Meatcutters’ strike. The very day the strike began, the eight companies represented by the Milwaukee Independent Meatpackers Association began hiring replacement workers, some recruited from as far away as Nebraska and Texas. In response to this first attempt by Milwaukee employers to bust a union since World War II, the Menominee Valley filled with angry picketers––black, Latino, and white––rallying to protect their jobs. After fifteen months the employers association had their victory and decertified the union. Hundreds of hard-working union members lost their jobs. Full-time permanent employees were replaced by low-wage workers frequently hired through temp agencies.

The strike legitimized replacement workers, beginning waves of attacks on unions and the city’s working class. When UAW workers struck Master Lock in 1979, Milwaukee police officers escorted replacement workers across the picket line. Two years later A.O. Smith built a non-union plant in Tennessee, the first nail in the coffin of its Milwaukee Automotive Works, which had dominated the city’s north side since the early 1920s.

Emphasis mine.

Milwaukee is now one of the nation's poorest cities. Our African American poverty rate is now forty-nine percent higher than the African American national average, and median income is 30 percent lower.

[dembotoz]

1. bout sums it up

[el_bryanto]

2. It is depressing - Republicans, particularly corporate Republicans, have had a 2 thrust anti worker

agenda. 1) get rid of unions. 2) get rid of government regulations. The end result is that Americans workers have no real protections, and things just get consistently worse, because workers have no real options.

Bryant

[Sherman A1]

3. Precisely

that is pretty much their whole plan and it is a plan that will ultimately lead to failure for all, including themselves.

[rurallib]

5. And the next campaign Repugs will fill the air with messages of how they love workers

Their union busting practices have largely gone unreported in the press and it is something no one talks about. But it has been the main thrust of their party from the early 1900s. And they always couch their anti-union rhetoric in terms like "freedoms" and "liberties."

Yeah - the freedom to work for nothing and the liberty to starve to death.

[CanonRay]

4. My grandmother helped found the ILGW in Milwaukee

she is probably spinning in her grave there.