The renewal in the method and content of historiography on the labor
movement is due to the introduction in the studies of investigations onaspects such as workplaces, living conditions, personal and gender
relationships. The reading of workers' struggles does not stop at the
clash over wages but extends to the organization of work as a central
element of industrial production, therefore it addresses the overall
working condition, that is, the culture of origin, the family, the
church, the school, the social fabric. The new historiography especially
in the American reality reconnects the union and social history to the
political one, as in the case of solidarity strikes, and on the
affirmation in the thirties of a new trade unionism that will be the
basis of struggles and claims until the fifties.
These struggles, focused on the search for mass security and
characterized by an informal, unofficial politicization, will create a
union between spontaneity and organization, sometimes coherent,
sometimes difficult, that will have to face a system of power that
intervenes against political and social recompositions.
The problem of unemployment and assistance to those suspended is one of
the central aspects for reading the American union movement, the
restoration of jobs, the seniority clause, the rotation call, the
placement managed by the unions, the control of the suspensions of
female workers and blacks, the distribution of work will lead to the
achievement of collective bargaining in the 1930s. These are the moments
of struggle that have allowed the union not to be crushed by the control
of the employers, by the price policy, by the expulsion of foreign
workers and by government repression in a period that reaches up to the
1970s. The economic system, despite state interventions, never reaches
full employment and leads unions to seek political alliances with the
Democratic Party or to propose protectionist closure as a response to
the policies of multinationals or to internal youth protests against the
war in Vietnam.
In the two decades following the end of the Second World War, workers'
opposition is significantly reduced and productivist and efficiency
strategies do not encounter union opposition, leading social and
historical studies to consider workers' protests concluded, absorbed by
capitalist rationality.
To understand American social reality in different historical periods,
the stories and experience of Tillie Lerner Olsen (1912-2007) can be
useful, an American writer, daughter of Russian Jews who emigrated after
the 1905 revolution, who played an important role with her militant
commitment in giving voice to workers and the American left.
Politically engaged on the left, in socialist and communist parties but
also in feminist associations, Tillie Olsen studied and worked to become
a writer and a trade unionist who described the soul of the American
working class, of working women, with a form of creative and poetic writing.
She was arrested twice during the union struggles and remained in
prison for weeks because she did not have the money to pay the bail, in
the post-war period she suffered McCarthyist persecution with her
husband Jack. She tells of hidden social dynamics and the transformation
of the working class in organizational terms and in terms of mentality
produced by the profound policies of absorption of egalitarian drives
through increased consumption, access to new comforts of life, the
absorption of workers' conflict through the affirmation of private
initiative aimed at economic success.
The richness of the stories lies in the use of different points of view,
placed on the same level even with different languages in different
social and working situations. In particular, the lives of working-class
mothers, wives and daughters are represented, even in the traditional
roles to which they were relegated. The writer also addresses the issues
of racism and anti-Semitism in their private aspect and personal
relationships with the aim of achieving "full humanity".
In recounting different working realities such as the workers of
Wyoming, the laborers of the Midwest, the workers of large production
centers, she also transfers into her pages the chronicle of struggles
such as the strike of the maritime workers of San Francisco in May 1934
that extended to the entire coast of California with the aim of
modifying the hiring system of the port companies and introducing the
"rotating call". In July the strikers were attacked by the police
causing three deaths and dozens of injuries. This will then lead to the
general strike of the dockers of July 16. Tillie Olsen remembers one of
these protagonists Jack Eggan (1915-1938) who will be a volunteer in
Spain in the "Abraham Lincoln" brigade and will die during the
retreat on the Ebro.
A poetic writing that has found on its path writers like Jack Kerouak or
Allen Ginzberg, stories of ordinary people who ennoble humanity in love,
in spiritual and material life, thanks to a push towards equality and
social freedom in America and a criticism of mass society. Stories of
political defeats but of a working class that always creates something
new to start a future of new struggles, and is capable of becoming a
collective subject and protagonist of its own contemporary story, a
resistance that restores confidence, dynamism and recognition to the
role of the working class.
Bibliography: Tillie Olsen, Fammi un indovinello, Marietti1820, Bologna,
2024;
Cinzia Biagiotti, Broken Silences - The Writing of Tillie Olsen,
Edizioni QuattroVenti, Urbino, 2005;
David Montgomery, Class Relations in Early 20th-Century America,
Rosenberg&Sellier, Turin, 1980.
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