Why Labor’s Cause is Eternal
A sweeping conversation with journalist, author, and organizer Kim Kelly
With Labor Day around the corner, and 2023 on pace to be one of the most significant years for work stoppages in recent history, I spoke to Kim Kelly, an independent journalist, author, and organizer. Kim has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among many others.
Kim is also the author of Fight Like Hell, a book of intersectional labor history (now in paperback!). In her book, and in conversation, Kim chronicles the ups and downs of labor movements over the course of hundreds of years. A third-generation union member herself, Kim is an elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, and she also provides some helpful context on the ongoing writers and actors strike.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes further exploration of early strikes in New England; France Perkins, “the woman behind the New Deal”; and incarcerated people’s ongoing demands to be treated with the dignity they deserve:
Ben: Kim, thank you so much for being here.
KK: Thank you for having me.
Ben: Today I want to focus on a handful of the many labor disputes that you cover in your book. To get us going, can you talk about the Uprising of the 20,000 and one notable holdout from the safety accommodations that workers won?
KK: How foreshadowing.
Ben: I like to inject drama.
KK: One of the things about labor history in this country is that it goes back a long time. The first factory strike in US history occurred in 1824, led by women in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A few decades after that, mill girls in New England successfully forced some of their employers to implement shorter work days. So New England is where women began organizing and getting involved in strikes, but things really popped off in New York City in the early 1900s.
The Uprising of the 20,000 occurred in 1909. At that point, there were thousands and thousands of women working in garment factories and sweatshops in New York, concentrated in the Lower East Side. Immigrants from Italy, Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe were shoved into factories that were about as bad as what women in New England had dealt with years and years before.
When the uprising happened, there were already some active strikes going on. At a big mass meeting of garment workers held at Cooper Union, a young woman named Clara Lemlich, a socialist and Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, listened for hours as labor leaders talked about men's issues. Finally, she stood up and called for a general strike, and the crowd roared. The next day, 20,000 factory girls hit the streets.
The next year, workers negotiated better wages, a 40-hour work week, and safety precautions, like dealing with fire hazards, in 339 of 353 firms. One of the big holdouts, as you alluded, was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. They were the biggest maker of shirtwaists, which were basically undergarments that women wore. It was a fateful decision on their part.
Ben: Readers and listeners will likely be familiar with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that, horribly, occurred the following year.
They might be less familiar with the Bisbee Deportation. What happened there?
KK: This is such a wild little tidbit of history, concerning a mining company called Phelps Dodge in the Southwest.
In the Phelps Dodge mines (and throughout the Southwestern copper mining industry), Latino and Indigenous workers were regularly paid far less than their white coworkers. They were shunted into segregated locker rooms and eating areas and were subjected to racist abuse and discrimination on the job. In 1917, women miners, who also dealt with sexual harassment and sexist discrimination, went on strike in Bisbee, Arizona.
Phelps Dodge had no interest in negotiating. Instead, they essentially kidnapped over a thousand union members at gunpoint, herded them into cattle cars that were still full of manure, and dumped them in the desert. They told them never to come back. It was the largest forced migration overseen by a private corporation in American history.
Ben: I couldn’t believe that story (and yet also, I could).
Staying in the Southwest, it seems like workers at Farah Manufacturing were a little more successful than their peers at Phelps Dodge.
KK: Yes, after World War II, the manufacturing industry shifted to southern and western states that lacked strong labor regulations. FDR, with the help of a largely overlooked labor activist named Frances Perkins, passed new worker protections under the New Deal. Once he did, bosses realized they could get away with more in places like Texas.
By the 1960s, the Farah Manufacturing Company, based in El Paso, was a huge company, producing pants. The vast majority of the people working there were Mexican, Mexican-American, and Indigenous women. They were paid terribly. They worked long hours. A lot of them developed respiratory illnesses from a lack of ventilation. Some of them lost fingers or eyes in their sewing machines.
In 1972, 3,000 workers went on strike. They held the line for two years and dealt with massive retaliation and violence. At one point, the mother of Willie Farrah, who owned the company, tried to run them down on the picket line with her car.
Ben: Maybe she was also the one driving the cattle cars in Bisbee.
KK: Ha maybe. What really pushed things over the edge was when the workers launched a boycott, forcing Willie Farrah to come to the table. In 1974, they won higher wages and a pension, continuing the tradition of workers demanding to be treated as they deserved.
And I should add that workers weren’t done fighting against Phelps Dodge, either. The Bisbee Deportation was such a traumatic, harrowing experience that it became part of the fabric of Latino and Indigenous mining communities. In the 80s, there were still tons of Latino and Indigenous working in the mines for Phelps Dodge. They still had segregated facilities and were paid less than their white coworkers.
In 1983, workers in four locations went on strike, including in Bisbee. They also held the line for two years! But sadly, the Great Copper Strike of 1983 wasn't a win. The Reagan administration chipped away at unions’ power, and the action took a heavy toll, ultimately resulting in the largest decertification (a majority vote against the union) in US history, affecting workers in a variety of states.
Ben: This is kind of a theme of Fight Like Hell. Some stories are wrapped up with a tidy bow, but just as many of them end up looking like something I gift-wrapped on Christmas.
KK: Well, there’s never a period on anything. Everything's an ellipsis. And all of the past labor struggles I talk about in the book inform strikes that are impacting us and so many of our friends and colleagues right this second.
Ben: On that note, could you maybe give us a little background on the writers and actors strike? I know it’s not just something that you and I are thinking about.
KK: Well, it’s the same dynamic we’ve seen for hundreds of years: people in charge not valuing their workers.
One of the main issues is residuals, recurring payments for people who helped make a TV episode. Execs are very resistant to paying more than a pittance for episodes that are rerun on streaming services.
Another issue is obviously artificial intelligence, as studios try to use AI to replace writers. They think that robots can do our jobs but they're sadly mistaken. That's why all of the fall TV lineups look like shit.
One of the reasons that the strike is so important is that whatever happens with our new contract and the rights that we win—and we will win—is that it'll impact the way that bosses in all kinds of other industries integrate automation for a very long time to come. The same way that the Luddites in England worried about being replaced by mechanical looms in the 19th century; the same way that auto workers have fought against being replaced—we’re facing the same thing.
Ben: Solidarity. Here’s hoping victory comes sooner rather than later.
And. Speaking. Of. Replacing. Writers. With. Robots. I'd like. To finish—
KK: Ha!
Ben: ...by asking one last question.
You discuss incarcerated people at length, a too-often ignored population that has long protested unfair working conditions. How do their demands for justice factor into labor history and the present moment?
KK: During the 70s, there was a huge wave of organizing by incarcerated workers in prisons across the country. One of the most interesting things I found when researching was a Supreme Court case in 1977 (Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union) that stripped incarcerated workers of the right to unionize. SCOTUS’ decision crushed a growing movement led by prison workers’ organizations.
The next real big burst of organizing among incarcerated people, at least that we saw and heard outside the walls, wouldn’t come until 2014. Then, the Industrial Workers of the World launched the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). IWOC includes incarcerated workers as well as formerly incarcerated people and outside advocates. Prison labor is a billion-dollar industry, and incarcerated worker strikes, led nationwide by IWOC, called attention to the fact that people convicted of crimes are paid next to nothing—if anything at all. (For example, states like Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas don’t pay incarcerated people for their work.)
We’ve seen more strikes in the 2020s too, amid the pandemic. There’s been so little happening inside prisons and jails to protect people. A friend of mine helped organize an abbreviated hunger strike at Riker’s Island, in one instance.
And there are things like that happening in prisons all over the country, all of the time, because people do not give up their spirit or their pride when they end up behind the walls. They just find different ways to hold on and push back against the powers that be.
In prisons and out, you can bet we’ll see more strikes from workers demanding dignity in the years to come.
Ben: As a favorite author whose book just came out in paperback writes, “There is always another fight, a new contract, a fresh adversary. There is always another struggle to join, and another picket line to walk. Labor’s cause is eternal, and its work is never done.”
KK: Oh, that sounds familiar.
Ben: Kim, thank you so much for your time and for your scholarship. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.
KK: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.