Overview

John W. Livingston, born August 17, 1908, on a farm in Iberia, Missouri (the foothills of the Ozarks),  served the AFL-CIO in the post of Director of Organization for ten years, from the merger of the AFL and CIO in December 1955 to December 1965. During this period, Livingston demonstrated his well‑known skills as an administrator, negotiator, and organizer.

By the time Livingston was twenty-six, he was well into a lifelong career as a trade unionist. In December 1927, after attending Iberia Academy for two years, Livingston worked five years at the Fisher Body Division of the General Motors Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked in the trim department. In  1930, he had a brush with management when he and some thirty other workers demanded an increase in their 40-cents-per-hour wage. For their boldness, Livingston and thirty-one other workers were summarily fired. A skillful worker, Livingston was soon back at Fisher. John William Livingston

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Born March 2, 1915, in Athens, Ohio, William "Bill" Kircher rose from the labor union ranks to hold the AFL-CIO post of Director of Organization from 1965 to 1973. A well-liked fellow, Bill Kircher's life was long and studded with many achievements.

Kircher graduated in June 1932 from Athens public schools. He then attended Ohio University and graduated in 1936 with a bachelor's degree in journalism. He worked as a reporter and editor for the Athens Messenger (1935-1936) and as editor for La Peunte Valley Journal (1936-1937). From 1937 to 1941 he also served as editor for several community newspapers in the Cincinnati area. Kircher's union activity began with editorial employees on several newspapers in Ohio; he helped to bring them into the American Newspaper Guild.

In 1940 Kircher went to work for the Wright Aeronautical Plant in Evansdale. While working at this defense plant, he helped form UAW Local 647 and served from 1941‑1943 as the local's full‑time Education Director. William Kircher

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Negroes in the United States read this history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the good will and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and protests are becoming our every day tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table. We want to rely upon the goodwill of those who oppose us. 

Indeed, we have brought forward the method of non-violence to give an example of unilateral goodwill in an effort to evoke it in those who have not yet felt it in their hearts. But we know that if we are not simultaneously organizing our strength we will have no means to move forward. If we do not advance, the crushing burden of centuries of neglect and economic deprivation will destroy our will, our spirits and our hopes. In this way labor's historic tradition of moving forward to create vital people as consumers and citizens has become our own tradition, and for the same reasons. Martin Luther King

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Samuel Gompers    John Mitchell    John L. Lewis   Walter Reuther The Negro and Industrial Unionism  Labor Fights All Injustice 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Section 2 -- Life of the Organizer    Home

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Fred Punch & Black Students

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The Worst and Best of Times

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There currently is a dangerous situation developing within the Amalgamated Transit Union, Division 241, AFL-CIO in the city of Chicago where, as I understand it, efforts are being made by the black membership to disaffiliate from the International Union. They have already conducted a four-day wildcat strike in Chicago on this issue -- mainly not sufficient representation within the officers and executive board in the Local Union.

They are again threatening a shutdown right around convention time. This is a rather serious situation as President and Business Agent James Hill has been appointed to fill the vacated Secretary-Treasurship of his International Union, the big problem being that there are only 4 Negroes on the 26-man Board of the Division and the Local has a procedure whereby pensioned off employees vote on the election of officers. Since most of the pensioners are caucasian, this allows the present power structure to pretty well designate who goes on the Executive Board. Black Militants in Unions *   *   *   *   * There are no lines of communication between the white and Negro workers. Men working side by side on the job no longer even talk to each other. In Unions which have no Negro members--telephone workers, railway, printing and others--there is also talk of getting out of the national and international unions and establishing a southern federation of labor based on segregation. So far, I have not found out what the situation is in the United Steel Workers which appear to be the center of activity of the White Citizens Councils. The entire staff of the Steel Workers Union is in Chicago this week, attending the wage policy committee meeting. The State Federation people are away on trips too.  Letter to the Civil Rights Department

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"In the case which was before the United States Supreme Court on the question, the CIO, now merged with the AFL in what is called the AFL-CIO, filed an official document in which it stated emphatically and positively that the Union 'supports the elimination of racial integration . . . from every phase of American Life.' Further the union urged that segregation should be ended 'forthwith' rather than by 'gradual adjustment.' The document further states that where the 'Unions have there way, there is like wise no segregation in the use of plant eating places, locker rooms, rest rooms, etc.'

"You may not have noticed in the newspapers that the AFL-CIO at its recent convention took $75,000.00 of the dues paid to it by the people who are its members and gave this money to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is the organization aggressively working for the wiping out of all racial segregation, both in schools, manufacturing plants and elsewhere."

Octave Blake Says

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Putting the World Together My Father Walter Reuther, The Liberal Warrior By Elisabeth Reuther Dickmeyer A memoir about growing up with labor legend and social visionary, Walter Reuther, by his youngest daughter, Elisabeth. It is also a history of the UAW with Walter Reuther at the helm, and the monumental social impact he had on America and the world. The book dispels the conservative propaganda that liberals are bad for America. In contrast it tells how one of our nation's greatest liberal and moral leaders created pensions and health care for workers, during World War II gave FDR the plan to turn Detroit's auto plants into manufacturing of planes and tanks, thus creating the Arsenal of Democracy, co-founded the United Way with Henry Ford II, marched side-by-side with Martin Luther King, Jr., during all great civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s, was the first to give aid to Cesar Chavez and the migrant farm workers, gave President John F. Kennedy the plan that became the Peace Corps, gave the seed money for the first Earth Day, and at the time of his untimely death in a mysterious plane crash was leading the effort for national health care insurance for every American. The book also reveals Walter Reuther and his close relationships with Eleanor Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Elisabeth tells of the security measures her family endured as numerous assassination attempts were made on her father's life. Her first memory, a shotgun blast that nearly killed her father, taught her that he had numerous enemies who were trying to stop him. Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and J. Edgar Hoover never tired of trying to destroy Reuther's voice. This is an inspiring story of a true working class hero.

 

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Sex at the Margins Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry By Laura María Agustín This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

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Salvage the Bones A Novel by Jesmyn Ward On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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update 31 December 2011