John
William Livingston, 1908-1997
A Biographical
Sketch
By Rudolph Lewis
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.
The
day the NRA was passed, June 1933, Livingston began his union
activity. Eighteen workers met to plan how to organize workers in
the Fisher plant. This meeting laid the groundwork for the
establishment of Local No. 18386, which later became Local 25 of
the UAW-CIO. Between 1934-1939, Livingston was elected and
reelected president of this local union of auto workers.
In
1939, UAW-CIO employed Livingston as an International
Representative in the General Motors Department. During his three
years in this position, Livingston served as Vice‑Chairman
and Chairman of the National UAW-GM Negotiating Committee.
In
1942, the UAW-CIO Convention elected Livingston Director of UAW
Region 5 (Missouri, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana, Oklahoma,
Arkansas, and New Mexico) and a member of the International
Executive Board. During the first eighteen months of his
directorship, the UAW‑CIO membership in this region was
increased thirteen‑fold.
Livingston
continued to move up the organizational ladder of responsibility.
In 1946, he was made co‑director, with UAW President Walter
P. Reuther, of the union's General Motors Department. In 1952,
Livingston assumed sole responsibility for this post. At the
Atlantic City Convention in 1947, Livingston was first elected as
one of the two international union vice‑presidents. He was
reelected in 1949, 1951, 1953, and 1955.
In
1947, Livingston was also appointed director of the aircraft,
airline, McQuay-Norris, and piston ring departments. Late in 1948
he became director of the agricultural implement department of the
UAW-CIO. In 1952, he resigned from the directorship of this
department, but kept the directorship of the national aircraft
department.
Even
with his many departmental duties, Livingston still participated
in several organizing campaigns. He provided some leadership in
the 1948 campaign to bring all farm implement workers in the UAW‑CIO
ranks. He also coordinated the UAW‑Political Action
committee campaign drive for the 1948 national Presidential
election.
Before
he became AFL-CIO's first Director of Organization, Livingston
participated in virtually all UAW contract negotiations with the
General Motors Corporation. In 1948, he was the chief
international officer assigned to the General Motors wage and
contract negotiations, in which the annual wage improvement and
cost‑of‑living escalation was introduced.
In
1950, Livingston took part in the talks between the UAW and
General Motors Corporation, which resulted in an unprecedented
five‑year agreement later used as the model for agreements
in many other industries. As leader of the UAW's bargaining team
in the 1955 General Motors negotiations, Livingston established
for the first time a full union shop and the principle of
guaranteeing wages to laid‑off industrial workers.
Before
1955, Livingston had played important roles in both national and
international assignments in which he helped to establish policies
favorable to labor. During the summer of 1950, Livingston was
chairman of a twelve‑man UAW-CIO delegation that visited
England, France, Italy, and West Germany. In Paris, he presided
over the first conference of the automotive and truck department
of the international Metalworkers Federation. After conferring
with European trade union official and with representatives of the
Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Livingston presented a
program, later adopted in a large measure, for implementing the
Marshall Plan so that it would benefit people from all walks of
life.
In
May 1951 Livingston served for a year on the National Wage
Stabilization Board in Washington. He played an important
role in establishing policies free from the limitations of
the War Labor Board, its World War II counterpart.
At
the December 1965 convention of the AFL-CIO in San Francisco,
Livingston retired at the youthful age of 57. From then until
October 2, 1967, Livingston operated his cattle farm in the
Ozarks. From then until 1968, he worked on the assembly line at
the Fisher body plant in St. Louis and farmed on weekends.
In
March 1968, President George Meany appointed Livingston as
director of union relations of the National Alliance of
Businessmen (NAB). To demonstrate the importance of the assignment
the AFL‑CIO contributed Livingston's services with the NAB,
established at the suggestion of President Johnson to undertake a
program to employ the hard‑core unemployed.
John
William Livingston married Rubye Britt on May 9, 1931. He is known
to his friends as Jack. In his leisure hours he enjoys hunting and
fishing. Business Week (November 19, 1955) noted that he had
"a jovial, likeable personality; he is
scrupulously honest and fair. His staff members swear by
him."
At
88 years old, on May 25 in Westphalia, Missouri, Livingston died
of unreported causes.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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updated
25 July 2008
