Talking union: The labor movement in Barberton, Ohio, 1891-1991.

摘要

This is a study of the labor movement in Barberton, Ohio, from the founding of the city in 1891 and carried through to the present. Created by Ohio Columbus Barber, the moving figure behind the Diamond Match Company, Barberton was the stepchild of corporate capitalism. From its inception, Barberton was the site of the most modern industrial factories--producers of matches, electrical insulators, tires, valves, boilers, and chemicals. The need for unskilled workers in these enterprises drew immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, African-Americans from the South, and native-born whites from Appalachia and southern Ohio.;With the onset of the Depression in 1929, Barberton workers began to unite under the banner of organized labor. Organizing on an industrial union basis through American Federation of Labor federal labor unions, before the creation of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, Barberton workers were free to improvise the nature of their union movement. Through a series of violent strikes in 1934 through 1936, Barberton unionists developed a community-based model of organization. This type of organization operated horizontally on the basis of community solidarity, rank-and-file control, and internal union democracy and was predicated on the belief that the interests of workers in disparate industries in the city were the same. Relations between AFL and CIO unions remained friendly and cooperative.;Significantly, in later decades, this deeply entrenched culture of solidarity did not fade. In contrast to the stereotypical portrait of post-World War II American workers as a deracinated, apolitical mass of beer-swilling-Archie-Bunker types, Barberton workers remained militant and committed to rank-and-file activism. This was captured in union political activism, disaffiliation and reaffiliation among various unions, and shop floor struggle. In the decade between 1965 and 1975, for example, unionists at the Babcock & Wilcox boiler plant conducted nearly fifty wildcat strikes. By the 1960s, crowds of over one hundred thousand were jamming into Barberton (population thirty-three thousand) for the city's annual Labor Day parade. The study concludes with an analysis of the relationship between this labor militancy and deindustrialization.