Jump Jim Crow

A few days ago Bryan analogized right-to-work laws to laws against racial discrimination. The argument, roughly, was that without such laws unions terrorize people into joining just as, without anti-discrimination laws, businesses are terrorized into discriminating.

The problem of course is that segregation was a government program, dreamed up by the finest progressive minds seeking to apply 'science' to social relations. Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the civil service, wasn't some dumb hick from Mississippi; he was the former president of Princeton. The backstory of the lynchpin of segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson, is quite telling. Homer Plessy, a man with mixed ancestry (he was technically classified an "octoroon," meaning he was one-eighth black), boarded an all-white train in violation of a law (yes, a law, not the policy of a private business, but an enactment of the state legislature). So little enforced was this law, and so little consternation did his act provoke, that the organization seeking to challenge segregation in court actually had to hire a private detective to remove Mr. Plessy from the train- the police didn't give a damn. Of course, you know how his case turned out. The point remains, though, that segregation was a system designed and enforced by governments. Private businesses did not just one day decide not to serve black people. They were forced to segregate, and the ensuing mess is just another case of government interference mucking things up.  We have no idea if the economic incentives against discrimination would ever have worked, because they were never allowed to work- first, the government segregated by force, and then the government integrated by force. Given the former, of course I am not going to get in a twist about the latter, but the facts matter.

How does this relate to unions? Well, again, let's look at who introduced violence. The very act of going on strike- that is, saying to your employer that you and your fellow workers aren't going to work until he treats you better and that in the meantime you'll be picketing his place of business- was illegal in the United States until 1842, with unions treated as criminal conspiracies. Even afterwards, law enforcement, state militias and federal troops were repeatedly called out against workers- such as during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, the Pullman Strike of 1894, or the Longshoremen's Strike of 2002. Have workers at times responded in kind? Sure they have. But to claim one is going to take an "even-handed" approach and view workers and the corporatist state as "equally" violent is to be willfully blind at best. The danger posed by striking workers calling scabs mean names, vandalizing employers' property or even attacking scabs directly pales in comparison to that posed by the serried ranks of corporatist forces clubbing, stabbing and shooting workers who dare challenge the terms of their employment publicly and en masse. Right to Work laws are just another installment of the long, sordid history of state suppression of workers' attempts to use the market to their advantage.

Further, let's pretend that the intimidation to which Bryan refers really is pervasive. Should we respond to it by interfering in the right to contract, or by prosecuting assault and battery? If a man throws a bomb during an anti-goverment rally, do we ban rallies or prosecute bomb-throwers? Labor disputes are intense. For workers, their livelihoods are at stake. Tensions run high, and sometimes things do get ugly. But the only role of the state is to break up fights and punish those who resort to violence. If a scab is afraid to cross picket lines because he fears the condemnation of his peers, good. It's only if the strikers resort to actual violence that the state need be involved.