Yongho Kim

Category: labor

  • PTI's marketting strategy

    So, I visited back the thread on CivicSpace for Labor Unions and found some collaboration effort going on. Decided to follow one of those “Labor Relations” links that union busting companies paid Google for its adsense propaganda, and found PTI. Hmm.. these folks are hilarious. PTI shows you some figures about how much unions cost the employer, and incite: “How can you afford not to launch a full-scale anti-union campaign?” Har har.

    Full-Size (500×400) Video Link: http://ptilaborresearch.com/~media/video_custom_500.asx

    For a 320×240 PR video, (more…)

  • "labor unions" triggers "labor relations" at adsense

    this is very, very sad.

  • Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    May 10, 2004. (due May 7th – three days late )

    Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    In reflecting on the production of “Forgotten”, I want to focus on the difference between the performance at the Union Hall and the one at Macalester in the level of connections it allowed student performers to make with the audience during the show itself.

    The Union Hall was not meant to be used as a performance space – it had a podium dedicated to lectures and some backstage space. Bob arranged it so that the main actors would hide behind the backstage space when they were not performing, but the worker’s chorus had to stay in the back of the hall, visible to the audience. In between scenes, and in the majority of scenes where the worker’s chorus was not present, we (the worker’s chorus) could stand in the back and listen to peoples’ reactions – laughter, exclamations, suspense, etc.

    Having not had the time to stay and chat with audiences, this was a medium through which I could connect with the audience. They laughed when the foreman said “It’s in the corner where no one else ever goes”, they were focused and silent during the introduction of “The Ford Hunger March”. I also had a chance to confirm feelings I had towards situations – a bitter taste for Lewis not listening to his wife, for example – by finding reactions or the lack of them in the audience. In the same vein, not having a proper lightning set helped view the expressions in the faces of the people present there.

    On the other hand, Macalester’s concert hall was conceived from the beginning as a performance space. There were doors that closed well (the Union Hall’s backstage was not an enclosed space, but just a wall separating the hall from the back stage) at the stage and a separate entrance hallway outside of the concert hall, which was where the students waited. Behind the thick walls, we could only follow the general melody in order to know when to enter. The intense spotlight also prevented us from seeing the audience.

    This contributed to separating the student performers from the performance experience. Although a stretch, I parallel this to a general pattern where technical professionalism matches an increased distance between artist and audience as in Rose’s account of western music isolating the musician through sheet music. As Pete Seeger’s effort to incorporate the audience in the singing was a way to break through his contradictions between the message portrayed and his own life (Filene 196), directions to the opposite pole seem to alienate the performers.

    As a side note, I would like to point out that our Thursday concert was the second time I had listened to the lyrics for the whole show attentively and could figure out what the whole story was about.

    As a result, in the brief moments that I exchanged brief commentaries with audiences after the show, I felt there were more shared emotional links in the Union Hall, not because it was a working class space, but because it was less professional and allowed for informal human expressions such as laughter to transmit both sides.

  • Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    February 25, 2004

    Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919: Class Solidarity and Divisiveness, and Incorporation of the Other in post-World War I Unionism.

    Seattle 1919 addresses issues of class solidarity frequently present in the newly emerging U.S. unionism and attempts to unite workers from different race, gender, and skill groups under a common struggle against the capitalist classes. Babson defines solidarity as that which “defined an injury to any one worker as an injury to all workers” (Babson, 9). In practice, this amounted to workers striking in sympathy for a strike held by workers from another industry brought together by geographical links (such as the different unions in the Seattle 1919 strike) or by relationships in their modes of production (such as the Pullman 1894 strike, in which railroad workers joined train operators’ strike). Indeed, the Seattle 1919 strike appears to have been a major show of class solidarity in the inter wars period; was this the reason that it was picked as the title for The Fuse’s rock opera – because the songs focused in class solidarity and Seattle 1919 was its symbol?

    A major point of contention between workers (particularly the skilled) and the factory owner class in early 20th century was scientific management and the scrip system (Zinn, 9). Scientific management, a system of production introduced by Taylor in which workers were to perform minimum tasks on pieces carried on a line (Babson, 27), involved a decrease at the cost of production and the de-skilling of workers, which threatened to end with the relative autonomy enjoyed by skilled craftsmen. (Babson, 29)

    Class solidarity was a problematic concept in early U.S. unionism, especially when applied over marginalized minorities among the working class. White workers would often not accept African-American authorities, although they would appeal to class solidarity in times of hardship. (Arnesen, 80)

    In “Street Speech”, a rhetoric that seems to have been transplanted from that of freedom for slaves is used to advocate the right for workers to be free from the scrip system. The singer says, “brick by brick / nail by nail / we built the mansions / and we built the jails”, pointing out that the power to bring about both opulence of the upper class and oppression on the worker class lies within the worker class. At the same time, it is suggested that the struggle of the working class is akin to that of the African-American peoples because both are directed against a group that owns the means of production. The song goes on: “We don’t want them / we don’t need them / these parasites who live off someone else!”. Thus “Street Speech” is a coalitional effort to incorporate African-Americans to the organizing effort, while at the same time it is meant to rouse feelings of class solidarity from white union workers towards African-Americans who, driven by poverty, often acted as strikebreakers (Babson, 48), triggering racial lynching from union members.

    Unskilled workers were also often excluded in the support from skilled workers’ unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). During World War I, unskilled workers’ unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were prosecuted by the government under the implicit consent of the AFL (Babson, 37). In Seattle’s 1919 strike, even though local AFL affiliates cooperated with each other on a radical path more on IWW’s lane, national AFL representatives dissented. (Brecher, 105) It is to note that the price of such non-cooperation only came back to the worker. In “Caught in the middle”, the singer laments: “I joined IWW for a principle / and the AF of L for a job / now I’m caught in the middle / don’t know which way to go”.

    The uneasiness between the AFL and IWW is also closely bound by the tensions around the newly introduced scientific management. Scientific management, introduced by Taylor, was encouraged to union workers to work in small, mechanical tasks that didn’t require a specific skill. This meant that whenever a strike broke among skilled craftsmen, managers could easily replace them with dozens of unskilled workers from the streets. (Babson, 28) This was the chief reason why AFL would not offer membership to industrial workers. (Babson, 32)

    Seattle 1919 uses strategies of incorporation by appealing to shared experiences as described above. It also points out a common struggle against the capitalist class as a reason to unite forces. The scarcity of solidarity among different minority groups is sometimes compensated by recognizing a common opposing force.

    One form of such approach is by weighing the capitalist’s power against powers traditionally held as authoritative. The singer expresses this in “One Step Further”, in which he sings “I don’t care about the government / I think Rockefeller owns the president”. The capitalist class is portrayed as am powerful force that flies above any controlling mechanism. The weariness of an opposing force that go beyond law is a compelling reason to join a struggle against it.

    A definitive split between AFL and IWW, and the eventual demise of the IWW while AFL grew under government protection, took place during World War I. On the one hand the demand for industrial output increased, while available labor was held steady because immigration routes were blocked. The government, worried that a general strike may disrupt the highly profitable war machinery exportations situation, created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) that mediated negotiations between corporations and unions in order to prevent strikes from erupting. AFL was highly cooperative in the process, alienating the draft-resisting IWW in the process. (Babson, 39) Seattle 1919 is critical of this relationship. “The Push” goes like this: “You say it’s for the war but I think it’s for the money”, which may be referring to the NWLB that is pleading for no strikes because it would damage the country but also to the AFL that claims to show its patriotic stance while receiving compensations in the form of organizing support. I think the song lines up with the IWW, which is evident in the anti-war stance of the lines “In the bloody trenches / where is law and order? / Dying for your country”

    Seattle 1919 is a call to class solidarity across skill and racial lines, because there is a common struggle against a common opposing force. Unfortunately, the brief one-month general strike in Seattle, which most closely resembled such close knit solidarity among the working class in the city, fell down because of fissures with external AFL pressuring and the government threat of turning the peaceful manifestation into a violent one.