{"id":8897,"date":"2023-01-15T22:33:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-16T03:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=8897"},"modified":"2023-01-22T20:23:10","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T01:23:10","slug":"giving-credit-to-the-wrong-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/01\/giving-credit-to-the-wrong-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving credit to the wrong class"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n his response<\/a> to my critique in Tempest<\/em><\/a> of his argument about the role of NIRA Section 7(a) as \u201cspurring\u201d the upsurge in strikes in 1933, Eric Blanc writes, \u201cKim Moody\u2019s new long polemic\u2026can\u2019t explain why workers struggles began to focus on union recognition after the gov passed 7(a) recognizing the right to organize.\u201d While my \u201clong polemic\u201d did note the large number of recognition strikes in 1933\u20131934, it didn\u2019t explain their rise separately because they have historically followed the trend of strikes in general and been a regular feature of worker upsurges for decades, as I will show below. To put it simply, recognition strikes were nothing new in the immediate post-7(a) period. My basic argument about the upsurge of 1933, shown in Table I of my Tempest article, was that the strike wave of that year actually began to take shape before 7(a) was passed in June and that it was encouraged by an upswing in the economy in early 1933, the prior accumulation of organizing experience and radical rank and file leadership (the militant minority) of the previous three years, and to a lesser extent, once 7(a) was passed, by the brief though unmeasurable psychological effect of Section 7(a) on the attitudes of workers and union leaders.<\/p>\n

The authors of the Brookings study of National Recovery Administration (NRA) labor boards, for example, reported the following rise in strike activity in early 1933, which they seemed to think was significant:<\/p>\n

In January 1933 the number of man-days lost in disputes rose rapidly to a total of 240,912 an increase of some 500 per cent over December. In February there was a recession but in March the figure advanced sharply again to 445,771. This advance may have been due to the spurt in production and prices which began shortly after the bank holiday. The number and severity of industrial disputes continued to increase in April (535,039 man-days lost) and May (603,723 man-days lost).1

After that it fell slightly in June and then rose rapidly in July with the ink on 7(a) hardly dry. This study also attributed the July upsurge in large part to the \u201cbusiness boomlet\u201d of that time.2

Furthermore, there was a strong continuity between pre- and post-7(a) strikes. As Michael Goldfield writes about pre-7(a) organizing, \u201c[B]efore FDR signed the NIRA on June 16, 1933, organization was virtually complete in many areas in both the garment and coal industries.\u201d3