By Dave Kamper, author of Who’s Got the Power?
In Milwaukee, in 1886, just a day after the infamous Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, a group of workers and their families, demanding the eight-hour day, marched on the Milwaukee Iron Company. The state militia, directed by the Wisconsin’s Governor, Jeremiah Rusj, opened fire and killed at least seven. None of the militia were charged with a crime, and Governor Rusk was made Secretary of Agriculture a few years later.
In 1914, Colorado National Guardsmen, who were being paid by John D. Rockefeller, opened fire on a tent city of striking miners in Ludlow, killing13 women and children who burned to death while they hid in pits dug underneath tents that had been set on fire. None of the Guardsmen were ever indicted or convicted of a crime. Rockefeller died peacefully in his bed twenty-three years later.
In 1937, Chicago police opened fire on unarmed steelworkers and their families marching peacefully on Memorial Day. Ten died. No one was ever prosecuted.
You might look at those examples and conclude they are an example of the Bad Old Days, and that America is long past that. We’re not. While outright massacres in the US are now few and far between, breaking labor law without consequence is alive and well. It’s no surprise that the billionaires, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have long records of violating labor laws. They spend millions to defend themselves when they illegally fire workers for organizing, and millions more filing lawsuit after lawsuit challenging the basic tenets of American labor law.
No example is more ironic than that of Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks. Starbucks has been found to be in violation of labor law literally hundreds of times as it fights off unionizing baristas, whose courage and strategic skill have made them heroes to workers everywhere. It’s not just that Starbucks has yet to face any serious legal consequences for its actions; it’s also that, as recently as just a few years ago, Schultz was considered such a friend of the supposedly pro-worker Democrats that he reportedly was Hillary Clinton’s pick to be Secretary of Labor had she won in 2016.
At least, Starbucks claims that it hasn’t broken the law – there’s a tiny amount of comfort in the company’s showing a fig leaf of shame. But oftentimes, capitalists don’t even pretend to care about such niceties.
In 1978, a management-side lawyer named Leonard Scott handwrote a memo to clients on how companies should respond to union drives. On the bottom of the first page, he jotted out a little timeline of a union campaign. Right before “Petition filed” in the timeline, he wrote, with a little arrow pointing to where it should go: “Violate the law here.”
Fans of HBO’s The Wire know that you don’t take notes on criminal conspiracies, but here was a sitting member of the bar, on paper, openly advising a client to violate the law, and so unconcerned about the consequences of that unethical advice that he later included the memo in the papers he donated to the Cornell University archives.
When you look, therefore, at the lawlessness of the Trump administration, remind yourself that it’s nothing new.
The second Trump administration, much more so than the first, has a steadfast contempt for the rule of law. It’s not just that the administration skirts the rules or plays on the margins of the law. It outright defies it, openly and proudly, and dares us all to try to stop them. What would be new is if, once (if) we manage to put this nightmare behind us, the bullies and billionaires who showed such disregard for the rule of law were held to account for it.
