Nat’l Assoc. of Manufacturers: Anti-communist union buster

American Axle’s CEO Richard Dauch is a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers and was, until recently, its chairman and public face.

NAM brags on its Web site of its “proud history of achievements.” Just what are the “achievements” of this capitalist consortium, founded in 1895 by over 70 industrialists as they were simultaneously entering the imperialist phase of U.S. capitalism? What domestic agenda coincided with their plans to plunder the world?

“The genesis of the NAM’s commitment to sound employee relations policies,” the organization explains, “was the anthracite coal strike of 1902. The following year, the NAM established an internal department to advocate open shop labor policies.”

The strike of 144,000 men and boys in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania was in response to brutal ten-hour days and wages as low as $22 a month. Led by the United Mine Workers, the strike won higher wages and shorter hours but after five months failed to achieve union recognition. The open shop (nonunion at that time) prevailed.

By the 1930s the costs of NAM’s favored “employee relations policies” were high. Hundreds of union supporters had been murdered and untold numbers beaten, gassed, arrested and “blacklisted.”

The cost of industrial espionage alone had climbed to $80 million, with tens of millions more spent on private corporate stockpiles of weapons and tear gas, not to mention the burden to taxpayers of widespread government repression.

With the cost passed on to consumers by the association’s corporate members, its National Industrial Information Committee “spent more than $15 million on leaflets, movie shorts, radio speeches, films for schools, reprints of articles by economists, and other public relations efforts,” according to the NAM web site.

NAM provided ready-made “news,” radio programs (“American Family Robinson”), cartoons (“Uncle Abner Says”), and editorials to a media all too willing to conceal the authorship.

Twelve thousand local newspapers received editorials equating unionism with communism and some 2.5 million column inches of this drivel were published. NAM’s “Factual Bulletin” was sent to every paper in the country while its “weekly press service” articles were translated for 2.5 million readers of Italian, German, Hungarian and Polish media.

None of this propaganda could halt the forward march of labor. In 1937 workers engaged in 4,700 strikes, including 477 sit-downs. A follow-up pamphlet, “Join the CIO and help build a Soviet America,” proved equally ineffective, although NAM’s membership soared.

Labor rights under attack

Continuing with its boastful pride, the Web site recounts that “NAM played a leading role in the 1947 enactment, overriding President Harry Truman’s veto, of the Taft-Hartley Act, which served to level the playing field in labor relations.”

For over 50 years Taft-Hartley has been used to curtail labor’s only real leverage against employers, the right to strike.

There’s more. “A major NAM effort to document the abuses of union power led to the 1959 enactment of the Landrum-Griffin Act,” which tightened controls already in place under Taft-Hartley and gave the secretary of labor extensive powers to interfere with private union affairs.

Unwilling to allow any limits on the reach of Taft-Hartley, “The work of the NAM and its members helped derail union-backed ‘labor law reform’ legislation via a Senate filibuster in 1978.”

NAM’s “achievements” of the 1980s and 1990s include the passage of NAFTA and CAFTA and “successful lawsuits reining in rulemaking abuses at OSHA and EPA.”

Overturning OSHA’s ergonomics standard was, in the vile organization’s own words, “a particularly satisfying victory.”

Currently, NAM is lobbying for the passage of the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia’s fascist Uribe regime, with which it has in common a deep hatred of unions.

At the same time, these capitalists are pushing to defeat Senate Bill 2191—which aims to reduce total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 63 percent below their 2005 levels by the year 2050—and the EPA’s new ozone standard.

All of these current and historical attacks on labor are documented unashamedly on the NAM Web site, but there is one particularly sordid chapter left out. In 1924 both the House and Senate passed overwhelmingly an amendment to the Constitution giving Congress “the power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.”

Defeating this amendment at the state level became NAM’s primary obsession. Not only was what would have become the 20th Amendment denounced as “Bolshevistic,” the outlandish claim was made that it was “a revolutionary transformation of the traditional relationship and respective function of local and federal government and the primary control of parents over the training and occupation of their children.”

With the help of Roman Catholic clergy the amendment failed in Massachusetts. NAM then turned its eyes on Minnesota. Ally Uriah Briggs of the Minnesota Citizens Alliance insisted that: “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the boy who has not learned to work before he is eighteen years old increases the idlers and street corner loafers, thieves and other criminals, and goes straight to perdition. ... Which will you have—your children in the Devil’s Workshop or in the Industrial Workshop?”

In 1933 Minnesota finally passed the amendment over employer objections, but by that time NAM had effectively killed any hope of giving constitutional protection to this country’s children.

Low wages, long hours, pollution and child labor—these are the causes to which the National Association of Manufacturers has devoted itself for over a century! In his drive to bust the UAW, the CEO of American Axle is in good company.