Ewan MacColl, Laborers and the Efforts to Obscure the Class Struggle.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

11/18-25

 

I posted Roberta Flack singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face to Facebook a few days ago. It has to be one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. The man that wrote it was Ewan MacColl, an English folk singer and Communist Party member. He also wrote, Dirty Old Town. And many other songs about working class life. He wrote the love song for Peggy Seeger, Pete Seeger’s sister and they eventually married.

 

I had a Ewan MacColl album a long time ago, or folk album at least, can't remember exactly, and I liked the song in the video above. The reason was it reminded me of the term labourer and that I was a labourer, both in factories and fields. At the time I had not long left a job laying sewer mains with Irish laborers in the Oxfordshire countryside. I was in teenage love with this farmers daughter once, what we'd call the rural petit bourgeois. When her father got wind of that he put a stop to it right quick.

 

I’m pretty sure on my first passport it said, labourer under “profession”. There was no shame in this although it was clearly seen as a low rung on the ladder in the British class system. I think my US wife’s parents must have had a fit when she brought home this guy who was not only a labourer, but an unemployed one; but they were always kind and accepting of me. I wasn't a skilled tradesman, no university education and if I went to the labor exchange they’d ask me what I was looking for, they'd tell me what labourer positions might be available. Normally though, one would just wander on to building sites or walk in to a factory to see if they had any openings.

Back in the 1980's when I was a delegate from my union to the Alameda County Central Labor council here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I noticed how language was changing. Organized labor had lost many battles throughout the 1980’s due to the refusal of the labor hierarchy to mobilize a generalized fightback against the employer’s offensive and efforts at labor/management partnerships gained traction. The hope was they might convince the boisses' to be less aggressive.

 

So there was a lot of talk about changing the culture, the adversarial culture between labor and capital that is portrayed as simply a matter of choice, as opposed to it being an integral part capitalism and class society. In its place, the Team Concept culture, that workers and bosses are partners, members of the same team, began to get a real hold.

 

There was a culture war on language. The term “worker” was being replaced by “team member” or “Associate” and similar terms that were meant to obscure the inherent antagonistic relationship between employers and workers, the buyers of labor power and the sellers of it.

 

Janitorial became “environmental services” and a Janitor, a “custodian” or at best, an environmental engineer.  I was in a store once and I saw this employee on his knees stacking a lower shelf with goods. I got his attention and he strained a bit as he looked up at me, a clear sign getting up and down was hard for him. He was an older black man and I noticed it said on his coveralls that he was an associate.

 

“You’re an associate are you?” I said with a wry smile. He got it and replied, “Yeah, but they don’t pay me mfu&%*in’ associate's wages”.

 

In 1995, after John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in the first contested election in a century, he initially threatened some militant changes and initially talked of using direct action, blocking bridges like Martin Luther King. His first VP Richard Trumka boasted in 1995 that, “…the era of union busting, contract trashing and strike breaking is at an end.

 

Well that didn’t last long and, Sweeney went from blocking bridges to building them, not with the rank and file of the organization he headed, but with the bosses. One of his trusted advisors as president of the AFL-CIO was Bill Fletcher who is considered by some to be a militant labor activist, but he was, for the most part, an important member of the labor bureaucracy in this period. In other words, art of the problem from the dues payer's point of view.

We know what we are no matter all the attempts to convince us we are something different. I remember being insulted when I first came to the US and someone told me I was middle class. I never had any aspirations to be middle class, I am a worker. It shows the inherent fear the ruling class has of the working class that it has convinced millions of workers they are not workers. And the labor bureaucracy have embraced this deception.

Adding this later, but as it was over 50 years ago I might be mistaken above and the song might have been this one below but I couldn't find Ewan MacColl singing it.

 

I’m not a bible type, but one of my favorite quotes (I don’t know too many) is from Job: “Man is born to labor and the bird to fly.”. Job must have had an honorable job himself 

 

Most importantly, don't lose sight of the fact that labor is the source of all wealth----------mental and physical. Embrace it.