This Day in Labor History: March 2, 1957

On March 2, 1957, Indiana became the first industrial state in Midwest to pass a right to work law, a major defeat for unions and a major victory for the anti-union forces growing in power during these years.

Even at its strongest, the American labor movement was never really that powerful. Even at the height of the mass organizing era of the CIO, half of that federation’s members were in five states–Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. And while a few smaller states in New England had a strong union presence, the movement simply could not organize in enough of the nation’s smaller industries to become powerful in most of the country. What this meant was a limited amount of political power. The big strike wave of 1946 combined deep hatred of unions among many politicians to lead to a huge backlash in 1947, culminating in the Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Harry Truman’s veto. That alone shows just how few states had senators and representatives who felt they couldn’t reject the power of the labor movement. Among the many horrible things about that law was a provision to create so-called “right to work” legislation. That allowed states to pass laws saying that a worker did not have to be a member of their union even if their coworkers had voted for a union. But the union was still responsible for bargaining your salary and working conditions and even had to represent you if you got in trouble at work. In short, it was a right to leech provision that incentivized workers not joining unions and proved a real challenge to organized labor in those states where it passed. But that was mostly the South in the decade after the law passed and organized labor had already mostly failed there for other reasons.

Still, when Indiana decided to push forward a right to work bill in 1957, the labor movement didn’t really think it had any chance to pass. But really, Indiana has long been a problem for left-of-center America. Even today, I am amazed that Barack Obama won the state in 2008, which really did come out of nowhere and will never be repeated by a Democrat in my lifetime. All of the Midwestern states were fundamentally Republican until they industrialized and enormous numbers of immigrants moved in to work the factories and then the unions came and organized them all and the New Deal brought them into the coalition. But Indiana had this less than any other similar state. Indianapolis was always and remains a boring sprawling city that never did what Chicago, Detroit, or Minneapolis-St. Paul did in their states, provide that urban core of huge Democratic votes. And as for other industrial cities, Gary was very important. But the few other industrial centers in Indiana such as Terre Haute, Fort Wayne, and Muncie just never were big enough to make the Hoosier State a Michigan or even an Ohio.

In fact, the labor movement had done a good job organizing the Indiana working class, with about 40% unionization rates in the mid-50s, which was certainly higher than other states who would adopt right-to-work legislation. But the state’s labor movement was deeply divided between the AFL and CIO unions and the infighting between the two federations was even fiercer in the state than elsewhere. The building trades hated the connections between the CIO and the Democratic Party. In fact, even when the national federations merged in 1955, many of the Indiana trades refused to participate at the statewide level, wanting nothing to do with people they believed were communists.

So labor sure got a shock. But maybe it should have expected this. If any Midwestern state was going to try to go right to work, it definitely was going to be Indiana. Labor tried to fight. As the bill was about to be signed by the governor, labor came to town, 10,000 strong to protest. But what was 10,000 people in a pretty large state? There were deeper problems. The AFL-CIO, now merged, largely ignored state federations and state-level organizing. It was so focused on Washington that in forgot Indianapolis. Moreover, Republicans had gained huge majorities in the state during the Eisenhower years and while at first, the party didn’t want to take on labor directly, when it realized it could, it did.

The moment that pushed Indiana Republicans into outright anti-unionism was a strike at an auto parts plant in New Castle, against an employer that still absolutely loathed the sheer idea of unions, often a problem in the smaller auto plants. It forced the United Auto Workers into a strike in 1955 by denying its demand for a union shop. The company went old school and hired thugs. A company guard fired into a crowd, strikers rushed to get their own guns, a shootout took place, and 8 people were wounded. Although this was started by the company thugs, Indiana Republicans saw an opportunity to bust labor in the state entirely. The Chamber of Commerce led this new offensive, of course. Indiana State Federation of Labor president Carl Mullen got a meeting with Governor Harold Handley, urging him to veto the law. This itself was the result of a huge miscalculation. The state labor federation had not endorsed the Democrat against him the previous fall because they believed he would veto right-to-work legislation if it came to that. Whoops.

Labor tried mass mailings at the national level. But as these things always go, the legislators didn’t care. They just said, well, all this mail opposing right to work came from other parts of the country. Why would we care about that? This is usually the case with mass mailing, petitions, emails, and other ways that activists try to get people on board around a law. If it’s not in-district folks, or in-state in this case, they don’t care. There’s a lesson for us today in this. I’ve seen this in archives too–the staffers just bundle them all together and throw them in a folder and that’s the end.

It was also not hard to find union members who didn’t like their unions and supported this legislation, including workers who were forced to be union members of organizations that they hated. That didn’t help. So Handley signed the legislation and Indiana never looked back. In the aftermath at least, the AFL-CIO did start to take state level politics seriously. The state did repeal the law in 1965, after another long fight, though in 2012, it reinstated a new one, a sign of the horrors of the contemporary Republican Party.

I borrowed from Marc Dixon, Heartland Blues: Labor Rights in the Industrial Midwest to write this post.

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