The unorganized worker owes a debt of gratitude to his organized brother. If his living standard has not been beaten down to the level of the Russian peasant of the Czarist days, it is due to the demands the organized worker has been able to enforce. The former has benefited from the struggles and sacrifices of the latter.

As to the relation of workmen to their union-for often they belonged to a union-I concluded that in the average industrial community it was not unlike that of the average citizen to his political party and political boss. Both the union and the employer seemed to me to be missing opportunities to help men to understand the structure of industry, perhaps because they did not themselves understand it too well, or sank their understanding in politics. Both union and employer depended upon one or another form of force when there was unrest, rather than education and arbitration. In doing this they weakened, perhaps in the end destroyed, that by which they all lived. The most distressing thing in mills and factories seemed to me to be the atmosphere of suspicion which had accumulated from years of appeal to force. I felt it as soon as I went into certain plants everybody watching me, the guide, the boss, the men at the machines.

Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged and barren....American industry organized misery into sweatshops and proclaimed the right of capital to act without restraints and without conscience. The inspiring answer to this intolerable and dehumanizing existence was economic organization through trade unions. The worker became determined not to wait for charitable impulses to grow in his employer. He constructed the means by which fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him or the wheels of industry, which he alone turned, would halt and wealth for no one would be available...

I wanted to document, somehow, the strength of those people that I had known . . . when the migrant worker was living without any kind of protection.

Those were the days of the battles for the right to organize, and the conditions of workers were abominable.

To a degree, we have been attacking the problem by increasing purchasing power through higher wage scales and increased Social Security benefits. But these measures are exercised with restraint and come only as a consequence of organized struggles...Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white, the Negro, the aged, are traditionally unorganized and have little or no ability to force a growth in their consumer potential. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.

The United States' labor laws are outdated, the National Labor Relations Board is still a husk of itself, understaffed and weakened after decades of neglect-and yet, there is a great and mighty wave of organizing happening regardless. (p. xxvii)

Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience and protests are becoming our everyday tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table.

The unionization of women, even in occupations like the needle trades where they predominated, had scarcely yet begun. Equal opportunities, equal pay, and the right to be organized, were the crying needs of women wage-earners then and unfortunately these demands remain with us today. Many union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, did not consider women workers organizable or dependable. "They only work for pin mon-ey was the usual complaint. An outside job was considered by the woman worker herself as a temporary necessary evil-a stop-gap between her father's home and her husband's home. Fathers and husbands collected women's wages, sometimes right at the company office. Women did not have a legal right to their own earnings. There was no consideration for the special needs and problems of working mothers, though they were numerous and pressing. Even the clothes of women hampered them-the long skirts that touched the ground, the big unwieldy sleeves, the enormous hats. You were still "a girl" if your skirt was above your shoe tops.

Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.

The negro workers are still unaware of the force that can give them union organization; happy industrialists.

Unfortunately, only about one fifth of the nation's working population is organized into unions, but millions of non-union wage-earners have benefited from organized labor's insistence upon decent living standards for all. Those millions remain opposed or indifferent to unions through sheer ignorance of their merits.

So many of these workers newly recognized as "essential" toiled in industries that lack labor protections, were not and still have not been paid a livable wage, still cannot access affordable health care, and are still disenfranchised by a deeply flawed system that places people of color and undocumented workers at increased risk, whether there's a pandemic raging or not. People incarcerated in jails and prisons were forced to manufacture masks, gowns, and hand sanitizer for use outside the walls, even as the virus turned these grim facilities into death traps, and many there have had to dig graves for those who were lost to its grip. Those in the medical field-doctors, nurses, hospital technicians, hospital janitors and laundry workers, funeral home owners and morticians-were placed in extreme danger by personal protective equipment shortages. The entire affair exposed the rotten, hazardous conditions that have been allowed to fester thanks to capitalist cruelty and federal malfeasance, and by hitting the streets and raising the alarm, workers are now fighting back. (p. xxvi)

We are dealing here with a kind of worker aristocracy; around them would gravitate the people who were to be helped and raised up but who, for the moment, really were inferiors within the context of the working class itself. This translated into the choice of a particular form of unionization. When the time came to raise the issue of forming industrial unions, the skilled workers opted for craft-based organization, because that would exclude the unskilled. Objectively, this gave rise to a particular kind of union struggle that was real enough at the time, because in practice it was enough for the skilled workforce in a factory—the minority—to go on strike for operations to cease, even if the unskilled majority wanted to go on working. The union practice of the time, the kind of self-valuing, the type of struggle and form of organization, corresponded strictly to what those workers were, to what the machine was. We are not saying here that they were wrong or right: they were all that the universal lathe allowed them to be. It was in them, as their superiority; they interiorized it, and this interiorization, or subjectivation, produced the whole phenomenon of anarcho-syndicalism.
This was not, as Lukács claims, because they did not grasp the totality of what the working class was and what its struggle was. On the contrary, because they were at the centre of production, they did grasp it as it was at that time. It is true that at that time they were far better qualified than the rest, but it is also true that this led to the development of yellow unions, an aristocracy of labour and a host of fairly aberrant secondary elements reflecting that conception, that interiorization in the form of social superiority, which disappeared wherever work that required training was replaced by semi-automated, then automated machines. But in that epoch they could not have been expected to foresee the existence of such machines, practically and in their struggle. Of course Marx described them in Capital, but he was a theorist, a leader of the International, not a worker who struggles at every instance of his life, someone who is formed by the machine and at the same time internally transforms it. Which means that class consciousness itself has its limits, which are the limits of the situation as long as that situation has not been completely revealed.
Should this lead us to describe this type of 'class consciousness' as empty? Should we decide that the anarcho-syndicalists were not the men required? On the contrary, it is because they were aware of their strength, their courage and their worth, because they established unions and specific forms of struggle, that other forms of struggle could emerge in the era when specialized workers appeared. In the course of struggle, the subjective moment, as a way of being inside the objective moment, is absolutely indispensable to the dialectical development of social life and the historical process.