With time for this year’s 36th biennial Kentucky State AFL-CIO convention approaching, I’m thinking of President Emeritus Bill Londrigan’s farewell address on the last day of the 2023 gathering.
His words are as timely as ever with Donald Trump intensifying the assault on democracy that he began in his first term.
“How many times in the past have you heard us really talking about democracy and what it means?” Londrigan challenged delegates. “We haven’t had that conversation. We’ve always focused on what we’re doing as a union movement to improve the wages and benefits of our members and the rest of society.”
Londrigan, who stepped down after 24 years, said free trade unions reflect a familiar picket line chant. “This is what democracy looks like. In a democracy, unions are able to strike without fear of being beaten, jailed, tortured, or even killed,” he explained.
“One real way to look at what democracy looks like is to look at what democracy isn’t,” he proposed. “We haven’t necessarily gone out and talked about what role we play in protecting democracy. You need to think about that.”
To that end, the veteran union leader read from William L. Shirer’s The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940, the journalist-historian’s first-hand account of how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis destroyed Germany’s fledgling democracy, including its powerful unions. (Hitler and the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists.” They weren’t socialists. They used “socialist” to dupe and win over working-class voters. The Nazis courted rich capitalists, even furnishing them slave labor during World War II.)
Unions were among the staunchest champions of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s fledgling democracy. They also were among Germany’s most outspoken critics of Hitler and the Nazis.
So soon after Hitler took power in 1933, he killed the republic and suppressed the unions.
Hitler’s hatred of unions went hand-in-hand with his genocidal anti-Semitism. The latter resulted in the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million European Jews. Many Jews were in unions, too.
In Mein Kampf, his infamous autobiography, Hitler claimed unions “created the economic weapon which the international world Jew uses for the ruination of the economic basis of free, independent states, for the annihilation of their national industry and of their national commerce, and thereby for the enslavement of free people in the service of the above-the-state-standing, world finance Jewry.”
Gustav Schiefer, pro-democracy and anti-Nazi
Gustav Schiefer, a Munich labor leader and member of the Munich City Council, was one of the early victims of the Nazi attack on organized labor. Hitlerite thugs severely beat him. He was arrested and imprisoned. Undaunted, he joined the anti-Hitler resistance and was thrown into the notorious Dachau concentration camp.
Schiefer belonged to the anti-Nazi and pro-union Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party). The SPD championed the republic and unions. Many union members, including Schiefer, were in the SPD.
After the conservative parties helped him gain power, Hitler outlawed all political parties other than the Nazis. He singled out the SPD and German Communist party for especially savage treatment.
The Nazis maimed, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered members of both parties, including those who had been freely elected to Parliament under the republic. A memorial to lawmakers the Nazis killed stands outside the Reichstag in Berlin. The historic building has housed Parliament since the reunification of Germany.
Schiefer had been executive chairman of the Munich Local Committee of the Allgemeiner Deutcher Gewerkschaftsbund (German Trade Union Association) for going on 15 years when Nazi goons burst in and ransacked the association’s Munich headquarters onMarch 9, 1933, two months before Hitler officially sent police and his feared Brownshirts to seize union offices and arrest union leaders nationwide.
The Nazi Labor Front
The unions were replaced with the Labor Front, a Nazi puppet organization. Under the Labor Front, the German worker was “bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor,” Shirer wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth ‘labor trustees,’ appointed by him, would ‘regulate labor contracts’ and maintain ‘labor peace.’ Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes.”
Hitler named Dr. Robert Ley, whom Shirer described as “the alcoholic Cologne [Nazi] party boss,” as Labor Front chief. Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory – that is, the employer,” the author added.
The Nazis terrorize Schiefer
Munich Nazis cynically ordered Schiefer to return to his post On March 15, “and resume … normal activity within the framework of the trade unions,” he testified to a U.S. Army officer on October 17, 1945. (World War II had ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7 and 8, 1945.)
The feisty 56-year-old World War I veteran refused to become a Nazi stooge. So they forced him back to his office.
Schiefer had said that in the break-in, the thugs had stolen items. Knowing he couldn’t identify the thieves, the Nazis ordered Schiefer to write down their names.
Schiefer refused to play the Nazis’ game and suffered harrowing consequences. He told the American officer what happened next, sparing none of the grisly details:
“As I refused my signature about 10 Nazis beat me ... indiscriminately until I collapsed. Upon that they seized me and threw me into the bottom of the light shaft of the Trade Union Headquarters Building. After lying there for some time I summoned up my strength and tried to rouse myself. When the Nazis noted that, they again dragged me into the hall and beat me until I collapsed and fainted. My colleagues ... grabbed me and brought me in this condition to the Munich-Schwabing hospital.
“In addition to many other injuries, Professor Dr. Kerschensteiner, director of this institution, diagnosed serious concussion of the brain with hemorhage into the brain. I remained from 15 March to 5 May 1933. On 5 May the Precinct Physician, at that time already a Nazi, certified that I was sufficiently fit for arrest. On 5 May I was transported to the Ettstrasse Police Prison, and from there to Stadelheim [Prison]. I remained in Stadelheim until 25 August 1933.”
Schiefer faced confinement in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Opened in 1933, it was Hitler’s first concentration camp. Here, prisoners were frequently tortured and murdered. Behind the camp’s high concrete walls and electrified barbed wire, the Nazis, during the war, carried out their barbaric “medical experiments” on helpless prisoners, usually Jews or Soviet POWs.
“It is due to an extraordinarily fortunate circumstance that I was saved from Dachau in 1933,” Schiefer testified. (He would wind up in the camp in 1944.)
He explained: “… Dr. Geisendoerfer, who was chief physician in Stadelheim, knew me. ... During my stay in Stadelheim the Gestapo had me examined five times by the chief physician, who always held a protective hand over me, and to whom I am also indebted for my early release, due to a serious illness. …”
Schiefer was denied disability compensation until New Year’s Eve and was unable to find work until spring, “After my release from Stadelheim I had to report to the police every third day for almost 2 years,” he remembered. “Constant police supervision was one of the simplest cases of chicanery.”
Encouraged by a colleague, Schiefer “joined the movement against the Nazi system in good time; and it was exclusively due to the steadfastness of my colleague … I, like many other friends, am still alive. After the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944, I was again arrested and shipped to Dachau Concentration Camp. … On 6 October 1944 I was released without any interrogation. I was extraordinarily fortunate.”
Upon the collapse of the Nazi regime, Schiefer said he became “again active in the trade union as well as the political movement and also in social work and life.” He was reelected to the council and in 1945-1948 was chair of the SPD membership.
Schiefer complained that after the Nazis were defeated, “not a hair on the head of any of these swine was harmed on behalf of the trade unions. We bore witness, and still bear witness today, for human dignity and justice. [Italics mine.]
Londrigan: “The union movement is what democracy’s about.” Trump isn’t.
“The union movement is what democracy’s about,” Londrigan also said in his speech. He urged the convention to think hard about the future of American democracy because “this is a pivotal time for this country. ... If we don’t have democratic, free unions we don’t have a democracy.”
When Londrigan addressed the convention, Trump, who had proved to be the one of the most-if not the most-antiunion presidents in American history, was running for a second term.
Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.
– The AFGE’s Everett Kelley
No sooner was Trump again inaugurated last January than he renewed his assault on unions. He issued an executive order denying federal workers their collective bargaining rights, claiming it was necessary for “national security.”
Warned American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley: “President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants – nearly one-third of whom are veterans – simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies. This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association. Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”
So far, lower courts have rebuffed Trump’s federal union-busting. But he has a big ace in the hole with the union-despising, 6-3 far rightwing Supreme Court majority.
The fate of Gustav Schiefer and thousands of trade unionists in Nazi Germany serve as a chilling reminder of what can happen to the American trade union movement if union members don’t continue to resist Trump, an authoritarian wannabe at best, a protofascist at worst.
Londrigan said he never imagined that he would stand before a union crowd “talking about such things as losing our democracy, and here it is right in front of us.” He challenged delegates to “figure out what the hell is going to happen going forward” for the sake of “our children, our grandchildren.” Otherwise, they won’t “have a labor movement” or “a right to collective bargaining. It’s up to us ... to spread that message and to fight back.”
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