Mid-20th Century Maine Labor Movement Documented in New Book
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — In the years during and immediately following World War II, organized labor in Maine was at its peak, with upward of 95,000 men and women — nearly 37 percent of the state’s nonagricultural workforce — resoundingly supporting the war effort by helping build “the arsenal of democracy,” according to University of Maine labor historian Charles Scontras.
Newly created collective rights for workers, appeals for cooperation and unity in a time of war, and the war-induced demand for labor produced a surge of growth in the labor movement. Despite lingering antiunion sentiments from some quarters, the late 1930s to early 1950s was an era when a rejuvenated organized labor force was afforded an unprecedented measure of recognition and status. Even government war posters promoted labor’s efforts as indispensable to victory.
The importance of labor to the war effort reinforced workers’ claims to their historic role as the “producers” of wealth, says Scontras in his new book on the subject.
“More than ever, the labor movement in Maine had become part of the established order of things,” Scontras writes in Labor in Maine: Building the Arsenal of Democracy and Resisting the Reaction at Home, 1939“1952, published by the Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine.
The newest volume on Maine’s organized labor history by Scontras is a timely look at the societal, political and economic factors that brought the state’s union activism to its height. The book details Maine’s preparation for global conflict, the role and contribution of its workers — including more women and persons with disabilities than ever before — to the war effort, and organized labor’s participation in a variety of war boards, agencies and commissions helping to orchestrate the war effort.
This latest book, one of a series by Scontras related to Maine labor history, also traces the struggles between the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for the hearts and minds of Maine’s textile, shoe, and paper workers. The legislative history of organized labor outlined in the book includes the reforms achieved amid national and local reactionary efforts to hobble the movement.
Particularly inspiring is a chapter on Maine’s version of Rosie the Riveter, part of the aggressive campaign to recruit women into the workforce and the myriad of issues they faced in their new role as defense workers, including the struggle for equal pay for equal work.
The 400-page volume is being released at UMaine in conjunction with an 11-page essay by Scontras, “Requiem for the Labor Movement? A Perspective.” The essay draws on Maine’s labor history as a resource for understanding contemporary labor issues and the possible direction of the movement in the state and nation.
Taken together, the book and essay provide a unique perspective on what difference organized labor, at the height of its strength, made in Maine, and the conditions for workers in the state and nation today amid declining union activity and widespread antiunion policies and philosophies.
Despite the “ideological echoes of the antiunionism of the past,” especially in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, Scontras says there is a glimmer of hope for workers and their eroding rights in today’s global economy.
“The sense of urgency triggered by the unbridled growth of capitalism that provided the impetus for the growth of organized labor may be returning,” Scontras writes. “Economic anxieties that were once viewed exclusively as blue collar phenomenon in the past now embrace these (white collar) workers of the ˜new economy,’ and experience may teach them that collective action to secure a measure of dignity, security and a greater share of the wealth they help to create is no longer a foreign idea which is beneath them.”