Public Employee Press

David Montgomery: author, activist and machinist

I first learned about David Montgomery in the 1970s, a period of rank-and-file militancy influenced by the civil rights movement. He was blacklisted and fired from jobs as a machinist in the 1950s because he was a tremendously effective union organizer, and he was harassed by the FBI as a communist.

Montgomery became a labor historian who inspired activists and academics alike. He joined with other labor historians who focused less on the leaders and institutional history of unions and more on the experiences of ordinary workers, minorities and women in the factories and their struggles with management at their workplaces.

In his book "Fall of the House of Labor" Montgomery tells of the vibrant labor movement in the decades before the 1920s. In a long war, owners wrested control of the factory labor process from skilled workers by using "scientific management" to break down skilled jobs and introducing time clocks and closer supervision.

The skilled workers fought back, joining with less skilled and immigrant workers battling sweatshops and declining real income. They resisted with strikes, often aided by sympathy walkouts.

These struggles - in alliance with socialist movements and often demanding democratic control of the workplace - continued until the end of World War I, but the post-war depression and Red Scare wartime victories. Labor didn't advance again until the 1930s.

David was often a guest on my WBAI "Building Bridges" radio program, where he put labor's current decline in the context of workers' struggles over the decades.

He built faculty support that helped Yale clerical workers win their strike for union recognition. I'm glad he got to see militancy reemerge in the form of the Occupy movement before he died Dec. 2. By reading his works, which are in the Ed Fund Library, the Occupy activists could learn how workers in the past built movements.

David Montgomery was a teacher and organizer for us all.

— Ken Nash