Labor Today

LABOR TODAY (1961-1986). A magazine that shifted into tabloid format, sought to reinvigorate the Left within unions after the easing of the McCarthy Era allowed more room for labor’s progressives. In its early years, Labor Today focused on many of the issues raised by the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Like Freedomways magazine, it mirrored the sense that a new era for progressive and left-leaning interracial movements had begun. Its founding editor, Charles M. Dewey, had been a United Auto Workers activist with ties to the Communist Party.

In 1970, Labor Today moved to Chicago and began to focus on shop floor issues. This shift reflected the CPUSA’s new orientation toward forming rank and file left-wing caucuses in unions, and the paper affiliated with the National Committee for Trade Union Action and Democracy (TUAD). Labor Today’s new editorial board consisted of John Kailin, a printer; Adelaide Bean, a veteran theatre workers activist; and Fred Gaboury, a logger from Washington State. Gaboury, a TUAD organizer, remained closest to the national CP leadership and later wrote for the People’s Daily World.

Reflecting a new militancy and restlessness within the labor movement, Labor Today succeeded in becoming a lively paper with many first-hand accounts of local union struggles. It struck a chord especially with rank and file efforts among the Steelworkers, the Mine Workers, Electrical and Auto Workers unions. Teachers and public workers also supplied news of their ongoing struggles. The paper highlighted militant rank and file struggles waged to expand democracy, especially within these unions, and to resist corporate efforts to roll back hard-won gains. Jim Williams, a veteran of Southern union struggles, joined John Kailin as editor, and Labor Today carried the stories from their work-place origins.

Major rank and file upsurges within the unions themselves dramatized the paper’s practical achievements, whether winning or (usually) losing to the existing labor bureaucracy. United Mineworkers members successfully elected a leadership directly from the pit faces. A rank-and-file team rocked the Steel Workers union leadership, winning the basic steel locals before losing the national vote. Challenges in the Auto Workers likewise fell short of victory. Labor Today also launched a campaign to reduce the workweek, based in the Auto Workers, with a conference attended by delegates from dozens of union locals. Among social issues, racism became a signal target for Labor Today as it documented shop floor struggles by African Americans and Latino workers. Women’s’ rights prompted lively debates.

By the late 1970s, Debbie Albano joined Fred Gaboury as editors of Labor Today, as it sought to expand further its coverage of the deteriorating labor scene. Serious cutbacks in industry, especially in steel and auto, undercut existing efforts and threw the very existence of the paper into doubt. Gamely, Labor Today turned toward the efforts of unemployed steelworkers to save their pensions and backpay at Wisconsin Steel and other mills. The mid-1980s delivered a deathblow to Labor Today: Communist Party leadership, cutting its losses, withdrew financial support, and the paper ended its nearly two-decade existence.

Charles M. Dewey Papers. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/2469

Wheeler, Tim, “Fred Gaboury, Dean of Labor Writers, 78” People’s World. February 12, 2004. https://peoplesworld.org/article/fred-gaboury-dean-of-labor-writers-78/