ABSTRACT

This chapter describes author's experience about the labour movement. His parents were union members at Consumer Reports magazine where they worked. There was a lot of conflict between labor and management at Consumer Reports, and finally his parents quit. Many years later, after he started writing about labor history, he realized that he had been witness at an early age to an elemental act of labor solidarity. He heard labor historian David Montgomery describes the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) in the era of George Meany as a 'great snapping turtle' trying to contain the working class within its shell and snapping its jaws at anyone who might cross the border. There was a sort of cultural apartheid that separated working and middle class worlds. That in turn was in part an effect of the political and institutional isolationism enforced by the snapping turtle. But it posed troubling questions for social movements in general.