|Home | Site Map | Flashpoints Menu||text version| |LARRY
FOREMAN (an organizer) The difference? Open shop is when a
boilermaker can be kicked around, demoted, fired, like that --
he's all alone, he's free -- free to be wiped out. Closed shop
-- he's got fifty thousand other boilermakers behind him, ready
to back him up, every one of them, to the last lunch pail. The
difference? It's like the five fingers on your hand. (tapping
one finger) the boilermakers -- just one finger -- but this --
(pointing to finger for each) rollers, roughers, machinists,
blasters, boilermakers -- that's closed shop! (makes a fist of
it) that's a union! (thumbing nose with that hand.) The Cradle
Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein (words and music), 1937, music drama.
Excerpt from scene 7. Random House, 1938. The Federal Theater
Project's The Cradle Will Rock At the height of the Depression,
President Franklin Roosevelt creates the Works Progress
Administration, a relief organization designed to put American
workers back on the job. Respond