The Transformation of U.S. Unions: Voices, Visions, and Strategies from the Grassroots 9781685854072

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The Transformation of U.S. Unions

Transformations in Politics and Society Series Editor: Theodore Becker

The Transformation

of U.S. Unions Voices, Visions, and Strategies from the Grassroots

edited by

Ray M. Tillman Michael S. Cummings

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

To all the insurgents and union activists in the past, present, and future who have dedicated their lives to transforming the U.S. labor movement and society as a whole; and, most of all, to my wife, Lynne, and daughter, Rya, who through their abiding support, understanding, and love allow and provide me with the energy to continue the struggle. — rmt To Leonard, who made things grow; Charlie, who showed me how things work; Harry, who fed me late at night; the other Harry, artist of engines; Eugene, who led me to the unknown; Ralph, who protected me; Inez, who included me; Lawrence, who taught me that winning isn’t the only thing; Libbus, who bucked the boss; and Nellie, who showed me how to make a difference. — msc

Published in the United States of America in 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress (CIP 98-45923). British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

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Introduction Michael S. Cummings and Ray M. Tillman

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A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old? Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello

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A Rising Tide of Union Democracy Herman Benson

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The New AFL-CIO: No Salvation from on High for the Working Stiff Jane Slaughter

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Labor: Turning the Corner Will Take More than Mobilization Michael Eisenscher

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Learning from the Past to Build the Future Peter Rachleff

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The Dynamics of Change Kim Moody

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Unsung Heroes of Union Democracy: Rank-and-File Organizers Peter Downs

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Reform Movement in the Teamsters and United Auto Workers Ray M. Tillman

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Hell on Wheels: Organizing Among New York City’s Subway and Bus Workers Steve Downs and Tim Schermerhorn

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The Local Union: A Rediscovered Frontier Staughton Lynd

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Restructuring Labor’s Identity: The Justice for Janitors Campaign in Washington, D.C. Jane Williams

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CONTENTS

Lessons from the UMWA Anna M. Zajicek and Bradley Nash Jr.

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Cross-Border Alliances in the Era of Globalization Bruce Nissen

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A Strategic Organizing Alliance Across Borders Robin Alexander and Peter Gilmore

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Conclusion: Union Democracy and Social Unionism Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings

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Selected Readings About the Contributors Index About the Book

275 279 283 297

Introduction Michael S. Cummings and Ray M. Tillman

“The search for new directions is not easy, but history is the story of change!”1 A significant change came about in 1995 when the New Voice slate, led by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president John Sweeney, United Mine Workers (UMW) president Richard Trumka, and Linda Chavez-Thompson, was elected to lead the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)—a stunning result of the first contested AFL-CIO presidential election in over seventy years. A key question asked in this book is how important the Sweeney team’s upheaval may turn out to be for the democratic transformation of unions. Some observers point to important changes already made by the new leadership; others argue that the reforms promised by New Voice are, democratically speaking, “two days late and two dollars short.” A key point of contention is whether labor should cooperate with or struggle against capital and its attempts to downsize, outsource, and globalize the workers and the U.S. economy. The fourteen chapters that follow make a powerful case for a socially conscious grassroots democracy as the crux of union reform and perhaps even as the salvation of the union movement. The authors assess both the promise and the limitations of the AFL-CIO’s new, reform-oriented leadership, which hopes to reverse the disastrous, forty-year decline of organized labor’s share of the paid workforce—from one-third in the 1950s to less than a sixth in 1998. By connecting the history of union reform with a critical analysis of reform movements today, the authors develop recommendations for transforming U.S. labor in the years to come. The chapter authors—labor activists, scholars, and journalists—explain and document the vital importance of union democracy, the importance of workers’ taking matters into their own hands by participating in union decisions, by holding their leaders accountable, and by reaching out 1

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to the larger community. Despite differing emphases, all the contributors agree that rank-and-file workers cannot afford to entrust their lives or their livelihoods to the good graces of government officials, corporate owners, or union oligarchs. As Michael Eisenscher puts it, “Democracy is an instrument for building solidarity, for establishing accountability, and for determining strategies—all of which are critical for sustaining and advancing worker and union interests.” In the book’s opening chapter, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello stress the vital links between union struggles and broader movements for social change, urging labor to unite with other progressive community organizations. In “A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?” Brecher and Costello argue that “any substantial revitalization of the labor movement will require a move toward social-movement unionism” to accompany rank-and-file empowerment within unions. In “A Rising Tide of Union Democracy,” Herman Benson shows how today’s reform movements have grown out of earlier struggles for internal democracy. Faulting the new AFL-CIO leadership for failing to strengthen the rights of union members, he argues that internally, unions must open up to membership participation and dissent, and that externally, they must help build “a great new moral, social, and political force capable of moving the conscience of the nation.” Benson cautions against any premature conclusions about the long-term effects of the Sweeney reform era in the AFL-CIO. These two chapters frame the basic choice facing U.S. labor today: business-friendly, conservative “reform” or authentic, democratic transformation of U.S. unions. Jane Slaughter dissents from Sweeney’s emphasis on building labor’s muscle by increasing union ranks and persuading workers to vote Democratic. In “The New AFL-CIO: No Salvation from on High for the Working Stiff,” she warns that workers will not be saved by the high and mighty or by the Democratic Party but by their own class-based militancy and union leaders held truly accountable by the rank and file. In “Labor: Turning the Corner Will Take More Than Mobilization,” Michael Eisenscher argues that unions, “once heralded as leader of a broad progressive coalition, . . . are more commonly portrayed today as merely a ‘special interest’.” He emphasizes the importance of “a deep-going process of internal transformation” based on democratic and communitarian values, and of a greater role for unions in their communities, not just of a change in leadership. In “Learning from the Past to Build the Future,” Peter Rachleff finds hope for the future in the U.S. labor movement’s record of resurgence from low points in the past—recoveries based on blending the experience of current unionists with the energies of new social forces and newly organized workers. He shows that U.S. labor’s big comebacks have typically combined militant workplace action by the rank and file, support for local

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strikes by the larger labor movement, and campaigns for public support— three strategies he finds shortchanged by the New Voice AFL-CIO leadership. In “The Dynamics of Change,” Kim Moody proposes bottom-up approaches and stresses that change must come from rank-and-file activism rooted in social conscience. Peter Downs credits the “Unsung Heroes of Union Democracy,” its rank-and-file organizers, for benefiting not only union members but the larger society as well. “Perhaps the most important contribution of rank-and-file organizers to democracy,” he says, “is to teach working people that they don’t have to be powerful as individuals to change things for the better.” In “Reform Movement in the Teamsters and United Auto Workers,” Ray Tillman argues that if democracy can be made to work in unions, the members will champion it in other areas of life as well. Tillman’s study of two reform movements, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the UAW’s New Directions Movement, connects their struggles for internal democracy with their social unionism; these two case studies suggest an alternative approach to rebuilding the U.S. labor movement. In “Hell on Wheels,” Steve Downs and Tim Schermerhorn examine the New Directions Caucus of Transit Workers Local 100, in which reformers broke the incumbent leaders’ monopoly of power and won democratic concessions for the members but continue to struggle against oligarchical tendencies among themselves, as New Directions’ own members get co-opted by accepting staff positions. As New Directions candidates, Downs and Schermerhorn daringly point out that their own platform for union democracy will “make it easier for the next group of dissidents to get rid of us if we become ‘them’ than it was for us to get rid of the current ‘them’!” Without denying the importance of reformers’ capturing national union offices, Staughton Lynd makes a strong case for emphasizing grassroots reforms at the local level and for building horizontal networks among progressive locals. In “The Local Union: A Rediscovered Frontier,” he documents the record of locals, impressive compared to national unions. He nonetheless warns of locals’ biggest challenge: “the selfishness that destroys solidarity inside unions.” In “Restructuring Labor’s Identity,” Jane Williams uses SEIU Local 82’s Justice for Janitors campaign to show the need to link workers’ interests with people’s broader concerns for social justice. She also illustrates the problems a union may face if it organizes new workers but ignores the needs and views of existing members— especially if workers are divided along ethnic lines. While crediting John Sweeney for a sea change in union practices, she notes the dangers of overstressing his view that “unions should look outward, not inward.” In “Lessons from the UMWA,” Anna Zajicek and Bradley Nash Jr. advocate a healthy balance between strong national unions and strong locals. Examining the United Mine Workers’ recent history, they caution that

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unions must adapt to changing conditions and that “there is no one best way to structure a union movement.” They suggest that while excessive union centralization demobilizes the members, excessive decentralization weakens the national union and may result in losses and concessions despite increased local militancy. Two final chapters emphasize the global challenges facing unions today. In “Cross-Border Alliances in the Era of Globalization,” Bruce Nissen documents recent cross-border alliances and offers a number of principles for helping them grow and thrive. Especially important is to increase and regularize contact across borders not only between union leaders but between rank-and-file workers from different countries. In “A Strategic Organizing Alliance,”2 Robin Alexander and Peter Gilmore give an example of a U.S. union and a Mexican union building a successful alliance to deal with multinational corporations that hire workers from both countries. In addition to sharing organizational training sessions, this alliance uses language, theatre, murals, cartoons, music, and other art forms to build and express its international solidarity. This book records offers the voices of a dissident unionism that is growing in strength as we enter the new millennium. These voices resonate with millions of Americans whose critical view of unions targets bureaucratic or corrupt union leaders. A recent Roper Center poll found that Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, accord labor unions a right to exist, but that a slight majority (45 percent to 41 percent) view them more negatively than positively. Americans typically sympathize 2-to-1 with “striking workers” in opposition to “company management,” but favor “business” over “labor unions” 4-to-3, and fault “labor union leaders” almost 2-to-1 as “more interested in their own personal concerns” than in “helping their members.”3 It is ironic that the word union itself has become not a unifying but a divisive symbol, representing a “special interest” alienating many Americans from their fellow workers. Organized labor now ranks with government, lawyers, political parties, pro sports, and the media as untrustworthy when compared with colleges, religious institutions, and charities, which inspire much greater confidence among Americans.4 Union members are almost as hostile to union leaders as the general public is: Union respondents rated union leaders as primarily selfish by 51 percent to 38 percent (nonunion Americans were only somewhat more critical of them, 57 percent to 28 percent). For the same Roper Center report, KRC Research and Consulting assembled eight broadly representative focus groups of workers in New York, Mobile, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. “Nearly all respondents [including those who were generally prounion] portray union leaders as ‘greedy,’ ‘corrupt,’ and ‘out of touch.’” In addition, many women workers “see unions as a male-dominated institution.” 5 The general sentiment of the workers was that “unions need to

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operate differently than they have in the past and to pursue somewhat different objectives.”6 Speaking for workers, labor economist Michael Yates asserts that “the accumulation of capital remains the source of our most pressing problems.”7 Yates may be right, but rank-and-file workers who tolerate company-friendly unions with corrupt and autocratic leaders participate in their own oppression. Racism, as well as the sexism noted above, continues to divide and conquer the labor movement. Sociologist Kenneth Clark tells us to “look at the American labor movement. With very few exceptions, it was never able to grow strong and effective because it was oppressed by its own racism. There’s a curious kind of tragic humor in racism oppressing its perpetrators.”8 Unions also alienate would-be friends when they support company activities that poison the environment or degrade low-income neighborhoods. With the Soviet bogeyman dead and gone, “capitalism must now stand naked before the world.”9 But so must labor. U.S. society needs to attend to the unfinished business of providing for its people’s basic needs; of eliminating sexism, racism, ageism, and homophobia; of reversing ecocidal priorities of production and consumption; and of returning power to ordinary citizens both at work and in our communities. If organized labor is to play its proper and vital role in this transformation, it must practice what it preaches. It must reach out to the nonunionized and unpaid workers in our society, including those whose work is to rear and nurture future generations. It must reach out to local communities affected by its work. It must steward not only its own members and shops but also the earth on which we all depend. It must link its own struggles with those of all people who suffer from disadvantages that are not of their own making. More than market forces themselves, it is unaccountable elites, profiting off the labor of others, that harm the working class and undermine the common good. If ordinary citizens controlled the public and private political economy, market forces could reliably serve the common good more of the time, with greater justice and efficiency. The movement for union reform and workplace democracy can help us transform U.S. society in this more humane and communitarian direction. As Michael Eisenscher argues, “Expanding the democratic realm in the labor movement is key to winning greater democracy in the workplace, in the economy, and in society.” And conversely, if the arguments are valid for democracy in politics—for Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”—they are just as compelling for democracy in the union halls and the workplace. Free markets can encourage us to produce higher-quality goods and services at lower cost, and they allow us important freedoms of choice as workers and consumers. But markets alone, whether unfettered or manipulated by

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corporate capitalists, cannot adequately provide for such important public goods as job safety and security, environmental protection, maintenance of infrastructure, public health and education, protection for the disadvantaged, multicultural diversity, planning for future generations, and community integrity in the face of untrammeled growth. Market values must be balanced by community values. Eisenscher recognizes the role of values in social and economic transformation: “We need to build a labor movement that recognizes, articulates, and practices values that are fundamentally different from those of the market, namely values of solidarity, equality, inclusivity, community, and democracy.” Michael Yates notes: “Examples of union autocracy abound; whenever possible the AFL-CIO must oppose them and give support to insurgent movements.”10 As the twenty-first century dawns, we may ask whether autocracy and bureaucracy must eventually triumph over democracy. We hope not, though it may be an uphill battle to prove Robert Michels wrong in his Iron Law of Oligarchy. In the complex modern world, it is always tempting for overburdened workers and citizens to leave governing to elites. Moreover, where grassroots struggles have suffered a history of defeat, “the anticipation of defeat by the relatively powerless” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As John Gaventa concludes in his influential study of an Appalachian valley, “Participation denied over time may lead to acceptance of the role of non-participation, as well as to a failure to develop the political resources—skills, organization, consciousness—of political action.”11 Many forces discourage rank-and-file workers and ordinary citizens from engaging actively in the political process that will help determine their fates. But this engagement is the only alternative to elite rule by default, and it must at a minimum succeed in holding leaders accountable. As Teamster President Ron Carey’s 1998 decertification suggests, even wellmeaning reformers need to be monitored by the rank and file.12 Until unions and communities institutionalize grassroots participation in their governance, we will continue to travel a rocky journey to an uncertain destination on a road laid down by others. Labor desperately needs collaboration with academia, the community, and other social movements (as occurred in the 1930s at the Brookwood Labor School and the Highlander Folk Center). Jerry Tucker, coordinator of the New Directions Workers Educational Center, argues that “workers confronted with huge multinational corporations and an international economic environment need new ideas and new strategies to preserve and enhance their eroding livelihoods, health and safety, and human rights.” On the other hand, Tucker stresses, “the intellectual establishment needs to understand how its theories and work-organization models play out on the shop floor.” Academics need to grasp such fundamentals as “how high

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skills can still yield low wages and worker dissatisfaction, how ‘flexibility’ can become a code word for creating a contingent workforce” used against workers and their “hard-won legal protections.”13 We are pleased to offer this book as a continuation of the “labor-intellectual alliance” featured in the January 1997 issue of Union Democracy Review. If the history of U.S. labor is a mixed one, the appropriate response may be neither optimism nor pessimism but hope for authentic union democracy—and a dedication in our actions to give that hope its best chance. We believe that the cases of transformative struggle for union democracy explored in this book are indeed hopeful ones for the future of the U.S. labor movement. Unlike events over which we have no control, workers and friends of labor alike can make a difference in this future by understanding, promoting, and engaging in the ongoing process of change.

Notes 1. Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976 [updated foreword, 1991]), ix. 2. Between the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), or True Alliance of Workers. 3. Roper Center, “Transformation of the American Labor Movement,” The Public Perspective: A Roper Center Review of Public Opinion and Polling, 5:5 (July/August 1994), 13–16. 4. Americans’ ratings of business vary widely, being generally positive for “free enterprise” but negative for “large corporations.” A “trust” and “confidence” survey of 800 registered voters in Colorado, carried out in 1996 by the Public Policy Program at the University of Colorado at Denver and sponsored by the NORWEST corporation, reported “business” as rated favorably by a 2-to-1 margin (compared with 5-to-1 for colleges, 4-to-1 for charities, 1-to-2 for labor, and 1-to4 for the federal government). Institutional ratings vary geographically, and it should be noted that Coloradans, like registered voters, are more politically conservative than the general U.S. populace. However, the institutional rankings reported here in most respects mirror the results of national polls in the 1990s. 5. Roper Center, “Transformation,” 17. 6. Ibid., 18. 7. Michael Yates, “Does the U.S. Labor Movement Have a Future?”Monthly Review, 48:9 (February 1997), 17. 8. Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Feel About the Great American Obsession (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 335. 9. Yates, “Does the U.S. Labor Movement Have a Future?” 13. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 254–255. 12. Many believe that Carey himself was unknowingly victimized, especially by his former campaign manager and chief accuser, Jere Nash. Carey’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, has pointed out that Nash, along with Martin Davis, pleaded

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guilty to misuse of funds and that Carey passed a polygraph test regarding his own ignorance of the illegal contributions to his re-election campaign against James Hoffa Jr. (Associated Press, January 1, 1998). 13. Telephone interview of Jerry Tucker by Ray Tillman, May 5, 1995.

1 A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old? Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello

The Politics of Reform In 1995, an insurgent campaign that dubbed itself “A New Voice for American Workers” captured the leadership of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). It called for a “new labor movement,” but any effort to construct a new labor movement was bound to come up against the fabled rigidity of the AFL-CIO, which labor historian David Montgomery once compared to a great snapping turtle, “hiding within its shell.” Why did the New Voice emerge, and what possibilities does it open up for the development of a new labor movement, given its location within the rigid and contorted shell of the old? The Fall of the House of Labor A lot has changed since the formation of the AFL-CIO. A regulated national economy has been transformed into a global “free market” economy, one in which U.S. workers can be put into competition with others anywhere in the world. Corporations have decentralized their activities, downsized their in-house operations, and outsourced their production even while concentrating their power around the globe. Large urban industrial complexes like Detroit and Pittsburgh have been replaced by small, highly mobile production units, which can easily be relocated. White men have become the minority of the U.S. workforce and women and people of color the majority.

This chapter is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Labor Research Review 24 (1996). 9

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Meanwhile, no major U.S. institution changed less than the labor movement. At the end of the twentieth century, U.S. unions are as poorly adapted to the economy and society of their time as were the craft unions of iron puddlers and cordwainers to the mass production industries of the 1920s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the AFL-CIO executed a stately, slowmotion collapse. Membership plunged to 15.5 percent of wage earners, with only 11.2 percent in the private sector. Major strikes and lockouts, for example Bridgestone, Caterpillar, Staley, and the Detroit newspapers, ended in devastating defeats. Not surprisingly, many workers came to accept almost any concessions rather than strike. In 1995, there were only 385 work stoppages, compared with 3,111 in the peak year of 1977, and in 1996 strikes hit a fifty-year low. Real wages declined about 15 percent between 1973 and 1995; real incomes for young families decreased by one-third. And after its greatest grassroots mobilization in twenty years, labor saw a Democratic president and Congress it had worked hard to elect pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which posed the threat of a personal pink slip to large numbers of U.S. workers and union officials. Maine AFL-CIO president Charles O’Leary observed that labor’s public image was that of white-haired old men meeting down in Bal Harbor talking about the past. The once powerful AFL-CIO seemed little more than an empty shell. During labor’s “era of stagnation” there emerged a considerable number of reform movements, local activists, leaders, and staff members with progressive political ideas. They were visible in official and insurgent strikes like the Pittston coal strike and the Austin, Minnesota, Hormel strike; the biennial labor convocations held by Labor Notes; the militant AFL-CIO Organizing Institute; the transnational and strategic corporate campaigns of the Industrial Union Department; the local coalitions against NAFTA; the cross-union activism and solidarity promoted by Jobs with Justice; and the successful reform movement in the Teamsters union. Until 1995, however, barely an echo of these new forces was audible inside the AFL-CIO’s headquarters in Washington or at its council meetings in Bal Harbor. New Voice Early in 1995, leaders of the biggest unions, well aware that inertia at the very top of the AFL-CIO was contributing to the decline of their own organizations, attempted a conventional power play. They asked Lane Kirkland, for sixteen years the president of the AFL-CIO, to step down and let his second-in-command, Tom Donahue, take over. When Kirkland refused, they asked Donahue to run against him, but he declined. John Sweeney,

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head of the large and fast-growing Service Employees International Union (SEIU), emerged as the insurgents’ alternative. Sweeney said he was launching his candidacy only because Donahue refused to join the drive to unseat Kirkland. He said that in his opinion organized labor is the only voice of American workers and their families, and he found the silence deafening. As Kirkland continued to hang on, the Sweeney campaign dubbed itself “A New Voice for American Workers” and developed a momentum of its own that went far beyond the initial palace power play. To Sweeney, generally regarded as a dynamic but mainstream trade unionist, the New Voice ticket added Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), for many a symbol of militancy, and Linda Chavez-Thompson, representing women and people of color, groups notoriously unrepresented in the AFL-CIO’s top echelon. New Voice developed a trenchant critique of two decades of labor movement failure. Sweeney scored the AFL-CIO as a “Washington-based institution concerned primarily with refining policy positions” instead of a “worker-based movement against greed, multinational corporations, racebaiting, and labor-baiting politicians.” He charged that the U.S. labor movement is “irrelevant to the vast majority of unorganized workers in our country” and added that he had deep suspicions that “we are becoming irrelevant to our own members.” Linda Chavez-Thompson attacked “30 or 40 years of AFL-CIO isolation and inaction.” Further, the national union presidents who initiated New Voice turned to forces from outside the palace. New Voice mobilized thousands of activists and progressives and promoted many of their ideas and programs. By the time Kirkland finally accepted his opponents’ original demand and stepped down in favor of Donahue, it was too late. There was no going back for the forces the Sweeney campaign had mobilized. It is symbolic of the new forces at play that the reformers who had taken over the Teamsters provided Sweeney’s margin of victory at the October 1995 AFL-CIO convention that elected the New Voice ticket; it is indicative of the continuity in the AFL-CIO’s power structure that the presidents of a few large unions called most of the convention’s shots. New Dynamics New Voice shifted the AFL-CIO’s rhetoric from that of business unionism toward that of a social movement and proposed institutional vehicles for making that rhetoric real. But the new AFL-CIO executive council was composed primarily of the same officials who had presided over the labor movement’s decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Few of them had challenged the institutional constraints imposed by labor law, union structure, bureaucratic

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deadwood, and organizational inertia. Although some New Voice leaders had been associated with progressive or reform forces in their unions, others had fought opposition groups that advocated the very changes New Voice was now promoting. Some had silenced rank-and-file initiatives and even broken strikes of their own members. Few had projected an alternative vision for the labor movement, let alone for society. Nonetheless, even bureaucrats, faced with extinction, have been known to change. Many of the union leaders who initiated the CIO, John L. Lewis in particular, had been politically conservative and heavy-handed with their own members. But they came to recognize that the labor movement and their own organizations in particular could be saved only by unleashing a rank-and-file initiative that they could not always count on controlling. Those who took over the AFL-CIO face a similar challenge: Encourage dramatic change or see their own organizations plunge toward extinction. They might prefer to limit change to a militant business unionism that combines top-down control with more vigorous organizing and a greater willingness to strike. Nevertheless, any substantial revitalization of the labor movement will require a move toward social movement unionism, in which grassroots activism supplants the rigid, bureaucratic character all too typical of U.S. trade unions. Transcending the Shell The new leadership has set up a slew of task forces, institutes, centers, and committees to implement the New Voice program. These can provide information, resources, networking, and leadership that will be invaluable to local activists. But they will accomplish little unless they encourage those on the ground to empower themselves. Some of the most important recent initiatives of labor movement activists—building local coalitions, conducting their own international outreach, organizing solidarity operations, and supporting rank-and-file insurgencies—have been independent of and at times even opposed to top labor leadership. Activists may well be tempted to abandon such independence for more conventional activities within the framework of a more accepting AFL-CIO mainstream. And the labor mainstream may try, even with the best of motives, to internalize such efforts. For example, soon after his election, a top New Voice official told local Jobs with Justice activists that, with New Voice’s ascendancy, they should start directing more of their efforts into regular union channels, a position that was actively contested and eventually reversed. The unfortunate result could be official coalitions dominated by unions with only paper participation by allies, international linkages limited to top union officials, union solidarity that mobilizes more staff than

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rank and file, and isolation of progressives from the struggle for grassroots democracy within the labor movement. It could also turn progressives into disciplinary agents within the labor movement and leave them no base if conservative forces regain control at the top. In an earlier era, trade unions were regarded as only one element of a wider labor movement. Tomorrow’s “new labor movement,” likewise, should be seen less as a reformed AFL-CIO than as a broader constellation of allied forces and institutions. Both AFL-CIO leaders and local activists need to promote institutions allied with, but outside, the shell of the AFLCIO: occupational safety-and-health groups, labor education programs such as the Highlander Center, labor history associations, labor arts programs, producer and consumer cooperatives, vehicles for community investment, Jobs with Justice, political coalitions, issue coalitions, local labor centers, and the like. Such initiatives outside the shell are one key to putting the “new” in the “new labor movement” and to opening the way for future organizing.

The Future of the Reform Agenda The New Voice campaign issued an election platform with a broad evaluation of the crisis facing U.S. workers and dozens of specific proposals for generating a new labor movement to meet it. Taken as a whole, the New Voice platform represents a serious, comprehensive, and well-thought-out response to the AFL-CIO’s present predicament, incorporating a great many of the ideas proposed by reformers in recent years. It provides both a valuable starting point for a discussion of what changes the labor movement needs and a set of commitments for which the New Voice leadership can be held accountable. We will address in turn each of the seven sections of the New Voice program. Organize at a Pace and Scale That Is Unprecedented The New Voice program states that “the most critical challenge facing unions today is organizing.” Whereas previous AFL-CIO strategy concentrated on political efforts to ease organizing by changing labor law, the New Voice platform argued: “We must first organize despite the law if we are ever to organize with the law.” It proposed to increase the AFL-CIO organizing budget substantially, create an AFL-CIO organizing department to facilitate multiunion organizing and explore experimental organizing approaches, and expand the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute to train and deploy 1,000 new organizers in two years. During its first year in office, the New Voice leadership moved rapidly to meet or even exceed these goals.

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Organizing has often been offered as a panacea for what ails the labor movement, but the realities are sobering. A study in 1990 by Gary Chaison and Dileep Dhavale estimates that to maintain present memberships, unions would have to spend $300 million on organizing. The difficulty of conventional organizing—involving professional organizers handing out union cards and petitioning for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections—has led many labor activists and progressives, including those within the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute, to advocate more radical approaches. New Voice rhetoric redefined organizing as a movement for human rights, not just as a vehicle for economic bargaining. It envisioned a strategy that would move beyond workplace-by-workplace organizing to the creation of a mass movement. In his acceptance speech Sweeney proclaimed: “If anyone denies American workers their constitutional right to freedom of association, we will use old-fashioned mass demonstrations, as well as sophisticated corporate campaigns, to make worker rights the civil rights issue of the 1990s.” Organizing strategy would include “training and motivating rank-andfile workers to organize the unorganized,” supporting “local coalition-building efforts with community, religious, civil rights and other organizations,” and creating a network of “local organizing centers” and community-based worker rights boards. In another speech, Sweeney also emphasized the value of new forms of “community unionism,” such as the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, and experiments with “associational unionism” in which workers form “an association that addresses sexual harassment, pay equity, promotional activities” instead of, or prior to, traditional collective bargaining. Discontent among U.S. workers is at a historic high. If the labor movement can make itself a vehicle for expressing that discontent, people will clamor to join unions or will simply go ahead and organize themselves. But at present most do not identify joining a union as the solution to their problems. No organizing technique is likely to be effective if people see the labor movement as an undemocratic, toothless bureaucracy representing interests different from their own. Ultimately, success in organizing new members will depend on success in transforming the labor movement itself. Build a New and Progressive Political Movement of Working People The New Voice program emphasized that “our politics must start in the neighborhoods where our members live and vote.” It called for a National Labor Political Training Center to train labor activists and political candidates and a Labor Center for Economic and Public Policy to develop

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policy and support legislative efforts. A new media strategy established a media workshop, studio facilities, marketing and distribution teams, and a strategic center. The Campaign 96 Fund expanded money devoted to politics. In its first year the new leadership substantially increased spending on electoral campaigns, though the increase was dwarfed by the explosion of corporate spending in the 1996 campaign. Portraying central labor councils (CLCs) as the stepchildren of the labor movement, New Voice proposed to revitalize them to serve as “the front line of labor’s political efforts.” (Chavez-Thompson noted: “The AFL-CIO has left the state federations and the central labor councils up the creek and they didn’t even lend them a paddle.”) They would organize members on a multiunion basis in neighborhoods to “re-energize our base and build bridges with individuals and organizations who share our views.” An apparent contradiction in the New Voice political program concerns labor’s relation to the Democratic Party and its candidates. Sweeney has said that labor needs to “stop wasting our money on candidates who turn their backs on workers after they are elected.” But in spite of its dubious record, he continued the traditional AFL-CIO knee-jerk support for the Democratic Party, saying, “President Clinton has done a great job as president and deserves our support.” In his acceptance speech at the AFLCIO convention he said, “We will re-elect a president and elect a Democratic Congress committed to the people who ‘work hard and play by the rules.’” Sweeney’s strategy appeared to assert more influence by involving the labor movement more intensively with the Democratic candidates. But labor’s support seemed to have little influence on either Clinton’s campaign or his second-term agenda. Such a strategy cannot deal effectively with “candidates who turn their backs on workers after they are elected”—a problem evident on issues ranging from NAFTA to labor law reform. Nor is it likely to “build a progressive political movement.” Local labor activists have developed more promising strategies. In many states they have established coalitions with other progressive groups that have in effect created their own progressive political machines from the ground up. They have recruited activists from their own ranks, trained them, put resources behind them, and managed their campaigns. This activity has created a base from which they can challenge Democratic machines in primaries or, when necessary, run independent candidates. If the AFL-CIO wants to build a progressive political movement and hold those it elects accountable, it should direct major support toward such efforts and encourage its local affiliates to participate in them. Considerable sentiment has also developed in the labor movement for a labor-oriented third party, perhaps modeled on the Canadian New Democrats. Whether or not a third party is ultimately the best political strategy,

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labor can only benefit from the development of a party with a pro-labor platform. The AFL-CIO should welcome the participation of labor activists in groups like the Labor Party and the New Party, and it should support independent and third-party candidates when Democratic and Republican candidates are unacceptable. Construct a Labor Movement That Can Change Workers’ Lives The New Voice platform declared that “the Federation must be the fulcrum of a vibrant social movement, not simply a Federation of constituent organizations.” The proposed vehicle for this goal was a Center for Strategic Campaigns that would coordinate national contract campaigns and establish a national network of resources inside and outside the labor movement for bargaining and organizing campaigns. A strategic campaign fund would provide grants to unions in difficult contract fights. A strike-support team of top leaders and staff from international unions would be deployed early to help local leaders with long-running strikes. A modest start was made on this ambitious program during the new leadership’s first year. Breaking with the past, New Voice leadership tried to stress solidarity and identify the AFL-CIO with militant labor struggles. New Voice candidates joined picket lines around the country (provoking their opponents to do the same). At the 1995 convention they honored strikers and locked-out workers like Staley hunger striker Dan Lane. The new AFL-CIO leadership initiated a series of campaigns to build momentum for its efforts through 1996. In the spring of 1996 it held hearings on decreasing living standards in communities across the country to “ask working men and women what is happening to their jobs, their paychecks, and their family budgets.” “Union Summer” started in June of that year, with 1,000 college students and young workers organizing voter registration and living wage campaigns. “Union Fall,” intended to “organize and mobilize working Americans around the fundamental issue of raising wages and increasing incomes,” started in September; it was essentially a campaign for the Democratic Party ticket. Some elements of what the labor movement could do to change workers’ lives were missing from the New Voice program. For example, little attention was given to issues such as shorter hours, rights for contingent workers, resistance to lean production, and other problems of daily work life. Similarly, capital strategies, which promote employee ownership and community economic development, were not included in the New Voice vision, though they subsequently received attention from the new leadership. Most important, crucial struggles like the Staley and Detroit newspapers lockouts have been allowed to go down to devastating defeats. Top

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AFL-CIO officials have joined picket lines and even committed civil disobedience but so far have not tried to mobilize workers for a major mass struggle. Create a Strong New Progressive Voice in American Life The New Voice program called for an overhaul of the AFL-CIO’s public communications and public affairs work to “redefine America’s (and many of our own members’) perceptions of us.” The AFL-CIO should provide a “forceful new voice for working families on national issues.” The vehicle would be a revamped Labor Institute for Public Affairs, transformed from “an institutional support organization” into a “pro-active strategic operation” aimed at “creating a pro-worker and pro-union public environment.” Sweeney initiated an effort to redirect the national political debate by trying to make low wages amid high profits a national political issue: “In every speech I give from the Press Club to the picket lines, I try to make this simple point: America needs a raise.” This campaign was highly effective in pressuring Congress to raise the minimum wage. Labor’s problems with the public and with its own members go far beyond communications, however. As a recent study conducted for the AFLCIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates observed: “Members generally have little or no ideological orientation that would link economics, government, and politics. So while they know that these are hard economic times for working people, few can articulate any explanation for what has gone wrong, who is responsible, or what should be done about it.” The study concludes: “Labor’s longer-term strategic mission is to develop an ideological framework among the membership that helps them to make sense of the Brave New Economy they confront in ways that lead to progressive political conclusions. We need to tell a compelling story about the economy, corporate irresponsibility, and the conservative policies that have helped shift even more bargaining power toward capital over labor.” The war of ideas has been crucial to the right’s current dominance. The labor movement needs to provide a distinctive labor interpretation of what has happened to working people, why it has happened, and what can be done about it. “America needs a raise” was a good initial slogan, but it provides no answers to the ideas of the Christian right, Pat Buchanan, the free-market right, New Democrats, corporate globalists, and establishment liberals. Labor needs to explain that the suffering of working Americans is being created by global corporations that are playing workers and communities against each other and that the solution to our deteriorating conditions of life and environment lies in a new solidarity of working people. Labor also needs to develop a program to address the real problems of working Americans, including local, national, and transnational strategies

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for countering the effects of globalization, providing jobs and economic security for all, establishing basic democratic rights and a high quality of life in the workplace, giving individuals and families greater control over their time, reversing the drive toward inequality, and protecting the natural and social environment on which our lives and our economy depend. Ultimately, this package adds up to an alternative vision of society and the place of workers within it. Developing an alternative vision of this kind is not something that can or should emerge from a committee or a handful of leaders. But organizational leaders can foster an environment that nurtures such a vision. Toward that end, the AFL-CIO should create an equivalent of the Organizing Institute dedicated to popular education for its members and allied groups. It should promote and distribute a wide range of existing models and materials and fund the development of new ones. Its goal should not be indoctrination but rather informed debate on the future of work and society. Similarly, activists should create and the AFL-CIO should support the development of an independent labor education movement like that which exists in England and many other countries. This movement would include college programs like the labor studies and labor extension programs at the University of Massachusetts, where rank-and-file activists from different unions and different backgrounds can come together, and independent centers like the Highlander Center in Tennessee and the Labor Institute in New Jersey. Renew and Refocus Our Commitment to Labor Around the World At first glance the New Voice program appeared to support the Cold War– oriented international policy that has been a dominant feature of the AFLCIO since its inception. It stated: “We are proud of our accomplishments over the years, culminating in the defeat of apartheid in South Africa and the role of Solidarnosc in leading Poland to democracy.” Whereas many U.S. trade unions provided valuable support to the freedom struggle in South Africa, the AFL-CIO’s most notable contribution was its long-running refusal to work with the principal black trade union center, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), because of its alleged communist ties. The program proposed, however, to redirect the AFL-CIO’s international work: “In today’s global economy we need to see our international efforts much more in terms of the self-interests of American workers.” Although this formulation may seem to indicate a nationalist or protectionist direction, the contemplated shift seemed instead to be from helping downtrodden workers abroad to mutual aid for mutual benefit. The program

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noted: “We recognize that we need the support of the international free trade union movement because global employers exploit workers wherever quick profits are to be made and because so many of our American employers are corporations that are controlled abroad.” New Voice proposed to create a Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project, perhaps as part of the Center for Strategic Campaigns, that would serve as a central resource for information on global, corporate, and labor organizations, support all efforts to achieve international solidarity on behalf of U.S. workers, and monitor international institutions and treaties such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and NAFTA. Such a project could serve as a vehicle for reorienting the AFL-CIO vis-à-vis the global economy, but there are several problems. One problem is the AFL-CIO’s approach to the global economy. In a labor version of economic nationalism, Sweeney told the AFL-CIO convention: “The problem is U.S. companies that export jobs instead of products.” If the AFL-CIO embraces an economic nationalism that promotes the interests of U.S. workers at the expense of those elsewhere, it is hardly likely to find enthusiastic support when American workers need international solidarity. Instead, the AFLCIO needs to develop a global strategy based on raising the labor, social, and environmental standards of workers all over the world. As Richard Trumka put it, U.S. workers need “an America which doesn’t compete around the globe by driving our wages down, when we should be forcing our competitors to pull theirs up.” Another problem is the heritage of the AFL-CIO’s international work. During the Cold War, the AFL-CIO’s international operation was virtually an arm of U.S. foreign policy, often lending support to dictatorial regimes around the world. Business Week described the AFL-CIO’s global operations, such as its International Affairs Department (IAD) in Washington, D.C., and its American Institute for Free Labor Development in Latin America, as “labor’s own version of the Central Intelligence Agency a trade union network existing in all parts of the world.” The AFL-CIO demanded that trade unionists shun all contact with unions tainted by communism; in practice, it often demanded that its affiliates shun even nonaligned unions. The principal funding for AFL-CIO activities overseas has been the U.S. government. That fact is particularly ironic, since the AFLCIO defines the “free” labor unions with which it will cooperate as those that are not subject to government influence or control. The past role of the IAD and the regional institutes in such countries as South Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Chile forms a serious block to solidarity with the very labor groups with which U.S. workers need to cooperate. Some national union leaders, as well as many if not most of the activists who supported New Voice, rejected the AFL-CIO’s Cold War heritage; so do

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the new staff members Sweeney has appointed to head the International Affairs Department. There is considerable opportunity for both the IAD and progressive officials and local activists to effect change. For instance, they can pick some good fights that symbolize the common interests of workers in different countries and the value of international labor solidarity. When these fights require cooperation with labor organizations the AFL-CIO has previously shunned, officials should insist that cooperation is necessary and right. They can use these fights to educate union leaders and members on how workers should deal with the global economy. In these efforts they should utilize the experience of groups like the National Labor Committee in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America and the International Labor Rights Research and Education Fund. The New Voice program noted that “we also have much to learn from unions abroad.” The AFL-CIO leadership should encourage tours to learn from unions in Canada regarding health care, labor law, and international labor cooperation, in France about resisting government cuts, in Germany concerning shorter hours and job training, in Brazil about alliances of labor with the poor and unemployed, in South Africa regarding transforming racist institutions, and so on. If the AFL-CIO won’t do it, progressive unions should give some highly visible invitations to some previously shunned unions and let the chips fall where they may. One of the most important tasks of the new institution for transnational corporate monitoring should be to make it possible for all workers to link up with those in the same industry, company, or occupation anywhere in the world. Lead a Democratic Movement That Speaks for All American Workers The prevailing image of organized labor is of a bureaucracy that primarily represents the special interests of its officials and a privileged sector of the workforce. The New Voice platform proposed to “create a labor movement that speaks for and looks like today’s workforce.” This involves a redefinition of the role of the labor movement, a new emphasis on racial, ethnic, and gender inclusion, and reforms of organizational structure. Representing all workers. New Voice leaders are trying to position the AFL-CIO as an advocate for all working people, not just the agent of those in unions. As the New Voice program stated: “The labor movement must speak forcefully on behalf of all working people.” Sweeney proclaimed: “To the more than 13 million workers we represent, and to millions more who are not represented, our commitment is firm and clear. When you struggle for justice, you will not struggle alone.” Linda Chavez-Thompson said the labor movement needs to be the voice of those who need it, such

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as the unemployed, the underemployed, the young, the old, the poor, and children: “We need to be the hopes and dreams of those who can’t speak for themselves.” This change of emphasis is essential for creating a new labor movement, but it needs to be implemented concretely. For example, campaigns for rights of contingent workers and laws requiring just cause for firing would address core problems of workers who are not organized. AFL-CIO support for worker advocacy resource centers and organizations of the unemployed would show commitment to advocating for all working people, not just current union members. Inclusion. The New Voice leadership has begun to change the scandalous domination of the AFL-CIO by older white men. It created a new position of executive vice president and ran Linda Chavez-Thompson, a Latina, for the seat; she was then given primary responsibility for outreach to women and minorities. New Voice reserved ten seats on the executive council for women and people of color and negotiated a new executive council with six women, nine African Americans, one Latino, and one Asian American. It proposed the establishment of an advisory Young Workers’ Task Force. The AFL-CIO has taken steps in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go to reach full and equal representation. Prior to the October 1995 convention, black union leaders noted that they had not been consulted in selecting either candidate. William Burrus, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union and a leader of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, observed: “Decisions were made without including us. Now, after the fact, they are reaching out to hear our views.” The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists drew up eleven demands calling for more minorities and women as delegates, executive council members, and staffers. Although both tickets agreed in principle to most of the black unionists’ demands, the issue of tokenism remained, according to Burrus. “You can’t hold them accountable until they’re forced to recognize the political strength of groups like women, African Americans, and Latinos,” Burrus observed. The look of the executive council won’t change, Burrus noted, “as long as they have the power to anoint with a hand on the shoulder who they want.” The question of inclusion also involves the ways issues are framed. William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, notes that the AFL-CIO opposed NAFTA primarily on the grounds that Americans would lose jobs as companies shifted operations to Mexico. According to Lucy, what should have also been stressed was a civil rights issue: the diversion of investment from urban communities where blacks might have gained employment. Burrus added: “With a black viewpoint included, the campaign against NAFTA might have been a lot deeper and broader.”

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Organizational reform. The New Voice program proposed to “expand the involvement of our grassroots leaders” and called for “the top leadership of the Federation” to be “in constant touch with its grassroots leadership.” It proposed quarterly executive council meetings with written agendas circulated in advance and summaries of council action sent to affiliates, an annual budget, annual general board meetings of all AFL-CIO unions and all state federation presidents, an annual conference for all central labor council leaders, and an age limit of seventy for top officers. By the very act of contesting the election, New Voice challenged the one-party, party-line norms that have governed the labor movement since the era of Sam Gompers (1888–1926). Sweeney told delegates to the AFLCIO convention that the secret to protecting the labor movement lies in part in “opening the AFL-CIO to debate. When we do that, the solidarity and unity that are at the core of our movement are tempered and trued and made stronger.” Like Pope John XXIII, he has recognized the need to “throw open the windows of the church.” But the New Voice program barely begins to grapple with the depth of the problems created by the lack of democracy in the AFL-CIO, let alone in the labor movement as a whole. From 1979 to 1995, the AFL-CIO executive council was composed of thirty-three mostly white male international union presidents who were reelected every two years as a group by voice vote without opposition or debate. They met in closed sessions and kept any disagreements secret; council minutes remained closed even to scholars for thirty years. The new executive council was also selected via a backroom negotiation between the two tickets and elected with virtually no opportunity for discussion or alternative nominations. Many national unions function with a similar lack of democracy. This absence of democracy contributes mightily to negative public and member perception of the labor movement. One study noted that many union members often liken the union to “another boss”: “Too many members see unions as bureaucratic institutions which have lost sight of the average member’s interests.” Sweeney has said that the whole governance and structure of the AFLCIO needs to be reviewed to “find ways to operate more effectively.” But the reforms proposed by New Voice were grossly inadequate to address this problem realistically. Unions at every level need to be run more by rank-and-file workers and less by full-time officials, to guarantee freedom of speech and association without the threat of reprisal, to provide direct elections of top union officials by all union members, and to ensure rank-and-file negotiation and ratification of contracts. New AFL-CIO structures should support rankand-file empowerment, not recentralization of authority.

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Although democratic reform will require a grassroots struggle union by union, the AFL-CIO can make a significant contribution. It should use the precedent of its first contested presidential election to advocate a new norm of democratic pluralism rather than single-party rule for all levels of the labor movement. It should insist that oppositions and insurgencies be regarded as legitimate elements of the labor movement and pursue genuine neutrality toward them. It should welcome back into the fold those who have been shunned because of past support for oppositions and insurgencies. Its emerging ethical-practices code should require that affiliates provide the basic human rights and democratic practices that people demand of governments throughout the world. Now, as in the past, conflicts between national union leaders and their own rank and file are likely to pose difficult problems for the AFL-CIO leadership. What will the New Voice leaders do when rank-and-file workers reject contracts but are ordered back to work by national union officials? When appointed trustees replace the elected leaders of local unions? Or when workers strike despite the opposition of their union leaders? Although it may not be the AFL-CIO’s role as a federation to choose sides in such situations, the new leadership should at least ensure that the AFLCIO will not function as a de facto strikebreaker. Labor activists who believe in union democracy should continue to support the right of rank-andfile workers to act on their own behalf, whatever national unions or the AFL-CIO may do. Institutionalize the Process of Change The New Voice platform emphasized the need “to provide for a process of continual growth and change.” To that end it proposed a “Committee 2,000” of top union officials to conduct a strategic planning process and submit a report to the 1997 AFL-CIO convention. Although such a process is doubtless a good idea, the proposed form suggests that the process of change will be tightly controlled by those at the top of the labor hierarchy. An essential requirement for a new labor movement is relaxation of the top-down control to make room for a continuing process of initiatives from below. In shaping the future, the new AFL-CIO leadership needs to pay far more attention to John Sweeney’s campaign rhetoric: “We mean more than just changing the leadership of our labor federation at the top. We mean building a strong new movement from the ground up.” The organizational strategy outlined in the New Voice program proposed essentially to build a new AFL-CIO staff structure that largely bypasses the existing officers and departments. This proposal reflected the need to address a new set of tasks, to avoid entanglement in structures that

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are poorly adapted to those tasks, and to circumvent the bureaucratic deadwood. Though perhaps wise, this strategy risks building not a new labor movement but rather a new bureaucracy in the shell of the old. Labor writer Suzanne Gordon wrote of the New Voice program: For every union problem, there’s a new Washington solution—an institute, a task force, a monitoring project, a clearinghouse, a policy center, a training center, a center for strategic campaigns, a new organizing department (with an office of strategic planning), a strategic planning process (“Committee 2,000”), two or three campaign funds, a labor council advisory committee, and a “strike support team of top people” from various union staffs. . . . This platform proclaims that “we must institutionalize the process of change.” They will certainly do that if, on top of the AFL-CIO’s many existing departments, they establish all these new institutions in and around 815 16th Street, NW.

If the new AFL-CIO leaders count on their new committees, task forces, institutes, and centers to create a new labor movement, they will fail. Only if they are able to nurture a new movement culture that values and promotes rank-and-file initiative do they have a chance to succeed. What they can and should do (and what the New Voice program at its best proposed) is encourage and provide resources for a wide range of such initiatives. After the devastating defeat of the Pullman strike in 1894, Eugene Victor Debs opened the pages of the union’s magazine not only to the union’s members but also to the widest possible range of people throughout the country who had proposed new approaches to the labor question. Such an open discussion updated for the age of electronic communication would provide a more inspiring model of how to institutionalize the process of change within the labor movement than a committee of top union officials attempting to chart the future for the entire labor movement.

Conclusion As Peter Rachleff documents in Chapter 5 of this book, the labor movement’s historical low points were also its turning points. The same could be true now. But to meet the needs of working people today, the labor movement needs to change at least as radically as the transnational corporations have changed. What needs changing goes far beyond the AFL-CIO as a national union center. The entire definition of the labor movement as a means for particular groups of workers to bargain with particular employers within the framework of a national economy is as outmoded as the vertically integrated national corporation. The traditional AFL-CIO focus

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on collective bargaining, definitions of bargaining units, and divisions among unions, its notions of seniority, its limited repertoire of tactics, its narrow conception of workers’ needs and interests, its faith in the beneficence of economic growth, and its embeddedness within a national framework all require drastic change. In today’s globalizing economy, the needs of working people and the goals of the labor movement can be met only through a worldwide coalition of labor and other movements to impose human and ecological interests on transnational corporations and other out-of-control institutions and forces. Within such a coalition, the labor movement can represent workers’ needs in the workplace and their organization at work as part of the movement as a whole. In some ways, such a labor movement would more resemble that of the nineteenth-century Knights of Labor than the model we have inherited from Gompers and Meany. Can the emergence of new leadership in the AFL-CIO contribute to such a change, or will it instead help contain the forces of change within the existing shell? Some shelled animals outgrow their original shells but continue to prosper by adding on new, larger, and differently shaped chambers; some leave their outgrown shells behind; some die when their shells no longer allow them room to develop. If the AFL-CIO can change enough to let a new labor movement emerge, or even if a revitalized labor movement eventually has to escape from its confines, the current attempt to build a new labor movement within the shell of the old will have played a constructive role. But if the AFL-CIO tries to confine the regeneration of the labor movement within its own shell, it risks killing the very forces that might give it a new life.

2 A Rising Tide of Union Democracy Herman Benson

You could report it as a sudden rebellion by lords against the king or a call to end the era of stagnation. When leaders of major unions forced Lane Kirkland to resign as AFL-CIO president and John Sweeney mounted a successful opposition campaign at the 1995 AFL-CIO convention against Kirkland’s successor, Tom Donahue, these events were featured in the media as a milestone in labor history. Most comments were upbeat; for the first time in recent memory, the labor movement was greeted with favorable nationwide attention. In dreary times, something fresh had emerged out of labor, which had been presumed dead or dying. For that reason alone, if for no other, it was welcome news to union advocates. By inspiring their own active cadres and convincing reporters, editorial writers, sympathetic intellectuals, and even critical opponents that they meant business, the rebels raised the morale and stimulated the enthusiasm of union activists. Even if not much more follows, you can’t take that away. So far, however, the great change is manifest mainly in public relations and promise. But to translate good intentions into reality requires more than press-grabbing rhetoric. The Sweeney forces are proud of inducing a thousand student interns to spend a summer with union organizers; they propose a series of organizational rearrangements to bring women, minorities, and younger representatives into staff and leadership positions; they intend to send more full-time organizers into the field in stepped-up campaigns to organize the unorganized, especially low-wage workers; they put more money into politics; they make misty allusions to blocking bridges to protest injustice. And they offer a pack of other practical measures. As Sweeney came to power, the scene from a laborite’s standpoint was dismal: a right-wing offensive in politics, a retreat on social welfare issues, 27

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downsizing and globalization, low-wage competition at home and abroad, and a retreat of unionism from private industry. Labor’s critical problem is apparent in the decline of the organized sector to less than 15 percent of the paid workforce, the lowest number in generations, and in the dilution of labor’s power in political and industrial life. The Sweeney forces vow to reverse the decline, rebuild the labor movement, and restore its influence in national life. Their professed goal is lofty enough, nothing less than to transform the United States by refurbishing the labor movement. The big question remains, however, whether their program of action, even if pursued with vigor, is adequate to serve their larger professed goals. Are they nibbling at the edges? Is what they actually propose equal to their vision? Twenty pages of utilitarian proposals presented to the AFL-CIO convention delegates in 1995 were interspersed with repeated calls for a new vision for the United States: for “a reborn movement of American workers, ready to fight for social and economic justice . . . a new progressive voice in American life . . . changing the direction of American politics . . . a vibrant social movement not simply a federation of constituent organizations . . . redefin[ing] America’s (and many of our own members’) perceptions of us . . . a democratic movement that speaks for all American workers.”1 But in Sweeney’s program, as in Kirkland’s before him, the means of unleashing the principal mass of labor power is missing. The army of labor, still in reserve, is the great untapped resource with the potential for changing the United States. These 16 million organized workers—13 million in the AFL-CIO—and their immediate families constitute one-quarter or one-third of the nation. A thousand organizers can perhaps win a few thousand new recruits to unions. But millions of union members, if imbued with pride in their unions, if convinced that this movement is truly theirs, if persuaded that it defends people against narrow private interests, can become the social force that shapes public opinion and creates a new mood in the country. The key to releasing that power is to rekindle the spirit of union democracy. Before the labor movement can effectively spread the message of freedom and social justice to the nation, it must renew that same spirit within its own ranks and convince its own members that this great movement belongs to them and not to its officials. Can Sweeney tap the great potential source of energy in internal union democracy? In coming to power he needed to reach only those already in positions of power, thus accomplishing a palace revolt rather than a democratic revolution.

Mass Upsurge v. Palace Revolt In the Washington Post, the Sweeney-Donahue contest was characterized as “one of the biggest political showdowns within organized labor since

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Mine Workers President John L. Lewis bolted the AFL in the 1930s to form the rival CIO to organize industrial workers.”2 But compared to the great events in labor’s recent past, the 1995 AFL-CIO overturn is a portrait in miniature. Earlier movements brought hundreds of thousands, even millions, of workers into action. In the 1930s, strikes, sit-downs, and demonstrations brought unions into the mass-production industries. In the postwar strikes of the mid-1940s, millions of unionists held together in total solidarity— no replacements, permanent or temporary—and established the contemporary labor movement as a continuing force in U.S. life. In contrast, 1995 comes after a period of setbacks, and the action is still confined mainly to the top fringes, leaving the body of union members unmoved. Everyone could recognize John L. Lewis or Walter Reuther. Only a select union cadre, some reporters, and liberal intellectuals know John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO’s president, and Richard Trumka, its secretary-treasurer. No labor leaders have perfected the sorcerer’s art of summoning forth tidal waves of popular enthusiasm. This time there is grand rebellion at the summit, but so far no upsurge from below, no widespread mass movements, no spontaneous mass strikes of workers calling for organization. What there have been, however, are pressures for democracy, reform, and militancy by movements independent of the official union power structure. It is these movements combined that provoked the Sweeney palace revolt and made his victory possible. That idea may become clearer as we proceed, but we turn first to an odd aspect of the Sweeney-Donahue confrontation: that despite the debaters’ fanfare, there was little difference in the actual programs of the two camps. To put it another way, to the extent that differences could be detected, they were essentially irrelevant to the big issues faced by labor. The Donahue Old Program As the rivalry between Sweeney and Donahue developed in the preconvention period, any difference between the stated programs of the opposing forces became indistinguishable except to those who could detect subtle nuances of opinion. The Sweeney camp played to the galleries by deploying blunter clichés and hinting at “blocking bridges,” while Donahue demurred and called for “building bridges” to win public sympathy. When Donahue talked of stronger enforcement of a more effective ethicalpractices code, Sweeney ignored the subject. Oddly, Sweeney complained that his program had been stolen by Donahue, a charge without merit, because Donahue could have countered justifiably that his program had been stolen—at least in part—by Sweeney. The transformative possibilities in Sweeney’s program had actually been suggested by Donahue ten years earlier, as reflected in widespread reactions

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at that time. James Joyce, the president of the bricklayers, stated: “Our task is to express the growing militancy among our rank and file and our mid level officials.”3 A New York Times editorial observed that “organized labor has set out to reinvent the labor movement for the post-industrial age.”4 Business Week heralded, “[Kirkland’s report] may be celebrated as the date the resurgence began. . . . The federation’s action is . . . likely to mount the most centralized offensive against management since the AFL-CIO was formed in 1955. . . . It reflects . . . an unprecedented degree of self-examination.”5 When Donahue was still AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, he headed up a Committee on the Evolution of Work, which in 1985 issued its report, “The Changing Situation of Workers in Their Unions.” The report in large part is an earlier version of the practical aspects of the Sweeney program but without the rhetoric. (It enthusiastically quotes Eugene Victor Debs: “Labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as the setting of the sun.”)6 Among the 1985 signatories of Donahue’s statement were Sweeney himself and the heads of other unions that later backed Sweeney: machinists; operating engineers; steelworkers; and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). When Donahue’s 1985 report was published, Union Democracy Review sardonically urged investors to purchase copies, predicting that it could become a rare, forgotten, and possibly valuable document. Valuable it never became. Forgotten it was, until Donahue reminded his rivals at the 1995 convention. From Private Complaints to Palace Revolt Without the heady stimulus of a rising workers’ movement, without any clear-cut difference in program between the two camps, the 1995 overturn was preceded by a private expression of malaise and ended as a rare kind of palace revolt, engineered by the presidents of six major AFL-CIO unions: steelworkers, autoworkers, machinists, teamsters, service employees, and AFSCME. Top AFL-CIO officers are elected not by popular vote but at conventions by weighted vote of delegates from the affiliated unions. These delegates, in turn, are not elected by the membership but are handpicked by the affiliate’s top officers. The six presidents, their pockets lined with 5 million votes, needed to win over not rank-and-file members but only the top officials of a few other unions to be guaranteed a majority of the 13 million total convention votes. This task was not difficult once their bandwagon got rolling. At first they tried to induce Lane Kirkland to step down obediently as AFL-CIO president. In the peculiar chronology of events, critics drifted into open rebellion despite themselves. Tom Donahue, the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer whom

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critics later derogated as the symbol of stagnation, was their first choice as replacement president to lead a painless transfer of power. Breaking the Code If Kirkland had bowed out, Donahue could have taken over peaceably. But proud and stubborn, Kirkland resisted, and Donahue refused to become an insurgent candidate against him. When at last Kirkland realized that his cause was doomed, he resigned, and Donahue was then willing to accept the succession. But by then it was too late: The rebels had selected Sweeney. Donahue could no longer satisfy the rebels merely by agreeing to take over. They insisted that he reject the past, something which went against the grain. He knew that everyone on both sides had equally and unanimously endorsed all the earlier decisions and that they could not, in good conscience, emerge holier-than-thou. Donahue was ready to consider bold new programs of action, but not to repudiate Kirkland. In refusing to desert his colleague, Donahue remained true to the chisled-in-stone commandments that govern relations among union officials, a code seldom broken that mandates loyalty, mutual support, and a live-and-let-live attitude. In a smooth transition, the old head of the pack retires or steps down gracefully, is always replaced in a celebratory spirit of amiable consensus, is honored by accolades for past services to humanity, and is rewarded with a golden parachute. In its most extreme and debased form, the code prescribes that you may run your union as you see fit, even honestly, as long as I am permitted to run mine as I see fit, without public criticism. In that spirit, for example, officials of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association received fine press notices in the AFL-CIO News shortly before they went to prison for stealing union moneys. In that spirit, union leaders voted unanimously in 1987 to readmit the Teamsters union back into the fold, even though the Teamsters were still under racketeer domination. Still restrained by the gentlemen’s code, the first public press criticism of Kirkland came anonymously, perhaps in the hope that he might do the expected and resign. (The anonymous source turned out to be Gerald McEntee, AFSCME president.) When the Sweeney camp transgressed the traditional etiquette by mounting a full, public, insurgent campaign, some were outraged by the violation. Albert Shanker, president of the teachers union, expressed his distaste, telling the Associated Press that union chiefs who criticized Kirkland publicly should consider whether “they would like it in their own union.”7 The shelving of Kirkland and Donahue, in itself, was not a big labor event. It was not a matter of personalities, said some observers, but neither was it a matter of clear difference over policy. The significance lies not in the actual change but in the method; the transition was achieved not by a

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graceful succession negotiated behind the scenes to preserve the myth of unanimity but by breaking the code, by public criticism, by insurgency. To the extent that the grand rebellion legitimized dissent in the labor movement, it is a big step forward, because the great lack inside the labor movement is democracy. New Arithmetic and New Mood Two factors combined to create the conditions for a successful palace mutiny. One was a down-to-earth major arithmetical shift in the AFL-CIO balance of power. The other was a long-term evolution, an altered mood, a change in the moral atmosphere that finally made the public expression of dissent tolerable, even legitimate. Both were the fruit of more than thirty-five years of rank-and-file reform protest and independence, a continuous wave of insurgency that passed through the labor movement, one union, then another, at first in isolation from one another, but later brought together in an informal network. The factor easier to understand is the arithmetic of power politics instantaneously recorded in the 1995 AFL-CIO convention election tally that put Sweeney easily over the top. He defeated Donahue by a weighted roll call vote of about 7.3 million to 5.7 million. But that big margin of victory provides an interesting lesson. About 1.3 million of the Sweeney majority came from the Teamsters union, which only four years earlier had come under new reform leadership. If those Teamsters votes had switched from one side to the other, Donahue, not Sweeney, would have triumphed with a comfortable majority of 1 million, 7 million votes to Sweeney’s 6 million. What put the Teamsters into the Sweeney column in 1995 was the victory of the reform forces in 1991, which had ousted the Teamster old guard from controlling the international office. The Teamsters union, which had been expelled from the AFL-CIO in 1957 on corruption charges, was brought back into the AFL-CIO in 1987 by Kirkland and Donahue, even though that union was still dominated by organized crime. In fact, Kirkland boasted of his success in “unifying” the labor movement, pointing with pride to the readmittance of the Teamsters. At the time, the Teamsters union was under massive pressure from the federal government, and its officialdom faced a powerful internal challenge from the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Kirkland and Donahue continued to give the Teamsters racketeers an important cover of public respectability, thereby undermining the efforts of Teamster reformers. But despite the moral boost from Kirkland for the old guard, the Teamster reformers won their battle in 1991, took control of the international office, and elected Ron Carey, who later became one of the principal backers of the Sweeney rebellion.

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Insurgent laborites provided more than votes to the Sweeney camp: They created his candidate for secretary-treasurer. In 1968, Jock Yablonski had led an insurgent movement for democratic reform in the miners union. After he, his wife, and his daughter were murdered in late 1969, the insurgents formed the Miners for Democracy (MFD), which ousted the incumbent president, Tony Boyle, who was later convicted of the murders and died in prison. The new MFD administration rewrote the miners’ constitution and democratized the union. At that point, Richard Trumka, once a miner, left the field to become a lawyer. Yablonskis’ crusade and the MFD reform victory, however, gave him a new direction, and he was later elected president of the mine workers union. Without the Yablonskis’ martyrdom and the successful rank-and-file insurgency, Trumka today would undoubtedly be known as an excellent pro-labor attorney, talented and effective, but one among many. But the rank-and-file miners movement for democracy, ridiculed by George Meany and not supported by a single AFL-CIO labor leader, propelled Trumka into the second highest AFL-CIO post. The Moral Atmosphere for Change In addition to Teamster votes, the traditional repugnance for tolerating internal dissent had to be overcome. The inspiration for this change in mood had been slowly infused into the labor movement by decades of reform activity independent of the established leadership. Sweeney and his friends did not create the reform wave; they rode it. At best, some were passive onlookers; at worst, they were hostile to it. “Put the movement back into the labor movement!” was the watchword of rank-and-file insurgents as they campaigned for reform, a phrase the Sweeney rebels conveniently adopted as their own. A realization of the pressing need for new policies was born not in the heads of newly enlightened officials at the top but in persistent movements for decency and democracy among thousands of union activists throughout the labor movement. The victorious miners who restored democracy to their proud union and the courageous Teamster reformers who battled organized crime made their mark on history. But there are others, many others. To record their story is not a matter of assigning credit but of understanding and acknowledging the principal force that powers the reinvigoration of our labor movement.

Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act to Miners for Democracy: 1959–1969 In the late 1950s, the McClellan Committee hearings on abuses in unions were held in the U.S. Senate. Following the hearings, Congress adopted

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the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959. Both events were a wake-up call for union reformers. For the first time, the law established explicit federal protection for members’ rights in their own unions. Just as the Wagner Act had stimulated organization in industry in the 1930s by protecting the right to form unions, on a lesser scale the LMRDA stimulated the organization of reform and dissident movements inside unions. The 1960s saw an outpouring of dissent, focused mainly on demands for democratic rights and for action against corruption. Although the media and the public paid little attention, a current of reform spread through the labor movement during this period. Masters, Mates & Pilots Lane Kirkland should have been watching his own union, the Masters, Mates & Pilots (MMP); but in 1952, when this story begins, he was ensconced and isolated from events, serving George Meany in the AFL headquarters in Washington, D.C. The MMP, then with some 11,000 licensed marine deck officers, had organized the captains and mates who navigated and commanded the nation’s vessels. At that time, the MMP was organized into self-governing port-side locals. A faction arose in 1952 in the largest local, New York Local 88, to oppose C. T. Atkins, who was both local and international president of the union. Advised by the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), the insurgents organized into the Party for Union Democracy, advocating an internal union two-party system. These were the days before the LMRDA protected union democracy, and the insurgent leaders were quickly expelled. Represented by John Harold, an ACTU attorney, they took their case to New York State court and won reinstatement in 1955. Madden v. Atkins established the kind of legal protection for New York unionists that was later embodied in federal law. When Atkins was indicted and later jailed for selling jobs, the insurgents won control of Local 88 and supported a national insurgent movement that established basic democratic rights in the MMP. Painters In the early 1960s, District Council 9 of the painters union, the largest district in the international brotherhood, was dominated by racketeers. By construction industry standards, wages were low and dropping. Business agents were flagrantly taking payoffs from employers. At one point, the union officials had settled for a total wage increase of 5 cents per hour over a three-year period, or an average of 1.3 cents per year. In 1960, Frank Schonfeld organized an opposition caucus and ran for the top union

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office, secretary-treasurer, in an effort to oust the incumbent, Martin Rarback. Schonfeld, then forty-five, was the son and grandson of prominent rabbis and was destined to become a rabbi himself, but after graduation from yeshiva and before his ordination, the course of his life changed. Like others of his generation, he decided to join the labor movement as the best means of striving for social justice. He became a painter and joined the union. The union officialdom reacted swiftly and relentlessly to Schonfeld’s challenge. In the first massive attempt at suppression since the passage of the LMRDA, the leadership brought Schonfeld and nineteen others to trial on assorted charges; they were all fined and suspended. But their rights were protected by federal law, and they were reinstated by federal court order. After Secretary-Treasurer Martin Rarback, several employers, and New York City housing inspectors were indicted (and later convicted) on bid-rigging charges and one employer who had exposed the racket was beaten almost to death, the opposition gained support and succeeded in inducing a federal judge to order an election under the supervision of a court-appointed monitor. Schonfeld was elected by a clear majority and went on to institute reforms that ensured fair elections and led to the union’s first strike in a generation, almost doubling the previous wage. But Schonfeld was unable to oust the old business agents. He presided at the top, but they were entrenched in the more than dozen locals. He soon found his regime under attack from the old business agents, the employers, his own international officialdom, and the New York City Housing Authority; it was raided by the carpenters union and the Teamsters union as well. In those days, it was difficult for a reformer like Schonfeld to rally support from the public or from government authorities. Nevertheless, he held on for six years, until 1973, when this combination proved too powerful and he was defeated. In the ensuing years the union fell back under the control of the Lucchese crime family. Schonfeld’s successor, who had been installed with mob support, was later murdered when he crossed up his racket bosses. Meanwhile, in the San Francisco Bay Area, another insurgent painters movement was shaking up the union establishment. In 1958, at the age of thirty-two, Dow Wilson was elected business agent of a painters local in San Francisco, merged it with another, and became leader of a 2,500member local, the largest single local in the international. By 1962, he had won a reputation as a militant, independent-minded union leader. He exposed a collusive arrangement between some union officials and employers in public-housing painting and campaigned hard to democratize the structure of the Bay Area union. When his local led a strike and other union officials sent their members to work on the struck jobs, Wilson publicly denounced those officials as scabs and strikebreakers. The union

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officialdom brought him up on charges of slander, and in an earlier time he surely would have faced expulsion and an end to his union career. But these were the days of the LMRDA, and he forced his accusers to drop the charges as a violation of federal law. Because Wilson could not be quelled, officials decided he had to be killed. He was threatening to expose the pilfering of the union insurance fund in 1966 when he was shot to death. A month later, Lloyd Green, secretary of Local 1178 and a Wilson supporter, was also murdered. Ben Rasnick, secretary-treasurer of Painters District Council 16, and two employers were later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The painters’ battle exposed a public scandal. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal published long feature stories, and the main newsmagazines covered the scandal. The New York Daily News ran a front-page picture. George Meany was pressed into appointing a special investigation committee, which never consulted the reformers and brought in the expected whitewash report. In the end, the painter reformers lost the battle, but they had succeeded not only in shaking up their own union but in strengthening civil liberties inside the entire labor movement. Their efforts led to a landmark federal court decision in union democracy law, Salzhandler v. Caputo, which firmly established civil liberties for members in their own unions. Solomon Salzhandler was a painter, a member of Schonfeld’s District Council 9, and a local treasurer who had accused his business agent of stealing money. When he was fined and suspended on charges of slander, a federal appeals court ordered him reinstated, ruling that unions had no power to restrict free speech on mere charges of slander. LMRDA During the McClellan Committee hearings of 1957–1959, committee counsel Robert Kennedy reported that some 112,000 unionists had complained of abuses in their unions. George Meany told a New York Times reporter on November 2, 1957: “We thought we knew a few things about trade union corruption, but we didn’t know the half of it, one tenth of it, or the hundredth part of it.” In 1959 came the adoption of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, which, following Salzhandler v. Caputo, established clearcut protections in federal law for the rights of members within their unions. In the following decade, in one union after another, rank-andfilers, local leaders, and a few national leaders organized caucuses to battle for policies, programs, and leaders more responsive to the membership. Railroad workers organized a right-to-vote committee to demand a decisive voice in the adoption of collective bargaining contracts. Local leaders in the International Union of Electrical Workers defeated their international

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president after they thwarted attempts by administration officials to steal the election. Jerry Wurf ousted Arnold Zander as president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Rank-and-file members of the operating engineers union in Ohio, New Jersey, Detroit, and Los Angeles rebelled unsuccessfully against their local officers. These groups, caucuses, and slates were seeded widely throughout the labor movement but lacked contact with one another. What they had in common, however, was the spirit of independence from the establishment and a quest for change. Some, including the musicians union, the Masters, Mates & Pilots union, and the teachers union, made lasting democratic gains. But most of the insurgent efforts were unsuccessful and disappeared as organized groupings. Intangibly, however, they left their mark. As we look back, we can see that they softened the old bureaucratic mold and helped make way for a new mood in the labor movement. Slowly democratic reformers built up pressure against the dam of bureaucracy. That dam began to crack massively when miners fought to reform their union.

Triumph of Democracy in the Miners Union: 1969–1972 With Jock Yablonski’s challenge to Tony Boyle in the miners union, 1969 became a turning point for union democracy. The previous decade can be viewed as a slow accumulation, a process hardly observed, a penetration by osmosis of the notion of democracy and insurgency in the labor movement. But the miners forced the subject, bluntly and explicitly, into the open. “Union democracy is the single most important issue,” wrote Jock Yablonski in 1969, just weeks before he was murdered.8 Yablonski had been a top officer of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) under John L. Lewis and was a member of the union’s international executive board when he announced his campaign for union president against incumbent Tony Boyle. According to the official union tally, Yablonski received 37 percent of the votes in a membership referendum; but the election was riddled with fraud and was voided, many months later, after the U.S. Department of Labor sued in federal court. Yablonski himself never got a second chance; on the night of December 30, 1969, three murderers broke into his house and killed him, his wife, and his daughter. (Much later, Tony Boyle, convicted of hiring the killers, was sentenced to life and died in prison.) Yablonski’s death did not end the reform movement. His supporters organized into the Miners for Democracy and continued the battle, elevated now into a moral crusade. In an election supervised by the Labor Department in 1972, the insurgents ousted the Boyle machine. At the first

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union convention under the new leadership, the constitution was rewritten to reestablish autonomous rights for the districts, to guarantee fair elections, and to establish the right of miners to vote on contracts. Some years later, protected by that new constitution, Richard Trumka was elected UMWA president. Up to then, however, few outside the union had heard of him. During the earlier battles for democracy, he was simply one of the dedicated lawyers working for the miners under the direction of Joe Rauh, the eminent labor attorney. The victory of the MFD inspired a new wave of public support for the democratic rights of workers in the labor movement. For one thing, it demonstrated in action the kind of tripartite combination that could rescue a union from the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous autocrats. First, an organized movement of union members determined to fight for their rights. Second, federal law that protected those rights and provided the basic tools of democracy: civil liberties and fair elections in their union. And finally, the supporters of democratic unionism outside the labor movement: the civil libertarians, the workers’-rights attorneys, the liberal and pro-labor foundations that came forward with the talent, the legal aid, and the money so necessary to even the odds in any battle against an entrenched officialdom. Under the direction of Joe Rauh, one of the most effective civil-liberties and pro-labor attorneys, a group of lawyers was recruited to give legal aid to the Miners for Democracy. In federal court, they compelled the UMWA to release its autocratic grip over the districts and open them up to democratic contest. They intervened in the Labor Department’s suit in federal court and induced the judge to issue a court order for the most farreaching conditions for democratic procedures ever devised in any union election. Above all, the miners’ battle forced unionists and labor intellectuals to reevaluate their views on the meaning of democracy in unions. It exploded the myth of dependence on the autocratic strong man. Up to then, a common conception, perhaps the prevailing ideology, held that democracy was somehow irrelevant in a labor movement whose objective was to make practical gains for workers by whatever means, preferably legal. When union democracy advocates formed the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) in 1969, some of their best friends suggested that they were wasting time in efforts divorced from reality. The career of John L. Lewis was offered as crushing proof. He was autocratic, contemptuous of democracy, and preoccupied presumably with providing “eating money.” Guided by that philosophy of power, he had wiped out democracy in the miners union. But, our critics insisted, he had built a powerful union that served its members well. The miners’ reform movement tore away that veil. Behind that not-so-benevolent autocracy, the union and its officialdom had been degenerating. After Lewis retired in 1960 and Boyle took over in

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1963, the decay became manifest: dictatorship, beatings of delegates, union money pilfered, insurance funds dissipated, miners’ health and safety ignored. And what was the missing ingredient, what was the weapon to cure the rot? In Yablonski’s words, “union democracy.” The miners lit the torch. Others in the labor movement and union supporters and civil libertarians on the outside were inspired to take up the cause. Young lawyers came forward to offer their services to reformers in many unions. The Naderite Public Citizen Litigation Group initiated a union democracy project headed by Paul Alan Levy and Arthur Fox, who both later became directors of the AUD. Many of these young attorneys were associated with the National Lawyers Guild, which by 1980 had established its own National Labor Law Center to defend the rights of union dissidents. (The center was active and effective for only three years, until 1983, when the guild abandoned the project, which had put its members at odds with union officials. Some guild members continued their own personal support to union dissidents.) Founded in 1969, the AUD had ties with the miner reformers and by 1972 was providing advice and assistance to reformers in many unions, partly through its bi-monthly publication, Union Democracy Review. Its first national convention, in Detroit in 1980, the first of its kind anywhere, brought together 350 union activists, workers’-rights attorneys, labor educators, students, law professors, writers, and others concerned with labor affairs. In that same period, several magazines concerned with problems in the labor movement but independent of any union officialdom began publication. Important among them was Labor Notes, published by an informal cooperative dedicated to furthering more militant policies in unions. Labor Notes inevitably reported widely on the efforts of union democratic reform groups, and within a few years it was holding annual conferences that attracted more than 1,000 union activists. Inspired by the miners’ victory, a union democracy “movement” began taking shape, emphasizing the need to protect union members’ rights against authorization officialdom in the labor movement. No longer were insurgents lonely union reformers, morally and physically isolated from one another. There was now an informal bond, a network, a sentiment of solidarity. The movement’s existence and its activity were beginning to penetrate thinking in the labor movement. The miners’ insurgency, with the support of civil libertarians, with the defense of legal rights by cooperating attorneys, and with the right to a fair election count ensured by the government, had triumphed in a union dominated by thugs and crooks. Their success encouraged reformers in other unions. It brought Joe Rauh into the union democracy movement and inspired a group of young attorneys, for a time, to volunteer assistance to reformers in other unions. Most significantly, it encouraged other activists

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to take up the cause in their own unions and set off an explosion of dissent in the labor movement. From this standpoint, the twenty years following the insurgency can be viewed as a preparation for the great watershed that shook the entire labor movement: the revolution within and defeat of one of the largest and most powerful unions, the corrupt and racketeer-infiltrated Teamsters. Steel Fresh from his success with the miners, attorney Joe Rauh confronted the steelworkers. By 1973, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) had accumulated a record of ballot stuffing in union elections, especially in Chicago’s District 31, where its director, Joseph Germano, was closely identified with the local political machine of Mayor Richard Daley. Looking back from retirement, former international president David McDonald told a New York Times reporter: “I know how to run elections, I stole four elections for Joe Germano as director of District 31.”9 In 1973, when Germano was about to retire, Edward Sadlowski, then an appointed international representative, announced that he would run for director of District 31 against the candidate supported by the “official family,” which is how the international administration liked to characterize itself. With 140,000 members and 297 locals, District 31 was the union’s largest. International officers are elected by direct membership referendum, and district directors, who serve on the international executive board, are elected by the members of their respective districts. Late on election day, the Sadlowski camp’s own unofficial tally pointed toward victory, except for an all-too-familiar phenomenon: Lastminute nighttime returns had a remarkable tendency to turn the tide of opinion toward incumbents. The dissidents’ disquietude proved to be well founded. Sadlowski’s margin was wiped out when the official tally reported him defeated, his 21,606 votes to the putative winner’s 23,394. Those tardy tallies had done the trick. Unlike other victims of fraud, Sadlowski was not left to his own devices. His rights were protected by federal law, and, even more decisive, he could now count on help from Joseph Rauh. Assisted by Leon Despres, a prominent Chicago civil-liberties attorney, and later by Judith Schneider, then legal director of the Association for Union Democracy, Rauh prepared Sadlowski’s appeal to the U.S. Department of Labor. When the department upheld Sadlowski’s complaint and filed suit in federal court to void the election, the Rauh team, representing Sadlowski as intervener, presented convincing evidence of massive fraud. His legal victory was expedited by Rauh’s earlier achievement for the miners. Sadlowski’s right to intervene

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in a Labor Department federal suit had been established by the miners’ legal victory in Trbovich v. United Mine Workers of America. In a rerun election, supervised by the department, the insurgent Sadlowski swept to victory by a 2-to-1 margin. Sadlowski’s Run for USWA President In 1977, when I. W. Abel retired as USWA president, Ed Sadlowski decided to run for the job against Lloyd McBride, the candidate anointed by the official family. Sadlowski easily gathered the necessary endorsements from locals to put a full opposition slate on the ballot. The opposition could count on a well-organized caucus in the Chicago area, but only on dispersed individual supporters elsewhere. Policing the casting and counting of ballots at more than 5,000 voting sites scattered all over the United States and Canada was an impossible task. With the assistance of an election project administered by the Association for Union Democracy, the insurgents were able to post observers at about 800 of those sites, but that partial achievement could not allay the misgivings of those who were familiar with the union’s record of suspect elections. The Sadlowski camp lost, but it gave the administration something to worry about. With the active support of the whole official apparatus, which campaigned for votes and sometimes counted them, McBride was credited with 328,861 votes, Sadlowski with 249,281. But the administration could not rest easy with this victory. In past contested national elections, steelworkers had given heavy support to the opposition. In only one case did the administration claim a narrow victory over the opposition in basic steel. The steelworkers’ administration, victorious but shaken and obviously nervous, went searching for future guarantees against effective challenge. In 1978, it petitioned a federal court for an order to permanently bar the Association for Union Democracy and eight foundations that had supported the associations’s election project from “interfering” in its elections. The suit was quickly rejected by the court. But with the suit, the union officials did succeed in harassing the AUD. Within a few months after the union had filed its suit, both the New York State attorney general and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) challenged the AUD’s tax-exempt status and raised questions about the propriety, under IRS tax-exemption rules, of the AUD’s election project. There followed more than two years of administrative proceedings and an expenditure of thousands of dollars before the AUD was fully vindicated by the IRS. Both of these efforts failed to render the union officials immune to challenge, but they had still another, more poisonous arrow in their quiver.

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They could not control the courts or the IRS, but they did dominate their own union by making it more difficult for any future potential opposition to mount a challenge. At the union’s convention in 1978, the constitution was amended to make it illegal for any candidate for national union office “to solicit or accept financial support, or any other direct or indirect support of any kind (except an individual’s own volunteered personal time), from any nonmember.”10 This amendment made it impossible for a candidate to accept support even from his or her own family. To enforce that rule, candidates were required to submit intricate, frequent, and burdensome financial reports and to reveal the names of any union member who donated more than a nominal amount to the campaign. In the years that followed, the union administration succeeded in reestablishing a more secure control, but they had learned to respect the power of insurgency. After his defeat in the campaign for president, Sadlowski resumed his appointed position as international representative and held the job until his retirement.

Architects of the Future? These days, the slogan that inspired Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers (UAW) seems like a message from a dead planet: “The UAW is the vanguard in America, the architect of the future.” But John Sweeney hopes to reinvigorate the labor movement with that same sense of mission. Borrowing from union radicals, he talks of putting the movement back into the labor movement. Will he succeed? The question remains open, because before changing the labor movement, the leaders may have to change themselves. When the Teamster reformers took over the union’s marble palace in 1992, all elements were finally in place to enable Sweeney’s supporters to make their move. Successful insurgency on a grand scale in the Teamsters union gave moral legitimacy to insurgency throughout the labor movement and demonstrated that such a revolt could refurbish labor’s public image. Of decisive importance in increasing the odds of a successful revolt, the insurgency provided Sweeney with the sheer voting majority to guarantee victory at the AFL-CIO convention. Although the top leaders who gathered around Sweeney were the beneficiaries of the successful Teamster reform movement, none had ever contributed an iota to its victory, none had offered even moral encouragement when Teamster reformers were on the embattled defensive. During the twenty years of the TDU-PROD battle between the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the Professional Drivers Safety and Health Organization some more enlightened union leaders surely must have harbored a private sympathy for those who were resisting racketeers. But if they were

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sympathetic, they remained discreetly silent. Their public stance, however, was quite explicit: At an AFL-CIO convention, they unanimously welcomed the Teamsters back into the federation just when its suspect old guard desperately needed a new cover of respectability. Fortunately for the union, for progressives in the labor movement, and for Sweeney himself, that endorsement failed to save the corrupt regime. Ironically, Richard Trumka, not yet AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer but president of the mineworkers union, went even further. He joined a consortium of top labor officials who tried to shield the corrupt racketeer kingdom from the federal government’s suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which ended the regime. Luckily for him, Trumka was unsuccessful. Later, the votes of the Teamster reformers, who were victorious despite Trumka’s efforts, propelled him into the second highest post in the AFL-CIO. The reform victory in the Teamsters union tipped the AFL-CIO power scale, but it was only the final, pivotal element. It had been preceded by thirty-five years of intense reform activity that suffused the whole labor movement, beginning with the early insurgencies that were prompted by federal union-democracy legislation in 1959, then the landmark victory of the Miners for Democracy in 1972, which encouraged reformers in other unions, especially the Teamsters, and finally the decisive Teamsters revolution of 1991. Those years of reform insurgency had loosened the barnacles of bureaucracy that had fastened on the labor movement. Although the Sweeney camp had ridden that wave of reform to power, they, like most other top labor officials, had distrusted and even opposed it at every juncture. Trumka, as president of the UMWA, later became the choice of the Sweeney insurgents, but only after the miner reformers had won their battle. None of Trumka’s new friends had ever supported the Miners for Democracy, whose efforts had lifted him into power. In fact, Trumka himself seems to have blocked out the memory of his own origins in the miners’ insurgency. Earlier, on a smaller stage, a similar play was enacted in the steelworkers union. In the late 1950s, the rank-and-file Organization for Membership Rights, confronting the solid hostility of the steel union officialdom, shook up the administration by a powerful run for the international presidency. They were defeated, but their insurgency revealed a level of discontent running so deep that it split the official family and led to the overthrow of President David McDonald by Secretary-Treasurer I. W. Abel. The miners, painters, steelworkers, seamen, electricians, machinists, autoworkers, Teamsters, and all the others who organized against the official labor leadership were never motivated by a mood of anti-unionism. Quite the contrary. They were loyal oppositionists who criticized the labor establishment because they wanted a stronger and more effective labor movement, one that would stand up more aggressively against employers

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and defend workers’ interests in the nation. At bottom, their discontent within the union reflected their discontent with the position of workers in the country. In other words, they were insurgents inside their labor movement because they wanted their labor movement to be an effective insurgent force in the nation. Sweeney took advantage of that mood of insurgency to ride to power in the labor movement. The question now is whether he and his allies can encourage and utilize that same spirit to change the balance of power in the United States, which is the proclaimed aim of the new AFL-CIO leaders. The executive council adopted Sweeney’s definition of its aim: The mission of the AFL-CIO is “to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our nation.”11 They want nothing less than to transform the United States. The new regime has had notable success in winning a new round of public sympathy: The press is more tolerant, student volunteers join in union activity, pensioners are activated, community groups are becoming allies, sections of the paid union staff seem encouraged, and liberal and progressive intellectuals are inspired by the promise of a new labor movement. A key problem remains, however: So far, the mass of unionized rank and filers remains unmoved. The Sweeney group acknowledged in their campaign program the need to inspire the membership: “Develop a program to expand the concept of Membership Organizing [original emphasis], training and motivating rank-and-file workers to organize the unorganized. . . . We need to expand the involvement of our grassroots leaders.”12 Still, Andy Stern, new president of Sweeney’s Service Employees International Union, told one reporter: “People like me don’t like to change, even though they know it’s necessary. There are people who are concerned and who are nervous.”13 What makes so many so nervous? Perhaps officials are dismayed by the vision of an activated union membership, trained, educated, newly accustomed to exercising independent initiative and judgment. And once so inspired, after resisting the employer establishment at work, they might be inclined to do the unmentionable: criticize the establishment in their own union and actually run for office as insurgents. For incumbents, this is not so much a vision as a nightmare. Not that top union leaders want their members always to remain passive. Many see their members as a directed mass that acts in response to the leader’s signal, to vote, to pay dues, to stand up and fight but then to sit down and shut up when ordered. They want an army that responds to their command, but they are wary of members who respond to their own critical judgment and who insist on asking questions. What makes them nervous is that they distrust their own membership, which explains a great labor paradox.

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On most issues before the courts and legislatures that involve the rights of unions and the rights of workers in society, the AFL-CIO and most of its affiliates have been firmly on the side of social justice and civil liberties. But on every issue that involves the rights of members inside their own unions, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates have been on the side of limitation and repression. They opposed the bill-of-rights section of the LMRDA that protects civil liberties in unions. In Hall v. Cole, they opposed the right to legal fees in union democracy cases. In Salzhandler v. Caputo, they opposed legal protection of free speech in unions. In Trbovich v. United Mine Workers of America, they resisted the right of complainants to intervene in union democracy cases. In Brennan v. Bachowski, they supported the Labor Department’s claim that its decisions in union election cases were not subject to judicial review. In Phelan v. Plumbers Local 305, they successfully strengthened the right of business managers to blacklist union political opponents. Meanwhile, in large sections of the labor movement, restrictive rules make it difficult for oppositionists to run for office. In defiance of the spirit of federal court decisions and Labor Department regulations, some unions, including the big machinists union, enforce constitutional provisions that disqualify over 90 percent of their members from running for office. When the Labor Department requested comments on a proposal to relax such rules, fifteen unions, including the AFL-CIO itself, opposed any such move, and not a single union endorsed proposals to make it easier to run for office. Through their control over union hiring halls and their collusive agreements with employers, many union officials, especially in the construction trades, use their control over job referrals to build their political machines and to starve out critics. None of these subjects has been addressed by the new Sweeney leadership. All of these restrictive measures weigh down upon some of the most active and articulate rank-and-file union activists, the same type of reformers who succeeded in turning the Teamsters and miners unions into models of democratic unionism. Without loosening up and encouraging the exercise of internal union democracy, the Sweeney leadership will be hard pressed to convince independent-minded unionists that the labor movement belongs to its members and is not the private property of its officials. At Sweeney’s initiative, the AFL-CIO council endorsed those gallant words, “to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our nation.” 14 But to achieve so sweeping a change in U.S. life requires more than organizing as it is commonly understood. It requires a great new moral, social, and political force capable of moving the conscience of the nation. That force already exists, but only as a potential. The monumental task is to call it forth. That army in reserve is the membership of the organized labor movement.

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Even in its doldrums, the labor movement enrolls some 16 million men and women of all races, trades, and national origins. With their families, they make up perhaps 50 million citizens and residents and are labor’s main resource. Imagine if this mighty army—not just its loyal cadre—could be imbued with the deep conviction that the labor movement is truly their movement, that it stands up for their rights inside and outside unions, that they need not cringe before employers or business agents, that union hiring halls are fair. If this army could be convinced that the labor movement genuinely raises the banner of decency and democracy, such is the message that its members would carry to the public. It is hard to imagine how any right-wing message could stand up against so powerful a moral appeal. The lesson to the labor movement is: Open up! Let members run for office without niggling restrictions or intimidation. Let them speak their mind without fear of retaliation or blacklisting. Give them fair trials before truly impartial tribunals. Open union papers to dissenting views. Expand the right to elect stewards and business agents and to vote on contracts. These ideas are simple but powerful. Not that democracy by itself is the quick answer to all problems. Even with democratic rights, people don’t necessarily do what is best. Democracy must be linked to intelligent leadership and wise policy. But the labor movement depends upon the democratic spirit for its own internal strength and for moral authority in the life of the nation.

Conclusion John Sweeney’s victory was made possible by the ferment of rank-and-file activity and by the rising spirit of independence inside the labor movement. For the AFL-CIO to move forward massively and make good on the Sweeney promise requires that the new AFL-CIO leadership tap the same source of power in the ranks that brought them to the helm and use that power in the national social and political arenas. Are the new leaders capable of doing so? That question hangs over the future. The new leadership will have to abandon the dominant tendency to restrict the rights of members inside their unions and embark on a new era of opening up, not only to utilize the new spirit of democracy but to encourage it.

Notes This chapter is part of a larger work by Herman Benson, supported by a grant from Furthermore, the publication program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. 1. From “A New Voice for American Workers,” Sweeney slate pamphlet distributed at AFL-CIO convention 1995, passim.

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2. Frank Swoboda, “AFL-CIO Candidate Rejects Unity Ticket,” Washington Post, June 29, 1995, B9. 3. A. H. Raskin, “Big Labor Tries to End Its Nightmare,” New York Times, May 4, 1986. 4. “Reorganized Labor” (editorial), New York Times, April 4, 1985. 5. “Labor’s Bold Pledge to Come Back Swinging,” Business Week, March 11, 1985. 6. “The Changing Situation of Workers in Their Unions: A Report by the AFL-CIO Committee on the Evolution of Work,” February 1985, 12. 7. John King, “Labor’s Leadership Debate,” Meriden Record-Journal, February 20, 1995. 8. Yablonski election handbill, quoted in Union Democracy in Action 37, February 1970. 9. Herman Benson, “Will Steelworkers Get an Honest Count?” Union Democracy Review, vol. 39 (March 1984), 1–3; see also McDonald quote and Benson report for the ACLU Labor Committee, 1960. 10. Full text of rules printed in Union Democracy Review 17, January 1980, 5, 6. 11. From a 1996 statement of the AFL-CIO executive council, quoted by David Moberg in WorkingUSA, May–June 1997, 5. 12. New Voice campaign literature, Summer 1995. 13. Frank Solowey, interview with Andy Stern, WorkingUSA, May–June 1997, 62. 14. From a 1996 statement of the AFL-CIO executive council, quoted by David Moberg in WorkingUSA, May–June 1997, 5.

3 The New AFL-CIO: No Salvation from on High for the Working Stiff Jane Slaughter

For years the pundits had counted organized labor out. Most newspapers no longer saw any need for a labor reporter; perhaps some junior staffer took “work and family” as part of a beat in the lifestyle section. But with the vigorous campaigning of John Sweeney’s “New Voice” team for leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the resurrected labor movement became almost popular with the media. By the time of the Teamsters’ victorious strike against United Parcel Service (UPS) in the summer of 1997, much of the coverage was positively glowing. Since the new leaders’ victory at the October 1995 AFL-CIO convention, one of their most noticeable achievements has been to make the labor movement visible. Sweeney also deserves praise for the way he ran his election campaign. He and running mates Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson went out to the rank and file, particularly to strikers and to other workers in struggle. These workers had no say in the election at the convention, where international union presidents cast their votes in blocs. The members had no influence on how their presidents would vote, and yet Sweeney took the opportunity to campaign widely, to let union members— and the public—know that a change was coming. The unaccustomed media attention was one reason that many activists and local officers began to feel more hopeful about the future of their movement. Although the majority of uninvolved members remained cynical or uninterested, the more active ones dared to hope that the victory of the Sweeney team might trickle down some results. And there was indeed positive fallout in the first two years of the Sweeney administration: a new emphasis on organizing the unorganized, a conference on women workers, a meeting of activists running “living wage” political campaigns around the country, an attempt to resuscitate the 49

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moribund local central labor councils. Activists felt—from the federation, if not within their individual unions—a new spirit of openness to possibilities. So much has been written in praise of the “new AFL-CIO” that it is unnecessary to recapitulate it here. It is perhaps more useful to remind ourselves that in most important respects, the politics of the union hierarchy have not changed. The New Voice team remains committed to the same stance toward employers and to the same methods of functioning that helped organized labor fall to its current puny proportion of the workforce. That stance and those methods are part of the reason for labor’s continuing impotence both in the political arena and in bargaining. Sweeney has kept his campaign promise to focus the federation’s energies on just two priorities: organizing and politics. But his approach to these tasks is problematic. Equally problematic are the large areas of labor’s business that the new AFL-CIO tries to ignore altogether. When Sweeney does address these concerns—the relationship of workers to employers, for instance—he reveals how committed he is to a continuation of labor’s old politics.

Organizing the Unorganized The AFL-CIO actively encourages locals and internationals to organize and promotes multiunion organizing campaigns by providing them money. Some local central labor councils have used the AFL-CIO’s Membership Education and Mobilization for Organizing (MEMO) training. This tack encourages involving members in organizing rather than unions simply assigning staffers to do so. The federation is using moral suasion to get locals and internationals to commit 30 percent of their budgets to recruitment. At the Washington State Labor Council convention in September 1996, for example, stickers reading “30% BY THE YEAR 2000” were distributed. Delegates signed a petition endorsing Sweeney’s call for 30 percent across the board. In Sweeney’s old union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), if locals commit certain percentages of their budgets to organizing, they receive a dues rebate. And, of course, “Union Summer”—though it may not have made a difference on the ground in actual campaigns—gave a boost to labor’s image and attracted some young people who will return to the labor movement as organizers and other types of staffers. All of these efforts have not yet resulted in a noticeable uptick in organizing victories. For one thing, 1996 was an election year, and much of official labor’s energy was focused on campaigning. More important, AFL-CIO leadership’s pledge of $50 million for 1996–1997 is a drop in the bucket considering the tens of millions of nonunion workers. Most of

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the actual work in the field must come from the unions themselves, not from the AFL-CIO. Workers join unions, not the federation. This is not a criticism of Sweeney. But it does point up another problem with his organizing strategy: though ambitious, it is scattershot. All unions are encouraged to organize and to merge with each other as well (much union “growth” is merely affiliation of existing unions with larger ones), but there is no overall look at or attempt to focus resources on the organizing drives or mergers that might be most strategically important. So the National Writers Union affiliates with the United Auto Workers (UAW), but the latter does nearly nothing to organize auto-parts suppliers. The laborers recruit practical nurses; the United Mine Workers takes in university employees (while the coal industry is over half nonunion). The International Chemical Workers Union merges with the United Steelworkers instead of with the more radical Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. The Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers joins the SEIU rather than seeking unity with the other, fragmented craft unions on the railroads. More and more unions are becoming general unions rather than following the old slogan of the South African federation COSATU: “One industry, one union.” Under this policy, all hospital workers, for example, would be in one union rather than split up among the SEIU, Local 1199, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and every industrial union. Sweeney’s brand of encouragement to organize and merge does nothing to help sort this mess out. The SEIU, both under Sweeney’s presidency and since his move upstairs, has thought strategically in the sense that it has targeted specific kinds of workers: janitors and health-care workers. The good thing about this choice is that it means pursuing low-paid workers whom many unions have not cared about, and in particular immigrants, women, and people of color. SEIU staffers argue that it makes sense to aim for industries in which a union can gain control over the local labor market rather than those that are in international competition. Nursing home owners cannot move the shop to Mexico. That focus may be easier, but it does not challenge the nerve centers of capital. Although Sweeney does not have the authority to tell affiliates whom to organize, it’s interesting to think what could happen if AFL-CIO leaders thought strategically about which organizing gains would most increase labor’s power overall. One strong contender would have to be the auto-parts industry. Imagine if Sweeney declared, “The auto industry is still the premier industry in this country, with the greatest economic reach. But a smaller and smaller proportion of autoworkers are unionized. Today only one-fifth of non–Big Three parts workers are union members, down from two-thirds in the mid1970s. This dissipation has hurt union clout tremendously.

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“However, we know that the companies’ just-in-time systems give unionized parts plants enormous power—as was demonstrated by the strike of two UAW brake plants against GM in March 1996, which shut the company down across the continent and cost it nearly $1 billion. “So I’m swinging my weight to convince the UAW to use its enormous stash of cash to do a massive organizing campaign among auto-parts workers. If the UAW won’t do it, I’ll charter a new union to do so. Or I’ll invite the UE [United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers] back into the fold and give them the money to go for it.” Such a breach of protocol will not happen, of course. But it would truly put the commanding heights of capital on notice that the labor movement meant business. It is worth mentioning here that the United Auto Workers’ failure to organize the parts plants was not an oversight. The union’s acquiescence during the 1980s and 1990s as the Big Three jobbed out more and more work to nonunion shops appears to be part of a strategy to help the companies lower overall production costs in the United States. The union’s thinking is that if parts production is relatively cheap, the Big Three will not feel the need to move their final assembly plants abroad. The UAW can remain a union of high-paid workers, though one with many fewer members. (And perhaps the strategy has worked: the last assembly plant to be opened in Mexico was Ford’s Hermosillo plant, where production began in 1986.) Thus it would be a mistake to see the choices made about organizing by either the AFL-CIO or any other particular union as the result simply of incompetence or inertia. The larger question is union leaders’ friendly relation to capital, which is discussed in the next section.

Politics For those who consider the Democratic Party a corporate-owned coalition, with labor the most junior of partners, one positive effect of the Sweeney victory has been that it created somewhat more space for the new Labor Party, founded in June 1996. Although the New Party is timid, declining to run candidates of its own, it at least raises the issues of independence from the Democrats and of working people having their own political representatives. Sweeney has remained neutral on the Labor Party and has not tried to stop affiliates from joining, as his predecessors would have done. This is small comfort, however, given the fact that Sweeney is quite clear that the AFL-CIO will stick with the Democrats. This is so despite the fact that under Bill Clinton the party has given up even lip service to the goals of organized labor. Union leaders have always strained at election

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time to excuse politicians’ antiworker actions, fearing the greater evil of the Republicans. But the capitulation in Sweeney’s endorsement of Clinton in early 1996 deserves some comment. Briefly, Clinton’s antiworker record includes the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); failure to press hard for antiscab legislation, which subsequently died; a pro-business proposal on health-care reform; the Dunlop Commission, which recommended changes in labor law that unions opposed and employers demanded; and welfare reform/workfare. Despite this history, the AFL-CIO executive council endorsed Clinton without reservation and with no conditions or even requests. Sweeney described this move as bold and brave; he wrote soon after in Labor Research Review that “we defied convention and made an early endorsement.” The AFL-CIO then did what it had said it would do; it poured at least $35 million into electing Democrats. Even on its own terms, this effort did not produce impressive results. The day after the election, labor was unable to point to a large number of seats won. So AFL-CIO spin doctors declared instead that their effort had forced the Republicans to take up labor’s issues: “The 105th Congress will legislate under the spotlight of a working families agenda, not a business-driven Contract with America.” The spotlight did not appear to make much difference, as Congress continued its same antiworker trajectory.

Militancy and Member Mobilization The New Voice campaign promised that the AFL-CIO would be militant about organizing. Sweeney’s record at SEIU was impressive on this score, especially in the Justice for Janitors campaign. Immigrant janitors in many cities demonstrated and carried out civil disobedience; SEIU organizers encouraged real mobilization of potential members. There is reason to believe that the AFL-CIO will encourage more such forceful actions in order to win union recognition. But the question also arises of how to win struggles once the union is in place. Is Sweeney for masses of members sitting down in the streets to win strikes, for example? A major barrier to Sweeney’s promoting militancy, should he want to do so, is protocol, which has always been the ruling energy within the AFL-CIO. (Sweeney, of course, broke decades of encrusted protocol by challenging an incumbent for the top job.) The rule is that the AFL-CIO leadership does not try to tell an affiliate union what to do. An early case of protocol in action came about after Sweeney’s promise to the locked-out workers of the Staley Corporation. At the AFLCIO convention, a Staley hunger striker pleaded for solidarity in their twoand-a-half-year struggle. Sweeney pledged, “Your struggle is at the top of

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our priority list.” But the workers’ international union president, Wayne Glenn of the Paperworkers, said no thanks to Sweeney’s support. Glenn wanted to end the Staley struggle. He pulled the plug on the strike, and Sweeney refrained from intervening. Perhaps Sweeney’s best chance to show that he wanted to lead a more militant labor movement would have been the Detroit newspaper strike. Unions at the city’s two dailies went on strike in July 1995. Sweeney and Trumka campaigned for office on the picket line. The dailies belonged to the first- and second-largest newspaper chains in the country, Gannett and Knight-Ridder, which seemed determined to break the unions and set an example for their other employees. It would have required a massive mobilization, far beyond the business-as-usual activities envisioned by local leaders, to win against such determined employers. Facing this intransigence—and these deep pockets—the unions’ only hope was to create a political crisis in the city, one hot enough that even the far-off CEOs would feel the heat. One possibility was massive protests and civil disobedience, with supporters from other unions joining the fray. The idea of this sort of mass mobilization was raised early on in the strike by Richard Trumka himself in an August 1995 visit to Detroit, before he was elected to the number-two position at the AFL-CIO. Trumka had been president of the United Mine Workers during the 1989 strike against Pittston Coal. There the miners set a prototype for sustained, militant—and illegal—defiance, and they won. Thousands of supporters from the East Coast and the Midwest had driven to the Virginia hills to sleep out at the miners’ Camp Solidarity. Strikers engaged in civil disobedience to block scab trucks. The coal operators procured injunctions aplenty, and Trumka risked the union’s treasury in the face of $65 million worth of fines. Finally, ninety-nine miners and a preacher occupied a coal plant and forced management’s hand. But Detroit local leaders were not interested in such a scenario, preferring to rely on boycotts and the National Labor Relations Board. Again, Sweeney and Trumka, now elected to the AFL-CIO’s highest offices, chose not to interfere. What is more, Sweeney declined to honor even a request for help that met all the requirements of protocol. Early in 1996, both the Detroit AFL-CIO and the striking unions’ leadership asked him to call a Solidarity Day III, a massive march on Detroit, to pressure management. Sweeney finally responded to this plea with a smallish, decorous march in June 1997, twenty-three months into the strike. One angry striker called the event “a consolation prize.” Of course, protocol is not the only reason that Sweeney holds back from encouraging militant action. As always, top leaders shun militancy because aroused members can get out of control. How would it look for a labor statesman, someone who lunches with senators, to have his constituents

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breaking laws, windows, or legs? Detroit activists were hoping that Sweeney would set their march for Labor Day 1996. But that was election season, and Sweeney was careful not to embarrass Bill Clinton with a display of “special interest” acting out by big labor. We can assume that Sweeney sincerely wants to see a more powerful labor movement, in his own definition of that term. The long-term dangers of a defeat in Detroit, once seen as labor’s stronghold, following the defeat at Staley would have been obvious to him. In both cases, the workers fought hard and received much support from other local unions around the country. In both cases, however, the higher levels of labor drew back, demonstrating to corporate strategists that they were not willing to do what was necessary to win. These retreats are more instructive about the potential for Sweeney’s leading a rejuvenation of the labor movement than are a dozen organizing drives.

Democracy Democracy in a union context means rank-and-file control. It is perhaps the union issue in which Sweeney has shown the least interest; he has never mentioned it in his public statements. We can get an indication of Sweeney’s stance on democracy, however, by examining his record at the SEIU. At both the local and the national levels, the SEIU is largely run and dominated by its staff members. Not only does the union hire most staff from outside—people who have never worked as a janitor or in a nursing home—those staffers may then run for local office and become elected officials. Many locals are huge statewide amalgamations of 10,000–25,000 members, whose rank-and-filers have not a prayer of influencing the professional officials’ priorities. The culture of the SEIU is such that staffers see no problem that they, not the members, are running the union; they are proud of it. So the question arises: If Sweeney does succeed in organizing tens of thousands of new union members, what is he organizing them into? The case of the janitors of SEIU Local 399 in Los Angeles has often been cited. In their organizing campaign, these Salvadoran cleaners used civil disobedience to disrupt business at Century City’s luxury office buildings and in return were beaten by the police. Finally, they won a contract. But then they were dumped into a 25,000-member citywide SEIU local run very much in the old style. In 1995, they and others organized a dissident slate called the Multiracial Alliance to run in the local’s first ever contested election. They won every seat except the presidency, which they did not challenge. When the old president refused to cooperate with the new officials, Sweeney’s response was to throw the local into trusteeship.

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As Martha Gruelle wrote in Labor Notes, “The rank and filers had violated the understanding that their organizing was to stop when they became members.” No union official will speak publicly against democracy or rank-andfile power. But neither has the New Voice group said that democracy is part and parcel of its program. A major article in the April–May 1996 Boston Review by Stephen Lerner, who was the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign under Sweeney, provides a good example of a militancy-without-democracy point of view. Lerner presents a thorough action program for labor (more radical than Sweeney’s), calling for mobilizing the most active 1 percent of union members into “an army ready to risk arrest . . . to bring whole cities to a standstill.” But one plank is missing: Lerner says not a word about rank-and-file initiative or control of the militant actions he espouses, much less rank-and-filers’ taking control of their unions. Rather, members are to be “activated” or “asked” to participate— the cannon fodder version of organizing. This notion of union power is the opposite of that held by the most successful rank-and-file movement for union democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). TDU has always maintained that democracy increases workers’ power against the boss. Throughout the movement’s twenty-year history, members and leaders have treated the two goals of democracy and power against the companies as thoroughly intertwined. In the late 1980s, TDU persuaded the government to impose demo cratic reforms on the Teamsters, including rank-and-file election of top officers. In 1991, TDU campaigned—and helped win the election—for Ron Carey and his entire slate of reformers. In 1997, when Carey called a national strike against UPS over the issue of replacing full-time workers with part-timers, it was not only Carey’s leadership that helped win the strike; it was TDU’s persistent history of educating the rank and file and mobilizing them that made the strike solid. (TDU did fold up its tent when Carey was elected but continued its role as an independent mobilizer.) In contrast, the Teamster old guard, shielded from democratic rank-and-file control, had handed low-paid part-timers to UPS on a silver platter in the 1980s. At that time, Teamster members could reject a contract they did not like only if two-thirds of the members voted against it. Thus the Teamsters’ victory on part-timing, a victory against the employers, would not have been possible without a dissident movement that won democratic reforms while practicing militancy. Sweeney hailed the victory, but we can be sure that, given his adherence to protocol, he will not be encouraging such opposition movements within other unions. Although Sweeney’s apologists would have it otherwise, the questions of democracy and the willingness to take on employers also affect organizing. Optimists make much of the fact that the AFL-CIO’s new line is

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that rank-and-file members, not just professional staff organizers, should be involved in recruiting new members. In the SEIU, for example, the international office says that locals will qualify for organizing money on the condition that they set up a member-organizing committee. But why should rank-and-filers devote their weekends to calling on prospects if they have no say in their own union? If that union has done little or nothing to confront the changing conditions of work, how are members to describe its advantages to potential converts?

The Relationship Between Workers and Owners Sweeney’s record on the labor-management relationship thus far is mixed at best. He is willing to wage a fight against an employer to win recognition and a contract, but once the union is established, his notion of the proper labor-management relationship elides into the orthodoxy of the 1990s: labor-management partnership. U.S. employers must be persuaded to follow the German codetermination model—never mind that German employers have decided they are not playing anymore. When he was newly elected, Sweeney appeared before many conclaves of concerned business executives. In these speeches, he called for a “social compact.” The argument—the same as his predecessors’—runs: Corporate leaders should wake up and realize that recognizing unions is actually in their interest. Enlightened employer self-interest should lead companies to take the high road. Partnership with a union, along with a high-wage, high-performance workplace, will yield greater productivity and quality, and therefore profits—a win-win situation. In other words, “There’s a lot we have in common with the greedy parasite.” In October 1996, Sweeney told members of Business for Social Responsibility, “We want to help American business compete in the world and create new wealth for your shareholders and your employees. We want to work with you to bake a larger pie which all Americans can share, and not just argue with you about how to divide the existing pie.” Under this scenario, it is not necessary to take anything from the shareholders in order to increase the amount of money that workers take home. The problem is that employers are choosing the low road—downsizing, using low-wage labor, busting unions—not because they are shortsighted or stupid mismanagers. They do so because the market rewards low-road companies. An example is Kaiser Permanente, the huge health maintenance organization. Like other health-care companies forced to compete with forprofit giants, nonprofit Kaiser has closed hospitals and departments, contracted out care, cut professional staff, and shifted work to nonlicensed

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employees. A federal investigation cited severe deficiencies in Kaiser hospitals in low-income areas; one Kaiser union accused the company of “medical redlining.” Despite this antiworker and antipatient record, in April 1997 the AFL-CIO announced a partnership with Kaiser, negotiated by Sweeney himself. The federation would market Kaiser to unionists, and the company would give workers “input” on quality issues and remain neutral in organizing drives. The parties said their aim was to show that “labor-management collaboration produces . . . market leading competitive performance.” It was the first time the federation had agreed to promote the interests of a specific business on a national basis. As part of their obligation to promote Kaiser, the unions agreed not to engage in any activities that might damage the company’s reputation, such as public opposition to any closings or other service cuts. Kaiser unionists who had campaigned and struck against the company’s cutbacks said the agreement would undermine both the quality of patient care and their ability to fight the loss of jobs. It seemed clear that the real prize here for the AFL-CIO was the prospect of tens of thousands of new union members, won without resistance from management. The heavy emphasis on organizing new members—which most observers see as purely positive—in this case led to collaboration that will hurt current members and that outweighs concern for the quality of jobs or the quality of care.

Life on the Job In the past decade almost every U.S. workplace of any size has undergone sweeping changes in the way work is organized. Sometimes with the way eased through labor-management participation programs, sometimes by management fiat, workers have been subjected to reengineering, speedup, deskilling (often called “multiskilling”), quality circles to filch workers’ job knowledge, rigid standardization, increased contracting out, use of part-timers and temporaries, long or nonstandard hours, computer monitoring, reorganization into teams, and just-in-time schedules—what many call “lean production.” Jobs are more regimented, more stressful, with longer hours, than most workers can remember. Yet the workplace regime does not appear on Sweeney’s list of priorities. This lack of interest is not startling. For most top labor leaders, working conditions are never much of an issue. They are concerned with matters that can be more easily measured—the increase in the hourly wage, the number of jobs, the number of members. What their members actually do for eight—or ten or twelve—hours per day and how those conditions are being transformed do not usually percolate up. Yet the workplace is

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seeing more change today than at any time since mass production began, and it is a major weakness of the new AFL-CIO’s outlook that it ignores or misunderstands this transformation. The profound reorganization of work could make the workplace once again a locus of struggle. The anonymous factory worker of the 1930s said it well: “I ain’t got no kick on wages; I just don’t like to be drove.” Although the majority of unionized workers are not yet bucking the new ways of working, there are signs of unrest: the Staley workers’ resistance to the twelve-hour day, a dozen local strikes at General Motors demanding more bodies on the line to relieve the speedup. Anger at insecure and stressful jobs is waiting to be tapped. But for unions to challenge the dictates of lean production would mean challenging the methods that are wringing more profits out of the workforce. And given the conventional wisdom that unions should “make the pie bigger” rather than “get workers a larger slice,” higher profits are the only means that labor leaders can see to achieving Sweeney’s slogan, “America Needs a Raise.” * * * The two priorities of the new AFL-CIO sum up clearly Sweeney’s perspective on how unions are to increase their power in society: They must increase their numbers through organizing and they must elect friendly politicians. But large numbers do not translate automatically into power vis-à-vis the boss; muscle must be flexed in some way. Sweeney’s record shows that his plan is not for these larger unions to confront employers directly. Unions are to collaborate, as at Kaiser, not confront. How, then, is a larger organized labor movement to translate into power vis-à-vis the corporations? Sweeney’s answer is that larger unions will be better able to get out the vote. They must persuade their members to vote Democratic. At the 1997 AFL-CIO convention, Sweeney announced that the federation would seek to register 4 million members of union households by the year 2000. By showing the politicians that labor can put them in office or take them out, labor will persuade the Democrats to tilt back in a pro-labor direction. Pro-labor legislation will level the playing field with employers. This view was embodied in the federation’s postelection press release of November 1996. Most observers have noted that organized labor’s importance to the Democrats has shrunk, as evidenced by that party’s ability to ignore union concerns. But the AFL-CIO argued the opposite, pointing out that union households accounted for 23 percent of the overall vote in 1996, up from 19 percent in 1992, and that 59 percent of union households voted for Clinton, versus 46 percent of nonunion ones. One million union

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households had switched from the Republicans to the Democrats between 1994 and 1996. Thus Sweeney’s two-point program hangs together: Workers are to organize, but not to confront the employers on the picket line or in the workplace. They are to become union members so that their officers can persuade them to vote Democratic, or even better, to go out and work for the Democrats. This is the AFL-CIO strategy for worker power. The Sweeney victory was positive for the labor movement. It has created openings for unionists who want more militancy and more power, because it has made the idea that something can be done—not an option under the old regime—seem more viable. Labor activists at all levels now feel that they can talk about what the labor movement needs. But the need for union reform and strong class politics is as great as before. As ever, salvation for the working stiff will not be handed down from on high.

4 Labor: Turning the Corner Will Take More than Mobilization Michael Eisenscher

It has been called the postwar labor-management accord, social compact or contract, industrial truce, accommodation, and détente. By whatever name, out of the years during and immediately following World War II emerged a system of labor relations markedly different from that preceding the war. The New Deal–era labor movement, which had been engaged in sharp, seemingly intractable conflicts with the nation’s corporate giants, had been guided by solidarity, militant collective action, considerable membership initiative and authority, and a broad sense of class interest—earning it the characterization as a social movement unionism. It included a significant number of workers who questioned the very assumptions on which capitalist relations of production were founded and who had an alternative, socialist vision for society. A very different labor movement emerged from the decades immediately following the war—one that placed a premium on stable and responsible relations with management, social respectability, insider political access, and pursuit of a middle-class lifestyle. It accepted and even celebrated the achievements and constraints of modern industrial capitalist society. Its former adversaries in the U.S. corporate world no longer sought organized labor’s destruction; they sought instead a reliable (junior) partner in production for an expanding consumer economy.1 The terrain dramatically shifted again in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, yet the labor movement continued to cling tenaciously to its past— not to the militant social movement of the New Deal years but to the conservative era of the Cold War. As the economic, political, and social ground shifted under the postwar labor movement, it suffered a persistent and continuing decline in its membership, power, and influence. From its mid-1950s peak of over 35 percent of the paid labor force, unions now represent less than 15 percent (in the private sector near 10 percent). Once 61

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heralded as leaders of a broad, progressive coalition, unions are more commonly portrayed today as merely a special interest. The postwar era produced a contemporary version of business unionism, or what is now more commonly referred to as the service model. Unless it stems the tide of this decline, organized labor risks being marginalized in a few labor market niches of the twenty-first-century economy. In this chapter I examine how elements of labor’s own organizational culture2 now act as impediments to its revival. The world that helped create that culture changed while organized labor for the most part did not. First I discuss the roots of labor’s present crisis; then I assess the response of the new leadership of the AFL-CIO and its efforts to restore labor’s ranks and power. Next the chapter describes what is needed—a deep-going process of internal transformation—and concludes with some recommendations about how unions might proceed to rejuvenate and transform themselves, and thereby their prospects, in the next century.

The Roots of Labor Crises In general terms, the postwar accord was a tripartite arrangement, characterized by management’s willingness to live with the labor movement where it was already organized and its continued resistance to and avoidance of unions outside labor’s well-organized core sectors. Unions, for their part, accepted managerial prerogatives that conceded control over production, the labor process, and technology, as well as other strategic business decisions. They also accepted productivity bargaining, taking on some responsibility for production efficiency and the orderly management of conflict through increasingly elaborate multistep grievance procedures leading to compulsory arbitration. They sought to protect work and jurisdictions through the negotiation of elaborate job-classification systems with rigid job descriptions and work rules. Both parties accepted (or tolerated) substantially greater government intrusion into what had been the private sphere of labor-management relations.3 Industrial relations, it was thought, had finally matured. The labor relations system of the 1950s assumed, and in many respects required, an expanding economy and U.S. global dominance in capitalist markets. Most of the labor movement willingly embraced capital’s global aims and became collaborators with U.S. postwar hegemonic ambitions in the name of fighting communism. Union leaders imposed a consensus in support of U.S. government and corporate global objectives through a purge of labor’s anticapitalist left and other dissenting voices.

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Characteristics of the Cold War Social Contract The 1950s labor relations system assumed and in many respects required: • Expanding markets and rapidly rising consumer demand; a shared union-management commitment to economic growth through productivity increases and Keynesian fiscal policy • A generally rising rate of profit • Government programs extending the New Deal welfare state • Unchallenged U.S. economic and military supremacy in the global market, providing access to cheap raw materials as imports and foreign markets for exports • Support for and collaboration with U.S. global Cold War policies by labor leadership and labor leaders’ participation in suppression of dissent from those policies, making U.S. labor a partner with the U.S. government in the destruction of the left here and abroad and witting collaborators in the suppression of emerging popular democratic movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia • Supremacy of the dollar as the medium of international trade • An economy fueled by substantial public subsidies to the military/industrial complex; extensive government underwriting of corporate research and development costs • Management acceptance of the legitimacy of unions in the already organized industrial core and resistance or avoidance in other sectors, reinforcing labor market segmentation • Government regulation of labor relations; administrative and court determination of the outer bounds and terms of conflict • Corporate and labor adversarialism focused narrowly on wages, benefits, hours, and some working conditions; union acceptance of managerial prerogatives and control over the labor process, technological change, product design and quality, and investment decisions • Worker militancy contained by a system of administrative, legislative, and industrial institutions and practices that left power relationships relatively unchallenged; technical and depoliticized dispute resolution relying on mediation and arbitration; a shared labor-management goal of industrial peace and stability leading to the negotiation of ever longer multiyear agreements (continues)

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Characteristics of the Cold War Social Contract (cont.) • The ability of employers to absorb higher wage and benefit costs because of productivity gains, market influence, and global dominance • Technological change that subsequently created more jobs than it displaced • Union growth derived from employment growth in organized enterprises rather than organization of unorganized workers • The expansion of union bureaucracies and the emergence of specialized staff focused narrowly on grievance resolution and contract negotiation

The Service-Model, Business-Union Culture The postwar labor relations system helped generate a new culture in which collective bargaining and worker struggles became subject to greater legal scrutiny, regulatory control, and court precedent. Disputes were safely contained in a web of administrative procedure. The relationship between labor and capital moved from the no-holds-barred battlefield of workplace conflict to the well-ordered administrative terrain of industrial relations and human resource management—the province of a growing army of labor relations professionals, lawyers, and administrative managers on both sides of the bargaining table. Union bureaucracies mushroomed to provide technical expertise and to handle the growing administrative burden. Union leaders and staff returned with increasing rarity to the ranks from which they had risen, while college graduates could actually contemplate a career in labor without ever having worked in the trade or occupation of the workers they represented. Adherence to administrative and legal procedure and the ability to maintain labor discipline became the measures of responsible union leadership. Union strategies were substantially determined by what lawyers advised was permissible and by what the temper of a Cold War order dictated was acceptable. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which originally (as the Wagner Act of 1935) had been written to encourage collective bargaining, was transformed by the postwar Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin acts and the decisions of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and courts into a weapon of employers. The New Deal balance of power had shifted during and after the war substantially to capital’s favor. The years immediately following the war, however, appeared to affirm the wisdom of the accord. An expanding economy paid off with rising real

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incomes, greater job security, home ownership, consumer credit, and opportunities for college education that had been beyond the reach of most working people prior to the war. These economic improvements, however, were not accompanied by comparable advances inside the workplace. Speedup, job stress, and alienation continued and even worsened as production systems were rationalized. Not everyone gained equally from the deal, either. Labor force segmentation created two divergent tracks, consigning a large (and growing) portion of women, rural workers, and African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American men to the most poorly paid, insecure, low-skilled, dead-end jobs in sectors that had been largely bypassed by the labor movement during its period of expansion. Among workers, semiskilled and skilled white males employed by large multinational firms benefited most. But the lion’s share of the rewards of the postwar boom went to those who had always gained the most: employers and wealthy stockholders. When their share began to decline, the deal unraveled.

The Deal Unravels Beginning in the late 1960s, this social contract started to break down as U.S. capital suffered declining rates of profit and productivity, faced newly revitalized and more efficient foreign competitors, failed to modernize its own productive capacity, and began to experience saturated markets and global overcapacity. Workers grew more militant in the face of speedup and various efforts to rationalize production leading to an increase in strikes and other disruptions. A new baby boom generation in particular seemed afflicted with an epidemic of workplace alienation and discontent. The cost of acting as global policeman for U.S. interests grew as the U.S. role expanded from adviser to full combatant in Southeast Asia and as the CIA escalated its meddling in the internal affairs of other nations. The 1973 Middle East oil embargo sealed the fate of postwar arrangements. Profit margins turned south, to the Sun Belt and below the border, and with them many of the key assumptions on which the postwar labor-management accord depended crumbled. Employers took the offensive to restore their rate of profits and market share, generally at the workers’ expense. Nineteen seventy-three marked the beginning of a nearly unbroken decline in the real standard of living of a majority of U.S. workers. Inflation and the rising cost of maintaining the warfare/welfare state began to seriously undermine the effective purchasing power of U.S. consumers as real wages declined, personal debt soared, and corporations and the wealthy successfully shifted the tax burden from themselves to workers. Workers in the most highly organized industrial core of the economy were bludgeoned into concessions and two-tier contracts (protecting current members at the expense of future

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ones and further isolating them from the next generation of young workers). They lost more ground to plant closures, automation, and corporate restructuring. Union busting became legitimate once again and spawned a growth industry of consultants and law firms (“goon squads with briefcases”) that specialized in union avoidance and deunionization. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the wholesale discharge and replacement of air-traffic controllers during the strike by the Profession of Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981, an offensive by capital against labor that had been building for almost a decade was given the official blessing of government. Two of the three partners to the postwar tripartite understandings had abandoned the accord and turned on labor. The offensive escalated. Union leaders were wholly unprepared to respond; labor remained on the defensive throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Electronic technologies made possible job-displacing and worker-controlling technical rationalization without expanding the base of employment for most workers dislocated by those technologies. The electronics revolution gave capital a qualitatively greater capability for global expansion and flight. Many employers pursued the Sun Belt option, relocating jobs to bastions of the open shop that had been preserved by Taft-Hartley options for state right-to-work laws (which outlawed mandatory union membership requirements). This process was made easier by labor’s failure to mount credible organizing efforts in the South and Southwest (or for that matter almost anywhere outside the public sector). Other employers chose the option of relocating operations to foreign countries kept in a state of underdevelopment and subservience by multinational corporations, local capitalists, authoritarian dictators, and armies supplied and trained by the United States and its allies (backstopped by the threat or reality of direct U.S. military intervention in the name of fighting communism or defending democracy). Redistribution of industrial capacity, along with demographic and other labor force shifts, had another important effect. As young workers left their homes for distant suburbs and greenfield jobs in other states, they left behind the cultural influence of the generation that had been responsible for labor’s New Deal and wartime resurgence. More often than not, they found employment in places that were assiduously cultivating a union-avoidance/union-free environment in new suburban industrial parks that served as compounds against occasional forays by unions chasing relocated facilities. Job-hungry communities and state governments were pitted against one another in pursuit of employers, investment capital, and jobs. They offered tax incentives, free infrastructure improvements, job training, and other inducements, including assurances of a cooperative workforce free of union influences. Profit-hungry employers encouraged

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and exploited the process, producing a downward spiral of wage and standard cutting that has been characterized by some as a race to the bottom. Recognizing a dramatically different environment, corporations sought to reinvent themselves while unions remained largely unchanged, embedded in an organizational culture based on an economy and labormanagement-government relationship that no longer existed. The leadership of most unions remained in the hands of aging white men who remained wed to policies, practices, and a style of leadership that were out of touch with an increasingly diverse labor force that had no experience with, or exposure to, unions. Union officials who saw the shift seemed powerless to respond effectively without putting their own interests at risk, because doing so would require a break with a system with which they and their organizations believed they had reached accommodation. Even those who might have been inclined to take such risks found themselves trapped by member expectations generated by a consumerist culture these officials had helped to encourage. Absent pressure from below demanding a radical departure, it was easier to conform, to deny reality, to batten down the hatches in the hope that the storm would blow over rather than to challenge the prevailing order. It took another quarter of a century for a crisis spawned by the new reality to provoke a change.4

“More and Better” Is Not Enough The new leadership of the AFL-CIO now seeks to break organized labor out of the tightening circle that capital and a succession of both Democratic and Republican administrations have drawn around it. The “New Voice” team of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and Linda ChavezThompson has begun to implement changes to enable organized labor to marshal resources and mobilize members and to more aggressively execute labor’s strategies in pursuit of its goals. In a letter to affiliates on January 15, 1977, President Sweeney wrote: The Federation has committed itself to speak for working people every day at every level of our world economy, as well as to transform the role of the union from an organization that focuses on a member’s contract to one that gives workers a meaningful say in all the decisions that affect our working lives, from capital investments, to the quality of our products and services, to how we organize our work.5

This stance represents a substantial departure from views expressed by Sweeney’s predecessors. Within federation headquarters Sweeney has established task forces on organizational culture that are looking at problems

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that heretofore had been discussed only by radicals, dissidents, and an occasional academic. The new leadership has moved aggressively to retool, streamline, reorient, and mobilize unions to meet the challenges they confront and to revitalize and rebuild labor’s ranks. Its clarion call is mobilization for action. It has shifted resources to promote and support organizing; it has restructured its international relations work to expand solidarity across borders in order to deal more effectively with transnational capital; it has shifted its political action priorities to focus more on issues and to improve labor’s capacity to target, educate, and turn out its own voters.6 The federation took a step toward greater gender, racial, and ethnic diversity by electing Linda Chavez-Thompson to the newly created post of executive vice president, and by adding more women and people of color to its general executive council. A newly created women’s department is part of the new leadership’s effort to reach out to constituencies that represent the fastest-growing segments of the labor force. Its director, Karen Nussbaum, brings to the post her experience as head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich, as well as her pioneering work as founder of 9 to 5. Plans are being laid to bring this program to every corner of the labor movement. Repairing a rupture between labor and academia that has continued since the Vietnam War, the Sweeney administration participated around the country in a series of teach-ins about the labor movement, starting with Columbia University in 1996. This turn of affairs began with an open letter from forty-one scholars, authors, and educators published in November 1995 calling for a renewal of the labor-academic relationship. Laborfriendly scholars numbering in the hundreds subsequently established new connections to the federation and its affiliates, sparking new research, joint actions, and support for labor’s economic, political, and social agenda.7 The federation’s newly appointed director of education, Bill Fletcher, has engaged the labor-education community in developing basic economics education for union members that will help them understand the systemic forces outside the workplace that affect their jobs and lives. Under the leadership of Marilyn Schneiderman, the federation’s field services department has been reconstituted as the Department of Field Mobilization in support of its new strategic goals. A task force of central labor council leaders working with federation officials developed a “Union Cities” program to harness these heretofore largely sedentary bodies to the federation’s organizing objectives. The new leadership encourages member participation in organizing and has greatly expanded the Organizing Institute (OI) to recruit and train a new generation of union organizers. Richard Bensinger, who had been most responsible for the efforts of the OI, was appointed to head a new

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organizing department with a budget in 1997 of $30 million. It proposes multiunion strategic campaigns that target whole industries, occupations, and labor markets and has launched such drives in the hospitality industry of Las Vegas, among strawberry industry workers in California, and among poultry workers in the South. Although it has not entirely abandoned traditional government-conducted elections, the organizing department is also encouraging unions to utilize other strategies for securing employer recognition. Bensinger describes the NLRB procedure as “a sham process, . . . one of the best-kept dirty secrets in the country.”8 A Department of Corporate Affairs has been established to research corporate vulnerabilities, coordinate anti-corporate campaigns, leverage union stockholdings and pension investments, and take battles with recalcitrant corporations to capital markets. The Departments of Corporate Affairs, Field Mobilization, Public Affairs, and the industrial union department will coordinate with the organizing department to support non-NLRB strategies for winning union recognition and first contracts. As has now been well publicized, the AFL-CIO assumed a high-profile role in the 1996 elections under the direction of Steve Rosenthal, spending $35 million directly on an issues-based voter-education and mobilization campaign that targeted strategically selected congressional opponents of labor’s legislative agenda. These political operations were supported by a newly reorganized public-relations effort designed to raise organized labor’s public image and influence. A report by the Center for Responsive Politics indicates that unions overall spent at least $119 million during the 1996 election cycle, half of which went to campaign contributions. All but a small portion of these funds were spent directly or indirectly to benefit Democrats. Despite the considerable expenditure of resources, labor did not succeed in its objective of taking control of Congress. Nonetheless, the federation proclaimed the results as a victory for the workers’ agenda.9 One of the less well-analyzed changes made by the new leadership involves labor’s Cold War international operations. Sweeney recruited Barbara Shailor from the headquarters of the machinists union to head up a newly consolidated AFL-CIO International Affairs Department. She promptly disbanded separate programs aimed at Latin America, Asia, and Africa that were widely regarded as conduits for U.S. intelligence operatives. Government funding for these programs had already been dramatically cut after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Sweeney promised to end further reliance on government funding. In place of the federation’s earlier Cold War ideological litmus test for relations with foreign labor movements, the new leadership has stated its readiness to cooperate with any labor organization willing to confront their common adversaries, transnational corporations. Reaching past the government-dominated labor federation Confederacion de Trabajadores

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de Mexico (CTM) in Mexico, which had previously been the only officially recognized labor grouping in Mexico, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates have established ongoing cross-border working relations with independent unions like the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT) in an effort to organize the booming maquiladora factories that now dominate Mexican border towns from Texas to California.10 This new attention to international solidarity has already begun to pay off. During the United Parcel Service (UPS) strike, a Teamster emissary dispatched to Europe was able to secure solidarity commitments from unions representing UPS employees across the continent, raising the specter of even wider disruptions if the strike had not been settled.11 Together these changes represent a substantial course correction for the AFL-CIO, particularly since they have all occurred during John Sweeney’s first two-year term. Although these first steps are promising, these reforms will likely fall short of the fundamental restructuring of labor’s key institutions and long-standing practices that will be needed to achieve the transformation to which Sweeney aspires. The changes made to date represent more of a commitment to revitalization than was previously the case; they are certainly better than the practices and policies they replaced. Yet they do not address the fundamental problems created by elements of labor’s organizational culture. To transform the union’s role in decisionmaking in the workplace as called for by Sweeney will require that organized labor transform the role of its own members within the unions themselves and the role of those unions in their communities.

Potholes in the Road to Change In a few places, organized labor has begun to act with greater independence by focusing on its own issue agenda, conducting its own voter mobilization, and refusing to turn union volunteers over to the dominant political parties and their candidates. Yet for the most part, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates continue to focus on raising and making financial contributions to candidates and party organizations, voter registration, education, and election-day mobilizations. They endorse many candidates who lack any commitment to the labor movement and whom they are unable to hold accountable. Where neither major party offers a reliable union-friendly alternative, the federation and its affiliates still shrink from putting up their own candidates or supporting those of third parties. Their approach to collective bargaining and grievance resolution has also altered little. Some unions claim to have replaced the postwar service model with an “organizing” model. They have made modest progress in mobilizing their members, which may create more but not qualitatively

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different activity. Too often this limited conception of the organizing model has meant little more than that stewards now do things that had once been done by business agents so that business agents can do more of what staff organizers do. But the role of union representative, whether filled by a business agent or a steward, remains guided by an image of the union representative as social worker, litigator, advocate, and sometimes gladiator on behalf of relatively passive members. There has been little substantive change in the nature of members’ participation in the bargaining process, the resolution of their own problems, or their ownership of decisions, activities, goals, and objectives of their unions. This limited approach grafts a patina of activism onto what remains of unionism as a consumer good. Despite its laudable efforts, the New Voice and most union officials continue to embrace a concept of unionism that rests on an assumption of mutual interests between workers and employers that masks or ignores the imbalance of power between them. In the much heralded partnership between the giant health-care provider Kaiser and its AFL-CIO unions—a partnership praised by John Sweeney—management promised advance discussion of strategic business decisions and employer neutrality in union efforts to organize the remaining unorganized Kaiser workers. Yet the agreement placed beyond discussion all of the cost-cutting measures (facilities closures and job cuts) Kaiser had already announced. And, of course, prior consultation is not the same as mutual consent. In those cases where management and the union disagree, Kaiser retained the right to act as it sees fit. As part of this agreement, Sweeney announced that labor would promote Kaiser as a “preferred” union provider of health care. What message does this stance send to Kaiser’s union members when they try to redress workplace grievances or return to the bargaining table for a new contract or to union members and unorganized workers alike at Kaiser’s competitors? This preferential feature undermines labor’s long-standing tradition of using the union label as a symbol of decent treatment and working conditions. In the Gannett and Knight-Ridder Detroit newspaper strike, in battles at Caterpillar and Staley, and in other less publicized struggles, employers have demonstrated their resolve to break or radically limit the power of unions and to turn the clock back on collective bargaining.12 These strikes, and the defeats that accompanied them, have implications far beyond Detroit and Decatur. They encourage other employers to do likewise, and they also send a message to organized and unorganized workers alike that resistance to corporate demands is futile. Yet national leaders of the affected unions, including some who had helped bring the New Voice slate to office, and of the AFL-CIO have failed to develop a coordinated multiunion campaign that could make

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these battles the responsibility of the entire labor movement. They have treated these engagements with transnational corporations as little more than high-profile local skirmishes. Labor’s response has lacked the focus, energy, and urgency these struggles deserve and reflected a general unwillingness to fully mobilize union members and resources nationally to meet the strategic challenges these strikes represent. To do so would require that unions be prepared to put their assets and relationships at risk. If union officials refuse to step beyond the constraints imposed by existing labor laws (something the mineworkers union did in its successful fourday occupation of a Pittston Coal treatment facility in Virginia in September 1989), if they do not develop well-coordinated national solidarity actions that bring to bear the energy of the entire labor movement, unions will continue to find themselves outflanked by large corporate employers. In the case of the Detroit newspaper strike, the AFL-CIO general executive council agreed to mobilize a national demonstration only after the unions involved had ordered their members to make an unconditional offer to return to work. The demonstration was too little, too late to affect the outcome demonstrably. The affected national unions banked on a consumer boycott and a federal court injunction sought by the NLRB to return strikers to their jobs. But the inadequacy of that approach was revealed when the courts turned down the request, leaving locked-out workers to languish as the matter works its way through what could be years of appeals. Even if the appeal succeeds, union members will return to work under terms dictated by the newspapers—without contracts, without union security provisions, without the right to arbitrate grievances, and without any of the other protections their contracts had afforded. Neither the federation nor the striking unions have said how they intend to recover their contracts and restore union conditions. Even if the best judgment dictated that the strike be terminated, the manner in which it was ended embittered many of the strikers and their supporters across the country. Among the six striking unions, only one allowed its members to vote on the matter. National leaders did not go to Detroit, meet individually or in small groups with the strikers, make the case for ending the strike, or give strikers the opportunity to convince them there was a better course. Conversations of this sort, rather than directives, demonstrate that leadership highly regards what members think, is directly concerned with their fate, and is willing to explain clearly the constraints under which the union operates or the circumstances that require a change of strategy. Then a vote at a joint meeting of all the striking unions could take place with workers clearly understanding that a decision to continue the strike could mean they would have to go it alone. If a realistic alternative strategy is laid out in small meetings, where it can be thoroughly explained and discussed, and firm commitments are made to that strategy, it is most likely that a majority of strikers would vote to return

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to work, resolved to continue their struggle by other means. This was not the approach used in Detroit. What happened there demoralized the strikers. It also reinforced a stereotype of labor’s top officials as self-interested, autocratic leaders who make their decisions without regard to what their members think. The Teamsters’ successful UPS strike, which stands in contrast to the Detroit strike, demonstrated the importance of the following elements: careful preparation; the clarification of the union’s message and the capacity to get that message out; the development of a large number of rankand-file members who were able to communicate convincingly the union’s central message to the public; the identification of the interests of the workers with the interests of the general populace; the mobilization of the entire union and its resources; the establishment of connections to natural allies outside the labor movement; and the mobilization of the rest of labor in support of those efforts. In pledging the full support of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates to lend the Teamsters funds for strike benefits until a favorable resolution was secured, Sweeney demonstrated that the UPS strike was not just a Teamsters strike. He made it the property and responsibility of the entire labor movement, and workers across the country responded enthusiastically with demonstrations of solidarity. Changes at the federation notwithstanding, strike strategy remains the province of leaders of the affected unions, not the AFL-CIO. The federation will intercede only when it is invited to do so. But that fact hardly means that federation leaders are without influence. In the cases of the strawberry workers’ campaign in California and the hospitality/gaming industry drive in Las Vegas, the AFL-CIO played a central role in bringing multiunion partnerships together and helping to formulate strategies and concentrate resources. This role built on long-standing efforts to develop coordinated bargaining between unions facing the same employers. As the AFL-CIO builds up its organizing and corporate campaigns departments, as well as other strategic services, national unions, especially those that are smaller, will increasingly turn to it for assistance. As the federation develops a track record and as examples of successful cooperative arrangements become better known, President Sweeney’s moral authority to affect the direction of strategically important labor battles will also increase, and the lesson will not be lost on members and local leaders who want to put pressure on their national leadership. As the leading national spokesperson for organized labor, John Sweeney has access to a powerful bully pulpit that he can use to influence resistant affiliates. Whether he uses it wisely and effectively will be one test of his leadership. When local and national unions are ready to do the preparatory work with their own rank and file, and when strikes are met with employer intransigence, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates should be prepared to create a national crisis, just as Martin Luther King did in Birmingham and Selma

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to protest the immorality of segregation and the denial of voting rights. Focused AFL-CIO action in support of a beleaguered local or national union, particularly when preparation has allowed for gearing up the AFL-CIO machinery, communicates a message to union members, employers, and politicians alike: Where there is no justice, there will be no peace. It says that organized labor is prepared to make any local, regional, or national labor dispute or any recalcitrant, union-hostile corporation the object of national attention, direct action, and moral condemnation and that there will be no business as usual until a just resolution is found. This kind of leadership puts labor on the moral high ground and also will play an important part in rebuilding a culture of solidarity that will benefit everything else labor sets out to do. The capacity of the labor movement to match its rhetoric with resolve and its willingness and ability to organize concerted national and international responses to corporate challenges are other tests of whether the New Voice leadership can achieve a qualitative turn in the present trajectory of labor decline.

Rebuilding Labor Requires More Than Good Reforms However important and welcome, the changes announced by the AFL-CIO thus far are neither individually nor in combination sufficient to bring about real organizational transformation or significantly rebuild union ranks and power. To achieve such a transformation, to realize the objectives defined by President Sweeney, organized labor will have to change the relationship between members and their unions. Some data may help illustrate the point. Merely to maintain union density (the proportion of the work force that is organized) at its 1995 level (14.9 percent), the labor movement needed to enroll about 400,000 new members in 1996. Union density in 1996, however, dropped to 14.5 percent because the workforce grew by 3 million but union membership remained at about 16.3 million. To raise the 1995 density one percentage point would have required about 1.5 million new members. Even with an expanded organizing program, [a shift of] resources, and greater attention, organized labor was unable to even maintain its relative proportion. In the joint United Farmworker/Teamster campaign to organize the Watsonville, California strawberry industry of 15,000 workers, it has been reported that the two unions and the AFL-CIO together have fielded approximately one full time staff person (organizer, field supervisor, or support, research, and PR staff) for every 250 to 300 workers. If on average each costs about $50,000 annually (a modest estimate of salary,

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benefits, taxes, expenses), the personnel costs for this one campaign alone for one year come to $2.5 to $3 million. If that cost were extrapolated nationally, to merely maintain union density relying on staff organizers would require between $67 and $80 million. Raising union density by one point would cost between $250 and $300 million for a single year’s effort.13

In an interview with labor journalist David Bacon, Richard Bensinger acknowledged, “We will never have nearly enough professional organizers to organize the number of workers we need to. And if you look at history, that’s not how the labor movement organized in the first place. We need more staff, and unions need to hire more organizers. But I think unless the fight is owned by the membership, and unless union leaders give ownership to the membership, it won’t succeed.”14 The data and several studies bear out Bensinger’s prediction. Relying on the traditional NLRB-supervised representation election process, last year unions won just 47.7 percent of their elections (down from 48.2 percent in 1995). The NLRB election win rate in manufacturing was only 37.5 percent; in services, 59.6 percent; in construction, 55.4 percent; in retail, 51.5 percent, and wholesaling, only 30.8 percent; and in transport, communications, and utilities, 47.3 percent. These victories produced a total of just 69,111 potential new union members. Why only potential members? Because unions succeed in gaining first contracts in only about half the units they organize via the NLRB process, and in most unions, newly organized workers don’t start to pay dues until they ratify their first contract. To make matters worse, in 1996 there were also 485 decertification elections (in which unions can lose the right to represent workers). Unions won only 30.7 percent of those elections, resulting in the loss of a large majority of the 25,011 members affected by them. So the gain in actual new members for the entire labor movement for all of 1996 through the NLRB process was likely little more than the number lost to decertifications. When additional losses resulting from business failures, permanent layoffs, plant closures, quits, firings, retirement, and death are factored in, it is no mystery that total union membership remained essentially flat despite modest increases in organizing effort.15 Two different academic studies of union-organizing outcomes confirm what these numbers suggest: traditional approaches will never be sufficient to rebuild the labor movement. A Cornell University study looked at various union tactics used in NLRB elections and found that among other influences (employer tactics, bargaining unit demographics, organizer background, organizing climate), union strategies can make the most difference in election outcomes. The study determined that a “rank-and-file intensive” strategy could increase union win rates by 12 to 26 percent. A separate study found that organizing effectiveness is enhanced by innovative

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organizing efforts, representational specialization, and internal union democracy but is reduced by excessively centralized national union control.16 Quite clearly, rebuilding the labor movement cannot be achieved just by hiring and training more staff, yet that is where much of the effort continues to be expended. But beyond the costs involved, there is a more important issue. If rebuilding could be done with more staff, the result would be staff-dependent unions. Thus, a “more and better” approach simply replicates service-model unionism on a larger scale. The argument could be made that a front-end investment of staff might be needed to kick-start a process of union building that over time would become less dependent on staff as it picks up momentum, reaches local critical mass, and results in sufficient union power to overcome resistance among any remaining group of nonunion employers. Even granting this argument, it does not speak to what kind of union results from this investment. The argument also does not address the quality of each new member’s relationship to the union, to co-workers, or to members of other unions. One lesson astute organizers learn is that newly organized unions more frequently than not develop a culture that reflects the character of the struggle conducted to win recognition and a contract from the employer, as well as the role played by the workers themselves during that effort. If the objective is participatory, solidaristic, community-minded, class-conscious unions, that objective cannot be reached with the tools and strategies of “more and better.”

Transformation: A Deep-going Process of Cultural Change Deeper changes will be needed not only in the style but in the substance of how unions operate and how their members relate to the ways unions function. Changes will also be requireed in how union leaders, staff, and members understand the nature of the challenges they confront, how they understand and engage with the environment in which they function, and how they view their respective roles in the life of the union. This shift in perspective requires a reassessment of programs and strategies, to be sure, but also a reevaluation of the mission and values that guide them. These are changes that must occur in the culture of the labor movement, not merely in its leadership, allocation of resources, strategies, or tactics. In this perspective, deeper changes in labor’s organizational culture are required in every facet of the life of unions: • In collective bargaining: in the nature of the demands made upon management, in what is considered a legitimate subject for negotiation, in the scope of managerial prerogatives, in what is an

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appropriate role for unions and union members in their workplaces, and in the strategies pursued to induce employers to accept these new definitions In labor’s approach to resolving grievances and labor disputes: in the role played by members as active participants in resolving problems before the grievance machinery is invoked and in labor’s willingness to look outside legal strictures for solutions that cannot be found within them In labor’s relationship to the unorganized: in its definition and advocacy of its own interests in relation to the unemployed and contingent workforce, in its approach to organizing and gaining recognition and contracts, and in the roles played by union members, community allies, and the unorganized themselves in the process of building unions In how unions participate in politics, both electoral and legislative: in their relationship to the political process, political parties, and politicians, in their role as autonomous political actors, and in their capacity as stakeholders in their communities and in society at large In labor’s connection to communities: in the nature of its alliances and working relationships with forces outside the labor movement, in its view of reciprocal obligations and interdependence with other constituencies, including women, people of color, immigrants, gays and lesbians, the young and the elderly, the poor, chronically unemployed, and underemployed, contingent workers, and others In the way labor defines and articulates its vision and values and in how it communicates those values and deepens and expands their acceptance both within and outside the labor movement In the ways unions function: in the substance of the relationships between union officers, staff, and members, in the process by which strategic decisions are made, and in the manner in which they are implemented

Such changes cannot take place without involving the union’s rank and file in meaningful conversations in which they examine their present circumstances and discuss what they are prepared to do to change them. There will have to be a dramatic increase in the level and nature of member participation in every aspect of the life of the union, in ways that give union members greater effective ownership of their unions and responsibility for charting their courses. The common two-step dance in which union leaders complain about member apathy and members ask, “What’s the union going to do for me?” (as if it were something external to themselves) will have to end. Attitudes, expectations, perceptions, beliefs, values, and feelings about how the union should conduct its business, and

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even what role the union should play in the workplace and in society, need to be questioned, reevaluated, and transformed as part of a process of deep-going change.

Another Path to Renewal There is an alternative. Its seeds can be found in President Sweeney’s statement on transformation quoted earlier. Both Bill Fletcher in the AFLCIO education department and Richard Bensinger in the organizing department point to it. The labor movement can be rebuilt only with a more critically conscious, engaged rank and file who see their unions as the most effective, perhaps the only, instrument for realizing their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, their communities, and society. This change requires that union members become engaged with their unions as co-creators of their own destiny. And that change requires that unions be able to project a vision of what society might be like if its governing principles were economic and social justice, concern for humanity and community over property, and sustainable economic development that is not achieved at the disadvantage or by the exploitation of others who inhabit the planet. Union reformers need to build a labor movement that recognizes, articulates, and practices values that are fundamentally different from those of the market, namely, solidarity, equality, inclusivity, community, and democracy. Such a movement would embrace the economics of sustainable development that serves the entire community rather than only those fortunate enough to hold union jobs. It would develop an analysis, a program, and strategies predicated on the priority of labor over capital and community over markets. It would practice international solidarity based on the recognition of mutual interdependence of working people across borders, and it would pursue a kind of politics that seeks to make solidarity rather than the needs of transnational capital the core of U.S. foreign policy. Such values give life to aspirations for a society that is more just, equitable, democratic, and humane. A program based on these values would lead to a labor movement with strong ties to communities and to the various struggles against oppression of others—one that respects struggles for gender, racial, ethnic, and other forms of equality and justice. It would pursue both electoral and nonelectoral politics of mass action independent of either major party to assert directly the interests of workers and the poor through organizations democratically controlled by them. One may arrive at these values through class analysis, political commitments, religious faith, or a belief in the fundamentals of democratic citizenship. However one arrives at them, the labor movement will have to

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articulate a vision that radically departs from the “me-first,” status-driven, acquisitive, consumerist ethos that is the hallmark of our market-obsessed system and that favors the development of the few over the advantage of the many.

Transformation Begins with a Union-Wide Conversation The path to that form of unionism starts with a process of discussion within the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, in every labor council and state federation, in every local union and bargaining unit group that is willing to organize such a discussion. It could begin with simple questions: • What do you think you need and deserve as a member of this society and this community, as a worker in this workplace or occupation, and as a member of this union? • How do you think the union could best play a role in achieving those goals? • What are you willing to contribute to making that happen? The measure of the success of this effort will be the actions generated from the deliberations of an engaged membership guided by the basic human values that characterize the labor movement at its best—democratic involvement, social and economic justice, equality, solidarity, fairness, inclusivity, and community—not the level of militancy or radicalism it generates. From this perspective, a less militant course of action involving greater numbers from the rank and file who have developed their objectives and tactics out of their own discussions is more desirable than one called for by gallant leaders who conceive the plan themselves and whose members say, “We’ll do whatever you think is best.” The reason is simple: An engaged rank and file capable of evaluating an action they themselves have conceived, guided by the values noted here, can change course and become more militant based on their own assessment of what it will take to achieve their objectives if a less militant course proves insufficient to secure a satisfactory response. Members who are accustomed to responding to whatever comes out of union headquarters, decisions that are supported by a small group of devoted union activists, remain consumers of unionism rather than its cocreators. Such members may support what is proposed. Some will participate. Most will usually remain spectators who wait to see what results from the course of action chosen. If they like the results, they will applaud and reelect the incumbent leadership; however, their relationship with that

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leadership and the union will remain unchanged. But—and this is key— the labor movement cannot realize what President Sweeney calls for without transforming the relationship between members and their leaders and between members and their union. This relationship is the ultimate source of any union’s power, and that power can be fully realized only if members are willing to engage deliberately, participate consciously, and assume responsibility for the fate of their own organization. They must become active in creating their own future.

Transformation Is Not a Quick Fix Such an approach is not a quick-fix remedy for what ails the labor movement. Organizing a discussion at every level of the labor movement, in each union body, among members in their workplaces and homes, will take time and effort and must be seen as a process. The measure of the success of this process will be determined by the nature of the discussions taking place and by the extent to which they penetrate every crevice of the labor movement and reach down deeply to engage every member. Who is involved? What questions are asked? What core values are expressed within the discussion? How many members participate in actions that arise out of those discussions? What is the quality of their reflection and evaluation after the action is taken? What conclusions do they draw that help them determine what action should follow? Does that subsequent action actively involve an even larger number of members? The answers to these and many other questions will determine the success of this effort. Will the Sweeney administration seek to implement this approach? It is too early to say. But it is not too early for those who wish to see these steps taken to define their role in helping to make it happen. • Labor leaders who support this direction should promote this form of transformation and encourage and support it wherever they can, communicating that support through both customary union channels and other vehicles (Internet postings, interviews with the media, articles in magazines, etc.). • Union activists and others who embrace this approach should support and become involved in efforts to implement it. For many union officials and union activists this commitment will require learning some new skills: to listen rather than instruct, to interact rather than direct, to engage in dialogue rather than polemics, to draw into discussion those who are accustomed to silent observation of what others have to say, to prevent those who always speak from dominating discussion. This path to transformation will require greater attention to involving and engaging members than does the path of mobilizing and motivating them. It will require a conversation

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about core values that are at the heart of what the labor movement stands for and how those values differ from the values promoted by the culture of the marketplace. • Horizontal means of communication should be developed to link experiences across jurisdictions and geographic boundaries. Conferences, workshops, retreats, ad hoc meetings, training sessions, and other means should be employed that strengthen, deepen, and extend transformative tendencies within the labor movement. Open technologies, such as Internet chat groups, discussion lists, electronic bulletin boards, and e-mail systems, should be made available to as many members as is feasible. Toward that end, unions should do much more to make available to their members these technologies and the training to use them. To implement this process of renewal there must be space for open discussion, a space that tolerates dissent but seeks consensus, one that can accept criticism yet builds unity, and one in which mistakes can be openly discussed without the need to assign blame. There must be a willingness to reflect honestly on the past and to be open to innovation and experimentation for the future. Expanding the democratic realm in the labor movement is key to winning greater democracy in the workplace, in the economy, and in society. Workers should not find more opportunities for participation and decisionmaking (however superficial) in employer-sponsored involvement schemes than they do in their unions. A labor movement that recognizes and articulates these values must seek to embody them in its internal operation. Clearly, there are innumerable ways in which those at the top can nurture and facilitate this process at the local level. Transformation will accelerate when the top of an organization strengthens and supports what takes place at the bottom. In doing so, the more participatory organization that results will also strengthen those at the top as the organization as a whole becomes more effective. A couple of examples illustrate the point. In 1977, 35,000 or more union members, unorganized workers, and their supporters gathered in Watsonville, California, to demonstrate their support for the strawberry workers’ organizing campaign being conducted jointly by the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) and Teamsters union. After gathering at a high school stadium, they conducted a spirited march that wound throughout central Watsonville, gathering residents as it passed. The marchers returned to the stadium, where they were presented with a host of speakers from unions and supporting organizations. Some were inspiring; most were not. But largely absent from the speakers’ platform were the workers themselves. Prominent union leaders flew in from across the country. When the event ended, they flew out again. Few, if any, engaged in any discussion with the strawberry workers.

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A process of transformation would suggest a different relationship between leaders and members, one in which leaders could be recognized but members step into the spotlight; one in which leaders might issue their statements but also spend time listening to what the workers themselves have to say. Rather than reinforcing the all-too-prevalent hierarchical structures of our society, this approach would communicate a different message, one consistent with the efforts at transformation within the unions. There are occasions when unions have no choice but to end up in court. Currently when that happens, union attorneys, sometimes accompanied by a few officials, engage in verbal fisticuffs with the employer’s lawyers, and the entire matter is decided by a hearing officer or judge, who most likely has no idea what workers confront at work, how they live, what they think, or what their concerns are. A decision is rendered, the lawyers collect their fees, and frequently the members are not even informed of the outcome or receive news of it. Courts are inherently political institutions, deeply influenced by what happens in society. A transformational approach looks upon the courtroom as but another arena of struggle, as appropriate for worker participation as any picket line. Unions should use legal proceedings as an opportunity to fully involve their members; they should insist that their attorneys spend time before and after any hearing explaining the proceedings and listening to what workers have to say. Individual workers’ names could be added to lawsuits, entitling them to be present en masse to confront the employer and judge. Prior to and following the hearings, and at hearing recesses, unions could organize rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and other forms of action to bring public attention to the issues in dispute. Members who attend could be prepared to speak to the media and should be given opportunities to report back to their co-workers as eyewitnesses to the process. The course of legal proceedings as witnessed by members present would then be reported to those who did not attend, in the workplace, after work, and at other small group meetings where members could then consider what other forms of action would be appropriate for communicating the union’s position and bolstering its case. These are but two examples that suggest that everything that unions do should be reexamined with an eye toward how changes could be made so that union members become fully involved and how activities, programs, and tactics could be restructured to put members at their center as active participants in every facet of the life and affairs of the organization.

Energy for Change: A Bottom-Up Process The election of the New Voice team and its initiatives have created space for serious discussion of transformation. That fact alone should be sufficient for

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transformers to welcome the change, but it is also a challenge to use this opportunity to nurture and promote the process of transformation. Union democrats’ stance toward the New Voice should be twofold. Steps taken by the new leadership toward reform and transformation based on the embrace of transformative values should be applauded and supported. Failure to act in this way should be analyzed and criticized. The role of at least some of those who aspire to a transformed labor movement is to work at its base, recognizing that the necessary condition for transformation is an actively participatory membership committed to democratic values and steeped in democratic practice. No matter what happens at the top, such a labor movement can only be built local by local, workplace by workplace. To achieve these goals, we need local unions, the fundamental building blocks of the labor movement, in which leaders and members are engaged in renewing, revitalizing, and restructuring their organizations to encourage the kind of discussion imagined in this chapter and to make it a central feature of everything else the union does. This process of transformative discussion will initiate union debate, planning, education, training, and actions in an atmosphere that engenders thoughtful evaluation, reflection, and celebration. The changes the New Voice leadership has introduced have opened doors to labor’s revitalization, but it will be the changes implemented to realize that renewal that will determine whether unions will be able to reinvent themselves to become viable, relevant, dynamic, and effective as a social force in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. Historians debate whether there was a formal “accord” or merely a change in strategy and outlook that reflected new circumstances. Howell John Harris offers evidence of the conscious effort to formulate a new social contract (The Right to Manage [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982], 112–118). Whether by unstated truce or formal agreement, there is little debate that the postwar years produced dramatic changes to the contours of labor-management relations. It is not necessary for the purposes of this chapter to resolve that debate. 2. By “organizational culture,” I mean the habits, attitudes, expectations, and behavior that are simply assumed as the natural way of doing things and that are transmitted largely unquestioned from generation to generation. 3. For a more thorough discussion of the postwar labor-management accord, see the essays collected by Bruce Nissen (ed.) in U.S. Labor Relations, 1945– 1989: Accommodation and Conflict (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990). Although it was by no means the first expression of the postwar changes summarized here, the 1948 contract settlement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, described as “the Treaty of Detroit” (Fortune, vol. 42, no. 1 [July, 1950], 53–55), is widely regarded as marking the turn from confrontational and adversarial class-war labor relations to a more cooperative postwar regime. That settlement established the precedent of multiyear agreements, annual cost-of-living adjustments

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and productivity-factored wage adjustments, union cooperation to improve efficiency and productivity, and generous fringe benefits (Harris, The Right to Manage, 150–151). 4. In 1982, the AFL-CIO executive council created an internal Committee on the Future of Work to study the deteriorating circumstances of workers and their unions. The committee issued two reports, in 1983 and 1985. The first, “The Future of Work,” pointed solely to changes that had occurred in the workplace and society; it made a series of brief public policy recommendations that organized labor had no capacity to effectuate. The second, “The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions,” took note of the need for changes within unions; it made recommendations for various forms of programmatic, institutional, and structural changes. Some were implemented, but none challenged the fundamental assumptions, prevailing organizational culture, or distribution of power within the labor movement. It took another decade of continued decline before a revolt within the executive council forced Lane Kirkland into retirement and brought John Sweeney and his colleagues to power. 5. John Sweeney, 1997 correspondence to affiliated organizations, made available to author anonymously. 6. Many of these changes are reported by David Moberg in “The Resurgence of American Unions: Small Steps, Long Journey,” WorkingUSA (May–June 1997), 20–31. For a more critical view, see Jane Slaughter, “The New AFL-CIO’s FirstYear Report Card, Sweeney: Pass, Fail or Incomplete?” Against the Current 67, vol. 12, no. 1 (March–April 1997), 7–10. Michael Yates offers a more contextual analysis in “Does the Labor Movement Have a Future?” Monthly Review, vol. 48 (February 1997), 1–18. 7. See Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Long Road Ahead,” and Priscilla Murolo, “What Kind of Alliance?” both in Radical Historian Newsletter, no. 75, (December 1996); and Herman Benson, “That Labor-Intellectual Alliance,” Union Democracy Review (January 1997). 8. Interview with Daniel Levine, editor of Disgruntled, an Internet “ezine,” posted July 9, 1997; http://www.disgruntled.com. 9. Ruth Marcus, “Labor Spent $119 Million for ’96 Politics, Study Says,” Washington Post (September 10, 1997), A19. Slaughter, “The New AFL-CIO’s First-Year Report Card.” 10. Abby Scher, “Coming in from the Cold in the Struggle for Solidarity,” Dollars & Sense, no. 213 (September–October 1997), 24–28. These changes notwithstanding, the federation has yet to issue a public accounting for its lengthy collaboration with the intelligence community, or to apologize for its interference in the internal affairs of labor movements around the world in support of U.S. Cold War objectives. 11. “European Transport Unions to Discuss UPS; Strike Possible,” AP–Dow Jones News Service, Dow Jones Newswires, August 15, 1997 (posted to the Wall Street Journal Web site). Teamster representatives were invited to address the World Council of UPS Trade Unions and the London-based International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), which has affiliates throughout Europe. An anonymous Agence France-Presse wire service story (August 18, 1997) reported that the World Council of UPS Trade Unions includes organizations in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. 12. The Detroit newspaper strike began July 15, 1995, and ended in April 1997.

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The Cateprillar struggle in Decatur and East Peoria, Illinois, spanned six years, beginning in November 1991 with a strike over company demands for contract concessions. A second strike erupted in 1994 and lasted seventeen months, whereupon union members offered to return without a contract. A contract was finally ratified in March 1998, only after the company agreed to reinstate two hundred illegally fired union members. The battle at A. E. Staley Manufacturing in Decatur, Illinois, began in September 1992, when union members voted down a company concessionary contract offer. Rather than strike, they launched a corporate campaign against Lyle & Tate, the British conglomerate that had purchased the company. In June 1993, management locked them out. The strike ended in defeat when a contract was ratified on December 22, 1995. 13. Union density data through 1995 are reported in Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book: Compilations from the Current Population Survey (1996 Edition) (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1997); 1996 data are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on its Web site (www.stats.bls.gov:80/newsrels.htm and www.stats.bls.gov/news. release/, January 31, 1997). Estimates of new membership required to maintain densities and associated costs of organizing personnel required are from calculations by the author. The Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (September 22, 1997, AA1) reports that AFL-CIO biennial convention records show that overall membership has continued to decline despite the efforts of the new leadership. The 1997 total was 102,000 lower than it was when Sweeney was first elected in 1995, resulting in a smaller percentage of the nonagricultural private sector workforce organized today than in the Depression years 1930–1933 before the Wagner Act was adopted. Nineteen unions reported increased membership; twenty-two showed no change; twenty-nine reported declines. (Density data for the Depression years come from George Sayers Bain and Robert Price, Profiles of Union Growth [Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1980], Table 3.1, col. 4 [BLS data], 88.) 14. “The Promise of a Raise Is Not Enough,” Dollars & Sense, (September–October 1997), 22. 15. NLRB election data from Economics Notes, July–August 1997; decertification data from Harry Kelber, “Labor Talk,” posted to the Internet on July 20, 1997 . Accurate data on the number of new members brought in outside the NLRB process are not available. However, since government-supervised procedures remain the primary method by which unions organize, it is safe to assume that new members gained by nontraditional means have not altered the net membership figures, which have not risen. 16. Kate Bronfenbrenner, “The Role of Union Strategies in NLRB Certification Elections,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 50, no. 2 (January 1997), 195–212; Jack Fiorito, Paul Jarley, and John Thomas Delany, “National Union Effectiveness in Organizing: Measures and Influences,” Industrial Relations Research Review, vol. 48, no. 4 (July 1995), 613–635.

5 Learning from the Past to Build the Future Peter Rachleff

On the morning of July 17, 1997, I was in my car, headed for the Minneapolis Convention Center, where the John Sweeney–Richard Bensinger roadshow, “Organizing for Change/Changing to Organize,” was going to take place (on the tenth stop of its thirteen-city tour). Like most union activists, I was wondering what the new leadership of the AFL-CIO was really all about and whether it reflected a significant change in the direction of the labor movement. I hoped that attending this major event (700 to 1,000 people were expected) would give me some new insights. I turned on the radio to catch the news. National Public Radio reported that Woolworth’s was closing all 400 of its remaining five-and-dime stores in the United States, laying off 9,200 workers and ending a 117-year history. The commentator waxed nostalgic about lunch counters and milk shakes amidst lipstick and hardware, bemoaning the passing of yet another landmark in U.S. economic life. But I was thinking about a different dimension of Woolworth’s history, one less well known but perhaps more relevent to the future of U.S. economic life. And it was this part of history that reverberated in my head during the AFL-CIO organizing fest. On March 19, 1937, the business agent for Local 2 of the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) came to the Woolworth’s management in Albert Lea, Minnesota with a petition signed by all twenty-five employees (mostly young women) demanding union recognition and raises to $14– $16 a week. When the store manager began to threaten and intimidate the young women individually, the union members opted to strike. Rather than walk out and picket the store, however, they chose to sit down and occupy it. The IUAW had begun in the summer of 1933 in the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, twenty miles east of Albert Lea. Led by a variety 87

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of militants, including Wobblies (members of the Industrial Workers of the World), communists, Trotskyists and socialists, the IUAW had broken through at Hormel with one of the first sit-down strikes in the country. They established a solid shop floor presence through slowdowns and short work stoppages. From this base, the IUAW brought union organization to every department store, municipal office, barber shop and beauty parlor, restaurant, hotel, bar, construction site, and factory in Austin. IUAW rankand-filers supported organizing efforts through boycotts, picketing, and disruptive behavior in retail establishments, such as “shop-ins,” in which union members filled carts, clogged checkout lines, and then refused to check out until the clerks’ union was recognized by management. Austin became wall-to-wall unionized. Over the next four years, IUAW activists spread this model to thirteen other communities in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Albert Lea was the closest outpost, and the IUAW organization there rivaled Austin in its completeness and militancy. Organizers began with the largely male Wilson packinghouse and American Gas Machine workers and then reached out to transportation, retail, and service workers. Though the union won a number of hard-fought battles in 1934 and 1935, the business leadership and the local government remained adamantly antiunion, and IUAW Local 2 was always under fire. Class struggle erupted again in the spring of 1937, when the rising expectations of workers in several industries collided with the intransigence of their employers. In late March of that year, truckers and warehouse workers at several transfer companies began a sit-down strike for wage increases. At the same time, American Gas Machine workers occupied their two facilities to demand the rehiring of several discharged union activists. And at Woolworth’s, twenty-five women began their struggle for union recognition. The many dimensions of these women’s strategy speak to the AFLCIO’s current concerns with “organizing for change” and “changing to organize.” In the first place, the young women at Woolworth’s were taking primary responsibility for their situation. Although a business agent from the IUAW had presented their petition to management, they quickly decided to take collective action themselves. They chose a time of year—just before Easter—when their employer most needed them. And they chose to sit in and occupy their workplace rather than face possible replacement by scabs. Second, they were able to depend on a wider labor movement for support. IUAW members in Albert Lea and nearby Austin brought food to the sit-downers, provided them with visible moral support, and, when a crisis came, offered direct physical support. In this environment, the women workers’ power grew.

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Third, the IUAW waged an effective campaign for public support. Creative strategies in the store and in the streets helped keep public opinion with the strikers, despite a well-funded and carefully thought out effort launched by their employers. A longer sweep through labor history suggests that precisely this sort of strategy—a strong workplace presence manifested through direct worker action, active support provided by the wider labor movement, and a campaign for public support—has characterized every major leap forward for U.S. workers. This was the case with the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the new industrial unions of the early 1930s. The Knights of Labor was the first labor organization to take in unskilled as well as skilled workers, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, immigrants as well as the native born. Under their banner of “An Injury to One Is the Concern of All,” they recruited workers not only through workplaces but also through neighborhoods, fraternal orders, and churches. Not only did their members fight for higher wages and respect on the job, but they also organized producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, drama troupes, reading rooms, and political parties. Activists wove these elements together into a movement culture that held concerts, wrote poetry and fiction, produced newspapers, and performed plays. They contested the new corporate order for power in the 1880s, reaching a peak of nearly 1 million members in the struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886. A generation later, the IWW picked up many of the same themes as the Knights, from the organization of all members of the working class to the slightly recrafted slogan, “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All.” The Wobblies promoted industrial unions as the answer to an increasingly deskilled workplace and a multicultural movement as the answer to an increasingly diverse working class. They emphasized both workplace power—through sabotage, slowdowns, and direct action—and community activism—through soapbox speeches and free-speech fights. The IWW utilized poetry, plays, pageants, and parades to build a movement that on the eve of World War I reached from eastern coal fields and northern iron mines to wheat fields, lumber camps, and steel and textile mills. Though both the Knights of Labor and the IWW were ultimately defeated by employers and the state, veterans of these movements kept their ideas and strategies alive. In the early 1930s, the worst depression the United States had ever experienced provided fertile soil for the reemergence of these ideas. The unemployed, farmers, industrial and transportation workers, and then retail and service workers picked up these strategies and rebuilt a labor movement from barely 2 million members to more than 10 million strong. At the center of their breakthrough was the sit-down strike, but all around it were the familiar themes of direct workplace

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action, support from a wider labor movement, and a struggle for public opinion. In city after city, the new labor movement succeeded. The young women workers at the Albert Lea, Minnesota, Woolworth’s put these strategies to work in the spring of 1937. Their experiences testify to the effectiveness of this approach to organizing and provide a valuable benchmark by which to assess today’s AFL-CIO commitment to change to organize. Woolworth’s management, the chamber of commerce, and the local newspaper tried to undercut the strikers’ public support by manipulating gender conventions. While the other strikes were condemned as illegal seizures of private property, this one was labeled as utterly inappropriate behavior for women. The local sheriff approached the strikers’ parents and “assured them that immoral things were going on at the Woolworth store.” Rumors were spread that the young women were being forced to sit in by the male union activists who had joined them. But when the police chief visited the store, accompanied by the media, to ask the women if they wanted to leave, they responded en masse: “We’re sticking.” The newspaper also used the Easter holiday to pressure the strikers. In a patronizing editorial, it asked the women if they were willing to miss out on wearing their new Easter outfits and bonnets. The strikers and their IUAW supporters responded in creative ways. Older women members of the union joined the strikers in the store to act as chaperones. Other women in the union and its women’s auxiliary established a kitchen and commissary “to see that the sitdowners [were] kept well fed and happy.” For more than two weeks, the IUAW produced a daily newsletter, the Strike News, distributed free throughout Albert Lea and Austin, that told the stories of the participants in all three sit-downs. A week into the strike, the IUAW released a public statement from the Woolworth strikers: We, the sitdowners, do verify that we are still happy and contented. We have plenty to eat including regular meals, lunches, candy, ice cream, fruit, and gum—furnished by the union sympathizers. We have a private bed of our own, plenty of blankets, and plenty of reading material. We have a radio and pass most of our time dancing and singing.

The women and their supporters sought to maintain their morale and to undermine the unwholesome images being spread by their detractors. Inside the store, singing became a common activity, shared with passersby directly and with the wider public through the daily Strike News. The strikers’ theme song (to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare”) became well known throughout Albert Lea and Austin: The old five and dime She ain’t what she used to be

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Ain’t what she used to be Ain’t what she used to be The old five and dime She ain’t what she used to be . . .

Music was used not only by the strikers but also by their supporters. The IUAW Girls’ Drum and Bugle Corps paraded nightly from occupied workplace to occupied workplace, emphasizing the connections among the strikes and promoting solidarity among the strikers and from the wider labor movement. The Strike News reported on one evening: The girls serenaded the sitdown strikers with a few peppy selections at each of the three stops, outstanding union leaders spoke words of encouragement and the great crowd cheered to the echo. At the Woolworth Store the courageous girl sit-downers grouped themselves together on an improvised platform inside the swinging doors that have been locked for more than a week. Then they sang their sit-downers’ theme song. When the fighting damsels concluded their little ditty it seemed that all of Broadway was yelling its approval.

The IUAW even had a creative response to the problem of celebrating the Easter holiday. They recruited a Methodist minister to conduct a service inside the store for the sit-downers and their supporters. The Strike News reported that the reverend “urged” the women to “fight for their rights.” This service helped boost morale and public support. When the employers and their allies escalated their tactics by trying to organize a back-to-work movement, the strikers depended on a wide circle of labor solidarity to prevent scabbing. The employers sought and received an injunction ordering the strikers to vacate all the occupied workplaces the day after Easter. The strikers complied, but they set up mass picket lines. Three days later, the sheriff and 150 special deputies attacked the picket lines and the busy IUAW hall with tear gas and truncheons, arresting 62 union activists. In a matter of hours, a huge crowd had assembled in the center of Albert Lea. It included not only the strikers and Albert Lea IUAW and women’s auxiliary members but also 400 Hormel workers who had walked off their jobs as soon as word had reached them from Albert Lea. The crowd marched through the center of town. When they were confronted by the brand-new police cruiser, they surrounded it, took the police out, rolled it over, set it on fire, and slid the charred remains into the lake across the street. Then they laid siege to the jail. Armed with crowbars, individuals from the crowd began to pry open the bars on the jail windows. Seated on top of the building, a deputy either could not figure out how to operate the World War I machine gun stationed there or was unwilling to use it. The crowd was clearly in command of the situation.

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At this dramatic moment, Minnesota’s governor, Elmer Benson, made his way through the crowd. A Farmer-Laborite, he had arrived the previous day to mediate a settlement to all three ongoing strikes. He strode forward and demanded the keys from the sheriff. He then freed all the prisoners, who were carried away on the shoulders of the crowd. In a scene reminiscent of the humiliation of the Pinkertons in the Homestead steel strike of 1892, the crowd also forced the deputies to put their badges and weapons in boxes outside the door and pass through a gauntlet of strikers and their supporters. * * * My mind had wandered back to these events as I listened to the news about Woolworth’s closing and as I anticipated the AFL-CIO organizing program that July morning. I thought about not only the Woolworth’s workers but the Independent Union of All Workers, the building of the early CIO unions, and, even further back, the Knights of Labor and the Wobblies. All had relied on militant direct action in the workplace itself, the marshaling of support within the labor movement as a whole, and bringing public opinion to the side of the unions. Asking the Sweeney-Bensinger program to measure up to this historical drama would not be fair. Conditions and circumstances vary in different historical periods. But it does seem reasonable to ask how committed they are to direct workplace action, how willing the new leaders are to mobilize the rank and file in support of struggles, and how effective they are in swaying public opinion. Even regarding these issues, our insights have to be cautious and exploratory, sensitive to specific historical relationships of forces. If their program were to be judged by the organizing fest alone, the answers would be very encouraging. The mayor of Minneapolis herself welcomed the crowd and publicly signed a city council resolution urging local employers to obey federal labor laws. The crowd of around 500 was large, though not as large as expected. Rank-and-filers from recent organizing campaigns were visibly featured, interspersed with speeches from Bensinger, Sweeney, and local AFL-CIO leaders. The centerpiece of the day was a march and a silent vigil at a nursing home where the workers had recently voted overwhelmingly to be represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 113 but whose management was trying to delay the process by filing spurious National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charges. The afternoon consisted of well-attended practical workshops, where local union leaders learned more about change to organize. The main message, reiterated frequently, was that local unions need to shift their resources into organizing. Organized labor includes less than 15

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percent of today’s paid workforce, down from nearly 35% in the early 1950s and 23 percent in 1980. Bensinger pointed out that, on average, local unions devote only 2 percent of their resources to organizing; the AFL-CIO’s new goal is to reach 30 percent. Since organizing is the most important priority for the labor movement’s resources, additional funding is the key to whether sufficient new organizing will take place to shift the dynamics of labor—and class—relations in the United States. There are examples—Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles, hotel, restaurant, and casino workers in Las Vegas, strawberry pickers in California (efforts so frequently cited they almost constitute a mantra)—when concentrated organizing has taken hold with exciting results, echoing the experiences of the Knights of Labor, the Wobblies, and the early CIO. There have also been less-publicized local successes that show similar potential. But so far, neither the quantity nor the quality of the results has been very encouraging. In 1996, despite the new leadership and its initiatives, the AFL-CIO lost more members than it added. Even more important, not only has the overall character of local unions changed little, but an attitude of “Leave it to Sweeney” seems to have sapped some grassroots developments that had begun to emerge in the early to mid-1990s. There are other reasons to be concerned. The leadership message of “organizing to change/changing to organize” is really quite limited. The major change the leaders have in mind concerns the allocation of resources. Although they did suggest using rank-and-file organizers to expand, they were ominously silent on the culture, level of democracy and participation, and internal dynamics within existing unions. Sweeney and Bensinger even intimated that members might have to learn to accept less service while their full-time officers and staff were engaged with the business of organizing. This was especially disturbing given the composition of the audience at the Minneapolis gathering—mostly full-time staff and officers. On the one hand, it was clear that Sweeney and Bensinger do not want to upset the applecart these local bureaucrats are already atop. But on the other hand, it was not clear that these union officials accept the priorities being articulated from the podium, nor that they are capable of appealing effectively to potential union recruits. Another anecdote, this one of current vintage, may reveal the nub of the problem. Among the 200 or more local unions in the Twin Cities representing more than 100,000 members, fewer than five locals have begun the process of making organizing a priority. The most successful among them has been SEIU Local 113, with a membership of about 12,000 hospital, health-care, and nursing home workers. The chief officer of Local 113 is also secretary-treasurer of the international union and a longtime associate of John Sweeney’s. She has made her mark in the Twin Cities as a visible advocate for labor-management cooperation. Local 113 itself has

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been a fairly typical business union whose staff handles most of the dayto-day affairs of the union in workplaces and at the bargaining table. Local 113’s track record has been unimpressive. In 1995, when a Beverly Corporation–owned nursing home in Walker, Minnesota (about four hours from the Twin Cities), demanded wage cuts of its unionized workers down to the legal minimum, Local 113 ran a disastrous strike, which ended with half the local crossing the picket line, the other half being replaced, and the union being decertified without a challenge from 113. Last year, when the University of Minnesota Hospital merged with Fairview Hospital, Local 113 held back from the multiunion coalition being organized by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Teamsters, and the International Union of Operating Engineers, and sought instead to make its own deal with the hospital management. The results damaged all the workers at the merging hospitals. In early 1997, with money provided by the international union, SEIU 113 hired several organizers who had been through the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute. They were young and aggressive, and they began to have an immediate impact on the local nursing home industry. They lost their first campaign but have won four since, adding 1,000 mostly female workers of color to the union’s ranks. These campaigns have been dramatic, empowering processes in which workers have indeed found new voices and have intensely identified with the goals of expanding and strengthening the labor movement. But there have been serious problems meshing the new workers, their enthusiasm, hopes, and expectations with the existing culture of Local 113. In the first campaign, at a Catholic church–owned nursing home, the organizers found themselves up against a sophisticated union-busting consultant. When they suggested going public to pressure the Catholic hierarchy, through such tactics as picketing churches and appealing directly to congregations, or putting direct public pressure on the prominent Democratic Party officials who sat on the board of directors of the nursing home, the union leadership held them back, preferring to confer privately with these erstwhile friends of labor. By the time such a meeting could be arranged, the consultant had instituted a reign of terror through one-on-one meetings, and the organizing drive had been derailed. In the successful campaigns, the union leadership has sought to limit the size of rank-and-file bargaining committees and the power that they would have. They have also hamstrung the tactics pursued by members after election victories. At one nursing home, for instance, management filed a long list of spurious NLRB charges after Local 113 won an election 89 to 19. The organizers and the workers’ own committee wanted to keep the pressure on the corporation, which was seeking public support in a Twin Cities suburb to open an assisted-care facilty. The local union planned

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to bring a busload of workers to a city council meeting to challenge the company’s qualifications. When the company’s lawyer called the union leadership and asked it to call off this demonstration, offering to meet with the leaders the following day, the leadership told the organizers to cancel the demonstration. But the organizers threatened to quit unless they were allowed to go ahead. The city council action put considerable pressure on the company, which soon agreed to withdraw all of its NLRB challenges. Interestingly, Sweeney, Bensinger, and SEIU leaders were quick to claim credit for this outcome, saying that the AFL-CIO silent vigil outside the nursing home had brought management to its senses. The point, of course, is not who deserves the credit for the labor movement’s moving forward but whether current strategies can do the job. They remain, frankly, a far cry from the strategies practiced by the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World, and the struggles launched by such early CIO projects as the Independent Union of All Workers and the Albert Lea Woolworth’s workers. These contemporary strategies do not begin by empowering rank-and-file workers to fight their own battles directly but rather are premised on taking such power out of the workplace as quickly as possible and putting it at a bargaining table where full-time union officials can wield it responsibly and in the interests of a larger agenda. These strategies also do not call for energizing and involving the wider labor movement, particularly its rank-and-file members, for fear that such activities (as in the Staley, Caterpillar, and Detroit newspaper strikes) might get out of hand. Lastly, they do not call for taking workers’ cases to the general public in sustained and creative ways, relying instead on paid commercials with limited appeal. Our predecessors in labor history did more. Our current predicament deserves more.

6 The Dynamics of Change Kim Moody

The 1997 strike of 185,000 Teamsters at United Parcel Service (UPS) presents a microcosm of what U.S. labor is and what it might become. Behind the fifteen-day strike that brought an unusually quick and stunning victory flow most of the major trends affecting workers and unions in the United States and elsewhere. The diverse and largely part-time workforce reflects the changing working class from which it is drawn as well as the way labor markets are being shaped by major corporations. The issues these workers faced were issues now known to millions of workers. The history behind the strike, the transformation of one of the United States’ most corrupt unions into one of its most democratic and progressive, is even more extraordinary but is also one piece of the puzzle of changes affecting the labor movement from top to bottom. There is the danger that the UPS strike of 1997 will disappear from sight, overshadowed by the election rerun between Teamster President Ron Carey and old guard cipher James Hoffa. Just as likely, it may be remembered as a successful confrontation between a strong union using the latest mobilization techniques and an economic giant whose vast market share turned out to be its greatest vulnerability, one more case, like the 1994– 1997 General Motors (GM) strikes, that demonstrated the weaknesses of lean and mean corporations on the make. To be sure, the fifteen-day strike and the victory that ended it revealed a corporate fragility that only yesterday the experts had termed invulnerability. Likewise, Carey demonstrated a leadership too often missing at the top of U.S. unions. This version, however, would overlook what might be the most important lessons of this brief and successful labor struggle. Just below the surface is the fact that the Carey leadership is the result of a rank-and-file-based reform coalition that brought him to office in 1991 and back again in 1996. Pushing the coalition from below was the 97

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Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which for over twenty years has activated tens of thousands of rank-and-filers to fight for a different kind of union. TDU’s involvement with UPS workers dates back to the mid1970s. This fact in itself makes the UPS story a little different from some of the other strikes and lockouts in recent years. From the outside, UPS looks like another big corporation—a GM in the package delivery field. From the inside, however, it looks like the workforce that all of the United States is becoming. Full-time drivers are threatened with subcontracting, a major problem in many industries. Whereas about 18 percent of Americans work part-time, at UPS that proportion is close to 60 percent. Prior to the new contract, part-time pay had been frozen since 1982 at a starting rate of $8 an hour. The average part-timer made $9.50 an hour after two years; full-timers earned almost $20 an hour. Many UPS part-timers work well over the thirty-five hours that is the Labor Department’s official cut-off point. But they still get paid part-time wages and accrue part-time health and pension benefits. UPS is a two-tier nightmare. UPS is the last word in diversity—not the harmonious workplace envisioned in corporate sensitivity programs, but the real U.S. workplace in which race, gender, age, and sexual preferences are sources of conflict and distrust or worse. Once thought of as a place where students could obtain night jobs, UPS has become a contemporary refuge for those who would rather be somewhere else or who hang on in hopes of full-time work. Folks who might at one time have waited tables, swept floors, or driven a cab while hoping for a better job down the line now find their way to UPS’s part-time jobs. Many women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and a fair number of gays put in time in Big Brown’s sorting centers and hubs. Although the workforce varies from one part of the country to another, UPS’s part-time workforce comes as close as possible to a postmodern vision of workforce fragmentation. Despite the grounded appearance of the corporation, UPS seems happy with a casualized workforce. The work is hard, fast, and increasingly heavy. UPS sorters are expected to handle at least 1,200 packages an hour, or 20 a minute. Those who unload trucks are supposed to manage 1,500 an hour. Not surprisingly, the turnover rate among part-timers is 400 percent. So impermanence must be added to fragmentation. Yet despite all these familiar divisions and problems among the workers, almost all of them, even in right-to-work states, struck and stayed out together. Part of the reason for the workers’ solidarity lies in UPS itself. It is as mean as it is lean. Its management style is as militaristic as the brown uniforms it imposes on its drivers. UPS wants its workers to lift 150 pounds— over and over. Its part-time inside workers are subjected to an assemblyline discipline as bad as anything at the Big Three automakers. On top of it all, UPS is a dream buster. It dangles the hope of full-time, full-pay union

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work before workers’ eyes, but turns more and more jobs into part-time dead-enders. Until the new contract, that is. The exodus of the countless thousands who give up and go elsewhere might have continued but for the prior rebellion of the TDU. The Teamsters went through a massive reorganization. The thugs and millionaires who had let UPS have it their way for years were swept from the top. Former UPS worker Ron Carey took over with a slate of TDUers and a coalition that eventually reached close to the heart of the union. The TDU supported Carey, and after his victory, it remained an active but independent rank-and-file force within the reform coalition. The TDU was strong in UPS and helped the organizers and agitators to prepare for a strike in many parts of the country. Although the union’s mobilization campaign was uneven, particularly where old guard or moderate-reform local leaders were still in charge, the TDU provided the organizational backbone to make it real in many places. Something else was new. This strike floated in a sea of worker and consumer sympathy and support. Workers from auto plants to hospitals and the post office could see their own issues in the strike. They could also see their dismal future in contingent work and declining pay if UPS were to win. According to one poll, public support for the strike ran 2 to 1—55 percent for the strikers, 27 percent for UPS, the rest not sure. These figures were an almost crude reflection of society’s economic winners and losers of recent years.1 In a very real sense UPS stood as the proxy for capital and the Teamsters the designated hitter for all of labor. Carey constantly presented the strike as one for decent jobs for working families. And that is just how the majority saw it. So the UPS strike gave the country a sort of snapshot of today’s working class: its diversity, the conditions and pressures its majority faces, the new way in which it views such events, and the potential for change all of these elements imply.

Where the Dynamic Begins Until a few years ago, most discussions of changes in U.S. unions focused on their declining size, numbers, and clout. It was a given that organized labor was passé. Then, in 1995, the “New Voice” slate of John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and Linda Chavez-Thompson of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) captured the leadership of the AFL-CIO in the first openly contested election in the federation’s history. Since that time, most of the discussion of changes in organized labor has focused on the new leaders

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and what they have or haven’t done. Before I assess the role of this highlevel change, let us look at the roots of today’s rebellions. Labor in the United States, as elsewhere, has had its ups and downs. The decline of the 1920s was followed first by a rebellion from below as angry industrial workers took matters into their own hands. (The rebellion is well documented in Staughton Lynd’s We Are All Leaders). Later this rebellion led to a split at the top of the AFL and the formation of the CIO. The bureaucratization of many CIO unions and the merger with the AFL in 1955 ushered in the movement’s decline and ossification. Internal rebellion and wildcat strikes erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s as workers rebelled against the consequences of inflation, increased speedup, and union complacency. Alongside this trend came the organization of millions of public-sector workers. But the rebellion and gains of the 1960s were first squandered by union leaders who feared an uncontrolled rank and file and then halted by the economic dislocations of the 1970s and 1980s. Since the mid-1970s, U.S. workers have faced other devastating changes in economic and working conditions: industrial restructuring and the rise of neoliberalism and lean production. All of these factors have had a paralyzing and disorienting impact on workers and their unions. This is not the place to retell the well-known story of decline and retreat occasioned by these trends. I want to turn to the question of how these trends, or the conditions they have bred, have sparked resistance, rebellion, and reform in organized labor.

The New Satanic Mill and the Dying American Dream Sometime between George Meany (AFL-CIO president, 1952–1979) and John Sweeney, when most of today’s top leaders took office, the brave new comanaged workplace of the future turned into a top-down, well-lit satanic mill. Whether you work in a hospital or an auto plant, a post office or a postindustrial techno-office, it is more than likely that your job is worse than it was a decade ago—if you are lucky enough to have had one that long. Whether or not it is decorated with the trimmings of employee participation, Total Quality Management (TQM), or the like, it is certainly more stressful, probably harder, and definitely more dangerous. U.S. injury and illness rates in the first half of the 1990s ran anywhere from 9 percent to 100 percent higher than in the first half of the 1980s, as measured by the number of cases reported.2 When measured by the number of days lost for injury or illness, the difference is even greater, running as much as 500 percent higher in the early 1990s than in the early 1980s in some auto assembly plants.3 Not

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surprisingly, the Department of Labor stopped publishing the number of lost days in 1993. Contributing to this rise in occupational illness and injury are changing work-time patterns. Chances are your work hours are drastically longer if you’re full-time. If they are shorter, it is because you are part of the precarious workforce that fills the country’s growing number of part-time, temporary, or casual jobs, as exemplified by UPS.4 The monthly figures published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the number of part-timers (those working less than thirty-five hours a week) at 21 million in mid-1997, or about 18.4 percent, up from 16.6 percent in 1975. Yet over 38 million people actually work less than forty hours a week, and an uncounted number of part-timers earning part-time pay like those at UPS work forty or more hours week in and week out. More startling is the growth of temporary workers. Those who work out of personnel supply agencies have grown from 640,000 in 1987 to 2.7 million in mid-1997. An undocumented additional number of temporary workers work directly for a growing variety of firms. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute puts the total proportion of nonstandard jobs at 29.4 percent of the workforce, 34.4 percent for women workers—figures that adjust for the overlap of part-time, temporary, and contract work.5 What became equally evident by the mid-1990s was the decline of real wages (18 percent since 1973) and the marked redistribution of income in favor of the wealthy.6 This trend is well known by now, but the March 17, 1997, Business Week cover story, “Two-Tier Marketing,” gave this rising inequality a practical twist. Calling it the “Tiffany/Wal-Mart” marketing strategy, David Leonhart noted that more retailers are targeting either wellto-do or low-income markets, bypassing the middle. It seems that the United States’ merchants have discovered there is more money being spent by the top 20 percent these days, whereas the great middle class (read working-class majority) is up to its eyeballs in debt. In contrast, the denizens of the economic lowlands may have poor and declining incomes, but their numbers are growing larger. Even more visible these days is the blatant holdup being executed by U.S. chief executive officers (CEOs). The stickup artist of 1996 was Sandy Weill, CEO of Traveler’s Group insurance, who earned $94 million as a reward for cutting Traveler’s workforce by one-third since 1987. This sort of job cutting not only brings outrageous executive salaries and bonuses but propels the Dow-Jones to unparalleled heights. This financial space shot, combined with stagnant wages and respectable productivity, has flooded company coffers. Business Week warns: “The worry is that many companies are taking in cash so fast they can’t spend it efficiently.” In fact, if the Big Three automakers or UPS is any guide, these cash-rich corporations are spending their newfound profits in such favored investment centers as Europe, Latin America, and, the new favorite, China.

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This massive redistribution has not gone unnoticed by the majority that compose both the shrinking middle-income and growing lower-income working classes—and they are angry. Whatever glow may have accompanied the early days of partnership or participation faded rapidly for many workers as their jobs were cut or intensified to boost profits, stock prices, and top salaries. Counteracting this anger and disillusionment, however, is the fear of job loss from the same sources: downsizing, outsourcing, facility closures, or scab herding. As a Multinational Monitor editorial put it recently: “A ruthless employer class blends these multiple sources of job insecurity into a whole greater than the parts.”7 The fear of job loss might well be the strongest emotion in most working-class families these days. Its hold on the vast bottom layer of organized labor has been strong since the late 1970s. Strike figures have plummeted as a result. The fear of job loss also explains in part the mass of union members who have been more or less passive for quite some time. This fear-driven passivity has tended to reinforce the labor-management partnership agenda of the top union officials. The members appear to accept the new workplace regime and go about their jobs silently in this brave new world. The other side of the downsizing, however, is the intensification of work. Although no one in power listened to the workers who complained about this condition, at least a few ears perked up when Wall Street insider Stephen Roach wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The so-called productivity resurgence of recent years has been on the back of slash-and-burn restructuring strategies that have put extraordinary pressures on the workforce.” Roach predicted a “worker backlash.”8 There comes a point, after all, when the pressures and inevitable indignities of intensified exploitation outweigh the fear of job loss, as in the Great Depression. As Marta Ojeda, director of the Council for Justice in the Maquiladoras, put it eloquently at the 1997 Labor Notes conference in Detroit: “The hunger is stronger than the fear—hunger for justice, not only for food.”9 Groups are now testing the waters, and open conflict is returning to labor relations—despite the trimmings of company unionism or labor-management cooperation schemes. This trend is reflected in the bitter strikes of the 1990s in the United States. Some strikes lose, as at Caterpillar and A. E. Staley. Some are more or less draws, like those at Wheeling-Pittsburgh. Others win something, as did the dozen or so local GM strikes, the brief strike at Dunlop, the sixty-nine-day Boeing strike, the week-long general strike of Oregon state employees, the on-again-offagain strike at Yale, and the fifty-four-day confrontational struggle at WCI Steel in Warren, Ohio. Then there are the massive strikes of immigrant and Latino workers in California: janitors, drywallers, carpenters, and waterfront truckers. To these should be added struggles to organize 20,000 strawberry pickers in

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California and the smaller number of apple pickers and processors in Washington State. These and similar struggles of immigrant and Latino workers around the country also point to something new—the rise of Latinos not only in the workforce but in the unions. Although union membership continued to decline from 1992 through 1996, the number of Latino union members grew by 12 percent.10 After dropping for a decade to an all-time low in 1995, strike statistics rose in 1996. The number of major strikes (1,000 or more workers) rose from 31 in 1995 to 37 in 1996. The number of workers involved grew from 192,000 in 1995 to 273,000 in 1996. Only the total number of days spent on strike by all workers dropped. In all likelihood, with larger numbers of workers striking at GM, UPS, Wheeling-Pittburgh, and elsewhere, the number will continue to grow. More important than the figures, which are still very low, is that these are not the routine wage-and-benefit strikes of 1950 to 1979. For the most part they are defensive struggles over issues associated with lean production and the workplace of the future: staffing levels, outsourcing and subcontracting, workload, health care, and pensions. They are outbursts of accumulated anger. So, too, was the series of strikes in the auto industry at GM, Chrysler, and Johnson Controls. Striking workers who had long been afraid to buck the company-union love fest that was eroding jobs and conditions found their sea legs again. In a jujitsu-like flip of just-in-time production, these workers discovered they could close down much or all of a giant like GM or (in the case of supplier-firm Johnson) Ford just by striking one or two plants. The 1996 strikes against GM alone cost that company $1.2 billion in lost production. As each of these strikes brought new hires into the plants, other local unions summoned their courage for a shot at relief from leanness. In 1997, six new strikes hit GM, with more United Auto Workers (UAW) locals filing for a “five-day letter” asking permission from the international union to strike. Most of this new consciousness and sometimes desperate militancy comes from the activist layer of the unions. These are workers, workplace representatives, and local union officials who maintain the United States’ unions from day to day. They work between the upper layer of career officials and staffers on the one hand and the majority of members on the other. Some are full-time, paid officials, though many are not. They are forced to confront the reality of the workplace, as opposed to its ideology, whether or not they bought into this ideology in whole or part. A significant minority of this layer, however, rejects the labor-management ethos that comes from employers and career union officials alike. It is in this layer that the return of resistance has gathered the greatest force and, now and then, breaks through the passivity of the members and the backwardlooking resistance of the top officials.

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The activists and the top leaders are often at odds over how to respond to the changing workplace and labor market. The forms of this clash vary. One such form is pressure from the activist layer to act, a major factor in the GM and Boeing strikes. Another is turnover at the top. The Association for Union Democracy (AUD) estimates that about a dozen union presidents were ousted in contested elections from the late 1980s to the 1991 victory of Ron Carey. The ferment continues. Labor-democracy attorney Paul Levy summarized it in a speech to the National Lawyers Guild in fall 1996: There is extensive intra-union activity in a large number of national unions, much more than ever before. In service unions such as the Food and Commercial Workers, the Service Employees and the Hotel Workers, construction unions such as the IBEW (Electricians) or the Bricklayers and the Carpenters and the Laborers, government unions like the Letter Carriers, the AFGE (Federal Employees) and the Treasury Employees, industrial unions like the Machinists and the Auto Workers.11

To this list of challenges in national unions can be added similar movements in large local unions such as the New Directions caucus in the 30,000–member Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York’s transit system or the reform group in the similarly large union of New York City janitors and doormen, SEIU Local 32J/32B—John Sweeney’s home local. Even the famous Justice for Janitors local union, SEIU 399 in Los Angeles, saw a massive opposition movement of Latino and African American workers, called the Multicultural Alliance, replace the old-guard executive committee—only to be placed in trusteeship. The split of the militant California Nurses Association from the more conservative American Nurses Association in 1996 represents another form of rebellion from below. Recently formed local opposition caucuses, as opposed to traditional caucuses of the “ins” and the “outs,” have reappeared in unions as diverse as the UAW, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). There are also rebellions that have not yet focused on leadership challenges. Delegates to the 1996 IBEW convention, for example, voted over their union leaders’ objections to make the future elections of top offices by secret ballot of convention delegates. The membership of the laborers union went even further, with a 3-to-1 referendum vote to elect top officers by a direct vote of the membership in the future, also against the opposition of top leaders. Then there were the reformers in the machinists union who went from successfully challenging restrictive candidate requirements in union elections to organizing a rejection of a settlement with Boeing recommended by the union leaders. The machinists’ objection to the settlement was that it entailed a massive outsourcing of work. The reformers

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forced the union and the company to return to the bargaining table and come back with an improved offer. Nowhere was the challenge from below more successful or the process of union reform deeper than in the Teamsters. The reelection of Ron Carey over Jimmy Hoffa Jr. in 1996 not only spelled the end of the corrupt old guard, it opened a new phase of transformation. As Ken Paff of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) explained, “We won the political battle over the value of a clean, democratic union. Hoffa had to adopt our program and promise to do even better at it. But we have not yet won the battle over the need for a new kind of union that derives its power from a mobilized and involved membership.”12 Mobilization was a major theme when 140 Teamster activists gathered in Detroit in February 1997 to discuss the future of the reform movement that had brought Ron Carey back for a second term as reform leader of the AFL-CIO’s biggest union. The meeting, called by the TDU, reflected some of the ambiguities of success in the new “clean, democratic union.” Among the activists were a few international vice presidents, some teamster staffers, a significant number of local union officials, and a majority of rank-and-filers. This crowd, reflecting every level of the union, discussed not only what a new kind of union might look like and do but how TDU officers would relate to rank-and-filers, and how the TDU as a whole would relate to Carey and the international union staff. Although the builtin tensions between labor’s different layers were not entirely absent, the fact that within this reform movement representatives of all three layers were pulling in the same direction presented a ray of hope. Of course, the high-level officers in the TDU were among those who had fought to eliminate multiple salaries and pensions that had made old-guard Teamster leaders wealthy men. Movements, after all, change not only institutional arrangements but people. The dynamics of the Teamster revolution, as many at the meeting called it, had brought the TDU a long way from fifteen years in the wilderness as a clear-cut opposition to five years on the front lines defending the reform regime and fighting the old guard—perhaps once and for all. Now the most difficult question of all was posed: How could the TDU go beyond the norms of clean U.S. business unionism? Ideas ranged from the very practical to the highly visionary, but one theme ran throughout the entire meeting: The key to any reform was an informed, activated membership. Whether speaking of winning a strike at UPS, organizing the unorganized, or building broader coalitions for bigger social goals, success would depend on mobilizing the tens of thousands of workers on whom the real power of the union rests. This was no small task. More Teamsters voted in the 1996 election that kept Carey in office than in 1991, but the total was still only 34 percent of the members—with Carey taking only 52 percent of those. For the

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majority of members in the Teamsters, apathy and confusion remained the norm as it did in other unions. Although Carey’s bargaining record was far better than anything else the Teamsters had seen since the days of the original Jimmy Hoffa, the reformed union was still fighting the uphill battle that all of labor faced. For many members, change was too marginal to be inspiring. Though Carey had stopped and even reversed decades of downward motion in bargaining, he could not in five years undo a thirty-year legacy or sweep aside the damage done by deregulation. The victory at UPS in August 1997 was a big step in that direction, but the subsequent revelations of financial wrongdoing during the 1996 campaign eliminated Carey, creating a major setback for the reform process in the Teamsters. The question that still faces the Teamster reformers is essentially the same question that faces the entire labor movement: What kind of unions and what kind of movement can be built that is adequate to the challenges of corporate power, international competition, and the dominance of conservative politics? It is here that the limitations of change at the top of the AFL-CIO become most evident.

Institutes, Partnerships, and Organizing The change in the top leadership of the AFL-CIO occurred in a context of ferment below but was not a direct result of it. To be sure, Sweeney, Trumka, and Chavez-Thompson’s New Voice could not have beaten former federation secretary-treasurer Tom Donahue and the Communication’s Workers of America’s Barbara Easterling without the votes of Carey’s “New Teamsters.” But it was the very decline these leaders had presided over for years that brought the conflict among U.S. labor’s top officials and that shapes the program of the changing AFL-CIO. The centerpiece of the new leadership’s program was and is the goal of organizing the unorganized. Sweeney, Trumka, and Chavex-Thompson also appear to be serious about money, an expanded Organizing Institute, mass rallies, educational programs, and a lot of visible advocacy. In a federation of unions, the role of actual organizing falls either to affiliated national and international unions or to central labor councils (CLCs), which are the heart of the AFL-CIO’s “Union Cities” program. Yet most international unions and CLCs have poor track records on organizing, and it is primarily this fact and not organizing itself that the AFL-CIO leaders are addressing with their campaigning style. Unlike the leaders of many national labor centers in other countries, the leaders of the AFL-CIO are not the political leaders of the labor movement. Political leadership is left to the officials of the individual affiliated unions. For most of its life, the AFL-CIO has been (1) a lobbying arm

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engaged in national legislative efforts pursuing the federation’s consensus agenda and (2) a foreign policy advocacy and action center closely allied with U.S. business and imperial interests. The new leaders seem to be sincere about changing this latter practice. In particular, they have gone far toward dismantling or reshaping the shameful foreign policy institutes. They have also invested more energy and outreach in domestic advocacy. Yet the new approach to electoral politics sounds much like labor’s tired and often insincere rhetoric about building a broad progressive coalition that speaks out for social and economic justice. Nothing new here. Similarly, the “new” orientation toward the Democrats Sweeney speaks of appears new only in a minor tactical sense: that is, how, not whether or not, labor spends its millions on Democrats. Indeed, much of what appears new at the Washington headquarters of the federation is centered on technique rather than on basic ideas or political orientation. In October 1995, Suzanne Gordon commented on the solutions offered by the New Voice platform, an observation that has been borne out in the first years of the new leadership: For every union problem, there’s a new Washington solution—an institute, a task force, a monitoring project, a clearinghouse, a policy center, a training center, a center for strategic campaigns, a new organizing department (with an office of strategic planning), a strategic planning process (“Committee 2000”), two or three campaign funds, a labor council advisory committee, and a “strike support team of top people” from various union staffs. . . . This platform proclaims that “we must institutionalize the process of change.”13

Here, of course, in the platform on which the new leaders faced down the old, is part of the problem. The depth, breadth, and kinds of change needed to revitalize organized labor and bring in millions of new members cannot be accomplished by institutionalizing the process of change. The decisions about what kind of unions workers want and need, as the Teamster reformers put it, cannot be made in institutionally neat and controlled ways. Real change, whether in organized labor or in society as a whole, just doesn’t happen that way. To institutionalize a complex social process is to kill it. To see leadership as institutionalization is a classic malady of bureaucracy. The vision of a social movement as institutes, centers, committees, task forces, and symbolic (video-ready) acts of solidarity is doomed to halt the very process the new AFL-CIO leaders propose—including organizing the unorganized. As the rumblings and changes occurring in many unions and workplaces across the United States reveal, change is a messy process involving conflict within the unions as well as between them and the employers. To institutionalize this side of change is to suppress it, which is the default practice of most union bureaucrats everywhere.

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Reflecting this essentially bureaucratic vision of change is a deep ideological contradiction that in various forms is the heritage of generations of business unionism. The new leaders are willing to talk of conflict and even to support it, but they are equally committed to the idea of partnerships with business to make the United States competitive. Sweeney, for example, told the National Press Club: “We can no longer afford the luxury of pretending that productivity, quality and competitiveness are not our business.”14 Indeed, an April 7, 1997, article in Business Week cites the formation of the AFL-CIO’s new and inappropriately named Center for Workplace Democracy as evidence of a growing embrace of labor-management cooperation. A more dramatic and cynical instance of this mood is the labormanagement partnership between the AFL-CIO, six of its affiliates, and Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s oldest and largest health maintenance organization (HMO). This partnership includes not only the usual commitments to improve the business but a promise to promote Kaiser as the preferred HMO for union health plans. The partnership was announced in the midst of a life-and-death fight between Kaiser management and the California Nurses Association. It came only a year after Kaiser imposed a wage freeze on SEIU Local 250, which represents thousands of Kaiser’s nonprofessional employees. Labor’s renewed interest in labor-management partnerships is all the more baffling because of the clear track record of corporate double-dealing. A list of some of the major companies with which unions had established cooperation programs or broader partnerships in the late 1980s and early 1990s includes: Caterpillar, A. E. Staley, Wheeling-Pittsburgh, Detroit News Agency, Boeing, AT&T (which recently put Caterpillar CEO and arch-union-buster Don Fites on its board), and General Motors, to name a few. In short, today’s most aggressively antiworker major corporations are yesterday’s cooperators. An unfortunate but necessary corollary to partnership is the exclusion of the brutal reality of today’s workplace from the agenda of the new AFLCIO leadership. The road to competitiveness is being paved over the backs of the workers, as even Wall Streeter Roach noted. Although it is certainly true that “America Needs A Raise,” as Sweeney argues, America also needs a break. More to the point, it needs a unionism that will fight the harsh workplace regime that is the reality of lean production and highperformance workplaces. It is inconceivable that the massive expansion of members that labor needs to survive and renew itself can be accomplished by organizations that ignore today’s working conditions. Building unions on economic issues alone in the era of lean production, reengineering, casualization, and gender and race recomposition of the workforce is not likely to create the sort of momentum the leaders of the AFL-CIO talk

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about. Yet very little beyond blanket condemnations of downsizing has come from the New Voice team or much of the rest of the labor bureaucracy on these crucial issues. Somewhat more subtle but no less important is the relationship between union democracy and mass organizing. Organizing on the scale needed to make the labor movement grow again has never been done primarily by professional organizers. It has always been a matter of workers organizing other workers, as in the 1930s and in the 1960s when publicsector workers joined unions in large numbers. Not surprisingly, the Teamsters have been using members to organize workers at nonunion Overnite Transportation, one of a number of nonunion freight and package firms that grew during the old-guard regime. Whereas the old guard’s attempt to organize Overnite using its little army of time-serving international organizers was a bust, Carey’s use of rank-and-filers is working. In 1997, rankand-file Teamsters from Southwest Airline helped to win 5,000 Continental mechanics to the Teamsters. Early in 1997, Carey called on the members to raise a volunteer “army of 10,000 member-organizers.” This task will be hard enough for the reforming Teamsters. For unions in which democracy, membership control, and leadership accountability are stifled, the likelihood of such a sustained mobilization is slim. Although the AFL-CIO is experimenting with memberorganizers, and several unions employ this approach to one degree or another, going beyond marginal experimentation to mass mobilization cannot be separated from the question of internal union regime. To put it bluntly, members who have an influence on the objectives, strategies, and tactics of their organizations are far more likely to devote their scarce free time to organizing others. Unions, of course, can and do mobilize members for specific events or actions even where there is little or no democracy. But to sustain such mobilization requires rank-and-file involvement in decisions as well as specific actions. This kind of mobilization cannot be turned on and off like a water faucet or run by remote control from headquarters. In a widely circulated paper, Michael Eisenscher makes the point that “democracy is an instrument for building solidarity, for establishing accountability, and for determining appropriate strategies—all of which are critical for sustaining and advancing worker and union interests.”15 As reformers in Transit Workers Union Local 100 in New York’s Transit Authority put it, “democracy is power” in relationship to both the union leadership and the employer.16 The emerging practice today, however, is a sort of hybrid of the organizing and service models, as the opposing approaches are often characterized, in which new members are recruited using radical mobilization techniques but then subjected to a service model of business unionism

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once they have won a contract. Sweeney’s SEIU is the exemplar of this hybrid: tactically radical in organizing but staff-driven and hierarchical in daily operation. Sweeney himself presents an almost colonialist view of democracy as something that is always down the road. He told the Wall Street Journal just before taking office: “I’m very interested in union democracy, and rank-and-file involvement, but it can’t be accomplished overnight.” He spoke as though the unions had only appeared the day he assumed the top place in the movement. The New Voice team has at best an ambiguous record on matters of democracy. Sweeney’s personal involvement in internal democracy is almost entirely negative. As a board member of the notoriously top-down and corrupt SEIU Local 32B/32J, he supported the hounding of dissident union reformers. He was still SEIU president when the national union placed Local 399 in trusteeship after the Multicultural Alliance had beaten the mainly Anglo old guard. Trumka represents something more complex. He can trace his roots to the Miners for Democracy, the rank-and-file reform group that beat the UMWA’s old guard in 1971. The UMWA under his leadership has a welldeserved record of militancy and mobilization. For this reason some of the earliest AFL-CIO rebels pushed for him to be the presidential candidate. At the same time, Trumka has led the UMWA into a number of labormanagement cooperation set-ups. Chavez-Thompson’s state, county, and municipal employees union is not a risk taker like the SEIU and UMWA, nor is it very democratic. The views of Sweeney and many other labor leaders on the marginal importance of union democracy, on the one hand, and the continued relevance of labor-management partnership, on the other, are at odds with their own desire to organize the unorganized and tame the employers. The power to effect these goals must come from sustained mass mobilization, but distrust of the members runs deep among labor’s hierarchy. Furthermore, the embrace of partnership and the related tendency to ignore or subordinate workplace issues run hand in hand. Yet it is in workplace organization that the roots of durable union democracy lie. It is here that the power to impose accountability on top leaders begins. Indeed, the link between workplace power and organization and union democracy is so strong that it suggests an alternative type of unionism to the bureaucratic service-plus-partnership approach of the new AFL-CIO leaders.

Beyond Technique and Tactic Much of the thinking of labor’s friends and enemies alike has been shaped over the years by the long traditions of labor history and academic sociology

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that see bureaucracy as inevitable and, often, even desirable. This line of thought can be traced to British early-twentieth-century Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb and anti-socialist German sociologist Robert Michels, whose “Iron Law of Oligarchy” continues to influence the way unions are viewed even today. In the United States the “Wisconsin School,” descending from John R. Commons through Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, gave us the “Institutional” school of labor history. In all of these analyses of trade unionism, the unions are isolated from the concept of class and are reduced to the behavior of their leaders, who, this school believes, typically reflect the views of their members. Internal conflict, if it is admitted at all, is only a moment in the process of rational decisionmaking at the top. This view was challenged by events and by radical thinkers mostly outside the academy in the 1930s and 1940s but was restated in the 1950s as the “maturity” thesis, by which unions inevitably move from their militant, even democratic, state in organizing periods to the “normal” bureaucratic practices noted by the earlier theorists. Richard Lester, a leading institutionalist, wrote in the early 1950s: “Collective bargaining institutionalizes conflict by gradually building up orderly processes, joint machinery, and other administrative restraints against unruly or precipitate action.”17 To be sure, this is an accurate description of what happened roughly from the late 1930s through the 1950s. What is noteworthy is the absolute equation of collective bargaining with bureaucracy and order. In real life, of course, maturity eventually leads to death. Revitalization must therefore be like resurrection—something otherworldly. The maturity school, like the Wisconsin School, has no way of explaining the enormous transformations of unions in periods of intense class conflict or for that matter the breakdown of collective-bargaining institutions in the 1990s. Indeed, for Taft and his more resolute followers, bureaucratization was the answer to any changes in the labor and product market. In this theoretical world, it is markets, institutions, and their leaders that interact. Neither capital predictor nor the rank and file exists as an active force in living human form. This mode of analyzing the process of change in organized labor underlies much of the uncritical advocacy of lean production methods, decorated with empowerment and participation, to be sure, emanating from places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and finding a home in many union headquarters. In this institutional theory, union leaders are responding rationally to today’s profound labor and product market changes by instituting new forms of joint machinery and other administrative restraints. This sort of thinking about the inevitability of bureaucracy and the way change comes about is so ingrained in U.S. analysis of unions that even many who are firmly in the camp of labor see the current changes at the top as the only realistic possibility for revitalization.

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There has been, of course, a strong intellectual countertrend among labor historians such as E. P. Thompson and David Montgomery and laborprocess theorists such as Harry Braverman. Few of these historians and analysts would argue that leadership doesn’t matter. Rather, they would argue that leadership begins deep in the ranks and that great steps forward for the working class begin in grassroots organizations of many kinds. In other words, the dynamics of change originate at least as much beneath the surface of visible leaders and their interactions as they do in the realms of recognized power and institutions. Interrelated with this view is a class analysis, the understanding that there is more involved than individual grievances or simple wage bargains and that the problems facing workers in such periods, no matter how differently these problems may refract among them, stem from their shared class position. This view has found less of a home in the hierarchy of the unions than have those of the more officer-friendly institutional school. Regarding the current debates, no period of massive trade union growth or labor upheaval in U.S. history has resulted from professional organizers passing out recognition cards. To be sure, organizers and union officials can make a difference, but workers have been conditioned by decades of institutional labor history and theory to see even organizations such as the Knights of Labor or the CIO as the product of farsighted or flawed leaders. Yet the rise in worker activity and militancy that produced the CIO preceded John L. Lewis’s intervention, including his dispatching of organizers to the coal fields and steel mills. In most industries, organization came first from within the workforce, and such staffers as there were had usually risen from the ranks and acted more as tactical advisers than organizers in the contemporary sense. Much of the current debate over revitalization that takes place within the labor movement is framed as the choice between the organizing and service models. Often it is devoid of questions of democracy, workplace power, and worker self-activity. Discussions of how to organize the nation’s millions of unionless workers often come down to little more than an argument over technique or tactics. Membership mobilization is too often reduced to improved communications (from top to bottom), manifested in slicker communications products like the AFL-CIO’s new weekly fax bulletin “Work in Progress” or the monthly America@Work—glitzy, cheerleading, even informative, but devoid of debate or real analysis and, in any case, limited to officials, high, middle, and low. The same can be said of new organizing: The discussion often comes down to choices between the blitz and the long-term campaign; shop by shop and whole market; instant community support and long-range coalitions. Alongside this tactical focus is a tendency to dismiss or underplay class as an active concept in favor of vaguer, more acceptable ideas about working families, the embattled middle class, and a rehashed coalitionism.

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As with organizing tactics, important questions are involved, but as long as these alternatives remain locked in a business-union cage along with top-down decisionmaking and labor-management partnerships, they cannot take the movement very far. As long as the options are reduced to technique and the wisdom of consultants, they simply paper over the deeper dynamics of change. We return to the questions asked by TDU members as they face a new phase in the reform process: What kind of union and what kind of labor movement do we want and need? What are the dynamics that can reshape labor to approximate more nearly such a vision and reality? The TDU members who ask the question answer it themselves. Whatever labels they may use, the defining characteristics are union independence, democratic membership power, leadership accountability, and practical solidarity with other working people against the employers and corporate power. But, as I have argued, neither democracy nor independence from the employer nor the broader class view these imply can be taken for granted these days. They must be consciously fought for—a task the TDU and other union reformers accept. The dynamics that make this change possible today lie in the intersection of deteriorating working and living conditions and resistance to those conditions, above all in the workplace. What makes today different from the mid-1980s, however, is that these workplace problems are common across all industrial, regional, and demographic lines. Today’s workplace problems are social problems in that they affect much of the working class. This fact underlies the public (that is, working-class) response to the UPS strike and, before it, to some of the GM strikes and the Detroit newspaper lockout. More and more people see their own plight in those of the strikers. The glue of the coalitions that are often projected as the key to victory is far stronger now that more working people see themselves in the same boat or at least the same fleet. In this context, the idea of social movement unionism, one that is fundamentally democratic and independent and that reaches out from the starting point of self-interest to embrace a broader, more inclusive class interest, becomes a realistic alternative to the narrow, exclusive legacy of business unionism. Despite welcome changes at the top, however, this legacy hangs heavy on labor’s hierarchy, an impediment even to the changes the new leaders propose. It is unlikely to be broken by even the most creative institutional reshuffling at the top or clever outreach to those just below. The force for change, though seemingly dormant for years, lies where it always has lain, in the rank and file: those now in unions, those yet to be, and those who gain strength from alliances with unions. What is different is that the problems workers face on the job and in their basic economic and social situation now have a more visibly universal aspect. The United States’ fragmented bargaining system long emphasized

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what was unique to each group of workers. A decade or two of near paralysis within organized labor, in turn, disguised the potential agent of change. Capital has made once-unique conditions, such as the declining core and growing contingent jobs, more nearly universal or at least visibly interrelated. The relentless and for a while paralyzing homogenization of work norms and problems under lean production methods, by whatever name, has made labor’s separate grievances simultaneously more alike, more familiar, and more intolerable. The surfacing of a new, still tentative militancy has lifted the veil of increased exploitation and revealed capital’s real intentions. The matter at hand, then, is more than a debate over tactics and techniques, whether it involves new organizing, winning strikes, or even gaining political effectiveness. Labor is searching for an alternative perspective about the nature of unions in this globalizing era. Do the workers seek a unionism based in a rank and file willing and able to confront capital and its relentless drive for profit? Or do they settle for one that seeks alliances with the employers and hopes somehow to ride the forces of exploitation to prosperity? Do workers seek a spruced-up business unionism with a consultant’s vision of politics, or a social movement unionism rooted in the actions of the rank and file? The types of leaders we seek, the alterations of union structure and strategy we need, and the active agent we look to rest on the answers to these questions.

Notes This chapter is a revised version of “American Labor: A Movement Again?” published in Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 3 (July–August 1997), 63–79. 1. Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, The State of Working America, 1994–95 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 35–55; Newsweek, August 25, 1997, 28. 2. See Monthly Labor Review, vol. 120, no. 10 (October 1997), 96–97. 3. Ibid., 96–97; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unpublished data (1995). 4. Juliet Shore, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 1–15; Kim Moody and Simone Sagovac, Time Out: The Case for a Shorter Work Week (Detroit: Labor Notes, 1995), 17–22. 5. Monthly Labor Review (October 1997), 61, 66; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington, DC: 1989), 106, 124; Arne Kalleberg et al., Nonstandard Work, Substandard Jobs: Flexible Work Arrangements in the U.S. (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 1997), 9. 6. Mishel and Bernstein, The State of Working America, 116; Monthly Labor Review (October 1997), 83. 7. “Class War in the USA,” Multinational Monitor, vol. 18, no. 3 (March 1997), editorial, 5. 8. Wall Street Journal, June 17, 1997. 9. Ibid.

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10. Labor Department, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDL 93–43 (February 8, 1993) and USDL 97–27 (January 31, 1997). 11. Paul Ley, speech to the National Lawyers Guild, Fall 1996. 12. Ken Paff, “Why Did Hoffa Do So Well?” and “Where Do We Go from Here?” Labor Notes 215 (February 1997), 3. 13. Suzanne Gordan, “Is Sweeney’s New Voice a Choice or an Echo?” Labor Notes 199 (October 1995), 12–13. 14. Author’s personal notes, no date. 15. Michael Eisenscher, “Critical Juncture: Unionism at the Crossroads” (Paper presented at the Center for Labor Research, Working Paper and Public Forum Series, University of Massachusetts–Boston, May 1996), 3. 16. Robert L. Rose and G. Pascal Zachary, “New Labor Chief’s Top Job: Resuscitation,” Wall Street Journal (October 23, 1995). 17. Kim Moody, An Injury to All (London: Verso, 1988), p. 53.

7 Unsung Heroes of Union Democracy: Rank-and-File Organizers Peter Downs The preamble to the constitution of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) opens with a quote that it says is “expressive of the ideas and hopes of workers” who unionize. That quote is one of the most rousing in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Like the heroes of 1776, the champions of union democracy are not perfect. Far from it. But they face tremendous obstacles and endure terrible hardships to create the conditions in which liberty and equality can grow. They sacrifice their own comfort for a greater good. That sacrifice makes them heroes. The struggle for liberty, democracy, and equality is not a one-round fight. It is ongoing. Unions have a role in combating the dictates and bribes of corporate employers, but often they fail in their tasks because they, too, can fall under authoritarian rule. Today the best freedom fighters in the United States are often found in unions as dissidents, reformers, and rank-and-file organizers. Kurt Kausler is one of the unsung heroes of U.S. democracy. He doesn’t look heroic. He is a slight, pale, conservative-looking man standing about five feet, eleven inches tall and weighing about 145 pounds. But his softspoken, diffident manner masks a determination to fight for the rights of working people that has cost him friends, career opportunities, and money. Like tens of thousands of average Americans, Kausler was willing to sacrifice his savings and risk his family and his job to struggle for better treatment for his co-workers, better treatment from management, and better representation by his union. Kausler was a supermarket clerk and member of United Food and Commerical Workers International Union (UFCW) Local 655 for twenty-one 117

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years and a shop steward for seventeen years before he took up the cause of reform. He watched local officers negotiate two consecutive concessionaire contracts without opposing the leadership. When, after six years of wage cuts and freezes for members, the leadership voted itself a 10 percent raise, he felt something was wrong. When the executive board decided to let the retiring president name his own successor without an election, he concluded it had an “us vs. them” attitude toward the membership that would destroy the union. In 1990, he organized an opposition slate to contest the next election, and he funded it with his life savings. Several members of the slate came within 200 votes of winning out of more than 8,000 votes cast. Some of the anger driving Kausler and others like him comes from a frustration with union officials who seem ignorant of their duties or don’t care. Democracy activists take unions at their word. Unions are not simply about a nickel in the paycheck. They are supposed to give their members the strength and ability to defend and extend democracy. It says so right in their constitutions. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, it was painfully obvious that the greatest threats to individual rights came not from government but from corporations. The employer had replaced the town council and Congress as the single most important source of laws governing individual behavior. Unions emerged as the opponent of employer authoritarianism. Of all the institutions in civil society, only unions aim to defend the American dream in all its scope: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for working people. As Walter Lippman has written: “The effort to build up unions is as much the work of pioneers as the extension of civilization in the wilderness. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. . . . Men are fighting for the beginnings of industrial self-government.”1 Yet unions are not apart from society; they are a part of it. They, too, are buffeted by social and economic changes and subject to individual corruptibility. That they return again and again to put on the mantle of defenders of the American dream is due to the actions of real people, the reform efforts of rank-and-file activists and the democratic ideals they keep alive. To understand the problems of unions, we first have to understand the problem of working for hire. People need to work in order to live. If they don’t own their own means of making a living, they have to work for someone else. This disparity makes virtually every employer-employee relationship at some level tyrannical. Your employer has the ability to make your job harder or easier, to make your hours better or worse, to increase your pay or take away your income altogether, based on anything at all or nothing at all. In most states employers do not need a reason to fire their

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employees. They can be fired for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they perform their jobs. If you don’t own your own means of making a living, when you lose your job, you can lose everything. Chris Grygiel, a former activist in the Polish union Solidarnosc, discovered this fact after immigrating to the United States. Thrice during the 1980s the communist regime in Poland imprisoned him for his union activities. After his third release he came to the United States and settled in St. Louis. He got a job driving a taxi and found that he often had to work twenty hours a day or more just to make all the payments his employer demanded from him for the car, for insurance, for dispatch services, and so on. In July 1989, he led a work stoppage demanding better pay. He and several other drivers were fired and blacklisted from the industry. They had no income, not even unemployment checks. His pregnant wife was turned away by hospital after hospital. He appealed to the county, state, and federal governments, but to no avail. The experience was a shock. In Poland, communist authorities had put him in prison, but they left his family alone. “Every time I got out of jail, my job was there waiting for me,” he said. “They kept sending checks to my wife, and her health care was the same as when I was out.” He concluded that Polish workers aren’t free under communism but neither are U.S. workers free under capitalism, because they can lose their jobs for their political activities.2 President Woodrow Wilson recognized the basic servility in corporate employment: There is a sense in which in our day the individual has been submerged. In most parts of our country men work, now not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees . . . of great corporations. . . . You know what happens when you are a servant of a corporation. You have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders, and you have often times with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing of things which you know are against the public interest.3

It is a truism in U.S. labor relations that your civil rights stop at the workplace door. Once you step through that door, you lose the right to speak freely; doing so can get you fired for insubordination. A study by Lewis Maltby for the American Civil Liberties Union concluded: An employee who expresses any disagreement with company policy can be legally fired. It does not matter that the disagreement was expressed in a courteous and professional manner, or that it was expressed within the organization and not to the outside world, or that the employee continued

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to competently perform his or her job and even abide by the questioned policy. Any expression of disagreement can be a ground for firing. . . . Firing is often legal even if an employee objects to a company practice that is illegal.4

General Electric (GE), for example, issued an order barring employees from speaking to the public, the press, Congress, a court, or government investigators after some employees went to their congress members with allegations of safety and environmental problems at the company’s atomic power labs. The order went so far as to ban employee comments on management statements “appearing in newspapers, magazines, and books, or that are made in speeches, on TV, at open meetings, or even in casual conversations” and threatened workers with the loss of their job, fines of up to $100,000, and life imprisonment.5 Other companies, including Rockwell, General Motors (GM) and McDonnell Douglas, have imposed blanket gag orders on employees and threatened violators with loss of employment, stopping short of threatening fines and imprisonment. When dealing with government, Americans believe that free people have a right to due process, that proceedings against them should be fair and unbiased. That belief is summed up by the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.” In employer-employee arrangements, that assumption is almost always missing. As Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, has said, the acts of employers are exactly opposite to what we think of as fair play: “Employees accused of breaking a rule are punished and assumed guilty until proven innocent, and, unless they are in a union system, they have no formal system for demonstrating their innocence. Their only right is to quit without penalty. That’s one step up from indentured servitude, but still a long distance from democracy.”6 Privacy is another right many corporations refuse to grant their employees. “Many employers require people to reveal intensely private aspects of their lives as a condition of employment,” including details of their sex lives, their bathroom habits, and their feelings about family members, notes Maltby.7 Adolph Coors Co. asks employees about their alcohol and tobacco use, sexual problems, difficulties with in-laws or mortgage payments, and diet and exercise, in a program to hold down its insurance costs. Lambda Electronics Inc., of Melville, New York, asks similar questions and charges higher insurance premiums to employees who refuse to answer them. 8 A questionnaire used by the Target discount store chain asked job seekers about their religious and political beliefs. Six of the ten questions on a job application for Payless Shoe Source relate to whether the applicant ever received food stamps or Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Wal-Mart has fired employees for adultery. Companies can monitor their workers’ phone calls, and often do. In a survey of 900 companies released by the American Management Association

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in 1997, 63 percent of employers said they engage in surveillance or monitoring of their own employees, and 23 percent of those do so surreptitiously. Fifteen percent of employers read their employees’ e-mail. Sixteen percent videotape their employees at work.9 “In an extreme example, nurses in a hospital in Silver Springs, Maryland discovered a hidden camera the management had installed in the nurses’ locker room that was monitored by male security guards. . . . Some employers require employees to submit to searches or have their belongings or offices searched. . . . The Opryland Hotel (Tennessee’s largest convention center) randomly searches the handbags of women employees, seeking evidence of theft.”10 Employers also hire spies to pose as employees and report to management on the activities of the real employees. All workers know they give up rights when they cross the employer’s threshold. It is so common that it is accepted. What is less well known is that you don’t necessarily get your rights back when you go home. Employers have the legal right to censor and dictate employee’s speech and behavior outside of work. “An employer can legally fire workers for belonging to the ‘wrong’ political party, voting for the ‘wrong’ political candidate or writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper that expressed the ‘wrong’ point of view,” says Maltby.11 In the 1990s, Caterpillar and International Paper fired workers for wearing union T-shirts or sporting union bumper stickers. Caterpillar’s security firm, Vance Security, even spied on the spouses of Caterpillar workers and hauled them into court to try to curtail their speech. Such restrictions create a climate of fear in which employees learn to distrust their co-workers and censor their own speech. Such a climate is difficult for any organizer, but particularly for a rank-and-file organizer who is subject to the same oppressive discipline and conditions of work. Employers give many reasons for their dictatorial behavior. For decades, Electronic Data Systems cited “business reasons” to ban facial hair on male employees and pants on women employees. Union Pacific Railroad cited the “war on drugs” to justify dragging employees into small, bare cells to be interrogated by armed special agents about their offduty activities.12 GM and Chrysler use the same excuse to justify planting spies in their factories. Rockwell International, manager of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for the federal government, cited business reasons when asked to explain why it hired security officers and co-workers to spy on Ed Bricker and even forced him to undergo psychological testing and counseling after he spoke out about safety problems.13 Much has been written about the abuse of psychology by communist bureaucrats trying to suppress their opponents. Corporate officers use the same tactic. Eastern Airlines grounded pilot Dan Gellert for mental instability and sent him to three psychologists after he advised the National Transportation

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Safety Board of a defect in the L-1011 autopilot.14 An Ohio company, NLO, ordered an employee who was also a union negotiator to a psychiatrist after he rebutted company comments during contract negotiations.15 Val Romay, a GM worker and army veteran, said corporate efforts to control employees’ lives and speech reminded him of Eastern Europe before the fall of communism. “I served two years at the Berlin Wall,” he said. “We don’t need that here. We don’t need dictatorship in the plants.”16 Independent unions by their very nature breach management’s authoritarian rule. The very act of unionizing is an act of independence from management. Independent unions give employees a view of work and the economy independent of management’s. That is a necessary step in the process of promoting independent thinking, which is itself a precondition for liberty. Independent unions are the only broad-based institutions that fight for the most basic of individual rights, the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They fight for the right to life by pushing to end dangerous working conditions and struggling to raise the pay and benefits of the lowest workers to a level that supports a healthy diet and a safe home in a healthy environment. They fight for liberty by seeking to gain for workers more rights to decide what to do with their lives, from increasing educational opportunities and job choices, to freeing workers from employer dictates, to giving workers the skills and confidence to participate in the political process. They aid the pursuit of happiness by fighting for more personal time and higher pay to give working people the resources to pursue at least some of their dreams. They make it possible for people to work in order to live, instead of living in order to work. Unions fight for such rights, but they often fail to achieve them. President Theodore Roosevelt said that the central condition of progress is “conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.” The owners of corporations belong to the latter group. “The struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self-government,” Roosevelt observed, is the fundamental nature of fights between workers and their corporate employers. “Our country means nothing,” he added, “unless it means the triumph of real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” 17 The best there is in you may come out in activities other than your paid work. Throughout the twentieth century, many reformers turned to the government to solve the problems of working people by holding corporations in check. Samuel Gompers, the first president of the AFL, hoped the solution to corporate overbearance would lie in the creation of a Department of Labor to represent the interests of workers in the councils of government as a sort of a permanent lobby.18 Theodore Roosevelt championed the idea

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that government is an independent arbiter between capital and labor. In 1903, he persuaded Congress to create the Department of Commerce and Labor and to grant the president the power to publicize corporate wrongdoing. Roosevelt called the law “one of the most significant contributions . . . toward a proper solution of the problem of the relations to the people of the great corporations and corporate combinations.”19 Countering Roosevelt’s advocacy of regulation, Woodrow Wilson claimed government regulation of big business ultimately would lead to big business capturing government.20 In an era of million-dollar campaign contributions, when lobbyists write legislation for Congress and regulations get formulated in a subterranean world of business lobbyist and bureaucrat relations that are hidden from most citizens, what Wilson prophesied has come to pass. In any event, government proved either unable or unwilling to keep corporations in check. Its failure to guarantee workers their basic rights and a minimum standard of living was one of the factors that gave birth in 1936 to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The various unions, of course, are no more identical in the way they function and behave than are people. Some are more democratic than others; some do more to prepare their members to be leaders in their communities. Grading them on a two-dimensional scale delineates three types of unions: rackets, bureaucracies, and democracies. Racketeering unions are simply protection rackets that ensure companies uninterrupted business in return for payoffs to a few people. In bureaucratic unions, union officials mediate between the demands of workers and the needs of employers. Democratic unions are vehicles for workers “to participate meaningfully in making decisions affecting their welfare and that of the communities in which they live.”21 Any actual union may display elements of one, two, or all three types. Labor racketeering may be as old as unions themselves. Certainly it was a problem by 1900. Ray Stannard Baker exposed union racketeering and the partnership between certain businesses and unions to drive out competitors. One such partnership existed between the Fuller Company, owned by Standard Oil, United States Steel, and several large railroad companies, and Sam Parks of the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union (HBU). The Fuller Company originated in Chicago. When it expanded into New York, it brought along Sam Parks to manage union affairs. Parks, an ex-convict, took control of the 4,500-member local of the HBU. Thereafter, no one could build in the city without his approval and without a payoff. According to Baker: “There was evidence he was on their payroll (the Fuller Company’s) long after he became a leader of the union; that all the while he was drawing money from the Fuller Company to look out for its interests.”22 In another case, United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)

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District 12 president Frank Farrington signed an agreement to work for Peabody Coal Company as a “labor advisor” while still holding his union office.23 Baker concluded that such rackets were not “sporadic evils, they were deliberately organized and generously financed; they actually represented the American way of life in many of its most important activities.” A New York City district attorney told Baker: “This corruption in the labor unions is simply a reflection of what we find in public life. . . . It goes through every department of the national, state and local government.”24 Alongside racketeering, and sometimes coexisting with it in the same union, was the idea of an honest bureaucracy mediating between the demands of “the men” and the needs of the company. That was the model supported by Roosevelt and many Progressives. Roosevelt alarmed some Wall Street capitalists when he agreed to receive union leaders at the White House, a meeting that included UMWA president John Mitchell and Samuel Gompers. Roosevelt knew what he was doing. Mitchell and Gompers represented the more conservative wing of the labor movement. Both belonged to the National Civic Federation (NCF), formed in 1900 to promote labor peace. Another NCF leader was Republican financier Mark Hanna, the real head of the Republican Party. “Mitchell was ambitious, vain, and basically subservient in his attitude toward business. He saw himself less as the champion of the overworked and underpaid miners than as a skillful mediator between capitalist and workingmen and as a loyal lieutenant of Ohio’s Senator Mark Hanna,” writes historian Page Smith.25 In 1908, Mitchell resigned his UMWA office to become head of the NCF’s trade-agreement department. Hanna took the line that labor should be encouraged to organize, seeing unions as an alternative to socialism and communism. Since so much of politics is symbolism, a cordial White House meeting with Mitchell and Gompers could both strengthen their influence in the labor movement and increase Roosevelt’s appeal to workers. At the White House meeting, Mitchell and Gompers accepted the open shop for federal workers, acceding to Roosevelt’s argument that in the interests of equal justice he could no more recognize union membership in employment than he could give preference to members of a specific religion.26 Woodrow Wilson shared Roosevelt’s general view of unions. In 1917, he promised to promote “legitimate” trade unionism—that is, trade unionism of the Gompers and Mitchell variety—if such trade unionists endorsed the war effort. Wilson appointed Gompers to the Industrial Relations Council of the War Industries Board, which modestly reformed labor practices and established uniform hours and rates in various industries.27 Meanwhile, his attorney general raided the offices of unions that opposed the war and jailed thousands of their most active members—raids that continued after the war’s end until 1920.

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John L. Lewis, perhaps more than any other union leader, realized that White House symbolism could play in many ways. As president of the United Mine Workers from 1919 to 1959, Lewis perfected the art of putting pressure on the president to intervene in labor disputes to help his union broker solutions. Key to Lewis’s solutions was federal acceptance of market allocations and price fixing to finance wage increases.28 The War Labor Board and War Production Board institutionalized the system during World War II. Lewis’s name is inseparably linked with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the mid-1930s. The explosive growth of unions reflected much more than the draw of his name or a reaction to poverty; it reflected a basic yearning for freedom. The successful sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint in 1936–1937 legitimized both the UAW and the CIO and inspired a wave of strikes across the country. The essential grievance at GM was not pay—autoworker wages were 40 percent higher than the manufacturing average, much as they had been for twenty years—but overwork and the denial of human rights. The auto industry was (and still is) characterized by the primacy of the production line, backed up by intimidation, discrimination, and arbitrary managerial power. Reduced workloads, fair treatment by supervisors, and job security by seniority were the burning issues at GM. As one sit-downer told newspapers: “I ain’t got no kick on wages, but I just don’t like to be drove.”29 Thirty years later, another autoworker expressed the same sentiment in a blues song: “Please mister foreman, slow down that line. I don’t mind working, but I do mind dying.”30 Unions did not actually stabilize their memberships until World War II. In the run-up to war, President Franklin Roosevelt had declared one strike after another “a strike against the government” and ruled them illegal. But he offered union leaders a plum: If they pledged to accept a wage freeze for their members and gave up strikes, he would put pressure on employers to allow the spread of union membership. When employers balked at accepting the growth of unions headed by leaders judged responsible by Roosevelt’s government, the War Labor Board granted unions “maintenance of membership,” mandatory union membership for every production worker in an already unionized shop for the life of the contract.31 Government boards also took steps to reduce the influence of rankand-file members on their leaders. They introduced the grievance procedure into many industries as a way of removing conflict from the shop floor. They established industry-wide wage rates and demanded that unions cede the power to negotiate such rates to their national officers who sat on government boards.32 Economist Sumner Slichter expressed the reasoning for such policies in a 1941 study published by the liberal Brookings Institution:

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Because the officers of the unions are both more willing and better able than the rank and file to take account of the consequences of union policies [on the competitive position of their employers], and because they attach less importance than the rank and file to immediate effects and more importance to long-run results, unions are more successful in adjusting themselves to technological and market changes when the officers are permitted to make policies and negotiate agreements without ratification by the rank and file.33

The War Labor Board repeatedly ruled that national officers must have power over the members. It ruled that members did not have the right to organize against the leadership or its policies, and that the leadership had the right to expel dissidents. To prevent workers from voting with their money and withholding dues from unions that didn’t represent them, the board ordered the automatic deduction of union dues from workers’ pay in those industries with maintenance of membership. According to William H. Davis, chairman of the War Labor Board: Too often members of unions do not maintain their membership because they resent the discipline of a responsible leadership. A rival but less responsible leadership feels the pull of temptation to obtain and maintain leadership by relaxing discipline, by refusing to cooperate with the company, and sometimes with unfair and demagogic attacks on the company. It is in the interest of management, these companies have found, to cooperate with the union for the maintenance of a more stable, responsible leadership.34

In those instances where the Roosevelt administration concluded that the union leadership was not responsible, the government’s options ranged from denying the union maintenance of membership, to recognizing a rival union, to military intervention. It denied maintenance of membership to twenty unions.35 When the 12,000 workers at North American Aviation in Inglewood, California, went on strike in 1941, Roosevelt sent in 3,500 veteran troops to break the picket line. Armed with mortars, machine guns, automatic rifles, and bayonets, they cleared a mile-wide area around the plant and established martial law. The next day the workers yielded and returned to work. As they filed past the ranks of armed soldiers, the troops picked out the strike leaders and barred them from the plant. UAW international officers suspended the local officers and took direct control of the local union.36 Such policies are of more than historical interest. They set rules that limit workplace and union democracy and constrain those modern reformers who want to return the control of unions to their members. The post-war red scare, much like the one following World War I, cemented the position of bureaucratic unions, also called business unions or

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service unions. With loyalty oaths and communist purges, the government was able to ban disagreeable unions, whether or not they were controlled by communists, and conservative union leaders expelled their opponents, again regardless of any communist leanings or lack thereof. Lewis and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America had perfected the methods of imposing their dominance on a once democratic union in the 1920s. Their protégés in the CIO copied those methods and extended them. These tactics included, on the one hand, appointing convention delegates for phantom locals, placing dissident locals under international trusteeship, offering local representatives jobs on international staff, and outright bribery, and, on the other, physical threats and beatings, slanders and forged telegrams, and handbills.37 I saw the caucus of incumbent UAW officers, the self-styled “Administration Caucus,” deploy many of the same methods against reformers in the 1980s and 1990s. By the mid-1950s, virtually every president of every national union had rid himself of significant internal opposition. One of their favorite methods was to award staff jobs to up-and-coming activists, in short, buying them off before they acquired the base and the reputation to become a threat. Not only was a staff job a reward for loyal behavior, but through it international presidents gained another strong arm with which to impose their will on locals and the membership. From 1949 to 1969, for example, the number of staff positions in the UAW more than tripled, though the number of members did not grow. Other unions followed a similar trend.38 Such union leaders as Lewis and the UAW’s Walter Reuther recognized that the membership had to have some independence, some way to express dissatisfaction, to provide the opposing pole to management between which they would mediate a settlement. Their successors seemed to lack that subtle perception. They were mere bureaucrats who adopted the opinion of the Teamsters’ Dave Beck: “Unions are big business. Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy? Would any corporation allow it?”39 The UAW’s Public Review Board used a different but equally revealing analogy when it approved of the disciplining of staff who did not loyally support the president’s political slate. It said that executive board officers had a right to expect absolute loyalty from those below them because the union is “a one party state.”40 Only one union, the International Typographers Union, formally recognized the rights of opposition parties in its constitution. It was unique in maintaining a two-party system, albeit in a weak form. There is a famous dictum that after the party substitutes itself for the people, as in a one-party state, the party leader substitutes him or herself for the party. That is also true of unions. A case in point is the clerical workers union at Boston University. The clericals originally were organized into Clerical Union District 65, a union with neither a tradition of

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nor an orientation toward internal democracy. According to Elly Leary, a member of the New Directions Movement: All District 65 units in Massachusetts were in one giant local. There was an elected group of officers and stewards at each workplace, none of whom were full-time. The next layer up at the bigger units, like BU, was an appointed set of staffers, generally called organizers. When the local was large and involved in organizing drives there were up to four organizers, one of whom was responsible for BU. In early days, the union usually made the unit president or chief shop steward the organizer for BU. Organizing petered out in the eighties and the organizers were let go, except for one for BU. Gradually many of the key workers who had organized the union at BU moved on to other things, often to staff jobs in one union or another, and the local became weaker and weaker. One of the most dynamic founders of the local climbed the District 65 bureaucracy to the point where she appointed the organizer. She appointed a friend over the unit at BU and gave her unqualified support. [Since District 65 lacked an orientation toward membership control, the local had never adopted bylaws or rules outlining the rights and responsibilities of either members or officers. The officials, from stewards on up, simply ran the local. When the new organizer took over] she began to purge the stewards and officer ranks of activists and to supplant them as the union. One by one she bullied or brought charges against the chief steward and other strong stewards until she and two supporters were the only ones left. There were no membership meetings and, since there were so few stewards, few steward meetings.41

When Leary arrived at Boston University, workers had been complaining about the organizer to both District 65 leaders and regional officials of the UAW, with which District 65 had become affiliated, but to no avail. Leary argued that it was futile to rely on higher-ups to remove the organizer. The better strategy would be to get bylaws mandating elections for all offices and then defeat her in an election. About that time, the UAW, whose constitution requires elections for local officers, finally absorbed District 65. Leary ran against the organizer for chief shop steward and lost, 80 to 140 votes. A few months later she won an election to the bargaining committee. That position gave her access to more members and buildings, which enabled her to pull together a democratic slate for the next executive board elections. When that vote came, Leary’s slate won every seat by a 2-to-1 margin. The board’s first order of business was to follow through on its campaign promise to write a democratic set of bylaws to institutionalize membership rights and officer accountability, which the membership approved. The growth of international union staff armies to police the membership is itself a testament to the continued attraction of democratic unionism. It shows that despite the forces of repression that employers, the government,

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and bureaucratic union leaders have brought to bear, a tradition of democracy has lived among union members. Dissidents, reformers, and rank-andfile organizers have kept the tradition alive, often at great personal risk. That they do so in the face of massive forces arrayed against them is nothing short of heroic. The tradition of worker democracy flowed through such organizations as Kelley’s Army in 1894, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Brookwood Labor School, and the early decades of many unions, including the UMWA and the UAW. Many national unions arose from a collection of independent local unions. The national organizations they created quite naturally contained different factions and ideologies, which gave rise to lively internal debate. These organizations schooled workers in the crafts of political organizing and debate and gave them the confidence to participate in the political life of the broader society. Frank Marquart, at one time a local union education director and later an international staff representative in the UAW, recalled that in their early years many CIO unions had active education programs about controversial social and political issues. At Local 212, they dubbed the biweekly discussions “town hall meetings.” Such meetings were always overflowing and the discussions heated, and they prepared members to participate more fully in the political life of their communities. These, too, were suppressed during the red scare and the bureaucratization of unions.42 After purging unions of democracy, Congress unintentionally gave democratic unionists a tool in the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), also called the Landrum-Griffin Act. The LMRDA guarantees union members certain limited rights: the right to elect local union executive board officers, the right to speak freely on union affairs, the right to equal application of union rules, and the right to a copy of the collective bargaining agreement with management.43 These rights are important. Even forty years after the act, many union officers still do not acknowledge that members have free-speech rights. The Labor Department often is the only lever dissidents have to gain the ability to communicate their views to their co-workers. Yet these rights are limited. In many unions, the one body members can elect has very little to do with the most important rules and decisions affecting their lives, the contract. In the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), for example, the international president’s office negotiates all contracts. In other unions, appointed business representatives negotiate local agreements or a bargaining committee is formed separate from the local executive board. The LMRDA requires neither elections for bargainers nor membership ratification of agreements. Congress wanted membership oversight of the local union’s relations with the larger community, because it thought members were politically and socially more conservative than their leaders,44 but it did not want membership oversight

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of union-employer relations, because it thought union leaders were more conservative than their members. In what way do democratic leaders act differently from bureaucrats? John Anderson provides one example. Anderson was chairman of the bargaining committee at Midland Steel in the early years of the UAW. Instead of keeping the process of negotiations a secret from members until he had an agreement and then imposing it on them, or telling them only the highlights of the negotiations, puffing up the good points and ignoring the bad points, or telling members he had gotten them the best they could get and he wasn’t going back, he called a membership meeting after each meeting with company negotiators. He reported in detail on what took place and called for instructions from the workers. “Remember, you are the union,” he exhorted his members. “You call the shots. You decide what is to be done.” When he had a tentative agreement in hand, he read it to the membership, pausing after each sentence to ask for questions or comments.45 Sally Bier evinced the same democratic style at Michigan Blue Cross and Blue Shield. In the 1980s, she won the presidency of the UAW local representing the insurers’ office workers. She resisted pressure from the international union to force the company’s contract offer on her membership. Instead, she called a membership meeting to discuss the offer. She refused to let members get away with simply saying the agreement was good or bad. She insisted that each speaker specify why he or she liked or disliked the agreement. If they disliked it, she asked them which issue they were willing to strike to change. As the meeting progressed a consensus developed to reject the agreement. Bier accepted the judgment of the workers. She led them out on strike in the depths of winter, without the backing of the international union, and they won a better contract. Most dissidents and reformers don’t achieve important union office. More often they fill the role of gadfly, still an important function. By raising issues and questions that capture the thoughts and feelings of other members, gadflies encourage members to think about their union’s policies and actions and become involved, if only for a short time. They also pressure leaders to account for themselves. The most common issues concern money, honesty, and elections, issues that go hand-in-hand. Members don’t like to be lied to, but without the ability to elect their representatives, there is little they can do about it. All members hope the person for whom they vote will be honest. They hope the candidate is seeking office to represent them, not to enrich himself or herself. Elections give members the means to express their dissatisfaction. Electoral competition provides a system in which someone is always watching those in power, in which lies can be found out and exposed. Such concerns have been the mainstay of dissidents in unions as diverse as those representing railroad workers, autoworkers, Teamsters, mail handlers, operating engineers, machinists, janitors,

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office clerks, and retail clerks. Robin Kohl, for example, a UPS worker in Minneapolis, was always turned off by the “fat cat salaries” of Teamster officials, but she didn’t try to do anything about it until they delivered what she thought was a lousy contract in 1990.46 For Mike Vitale, a hoisting engineer in St. Louis, the issue was outright corruption. He watched his business agent plead guilty to taking kickbacks and then get promoted to international staff of the laborers union.47 Sometimes the issues gadflies raise so resonate with the membership that they launch reform movements and election campaigns. That is what happened with Kurt Kausler. His near upset of the bureaucratic machine was no small feat considering that the 16,000-member local covered 130 workplaces spread over hundreds of miles in two states. Kausler’s effort was all the more impressive given that the election committee appointed by the incumbent leadership failed to count all the ballots and destroyed them before an investigation could take place. That irregularity eventually led the Department of Labor to order a new election. In the meantime, the appointed president retired. His successor resigned after being accused of embezzlement. The executive board’s surprise third choice moved quickly to change the local’s image. He ordered business representatives to visit every workplace at least once a week and begin settling grievances. He toured workplaces and talked to workers himself—an unheard-of practice for a local president. He handily defeated Kausler in a rerun of the disputed election, but he did not forget the events that put him there. He paid more attention to the problems of part-time workers, whom the local had long overlooked despite the fact that they made up more than half the membership. The next grocery contract contained a raise for part-timers, the first in years not mandated by minimum wage increases. 48 Thus, although Kausler lost in his bid for local union office, he succeeded in making the union more responsive to its members. Out-of-office careerists also seize on issues of corruption and democracy to power their election campaigns. The difference is in how they frame the solutions to these problems. Careerists ask members to vote for them and then they will set things right. Reformers and rank-and-file organizers believe the solution lies more in membership involvement. They couple their election campaigns with bylaw reforms or contract changes. They champion such changes as limiting the number of offices or salaries an officer can hold, requiring membership ratification of contract changes, direct elections of all representatives, and opening up bargaining to members. Such were the changes Leary and her slate advocated at Boston University. Rank-and-file organizers want the membership to decide negotiating and strike policy and to consider more options than simply accepting what the employer offers or immediately going on strike. Often they pursue these objectives outside election campaigns. I was part of a group in

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one carpenters local that agitated for opening union meetings to all the members, electing shop stewards, and soliciting membership input to contract demands. In response, the district council claimed I was a Teamster agent sent to disrupt the union, and it brought me up on charges to expel me from the union. I got hired at GM and left the union, but the remaining reformers organized a rejection of the contract terms. They then took control of the strike out of the hands of the business agent by organizing picket duty and picket lines to stop shipments to and from the plant, despite the business agent’s promise to management that there would be no picket lines. Perhaps the most important contribution rank-and-file organizers make to democracy is teaching working people that they don’t have to be powerful as individuals to change things for the better. They can improve the circumstances of their lives themselves by working together to solve their common problems. That, after all, is the essence of democracy. Rank-and-file organizers accomplish this by rekindling the principle of solidarity, the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” In bureaucratic unions, the delegation of all authority to union officers and the legalistic application of grievance procedures isolate workers from each other and strip them of the power to improve their lives themselves. Common problems get turned into individual problems that union bureaucracies take away from the workplace to service. Instead of having an active role in the decisions that affect their lives, workers become clients for whom decisions get made. Democratic unionists seek to return problem solving to the workplace and reassert the common links between individuals. When reformers took office at the Westinghouse plant in St. Louis, for example, they began posting each and every grievance on the union’s workplace bulletin board. Workers could see the problems other workers were grieving and made connections to their own situations. As workers began to see a pattern in the grievances, they moved from individual complaints to group grievances, petitions, and mass meetings during break time demanding positive action from management.49 Contrast this process with the typical practice in some unions, including the UAW, which denies even the complaining employee a copy of his or her own grievance! The concept of solidarity does not stop at the workplace walls. Rankand-file organizers constantly strive to expand the boundaries of the concept to include employees of the same company at other workplaces, other workers in the industry, workers in other countries, and anyone who must work in order to live. Living solidarity means more than a national leader issuing a statement or a check that members know nothing about. Such an action is a dead formalism that does nothing to promote the role of workers, the members of unions, in decisionmaking. Living solidarity occurs

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when workers want to show their support for workers elsewhere, as when members of UAW Local 879 in St. Paul, Minnesota, wanted a vote to increase monthly dues by ten cents a month to support democratic unions in Mexico or when they urged Ford workers to stop accepting engines made by strikebreakers at Caterpillar.50 Unions have a crucial role in promoting democracy in the United States, both at work and in the wider political process. They hobble themselves when they suppress or restrict membership democracy. Dissidents, reformers, and rank-and-file organizers keep democracy alive. As Irving Howe and B. J. Widick wrote in 1949: There is one decisive proof of democracy in a union (or any other institution): oppositionists have the right to organize freely into parties, to set up factional machines, to circulate publicity and to propagandize among the members. . . . The presence of an opposition . . . is the best way of insuring that a union’s democratic structure will be preserved. . . . To defend the right of factions to exist is not to applaud this or that faction, but is the overhead (well worth paying) of democracy; groups one considers detrimental to the union’s interests will be formed. The alternative is dictatorship.51

Reformers, dissidents, and rank-and-file organizers recharge unions to play their role in society. They are the unsung heroes of U.S. democracy. Or, to paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, “If you love your freedom, thank a union dissident.”

Notes 1. Page Smith, America Enters the World: A People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I, vol. 7 (St. Louis, MO: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 36. 2. Peter Downs, Interview with Chris Grygiel, Progressive Review (December 1990), 3. 3. Woodrow Wilson, Documentary History of the United States, edited by Richard A. Heffner (New York: New American Library, 1985), 233. 4. Lewis Maltby, A State of Emergency in the American Workplace (New York: ACLU, 1990), 5. 5. Frank Bordell et al. v. General Electric Co., Civil Action No. 88-CU-1155; telephone interview and company documents first detailed in Peter Downs, “Gagging Workers,” Progressive Review (December 1990), 5; Thomas Carpenter, “Cleanup or Coverup? Government Accountability Project,” July 24, 1989. 6. Elaine Bernard, “Why Unions Matter” (Address to New Directions Education Fund Solidarity School, 1994). 7. Maltby, A State of Emergency, 6. 8. John Bremner, “It Wouldn’t Be Healthy to Pick On Country’s Unhealthy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 6, 1994, 16BP; see also, “Job Jeopardy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 20, 1991, 1.

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9. “Most U.S. Employers Spy on Their Workers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1997. 10. Maltby, A State of Emergency, 7–8. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Safir Ahmed, “Train of Terror,” Riverfront Times, vol. 704 (April 1, 1992), 1. 13. Robert Spear, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Final Investigation Report (Washington, DC: Internet Report, 1990). 14. Alan Westin, ed., Whistle Blowing! Loyalty and Dissent in the Corporation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). 15. Matthew Wald, “Retribution Seen in Atom Industry,” New York Times, August 6, 1989, 1. 16. Progressive Review, 6. 17. Wilson, Documentary History of the United States, 227–228. 18. Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969), 115– 119. 19. Smith, America Enters the World, 38. 20. Wison, Documentary History of the United States, 226. 21. United Auto Workers, Constitution of the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), Preamble, 3. 22. Smith, America Enters the World, 78. 23. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 95. 24. Smith, America Enters the World, 79–80. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. Ibid., 37–39; see also Dale Fetherling, Mother Jones the Miners’ Angel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 83–84. 27. Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis, 30; Smith, America Enters the World, 569–570. 28. Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis, 104. 29. Sidney Fine, Sitdown: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 57. 30. Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 130. 31. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London: Verso, 1988), 19. 32. Moody, An Injury to All, 30–33. 33. Ibid., 29–30. 34. Ibid., 20. 35. Ibid. 36. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 116–118. 37. Dubofsky and Van Tine, John L. Lewis, 86–99. 38. Moody, An Injury to All, 64. 39. Ibid., 57. 40. UAW Public Review Board, 5 PRB 337, 342 (1988). 41. Elly Leary, personal communication. 42. Frank Marquart, An Autoworker’s Journal: The UAW from Crusade to One-Party Union (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 111– 114. 43. Public Law 86–257, Title 1, Bill of Rights of Members and Labor Organizations, Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959.

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44. Moody, An Injury to All, 54. 45. Marquart, An Autoworker’s Journal, 72. 46. Robin Kohl, interview by author, “Rebuilding the Unions,” Progressive Review (February 1992), 4. 47. Mike Vitale, interview by author, “Rebuilding the Unions,” Progressive Review (February 1992), 4. 48. Interview with author, cited in Peter Downs, “Rebuilding the Unions,” Progressive Review (February 1992), 4. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. B. J. Widick, Labor Today (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 76.

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8 Reform Movement in the Teamsters and United Auto Workers Ray M. Tillman

Internal Democracy Is Essential for Unions As unions were hitting bottom in the 1980s, reformers in several large unions attempted to reverse this decline by forming opposition movements. Many of these efforts, along with some new ones, continue today. However, labor’s struggle for a more democratic and just economy will likely founder unless unions themselves become more democratically and justly run. Leaders’ love of power and, once empowered, their tendency to despotism show up in many labor unions across the United States. Some leaders feel that better pay and higher living standards take precedence over union democracy. Others contend that private organizations like labor unions should be expected to operate like democratic institutions of U.S. government. Perhaps the most widely held view is that unions are purely economic institutions whose main concern should be the attainment of economic goals for their members. Even those who bemoan union autocracy sometimes condone it as a necessary evil to counter the massive autocratic power of large corporations. Autocratic leaders like John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and Jimmy Hoffa contributed to the economic success of their workers by building political machines that dominated workers’ lives. By taking weak, divided unions and building them into a solid force that wielded great power, such leaders, though corrupt or dictatorial, dramatically boosted the living standards of their members. Robert Michels argued over eighty years ago that “the principal cause of oligarchy in democratic parties is to be found in the technical indispensability of leadership.”1 Not only is it virtually impossible for a large number of people to decide and execute policies, but most individuals do 137

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not want such responsibilities. This tendency leads the masses to pick leaders who will look after their affairs. Once those leaders have a firm control of the union apparatus, the workers who initially supported them have a difficult time removing them from office later. One reason is the long tenure labor leaders enjoy once they take control. “The longer the tenure of office the greater becomes the influence of the leader over the masses and the greater therefore his independence.”2 This factor allows the leadership to stay in power and suppress any opposition, as illustrated throughout labor history. Michels also contended that one reason union leaders do not relinquish any form of power is that if they should lose their office, they would usually find no positions to enable them to retain their status. Michels pointed out that leaders who are paid three to five times the wage of the average workers they represent have more in common with the managers they are supposed to counter than with the worker on the floor.3 Many labor unions seem to confirm Michels’s theory of the “iron law of oligarchy.” Leaders and members alike seem willing to trade democracy for economic gains. If we could count on truly altruistic leaders who not only took into account the well-being of their members but allowed diverse opinions to be heard and debated, then democracy might be less important for union governance. But U.S. labor leaders today, as they have been in the past, are inclined to shut down opposition and factionalism within their own unions. And evidence abounds of union leaders who are far from altruistic. Furthermore, when democracy is not practiced even to the minimal extent outlined in the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959, the result is typically a government by the minority, a rejection of the will of the majority, and a loss of the members’ right to rule themselves. Opponents of union democracy argue that democracy would have hindered the economic gains leaders like Lewis and Hoffa provided their membership. Although some leaders’ intentions may be selfless in the beginning, once the leaders are in power for a long period of time, they begin to see how their influence over the membership can enhance their own independence. In an autocratic organization, the leadership does not need the support of the membership and can bargain regardless of members’ concerns. This phenomenon was evident in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) when Lewis bargained without input from the rank and file. Although he could stay in power because of his enormous political machine, Lewis could not stop the wildcat strikes that plagued the UMWA in the 1940s and 1950s, when the membership opposed his contractual agreements. Leaders like Lewis, Hoffa, and Hillman have mostly sought to enhance their own power, ego, and personal gain. By inviting full participation, democracy produces diverse input into the decisionmaking process, whereas autocracy depends on decisions made

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by the inner circle of bureaucrats, leaving little room for accountability by the membership. In a 1995 article in Washington Monthly, Sean Reilly argued: “Some unions have made strides in fighting back management’s attacks on labor, but . . . overall, unions have failed because of their leaders’ lack of vision and narrow-mindedness, in pursuing their [own] short term goals.”4 Throughout labor history, leaders who hold office for many years usually become bureaucratic and aloof from what is going on on the shop floor. The alleged benefits provided to the membership by an authoritarian leader are not worth the outcome: corruption, murder, and crackdowns on the opposition. Who can say with confidence that democracy in unions led by such men as Lewis, Hoffa, and Hillman could not have created the same gains for the membership? There is no compelling evidence that democracy would impede such gains. In support of this argument, for example, the United Auto Workers (UAW) offers evidence that factionalism did not hinder economic gains made by the autoworkers during the 1930s and 1940s. During the time of conflict between the Progressive and Unity caucuses and throughout the collective bargaining process, the UAW leadership enjoyed the collective support of the membership. This chapter focuses on two reform movements, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and the UAW New Directions Movement (NDM), and their ideals of union democracy and social unionism. The reformers in these movements are fighting for democratic change and believe that democracy will provide the membership an opportunity to criticize ideas and endorse candidates of their own choice in national union elections. Although these reformers and dissidents view democracy as an effective and powerful vehicle in the struggle against the corporate United States and the survival of the U.S. labor movement, they approach reform from different directions.

Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) The history of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has been spotted with dissident organizations, mainly at the local or regional levels. None of these organizations, however, was powerful enough to overcome the authoritarian control exercised by men like Hoffa, Frank Fitzsimmons, and Jackie Presser. The victory of the Miners for Democracy over the corrupt leadership of United Mine Workers’ president Tony Boyle provided hope for dissidents within the Teamsters that a national reform organization could cultivate and democratize a political structure that had been plagued by corruption and dictatorial control. In 1975, “the nucleus of a group came together that could emerge as the national reform movement that would eventually transform the IBT.”5

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A Brief History To understand the reason behind the lack of national organized dissent within the Teamsters union, one must understand the permissive political structure of the IBT itself, which facilitated strong-arm tactics at the local level. During the 1940s and 1950s under the leadership of international presidents Dave Beck and Hoffa, the Teamsters became an increasingly centralized political entity. The IBT organization was similar to an AFL structure in that its underlying philosophy was based on decentralization and local autonomy. With mob ties and IBT-sanctioned local power, “Hoffa did not just build a more centralized bureaucratic union, he created an alliance with organized crime and other Teamster leaders tied to it.”6 This structure allowed local leaders to negotiate local contracts as long as they were loyal to the national leadership. Furthermore, the Teamsters constructed a constitution that provided the locals with complete power over their memberships. Whereas other unions enjoyed the process of electing delegates to the national convention, the vast majority of Teamsters delegates were hand-picked local officers. Dissidents within the union were prevented from running. Another barrier to reforming the union was the lack of opportunity for direct action. In most unions in which dissidents lacked the power to change policy at the national convention, they nevertheless had the power to mobilize the workforce and reject concessionaire contracts by referendum voting. In the Teamsters, the leaders instituted a constitutional clause requiring a two-thirds negative vote to defeat any negotiated contract. This clause provided both local and national leadership the power to negotiate contracts in the best interests of the corporations rather than the workers. In 1976, the members of reform movements within the Teamsters joined to form what has became the most powerful reform movement in U.S. labor today, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. According to TDU national organizer and founding member Ken Paff: “It was a very small, ragtag organization when we began, and at our first convention, we had the support of exactly zero [of the] over 4,000 Teamster officials. . . . We had to start small, and we had to start at the bottom. We named our organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and it was not a coincidence. . . . there was a dramatic lack of democracy within the union.”7 In the years that followed, the TDU occasionally won positions on local councils. Its first major victory came in 1983 when Jackie Presser was deterred from ramming through his first (as national president) concessionaire contract on the National Master Freight Agreement. The TDU pioneered the idea of contract mobilization campaigns, which were used during the 1997 Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service (UPS). “A year before a big contract would expire, [TDU] would be out holding

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meetings, getting people’s demands and putting up organizing actions at the gates.”8 Through the TDU network, its newspaper Convoy Dispatch, and TDU’s local organizers, Presser’s negotiated contract was trounced, 94,086 to 13,082 votes. Through this victory, the TDU gained the strength to challenge the national leadership on such issues as a direct vote for national leaders and a call for an ethics committee. In 1986, with the signatures of thousands of Teamster members, delegates aligned with the TDU presented resolutions to the national convention concerning these issues. The rubber-stamp national convention soundly defeated both resolutions. When the TDU took the issue of a direct vote to court, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was investigating whether to put the entire Teamsters organization under trusteeship through the provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).9 The TDU’s Teamster Rank and File Education and Legal Defense Foundation entered discussions with the U.S. Justice Department on the possibility of enforcing RICO on the Teamsters’ top leaders. Ken Paff states that the TDU understood the dangers in such talks because “we knew that the Justice Department of Ronald Reagan was going to use the top Teamsters leaders, and this is not exactly a bunch of labor militants.”10 The TDU did not want the government to put the union in trusteeship; therefore, it adopted the motto “No government control, no mob control, Teamsters want the right to vote.”11 Why was the TDU against a government trusteeship? As Paff explains: “At a basic level, a court appointed trusteeship is dangerous. It could legitimize the idea or establish a precedent that could be used against a militant union leadership that the government wanted to crack down on.”12 The TDU firmly believed that only membership control could clean up the union. In 1987, after the government threatened to intervene, the Teamsters leadership reaffiliated with the AFL-CIO. Ironically, thirty years earlier, the AFL-CIO had expelled the Teamsters union for its criminal activities. Nevertheless, Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, welcomed the Teamsters back with open arms and defended the Teamsters against government intervention. According to Dan La Botz: “The AFL-CIO was willing to overlook the Teamsters’ criminal activities if it could get the Teamsters’ numbers, their backing in organizing drives, and their dues, which would make up 15 percent of the AFL-CIO budget.”13 Consequently, the TDU took the political offensive by attacking the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of the IBT leadership. During this campaign against the government and the IBT leadership, the TDU went from being a dissident minority to a full-fledged opposition party. Through its membership campaign, TDU was able to defeat

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antiworker initiatives backed by the union leadership; for example, drug testing for car haulers and two-tier wage systems that started new employees at a 30 percent lower pay scale. Consequently, the TDU became a major threat to the old guard by winning numerous local elections around the country. On March 13, 1989, the government reached an agreement with the union leadership that the RICO charges would be dropped if the Teamsters would agree to a consent decree, which included democratic reforms and direct elections for national officers. The consent decree was a victory not only for the TDU but also for democracy within the labor movement. The settlement included the following elements: • • • • •

Government involvement to weed out corruption and mob influence Direct vote for national leaders Direct vote for delegates to the international convention Nominations to be made at the national convention Secure nominations for candidates receiving 5 percent of delegate support through a secret ballot • Independent auditors’ review of the international books • Government-supervised elections in both 1991 and 199614 During the first year after the decree was signed, the TDU refused to endorse any candidate for president. Instead, the TDU utilized its organizing tactics to educate the members about the new democratic reforms required of the international. In 1990, the TDU, which was in no position to put up its own candidate for national president, decided to back reformer and twenty-year New York local president Ron Carey. Carey “had been a Teamster official in the capital of Teamster corruption, New York City[,] . . . who had never sought to rise in the hierarchy, had a modest salary, [and] stood up as a militant for his members, including opposing national contract settlements repeatedly.”15 The TDU endorsed Carey to demonstrate that the TDU and other Teamsters reformers were united to democratize the union. More important, Carey’s slate of seventeen candidates included thirteen TDU members. In March 1991, Ron Carey and his entire slate won a three-way race, receiving 48 percent of the vote and a five-year term. The Carey slate could not have won without the support of the TDU and its acclaimed national network. After Carey’s election, the TDU decided to stay together as an opposition party. Ken Paff summarizes the TDU’s seventeen years of struggle: We’re about changing the Teamsters’ unions . . . and it does mean changing the leaders, but we think we need to change ourselves, the members. We need to change the members and get more than 29% to vote. We need

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to get the members more union minded and clamoring to get involved in organizing. We [also] need to change the structure.16

Although the TDU had finally helped take control of the teamsters presidency and the IBT executive council, the locals were still headed by the old guard. Ken Paff observes: “It was like a war, where you landed a helicopter on a mountain top and you said, ‘We’ve taken the mountain’ and you look down and the enemy has troops all around you on the sides of the mountain.”17 The TDU knew that the battle for democracy was not over and that these local leaders would eventually launch a counterrebellion against the new leadership. For that reason, the TDU felt an urgency to educate the membership about democracy and the need for change at the local levels. Political Philosophy When the TDU was formed in 1976, it hammered out a democratic constitution that became a model for other reform movements within the U.S. labor movement. This constitution charts the political intention of the TDU and its members, including the foundation of the organizational structure. It is no accident that the TDU wanted to separate itself from the top-down control of the international union by building a structure based on membership participation and inclusion in the decisionmaking process. The membership of the TDU is made up of many different political and union philosophies, ranging from conservative to socialist, but the founders of the TDU had leftist or socialist political tendencies. These leaders had been part of a new generation of radicals who came out of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and entered the labor market in the early 1970s. This socialist bent is not surprising, because throughout the history of labor it has been socialists “who have organized labor unions and later worked to reform them, and TDU was no exception.”18 Some of these young radicals in the Teamsters union belonged to a small group called the International Socialist (IS), “which believed in socialism from below, by which they meant that ordinary people needed to become involved in change.”19 The IS distinguished itself from other socialist organizations “in that, while it opposed capitalism, it also opposed the various Communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, and I.S. was a fervent supporter of Polish Solidarity when it appeared in 1980.”20 Mike Friedman, an original TDU activist, states in the book Rank and File Rebellion: “Our idea of socialism . . . was more democratic control,

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control by people who actually do the work in society: a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach: a sense that you have to have a democratic interplay, that there is no group that has all the answers.”21 To offset red-baiting attacks by the international Teamsters union, TDU organizers did not deny their affiliation with socialist organizations but “concentrated on the issues of union democracy, union contracts, and the big task of reforming the most powerful and autocratic union in the USA.”22 These tactics and the utilization of the TDU’s legal department to defend workers who spoke out or were fired for their labor activities eventually led more conservative members to join the ranks of the TDU and the reform movement. Today the TDU still believes in the idealism of a bottom-up approach to reform. Ken Paff states: “Democracy [is] not just democratic rules, not just voting out the top leaders, but a top to bottom change within the union, and inclusive unionism, a union based on an active, involved, informed membership.”23 Paff explains further that the TDU is narrowly focused on the Teamsters union because “without that focus we cannot win.” Although its main goal is changing the Teamsters, the TDU understands that there is a broader vision that includes social democratic unionism if the workers are going to overcome a two-tier society of the haves and the have-nots.24 The rallying cries for more democratic unions in the U.S. labor movement are based on arguments for more open debate, diverse views, and direct voting for all officers. Though diverse views and debate are encouraged, the TDU has historically been a unified movement. Factionalism is almost nonexistent in the TDU’s 10,000-member organization. Paff contends that if there were major rifts inside the organization, people would walk with their feet: “It’s not like a union where people would stay and fight because it determines their pension or their wages or provides big jobs worth fighting over. The biggest job here pays $20,000 with no benefits, and it’s long hours, so it’s not geared toward a bureaucratic set up.”25 The TDU and Ron Carey Since Ron Carey’s victory, the TDU has played an important role in ensuring that democratic reforms prevail throughout the IBT. At first Carey distanced himself from the reformers and offered an olive branch to the old guard to unify the Teamsters. To his dismay, the old guard tried to block all of his internal reforms. According to Diane Kilmury, a TDU steering committee member and vice president of the IBT: “I think we [have] extended the olive branch as far as it’s ever going to get extended. I told Ron Carey that I am going to put [him] up for the Nobel Peace Prize,

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because if it had been left up to me, there would have been bodies stacked up like cordwood around that marble palace [IBT headquarters], day one.”26 After a few years of trying to bring in the old guard and unify the Teamsters, Carey had no choice but to replace the carrot with the stick. Carey than allied himself with the TDU. The TDU has utilized its mobilizing tactics to help Carey offset the counterrevolution by the old guard. In 1994, the old guard started a new caucus called the “Real Teamsters” and picked Jimmy Hoffa Jr. as its candidate to run against Carey in 1996. As Paff states, reform has taken place both at the leadership level and with the rank and file; however, the old guard still controls most of the local leadership. In a bold move, Carey, backed by the TDU, had a national membership referendum vote for a 25 percent increase in membership dues to augment the dwindling coffers of the strike fund. The old guard mobilized its forces and started a disinformation campaign charging that Carey was calling for a 25 percent increase in dues—when in reality he was asking for a 25 percent increase in the minimum dues (which is two times a worker’s hourly wage). These efforts caused Carey’s ballot initiative to lose by more than a 3-to-1 margin. Bob Mattingly, a TDU organizer, states: “In general, members tended to vote in the dues referendum very much like they vote in the referendum for General President; that is, they voted against the union officials they know best—their principal officers and business agents.”27 After the defeat of the dues increase, Carey won two major victories: the strike against unfair labor practices by UPS and the abolishment of the area conferences, in which the old guard and local and regional leaders dominated. Both issues, especially the latter, were opposed by the old guard. To some members, this action to abolish the conferences was viewed as a purge of political oppositionists, but the executive board, which voted 14 to 3 to abolish the conferences, stated: Teamsters members now spend $15 million per year on area conferences, not counting organizers and clerical staff; the conferences pay a total of 13 people to work full-time on contract negotiations and contract enforcement. . . . When officials are not elected by the membership and not accountable to them, that inevitably leads to corruption and the kind of arrogance we have heard about.28

In 1995, the TDU engaged in a campaign to elect local delegates to the 1996 convention. The TDU recognized that although Carey might win the presidential election, a unified opposition could do serious damage at the convention and weaken Carey’s authority. If the old guard could garner 51 percent of the vote, it could essentially strip Carey of his powers, making him a figurehead until his new term expired.

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The 1996 Convention The Teamsters convention was held in Philadelphia in June 1996 and was attended by two opposing forces, democratic reformers and the old guard headed by James Hoffa Jr. As predicted, the forces led by Hoffa were well prepared for the weeklong convention. From the beginning, Hoffa delegates disrupted proceedings by drowning out the school children who recited the Pledge of Allegiance, Ron Carey, and even U.S. Senator Arlen Spector from Pennsylvania. Realizing that the Hoffa camp had a slight majority of convention delegates, Carey allowed the frequent interruptions and time-consuming hand-counts of votes led by this unified opposition. Over the five-day convention, “89 ‘points of order’ were raised, mostly by Hoffa supporters to make political statements.”29 By the final day, very little convention business had been completed. Teamsters vice president and TDU member Diane Kilmury was appalled at the way the Hoffa delegates were disrupting the convention. Kilmury later maintained that reformers at the convention felt as if they were “defending [their] home from the barbarians at the gate.”30 One important piece of business that was achieved was the nominations for general president of the IBT. Hoffa received 954 votes to Carey’s 775, well above the 5 percent of the delegates needed to be placed on the ballot. The TDU maintained that this vote was a major victory for Carey, who had received only 15 percent of the delegate vote in the 1990 convention but had gone on to win the popular vote. Because little business had been completed, the IBT executive board ruled that another convention would be held in 1997. Ken Paff stated: “Whoever wins the [1996] election will be able to control the [next] convention.”31 The TDU and the 1996 Election The 1996 election for president and other national officers became a referendum on the reform agenda set by Ron Carey after he won the 1991 election. In its attempt to get Carey reelected, the TDU used some of the strategies it had developed over the previous twenty years. One such strategy was to infiltrate the locals dominated by the old guard. Organizers with the reform movement built a network within these locals to get Carey’s message out to the rank and file. These “guerrilla tactics” provided Carey the popular vote, which became pivotal in his reelection victory. Carey won four out of the five Teamsters regions but won by only 4 percent of the popular vote. The question remains: Why was Hoffa able to garner 48 percent of the vote? The Carey camp claims that the margin was close because Hoffa had adopted issues from the TDU and the Carey campaign, such as “caps on

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salaries of union officials, support for the right to vote for convention delegates, and opposition to the reinstatement of Area conventions (which Carey and the Executive Council had abolished) and a bloated bureaucratic structure.”32 The most important factor was Hoffa’s ability to get his message out to the rank and file. According to one business agent from New York, Hoffa’s message was appealing “because you have to put effort into being a union member, but people want to say ‘Here’s my dues, you take care of it,’ which Hoffa, trading on his father’s tough guy image, promised to do.”33 Regardless of Hoffa’s strong showing, the TDU played a major role in Carey’s reelection and in protecting the democratic reforms attained since his inaugural election. After the 1996 election, the international issued the “Teamsters Action Plan for a Stronger Union.”34 This plan, which was endorsed by the TDU, included: • • • • • • •

One union, one game plan Smart strategies for taking on employers Organizing to build Teamster power Independent political action for working families Pension and health and welfare funds that serve the members A grievance procedure that works A union that belongs to the members

Plans for the Future After endorsing the Teamsters Action Plan, TDU members gathered in February 1997 to discuss the future of the TDU and the main strategies that would be developed to further their goals of building a democratic and rank and file–led union. The plan included: • A strategy to put members first. By building model locals, TDU would get the membership more active and informed. These locals would network to advance innovative ideas developed by the membership and supported by the international. • A strategy for winning better contracts. TDU envisioned a concept of utilizing the membership on bargaining committees and strategic planning that would involve the members, community groups, and the international. • A strategy for winning grievances. Union leaders would be held accountable for their representation. TDU would foster educational programs for business agents and stewards to strengthen the grievance process, and new strategies would be pursued to build rank-and-file unity and action to advance the union’s position.

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• A strategy for organizing the unorganized. TDU would seek to build a rank-and-file volunteer organizing committee (VOC) as a “strike-force” in every local. The VOC would be deployed during contact campaigns, for grassroots political action, and for community development. • A strategy for building a vital new labor movement. TDU would help networks among all unions to support struggles at the local, national, and international levels, as well as alliances with community, religious, and civil rights organizations.35 The UPS Strike On Labor Day, 1997, Ron Carey said: “The Teamsters’ new contract at the United Parcel Service is an historic victory for 185,000 Teamster members.”36 The victory was made possible by Teamsters organizing the shop floors six months before the strike. The tactics that forced UPS to concede to the union appear to have come from the TDU national planning meeting. The strategy included volunteer rank-and-file organizers who worked inside UPS to garner support by educating the membership on contractual issues and the possibility of a walkout. In addition, the international sought out rank-and-file members to become part of the International Bargaining Committee. Ken Paff explains that TDU organizers were used during the petition drive, prior to the strike, and that they collected over 100,000 signatures of UPS workers attesting that the rank and file were willing to walk if necessary.37 The international used volunteer rank-and-file organizers to disseminate information about the upcoming negotiations, first on a weekly basis, then daily as the negotiations grew closer. By the time the union went on strike, the members had become a cohesive force that brought the parttimers and the full-timers together. According to the Convoy Dispatch: “When the strike began, the months of building and organizing paid off. New leaders emerged from the ranks and took on responsibilities for staffing the lines, providing food, talking to the media, organizing roving pickets, talking to customers, leafleting the public and more.”38 Tim Buban, a UPS contract coordinator and TDU member, maintains: “The key was that it wasn’t about a few people mobilizing the masses by directing them and doing things for them. It was working with people to coordinate, communicate, and mobilize with each other. Keeping that spirit and solidarity alive on the inside is the challenge and why the contract campaign cannot end.”39 New Election: A Serious Setback A few days after the UPS strike had ended, Teamsters election officer Barbara Quindall nullified the 1996 election and ordered a rerun election

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between IBT president Ron Carey and his opponent, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. On September 18, 1997, three men who had worked on the Carey campaign pleaded guilty to illegal fund-raising schemes during the 1996 election. The improprieties stem from allegations that Ron Carey’s assistants worked out a scheme with the Democratic National Committee to funnel money into the Carey campaign. On November 18, 1997, Kenneth Conboy, the new court-appointed union monitor, barred Carey from running in the 1998 rerun election. Conboy disqualified Carey for engaging “in improper self dealing by diverting members’ dues to his campaign coffers in the [election] year, [which] nullified the election.”40 Although Carey declared his innocence and will fight the decision handed down by Conboy, he decided to take an unpaid leave of absence just before these charges were lodged against him. The TDU held its twenty-second annual convention in Cleveland in November 1997. With over 600 delegates attending, the largest number in TDU history, the shocked members expressed support for Ron Carey. However, as is the TDU tradition, the delegates vowed to continue their fight, if necessary without Carey. During the convention, three potential reform-minded candidates not associated with the TDU addressed the floor. The TDU decided not to endorse any candidate to replace Carey on the reform ticket at that time. In April 1998, election officer Michael Cherkasky announced that even though violations had occurred in the Hoffa campaign, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. could run for president of the Teamsters. Cherkasky fined Hoffa $42,000 for those violations. Although this decision was a major setback, the TDU decided to endorse Ken Hall, director of the International Union’s Parcel and Small Division as well as the chief negotiator during the UPS strike and an aide to Ron Carey. In the subsequent months Hall dropped out of the race because of health problems. The TDU then endorsed reform candidate Tom Leedham, director of the Teamsters’ 400,000member Warehouse Division and international vice president. Nevertheless, Tom Leedham came out on the short end of the November 1998 election. After just six months of campaigning on a reform platform, endorsed by TDU, Leedham garnered 40 percent of the vote to Hoffa’s 54 percent, while a third candidate, John Metz, received 6 percent. The ballots were counted during the first week of December 1998. In a press release, TDU vowed to “continue its fight for a strong, democractic union that stands up for all working people.” 41 Organizer Ken Paff stated: “This election shows that the rank-and-file power is here to stay. If old-guard officials like Hoffa are ready to change their stripes and mobilize members to take on corporate greed, we certainly will support them. But if they go back to corruption and backroom deals with employers, then rank-and-file Teamsters will be there to fight back at every turn.”42

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Future Prospects With all the major victories of the TDU, such as direct election of national officers, abolishing the conference committees, creating a human rights commission within the Teamsters, amending the constitution to become more democratic, and mobilizing, educating, and organizing the rank and file, the IBT has gone from one of the most reactionary trade unions in North America to one of the most progressive. The TDU has acknowledged that the struggle to keep the Teamsters a democratic union will continue for years—especially in light of the election of Jimmy Hoffa Jr. to the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Furthermore, the TDU continues to outline a future offensive to battle the old guard. The TDU asserts that the locals have become the next battleground for reform. It has introduced changes that could restructure local and regional IBT governments. These changes include democratic bylaws, elected stewards, elected business agents, mail ballots with outside supervision, lower salaries for local officials, voting on any salary increases by the members, steward councils, and election of bargaining committees by the rank and file.43 With the growth of the TDU over a twenty-year period, it appears that this reform organization will be around for years to come. Diane Kilmury summed it up in a speech in 1993: I’m not going to stand up here and say it’s perfect, you get a group like TDU, you take over the top leadership and everything’s perfect. It doesn’t work that way. . . . What I can tell you is that everybody in the new Teamsters, from the membership to the leadership to the people of TDU, are fighting away, we are never, ever going to give up, whether it is 17 years or 117 years, we are going to change the Teamsters union until it looks exactly like TDU.44

New Directions Movement In the 1930s and 1940s, the early years of the United Auto Workers, internal democracy was both a precedent and the foundation of this powerful union. At the time two factions were fighting for control of the UAW: the Progressive Caucus and the Unity Caucus. The Progressive Caucus was led by UAW president Homer Martin, who was considered more conservative by the rank and file. The Unity Caucus allied itself with socialist, communist, and unaffiliated militant unionists. By the mid-1930s, a two-party system and internal democracy had become part of the UAW political structure. “There have been few occasions in the annals of American labor on which fratricidal strife reached an equal pitch of bitterness and fury.”45

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Before the UAW was formed, opposition slates or parties in other unions were often formed by grassroots reformers trying to oust their leadership. Walter Reuther, a leader in the Unity Caucus, realized the danger this strife would cause in union dealings with the auto industry. Although there were fervent battles within the UAW over internal issues such as centralization and foreign policy issues as the United States was entering into World War II, the two caucuses made an earnest attempt to organize the auto industry. However, when Walter Reuther won the presidency of the UAW in 1947, democracy started to fade. In the early years of Reuther’s regime (which eventually became known as the Administrative Caucus), he began to build a powerful and loyal political machine by purging his opponents and appointing his allies to powerful positions. Since his death in 1970, there have been many disagreements on whether Reuther held true to his early principles in his later years or became just another authoritarian union boss. Some labor historians argue that Reuther ran the union with iron discipline but kept to his principles of social unionism, “the use of unions to pursue the public good through political, social and economic reforms.”46 Because the UAW constitution does not include rules governing succession, a struggle began within the UAW leadership after Reuther’s death.47 Leonard Woodcock emerged as the first of five presidents over the next twenty-eight years. The Administrative Caucus began a new era and came to resemble a dictatorial one-party state more than a democratically run organization. Most labor historians and the mainstream press have argued that the firing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) workers in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan was the beginning of the great decline of the U.S. labor movement. Although the PATCO incident was clearly a devastating defeat for the labor movement, the Chrysler bailout in 1980 was also a precursor to the declining power of U.S. labor. Two landmark decisions by the UAW leadership during the Chrysler bailout had an injurious effect that continues to plague the entire labor movement today. The first was the UAW’s abandonment of social unionism and adversarialism in favor of a more business-minded and cooperative approach with the auto industry to help save it from bankruptcy. In 1981, the UAW leadership under Douglas Fraser agreed that the union workers would take concessions if the government bailed out the Chrysler Corporation. In return, the UAW received a seat on Chrysler’s board of directors. After a more militant and radical philosophy toward the three big automakers in the 1970s, “the language of the UAW leadership had returned to the cooperative norm of business unionism. The talk of a onesided class war disappeared,” and the bailout “put the UAW in a new posture—that of a partner in corporate triage and salvation.”48

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In the following years, the UAW workers at Chrysler were asked for more givebacks, thus opening the gates for concessions within other companies by their workers. “The terms of the Chrysler bailout and subsequent events should have warned labor that employers were not out to cooperate, but to take advantage of labor’s weakness.”49 The cooperation approach of acceding to concessions has subsided in recent years but still appears to be the policy of the UAW leadership. The second concession during the bailout crisis was the new nonadversarial program of cooperation between labor and management. The idea behind “Quality of Work Life” programs (QWL), which started with the UAW, was “getting workers to identify with company goals. Depending on the particular scheme, the union is either integrated into this process or marginalized altogether.”50 The union was moving away from “an injury to one is an injury to all” to a corporate ideology of interworker competitiveness. Buying into the Japanese labor-management scheme of jointness took the union away from the process of confrontation and compromise to a philosophy of consensus.51 This approach has become known in union circles as the “team concept,” a decisionmaking process between labor and management. According to Larry Solomon, local president of the striking UAW Caterpillar workers and an initial supporter of the jointness program in 1982: “We started setting up teams inside the plant. Everyone was coming in and sharing their ideas about how to do the work quicker, how to do it with fewer people. . . . We helped them [Caterpillar] defeat us by writing up those detailed descriptions of our jobs. So I can tell that none of these companies have your interest at heart.”52 The jointness program has entrenched the UAW bureaucracy by creating a machine of appointed union members who are loyal to the leadership. Victor Reuther states: The tragedy of what has happened in recent years is that the union has come to accept the thesis that its future is intrinsically a part of the corporate future and, therefore, unless it makes concessions to help the corporate structure survive, the union won’t survive. And in the process, shop stewards have been eliminated, and in their place full-time functionaries are paid by the corporation, who serve as jointness committeemen on health and safety, on increased productivity, on outsourcing.53

A Brief History As the UAW leadership began in the 1980s to retreat from its democratic principles and social unionism, unrest within the ranks began to develop. Certain locals around the country became concerned about union concessions and the lack of leadership at both the national and regional levels.

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In addition, the UAW leadership became paranoid about internal challenges to the Administrative Caucus and its philosophy. In 1985, in UAW Region 5 (representing 75,000 UAW members in eight south-central states, including Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, and Kansas), a movement called New Directions began to develop. These new insurgents “disagreed with what they believed was the union’s concessionaire strategy and the lack of democracy in the region—initiating their movement out of directly felt needs more than a coherent philosophy or strategy.”54 New Directions grew out of a strategy developed by Jerry Tucker, a fourteen-year veteran of the international staff and assistant director of Region 5. Tucker developed a militant tactic called “running the plant backwards.” This tactic revived the old strategy of a worker slowdown and “created an atmosphere involving the rank and file in collective action on the job.”55 The utilization of work slowdowns, mass grievances, passive resistance, and other forms of Tucker’s “in-plant strategies” forced major companies to back down on worker concessions and management’s strategy of unfair labor practices. In 1986, New Directions nominated Jerry Tucker to run for regional director against the incumbent, Kenneth Worley. For his actions, the UAW leadership fired Tucker on what it called the “90 day rule.” This rule, which is not in the UAW constitution, “requires a staff member who wants to run against an incumbent Regional Director to announce his or her candidacy 90 days before the election, and to take an unpaid leave of absence.”56 Tucker, who did not begin his campaign before the ninety-day period, was forced to take leave by the UAW leadership. He challenged this action and began his campaign to unseat the incumbent. New Directions is an organized opposition caucus and network built around a reform philosophy and grassroots effort, not around one personality. Tucker argued “against depending on his candidacy as a panacea”57 and emphasized the need for direct action and the building of a grassroots organization. At the 1986 national UAW convention, Tucker appeared to have enough delegates to defeat his former boss in the regional election. After the ballots were counted, incumbent Ken Worley was declared the winner by a vote of 325 to 324.8, a difference of two-tenths of a vote. The New Directions Movement and Tucker contested the election results and retained attorney Chip Yablonski (an attorney who had helped in the Miners for Democracy campaign and victory in the early 1970s) to ensure that a new election was held. Through Yablonski’s services, the U.S. Department of Labor “found the following election violations: several delegates who had voted for Worley had never been properly elected in their local; two delegates who

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had voted for Worley received payments of approximately $5,000 in UAW funds.”58 After the election, the UAW used high-handed tactics to purge local leaders in Region 5 who were loyal to Tucker. To New Directions’ credit, while the investigation continued, the movement grew to unprecedented levels, owing both to the attacks on Tucker loyalists and to New Directions programs, such as all-day strategy workshops addressing union responses to whipsawing (economically pitting one shop against another), concessions, and plant closings. After the U.S. Department of Labor called for new elections, a special convention was conducted under the supervision of the department. Tucker won the election by sixty votes and was allowed to take his seat to finish out the last twelve months of his term. This reversal was not the end of the Administration Caucus campaign against Tucker and the New Directions Movement. The day Jerry Tucker was sworn in as regional director, the president of the UAW, Owen Beiber, announced he was going to lead a campaign to defeat Tucker at the next election. “The Administration Caucus set up a special ‘Friends Social Club’ dunning all international representatives for $500 each, in addition to the traditional ‘flower fund’ to which all staff are expected to contribute $150 annually.”59 During Tucker’s reelection campaign, the UAW leadership made sure, with the help of the auto industry, that Tucker and other New Directions candidates would not be allowed to campaign at auto plants. While Tucker and others were being denied this right, the UAW leadership was courting his opposition on elections within the same plants Tucker was prohibited to enter.60 In addition, Tucker, a political leftist, was actively red-baited at rallies across the country. The challenger told one rally that “his first official act would be to take down the communist flag in front of Regional Headquarters.”61 Although Tucker was very popular in Region 5, his defeat was centered on the ability of retired members to vote for delegates in regional elections. “The UAW mobilized extraordinary numbers of retirees to attend election-day meetings with top officials, and [Tucker] was incorrectly accused of wanting to take away retirees’ rights.”62 According to Tucker, “You can lose the union but you can’t lose the pension. And yet the retirees came out in record numbers in six big auto locals and those numbers defeated me.”63 Another setback for New Directions was the announced ruling by the UAW Public Review Board (PRB) on the ninety-day rule. Although Tucker decided to take his challenge on this issue to federal court, another challenger to the leadership from a different region contested his forced leave with the PRB. The board declared that a “one-party institution” is not illegal. The PRB recognized the fact that the ninety-day rule was never published by the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) or incorporated

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into the union’s constitution. Nevertheless, it argued: “For this Board to rule that the union can act only through formal action of the IEB . . . would be to ignore the realities of how this Union has long governed itself and would call into question a wide range and untold number of IEB actions over the years.”64 Because the PRB legitimized Tucker’s firing, the federal district court relied on the PRB ruling in its decision against Tucker’s claim. Tucker then took the case to the Supreme Court, which backed the federal court’s decision and refused to hear the case.65 After these two major defeats, 500 workers met in St. Louis in October 1989 and formalized the New Directions Movement as a permanent opposition group within the UAW. The New Directions Movement initially made enormous gains at the local level, including the election of Dave Yettaw, a New Directions member who won the presidency of a 14,000-member local in Flint, Michigan, the largest local within the entire UAW. Since 1989, New Directions has continued its long-term campaign both to democratize the union and to end the jointness program by initiating a “competent adversarialism” program on the workroom floor. In 1994, New Directions won a major victory when Dave Yettaw led his membership on strike over speedups and excessive overtime, thus forcing General Motors (GM) to rehire 779 laid-off workers. In addition, Yettaw forced management to accept a thirty-six-hour workweek at forty hours’ pay, and forced overtime was eliminated. Under the provisions of the UAW contract, locals can take strike votes if certain safety and work standard issues are unresolved. Before the Flint strike, the UAW leadership had prevented locals from striking over these issues and forced them to accept the concession demands of the company. Yettaw demanded his rights under the contract, and the UAW leadership “couldn’t rebuke him, because he was just too large, too well organized, and had overwhelming membership support.”66 Yettaw embraced the NDM position concerning overtime when he argued that corporations are “using [overtime] to avoid hiring additional workers, since it’s cheaper to pay overtime than to pay health and other benefits to new hires.” According to Yettaw, “overtime is the cocaine of the American auto worker”; “many members work the equivalent of six weeks a month because of overtime.”67 A year and a half after Yettaw’s victory, the regional UAW wanted Yettaw out of office and unleashed the political machine to defeat him. General Motors began to intimate that Buick City in Flint, Michigan, would have to close its facility. The UAW regional administration began a campaign against Yettaw by telling the workers that if Dave Yettaw won the next election, the plant would be shut down.68 The regional UAW put up an opposition slate against Dave Yettaw. With the help of Flint’s mayor, the city controller, GM, the UAW, and a disinformation campaign against the incumbent, Yettaw lost the election,

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54 percent to 46 percent. By injecting fear into the workers that the plant would be shut down if Yettaw won the election, regional UAW leaders persuaded some of the members loyal to Yettaw to vote for his opposition. Jerry Tucker argues that during his tenure as regional director, he seldom saw the national leadership’s fingerprints; it was the regional officials who were consumed with defeating him. Tucker maintains: “A lot of times this isn’t just a directive from the top, the way the rules of the one-party state operate is that anybody who is part of the apparatchik knows that it’s their duty to take out the enemies of the state.”69 The lesson that has to be fully learned, according to Tucker, is that “the company [GM] had already decided for other reasons, marketing cost associated with product transfers, and so forth, to shut that plant down. No amount of concessions and begging will save it.”70 Since the defeat of Yettaw, GM announced in 1997 that by 1999 Buick City in Flint will be shut down, 3,800 workers will be laid off, and another 4,000 will be transferred. New Directions’ Political Structure and Philosophy In 1989, the New Directions Movement met in St. Louis and assembled constitutional bylaws modeled after the Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s constitution. The delegates concluded that the movement would be based on participatory democracy and would be a model for the future of the UAW political structure. Preamble We have traded away the only true means of gaining and exercising power in the workplace and community—our solidarity as workers. The need for a new direction dictates the creation of a viable, rank and file directed alternative. Our union must defend workers from corporate attacks. Only a strong democratic union can coordinate this struggle to regain past concessions, and prepare the membership to resist future exploitation. We need a union controlled by an informed membership, not one under the domination of a one-party political caucus concerned with its own political self-preservation. . . . [The members] must have the courage and the commitment to fight racist and sexist violence and discrimination. The struggle to create a socially and economically just society cannot be won without such a labor leadership. Through New Directions our union can once again be in the forefront of that struggle.71

Although the members of the TDU realize that to change the U.S. labor movement they must help revitalize it in its entirety, they have also stressed that the TDU is a narrowly issue-oriented organization. For the New Directions Movement, the issue of changing the union is of global proportions.

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Jerry Tucker explains the difference between the TDU’s philosophy and that of New Directions: The UAW is a very centralized union. They are also a union whose role in social and community activities was, at least during the Reuther years, more prominent than the Teamsters. [The UAW] was known as a practitioner of social unionism, at least for a while, and influenced major industries, singular major industries. We [New Directions] tend to discuss issues such as international unionism because the industries we are dealing with are international in nature. They are multinational corporations, transnational, and they are really part of the growing hegemony of multinational corporations as well. Not just within one country, but on a world-wide basis. . . . We tend to take the issues that are broadly associated with progressive international unionism as well into account in our discussions because they have an impact on the issues facing the UAW.72

Although changing the internal structure is important to the members of the NDM, Tucker explains how the international, through global unionism, could bring corporations to their knees and to the negotiating table. Through his scenario, one can realize the power a union could have if it reached out globally to other unions around the world. First, through global unionism, a link would develop among the workers of the same sectors and corporations, and through this solidarity and strength, a company would have to think twice before shutting down or transplanting to a Third World country. Tucker, a master of inside-workplace strategies, believes that if the UAW had adopted a policy of internationalism, it could have won the Caterpillar strike in a matter of days. He explains that Caterpillar backlogged its inventory for a year and, through the jointness scheme, anticipated it could win a drawn-out strike or lockout. If the UAW had been headed by leaders of the New Directions Movement, it would have reached out to union members in countries such as South Africa, Belgium, and Brazil, where the second-largest Caterpillar corporations exist. The UAW, which has a strike fund of $600 million, could have utilized $10 million to hire organizers over in Belgium, Brazil, and South Africa—set up some kind of coordination and hire indigenous organizers from those communities who have labor backgrounds. For instance through global solidarity, the Brazilian workers could go on strike, and [the UAW] could have sent some of the strike funds down there and put it in a Brazilian [b]ank, and paid the Brazilian workers more than they are getting because of the rate exchange. It would have been cheaper than paying $100 per week to string UAW workers in the United States.73

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Furthermore, New Directions is trying to educate workers that the union must be an autonomous organization and be separate from corporate goals. Tucker argues that “we are pushing autonomous unionism. Autonomy from the corporation in the sense that you notice that much of our challenge to the international is to get out of bed with corporate America [and] the corporate world.”74 Tucker also believes that unions must return to the philosophy of unionism of the 1930s because “unions essentially came into being to . . . protect workers’ income security, and job security, and improve their working conditions.”75 The lack of vision by the UAW leadership, NDM argues, shows that the labor movement has “more confidence in business and business initiatives and grouping to recapture business unionism” than concern about the workers or social and community issues.76 Internal Union Philosophy Changing the union’s political structure and constitution remains a priority for the members of the New Directions Movement. In 1992, Jerry Tucker, who has popular support among the rank and file, ran for president against the incumbent, Owen Beiber. Tucker’s candidacy, which was symbolic, received only 5 percent of the convention delegate votes. Nevertheless, the New Directions platform has been endorsed by many rank-and-filers and local leaders. Suman Bohm, a national co-chair for the UAW New Directions, outlined the philosophy and goals of the New Directions Movement for the coming years. In a speech delivered at the 1991 UAW NDM convention, Bohm stated “The UAW New Directions Movement is committed to four basic principles: democracy for the rank and file, insuring that the union’s leadership is accountable to the membership, promoting solidarity among members, and rebuilding the union’s strength.”77 New Directions, not unlike the TDU, believes that if the membership were allowed to vote for its officers in a one-member, one-vote referendum, it would change the UAW immensely. Tucker explains that in 1992 New Directions collected 60,000 signatures for the advancement of onemember-one-vote and presented it to the delegates at the convention. According to Tucker, the “response to that issue was phenomenal, and that’s evidence again of the demand from workers for accountability.”78 Nevertheless, the convention, which has become a rubber-stamp legislature, overwhelmingly defeated the issue. In her speech in 1991, Bohm clearly summarized the NDM agenda and philosophy: New Directions members are driven by a strong, brave vision of democracy and fairness. This vision is similar to the dream that fueled the early

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civil rights and black power movements. It is similar to the perspective that brought about the voting rights for women. And it is similar to the vision that produced the great union organizing drives of the 1930s. It is our task to take this energy, commitment, and vision and concentrate on restoring it to dignity—and gain new economic power for—UAW members.79

Bohm concluded her speech by advocating the need for an awakening of class consciousness among all working people. The United States working class, which is becoming more powerless and more economically insecure, is in need of new leadership and a higher form of democracy that empowers, rather than disempowers, the average person. As we fight our battles for these goals within the UAW, every success we have, no matter how small, becomes part of the larger battle for true economic democracy in the country at large. This emerging movement of many people aching for economic security and emotional wellbeing is rooted in the harsh realities working people face every day.80

Current Prospects Since the defeat of Dave Yettaw, the New Directions Movement continues to fight the Administrative Caucus through networking and elections of local delegates to the national conventions, which are held every two years. The NDM members understand the long road that lies ahead. However, they feel that the UAW leadership is crumbling. According to Tucker: “It’s crumbling, but that does not mean it’s going away. I mean, it’s crumbling in its ability to actually service the membership. It’s crumbling in its ability to represent a reputable leadership, to be responsible. The hardest problem we face in trying to organize within the UAW . . . is the cynicism of the membership. The membership’s view is that the union is irrelevant, so why bother changing it?”81 In the past New Directions presented an opposition platform at the UAW national convention covering such issues as electronic roll-call voting, election of all bargaining unit appointees, single-payer national health insurance, and a renewed alliance with the Canadian Auto Workers. Although these issues are still supported by NDM, it decided at the ninth annual convention in 1997 to fight for the following major issues: • Ratification of national agreements. NDM believes that the UAW would be more effective if it allowed locals to settle agreements before it bargains over a national contract. In the past all local agreements were settled before the national agreement was negotiated. Presently only 66 percent to 75 percent of local agreements are settled when national agreements are ratified. The NDM contends that the UAW leadership should not allow locals to settle agreements that are common issues throughout an

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individual company and should take action as an entire union, with an overall plan that includes local, national, and international actions. • The three-union merger. New Directions believes that the merger of the UAW, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) should include standards to increase democracy, such as one-member-one-vote for all top officers, structures and policies that will ensure diversity and input from the membership, a comprehensive member bill of rights, and an independent appeals board. • Job stabilization and creation. Privatization, outsourcing, and the UAW leadership’s jointness agenda have decreased the power of the union. The NDM encourages the development of a comprehensive plan that places workers and communities ahead of competitiveness and profits. • Planning for the future. The NDM argues that the UAW must get back to the basics of unionism, including a struggle to make the lives of future generations an important goal. These basics include ensuring wage parity between workers doing the same type of job, organizing (especially in the South), creating meaningful career ladders for members, providing longer vacations, reducing work hours with no loss of pay, and stopping forced overtime.82 The NDM understands all too well how difficult it is to bring a resolution to the convention floor. First, a resolution has to be adopted by 33 percent of locals at the convention to have a chance to be discussed at the convention. Second, the resolution committee appointed by the UAW leadership has to allow it to be presented to the delegates. These committee appointments take the power away from the delegates and direct more centralized power into the hands of the executive board. Robert C. Hartley writes: The question then is not whether dissent survives, for it does, or even whether incumbents have the advantage, for they usually do. Rather, the question is whether the convention’s checking function fails because the committee system strengthens control of the convention by incumbents to the extent that dissent too seldom prevails. The answer normally, though not inevitably, seems to be yes.83

Future Prospects New Directions members today believe their movement is capable of making fundamental changes within the UAW. Nevertheless, the reformers are concentrating on running delegates to the national convention. Although the delegates understand that the NDM will not have a major impact at the convention, their attendance allows them to network, organize, and discuss

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issues with other local delegates. Furthermore, candidates run so that they can talk to the rank and file on the shop floor about what a good union ought to do. Most candidates see their candidacy as an opportunity to win support for the issues raised in this chapter. Presently, the NDM’s level of activism equals, at least, the voluntary activism and support for the administration.84 In 1995, Steve Yokich was elected president by the delegates at the UAW national convention. Yokich espoused a more aggressive agenda than his predecessor and laid to rest the notion that “the dissident New Directions Movement was dead.”85 According to Harley Shaiken, a labor expert from the University of California, “Yokich embraced the New Directions agenda of the late 1980s and 1990s, and anyone who thinks he is playing politics, is wrong. He reads the members much more astutely than any other top leader.”86 In his inaugural speech, Yokich borrowed heavily from the NDM program when he “made a commitment to renew efforts to get UAW members involved in union affairs, to organize the unorganized, to encourage local union officers to work as hard to elect pro-union politicians as they work for themselves, to shorten work time and put more people to work, to make the UAW a Union of All Workers, and to form a North American Metal Workers Federation.”87 Nevertheless, Yokich has not attempted to reach out or talk to the NDM since the convention. Yokich, who has stated that dissent is healthy and that he has adopted some of the NDM’s issues, has not put any of those ideas into practice. Since the 1995 convention, a merger between the UAW, the IAM, and the USWA has been announced and is to take place in the year 2000. Dave Yettaw sees the merger as “an opportunity, with sufficient internal debate and democracy, to withdraw from the false promise of jointness and oneway cooperation. With a membership educated around mutual defense and solidarity and by fighting, not yielding to whipsawing, unionism can be about making gains again in wages, benefits, and working conditions for workers.”88 Arguably, the NDM maintains that once the merger of the IAM, the UAW, and the USWA takes place, one of the first victims will be the UAW one-party state. Jerry Tucker claims: “Because the one-party state is built around certain conditions within the UAW the merging of these three unions will not allow for UAW structured regions. The UAW can only have major influence where there are strong pockets of UAW members.” But, as Tucker points out, the UAW will not have the influence in areas dominated by the USWA and IAM. For this reason, “the more the new union has to restructure, the more they have to change the way the leadership operates, and more chance for dissent.” He continues to argue: “I

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can’t speak to the ultimate outcome in character or what dissent will look like after the merger. But the issue for us is to carry these fundamental questions into the merger and try to find a kindred spirit.”89

Conclusion These two case studies of modern reform movements within the labor movement speak volumes on how reformers view the U.S. labor movement. Throughout the labor movement, whether they are factions, caucuses, or opposition parties, dissident movements are essentially reaching for the same goals: union democracy and the transformation of the labor movement. One of the main ideas behind union democracy is its correlation with social unionism. Reformers argue that a democratic union will “give its members such a taste for democracy that these men and women will expect other organizations and situations they encounter to be democratic as well.”90 As we witnessed in the two case studies, a more democratic union is usually concerned with such issues as the health and safety of its members, distribution of wealth, human rights in the workplace, shorter workweeks, and other social issues that affect the entire society. Business unionism has always been based on a centralized administration and a powerful leadership. It focuses largely on bread-and-butter issues, economic questions of wage and fringe benefits, rather than on working conditions, speedup, distribution of profits, and relocation. Today reformers continue to argue that business unionism is the major cause of the decline of the labor movement. Moreover, union reformers continue to remind us that social unionism was responsible for the passage of the forty-hour week, the abolition of child labor, workers’ compensation, and Social Security. In other words, labor’s victories of the 1930s shaped the U.S. workplace as we know it today. In light of the case studies of the TDU and the NDM, business unionism is not going to disappear overnight. However, because of such groups as the TDU and the NDM, the new leaders in the AFL-CIO are espousing the objectives of social unionism. Nevertheless, they themselves are the products of today’s business unionist philosophy, which could be the reason why the social agenda has been put on hold. Is it possible for a social unionism agenda to be successful in the next decade? How does the labor movement educate a younger workforce that has been subjected to the philosophy of individualism and conservative ideals? Some union activists have taken the first step in creating such an agenda through the establishment of the Worker Education Center (WEC), which is modeled after Brookwood Labor School and the Highlander Folk Center of the 1930s,

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when factory workers and intellectuals forged an alliance between labor and academia. The WEC, which has been in existence since 1993, is headed by Jerry Tucker, the former national organizer for the UAW New Directions Movement. The concept behind the school, according to Tucker, is to “analyze and develop strategies for power for workers to recapture or develop power in the work place, in the community, political arena, and then in the global economy.”91 As the right wing in this country tries to take control of the political agenda and the gap between the wages of workers and salaries of management widens, reformers are hoping that the working class will call for a stricter social agenda. As corporations set the agenda for the United States in the 1990s, some scholars and labor leaders see a clear parallel with the United States of the 1920s, when labor took charge of a progressive agenda. They argue that if the progressive forces are to have a voice in or compete for the U.S. agenda, labor must again take the forefront in such a debate. Schools such as the WEC have started to educate the future labor leaders and to espouse the need for a social-oriented workplace and society. For such a workplace and society to develop, however, it is essential that the more progressive academics at the university level ally themselves with the progressive rank-and-file members of the U.S. labor movement. If a transformation is to occur, labor must be successful in the coming years in adopting a more social unionist philosophy, such as those espoused by the TDU and the NDM, when dealing with both the corporations and the community at large. This philosophy will be essential in winning over the members of the working class. Business unionism in the United States has lasted for more than 100 years, and it appears that social unionism will not replace it in the near future. Social unionism is not inevitable, but it is a possibility. If reformers can find a way for social unionism and business unionism to coexist while labor tries to get back on its feet, it will be a major victory for both union reformers and the U.S. labor movement.

Notes 1. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1962), 199. (This book was originally published in Germany in 1911.) 2. Ibid., 120. 3. Ibid., 207. 4. Sean Reilly, “The Case for Unions,” Washington Monthly, July–August 1995, 29. 5. Kenneth C. Crowe, Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters (New York; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 230.

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6. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1992), 230. 7. Ken Paff, national organizer for the TDU, speaking at the Labor Notes Conference, Detroit, April 1993. 8. Ibid. 9. Dan La Botz, Teamsters for a Democratic Union: Rank and File Rebellion (New York: Verso, 1990), 288–291. 10. Paff, Labor Notes Conference. 11. Ibid. 12. David Pratt, “Teamster Dissidents Oppose Federal Trusteeship,” Labor Notes, vol. 109 (July 1987), 12. 13. La Botz, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, 291. 14. Ibid., 321. 15. Paff, Labor Notes Conference. 16. Telephone interview with Ken Paff, December 27, 1994. 17. Ibid. 18. La Botz, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, 182. 19. Ibid., 183. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 185–186. 22. Ibid., 186–187. 23. Paff, Labor Notes Conference. 24. Ibid. 25. Paff, interview, December 27, 1994. 26. Diane Kilmury, speaking at the Labor Notes Conference, Detroit, April 1993. 27. “TDU Regional Organizer Responds to the Organizers Article About Fight for Control of the Teamsters’ Union,” The Organizer, vol. 4, no. 5 (May 1994), 5. 28. Ron Carey, “The Facts Are Behind Us,” Convoy Dispatch, June–July 1994, 12. 29. Martha Gruelle, “Brotherhood Forever,” Labor Notes, vol. 210 (September 1996), 8. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 13. 32. Martha Gruelle, “The Teamsters Re-elect Carey,” Labor Notes, vol. 214 (January 1997), 1. 33. Ibid. 34. “IBT Issues Action Plan,” Convoy Dispatch, vol. 158 (March 1997), 6. 35. “Building a Strong Union with Rank and File Power,” Convoy Dispatch, vol. 158 (March 1997), 6. 36. Ron Carey, “Speech on Labor Day,” Washington, DC, September 1, 1997. 37. Ken Paff, telephone interview with author, October 20, 1997. 38. “UPS Contract Campaign Is Model for New Unionism,” Convoy Dispatch, vol. 162 (September 1997), 7. 39. Ibid. 40. Steven Greenhouse, “An Overseer Bars Teamster Leader from Reelection,” New York Times, November 18, 1997, sec. 1A, 1. 41. Ken Paff, “Teamster Reformers Vow to Continue Fight for Strong, Democratic Union,” press release, TDU homepage www.igc.org/tdu, December 5, 1998. 42. Ibid. 43. Paff, interview, October 20, 1997.

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44. Kilmury, Labor Notes Conference. 45. Frank Cormier and William Eaton, Reuther (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 115. 46. John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers (Boston: Little Brown, 1983), 48. 47. Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 471. 48. Moody, An Injury to All, 153–154. 49. Ibid., 155. 50. Ibid., 188. 51. Elly Leary and Marybeth Menaker, Jointness at GM: Company Unionism in the 21st Century (Woonsocket, RI: A New Directions Region 9A Publication, 1992), 29–30. 52. Larry Solomon, “Why Labor Must Oppose Jointness,” The Organizer, vol. 5, (June 1995), 4. 53. Victor Reuther, telephone interview with author, December 12, 1993. 54. Eric Mann, Taking On General Motors: A Case Study of the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 370–371. 55. Moody, An Injury to All, 238. 56. Jane Slaughter, “UAW Watchdog Body Labels Union a ‘One-Party Institution’ and Says That’s OK,” Labor Notes, June 1988, 5. 57. Moody, An Injury to All, 239. 58. Mann, Taking on General Motors, 371. 59. David Moberg, “Automakers ‘Teamwork’ Sets Workers to Fuming,” In These Times, June 7, 1989. 60. Barbara Koeppel, “Victor Reuther: ‘We Need a Union That Acts Like a Union Again,’” The Progressive, December 1989. 61. Jerry Tucker, telephone interview with author, December 20, 1994. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Slaughter, “UAW Watchdog Body Labels Union a ‘One-Party Institution,’” 5. 65. Tucker, interview, December 20, 1994. 66. Ibid. 67. Jane Slaughter, “Addicted to Overtime,” The Progressive, vol. 54, no. 4 (April 1995), 31–33. 68. Jerry Tucker, telephone interview with author, December 17, 1997. 69. Author interview, December 17, 1997. 70. Ibid. 71. UAW New Directions Constitution and By-Laws, approved October 1989. 72. Tucker, interview, December 20, 1994. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Jerry Tucker, telephone interview with author, January 12, 1995. 76. Ibid. 77. Jerry Tucker, telephone interview with author, January 4, 1995. 78. Ibid. 79. “It’s Clean Up Time: Stop the UAW’s Decline,” speech delivered by Suman Bohm at the 1991 UAW New Directions Convention (St. Louis, MO: A New Directions Publication, 1991), 1. 80. Ibid.

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81. Tucker, interview, December 17, 1997. 82. “1998 UAW Constitutional Convention Platform” was mailed to New Directions members, who distributed them to the rank and file. 83. Robert C. Hartley, “The Framework of Democracy in Union Government,” Catholic University Law Review, vol. 32, no. 13 (1982), 62–63. 84. Tucker, interview, December 17, 1997. 85. Pat Patterson, “New UAW Leader Embraces Reformers’ Agenda,” Labor Notes, vol. 198 (September 1995), 5. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. “Big Union–Big Challenge,” The Voice of New Directions, September 1995, 1. 89. Tucker, interview, December 17, 1997. 90. Cynthia E. Valentine, “Internal Union Democracy: A Protection or Hindrance to Wider Democratic Values?” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Denver, June 1976), 114. 91. Tucker, interview, December 17, 1997.

9 Hell on Wheels: Organizing Among New York City’s Subway and Bus Workers Steve Downs and Tim Schermerhorn New York City’s subways are run by the New York City Transit Authority (TA); its buses are run by the TA and the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MaBSTOA). Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union (TWU), the union that represents most of the bus workers and all of the subway workers in New York City, has rarely been without an organized rank-and-file opposition challenging the local’s leadership. In the mid-1940s, it was the Rank and File Committee of TWU Members for Democratic Trade Unionism. A few years later, there was the Rank and File Committee for TWU Democracy, and in the mid-1950s, the Motormen’s Benevolent Association (MBA). The late 1960s gave rise to the Rank and File Committee for a Democratic Union in the TA. The late 1970s had the Coalition of Concerned Transit Workers, the Committee of Concerned Transit Workers, and the Transit Workers Coalition, which ran as the Unity Slate in 1979. Since 1984 it has been the turn of Hell on Wheels/New Directions (ND). These opposition groups grew in response to specific issues and challenges facing the union. Despite the similarity in names, the Rank and File Committees of the 1940s were very different. The first, formed after the 1946 TWU convention, was anticommunist and opposed to the undemocratic practices of the Local 100 leadership then dominated by members and supporters of the Communist Party (CP). The Rank and File Committee of the late 1940s was organized by members and supporters of the Communist Party who had been driven out of positions of influence in the local when Mike Quill, one of the founders of the TWU and its international president, broke with the CP.1 The Motormen’s Benevolent Association was essentially a craft union for the drivers of the subway trains. When New York City’s bankrupt subway lines were taken over by the city, the TWU was denied status as a sole 167

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bargaining agent. The MBA argued that Local 100 did not provide proper representation for motormen and tried to get the city to adopt a “little railway labor act” so that the MBA could become the bargaining agent for motormen. The MBA had considerable support among motormen and pulled off a major wildcat strike in support of its demand for status as a bargaining agent. However, once the TWU conclusively won the right to bargain for all TA workers, the MBA joined the TWU, and the United Motormen’s Division of Local 100 was created. The Rank and File Committee of the late 1960s was an effort to replace the TWU as the bargaining agent for all TA workers. The committee was led by black workers with ties to the struggle for greater power in New York City’s black neighborhoods. They argued that Local 100’s overwhelmingly white leadership did not and would not adequately represent the majority black and Latino workforce at the TA. These workers eventually decided to try to replace the TWU rather than reform it because they believed that contract votes and union elections would always be rigged against them. Although the committee had considerable support among black and Latino transit workers, it faded away when it was unable to get state or federal agencies to hold an election to challenge the TWU’s bargaining status. But the demand for better representation and power within the union by black and Latino workers did not fade away. It provided part of the motivating force behind the movement of the late 1970s that almost unseated the entrenched leadership of Local 100. The rest of that force was provided by New York City’s fiscal crisis and its effects on transit workers. In brief, the effects of that crisis were a wage freeze during a time of high inflation, the establishment of a three-tier pension system so that workers hired after mid-1976 had a significantly worse pension plan, and deteriorating working conditions after a hiring freeze was imposed and funds for basic maintenance were cut. The anger of many transit workers over these developments combined with the anger already felt by many black and Latino workers at the domination of the union by the white, Irish-American workers helped give birth to the three opposition groups mentioned earlier: the Coalition of Concerned Transit Workers, the Committee of Concerned Transit Workers, and the Transit Workers Coalition. These committees had similar programs but were based in different sections of the workforce. Various efforts were made to bring them together, especially in preparation for the 1979 local elections. However, the principal leaders of two of the committees insisted on running for local president. As a result, all three committees put forward slates to challenge the incumbents, and John Lawe, the incumbent president, won with only 40 percent of the vote. However, after the election, two board members from the Lawe slate defected, giving the opposition a bare majority of the seats on the local’s

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executive board (twenty-three out of forty-five). At the end of March 1980, the board rejected a proposed contract and, given the “no contract, no work” position of the union, New York City’s bus and subway workers went on strike. Unfortunately, it was a strike that Lawe did not want to win, and the opposition groups were not prepared to take away from him the direction of the strike or negotiations. Winning would have meant not only winning a decent contract but also winning amnesty from the fines imposed under New York’s Taylor Law. (It is illegal for public employees to strike in New York.) The most common penalties are the loss of two days’ pay for each day on strike, fines against the union, and the loss of dues check-off. All of these penalties were assessed after the 1980 strike. So despite the fact that a significant wage increase was won by striking (enough to cover the lost wages within the first year), most transit workers viewed the 1980 strike as a defeat because they were paying fines out of their checks for months after returning to work.2 The opposition groups ran candidates in the 1981 local elections, but Lawe was reelected and the oppositions lost all of their seats on the executive board. After that, the opposition groups collapsed. This is the legacy that greeted us when we came on the job in 1982 and 1983.

Hell on Wheels If anything, conditions on the job worsened after the strike. Management stepped up its attacks on the workers, taking away long-established procedures that gave workers some control over their jobs, undermining seniority protections, and generally asserting management’s right to manage. Wages for new hires were reduced, and the time it took to earn top pay was lengthened. The number of disciplinary cases soared, especially for attendance violations. On top of these problems, the system continued its downward slide as the policy of deferred maintenance (if it ain’t broke, don’t maintain it) brought the entire subway and bus system to the brink of collapse by the mid-1980s. The union leadership had no strategy for responding to these issues, and the workers themselves were demoralized by their failure to elect new leaders and win the strike. One thing that changed after the strike, though no one saw its importance at the time, was that the TA did a lot of hiring in the early to mid1980s. The hiring freeze of the late 1970s, combined with the loss of senior workers as conditions deteriorated, meant that the TA simply did not have enough workers to keep the system running, let alone restore it. These new workers had not experienced the demoralization following the strike. They had not concluded that it doesn’t pay to fight back. They

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were a new set of union members to get angry at the lack of democracy and accountability in the union, and they included a handful of people with experience from the anti–Vietnam War, black power, free speech, and other progressive community and labor struggles of the 1970s. It is this handful who formed the initial core of the rank-and-file newsletter Hell on Wheels. When we were hired, Local 100 had about 36,000 members (around 1983, the number had risen to approximately 32,000). Most of these members worked for either the TA or MaBSTOA. A few thousand worked for private bus companies in and around New York City. Then as now, they work in hundreds of different locations, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. A car inspector in one of the main shops might see hundreds of co-workers in the course of a day. A conductor might see a few dozen. A railroad clerk in a quiet booth might see only the person she relieves and the person who relieves her. The union never has local-wide meetings. We meet by division, of which there are twelve. Local 100 does not even have its own newspaper; it gets a couple of pages in the international’s paper. Staff representatives (business agents) and stewards are appointed by the local president. The local’s vice presidents are elected by the entire local rather than by the members they represent. Thus, the vice president for rapid transit (representing train operators, conductors, and tower operators) on the incumbents’ slate keeps getting reelected, despite losing heavily in rapid transit in the last three elections. In rebuilding a rank-and-file opposition in the local, the first question we had to address was how to break down the isolation imposed on us by the job and the structure of the union. After the strike in 1980, John Lawe agreed to binding arbitration to settle the 1982 contract. The arbitrator gave the TA many of the concessions it had been unable to win in the 1980 confrontation with the workers. Lawe received much criticism for seeking binding arbitration because he had done so without the approval of the membership. Many Local 100 members believed this omission violated the TWU’s constitutional guarantee that no agreement would take effect unless it had been approved by the members covered by it. So in the summer of 1984, in preparation for the 1985 negotiations, Lawe held a referendum seeking approval for binding arbitration. It was approved overwhelmingly; the membership did not even want to consider the possibility of a strike. The referendum, and the fact that there was no way within the structure of the union for the membership to debate its pros and cons, led a few of the new activists on the job to call a meeting; the initial meetings included veterans of the 1978–1981 opposition, as well as people who had been hired since the strike. But once the group had approved the idea of a newsletter as a way to unify the isolated efforts to fight the TA and reform

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the union, support shrank. The 1980 veterans pulled out because, they argued, the newsletter was going to be too political. And just before the first issue was published, activists close to the Communist Party stopped attending meetings. Although they never gave a reason, it became clear that they had left because the newsletter broke discipline by being openly critical of the union’s leadership. Hell on Wheels was born. We had no illusions that we would be replacing the leadership of Local 100 in a short period of time. In fact, we expressly rejected the idea that electing new officers was the key to reforming the union and fighting back against the TA. Our short-term goal was simply to break the monopoly on information held by the union bureaucracy. We wanted to provide information and analyses to the members of the local so that they would have firmer grounds for challenging the policies of the top officers. While doing that, we would present our ideas about how to move the union forward. Not all the activists who put out the newsletter shared the same approach or perspectives. We came from different political traditions and experiences. For example, we disagreed about whether or when to run for low-level union positions and about the significance of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988. But we shared a commitment to a minimum platform of militancy, democracy, and solidarity and a recognition that our union lacked all three. We hoped that the newsletter could provide a political point of reference for transit workers who agreed with our general criticisms of the union officers. If we could get workers to identify with one another across the barriers on the job and in the union, we hoped we would be able to mount a serious practical and organizational challenge to the union officers. Even then, though, our emphasis would not be on trying to defeat the union’s officers in an election. We were convinced that the key to the changes we wanted to make in the union was organizing the rank and file of the union, or at least a sizable minority of them, to act on their own behalf, regardless of who was in office. If we were successful in promoting that level of organization, whereby transit workers would fight management on the job without waiting for the union to act for them, then the changes in the leadership would naturally follow. If we failed, then changing the leadership would not matter much, because no leader, no matter how well intentioned, could take on the TA if the membership was not ready and willing to fight. From the start, Hell on Wheels was well received among subway workers. They enjoyed the muckraking aspects of the newsletter and appreciated that someone was speaking out against management’s actions and the union’s inaction. With every issue, more people contributed a few dollars to help cover printing costs or asked for copies to give out on the job. But the number of people willing to write articles or sit through editorial

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meetings remained quite small. And despite the verbal support for the ideas we put forward about organizing and fighting back, resistance to the TA’s attacks was quite limited and rarely successful. In the spring of 1988, we decided we needed to do something different. So we did the only reasonable thing a few people in a local of 35,000 can do—we decided to run for local-wide office. We called ourselves the New Directions slate. Tim Schermerhorn was our candidate for president. Steve Downs ran for recording secretary. We ran candidates for five of the seven vice president positions, and we also ran five candidates for the local executive board (out of thirty-eight seats that were directly elected by the membership). Nobody, including us, expected us to win. We were right. We ran primarily to give the members an option, a way to register a protest. We also wanted to make the ideas we had been pushing in the newsletter more concrete. Our platform called for vice presidents and staff representatives to be elected by their divisions, for local-wide membership meetings and elected stewards, for amending the local’s bylaws to guarantee that members saw any proposed contract before a ratification vote, and to provide child care at union meetings. We also called for ending our political dependency on the Democratic and Republican parties by using the Committees for Political Action (COPE) funds to support independent, working-class candidates. Sonny Hall, the incumbent local president (and as of 1993 the international president), said that if Schermerhorn got more than 10 percent of the vote, it would be a defeat for the union’s leaders. Schermerhorn received 22 percent of the vote, but Hall did not concede defeat. Three people from the New Directions slate were elected to represent train operators on the executive board. Hell on Wheels/New Directions advanced steadily over the next four years. As we had hoped, running a candidate for local president and doing well in the elections made New Directions appear to be a viable opposition to the local leadership. As a result, more Local 100 members began coming to meetings and distributing the newsletter. In 1989, New Directions ran candidates for delegates to the TWU’s constitutional convention. We elected 10 percent of the delegates from the local, about 3 percent of the total number at the convention. The convention took place during the strike against Eastern Airlines, whose flight attendants were represented by TWU Local 553. Local 553 members came to the convention calling for the establishment of an international strike fund (a point we had also called for in our campaign platform). This point was also supported by dissidents from a few locals at Pan Am. The international leaders were not prepared for a fight on the floor on this or any other issue. Most of their supporters had come for an expensepaid vacation, not to work at keeping the hounds of union reform at bay. As a result, after a heated debate, the motion for a strike fund almost

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passed. In fact, we believe that it carried on the voice vote, but when it came time to stand and be counted, too many delegates didn’t. Officially, the motion received about 40 percent of the vote. We were also able to get onto the floor our motion for the direct election of international officers by the membership rather than by convention delegates. Not surprisingly, it was defeated. After the convention, while we continued producing the newsletter and encouraging the small signs of resistance that existed on the job, we began to prepare for 1991, which would hold both a contract expiration and local elections.

B.I.E. (Brakes in Emergency)3 The contract was scheduled to expire at the end of April 1991. It didn’t; instead, it was extended while negotiations continued. We didn’t think much of this extension at first. Local 100 no longer had a “no contract, no work” policy, and the extension gave us more time to conduct our contract campaign. We figured there would be a proposal shortly before the election in November so that the Sonny Hall slate could use the promise of an immediate raise to help slate members win votes. But when no motion was presented for ratification before the election, we realized that the contract must be so bad that Hall was afraid to show it to the membership for fear it would cost him the election. Tim Schermerhorn, running again for president, received one-third of the vote. New Directions candidates were elected to the executive board from the train operators, conductors, and track divisions (a total of nine seats out of forty-five). New Directions also won four of the five seats on the division committee representing train operators and all five seats on the conductors’ committee. (The division officers function essentially as chief stewards.) Schermerhorn was elected vice chair of train operators, and Steve Downs was elected to the executive board. Almost as soon as we were sworn in, we had a chance to show how we differed from the officers we had replaced and the officers who still held the top positions in the local. In early January 1992, the Transit Authority proposed a change in the way subway crews chose their schedules. The proposal was widely seen as a direct threat to seniority rights because it would undermine the ability of train operators and conductors to tailor their schedules as they gained more seniority. The response of the top officers was to say, “Don’t worry, we’ll take it to arbitration.” The response of the crews was to start a slowdown and tie up the road. There probably would have been a slowdown even if New Directions had not won the train operators and conductors divisions. But our election gave the subway crews more confidence that someone in the union hierarchy

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would support them in their action. The slowdown was strongest on one line, the Broadway Local. (The principal organizer was a prominent supporter of New Directions.) The slowdown was spread largely through the efforts of New Directions. The division officers encouraged the action, even though doing so was a violation of the Taylor Law and ridiculed the idea that the workers should count on arbitration. After a few days of the slowdown, which seemed to be picking up steam, the TA withdrew its proposal and agreed to expedite arbitration. On the day of the arbitration hearing, transit workers picketed outside the building where negotiations were being held and again tied up the road. The arbitrator ruled in the union’s favor. Despite the claims of the union vice president that it was his arguments that had won the case, the men and women on the job knew that it was their actions and the threat of escalation that had decided the outcome. They were getting a taste of what it was like to have union officers who were willing and eager to fight the TA. In late January 1992, Sonny Hall presented a proposed contract settlement to the executive board. As we had feared, it was so bad that it would have cost the Hall slate the election. The main features of the proposal were: • a $1,000 lump-sum payment instead of a higher percentage raise • a “Work Smarter” program that would give workers a share of money the TA saved as a result of suggestions from the workforce • a $10 co-pay on most prescription drugs and visits to a doctor • “fines in lieu of suspension” in the disciplinary procedure. Instead of serving suspension time without pay, the worker could choose to work that same number of days at 70 percent of regular pay. The 30 percent the TA saved was to be paid into the Health Benefit Trust. The perspective that had guided the union’s officers in bargaining was, as Hall put it, “Downsizing is going to come. We have to get as much as we can for the people who are left.” The nine New Directions members on the executive board were joined by two other board members in voting against recommending the contract to the membership. As usual in Local 100, the executive board was not shown the contract language, and a majority of the board voted against providing copies of the proposal to the membership. ND immediately launched a “Vote No” campaign. We produced flyers with the information we had on the contract and our reasons for opposing it. We pointed out that the lump-sum payment would cost us money in the long run because it wasn’t folded into our base pay. And because there was no retroactive raise, anyone who had retired between the last raise and the ratification of the new contract would not

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receive a penny. Many transit workers felt this feature was particularly unjust. We argued that the “Work Smarter” program was simply a way to gain the individual worker’s complicity in cutting jobs. Since the TA had sought the right to eliminate conductors from trains, schedule four-day, ten-hour shifts, and reduce the size of wash gangs, there could be little question that the money to pay a “Work Smarter” bonus would come from cutting jobs. As for the proposal’s third feature, nobody had to be convinced that the introduction of medical copayments was a major giveback by the Union. Finally, we opposed the fines in lieu of suspension, even though many workers found guilty of violating the TA’s rules would benefit from it. This new system would give the TA a financial incentive to write fines. The fact that the money from the fines would go into the Health Benefit Trust gave the union a stake in its members being disciplined. And we knew from experience that too many of the union’s officers and staff would say, “Just take the days; it won’t really cost you that much.” We produced a small black-and-white “VOTE NO!” button. Soon, thousands of transit workers were wearing them. We also called for a rally against the contract outside the TA’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn for February 12. Although it was very cold that day, close to 2,000 transit workers turned out to shout their opposition to the contract. But they wanted to do more than just shout at the TA; they wanted to let the whole city know how angry they were. After listening to speakers, we decided to lead the rally on a march. The first march, in which 1,000 angry transit workers closed half of the Brooklyn Bridge at rush hour, was the most dramatic of the three marches we held against the contract. We next held a brief rally at City Hall (which is on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge). Then hundreds of us took the subway up to the union hall, where a meeting of the conductors’ division was scheduled. We intended to demand that local officers at the meeting answer our questions. Fearing our approach, the union leadership called the police to keep us out of our own union hall! However, we reached an agreement with the police that allowed about 200 members into the hall to confront the vice president, who later brought charges against several of us for “kidnapping” him. Those 200 or so Local 100 members didn’t learn much about the proposed contract, but they learned a lot about the contempt the officers have for the membership. The contract ratification was conducted by mail ballot. When the votes were all counted, the contract was rejected by a 2-to-1 margin. This was the first time in the history of Local 100 that a contract recommended by the leadership had been rejected by the membership. When the contract was rejected, Hall acknowledged that the membership had spoken and said

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he would return to the bargaining table, but he also stated publicly that the TA had no more money and he didn’t see any way to negotiate a better deal. New Directions had made it clear all along that if the contract was rejected, it would be unacceptable merely to send the same people back to the bargaining table. We believed it was up to the membership of the union to win a good contract, because the officers rejected the idea that the members knew better than they how to recognize a good contract or that militancy and mobilization of the members had any place in contract negotiations. The problem we faced was that neither New Directions nor the members of the union had any control over the bargaining. The executive board didn’t even know when or where negotiations were scheduled. And with spring approaching, whatever leverage transit workers gained by threatening a strike in the winter would be lost. The longer New Directions went without advancing a strategy that would at least have a chance of winning a good contract, the more likely it was that transit workers would get stuck with a bad contract and conclude that militancy doesn’t pay. ND proposed a two-pronged strategy. First, we argued that there should be elections for rank-and-file representatives to the bargaining committee. We didn’t argue that the existing committee should be replaced entirely, though we thought it should, because we didn’t think enough of the members would support the idea of starting from scratch with inexperienced negotiators. Second, we said that the union should target for actions the Democratic National Convention, which was scheduled to take place in New York City in July. Our goal was to identify for the membership a way to regain the leverage we would need; the threat of a strike could have the effect of forcing the governor and the mayor to come up with more money for our contract. This proposal was extremely popular. Hall refused to expand the bargaining committee, and we had no power to force him to do so. However, he feared we could not carry out the unspecified actions around the Democratic National Convention on our own. We were right to think that the political powers that be in New York wanted to avoid any disruption of that convention. But instead of finding some way that might encourage other public workers to resist concessions to improve the contract, Hall pulled out all the stops to get us to accept the rejected contract. All of the major daily papers in the city editorialized against us and called on the mayor and the governor to stand firm. The union held a special meeting of division officers to hear prominent Democratic Party officials encourage them to accept the rejected contract. Sonny Hall raised the specter of binding arbitration and the possibility that the TA would get many of the items that had been removed from the table. Then the Health Benefit Trust announced that medical benefits would be discontinued on May 1. Hall stated that he would call a strike rather

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than have us work without medical coverage. And he made it clear that this would happen long before there was any possibility of disrupting the Democratic convention. This was the double whammy that sealed the fate of the contract. Most of the members knew that Hall had a hand in the decision to cut benefits, and they knew it was being done to pressure us to accept what we had already rejected. But many didn’t want to risk losing their benefits. New Directions had not found a way to assert rank-and-file control over the negotiations, and none of the members had any confidence in Hall’s commitment or ability to lead a winning strike. The TA and the union leaders were called into the governor’s office to try to resolve matters. Lo and behold, they came out with a new, slightly revised contract offer. The main changes were that the $1,000 lump-sum payment had been converted into a 2 percent retroactive raise. The “Work Smarter” program had become a “gain-sharing” program in which the division officers could reject participating. To increase the odds of ratification and to protect himself if it were rejected, Hall had the ballot worded in such a way that a vote to reject the contract was also a vote to send it to binding arbitration. Faced with the likelihood of ratification and unable to call for a vote that would result in binding arbitration, New Directions urged members to write “None of the above” on their ballots. Only a few hundred followed our recommendation. Seeing no prospect of getting anything better and a clear prospect of getting something worse, the members ratified the contract by a 2-to-1 margin.

Rethinking Our Approach The intense struggle over the contract in 1991 and 1992 and the fact that we were ultimately unable to significantly affect the terms of that contract led to changes in the perspectives of many New Directions members. In the immediate aftermath of the contract fight, three tendencies emerged within the group. The first outlook was sharply critical of New Directions for not going far enough to win a good contract. In a formal sense, this criticism was valid. Our efforts had come up short; we hadn’t gone far enough. But people who made this criticism never made clear what they thought we should or could have done that we failed to do. To us, this criticism seemed more a product of frustration than an assessment of what had actually been possible. The second position held that New Directions had to focus its efforts on winning the top offices in the union. The people advocating this position argued that, as important as organization among the rank-and-file is, the contract fight showed that if the leadership of the union did not support

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the activity of the membership, then the ranks would not be able to accomplish their goals. This has probably been the dominant position within New Directions since 1992. The third perspective, which the two of us advocated, responded to the two other views by arguing that ND members had done everything we could to win a good contract. We acknowledged the problem of having to overcome the obstruction of the union leadership. Our conclusion was that ND had failed because we had not been well enough organized among the rank and file to carry any further the contract fight, which was ultimately a fight for control of the union. We argued that if we had been better organized at the work sites, then other options for struggle and responses to the maneuvers of the union leadership would have been possible. We also argued that victory in elections would follow successful organization on the job and that if we managed to win without sufficient organization among the membership to enable us to successfully take on the MTA, the mayor, and the governor, we would end up disappointing the people who had elected us and discrediting the idea of union reform from the bottom up. In essence, we argued that ND had to keep doing what it had been doing for several years.4 Unfortunately, partly as a result of the exhaustion of our members and partly because of the need to gear up for the 1993 TWU convention, these assessments were only partially integrated into a new perspective for the whole group. As a result, the unspoken consensus that had existed before 1991 fragmented, and the differences that had developed led to serious conflict over how to promote the process of organizing the rank and file and reforming the union. A positive consequence of the contract fight was that in late 1992 New Directions established itself as a permanent, membership-based caucus of TWU Local 100. We had decided that we needed a stable organization through which to carry on our fight. After the conclusion of the contract fight in 1992, we feared that the members of the union who had supported us would withdraw their support, deciding that it didn’t pay to fight. The election for delegates to the 1993 TWU convention showed us that hadn’t happened. New Directions kept its strong support among train operators and conductors and won delegates in the car equipment, track, and line equipment/signal divisions, too. ND got 40 percent of the delegates from Local 100. But without support from reformers in other locals, as we had had from some of the airline locals in 1989, we had little impact on the convention’s proceedings. Furthermore, the international’s officers had learned a few things about how to create the appearance of democracy at the convention. Instead of preventing our resolutions from coming to the floor, which would give us something to protest, they brought all resolutions to the

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floor with a recommendation of approval or rejection. Ours were recommended for rejection. And this time, delegates lined up at the microphones to call the question before we could speak. The most significant development at the convention was that Sonny Hall, Local 100 president, was elected international president to succeed George Leitz, who had retired. The Local 100 executive board then met in a special session and elected Damaso Seda to fill Hall’s vacant seat and Willie James as secretary-treasurer to replace Seda. Seda became the first person of color to be president of the local. Hall and his crew were learning a few things about how to keep control of Local 100, but their choice of Seda would come back to haunt them. Immediately after the convention, in October 1993, we began preparing for the contract expiration and local election scheduled for 1994. As it turned out, the contract became embroiled in a change in the pension available to transit workers, a change Local 100’s leadership had gotten approved by the New York State legislature. Many transit workers thought that in order to get the improved pension, they had to vote yes on the contract. So despite contract provisions that have led to the removal of conductors from some trains (leaving only the train operator) and that permit the MTA to begin using part-time van drivers, and despite our efforts, the contract generated little discussion and passed overwhelmingly. In the elections that followed, ND’s candidate for local president, Tim Schermerhorn, got 45 percent of the vote, up from 33 percent in 1991, and ND won 15 of the 35 executive board seats directly elected by the membership (the board also includes the ten top officers, who are elected on a local-wide basis, for a total of forty-five seats). ND also won all of the seats on the committees responsible for the train operators, conductor/ tower operators, track, line equipment/signal, and car maintenance divisions. ND members thought that we would now have a few years to strengthen and continue building our organization throughout the local before the next contract negotiations and elections in 1997. We were mistaken. In the first half of 1995, we went through a bruising internal assessment of the election. The closeness of the vote led many ND members to conclude that the election had been stolen from us. Others argued that we would have won if only we had worked harder. Some of us, including the authors, believed that we had lost the election because we did not persuade enough people to vote for us. The loss was due more to a lack of presence in enough divisions before the election than to a failure to work hard during the election. These varying opinions reflected the differences that had emerged after the 1992 contract fight. The question became, how much weight should we give to winning as opposed to organization? When Steven Downs stated that New Directions should be proud of winning as much as 45 percent of the vote and that our primary goal was

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not winning but organizing the membership, some took this as an admission that he didn’t really want to win. Likewise, when a few people opposed a motion to appeal the outcome of the election to the Labor Department on the grounds that the irregularities in the election were not enough to have affected its outcome and that we should move on, this reference became evidence that they were not serious about winning. The election appeal was ultimately rejected by the Labor Department. Instead of being encouraged by the progress we had made, the group was demoralized by the recriminations about who had lost the election. In the summer of 1995, the pension deal that had helped Damaso Seda win the local election in 1994 created a crisis for the leadership of the union. The essential change in the pension was that it allowed transit workers to collect a pension after twenty-five years of service if they were fifty-five or older, a provision known as the “25/55” pension. This change supplemented the provision to collect a pension after thirty years of service at age sixty-two (the “30/62” pension). Those workers covered by the 30/62, a majority of the hourly workforce, paid 3 percent of their pay into the pension fund. Anyone choosing to opt into the new 25/55 would have to pay an additional 2.2 percent. The pensions and the level of contributions are not determined in contract negotiations but are set by the state legislature. Setting aside the problems created by the fact that the local officers had inadequately explained the terms of the new pension, the issue that exploded in 1995 was that information about the true cost of signing up for the new pension had been hidden from the members. Since early 1995, ND had suspected that Seda had signed an agreement committing the members to paying into the Health Benefit Trust to cover the added cost of medical benefits for those who retired at age fiftyfive, but we couldn’t prove it. Then, in August 1995, a copy of the agreement began circulating on the job. Not only had Seda signed such an agreement, but it had been put into the 1994 contract, something the membership hadn’t known during the contract vote. In October 1995, after winning an arbitration on this issue, the MTA began deducting an additional .7 percent (which rose to 1 percent in 1996) from the pay of everyone who had signed up for the 25/55. The members were incensed that they were paying more for the new pension than they had been told. Many local officers began to fear that Seda’s move would cost them the election in 1997. One set of division officers began circulating a petition to bring Seda and the other local officers up on charges before the executive board. They knew the charges would be rejected by the board, but their purpose was then to appeal to the international. When the motion to charge the officers came before the board, New Directions members on the board abstained. We believed that the

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charges were being backed by international president Sonny Hall, with whom Seda had had a falling-out, and that Hall was looking for an excuse to put the local in receivership. ND began a recall campaign. We sought to force a vote to remove the local officers and then hold an election for new officers. The demand for a recall and a new election was extremely popular, and several thousand signatures were collected in a little over a week. In November 1995, we met with Sonny Hall, who told our delegation that he was considering putting the local in receivership. He proposed a six-person body to administer the local, three people from among his supporters and three from New Directions. He said he wanted the body to prepare the local for contract negotiations in 1997. He hoped the experience of working together would enable us to agree on a “Unity Slate” to run the local at the end of the receivership. He also held out the prospect of jobs on staff for many of us. We responded that we would agree to participate in such a committee only if it were charged to organize new elections within six months so that the membership of the local could choose their own officers (the next regular elections not coming until the fall of 1997). This proposal was unacceptable to Hall. He stated that the international had never altered the regular schedule of elections and that he was not going to set that precedent. Hall knew that if elections were held in early 1996, New Directions might well sweep them. That was the real precedent he didn’t want to set, and his refusal ended the discussions.

One Down, Nine to Go But Hall knew that he had to get rid of Damaso Seda. He also knew that New Directions would fight any effort to put the local in receivership if it did not provide for early elections. He opted for a surgical strike. Hall had sent auditors to look at the local’s books in preparation for the receivership. He threatened to suspend Seda, pending a hearing on charges that Seda had poorly managed the local’s finances. Seda made it clear that he was not going to be the scapegoat. If he was brought up on charges, he would reveal irregularities within the union bureaucracy. Recognizing a mutual interest in keeping the functioning of the bureaucracy under wraps, Hall and Seda made a deal: Hall offered Seda a job on the international staff, and Seda resigned his position as Local 100 president. In January 1996, the Local 100 executive board appointed Willie James, the local’s secretary-treasurer, to fill the balance of Seda’s term. James was the first African-American to serve in that position.

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This maneuver bought the local’s officers time, which they used to restructure the local, shuffling its officers and staff in an attempt to preserve the bureaucracy’s control. Interest in ND’s recall campaign died once Seda was removed and the charges against the local officers bogged down in the union’s internal appeals process. James can best be described as a bureaucratic modernizer. He sees his task as reviving the union’s apparatus without fundamentally changing the role of the members in the union, the union’s decisionmaking process, or its relationship to management. He seeks to modernize, not democratize, the union.5 By January 1997, when the restructuring was complete, only four of the ten officers elected to local-wide office in 1994 held the same positions. Many staff representatives had been given new assignments to make room for younger members of the bureaucracy who would have a greater stake in fighting ND, namely, the prospect of years on the union payroll. At that point, James stated that he had a team in place that “could efficiently service the members. Not cater to them, but service them.”6 James has also sought to improve the members’ view of the officers. He spends one day a week in the field and requires that other officers and staff also spend more time in the field. He called a demonstration against disrespect at the TA’s headquarters, and about 1,000 members attended. A public relations firm was hired to help the local dispense information to the members and conduct a survey of the membership. James has paid greater attention to communication and consultation. Consultation, however, is not controlled by the members, and communicating is a far cry from being held accountable.

Going on Staff James knew that ND had overwhelming support among conductors and train operators. The only way he was going to cut into that support was by enticing some of our people to break with ND. In early 1996, he offered a staff position to Corine Mack, one of the leaders of ND. Mack had been elected chair of the train operators’ division, the strongest on the ND slate, and had been our candidate for local recording secretary in 1994. Despite the clear sentiment within ND against taking any staff positions, Mack accepted the job. Later that year, three other ND members, two of them vice chairs in the conductor/tower division and the other a vice chair in the train operators division, were offered positions on staff. Rather than face a split over this issue, ND voted to approve their going on staff. However, this vote only postponed the split. To varying degrees the four people who went on staff and the other members who supported them very quickly became influenced by the hierarchical methods and outlook of the machine of which they were now part.

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The new staffers rejected any effort by ND to direct them on how to function or to hold them accountable for their actions. They rejected the democratic process of ND as too time-consuming and inefficient. When ND members began discussing our election platform for 1997 and sought to define what we meant by our call for “a drastic reduction in the salaries of officers and staff,” they opposed setting a specific target for that reduction; some argued that there should be no reduction. Going on staff had almost doubled their base salaries. Of course, the arguments were seasoned by frustrated ambitions and personal resentments, but the political differences clearly go back to the contract fight in 1992. Most of the people who went on staff or supported those who did had concluded in 1992 that the most important thing was to win elections and positions within the union. As a result of their experience as low-level officers in the subsequent years, they decided that they could do more for the members if they took staff jobs rather than allow real bureaucrats to hold the positions. For them, the need to have good people in high positions overshadowed the need to organize the membership to act on its own behalf. By the time of the split, the issues and the responsibility were much clearer than they would have been if several members had left because the group refused to let them go on staff. By April 1997, in a bid to show their value to Willie James, former ND members organized slates to run against ND in the election for delegates to the international convention in both the conductor/tower and train operators divisions. ND trounced the opposition. ND’s victory clearly showed that ND had won the argument among the membership about why the split occurred, who was responsible for it, and what the goals were of those who split. Overall, however, ND won fewer convention delegates than we had in 1994, dropping from 40 percent to about 33 percent. The final event in 1996 that shaped the local’s political life was a vote on a surprise contract. Although the 1994 contract did not expire until October 1997, Willie James asked the executive board in September 1996 for permission to try to negotiate an early agreement. He claimed that the TA was threatening to lay off 2,000 cleaners and privatize their work because of a deficit of over $300 million. James wanted to try to negotiate job security for them before the layoffs actually took place. Three days after the board gave him permission (ND members had voted against it), James came back with a contract proposal. An unidentified local officer told the New York Times that the negotiations had taken place in secret so that ND would have less time to campaign against the contract. The central feature of the contract, from James’s point of view, was a no-layoff clause. In exchange for this commitment from the MTA, the union agreed to the elimination by attrition of 500 cleaner positions. The union further agreed that the MTA could use Workfare workers (from the

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Work Experience Program [WEP]) to clean trains, buses, and stations. The contract also substituted a lump-sum payment for a raise in its first year. Significantly, the contract eliminated the 1 percent deduction for health benefits under the 25/55 that had created such problems for the officers. ND members on the executive board voted against the contract and immediately began a campaign against it. For the first time ever, in response to pressure from ND and the union members, copies of the proposed agreement were sent to each member’s home. The focus of ND’s opposition was the loss of 500 jobs and the union seal of approval on WEP. James was hailed as a hero and a visionary by all major papers in the city for embracing WEP. But in a highly unusual step, several prominent labor leaders spoke out against WEP and against allowing WEP workers to replace union members. The contract did pass—the vote was 52 percent in favor to 48 percent against—but not easily. There was not much in that margin of victory for James to savor. In many respects the contract should have passed easily. It contained a no-layoff guarantee, no cuts in existing benefits or wages, and some new money. Interestingly, no WEP workers have come into the transit system yet. (In an apparent effort to help James with his reelection in the fall of 1997 and to ensure Local 100’s neutrality in the mayoral election, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has refused to allow the MTA to use WEP workers.)

The Rank-and-File Power The 1997 elections saw the return of the Rank and File United Slate, the name taken by the staff representatives and low-level officers who split from New Directions to run for delegates to the convention. The fact that the term “rank and file” keeps cropping up, that so many factions have sought an identification with it (including New Directions, which claims, in the masthead of Hell on Wheels, to be “the rank-and-file movement in Local 100”), is a recognition that the average union member perceives a difference between the rank and file and the officers. Union officers are commonly referred to as “the union” or “them” when they are not being described in more unflattering terms. Union members know, deep down, that something happens to people who become full-time union officers. They change. They start to dress and act differently. They talk about the need to look at “the big picture” and to be reasonable and responsible. They advise union members to leave the running of the union to “the professionals.” Union members are told to be ready to back up their officers, but to wait for the officers to decide when to move.

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Many workers expect that even the most militant reformer will become one of “them.” A widely held belief is that fighters will become soft as they move further and further from the everyday experience of work on the job. Despite that belief, so often confirmed by experience, union members are sometimes willing to take a chance on a new set of officers. They hope that maybe, just maybe, these people will be different. Or maybe they will at least make some improvements before they sell out. Or the members are simply so fed up that they will vote for anyone to get rid of the current set of “them.” This perception of officers by union members is accurate. Full-timers generally remove themselves from “the job”—that is, the factory floor, the train terminal, the office, the construction site, etc.—the place where the most direct and constant interaction between the boss and worker occurs. There are real risks to fighting the boss, so the union officer becomes skilled at making excuses for backing down. Perhaps most important, the ideology of U.S. trade unions for the past half century has fostered this separation between union members and union officers. Workers and officers alike are encouraged to view unions as one of many institutions in society that provide services—in this case, union representation, contract negotiation, and health insurance—for a fee (union dues). This view naturally leads to a separation between those who are skilled and experienced at providing the service and those who pay the fee. And the most that many union members want from their officers is that these services be provided efficiently. They don’t want to attend more meetings or take more responsibility for the union. They want more, as Samuel Gompers said, but they don’t want to have to do more to get it. Workers complain more about the result of contract negotiations than about the undemocratic process that produced the unsatisfactory result. Many union members, including supporters of reform or opposition groups such as New Directions, simply want to put someone in office, to hire someone who will do a better job of providing the services that have defined unions for decades. So where did this ideology leave New Directions? If we needed any proof that we were not immune to the pressures to become “the union,” we got it in the spring of 1998. Having convinced themselves that they could do more for the members than organizing them to do more for themselves, several longtime leaders of New Directions accepted the chance to move up in the union. Even if a future election puts New Directions in office, union democracy will not necessarily have won a lasting victory. The distinction between the “us” of the rank and file and the “them” of the union officers will still exist in the minds of the members. We have to provide better services for the union, but we also have to convince the members that we can’t “provide” a better contract without their active involvement in the union and the bargaining process.

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We will have to cut salaries of officers and staff, change the way in which vice presidents are elected, provide for the election of staff, and provide child care at union meetings. Such changes will show the members that we are serious about the platform we ran on and about giving the members greater control over the officers. It will also make it easier for the next group of dissidents to get rid of us if we become “them” than it was for us to get rid of the current “them”—but we are getting ahead of our story.

The Election Reveals a Deeply Divided Union In the fall of 1997, the incumbent Local 100 president, Willie James, defeated Tim Schermerhorn by just 881 votes out of almost 19,000 ballots returned. ND’s candidate for secretary-treasurer lost by only 358 votes, and our top vice presidential candidate, Pete Foley, came within 266 votes of being elected. The election revealed a clear split between the subway and bus divisions in the local. ND won 20 of the 23 executive board seats elected by the subway workers but none elected by bus workers (this outcome gave ND a majority of the seats directly elected by the members—20 of 36— but only 20 of 46 when the ten top officers are included). If vice presidents were elected by division rather than at large, ND would have four of the local’s seven vice presidents: rapid transit, car maintenance, stations, and maintenance of way. Unlike in 1994, when some of us felt that we should accept our loss and keep building for the future, the decision to challenge the election results with an appeal to the Department of Labor was unanimous. There were repeated violations of the prohibition against the use of union or employer resources to aid a campaign for union office, and we believe we can make the case that these violations might have affected the outcome of the election. For example, union staff campaigned for James while on the union payroll, and on several occasions management released people from work to hear campaign speeches from the James slate. The James slate was given a complete list of members’ phone numbers to use for phone banking. ND was not informed that such a list was available, and when we protested, we were given a partial list. Apparently recognizing that we had a strong case, TWU’s leadership acted to keep the Department of Labor out of the local’s affairs. First although he admitted to no wrongdoing, Willie James offered to rerun the election for the top ten positions. New Directions agreed to discuss this proposal. We made it known that we wanted the vice presidents elected by division and the election to be held in the fall of 1998 so that the fate of the 20/50

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bill would be known. After canceling three meetings with ND, James withdrew his offer and asked the international to rule on our appeal. In mid-March 1998, the TWU International Committee on Appeals found that the slates had unequal access to the list of members’ phone numbers and that this inequality might have affected the outcome of the election. The committee ordered the local to rerun the election, to use the American Arbitration Association to conduct the balloting, and to mail the ballots by June 1, 1998. It also ruled that the international had to hire a monitor from outside the union to watch the election process and to rule on any disputes that might come up. Despite learning on March 30 that the ballots would be mailed on May 1, leaving us only one month to campaign (and leaving the pension bill as a lure for votes for James), ND members were optimistic about their chances in the rerun. The context of the election had changed significantly from the fall, and we felt that this change would benefit ND. ND made an issue of the local officers’ mismanagement of the local’s funds. As of 1998, the local was nearly broke, having run a $3 million deficit in 1997, much of it caused by James’s hiring extra staff in his effort to win the local. James had negotiated changes in the working conditions for a category of workers and then refused to let the members involved vote on the changes. And, perhaps most important, the 20/50 pension bill was stalled in committee, and the local’s members became increasingly skeptical about the James slate’s ability to deliver on this promise. For its part, the James slate based its 1998 campaign on red baiting and the threat to the private lines that an ND victory would result in the closing of the private bus companies. When the ballots were counted, ND had gained ground, but the James slate held on to the top of the local and the union was more polarized than ever. James received 10,252 votes to Schermerhorn’s 9,582, a difference of only 670 votes. New Directions’ candidate for secretary-treasurer was only 214 votes behind her opponent, and our top vice presidential candidate missed winning a seat by 113 votes. New Directions picked up the executive board seat in the power department. We now have twenty-one of the twenty-three seats elected in the subways but still none of the seats from the buses. ND’s vote went up both absolutely and relatively in the subways, but we lost ground in the buses. ND is considering an appeal of the election’s outcome. There were a number of violations, but our case is not as strong as it was in the previous election. Clearly, our ability to implement a new direction for Local 100 from the top as well as the bottom has been postponed. But we have no intention of simply waiting for the next election to fight for the kinds of policies we think are necessary. As rank-and-file activists and as officers,

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we will be preparing the membership for next year’s contract fight. We will continue to build new directions and push for the reform of the local. And we will be struggling to overcome the deep divisions within our local. As of June 12, 1998, New Directions is the chosen representative of half the members of Local 100. In addition to our seats on the executive board, we are the elected division officers in almost every division in the subways and in one of the divisions of the private bus lines. Until the next election, we will be working to fulfill our obligations as officers and trying to make the most of those positions as we continue to organize New York’s transit workers to take back our union and stand up to management.

Notes 1. Quill’s organizational descendants in the leadership of the union deny that he was ever a member of the CP. Joshua Freeman, in his history of the TWU, concludes that Quill was a member. Joshua Freeman, In Transit (New York: Oxford Unity Press, 1989). 2. This contrasts with the fabled 1996 strike, when Quill demanded and received amnesty from any penalties before the union would return to work. However, at that time, public employees in New York were covered by the LondonWadlin Act, which called for the dismissal of striking public workers. It was the political impossibility of firing the transit workers that led the state legislature to resolve the law. Although the Taylor Law also provides for dismissal of strikers, the range of penalties it contains, especially the fines, makes it a more effective impediment to public worker strikes because it is more easily enforced. 3. B.I.E. stands for “Brakes in Emergency,” in other words, applying the emergency brakes of a train. As a chant, “B.I.E.” was recognized by transit workers as a call for train crews to deliberately apply the emergency brakes, delaying service in order to let the TA and the public know how dissatisfied we were. 4. We did reassess our mild hostility to running for union office, however. The dynamic created by the ND victory among conductors and train operators, which helped legitimate struggle on the job over seniority rights, and the contract showed us that the relationship between elections and rank-and-file action was more complicated than we had thought. We became more open to the potential role that winning and holding office, as opposed to running for it, could play in supporting a willingness of the rank and file of the union to fight back. 5. In a bid to win support from ND, James did make a nod toward greater democracy in the union. He informed the executive board in January 1996 that he favored the election of vice presidents by their division, instead of local-wide. He then appointed a bylaw committee to consider what changes should be made in the bylaws. The seven-person committee was chaired by James and included one ND member. As of September 1997, the committee had still not made a report to the executive board. 6. At a time when many unions are criticizing the “service model” of unionism and moving toward an “organizing” or “mobilizing” model, the leadership of Local 100 aspires to do more than service. Matt Noyes, a friend of ours who grew

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up in Colorado, says that where he comes from, “servicing” is something a bull does to a cow. We agree with his conclusion that the union bureaucracy has been servicing union members too well too long.

10 The Local Union: A Rediscovered Frontier Staughton Lynd

I suggested in 1979 that horizontal organizing at a community level based on the local union might be more promising than seeking to take over national unions. I wrote then in “Where Is the Teamster Rebellion Going?”: I believe groups like Miners for Democracy or Teamsters for a Demo cratic Union drift into an expectation that their ultimate objective is to take over and clean up the international union. I believe this perspective to be in error. For this great expectation, union reformers are repaid in broken hopes and inactive co-workers. . . . I suggest that it is right to run for the offices of steward and local union president, despite the very real compromises involved, and wrong to seek higher position or to control the union on a broader scale. Radicals in local office, according to the view urged here, should think horizontally: they should reach out to their counterparts in other locals of the same international union, and other locals and rank-and-file groups in different unions in the community. Their aspiration, in substance, should be a “parallel central labor union,” or, in rare situations, control of the official central labor body to which all unions in a locality send delegates. Such institutions should be seen as places where rebels in various work settings can meet one another, and educate each other into a consciousness which, because sensitive to the circumstances of all involved, is perforce a class consciousness. Local labor parties or some functional equivalent would be a natural next step.

My friends in Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) were not persuaded by my 1979 article and for two decades have focused their energies on electing new national officers and helping to keep them in office. And I concede that the local union administration of which I am now a part (as local education coordinator for Local 377, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in Youngstown, Ohio) might not have been allowed to take office had there not first been a change in the national union. 191

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Today, however, it seems that everyone has begun to talk about the importance of building power at the local level. TDU itself, at a strategy gathering early in 1997, said that it now sought “to build model local unions. . . . Local unions should take the lead in innovative programs and expect support from the International; local-to-local and member-to-member networks can build union strength.” A document adopted at that strategy meeting added: “None of us can say we’ve organized a Model Local Union. Many of us, however, can contribute our ‘Best Practices,’ areas we’ve succeeded in and that can help us all move toward a model.” Specific suggestions included: “Host a meeting of locals with a common employer. . . . Extend steward and VOC [volunteer organizing committee] networks across local union lines. . . . Hold joint educational conferences for members and stewards from several locals.” In concluding, the document stated: “TDU does a good job of helping rank and filers up the steep slope to office. But resources have been spread thin for helping officers juggle the balls of running their locals, getting members involved, dealing with politics, and building TDU into the life of the local.” Another expression of the newly perceived need to build union power from below is growing criticism of the “mobile national organizer” style of organizing. Steve Early, a staff representative for the Communications Workers of America, has been especially eloquent on this topic. Early argues that “unions should avoid over-reliance on young staffers recruited from college campuses, given a crash-course in organizing, and parachuted into workplace campaigns.” It is a big mistake to try to rebuild unionism without involvement by workers themselves, according to Early. “Peace Corps-type cadre who lack local ties, union experience, or any organizational context for their work are no substitutes for rank and file organizers.” Finally, building community-wide union power at the local level is the objective of Jobs with Justice (JWJ), a national network of two or three dozen aggregations of local unions and community groups in cities across the country. Individuals joining a JWJ group are required to commit to five actions a year in support of other workers. Workers rights boards have been formed in several communities, to which workers can turn as an alternative to the National Labor Relations Board. JWJ groups are in the process of assessing their identity in the context of John Sweeney’s accession to power in the national AFL-CIO. Just how independent of the national AFL-CIO can or should JWJ groups be? What should be their relationship to local central labor bodies? In a book published in 1996 for which I wrote the introduction, a group of younger historians examine the unionism of the early 1930s. They find that in that time also rank and filers “were obliged to turn to each other and create horizontal networks.” Locally based unionism, it would appear, is an idea whose time has come.

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Varieties of Local Union Experience Teamster history offers a rich array of innovative and effective local unions. Let me describe two. The key organizer in the history of the modern International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) was not Jimmy Hoffa but Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs belonged to Teamsters Local 574 in Minneapolis. Whereas most Teamster locals in the city were based on separate crafts, such as ice distributors, drivers handling milk routes, tea and coffee peddlers, drivers of cityowned trucks, and taxi-cab drivers, Local 574 was a general local union. It had about seventy-five members in the fall of 1933. Except for the local’s president, who was a full-time organizer for the Teamsters Joint Council in Minneapolis, members of Local 574 worked in the industry. This tiny local led the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. First a volunteer organizing committee won the support of Local 574 for strike action by coal haulers. The strike was begun and won without waiting for national union approval; indeed, a letter from national Teamsters president Daniel Tobin denying strike sanction arrived just as the coal strike was about to be settled. The “unprecedented appearance of Local 574 buttons on coal drivers after the strike,” as they made deliveries throughout Minneapolis, carried the message of this first small success to the community. The informal organizing committee developed in the coal strike was upgraded to an official body of Local 574, an outcome readily achieved “because coal drivers now predominated in the union and they tended to look upon the organizing committee as their real leadership.” The entire local union executive board was invited to attend meeetings of the organizing committee, which set out to organize the Minneapolis trucking industry on an industrial union basis. Wherever they went they found the workers waiting for them, Dobbs recalls. A class was organized to train volunteer speakers who appeared before meetings of other unions to explain the campaign. Each group of workers met to formulate demands for their specific section of the industry. “They made the decisions on all matters relating to wages, hours, and working conditions. The organizing committee simply added special clauses on points such as union recognition, job protection, grievance procedures, and comparable matters.” A mass meeting at a local theater in April 1934 ended with a local union membership of over 3,000 and an elected strike committee of more than 120. The Central Labor Union went on record in support of Local 574’s demands, cordial cooperation was established with the Minnesota Farmers’ Holiday Association, and a women’s auxiliary was organized. Space is lacking to tell the detailed story of the general strike that followed. As a result of that epic upheaval, the Teamsters union won recognition

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for drivers, helpers, platform workers, and also “inside workers” such as warehousemen and furniture packers. And as a result of Dobbs’s adamant, lifelong opposition to so-called neutral arbitration of workplace problems, “Local 574 retained the unconditional right to strike.” The local used the same militant tactics that had won the general strike to support other groups of workers in Minneapolis, for example, surrounding the strikebound Strutwear Knitting Company with “trucks of all sizes . . . double parked on the street.” Local 574 then embarked on the successful organization of over-theroad drivers in the upper Midwest. It negotiated a series of regional contracts, predecessors of the National Master Freight Agreement. The following “model contract,” endorsed by the membership of the local, became the basis of Local 574’s bargaining: 1. Contracts with employers to be limited to a term of one year. 2. Demands concerning wages and working conditions to be decided in consultation with the union members involved in each particular case. 3. Premium pay to be received for overtime, with the added provision that there be no overtime until all employees on the job worked their full quota of regular hours. 4. If the workweek should be reduced by legislative act, rates of pay to be increased in the proportion necessary to guarantee that there would be no reduction in total weekly pay. 5. Disputes over seniority standing to be settled by the union. The employer to have no voice in the matter. 6. Back pay owed to workers because of contract violations by the employer to be computed at two times the regular wage rate. 7. Formal recognition to be required from the employer of the union’s right to operate its shop steward system. 8. The union to retain the right to strike over employer violations of the working agreement. 9. No boss to order his employee to go through a picket line of a striking union. Most of these demands—in all cases including the right to strike over contract violations—became part of the Midwest regional contracts concluded in 1937, 1938, and 1939. Another instructive model for local unionists was created by Harold Gibbons, president of Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis after World War II. The “social movement unionism” that some have associated with national union leaders such as Walter Reuther was much more fully developed by Local 688. As journalist Steven Brill describes it in The Teamsters:

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Gibbons’ workers got free, unlimited hospitalization and medical care for themselves and their spouses and children—a benefit virtually unheard of in 1951. “Other workers, if they had any protection at all,” Gibbons explained, “had insurance. But that had limitations. If you had to have an appendectomy the insurance gave you $75. But the doctor charged you $150, so you were stuck. That was no good. Some of the guys I was organizing were making 35 cents an hour, and they couldn’t afford that. So we built our own Labor Health Institute with our own doctors [57 of them working part-time by 1951] that handled everything. It was the first prepaid health plan as far as I know, and the employers paid for all of it.” Gibbons’ members also got free dental care (except for bridgework and dentures, which they got at cost). They got free home nursing services, drugs and eyeglasses at cost, and free legal advice. By 1951 they also had pension benefits—at least four years earlier than other Teamster locals won them. When food prices rose rapidly that year, the union opened a nonprofit grocery for its members. A few years later, Gibbons persuaded the employers to pay for a recreation center as part of the employee health program. Wholly financed by employers, it had become, by the early ’60s, an unparalleled complex that included an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium center for winter recreation and a 300-acre outdoor swimming, camping, tennis and golf-course complex in suburban St. Louis. In short, the workers had the same kind of country-club facilities that their bosses had. “Many of our members were from the slums,” Gibbons said. “I saw the health-and-recreation camp as the only way to get their kids some fresh air and a decent place to play in. It was the first time recreational facilities were ever defined as part of a legitimate union health plan that the employers could pay for. For the members and children who were black, it was the only decent place they could go, because everything was segregated in those days.” Gibbons fought segregation in St. Louis. “We used the union as a social force.” In January of 1952, two years before the Supreme Court’s decision striking down school segregation, Gibbons published a union plan for the desegregation of St. Louis’s public schools. At the time, public schools were required by the Missouri constitution to be divided by race. “It was just plain common sense. But what a reaction the fuckin’ thing got,” Gibbons recalled. One St. Louis resident called it “a Russian booby trap,” in a letter to a local newspaper. When the civil-rights struggle in the South opened on other fronts in the middle ‘50s, Gibbons thrust 688 into the battle headlong: “If you were black you couldn’t get into a theater anywhere in the city of St. Louis except in the black community,” he recalled. “And you couldn’t find anywhere outside the black community for a black woman to eat or go to the john when she was shopping. Our Local 688 led that whole goddamn fight. We picketed the theaters. We broke ‘em down. We went down and sat in restaurants while we were in drug stores. We raised hell. We busted the city wide open.” Civil rights was not the only social and political front into which Gibbons threw his union’s muscle. A system of “community stewards” was established to put Teamster power to work in the neighborhoods. In each ward with more than twenty-five Local 688 members, a community steward organized meetings where members expressed themselves about garbage collection, street lights and other local services, and pressured

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officials to take action. As Gibbons explained it, “If, let’s say, we needed a playground in that neighborhood, we’d have the steward get all our members in that neighborhood together and start raising hell. We’d call a meeting, and you know when you’re talking about a playground it isn’t just for Teamsters members. So our guys would get every goddamn neighbor to go to the meeting, too. In the 24th Ward, which was our best ward, we’d have 1,500 or 2,000 people, when the ward committee man might get 150 to his meetings. He’d die. And you know he’d listen to us.” The union tackled citywide issues as aggressively as it did neighborhood service problems: “The streetcar companies were raising their fares and cutting back on service. Well, we have an initiative deal in Missouri where you can get up petitions and put something on the ballot. I mobilized the membership to sign petitions, and we got enough to put it on the ballot. The result is we socialized the goddamn transit system.”

As I noted in 1979 in “Where Is the Teamster Rebellion Going?”: “This picture of Local 688 in the early years of Gibbons’s ascendancy provides a glimpse of what a union might be which insisted on facing community as well as workplace issues, which explicitly organized the class as opposed to this or that segment of workers, and which, in so doing, began to transcend the apparent limitations of unionism and function as a political party.” During the more than twenty years I have been active in the Youngstown workers’ movement, I have had an opportunity to observe large local unions in the UAW (Locals 1112 and 1714, GM Lordstown), Steelworkers, IUE (Packard Electric), and Teamsters. All these local unions elect their local union officers and ratify contracts by referendum vote. Yet they differ dramatically in how much autonomy and internal democracy the local enjoys. For example: 1. In Teamsters locals, staff representatives (business agents) are elected by the members. In all other major locals in the area, staff representatives are appointed by district and national union functionaries. Where the national union controls the choice of staff representatives, it also controls the upper steps of the grievance procedure and can use its discretion to stall or to process perfunctorily the grievances of dissident members and locals. 2. Teamsters Local 377 is unique in that it has its own local union organizer. This position was created in 1996 after a reform slate was successful at the polls, and all the incoming officers and business agents took a pay cut so as to fund the new organizer. Local 377, unlike its UAW, Steelworker, and IUE counterparts, also hires its own lawyers rather than being forced to rely on the national union legal staff. 3. There is variation from union to union in the percentage of dues money that remains in the hands of the local and in whether the employer

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sends check-off proceeds to the national or local union. The national IUE constitution mandates the minimum amount of dues that any member must pay. Hence, even after the local negotiated a lower wage tier beginning at $10 an hour, lower-tier members were obliged to pay the same amount of dues as high-seniority members making twice as much. 4. Local unions that represent workers for a single firm with other plants throughout the country or the world are likely to have less autonomy than locals with a more varied membership. However, Local 1375, USWA in Warren, Ohio, represents workers for a single steel company (WCI Steel) that owns only one mill. This gives the local great power, as in the comparable case of Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana, in the 1930s. A strike by Local 1375 in 1995 generated widespread community backing, beginning with a Labor Day support march that numbered perhaps 5,000, hundreds of them children. This locally led and extremely militant strike caused the employer not only to fire its CEO but also to withdraw scabs from the mill during the course of what proved to be a successful struggle. 5. Some of the locals in the Mahoning Valley have created dozens of full-time union jobs, the holders of which are often better compensated than are rank-and-file members. Such a patronage army has a chilling effect on the possibility of unseating incumbent union officers at the polls. 6. Blacks and women are underrepresented in local union leadership. This is especially the case in the largest of the locals, IUE 717 at Packard Electric, where women make up a majority of the membership. In general, these are all powerful local bodies representing between 1,000 and 9,000 members. A local union that combined the most democratic features of the different large locals in the Mahoning Valley would be a formidable presence.

More Power Than We Know But do local unions, or local coalitions of unions like JWJ groups, have the power to go up against a modern multinational employer? Since the employers’ side is organized in national and multinational hierarchical organizations, mustn’t our side do the same? The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have been a period of unilateral corporate decisions to shut down production facilities; to shift production to low-wage outside contractors, right-to-work states in the South, or abroad; to reduce wages or resist wage increases; to try to get out from under pension and health insurance promises made in more profitable times; and, overall, to try to break unions. Resistance to these decisions has often had

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to be led by local unions, because the national unions involved washed their hands of the matter and looked elsewhere for dues. For example, this was the case in Youngstown, where Locals 1462 and 1330 of the United Steelworkers of America were obliged to lead campaigns against shutdown decisions by powerful national corporations, LTV and United States Steel. Indeed, many of the most significant labor struggles of recent decades have been waged against national corporations by heroically embattled local unions. This was true of the Local P-9 struggle against the Hormel meatpacking company in Austin, Minnesota, in 1983–1986. It was to a considerable extent true of the strike by paper workers in Jay, Maine, in 1987–1988 against International Paper, of the “inside campaign” and lockout at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois, in 1992–1995, and of the Detroit newspaper strike. These struggles often ended in defeat. However, the defeats at P-9, of the Jay paper workers, and of the struggles at A. E. Staley and in Detroit were caused not only—perhaps not even primarily—by the power of the employer. Interference by national unions kept the locals from doing all they could have done and wished to do. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) put Local P-9 into trusteeship after P-9 members overwhelmingly rejected an order by the national union president to return to work unconditionally. The United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU) approved contracts negotiated by local unions not in the “voting pool” of striking International Paper locals that were more concessionary than the strike demands, in effect scabbing on its own striking members. At Staley, the UPIU required a ratification vote on a contract with the company that the local union bargaining committee had unanimously rejected. In the Detroit newspaper strike, the new Sweeney leadership of the AFL-CIO refused for more than a year to heed the strikers’ call for a national solidarity march on Detroit. And the new Carey leadership of the national Teamsters union required its striking local unions to offer an unconditional return to work without giving members who had been picketing for eighteen months an opportunity to vote on the proposal. I am not pointing a finger at particular unions. The UAW was said to have opposed the insistence of the Teamsters and Communications Workers of America (CWA) national officers on an unconditional return to work in Detroit. But the same national UAW disgraced itself in the Caterpillar strike, forcing strikers back to work after they had overwhelmingly rejected a proposed contract. On balance, it seems that the involvement of national unions has more often hurt than helped. With the solitary exception of the United Mine Workers in the 1989 Pittston strike, even the most spirited efforts by national unions have stopped short of radical direct action at the point of production and focused instead on product boycotts and “corporate campaigns”

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intended to embarrass the employer. William Winpisinger, viewed at the time as one of the most progressive national union leaders, rejected a request to call out airline machinists in support of striking PATCO workers in 1981. “Our attorneys warn us,” he wrote in the Boston Globe, “that if I, as International president, should sanction, encourage or approve a sympathy strike under these conditions, I would risk the IAM’s entire financial reserves.” In contrast, local unions have shown that they can shut down the largest corporation in the world. In spring 1996, 3,000 workers at two brake plants in Dayton, Ohio, went on strike, causing General Motors to idle more than twenty assembly plants and to lay off more than 175,000 workers. A year later, a strike at a single Packard Electric complex in Warren, Ohio (near Youngstown), was rapidly settled by GM, on terms advantageous to the strikers, because this strike, too, was expected to shut down all of General Motors’ assembly in a matter of days.

The Withering Away of the (National) Union Histories of the labor movement in the United States since the 1930s typically offer a two-stage scenario. Stage one is a time of militant, decentralized, rank-and-file mass action. Stage two features the formation of centralized national labor organizations, recognized by the employer, enmeshed in collectively bargained rights and obligations, and deeply suspicious of unauthorized action by the rank and file. Some writers welcome this transition (scholars in the tradition of Selig Perlman, David Brody, and Robert Zieger). Other writers deplore it (Frances Fox Piven and myself). Perhaps we need to imagine a third stage. Perhaps, when bureaucratic organization has done its stabilizing work, it should become possible again to decentralize. After the creation of a culture of collective bargainining, it may be that local unions can begin to take on much of the work of negotiating and enforcing contracts. For surely an adult does not require the external discipline that may have been helpful to him or her as a child. This third stage, this dialectical synthesis of what has gone before, would increasingly cast national unions as coordinators of activity planned and carried out at a local level. It would become the challenge of a “good” national union administration to see how much centralized decisionmaking could be devolved to local unions. Progress would be measured not by the language of the most recent Basic Steel Contract or National Master Freight Agreement but by the degree to which local unions had become the cutting edge of the union’s work. I caught a glimpse of this happy state of affairs in the recent Packard Electric strike in Warren, Ohio. There are 8,000-plus Packard Electric

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workers left at its Warren complex, as compared to about 40,000 Packard workers in plants built in Mexico during the past twenty-five years. Early in May 1997, fifteen minutes before the local contract was to expire, the company told the chief negotiators for Local 717 that it would sweeten the package for senior workers on the verge of retirement and do something more for young workers in the lowest wage tier, but it would insist on its right to move equipment and operations out of the Mahoning Valley at will. The shop chairman answered: “Not without a fight.” The local’s negotiating committee backed him up unanimously. Within a span of minutes, seemingly, what had been a complex mosaic of subsettlements for a myriad of constituencies (the young, the old, the crafts, the unskilled, workers on traditional eight-hour shifts, workers on a “continuous run” schedule of twelve-hour shifts, etc.) resolved itself into a single question: Should the company be allowed to go on moving jobs to Mexico? This was understood by Packard workers as they began to form picket lines. Somehow it was also instantly grasped by the Warren police, who brought firewood and coffee to the strikers. I went to the lines early the next morning. I saw and heard a police car honk in support as it drove by. At the union hall, I assumed the task of locating the off-site warehouses at which the company had tried to store product for shipment and mobilizing other local unions to set up informational picket lines there. As I drove about town I listened to the community’s favorite talk show program, exclusively devoted to the strike. That morning every caller, too, seemed perfectly to have grasped the central strike issue. The company retreated, the union realized most of what it could imagine at the time, and my own task proved superfluous. But I had experienced the enthusiasm of a community mobilized behind a local union to ensure decent jobs for everybody’s kids. I believe that had the strike continued, Youngstown might have hit the bricks in a community-wide local general strike. In this emerging atmosphere of homegrown solidarity, local unions will hopefully also turn to their most serious challenge: the selfishness that destroys solidarity inside unions. The best example of this selfishness is when some workers work overtime while others are without work. The best place to confront that spirit is in the handling of layoffs. Already, here and there, local unions have revived a common practice of the early 1930s, “to share or ‘equalize’ the work among all workers who had completed the probationary period, regardless of seniority.” The late Ed Mann, exemplar for younger trade unionists throughout the Youngstown area, described the change needed in these words: The Wobblies say, do away with the wage system. For a lot of people that’s pretty hard to take. What the Wobblies mean is, you’ll have what

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you need. The wage system has destroyed us. If I work hard I’ll get ahead, but if I’m stronger than Jim over here, maybe I’ll get the better job and Jim will be sweeping floors. But maybe Jim has four kids. The wage system is a very divisive thing. It’s the only thing we have now, but it’s very divisive. Maybe I’m just dreaming but I think there’s a better way.

Notes on Sources My 1979 article “Where Is the Teamster Rebellion Going?” appeared in Radical America, vol. 13, no. 2 (March–April 1979), quoted material on p. 73; reprinted in Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader, edited by James Green (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). TDU strategy as of early 1997 was expressed in “T.D.U.: Building a Stronger Teamsters Union with Rank and File Power,” a paper circulated at the TDU Strategy Meeting in Detroit, February 22–23, 1997, and in the conference report, “The Teamsters Action Plan: Taking First Steps Toward Building a Strong Union and Our Reform Movement.” Steve Early’s article “New Organizing Should Be Membership-based” appeared in Labor Notes, April 1996. See also Danny Mitchell, “Don’t Blitz, Organize!” Labor Notes, June 1996, and Early, “Membership-based Organizing vs. the Mobile Organizer Model: Worker Empowerment Is the Way to Win,” in A New Labor Movement for the New Century, edited by Gregory Mantsios (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). The book published in 1996 for which I wrote the introduction is Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). My account of Farrell Dobbs and Teamsters Local 574 is based primarily on Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Monad Press, 1972) and Teamster Power (New York: Monad Press, 1973). The long quotation about Harold Gibbons and Teamsters Local 688 is from Steven Brill, The Teamsters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). Brill’s account is corroborated by UAW New Directions leader Jerry Tucker, who grew up in St. Louis. The experience of Local 1010, United Steelworkers of America, in bargaining with a company (Inland Steel) that had only one steel mill is described by John Sargent and Nick Migas in Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, edited by Alice and Staughton Lynd (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), 97–102 and 157–167. The general accuracy of their accounts is confirmed by Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The struggle against steel mill shutdowns led by local unions in Youngstown and Pittsburgh is described in Staughton Lynd, The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings (San Pedro, CA: Singlejack Books, 1982) and “The Genesis of the Idea of a Community Right to Property in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, 1977–1987,” Journal of American History, vol. 74, no. 3 (December 1987), reprinted in my Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical’s Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Other strikes referred to are described in Peter Rachleff, Hard-pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston:

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South End Press, 1993); Rose Feurer, “The Staley Lockout: A View from Below,” Impact, vol. 3, no. 4 (July 1995); Eric Chester, “The Lessons of the Detroit Strike,” Industrial Worker, May 1997, reprinted in Impact, vol. 5, no. 3 (June 1997); Jim Sessions and Fran Ansley, “Singing Across Dark Spaces: The Union/Community Takeover of the Pittston Coal Company’s Moss 3 Coal Preparation Plant,” in Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, edited by Stephen Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). William Winpisinger’s comment about the PATCO strike is quoted in the introduction to Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s–1990s, edited by Glenn Perusek and Kent Worcester (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). Some examples of sharing or “equalizing” work during a layoff are cited in the introduction to “We Are All Leaders.” Ed Mann’s comment is from Ed Mann, We Are the Union: The Story of Ed Mann, edited by Alice and Staughton Lynd (distributed by Solidarity USA, Youngstown, Ohio).

11 Restructuring Labor’s Identity: The Justice for Janitors Campaign in Washington, D.C. Jane Williams On the morning of September 20, 1995, a yellow school bus was parked across the eastbound lanes of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge connecting northern Virginia to Washington, D.C., and for over an hour blocked more than 100,000 commuters from entering the city. Frustrated, many commuters abandoned their car pools and walked into the District, disgusted with what at first seemed to be just another everyday traffic atrocity for the metro commute. But the cause of this gridlock was different. As many commuters, media, and police looked on, a mock classroom was set up, complete with school desks, chairs, and blackboards and several banners declaring “SAVE DC, CARR MUST PAY.” The largest disruptive protest of the Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign in Washington, D.C., had begun, and for a moment, janitors, who largely constitute what is often called the “invisible workforce,” were seen and heard. Through the media coverage generated by this demonstration, the citizens of the metropolits became enlightened about the desperate lot of those who clean the city. The protest also drew attention to one of the specific targets of the JfJ campaign, Oliver Carr, who, as the largest owner of commercial buildings in the metropolitan area, needed to know that the janitors who cleaned his buildings questioned his civic responsibility in paying his fair share of city taxes. The demonstration also linked the struggle to secure janitors a better wage to the larger crisis of the city. The school bus symbolized the round of budget cuts that would deeply hurt working and poor people dependent on public services while leaving the wealthy denizens of the city relatively unscathed. In other words, the JfJ protest was giving the metropolitan area a crash course in the effects of uneven development. As one protester told the media, “We feel that this little disruption is nothing compared with the major disruption the D.C. budget is going to have on working families and their kids.”1 203

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This chapter is about the JfJ campaign in Washington, D.C., which provides a model for organizing the low-wage service sector often infected with outsourcing, or contracting out. I will describe how outsourcing works and how the 1995 JfJ campaign sought to confront this pattern’s barriers to organizing workers into unions. I will also examine the campaign’s strategy of connecting the janitors’ plight to the local political economy, revealing the intricate relationships among the spheres of power in the District. The story of the janitors’ campaign in Washington also is about the profound difficulty of fostering union democracy. Breaking down hierarchichal power relations within unions remains an ongoing struggle, and I will argue that building a new, inclusive, and dynamic unionism will be hindered until a more democratic union culture at both the local and national levels is established. If unionists are serious about rebuilding unions in this country, they cannot do so without the full commitment of their membership. More important, if they fail to actively engage the workers they represent, the potential of unions to forge a just society will be squandered. Of course, this task is a tall order for any institution, let alone one that has been blunted by its own bureaucratic trappings since the late 1950s. But transgressing the confines of business unionism to forge social unionism fundamentally depends on the self-activity and self-organization of the rank and file. The potential and pitfalls of building an inclusive new unionism in the midst of a ruthless new world order can be gleaned, in part, by examining the JfJ campaign in Washington, D.C.

The Regime of Contracting Out Although public-sector workers have faced the devastation of privatization since the late 1980s, workers in the building services—janitors, elevator operators, security guards, window cleaners—have felt the effects of outsourcing since the 1960s. Before this surge of outsourcing, janitors and other workers in building services were generally considered members of the industry whose worksite they cleaned. An economist for the U.S. Labor Department explains: If an insurance company, for example, hires its own janitors, then those janitors work in the insurance industry. If the same company subcontracts its janitorial work to a cleaning company, then the janitors who may or may not be the same individuals previously employed by the insurance company, are employed in the building cleaning industry.2

In Washington, D.C., janitors hired to clean government buildings were civil servants and could rely upon job security, health benefits, sick

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and vacation days, and even pensions. When the government buildings shifted to contracting out cleaning services, janitors saw those provisions swept away. In the new work regime, workers often had no sick or vacation pay or leave. If they were absent to tend to a sick child or were too ill to work themselves, they could expect to be fired.3 Janitors faced a double loss: Work conditions continued to deteriorate because of privatization, and they lost their status as civil servants. Yet this new desperate work regime also paved the way for unionizing what previously had been government jobs. Consequently, Local 82 organized janitors in the Department of Labor, the General Accounting Office, and Housing and Urban Development, to name but a few federal agencies. Soon, however, the local encountered new institutional barriers to organizing in the contract industry. Hard-won union contracts would be nullified overnight when building owners hired and fired contractors in quick succession. A newly hired contractor had no legal obligation to honor any union contract signed by the previous contractor. Consequently, workers were often denied accumulated vacation time or sick leave, wages were often lowered and work hours reduced, all because of a change in employer. The government, which in effect hired the contractors, did nothing to redress this situation. As Arlene Neal, past president of Local 82, recalls, “The government was not guaranteeing that the workers would get any of the things we had gotten in the contract as the contracts evolved. So all these [abuses] then became so prevalent with the contracting work that the international started working with Congress to get an act passed that would protect the workers.”4 In 1965, the Service Contract Act was passed, and workers in the government buildings were assured that wage rates and benefits negotiated in a contract would be honored in the bids made by competing janitorial contractors. Thus, for the government buildings, janitorial wages were taken out of competition. Consequently, janitors in the government buildings maintained wages and benefits throughout the 1970s and 1980s and became the backbone of the local. However, the 1965 act did not include all workers, and nonunion workers laboring in the commercial sector suffered much the same fate as other janitors around the country. Glenda Lewis, a Washingtonian janitor in the commercial buildings, recalls the transition from working for a unionized contractor to a nonunion one: ISS was a union building, and they lost their contract . . . because when they went up to bid, UNICCO, who got the building, bid to pay us the least. They could pay us all the way back to $5.00 when we were just at $5.70. We were getting ready to get a raise from ISS if they had kept the building. . . . I never had a bad experience with ISS. . . . But I had a bad experience with UNICCO. First of all we worked eight hours, and had seven floors. The floors were very, very long. . . . We had to dust, vacuum,

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clean the blinds, clean the cabinets, bathrooms and all. It was a lot of work for eight hours. The building had begun to fall [apart] because it wasn’t getting a proper cleaning. I stayed there for a year. I worked fulltime for about three months, and I could no longer do that type of work.5

Conditions for organizing the commercial workers in the janitorial contracting industry have been daunting. A senior analyst with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) briefly explains the recent crisis of contracting out: It was a triple whammy: over-built office markets, nonunion contractors invading from the suburbs, and a sudden surplus of unskilled labor. Subcontracting in commercial office cleaning had grown steadily during the 1970s, but it took the crisis of the early ’80s to expose the weakness of the union’s position in the new institutional setting. . . . Building service locals faced the nightmare of seeing union jobs converted into nonunion jobs right before their eyes. Would union organization simply become irrelevant in the context of the harsh new realities of janitorial contracting?6

One of the harsh new realities of organizing in the janitorial contracting industry is the protected status of the building owner. The industry generally has three employment tiers: the janitor who works for the contractor, the contractor who works for the building owner, and the building owner who will lease space to tenants. In this multilayer arrangement, bargaining units are difficult to distinguish, especially within current labor law. For example, it is illegal for the union to picket the building owner, who is protected by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by his or her designation as a secondary employer. The building owner is protected by the NLRB, even though the owner has complete control over hiring the contractor, whereas the contractor has little financial autonomy and often accepts a thirty-day cancellation agreement from building owners to secure a contract. Moreover, to keep contracting costs down, as contractors are pressured to do by the building owner and the bidding process, wages are kept close to the minimum rate. As in many service industries, labor costs account for a high percentage of expenditures, around 85 percent for janitorial contracting even though on average only a nickel of each dollar in office rent goes toward janitorial services. 7 Consequently, even if the contractor were to accept the union, he or she might be at the mercy of a nonunion building owner who could easily dismiss the contractor in a month if the contractor has accepted the thirty-day cancellation clause. For the service contractor, it may be an asset for employment opportunities to be considered anti-union, as is the case in Washington. The building owner’s control over the contracting process is described by a Local 82 senior organizer:

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There is no way to have the company that employs the janitors to be union unless the owner is in agreement because the owner legally could get rid of any cleaning contractor within thirty days for any reason. And, one reason is because they’re more expensive, and if [they’re] union they’re going to be a little more expensive, not a lot but a little more. So what we have found is that if you organize a company through a traditional method with an election, thirty days later that company is gone and the new company comes in and you don’t have a contract. . . . All you have is nothing.8

With respect to building-service industries, one of the most pressing reforms in labor law is to assign the building owner coemployer status. Currently, the union cannot force the building owner to sign an agreement requiring the owner to employ only union contractors or if that owner has fired a union contractor, the union cannot force the building owner to recognize or bargain with the union. As I will describe later in the chapter, the Washington JfJ campaign has challenged the prohibition of picketing the secondary employer as it has creatively attempted to work around the NLRB ban. Older forms of union organizing granted by the NLRB are also being challenged by the JfJ campaign. For example, traditional organizing that is focused on NLRB election for union recognition is often sidelined by the campaign. And in the procedures of union elections, the NLRB has been abetting the employer more than securing the rights of the employee. Employers know what to expect when a union files for an election and can harass or fire union activists and commit a myriad of unfair labor practices that may attenuate the union’s position in the eyes of the workers it seeks to organize. Undocumented workers are particularly vulnerable to employer harassment. Further, when an election is filed with the NLRB, employers can legally delay the election and thereby reduce the ability of unions to eventually win.9 Organizing by individual worksite, the most acceptable form for the NLRB, is also circumvented by the JfJ campaign. Contractors dispatch their employees in a variety of buildings across the city, and organizing that is focused on a single building could lead to job loss or competition among workers who actually work for the same employer. Consequently, the nature of the contracting industry compels the union to organize the industry area-wide, focusing on both the contractor and the building owner. In light of this fact, the JfJ campaign in Washington has sought a master agreement that would provide the majority of commercial janitors with one contract. Arlene Neal compares the new goals of organizing to the old: “In yesterday’s organizing we organized the workers. Today they are organizing the employers.”10 This form of organizing has affected Local 82 in complex and, at times, conflicting ways, and I will attempt to illuminate its ramifications. But before I address the impact of this new organizing culture

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on the local, I want to describe the JfJ 1995 campaign within the specific context of the urban crisis of Washington, D.C.

Urban Crisis and Carr Trouble in Washington, D.C. In December 1994, the D.C. City Council approved a commercial property tax increase to generate much-needed revenue. At that point, the city was verging on financial bankruptcy, and full congressional control of the city’s budget was expected and dreaded by city advocates who were all too aware of the District of Columbia’s precarious position. Washington is, of course, the only U.S. continental jurisdiction without full congressional representation or self-government. Currently, 65% of city tax filers make less than $30,000 annually. Only 11.5% of the tax filers make between $50,000 and $100,000, almost 10% below the national average. Further, Washington has no commuter tax from the vast throngs of private and public employees streaming in from northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs each weekday.11 However, whereas the city suffers from underfunding, Washington commercial real estate owners amass, amazingly, the highest margin of profit compared with their counterparts in the largest seven U.S. metropolitan areas from New York to Los Angeles. Commercial real estate is a lucrative business in Washington, D.C. Commercial office buildings in Washington have the lowest rate of vacancy, around 8 percent; Los Angeles, which has the highest rate, is around 25 percent. Washington lease rates are the highest, at around $36 per square foot; the lowest rates belong to Los Angeles, at around $19, and Boston, at around $16. Moreover, Washington landlords reap the highest profit margins on the office buildings, at almost $20 per square foot, compared with Los Angeles profit margins of $14 per square foot and Boston at $12.12 Despite this potential for revenue, in January 1995 the D.C. City Council reversed its vote, and the Washington private real estate industry was granted $32 million in tax breaks.13 To illustrate the impact of this decision, JfJ widely distributed a leaflet, “Save Disintegration City,” depicting a giant building with arms and legs in the midst of a reduced city skyline. The arms of the giant building reach up, cutting open the bottom of an enlarged pail titled “CITY COFFERS,” which is laden with money dangling from a huge crane. The money is pouring into the giant building while the foot of the building crushes a police car. JfJ’s message is clear: Millions of dollars in tax breaks are allotted to commercial buildings at the price of further impoverishing the city.14 In 1995, there arose a new and powerful opposition to assess and tax commercial landlords fairly. The city’s financial crisis enabled Congress to

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appoint a financial control board that would have complete sovereignty over the city’s budget. After the takeover, the control board cut 5,600 positions in the city’s workforce and ordered cutbacks on benefits extended to workers displaced by privatization.15 While draconian budget cuts, including a threat to close down the University of the District of Columbia, fell upon the city, Oliver Carr, the largest real estate owner in Washington, D.C., reaped the financial rewards of the $32 million in commercial property tax breaks.16 Along with the D.C. City Council, the control board adamantly resisted imposing a tax on commercial realty. One reason for the board’s resistance to taxing building owners might have been that the chairman of the control board, Andrew Brimmer, also serves on the board of directors of Carr Real Estate Services.17 Indeed, as one JfJ poster plastered around the city declared: “DC HAS CARR TROUBLE.” JfJ’s corporate campaign against Oliver Carr is strategic for a number of reasons. Practically speaking, targeting the largest developer is critical to eventually achieving the master agreement needed to organize the janitors throughout the metropolitan area occupationally and geographically. More abstractly, targeting the largest developer within the context of the city’s financial crisis makes accessible through example the complex and often mystifying structure of uneven development. The misery induced through the city’s dwindling resources is contrasted to the enormous amount of wealth accumulated at the city’s expense by individuals such as Oliver Carr. Oliver Carr and Carr Real Estate Service (CRES) own or manage thirty buildings in the District. 18 According to the Washington Post, “Carr executives said they have a ‘strictly neutral’ position on the unionization of janitors . . . and that 30% of Carr buildings are cleaned by union members.”19 However, there is evidence to suggest that Carr and his realty companies are not at all neutral to unionization. One janitorial contractor hired by Carr is United States Service Industry, Inc. (USSI), which employs around 1,500 janitors in the metropolitan D.C. area.20 Often bragging about its union-busting capabilities, USSI is hardly friendly toward unions attempting to organize its janitors. Carr’s hiring a company such as USSI came as no surprise to Local 82. According to one senior JfJ organizer: “In Washington the building owners decided they were going to fight us. They decided publicly; they proclaimed it. During the first year of the organizing drive they listed as one of their biggest successes that they had kept a union out. They continue to fight us in every way possible.”21 In the JfJ campaign, the building owners have enlisted the aid of USSI, a company that has committed so many unfair labor practices that even the NLRB has rigorously ruled against it. Indeed, USSI’s labor relations history is a sordid affair. For example, in 1990 USSI refused to reinstate a total of thirty-five employees who had engaged in economic strikes

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against the company. Two years later USSI fired a janitor, stating that it “could not tolerate her stirring up other workers.” Through 1993–1994 the NLRB sentenced USSI for committing more than a dozen different kinds of labor violations against its employees. In June and August 1995, twenty USSI employees filed grievances against their employer that ran the gamut from illegal transfers to firing workers for being involved with the union.22 In October 1995, the NLRB handed down its third decision against USSI in sixteen months. The NLRB stated: “In light of this history of pervasive illegal conduct, we find that the Respondent’s unfair labor practices are likely to have a continuing coercive effect on the free exercise by employees of their Section 7 rights long after the violations have occurred. Additional remedy is necessary in order to dissipate as much as possible the lingering atmosphere of fear created by the Respondent’s unlawful conduct.”23 The NLRB related specific incidents of USSI employee abuse, noting one instance in which two workers “were told by a supervisor that they ‘could not work’ because they ‘had gone on strike and joined the union.’”24 On March 12, 1995, the Washington Post ran an article in which several female janitors from USSI were interviewed. One janitor, Ester Treminio, had led a walkout in 1994. In February 1995, she was fired from USSI. She said: “The workers like me because I am the only one who answers back, but the supervisors said I was a foolish instrument of bad people. . . . They kept giving me warnings, but I told them even if you fire me, the union will come eventually.”25 USSI lost its case against Treminio and was forced to put her back to work in another Carr building, where she was promptly fired again.26 Other employee abuse by USSI has been documented by JfJ and used in a campaign leaflet. One leaflet, for example, tells briefly of the outrageous affront suffered by a worker who attempted to organize. “USSI manager Robin Allen seemed to lose control when she saw Milagro’s union button. First, she physically removed the button from Milagro’s smock— in violation of the law—and then returned a half an hour later to fire her.”27 Janitors also complain of supervisors who abuse them for slight mistakes, such as not filling the soap dispenser to the top, and cheat them by not properly documenting their work hours on the timesheets.28 Even without employer harassment, life is hard for nonunion janitors. In Washington, the average hourly wage is $5.75 for private contractors such as USSI. There are no paid holidays, time off to attend funerals, or sick days. Part-time work enables the employer to withhold benefits and keep wages down. Thus, for twenty-five hours of work a week, a janitor earns less than $150. In Washington, a significant fraction of the workforce in commercial cleaning is Latino. These workers are frequently harassed for their vulnerable immigration status. Faustino Galindo, a thirtyseven-year-old Salvadoran JfJ organizer, stated, “The industry hires mostly

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Latinos now, and we know it’s not because they adore them, but because they’re easier to exploit.”29

Gridlocking for Justice To organize a new workforce of immigrants in a hostile anti-union industry, JfJ took its campaign to the streets in 1995. The year’s campaign was marked by mass demonstrations during a week in March and a week in September. Both of these demonstrations garnered national media attention. The schedule of protest and demonstrations during the week of March 18 was labeled “sit-in for justice.”30 “Flying pickets” marched down city blocks handing out leaflets detailing Carr’s tax rollback, its effects on the city, and the ruthless exploitation of janitorial workers by contractors such as USSI. When interviewed by the media, union officials cast the janitors’ plight within the context of the broader trauma of the city’s financial crisis: “This isn’t just about 5,000 janitors; its about issues that concern all DC residents—what’s happening to their schools, their streets, their neighborhoods.”31 Many participants were from local areas, but union organizers, activists, and janitors from Detroit to Orlando came to demonstrate for JfJ. As the Washington Post reported: Greg Ceci, a longshoreman from Baltimore, said he came to show solidarity with the janitors and because he senses the labor movement is becoming revitalized by recent attack from the Republican right. “I don’t know who Oliver Carr is but I know we need to stop resting on our laurels and letting the right wing whack away at us,” Ceci said. “We need to reach out to the workers who have been ignored by mainstream unions. We need to fight back, and I want to be part of it.”32

Before the week ended, the sit-in for justice had blocked traffic on the Fourteenth Street Bridge, the Third Street tunnel under the Capitol, and various other D.C. thoroughfares.33 The campaign was a public relations success, bringing to light the issue of taxing commercial real estate property. Even the Washington Post business section declared: “The union representing janitors who clean commercial buildings in Washington appears to have raised some legitimate questions about the way those buildings are assessed for tax purposes.”34 However, JfJ failed in one of its attempts to subvert the NLRB stricture forbidding picketing of secondary employers when it held a prayer vigil in front of the Bethesda home of Oliver Carr. A Washington superior court judge charged the union with contempt of court for picketing a secondary employer’s private residence. It was difficult for JfJ to prove its claim that it was actually holding a prayer vigil, since few known prayers

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have the continuous chant “We’ll be back, we’ll be back,” which was the verse of choice for the praying janitors.35 The September campaign was marked by the largest disruptive direct action of JfJ to date: the blocking of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. This demonstration generated coverage and commentary for several weeks. JfJ was designated “Traffic Terrorist” by two of the largest Washington newspapers.36 Ron Shaffer of the Washington Post, better known as “Dr. Gridlock,” was so traumatized by the protest that he mentioned it in his column for two months. Baffled and irate, he described the protest in these terms: “The demonstrators had no permit for that action. They simply pulled a bus across the lanes of traffic, got on top of it and chained themselves to objects to protest something that bothered them.”37 On principle, Dr. Gridlock refused to name the protestors because he was not willing to provide free PR to these traffic terrorists. But with all the media coverage of the event, Dr. Gridlock’s silencing tactics were thwarted. JfJ had hit a sore spot in a metropolitan area whose largest newspaper dedicated space each Thursday to hashing out the latest traffic atrocities. The incident even provoked a congressional subcommittee hearing and investigation on October 6 of that year. However, the president of Local 82 declined to testify. JfJ’s strategies offer a potent model for organizing the low-wage service worker by constructing the janitors’ plight in relation to the broad range of conditions affecting the city. The devastating cuts in public services, immigrant rights, sexual harassment, and even rent control have been an integral part of the campaign to win a modest wage increase and benefits for janitors. Further, JfJ’s picketing, bannering, and mass demonstrations provide a public critique of capitalism through illustrating, by examples drawn from constituents’ experiences, how wealth is created in a stratified society and who pays the price. Confronting the new challenges posed by the neoliberal economy—low wages, part-time status, contracting out—the Washington campaign to unionize janitors through a citywide master agreement has begun to structure itself as a social movement. This development is in keeping with the goals of all JfJ campaigns nationwide. A senior policy analyst with the SEIU explains: Civil disobedience by a cross-section of supporters, including religious and other community leaders, helps draw attention to the janitors’ plight. The themes of the campaign play a role here: “Justice” as opposed to “wage” slogans help broaden the appeal of the workers’ struggle. The problems of the working poor, mistreatment of minority groups, sexual harassment, and lack of health insurance are issues that will attract a diverse constituency. Justice for Janitors picket line gives sympathizers a vehicle for expressing their diverse concerns.38

Thus the project of the JfJ campaign is a concrete commitment to recasting labor’s identity as a broad-based social movement and advocating

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the varied needs of our most vulnerable workers. JfJ also challenges positing organized labor as a special interest group; instead, it illuminates the complex structures of oppression, from exploitation of new immigrants to the disintegration of the city’s public services.

Internal Problems Unfortunately, while the JfJ campaign in Washington is attempting to forge social unionism, the needs and aspirations of Local 82’s established membership have at times been marginalized. The reasons for this marginalization are complex, but part of the predicament stems from the kind of organizing conducted by the JfJ campaign. JfJ uses the tactics of a corporate campaign, such as the one waged against Oliver Carr, in the hopes of organizing the janitorial contracting industry citywide. Past strategies, however, concentrated on organizing the workers. Although few would argue that the external organizing and creative tactics of the JfJ campaign should be entirely abandoned, some workers have articulated the need to sustain and even advance internal organizing among the local’s established membership. Yet the need to focus on the already organized seems to be at odds with the current trend elaborated by the national leadership. For example, John Sweeney, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), recently wrote: “I often say that I want to revive ‘the culture of organizing’ within the labor movement. That’s just one way of saying that unions should look outward, not inward.”39 However, the workers I have interviewed continually stressed the importance of looking inward, too, of mobilizing the rank and file in the struggle to organize the new workforce and build social unionism. Angela Woodland, a member of Local 82 and an activist with the JfJ campaign, stated: “Organizing is important. You have to organize, but in order to organize you have to maintain.”40 The consequences of marginalizing union members have dire implications for building a democratic, multiracial union. Along with a different organizing approach, cultural differences, due to demographic changes in the workforce, have at times caused a sense of displacement for the older members of the local. In 1991, Local 525, which had served strictly as a JfJ campaign, merged with Local 82. Local 82 is a sixty-year-old union, and throughout its history members have been predominantly African American. With the merger, the international furnished the local with a new executive director and senior staff organizers primarily to organize the 5,000 janitors in commercial buildings. 41 The majority of these janitors are Latino, and nationwide the JfJ campaign has a distinct Latino identity. Many members of Local 82, a predominantly African American chapter in a predominantly African American city, now

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feel left out. Linda Kaye Holmes, a shop steward, noted that the membership in her shop didn’t even realize that JfJ was part of Local 82: When I would take the newsletter to the Howard University shop, which is a predominantly black shop . . . it was embarrassing. You only saw [Latino] faces and our membership was disenfranchised with JfJ. It was about Latino problems, like no one else had problems in their struggle. I think that we missed the boat. I blame the executive board and the executive director for not being sensitive to both [African American and Latino] needs to build coalition because we are all on the bottom of the boat fight[ing] for rights for janitors.42

During the 1996 Justice for Janitors Day on June 15, held two blocks from the White House, there were few African Americans on the podium, even though they make up over 60 percent of the membership. Language barriers continue to bar the way for building bridges among the multiracial membership. The union denied a request from black workers for Spanish lessons. Further, neither the local’s bylaws nor the constitution has been translated into Spanish. This failure is particularly worrisome to Angela Woodland, an African American and a committed rank-and-file activist. She believes that black members are not the only workers being let down by the union’s leadership; Latinos, too, are not being fully enfranchised into unionism. Referring to a possible strike in the fall of 1996 and the effects of potentially losing it, Woodland conjectures: “[JfJ will] lose all those members that they did organize. Those janitors will be left without anything, without a union and without the knowledge of a union and what a union can do for them.”43 The leadership’s seeming inability to alleviate the increasing alienation of the members is all the more painful when, as Woodland explains, the potential for powerful coalition building between Latinos and African Americans has sometimes emerged. Woodland served as a JfJ brigade leader and found that the Latino workers accepted her leadership: When I worked on the brigade, I knew very little Spanish, but I got along with everybody. I got along so well with them because my personality is that I want to be friends. They wanted me to be their leader in the streets. I couldn’t speak much Spanish, but they knew that I wasn’t going to let them get hurt. I cared about them and us and the local. This was important to them, and this is the kind of person they wanted to lead them.44

Both Linda Kaye Holmes and Woodland have articulated a complex understanding of how racial division is exploited by janitorial contractors, yet they are even more disheartened when their own union leadership neglects to confront similar divisive patterns in the local. Of course, Local 82 is not unique in this regard. The JfJ campaign in Los Angeles, for example,

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faced a bitter internal conflict, illustrating the price of shelving the difficult process of union democracy. The Los Angeles campaign has made impressive strides in the 1990s by organizing an overwhelming 90 percent of janitors who work in the city’s commercial jurisdiction. Set against these bleak years of neoliberalism, the success of the janitors’ campaign in Los Angeles is stunning. Yet there is an ominous side to this success story. An alliance of Latinos, African Americans, and whites ran a dissident slate called the Multiracial Alliance for the executive board of Local 399 and won the election. However, a power struggle between the newly elected officers and the local’s longtime president and administration ensued, and the international placed Local 399 in trusteeship. A dramatic hunger strike by the dissident members was held outside the union hall. Strike leader Cesar Oliva Sanchez was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “We built this union. We want to be able to make the decisions. I want to improve the lot of the workers. We must be respected as much by the companies we work for as by the union we pay dues to.”45 While the gains made by Local 399 to organize the unorganized are noteworthy, the internal problems of power sharing among members were reflected in “blatantly racist signs or banners.”46 The experiences of Local 399 suggest that without a commitment to internal union democracy, which is not always efficient and never easy, the possibility of a thriving and vibrant multiracial unionism is unlikely for the U.S. labor movement.

Conclusion The nationwide JfJ campaign was developed in part to challenge the paralysis of U.S. unionism. Stemming from the “Fight Back” campaign in Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s, JfJ gradually developed into a dynamic national strategy for organizing workers on the bottom of the economic ladder. Organizing the service sector is critical to the survival of unions, and the JfJ campaign has offered some important methods to advance unionization among this diverse workforce. It is no small task to bring attention to the exploitation suffered by workers who are often unnoticed or deemed insignificant in a nation that proposes high-skilled employment, such as computer programming, as the only path to escape the ravages of the neoliberal economy. Most Americans are not fortunate enough to have such educational training or employment opportunities and thus need unions to protect and foster their rights, which extend beyond the shop floor or over the store counter. This situation casts unions as pivotal agents for social change and begins to pave the way for a revitalization of the U.S. labor movement. JfJ could play an integral role in forging social unionism, but a top-down approach to

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organizing that alienates existing members will dissipate its energy and, ultimately, forsake its mission to a multiracial constituency. The intent of this chapter is not to construct a false polarity between external and internal organizing; instead, I assert that neither should be pursued at the expense of the other. Building democratic, multiracial, antisexist unions is the best means to challenge the brutality of the current economic order and to begin the project of constructing a more just society through solidarity.

Notes 1. Marianne Kyriakos, “Roosevelt Bridge Blocked in Protest of D.C. Budget,” Washington Post, September 21, 1995, B3. 2. Howard Wial, “The Emerging Organizational Structure of Unionism in Low-Wage Services,” Rutgers Law Review, vol. 45 (Spring 1993), 680. 3. Arlene Neal, Where We Come from Who We Are: Service Workers Oral History Project, February 1997, 13. 4. Arlene Neal, interview with author, March 1, 1996. 5. Glenda Lewis, interview in Where We Come from Who We Are, 74. 6. Jon Howley, “Justice for Janitors: Organizing in the Contract Services,” Labor Research Review, vol. 15 (Spring 1990), 64. 7. Ibid., 64. 8. Mary Anne Hohenstein, interview with author, April 11, 1996. 9. Wial, “The Emerging Organizational Structure of Unionism,” 693. 10. Neal, interview, March 1, 1996. 11. Eleanor Holmes Norton, “A Federal Discount for a Federal City,” Washington Post, February 7, 1996, A22. 12. “DC Vacancy Rates Are the Lowest,” chart (CB Commercial Vacancy Index, September 30, 1994). “DC Lease Rates Are the Highest,” chart (ULI Market Profiles, 1994). “DC Profit Margins Are Highest,” chart (BOMA 1994 Experience and Exchange). 13. J. Peter Nixon, “Justice for Janitors Mobilizes Against Tax Breaks for the Rich,” Washington Socialist, April 1995, 1. 14. “Save Disintegration City,” (JfJ SEIU Local 82 leaflet, 1995). 15. Howard Schneider and David A. Vise, “Unions Attack Control Board Threaten Protest,” Washington Post, December 13, 1995, D1. 16. Pamela Constable, “Janitors Union Expands Its Campaign,” Washington Post, March 23, 1995, B3. 17. A complaint was filed by JfJ Local 82 explaining Andrew Brimmer’s conflict of interest to the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance. Melvin L. Doxie, director of the Office of Campaign Finance, D.C. Board of Election and Ethics, letter to Mary Anne Hohenstein, JfJ campaign coordinator, September 6, 1995. 18. Constable, “Janitors Union Expands Its Campaign,” B3. 19. Ibid., B3. 20. Pamela Constable, “Union Label No Easy Choice for Janitors,” Washington Post, March 12, 1995, B4. 21. Hohenstein, interview, April 11, 1996. 22. “Companies Like USSI Hurt Everyone” (JfJ SEIU Local 82 leaflet, 1995). 23. Cited from Justice for Janitors letter to Office Tenants, October 24, 1995.

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24. Ibid. 25. Constable, “Union Label No Easy Choice for Janitors,” B4. 26. “USSI Unfair” (JfJ SEIU Local 82 leaflet, 1995). 27. “Milagro Sorto Is Still Out of a Job” (JfJ SEIU Local 82 leaflet, 1995). 28. Constable, “Union Label No Easy Choice for Janitors,” B4. 29. Ibid. 30. “Mobilizing for Justice,” Washington Socialist, April 1995, 7. 31. Constable, “Janitors Union Expands Its Campaign,” B3. 32. Ibid. 33. Ron Shaffer, “A Whip to Tame Traffic Terrorists,” Washington Post, September 9, 1995, D1. 34. Rudolph A. Pyratt, J.R., “Janitors Using Wrong Tactics on DC Tax Assessments,” Washington Post, March 27, 1995, G1. 35. Maryann Haggerty, “Carr Protest Draws Contempt Citation,” Washington Post, April 7, 1995, F3 36. Washington Post, as noted. “Traffic Terrorists” (photo), Washington Times, September 21, 1995, A1. 37. Ron Shaffer, “Targeting the Bridge Blockers,” Washington Post, October 12, 1995, DC3. 38. Howley, “Justice for Janitors,” 67 39. John Sweeney, America Needs a Raise (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 126. 40. Angela Woodland, interview with author, September 14, 1996. 41. Jay Hessey, interview with author, November 13, 1995. 42. Linda Kaye Holmes, interview with author, September 24, 1996. 43. Woodland, interview, September 14, 1996. 44. Ibid. 45. Sonia Nazario, “Hunger Strike Marks Union’s Split,” Los Angles Times, August 8, 1995, B3. 46. Stuart Silverstein and Josh Meyer, “Fast-Growing Union Hits Obstacles in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1995.

12 Lessons from the UMWA Anna M. Zajicek and Bradley Nash Jr.

Labor unions not only defend workers’ rights in contemporary societies; they also are an important force in struggles for economic opportunity and political empowerment for all people. For decades activists for social justice, labor unionists, social scientists, and industrial relations scholars have tried to decide what organized labor should do to best fulfill these numerous roles. Although this discussion is important and worth continuing, the more recent history of labor unions in the United States has shifted the focus of debate to the more pressing question of union survival in an increasingly adversarial environment. Although there are many different voices in this debate,1 a consensus has been reached that an adequate understanding of the current crisis of unionism requires that two types of factors be addressed: those that are more of an external, political-economic nature and those that deal more with internal and organizational issues. There is also a growing recognition that questions about the future of unions and visions of union reform must draw upon historical lessons emerging from unions’ past experiences. The need to focus on both external and internal factors and to integrate historical experiences in our visions of the future becomes especially acute in the context of recent transformations of industrial relations in the United States. These changes include the continuing proliferation of multinational corporations, a widespread deregulation of major unionized industries, the marked decentralization of collective bargaining, and a striking increase in anti-union practices and concessionaire demands by management. In turn, unions have been strongly pressured to adjust their structures and strategies to these new challenges. It is in this context that many advocates of union reform point to the importance of union structures, especially with regard to the relationship between organizational democracy and the ability of unions to maintain an active role in shaping 219

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the future of industrial relations. Indeed, many have argued that the centralized national union structures themselves have significantly contributed to organized labor’s decline.2 The rationale is that union centralization fosters worker apathy and constrains rank-and-file militancy, consequently transforming unions into “demobilized organizations.”3 According to this argument, if unions are to become more influential, they need to decentralize their authority structures, further incorporate rank-and-file workers in decisionmaking, and give greater autonomy to the historically more militant local unions. Although the advocates of a highly decentralized unionism make several valuable points, they nonetheless neglect the fact that the recent decentralization of industrial relations in some industries has been accompanied simultaneously by a concentration of capital and the emergence of centralized multinational corporations with diverse sources of profit. In this climate of global capital, the existence of a strong national union leadership becomes a vital component of union power. Specifically, such national leadership not only provides financial and organizational resources for local militancy but also can facilitate the diffusion of localized “cultures of solidarity”4 to related struggles in other contexts, thus bringing pressure to bear along the many fronts of corporate capital. In this chapter, we suggest that the continued ability of labor unions to influence industrial relations in the context of global capitalism depends to a large extent on the trade unions’ ability to adapt their structures and strategies to the reshaped organizational forms and managerial practices of capitalist corporations. This adaptation, in turn, necessitates that a balance be maintained between decentralization of union structures and the empowerment of the national union leadership. To support our point, we trace the historical movement in the U.S. coal-mining industry from largely decentralized and competitive industrial structures to a highly centralized and less competitive organization with strong ties to international and diversified capital. In this context, we focus on changes in the organizational structures of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Specifically, we examine the centralization of the union that occurred in the postwar decades under John L. Lewis and its later decentralization under the influence of the Miners for Democracy (MFD) movement during the 1970s. We argue that although an excessive union centralization may demobilize membership, union decentralization occurring in the context of an increasingly centralized industry may weaken the national union to an extent that losses and concessions may result despite the increased local militancy. Although a lot can be learned from the history of the UMWA regarding the possible pitfalls of union centralization or decentralization, the UMWA’s experiences also provide a vision of an alternative arrangement well adjusted to the organizational developments in multinational industries

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and characterized by a more viable balance of power between the national leadership and the rank and file. This vision is evident in the efforts at union reform during the presidency of Richard Trumka (1982–1995) when the leadership tried to maintain the MFD view of the UMWA as a democratic movement and simultaneously strengthen the power of the national union. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the relationship between the new arrangements within the union and its position vis-à-vis coal operators, including its ability to influence further the future of the industry. In this context, we emphasize the importance of maintaining a balance between the creation of strong union leadership and the inclusion of rank and file into decisionmaking processes for the union’s continued ability to mobilize mining communities. In the long run, the lack of balance between union centralization and rank-and-file participation may undermine the UMWA’s recent efforts at community mobilization and thus weaken its role in reshaping the future of the industry.

Union Centralization and Internal Strife The history of the UMWA dates back to 1890, when the union was formed out of the merger of the National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers and the Knights of Labor. During its first decade of existence, the union was involved in a basic struggle for recognition. To this end, “the UMWA’s first presidents led miners through one tumultuous strike after another.”5 Between 1902, the year of the great anthracite strike, and the end of World War I, the union grew and consolidated. After strengthening its organizational base, the UMWA then moved to the forefront of efforts at reshaping labor legislation and workers’ political representation. It was under the Lewis presidency (1919–1960) that the UMWA, which had remained relatively decentralized following its formation, became a very centralized union. As noted by one observer, before Lewis became president the union was a union in name, but in fact was an aggregate of large, individual domains loosely tied together in a national organization. Each mining district and its local chiefs guarded their own independence from invasion and domination by the national office. The miners summed up their conception of their rights in the term “autonomy.” This included the right to elect their regional officers.6

To achieve a better control over the union, Lewis changed the UMWA’s constitution so that he could control the appointment of local officials. In addition to taking away the selection of local officers from the rank and file, the president received the power to revoke local and district

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charters and to create provisional governments in their place.7 In practice, these changes enabled Lewis to replace elected district officials with his appointees and, in spite of vehement district opposition, to take autonomy away from most local unions. As a result, the UMWA became “run by an active minority which [controlled] policy objectives, tactical procedures, and all related matters.”8 This centralization of union structures was accompanied by the emergence of internal strife within the union, which consequently weakened miners’ solidarity and often pitted mining communities against each other. As a result, both unions’ and mining communities’ ability to defend their interests collectively against the coal operators declined considerably. As one observer has noted, while Lewis “was winning his power struggles within the UMWA, he was losing wars with coal operators.”9 Ultimately, by the mid-1920s, UMWA membership had declined to 100,000, from 500,000 in 1920, and the union was forced to sign several concessionaire agreements.10 Then, in the late 1940s, Lewis used rank-and-file militancy to conduct a series of strikes to regulate the coal supply and stabilize the coal market. Instead of stabilizing the market, however, these strikes allowed nonunion operators to enter the coal market, which had thus far been dominated by union-mined coal. Also, in the 1950s, Lewis gave “his blessing to massive mechanization of the nation’s mines.”11 Whereas many large coal operators praised Lewis for “saving the industry,” for many mining communities this policy meant an economic disaster. By displacing 300,000 workers, mechanization simultaneously created a small core of well-paid miners and an unprecedented level of unemployment among the majority of miners. And since Lewis assumed that displaced miners would be “reabsorbed into the economy,”12 the union did not make any significant efforts at retraining or relocating the unemployed. In this context, many miners and their families left the coal fields and massively moved to the North. The restructuring of the coal-mining industry was justified by Lewis’s business-unionist philosophy, according to which “miners’ standard of living could advance only if the coal industry prospered.” 13 The union response had far-reaching consequences not only for the well-being of mining communities but also for the position of the union vis-à-vis coal operators. Thus, it was under the forty-year tenure of the Lewis presidency that the UMWA became the epitome of U.S. business unionism. In contrast to Western Europe and elsewhere, organized labor in the United States, particularly in the post–World War II era, was never strongly enamored of class-based politics or socialist ideology. Rather, it was characterized by the more accommodating perspective of business unionism, which, as Moody notes,

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leaves unquestioned capital’s dominance, both on the job and in society as a whole. Instead, it seeks only to negotiate the price of this domination. This it does through the businesslike negotiation of a contractual relationship with a limited sector of capital and for a limited portion of the working class.14

In many respects, as president of one of the country’s most powerful and centralized unions and as one of the founders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Lewis can be seen as one of the key architects of this approach to industrial relations. Though the national walkouts by union miners ordered under his leadership created serious problems for the U.S. economy and could have crippled it, his goal was not to strengthen the union vis-à-vis coal operators. Rather, it was more health benefits, greater pension fund contributions, and higher wages from the existing system.15 Lewis’s successor, Thomas Kennedy (1960–1963), preserved the business-unionist strategy and autocratic structure established by his predecessor. In 1963, only five of the UMWA’s twenty-seven districts had full autonomy, as indicated by the holding of autonomous elections, three had partial autonomy, and those remaining were controlled by the union president.16 During Kennedy’s presidency, the position of the UMWA in the industry declined even further. This decline was due not only to the continued decline in employment, union membership, and the UMWA’s share of coal production but also to the deterioration of union-community relationships. Tensions in the relations between union and miners intensified when, in the context of growing unemployment, union leaders decided to cancel membership and welfare cards of those who were not able to pay union dues, instead of helping miners and their families.17 Such actions undermined the attractiveness of the union to the miners and created much resentment in many mining communities. The decline of the union’s position in the industry continued under the next president of the UMWA, Tony Boyle (1963–1972). Boyle also preserved Lewis’ philosophy of business unionism and centralized decisionmaking. Indeed, Boyle proved highly effective in maintaining one of the major pillars of Lewis’s autocratic government—trusteeship politics, which involved the presidential appointment of district officials and district delegates to different union committees. In 1971, for example, only four out of twenty-three union districts elected their officers.18 During Boyle’s presidency, the industry experienced growing safety problems and health risks associated with mechanization, but the union neglected to deal with these issues. Community resistance to an autocratic and unresponsive union first emerged in the early 1960s. In 1964, for example, the UMWA met with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA) to negotiate a new contract. Since independent voices of district

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officials and rank-and-file miners continued to be excluded from decisionmaking processes within the union, the union bargaining agenda was constructed unilaterally by the union leadership. As a result, when the 1964 contract, containing major concessions by the union, was signed, the rankand-file workers opposed it through wildcat strikes.19 In 1964, a grassroots initiative resulted in the creation of the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment in Southeast Kentucky. Besides playing an important role in mobilizing local communities around the issue of unemployment, the committee provided an institutional space in which traditions of resistance and solidarity among miners, alienated from their own union, could be preserved.20 By the late 1960s, miners’ militancy had surfaced in other coal-mining regions, including West Virginia and Pennsylvania.21 This militancy was fueled in 1968 by an accident at a Consolidation Coal mine in which seventy-eight miners lost their lives and by the growing medical evidence linking black lung disease to coal dust. Since the union remained largely unresponsive to the issue of black lung and the compensation system was not working effectively, disabled miners, widows, and other members of mining communities revitalized an independent grassroots organization, the Black Lung Association (BLA), and expanded it throughout the Appalachian region.22 Although assistance to the disabled miners and their families was the main focus of the BLA, the organization also brought together many dissident UMWA members who saw the BLA “as a vehicle for union reform.”23 Thus, toward the end of the 1960s, the centralization of union structures and national union politics vis-à-vis rank-and-file miners had resulted in the emergence of community-based oppositional organizations. Still, in spite of growing rebellion and militancy among rank-and-file union members, the 1968 contract between the UMWA and the BCOA did not contain provisions regarding black lung. And when 40,000 miners went on strike in June 1970 to pressure coal operators and the government to move forward with the black-lung legislation, union leaders ordered them back to work. This move proved that union leadership was still committed to making concessions and cooperating with the industry. In this context, to assert their interests, miners had to create a national rank-andfile movement to fight against both coal operators and union bureaucracy. Thus, at the beginning of the 1970s, miners’ opposition was crystallized in the creation of the Miners for Democracy, a grassroots reform movement developed from within the UMWA. Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, the MFD leader, was committed to the idea of decentralizing the union, granting autonomy to all union districts, enforcing job safety provisions, and improving educational and social services in mining communities. 24 His local union and community-oriented ideas received support from other grassroots organizations, including the Black Lung Association and the

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Disabled Miners and Widows of Southern West Virginia. Together, these organizations provided an institutional, community-wide basis for the reform movement that resulted in overthrowing the entrenched union leadership.25 This change occurred in 1972 when Tony Boyle was defeated by Arnold Miller, who had become the leader of the Miners for Democracy movement after Boyle (it turned out) had Yablonski assassinated. As Charles Perry notes, this “election brought to an end the ‘Lewis era’ of autocratic government in the UMWA and set the stage for a new era in the governance of the union—the ‘Miller era.’”26 In sum, toward the end of the 1960s, the UMWA was still characterized by a centralized decisionmaking structure. Union leadership continued its commitment to keeping miners’ militancy under control while engaging in concessionaire bargaining and trying to maintain cooperative relations with the industry. These undemocratic and conservative tendencies in union politics fostered miners’ opposition to union leadership. In turn, the internal strife within the union, as well as union concessions, weakened the UMWA position vis-à-vis coal operators.

Changing Industrial Structures, the Miller Era, and the Democratization of the UMWA An adequate understanding of the dynamics and consequences of union decentralization during the Miller era requires a contextualization of these changes in relation to the organizational changes in the coal-mining industry. One of the most important developments among coal companies prior to the Miller presidency was a slow trend toward the concentration of the traditionally decentralized ownership structure of the industry. This trend became apparent at the end of 1960s as company mergers accelerated. The merger activity can be attributed to the efforts of coal operators to generate the capital necessary to mechanize the mines, a move earlier supported by Lewis’s strategy to concentrate production in large coal mines. In 1925, for example, the 714 largest mines (10 percent of all mines) produced more than 5 percent of coal; by 1970, 307 mines (5.5 percent of all mines) produced almost 60 percent of all coal. 27 The concentration trend becomes even more pronounced when the top companies are compared. For instance, in 1941 the top ten companies accounted for 21.4 percent of total coal output and the top 25 companies, 33.4 percent. By 1975, the top fifteen companies produced 45.8 percent of total tonnage.28 Although it is difficult to assess the overall impact of these changes on the centralization of industrial relations, William Miernyk notes that this increasing concentration clearly affected collective bargaining in the industry “since they [large corporations] largely determine the strategy to be

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followed by the industry collective bargaining arm, the Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA).”29 Thus, during the 1970s, the structure of collective bargaining changed significantly in favor of larger members of the association. This change, in turn, had implications for the UMWA. Instead of having to bargain with several middle-size coal operators, the union now had to deal with and gain concessions from a smaller number of more powerful and resourceful corporations. A second significant trend was the entrance of energy conglomerates and oil companies into the coal-mining industry. This trend accounted both for the diversification of product and profit and for the fact that “decision making about coal companies became enmeshed in a set of considerations separate from the coal industry.”30 For the union, this development obviously meant that it was facing corporations that gained profits from different sources and were only partially dependent on the coal-mining industry. In this context, even a prolonged industrial conflict would not present a considerable threat to a particular company’s survival. All in all, these two developments—the concentration of the ownership structure and the entrance of the energy conglomerates—meant that decisionmaking processes were centralized, affecting a large section of the industry and placing the UMWA in a more difficult position vis-à-vis the industry. Turning to the changes in the union, what exactly was it that the Miners for Democracy and the Miller era brought about? First, in terms of collective bargaining, the earlier top-down approach to decisionmaking and contract negotiations, which tended to neglect lower levels of the union organization and excluded the rank and file from decisionmaking processes, was abandoned. In its place, Miller established new procedures for contract ratification, including the ratification of national contracts first by a bargaining council in which all districts were represented and then by a vote of the rank and file.31 Also, at the 1973 UMWA convention in Pittsburgh, Miller further democratized the union by introducing changes in the union’s constitution that protected district autonomy and provided once again for the free election of district officers and representatives to the international executive board. In this way, as Nyden notes, the “UMWA [had] become a weapon in the hands of rank-and-file against coal operators.”32 Second, union democratization was accompanied by major changes in union strategies. Compared with previous leaders, the new union leadership was more committed to organizing nonunion miners. The UMWA also became more willing to support the struggles of other unions, including strikes by sanitation workers and hospital workers in the United States as well as by British miners in 1974. At the same time, the national union also took a more militant stance vis-à-vis coal operators and became more supportive of local union militancy. This new, more open climate was also conducive to a more radical critique of minority group relations within the

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industry, including the issues of racism among coal operators and the deepseated prejudice against women miners who had begun entering the industry in 1973.33 In turn, women miners started pressuring the union to become more socially responsible by expanding its agenda to include such issues as sexual harassment and maternity benefits and by fighting for better health and accident benefits.34 Overall, then, by expanding its cooperation with other unions and by including broader social issues on its agenda, the UMWA under Miller had abandoned traditional business unionism and moved in the direction of a socially responsible and decentralized union. Yet despite the fact that the UMWA expanded its agenda and membership base, that the rank and file had greater participation in union matters and were more militant than ever,35 and that, unlike many other unions, the UMWA grew from 130,000 working miners in 1960 to 180,000 in 1978, the Miller era was not a complete success story for the UMWA. For example, by 1978 the UMWA mined only 55 percent of coal, compared with 70 percent in 1973.36 Furthermore, the union continued to experience internal strife, and its “organizing and educational activities [became] inefficient.”37 Finally, in 1977 the BCOA demanded several concessions from the union, some of which would significantly hurt the community health care system secured under the UMWA contracts. In response, miners went on a 110-day-long strike that ended in a major setback for the union. Ultimately, the UMWA defeat in the 1977–1978 strike created “the perception that the power of the union was declining and that concessions could be won”38 from it. The fact that the UMWA found itself in this precarious situation was due to a combination of factors, including the lack of strong union leadership and the structural mismatch between union decentralization and the organizational changes in the coal-mining industry. As many observers noted, Miller not only was a “tower of indecision”39 but also was perceived by miners as a weak leader who “sold them out.”40 Indeed, toward the end of his presidency, Miller undermined UMWA solidarity when he did not stand firmly behind the right-to-strike clause, which would enable working miners to decide about local strikes by majority vote.41 Moreover, under Miller, the national leadership was not able to “consolidate a political base in the districts, [and] to turn militancy of wildcat strikes into a disciplined force.”42 As a result, the union lost some of its leverage against the coal operators. In sum, during his presidency, Miller tried to improve the UMWA’s position in the industry by decentralizing the union, increasing union membership, and capitalizing on miners’ militancy. Although he was able to accomplish the two former goals, he failed with regard to the last. The union’s inability to capitalize on miners’ militancy can be attributed to two factors. First, the decentralized union now had to function in a context of

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a highly centralized industry, which had increasingly diversified financial resources and which could increasingly withstand a long strike. Second, the UMWA lacked the strong national leadership necessary to translate the miners’ militancy, the union’s new strategies, and its more communitybased, democratic structures into long-term gains for both the national union and local communities. In effect, then, despite all the transformations and reforms that the UMWA underwent during the Miller era, the union could not effectively harness and channel the energies that the democratization of union structures and movement toward socially responsible unionism had helped foster.

Combining the Democratic Vision and the Strong National Union When Richard Trumka became president of UMWA in 1982, the union faced several adverse conditions. First, at the national level, the union had to operate in the context of the Reagan administration’s “get-tough-withlabor” policies whose implementation was facilitated by an 8.9 percent unemployment level. Second, although UMWA membership grew by 15 percent between 1972 and 1980,43 output from unionized mines declined, ending at about 50 percent of total production.44 Likewise, the BCOA’s position in the industry had changed significantly. For example, in 1977 the mines operating under the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement (NBCWA) produced 330.8 million tons of coal, 47.8 percent of the total coal production. By 1980, although production had increased to 364.9 million tons, NBCWA mines’ relative share decreased to 44.3 percent of the total. For the next six years, NBCWA production fluctuated from year to year, but the overall trend was downward. In 1986, NBCWA mines produced 314.5 million tons, 35 percent of total U.S. production. This decline was mainly due to the decrease in the number of companies that the BCOA was authorized to represent. Specifically, while in 1981 the BCOA consisted of 143 coal companies, by 1984 this number had decreased to 52, and as of February 1988, only 38 companies authorized the BCOA to represent them in the negotiations with the UMWA.45 This shift meant that, compared with the years prior to 1980, the ability of the UMWA to disrupt coal production during a labor dispute diminished during the 1980s.46 The decreases in both the UMWA and BCOA shares of production were connected with the reduction of labor force and with the shift to surface mining, whose workers the UMWA found difficult to organize, and to non-UMWA underground mines.47 In this context, Richard Trumka faced four major challenges: (1) to reduce unemployment among miners; (2) to improve the organizing record;

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(3) to unify rank-and-file workers behind the union; and (4) to strengthen the union position vis-à-vis coal operators. Trumka, who in his election campaign had emphasized “the UMWA traditions of liberal unionism and anti-company militancy,”48 responded to these challenges by implementing several new, proactive strategies. During the 1983 convention, for example, the UMWA leadership approved changes that increased the powers of the president and limited rank-and-file miners’ involvement in decisionmaking processes. Simultaneously, though, union leadership tried to ensure rank-and-file support for the union’s actions. The elimination of the bargaining council established by Miller and the transference of the right to call a strike from the international executive board to the president are examples of the recentralization of union power. The creation of a special delegate conference exemplifies efforts to ensure rank-and-file miners’ approval of leadership actions. The elimination of the bargaining council, an intermediate structure between union members and the negotiating team, simplified the union’s bargaining structure, on the one hand, but expanded the powers of the president, on the other. In its place, the negotiating committee, appointed and chaired by the president, was established. The role of this committee was to set negotiation demands and explain the contract to the rank and file. Thus, under the new structure, the membership brought forth the bargaining issues to the union district conferences, which then presented the membership demands to the negotiating committee. This system remains in effect today. After a tentative agreement is reached, its content is presented to union representatives who conduct contract explanation meetings for local unions. The explanation meetings are subsequently followed by coal-field ballots and contract ratification by the rank and file. Similarly, the transfer of power to call a strike to the president may have simplified the process, but, even more important, it simultaneously centralized the decisionmaking for industrial action in one person’s hands.49 Also during the 1983 convention, the union undertook several actions to strengthen its position vis-à-vis coal operators, including the development of a selective strike strategy. Institutionalizing the selective strike strategy and establishing a selective strike fund—actions that made possible the decentralization of collective bargaining within the industry—surprised many coal operators. This change enabled the union to target one or more companies that refused to sign the contract for strike actions and contract negotiations.50 A key impetus behind the adoption of the selective strike strategy was the entrance into coal mining of multinational corporations with diversified sources of revenue. In light of this change, industry-wide walkouts were less effective because many multinationals could bide their time by sacrificing coal profits and depending on other resources. In this context, the selective strike was a more powerful weapon

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because “those companies whose mines are on strike face a loss of revenues, and possibly a loss of their share of the coal market, because all the other companies are working.”51 As a result, local strikes, consisting of fewer workers and potentially lasting longer, replaced industry-wide strikes, involving more miners but ending sooner. Since selective strikes are of limited scope, this change in union strategy both relied on and enhanced the importance of local cultures of militancy and solidarity in mining communities. Under Trumka, the UMWA not only put more emphasis on mobilizing rank-and-file miners but also broadened its strategies to encompass cooperation with other social movements, including the movement against apartheid in South Africa. In contrast to previous union leaders, Trumka supported the Coal Employment Project (CEP) and encouraged women’s involvement in the union at both the national and local levels.52 These changes in the national union’s position regarding women miners had farreaching consequences for union policies. The CEP pressed the UMWA for a more activist stance on the environmental impact of acid rain, solidarity with striking British miners, and race and gender discrimination. The CEP conferences became arenas for UMWA members to share their views on the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, gay rights, and AIDS.53

Under Trumka’s leadership, the union also started relying more systematically on corporate campaign strategies. Such strategies moved beyond the traditional bounds of business unionism by broadening industrial conflict and moving it to the new arenas outside the workplace and the immediate employer. Specifically, under the corporate campaign strategies, parent companies and subsidiaries of the targeted firm, along with its customers and financial backers, have become targets of leafleting and informational picketing. Advertising campaigns are also used to publicize the union’s position on questionable practices engaged in by the company. In effect, by deploying these strategies, the UMWA has attempted to redefine the dispute, not as a narrow economic disagreement, but as a broader community and political conflict. Finally, to ensure rank-and-file participation in setting the UMWA’s agenda and to unify the membership behind the national union, Trumka engaged in an unprecedented action in 1986 by calling a special convention to discuss the issues and goals for the upcoming contract negotiations with the BCOA in 1987–1988. The possibility of merging or affiliating with other unions, especially re-affiliating with the AFL-CIO, was also addressed at the convention.54 Among the resolutions put forth, the most important included a departure from concessionaire bargaining and the negotiation of contracts that provided workers with “job opportunities and

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economic security.” The convention also removed a cap from the selective strike fund.55 As the decade of the 1980s unfolded, predictions that the UMWA would be an “industrial artifact” by the end of the 1980s appeared premature, if not well off the mark. The Pittston strike, in which the union had taken on a powerful coal company determined to eliminate its unionized workforce and defiantly stood its ground, exemplifies the effectiveness of the changes in union structure, leadership style, and strategies. First, during the conflict with Pittston, union leadership emphasized the importance of building community solidarity through the involvement of community members in planning and conducting the strike. Although the decision about the strike action and its timing was made by the president long before the strike was called, union local and district offices, the family auxiliary, the international, and UMWA retirees prepared for the strike by building support for industrial action across the coal fields. Second, the manner in which the strike was conducted highlighted the importance of a democratic inclusion of miners’ “families, community residents, church leaders and other supporters to circumvent the court orders on the union, to conduct the campaign of massive civil disobedience, or to support people who did.”56 These innovative strategies turned out to be crucial for the outcome of the conflict, which resulted in an accord whose language was the same as in the 1988 BCOA-UMWA national agreement that had been rejected by Pittston company. This accord meant that despite Pittston’s efforts to sign an independent contract significantly different from the 1988 national agreement, the union was able to prevent the decentralization of collective bargaining on Pittston’s terms.57 The conclusion of the Pittston strike in 1990 thus opened a new chapter in the industrial relations of the U.S. coal-mining industry. Expectations of the further decentralization of collective bargaining and the withering away of union influence proved false. It became evident to coal operators that they just might have to deal with the “UMWA Forever,” the slogan that the miners occupying Pittston’s Moss 3 plant had spray-painted in three-foot letters for all to see.

Maintaining the Balance Between Union Centralization and Decentralization Despite the fact that the 1980s were a period of continued changes in the structure of coal mining, during that time Trumka not only created a desirable balance between union centralization and decentralization but also adjusted union structures and strategies to the developments in the coalmining industry. After powerfully asserting its continued influence in the

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industry, the UMWA at the beginning of the 1990s faced the even more difficult task of maintaining the balance and continually adapting to the changing industrial landscape. Among the new developments in the coalmining industry a few deserve particular attention. First, the number of underground coal mines has declined visibly while the average size of underground coal mines has increased. At the same time, the concentration of coal production has grown. In 1991, major coal producers, or firms producing more than 3 million tons of coal yearly, accounted for 77 percent of total coal production, compared with 57 percent in 1976.58 The share of the industry’s output accounted for by the top four coal producers was 22 percent by 1991, compared with 25 percent in 1976, indicating a slight increase in competition among coal operators. Other significant changes in terms of industrial structure during the 1980s included (1) the decline of the independent coal companies by more than half: 17 percent in 1991, compared with 35 percent in 1976; (2) the entrance of foreign capital into coal production; (3) the intensification of mergers that have further shifted coal production to large, diversified firms; and (4) the exit of oil and gas companies from the coal industry. As for the influx of foreign capital, in 1976 only one major coal producer was controlled by a foreign company, accounting for 1 percent of total coal production in the United States. By 1991, eight large coal producers, representing 14 percent of coal output, were controlled by foreign companies.59 Further, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, only two mergers were reported annually. In 1988, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) reported ten mergers; in 1989, twenty mergers; in 1990, ten mergers; and in 1991, eleven mergers.60 These changes in industrial structures, including the entrance of product-diversified multinationals in the coal-mining business, meant that long-term industrial policies were centralized at the level of the company’s multinational headquarters and a more elaborate hierarchy of command was created. In this context, the UMWA leadership was placed in a position in which it needed to make further strategic choices with respect to its relations with coal operators, on the one hand, and rank-and-file miners, on the other. Changes in the structure of the coal-mining industry, collective bargaining, and workplace relations created a situation wherein the union’s survival required it to “develop the ability to make the effective and timely changes necessary to preserve the integrity” of union organization.61 One such recommended change, suggested by Trumka during a meeting of leaders of major mining unions from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, South Africa, and the United States, was that miners’ unions begin developing a global strategy to counter the operations of such multinationals as Shell, Exxon, and Du Pont. In August 1990, Trumka declared that since the “employers have opted to bring the law of the jungle into labor relations . . . workers will

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resort to the wearing of camouflage and will use unconventional tactics to bring the battle to the front lawn of the corporate leaders.”62 This position was reinforced during the 1990 constitutional convention, during which Trumka emphasized the need for developing what he called creative militancy. At the center of the creative militancy was the recognition that the union must “move beyond the bounds of convention” and “quit behaving like an institution and start acting like a movement again.”63 More precisely, the UMWA needed to maintain rank-and-file miners’ high level of mobilization and members’ involvement in decisionmaking processes, on the one hand, and consolidate union organization, on the other hand. The consolidation of union organization was related to the question of union growth or, more exactly, the possibility of union destruction in light of the decline of union membership to 68,000 members combined with the decline in the number of active miners covered by the UMWA-BCOA agreement from 135,000 in 1979 to 45,000 in 1992.64 This decrease was related to the growth of non-UMWA coal companies among BCOA signatories from 19 percent in 1985 to 38 percent in 1992.65 To strengthen the union’s bargaining power, the delegates to the 1990 convention agreed to increase the funds to be used by the union leadership to cover bargaining costs.66 At the same time, in an attempt to reduce administrative costs, the convention approved the motion to consolidate some of the twenty-one union offices. Overall, these changes centralized the UMWA structure and gave more power to the union international office in Washington, D.C. At the same time, it appears that the centralization of union structure was accompanied by union-induced decentralization of collective bargaining and workplace relations in coal mining. First, in 1993 during strikeridden contract negotiations with the BCOA, the UMWA started conducting negotiations with a group of coal companies that wanted to avoid conflict with the union. The reassertion of union militancy and power in 1993 led to the creation of the Independent Bituminous Coal Bargaining Alliance (IBCBA), a second, multiemployer bargaining structure that organized coal operators interested in developing union-based approaches to labor-management relations. Second, the IBCBA agreement established the so-called Labor-Management Positive Change Process (LMPCP) to end adversarial relations in the industry. In contrast to other companymandated cooperative programs whose goal was to undermine the union, the distinctive feature of this program is that it empowers miners and local officials to work with management in the context of a strong union presence. The introduction of LMPCP not only signified the decentralization of decisionmaking at the workplace level but also spoke to the continued influence of the UMWA on the shape of industrial relations in coal mining. Although at this point it is difficult to evaluate the implications of recent union strategies for its position in the industry, it appears that the UMWA has retained or even increased its influence on industrial relations

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in U.S. coal mining. This development can be attributed to the leaders’ attempt to maintain a balance between decentralization of decisionmaking processes and centralization of union structures. Of course, the decentralization of collective bargaining and workplace relations may have some unintended consequences for the power of the national union. It could weaken the importance of central union leadership and even generate labor unrest when some districts and local unions secure concessions that others did not get.

Conclusion As the preceding discussion suggests, the organization and strategies of the UMWA have gone through some important changes since its creation in 1890. Specifically, the centralization of union structures and decisionmaking processes under Lewis, Kennedy, and Boyle ultimately weakened the position of the union in the industry. By the end of the 1960s, the UMWA, once the country’s most powerful union, had made several important bargaining concessions, faced a significant decline of membership because of its accommodating stance toward mechanization, among other things, and become internally divided. At the beginning of the 1970s, Arnold Miller decentralized the union and tried to revitalize its traditions of militancy. His reform efforts were only partially successful. In the context of a decentralized union and weak leadership, Miller was not able to turn local militancy into a unified and disciplined force, nor could he consolidate the union at the national level. In spite of heightened worker militancy and the increase of union membership, the UMWA made several bargaining concessions that undermined its power in the long term. Thus, neither strong leadership and union centralization nor local militancy and union decentralization result in more union power. In fact, as our brief analysis of the union’s history up to 1980 indicates, if strong union leadership and a centralized union are not accompanied by creative union militancy, a no-backward-steps policy, and rank-and-file mobilization, union power may erode. However, if the union is decentralized and lacks a strong leadership, then local militancy is unlikely to be organized into a disciplined force at the national level. In such a case, local militancy may actually contribute to a situation wherein union leaders feel they lack control over the union and thus become more willing to make concessions. Together, these observations cast doubt on arguments that view either decentralized and militant unionism or, alternately, the strong leadership and centralized union structures as a panacea for reversing the decline of unions in contemporary industrial relations. In fact, the history of the UMWA from 1980 to the early 1990s suggests an alternative vision of union reform. Specifically, under the Trumka

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administration, the union introduced several changes in union structures and strategies, some of which reversed many of the changes introduced by the MFD movement. Although some of these changes weakened the democratic spirit of the Miners for Democracy and of the Miller era, they did not represent a return to the autocratic model of union government established by Lewis. Because of earlier experiences and problems with rankand-file militancy, such as the 1977–1978 wildcat strikes and the inability to get leadership-approved contracts ratified during the Miller presidency, the UMWA curbed some aspects of the membership’s influence on union decisionmaking processes and activities. Yet UMWA leaders simultaneously maintained the MFD vision of the union as a movement, not an institution, while attempting to be more in tune with the interests of working miners, not the interests of employers in maintaining industrial peace (as Lewis was). At the same time, recognition of the changing industrial landscape— namely, the increased prevalence of multinational coal corporations with diversified sources of profit—demanded changes in union strategies for collective struggle. Contrary to assertions that organized labor failed to adapt to the new economic context of the 1980s and 1990s, hence contributing to its own decline, the UMWA exemplifies a union that did not wait passively for its demise. Rather, the union reformed itself and by doing so took a proactive role in shaping its future. The centralization of union structures during the 1980s and 1990s, which served to increase the power of the national union, was balanced by a greater involvement of rank-and-file workers in union and industrial matters. The systematic utilization of the selective strike strategy and corporate campaign tactics were both innovative and powerful tools in confronting the might of multinational corporations. Other changes in union strategies introduced during the 1980s, particularly regarding the participation of union members and sympathizers in planning and preparing strike action as well as the strategic use of civil disobedience, reaffirmed the importance of community support and rank-and-file solidarity for the union’s success in strike actions. Overall, however, the future of the UMWA is by no means settled. Its continuing presence as a strong and pivotal actor in the U.S. coal industry of the 1990s is the product of the fusion of two contradictory movements. One is the structural centralization of power in the union leadership. Another is the ability to tap and foster the “solidarity consciousness” 67 of rank-and-file miners and their families as they struggle to protect their jobs and communities. This solidarity and mobilization are possible only because members feel that union leaders do indeed hear their voice and are working for both immediate and long-term interests. It is no small task to keep these two tendencies in fruitful balance. If the UMWA leadership

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becomes too centralized, the rank and file may become disenfranchised, resulting in a return to the autocracy of John L. Lewis. If the leadership is too weak and rank-and-file militancy becomes the union’s guiding force, the intense but unchanneled energy of the Miller era may result. In either case, the gains of the late 1980s and early 1990s would probably be lost, and in the long run, the UMWA might indeed become an industrial artifact. The most important lesson emerging from the UMWA’s experiences is not that the decentralization of union structures will always weaken the union or that the centralization of union structures will always have negative effects on workers’ militancy. Rather, we suggest that the weakening of the UMWA during the Miller era was not an inevitable result of union democratization; rather, it was a result of historical contingency wherein a suddenly decentralized but militant union had to function under a weak leadership while it was facing a highly centralized industry. By the same token, the relative success of the Trumka era cannot be attributed only to union recentralization. Rather, it needs to be attributed to the union reform that involved the inclusion of rank-and-file miners in decisionmaking processes within the union and the adaptation of union structures, strategies, and leadership style to the new epoch in industrial organization. Consequently, any reform effort and vision of a union’s structure and strategies should try to maintain a viable balance between union centralization and rank-and-file involvement, must take into account several factors, including the peculiarity of the industry and its traditions of industrial relations, and must be attuned to the character of the industrial and corporate landscape in which the union has come to operate.

Notes 1. See, Thomas A. Kochan, ed., Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Thomas A. Kochan, Harry C. Katz, and Robert B. McKarsie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London: Verso, 1988); Lowell Turner, Democracy at Work: Changing World Markets and the Future of Labor Unions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Charles B. Craver, Can Unions Survive? The Rejuvenation and the American Labor Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 2. Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Moody, An Injury to All; and Samuel Cohn, When Strikes Make Sense—and Why (New York: Plenum Press, 1993). 3. Kim Moody, “Building a Labor Movement for the 1990s,” in Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community, edited by Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 217. 4. Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity. 5. Curtis Seltzer, Fire in the Whole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 27.

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6. Baratz, Morton S., The Union and the Coal Industry (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1955), 77. 7. Paul J. Nyden, “Miners for Democracy: Struggle in the Coal Fields” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975). 8. Baratz, The Union and the Coal Industry, 79. 9. Seltzer, Fire in the Whole, 44. 10. Ibid., 44, 45. 11. Bill Peterson, Coaltown Revisited: An Appalachian Notebook (Chicago: Henry Regenry Company, 1972), 54. 12. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 503. 13. Ibid., 502. 14. Moody, An Injury to All, 15. 15. Seltzer, Fire in the Whole, 55–60. 16. Nyden, “Miners for Democracy,” 350–351. 17. Anna M. Zajicek and Bradley Nash, “Community Empowerment and the Future of U.S. Labor Unions: Lessons from the UMWA” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, August 1996), 9. 18. Charles Perry, Collective Bargaining and the Decline of the United Mine Workers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 95. 19. Maier B. Fox, United We Stand: The United Mine Workers of America 1890–1990 (Washington, DC: UMWA, 1990), 434–435. 20. Nyden, “Miners for Democracy,” 473. 21. Ibid., 475. 22. Bennett M. Judkins, Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993), 226. 23. Ibid. 24. Nyden, “Miners for Democracy,” 501–502. 25. Ibid., 478. 26. Perry, Collective Bargaining, 9. 27. Ibid., 160. 28. Bituminous Coal Annual, 1953; Keystone Coal Industry Manual (Washington, DC: Bituminous Coal Institute, 1997). 29. William H. Miernyk, “Coal,” in Collective Bargaining: Contemporary American Experience, edited by Gerald G. Somers, (Madison: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1980), 9ff. 30. Richard Couto, “Changing Technologies and Consequences for Labor in Coal Mining,” in Workers, Managers, and Technological Change, edited by Daniel B. Cornfield (New York: Plenum Press, 1987), 191. 31. Ibid., 191. 32. Nyden, “Miners for Democracy,” 479. 33. Ibid., 876–883. 34. Marat Moore, Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), xii. 35. The President’s Commission on Coal, Washington, DC, 1980, 48. 36. Coal Outlook, May 22, 1978, 2. 37. George Getschow, “The Future of Mine Union Is Clouded and Its Share of Coal Output Drops,” The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1978, 1, 32. 38. Moody, An Injury to All, 107. 39. Seltzer, Fire in the Whole, 128. 40. Michael Yarrow, “Voices from the Coal Fields,” in Communities in Economic Crisis: Appalachia and the South, edited by John Gaventa, Barbara Ellen Smith, and Alex Wilignham (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1990), 305.

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41. Couto, “Changing Technologies,” 194 42. Seltzer, Fire in the Whole, 128. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. “Recommendations and Summary Findings,” President’s Commission on Coal, Washington, DC, 1980, 52. 45. National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of 1984 and National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of 1988. 46. Anna Zajicek, “Labor Activism and Industrial Relations in the Coalmining Industries of the United States, Great Britain and Poland” (Ph.D. diss., Virgina Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1995). 47. Miernyk, Collective Bargaining, 2; Perry, Collective Bargaining and the Decline of the United Mine Workers, 19–20; and Richard Hannah and Garth Mangum, The Coal Industry and Its Industrial Relations (Salt Lake City: Olympus, 1985), 36–49. 48. Seltzer, Fire in the Whole, 200. 49. Zajicek, “Labor Activism and Industrial Relations,” 315. 50. United Mine Workers Journal, vol. 95, no. 1 (January, 1984), 5–7. 51. Daily Labor Report, August 2, 1984, A-2. 52. Moore, Women in the Mines, xii. 53. Ibid., xvii. 54. United Mine Workers Journal, vol. 97, no. 10 (October 1986). 55. Coal Week, vol. 12, no. 8 (November 3, 1986). 56. Richard Couto, “The Memory of Miners and the Conscience of Capital,” in Fighting Back in Appalachia, edited by Stephen Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993), 179. 57. United Mine Workers Journal, vol. 101, no. 3 (March 1990), 9. 58. Energy Information Agency, The Changing Structure of the U.S. Coal Industry, 1993, vii. 59. Ibid., viii. 60. Ibid., 9–10. 61. United Mine Workers Journal, vol. 101. no. 4–5 (April–May 1990). 62. Daily Labor Report, no. 153 (August 8, 1990), A-11. 63. Daily Labor Report, no. 189 (September 20, 1990), A-8. 64. Hearing Before the House Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the Committee on Education and Labor, 103rd Cong., 1993, serial 103–127, 12. 65. Ibid., 28. 66. Daily Labor Report, no. 189 (September 20, 1990). 67. Moody, An Injury to All, 309–314.

13 Cross-Border Alliances in the Era of Globalization Bruce Nissen

The globalization of the U.S. economy is by now such a well-established fact that it becomes the starting point for most analyses of where the economy is headed in the coming years. As indicators of the degree to which the U.S. economy is intertwined with the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world, consider the following facts about multinational corporations and global financial/banking networks: • Three hundred companies own an estimated one-quarter of the world’s productive assets. • Forty-seven of the world’s top 100 economies are corporations that cross many national boundaries. • In the decade following 1983, foreign direct investment grew an average of 29 percent per year, which is three times the growth rate of export trade and four times that of world output. • The foreign exchange market processes approximately $1 trillion per day.1 This interdependence has had a profound impact on both workers in the United States and the U.S. labor movement. Globalization within a capitalist economy is, of course, not new; only the degree has changed. Recent advances in telecommunications, transportation technology, information processing, and the like have now accelerated a globalizing trend that has been apparent for much of the twentieth century. The pace of economic integration across the globe is unprecedented; furthermore, it is taking place within the context of a rightward political realignment that appears to be nearly universal, unlike previous waves of economic internationalization such as those that occurred in the 1960s. The so-called neoliberal agenda is now triumphant throughout most 239

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of the world; it calls for free trade, free markets, an end to most governmental “interference” in the marketplace, and reduction in social welfare measures. Although outright deregulation as called for by part of the agenda may be utopian and dysfunctional for the actual practice of today’s capitalist economies,2 there is no doubt that governmental policies are changing in the direction of far less protection for the vulnerable from economic competition. As a consequence of these economic and political changes, the power of transnational or multinational corporations vis-à-vis workers, unions, communities, and even national governments has grown enormously. U.S. workers find themselves in an insecure economic environment where some may be winners in the global competition, but it is a near certainty that many will be losers.

Labor’s Response Historically, the U.S. labor movement as a whole has not set a shining example of internationalist solidarity with workers around the world. Nationalism has exerted a very strong pull over U.S. workers, and in the post–World War II period, the labor movement pursued a foreign policy in alliance with U.S. capital, supporting U.S. government foreign policies to ensure U.S. companies access to foreign markets and investment opportunities. Even when this alliance meant unsavory affiliations with the CIA and backhanded support for dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines or Latin American military dictators, the official foreign policy of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) long remained in alliance with U.S. capital, always in the name of anticommunism.3 There are a number of explanations for why this alliance occurred. First, the existence of the communist bloc countries as the historic but unappealing alternative and as a potential threat to basic freedoms (including the freedom to form autonomous labor unions) may have been an important, if temporary, obstacle to true internationalism. Second, many labor leaders in the post–World War II era had fought their way to the top of their unions in direct conflict with communist and left-wing opponents, who stressed international worker solidarity against global capital. Personal animosities thus merged with a worldview that the American way brought the highest standard of living and the most freedoms available anywhere in the world. An additional possibility is that, at least in short- and medium-term payoffs, the desire by large U.S.-based firms to penetrate the world could be seen in the 1950s and 1960s as benefiting fairly large segments of the

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U.S. working class. 4 If these companies created millions of well-paying jobs with health care benefits and pensions, a business union labor movement could see organized labor’s well-being as coinciding with that of their large, increasingly international employers. Such an understanding was part of what some have called a “social accord” or “social compact” between organized labor and big business in the post–World War II years.5 If any such accord existed, it was being violated wholesale by the business community from the late 1970s onward. Plant closings, concession bargaining, union busting, export of jobs abroad, and mass layoffs have characterized corporate policy for the past two decades. The latest wave involves downsizing and the massive growth of a contingent workforce. An integral part of the attack on workers has been the actual movement of jobs abroad or the threat to do so as a device to force concessions from union locals.6 Union response to the changed circumstances has been piecemeal, uneven, and basically pragmatic. Unions in industries that faced early global competition (such as garments and electronics) raised the alarm first. As early as the 1970s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union ran a public relations campaign to “look for the union label,” an attempt to get the public to buy domestically made, union-made clothing. On a sectoral basis, unions initially lobbied vigorously for tariffs and quotas to protect unionized domestic industries from foreign competition. The change from an ideology of free trade, open markets, and open investment policies to one favoring political control over market relations was slower for unions in other industries. An example is the United Auto Workers (UAW). Long a supporter of free trade while the U.S. automobile industry faced no foreign competition in the domestic sales market, the UAW responded to Japanese and Korean competition by supporting quotas and later a domestic-content law. There is a pattern to U.S. union policy shifts from the 1950s to the 1990s. Free trade and open market policies accompanied periods when U.S.based producers dominated world markets. Significant foreign competition prompted an initial reaction of protectionism: tariffs and quotas, coupled with campaigns to “buy American.” Under heavy pressure because of the well-known anticonsumer effects of simple protectionism, unions subsequently developed more complex policies, including managed (or “fair”) trade and the combination of temporary protectionism with requirements of corporate upgrading and domestic reinvestment. However, very few union strategies from 1950 to 1990 involved forging alliances with workers and unions abroad. Despite exceptions, the labor movement’s main focus has been narrowly trained on short-term attempts to preserve jobs; broader contexts or strategic considerations have taken a decidedly secondary place.

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Recent Positive Developments In the 1990s, these limitations were partially overcome in the battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The U.S. labor movement’s 1993 struggle against the passage of NAFTA is perhaps the most positive development in international trade union practice in decades. It forged broad alliances with environmentalists, consumer groups, farm groups, religious organizations, social justice activists, and others to oppose a treaty depicted as good for transnational corporations but harmful to workers, ordinary consumers, and the environment. Some elements of the anti-NAFTA campaign drew out the class dimension of the conflict and promoted international working-class and anticorporate solidarity. For example, in its issue devoted to NAFTA, the UAW publication Ammo states, “We have no quarrel with Mexican workers,”7 highlights Mexican government suppression of labor rights, and argues for strong environmental protection rules, guaranteed labor rights for Mexican workers, and debt relief for Mexico. It also emphasizes NAFTA protection of investor rights. Similarly, the labor-based Jobs with Justice campaigned against NAFTA by emphasizing the need for three things: (1) enforceable workers’ rights; (2) a plan to raise living standards; and (3) protection for consumers and the environment. Anti-NAFTA union literature thus raised some broader, class- and consumer-based arguments. Another unusual feature of the anti-NAFTA campaign was the sheer number of unions and union members involved. In earlier times, an issue or a campaign involving international dimensions would usually be initiated by one union; other unions would perhaps assign ritual support activities to a small number of staff but do little else. In contrast, the antiNAFTA campaign involved virtually the entire U.S. labor movement. Closely related and perhaps most important, the anti-NAFTA campaign reached far down into the ranks, involving thousands of ordinary rank-and-file members. Pressure on elected political officials was not confined to a few paid union staff professionals, as was the case so frequently in past political union involvements. Significant numbers of the membership felt they owned this issue, and the more widespread membership involvement demonstrated this feeling. Further positive developments followed. After the 1995 changeover in leadership of the national AFL-CIO, most of the “Cold Warriors” were eased out of their positions in the federation’s international affairs department. New department director Barbara Shailor has not been implicated in the AFL-CIO’s past attempts to isolate and weaken left-wing labor movements or in its backhanded support for antilabor repressive regimes abroad as long as they were anticommunist. She has indicated that in the future, the AFL-CIO will work to build international solidarity free of such political litmus tests.8

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Many national unions have also taken international issues more seriously in the second half of the 1990s. Official trips by union leaders and occasionally rank-and-file members to the Mexican border to inspect the working and living conditions of workers in the maquiladoras (Mexican border plants, usually owned by U.S.-based companies, producing for export to the United States) have become commonplace. Unions are putting increasing time and resources into coalition efforts to halt the exploitation of workers abroad; a prominent example is the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. Occasionally, speakers from union movements abroad are invited to address national and regional conventions of U.S. unions. Although the emphasis in this chapter is on ties with Mexican workers, there is also growing activity in other areas of the globe. Highly publicized campaigns for labor and human rights aimed at companies such as Nike, R and Starbucks CofWalt Disney, Phillips–Van Heusen, the GAP, ToysRUs, fee regarding their operations in countries such as Indonesia, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and China have become so widespread that they received coverage in the mainstream media in the second half of the 1990s. Widespread media attention has forced the Clinton administration to develop at least token measures to persuade transnational garment companies to live up to minimal standards of labor relations conduct. In most of these campaigns, organized labor has played either a major or a supportive role.

Assessment of Current Practice Given these positive developments, is the U.S. labor movement now developing global labor ties based on worker solidarity and internationalism? Are class-based alliances finally confronting international capital? If so, it would signal a growing ideological clarity about who are genuine friends and enemies of labor, and it would help organized labor strengthen itself in the new global context as it faces the most vicious antiworker assault in approximately seventy years. Unfortunately, the reality is more complex. A closer look at the new activism reveals a less optimistic picture than one might envision from simply reading news reports. Union awareness about international issues has grown rapidly in the past two decades, but actual union practice beyond sporadic eruptions of activism in a time of perceived crisis (such as the 1993 anti-NAFTA campaign) is still rare. Following an initial flurry of activities concerning NAFTA, many unions took no further measures beyond conventional lobbying against the next free trade agreement, the updating of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the World Trade Organization, or “fast-track” authority for the president. Moreover, the activities that unions have undertaken have been relatively modest, both in their implied ideological understanding and in their

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scope. The actual building of activist coalitions with unions in foreign countries is still perhaps one of the rarest of all union globalization measures. There are exceptions, such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), which supports Mexican farmworker unions in the struggle for better union contracts, the United Mine Workers of America campaign in support of a Colombian union dealing with a common employer,9 and the Communications Workers of America’s joint work with communications unions around the world.10 But, again, these are exceptions to the rule, and in most cases it is unclear whether the new relationships being established have penetrated much below the leadership level. Some obstacles to effective and ongoing international alliances are practical. Language barriers can be formidable, especially for native-born U.S. citizens who are notoriously dependent on the English language. Face-to-face contact between rank-and-file workers can be costly if nations are far apart. The priorities of most union members will not favor a large expenditure of funds on international programs and contacts, at least not without extensive education on the importance of such contacts. Furthermore, the differing nature of unions in various countries can create real difficulties. For example, attempting to forge ties with the Mexican labor movement can be problematic, because the “white” (company) unions, “charro” (corrupt) unions, and many “official” unions affiliated with the government-dominated federation, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico (CTM), are not autonomous organizations dedicated to representing workers’ interests against their employers. In other cases, unions in foreign countries may be much more internationalist-minded than their U.S. counterparts, so the bigger obstacle lies in the United States. However, such potential obstacles should not be overemphasized. Language and cost barriers are relatively minor if there is a genuine understanding of the importance of international solidarity. Furthermore, in every country, including Mexico, there are a number of unions worthy of and interested in alliances with U.S. unions on a basis of mutual solidarity and respect. In reality, the major stumbling blocks do not lie simply in the practical difficulties. Rather, the major obstacles are more deep-seated. They lie in the conceptual understanding that most U.S. unions bring to their international work. On the whole, that outlook cannot be described as primarily internationalist or unambiguously class-based. The anti-NAFTA coalition demonstrates some of the shortcomings that stem from deeper roots. I noted earlier that some of organized labor’s opposition to NAFTA highlighted the class dimension of who wins and who loses. To some degree, transnational capital was depicted as the winner, and workers on both sides of the border as losers. Nevertheless, most of labor’s opposition to

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NAFTA came down to the issue of job loss in the United States. There is also no question that the “job loss” argument had the deepest resonance for increasingly insecure workers in the United States. That perspective became ever more dominant as the campaign progressed. In the heat of battle, most of the nuances and variations of argument flattened out to a fruitless argument over numbers of jobs lost or won. Although the “job loss” argument definitely rallied the troops in the short run, it failed to project a deeper understanding of common problems or to provide a meaningful intellectual basis for alliances between workers (or labor movements) in this country and in Mexico. If job loss is the essence of the story in the United States, then job gains constitute the Mexican counterpart. If the only goal, or the main one, of workers and unions on each side of the border is jobs, there is an inevitable “win-lose” battle between labor on both sides of the border for those jobs. There is also likely to be a competitive “race to the bottom” to give up the most to entice companies to provide the coveted jobs. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the perspective stressing competition over jobs could lead to a labor alliance with those sectors of capital confined to U.S.-based production, or with those sectors likely to be hurt by increased import penetration, and against foreign-based producers and workers abroad. This possibility would mean allying with forces unlikely to have a worker-friendly agenda on other issues. Small and medium-sized businesses in the United States with no significant foreign investments or with import competition in their product markets tend to have a conservative, antiworker agenda in their domestic public policy concerns, even if they allied with organized labor to oppose treaties like NAFTA. Small and medium-sized businesses are notorious for hostility to unions. Likewise, politicians pushing a strongly nationalist political agenda in trade policy tend to share the same conservative agenda. Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, with his “America first” agenda, is an extreme example. In no way can such politicians or the political perspective they represent be seen as friendly to the U.S. worker. Their overall agenda calls for antiworker measures, increased inequalities in the society, weakening of unions, and frequently racist or anti-immigrant policies to cause even more divisions within the U.S. working class. Most U.S. unions avoided this extreme. But there is no question that the “job loss” argument was the overwhelming argument made by organized labor against NAFTA. This posture allowed NAFTA proponents to label the U.S. labor movement as “protectionist” and as a “special interest.” 11 To the extent that U.S. unions concentrated mainly on their own members’ jobs to the exclusion of the larger picture, NAFTA supporters could easily extol the virtues of increased trade (greater product variety, better prices, greater production efficiencies due to “natural comparative

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advantages,” faster economic growth of national economies, more export markets and therefore more jobs in export sectors, etc.) while depicting the anti-NAFTA unions as narrowly and selfishly standing in the way of greater progress for the nation, all for the sake of a relatively small number of “protected” jobs for their own highly paid members. Unions were thus portrayed as reactive, even reactionary, forces holding back progress for selfish reasons. Unions fought to avoid such a depiction, but it seems to have held with a good percentage of the U.S. public. The narrow focus on job loss in union statements made the characterization plausible. In the end, unions lost control of the main terms within which the debate was conducted. The defining terms were commanded by figures such as presidential candidate H. Ross Perot who appealed exclusively to fears of job loss. His famous sound bite, that there would be a “giant sucking sound” of jobs pulled to Mexico if NAFTA was passed, overshadowed any serious analysis or debate on broader terms. U.S. unions tried to counter the protectionist charge by expressing concern for the Mexican worker. Yet the terms in which this concern was voiced sometimes offended those on the other side of the border. Depictions of workers as helpless semislaves living in cardboard shacks, willing to work for anything and so beaten down that they are thankful for even crumbs, were insulting to many Mexicans. Mexican trade union leaders pointed out that in many respects Mexican labor laws are superior to those in the United States; for example, workers must be paid in full for the duration of any legal strike, and replacement workers are forbidden. Although there are gigantic loopholes in Mexican labor law that make the application of such laws at best problematic, there is a definite underlying truth here: Mexican workers are not nearly as helpless or compliant as conveyed in many anti-NAFTA polemics. In fact, there are some histories of struggle and organizing in Mexico from which many U.S. workers and unions could learn a great deal. “Helpless victims” hardly portrays an accurate image. There is a striking parallel between the current image many U.S. workers and unions have of Third World workers and the views that many middle-income working Americans have held of the poorest segments of the domestic society, the so-called underclass. Historian Michael Kazin argues that there is a historical tendency in the United States, what he calls the “populist persuasion,” that views ordinary middle-income people as victims of privileged elites who run the system for their own benefit.12 The underclass is seen as a manipulable mass often used by the upper class to damage the interests of those who are seen as hardworking, honest, stable “ordinary people.” The underclass may occasionally be a potential ally in a battle against the elite, but more frequently its members are seen as helpless, unwitting dupes used to damage the stable middle. Over time, this

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view often degenerates into racist or xenophobic views that depict the underclass as a group of undeserving parasites who become part of the enemy. This same phenomenon, which has made the development of a stronger working-class consciousness more difficult domestically, may be at work in the current international arena, with Third World workers filling the role of the historic underclass. If so, U.S. unions need to combat this phenomonon rather than feed into it, because the lack of class consciousness both domestically and internationally can only undermine any attempt to build a strong labor movement in this country. U.S. unions’ concern for workers in other countries also appears to some foreign observers to be less than genuine. To some it appears to be merely tactical, probably just a cover for protectionist concerns. One Mexican union leader asked his U.S. counterpart: Why all of a sudden are you calling us “brothers”? Is it because today you realize you need us, because you are about to lose your jobs—even perhaps your unions—and because you think we stand to gain from your loss? Where have you been for the past 40 years, when many times we were in need of you?13

The questions reveal a skepticism about motivation. Is the new concern by U.S. unions nothing more than a narrowly instrumental desire to save domestic jobs, a casting about for assistance from Mexican unions, which could never expect the same kind of assistance in return? Was it simply the latest twist in a protectionist impulse because U.S. unions don’t operate from a broader viewpoint based on class interest and genuine worker solidarity? Such concerns have even led some within the underdeveloped world to oppose any linkage whatsoever between labor rights and trade. The opposition is not all coming from reactionary Third World governments or corrupted government-dominated unions in those countries. A striking example is the attitude of Martin Khor of the Third World Network, an organization based in Malaysia promoting the interests of workers and poor people in the Third World.14 Ordinarily, the Third World Network would be an ally of those fighting exploitation in underdeveloped countries. Yet Khor opposes conditions on trade requiring respect for labor rights because he fears that they will be used by governments and unions in advanced industrial countries as protectionist devices to keep goods produced in the Third World out of the First World markets. His equation of unions and governments in the advanced industrial countries demonstrates how little labor movements in the United States and Europe have been able to develop and project an internationalist, worker-based agenda independent of governmental purposes. I believe that Khor’s attitude is fundamentally in error, at least his blanket condemnation of all “conditionality” linking trade with labor

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rights.15 It is not really wages that would be taken out of international competition by international fair-labor standards or conditions on trade; it is the sacrifice of “human rights.”16 And human rights are a perfectly defensible standard for putting conditions on all relations between nations and economies, including trade relations. But the argument for such universal human rights will remain unpersuasive to many progressive thinkers in the Third World as long as the dominant message opposing free trade in the advanced industrial countries is “They’re taking our jobs!” The point is not that job loss is an illegitimate concern. Clearly it is an important and legitimate concern for any labor movement. But it alone is not an acceptable basis for international solidarity with workers in other countries, even if it is coupled with a (perhaps paternalistic) concern for the “oppressed foreign worker.” Such a stance fails to provide a concrete basis for international alliances based on class solidarity or even on mutual support grounded in enlightened self-interest. Framing the issue so that job loss is 90 percent of the problem and supplementing it with an altruistic concern for the poor Mexican (or Guatemalan, or Korean) worker is highly unlikely to sustain a long-term, truly internationalist practice.

Prospects for the Future Australian labor historian Barry Carr has noted that labor internationalism in the pre–World War II period was sustained by commitments to what he calls “grand narrative internationalisms.”17 By this he means commitments to radical left and emancipatory working-class ideologies that took the form of different “isms”: anarchism, socialism in its many variants, communism, syndicalism, etc. Movements adhering to these left-wing ideologies sustained an internationalist practice, as, of course, a later type of internationalism based not on class solidarity but on anticommunism created a very different and problematic practice in later years. We live in a world where grand narratives on the left have, at least temporarily, been greatly marginalized. On the surface, this fact bodes ill for international class-based solidarity, since it has always been the political left that has been the foundation for such solidarity. However, the end of the Cold War may have the opposite effect: Maybe unions will now more readily extend the hand of solidarity without using an ideological litmus test on the recipient of that solidarity. The rapid political changes in the world within the past decade have produced both discouraging and encouraging prospects for the future of labor internationalism. But at least the ravages of the free market and neoliberal policies have driven the labor movement in a positive direction; Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello call this “the promise of decline.”18

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Nevertheless, the movement toward a wider, more class-based understanding has been mostly a tentative groping. Most initiatives are primarily reactive, narrowly pragmatic, and ad hoc in nature. An important remaining task is to further develop and deepen a theoretical understanding based on solidarity and class self-interest. The prevalent tendency is still the instinctive reaction to promote nationalism, closed borders, and the like. What principles would produce the most enduring cross-border alliances? Which practices would best strengthen the U.S. labor movement? In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to give a partial answer to these questions, using examples wherever they are appropriate. First, the labor movement’s activities must be two-pronged: aimed at lobbying and changing public policies and laws but also involving direct cross-border activities with workers and unions across national boundaries. The primary tendency of many unions is to do only the former. The narrowest and least potentially fruitful approach is simply to engage the union’s paid staff and a few leaders in conventional lobbying of the government to change trade policies. As important as such activities are, they are likely to achieve little without broader initiatives that make the issues real to the union membership. Union involvement in broad coalitions aimed at influencing public policy, such as labor’s role in the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras or in the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, are positive advances over conventional limited lobbying. And cross-border activities involving direct contact with workers abroad further strengthen and broaden the engagement and clout of unions. Without these initiatives, unions’ efforts to influence public policy are likely to be less effective. Second, all activities need to be undertaken in a manner that reaches deep down into the ranks. The work cannot be confined primarily to paid union staff and top leaders. If it is, much of the educational value is lost, and the buy-in from the membership for international solidarity will be much less. The International Trade Secretariats (ITSs) of the worldwide federation International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) do a great deal of good,19 but they also demonstrate this danger of not involving the rank and file. ITSs facilitate very little contact between union locals across border lines, and their bureaucratic, top-down structure makes it difficult for them to do so in many circumstances. What is needed is an institutionalized mechanism for grassroots ties as well as links at higher levels of the union. If from lack of contact with foreign workers or from stereotyped media images, union members accept a worldview that sees foreigners as alien creatures who are stealing U.S. jobs, then the labor movement will not be able to achieve much progress on the issue. Cross-border exchanges below the level of top leadership and staff are extremely effective in breaking down such misconceptions.

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Third, unions should develop campaigns and international ties with unions abroad on the basis of common employers and common industries. The International Trade Secretariats do some of this linking. These types of strategic alliances are readily understandable from almost any political or social viewpoint. They make sense in today’s world even from a mildly enlightened business-union standpoint that moves beyond its narrowest and most conservative variants. These alliances, of course, also make sense from more progressive standpoints. They can prove a “lowest common denominator” approach to international solidarity which appeals to all political perspectives in the union. Everyone can see the need to stand together with those who are being victimized by the common employer or a common set of industry employers. This basis of solidarity doesn’t mean that a lowest common denominator approach is sufficient or that there will be no problems with rivalries over jobs and the like. But it is true that sectoral or common employer alliances are easier for everyone to understand than are other alliances that require a broader understanding of self-interest. Fourth, the preceding types of alliances are not enough. The labor movement needs to join with other forces to bring broad segments of the U.S. population into motion against the worldwide degradation of labor standards. There are excellent examples of such movements taking place: the campaigns against Nike for sweatshop conditions in Southeast Asia potentially appeal to teenagers; the “Sweat Gear” campaign exposing the sweatshop conditions producing many trendy clothing items appeals to humanitarians and many religious social justice people; the campaign against the Starbucks chain demanding a “code of labor conduct” in the picking and processing of coffee taps into the social conscience of some of the upper-income clientele of its shops. Organized labor could play a much larger role in these and similar campaigns; rank-and-file union members could actively participate along with the idealistic college students and activists now primarily involved. Unions need to bring opportunities for involvement to the ranks; the response would likely be quite positive. Fifth, international solidarity needs to work in both directions. Assistance to workers abroad is not charity; it is an act of self-interest. But this reciprocity will not be apparent to most union members unless concrete assistance is rendered both ways. The U.S. labor movement is not so problem-free that it needs no help from unions abroad. Two examples follow: The AFL-CIO has helped Bangladesh garment and textile unions, which face enormous obstacles. When UNITE [Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees] had trouble organizing a group of Bengali immigrant workers, organizers from Bangladesh came to help with the organizing drive. The United Electrical Workers, which has actively supported independent unions in Mexico, similarly called on Mexican organizers to

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help win a major campaign in Milwaukee where there were many Mexican immigrants.20

Many foreign labor movements also have a lot to teach U.S. unions on how to integrate the labor movement into community struggles that are in the wide interests of the working class and the marginalized elements of society. This integration is a major objective of the new AFL-CIO leadership; training from foreign union leaders and activists could help in achieving that goal. Sixth, the U.S. labor movement also needs to broaden its ties with unions in developed countries. The examples cited in this chapter, and indeed most current activity, concern workers and unions in underdeveloped countries. Yet, most investment by U.S.-based transnational corporations is in developed countries, and most foreign investment in the United States comes from developed countries. The United Steelworkers, for example, has made excellent use of union assistance in worldwide battles with the Bridgestone-Firestone Tire Company and the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation. European and Japanese unionists were important in both successful battles. The forging of ties with unions in countries with a standard of living equal to or higher than that of the United States will also help move the understanding away from charity and toward solidarity. Seventh, U.S. unions need to continue the trend of breaking down the rigid separation between official and unauthorized, left-wing forms of crossborder contacts. The relative openness of the new AFL-CIO leadership in this regard is most welcome. Reprisals are no longer an automatic response against those union members and activists daring to involve themselves in traditionally left-wing transnational exchanges and meetings held by groups such as the Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE) and the publication Labor Notes. Likewise, the United Electrical Workers (UE), long considered to be an unacceptably left-wing union, is actually being looked to and emulated by some AFL-CIO unions in their developing international practice. And, finally, eighth, those unions and union leaders that still retain a grand narrative understanding of the world may be able to lead by example, demonstrating to the rest of the labor movement the value of longerterm, strategic alliances across borders. Examples already exist. One of the most widely known is the strategic alliance between the U.S.-based UE and the Mexican-based Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT).21 The UE-FAT alliance has involved concrete assistance in organizing drives on both sides of the border, organized exchanges of worker delegates, tours in both directions, a training center in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and more. (For more details, see the following chapter in this book.) Also important is the “sister union” relationship between UAW Local 879 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Democratic Ford Workers’ Movement

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in Cuautitlan, Mexico.22 Exchanges, common actions on a given day, concrete assistance, and the like have characterized this more strategic and long-term relationship. Canadian unions such as the Canadian United Steelworkers, the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEPW), the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), and, recently, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) have set up a humanity fund that utilizes collectively bargained moneys for solidarity activities around the world.23 In general, unions need to develop ways to naturally integrate internationalist activities into their day-to-day activities. As it now stands, union locals have to take extraordinary measures to engage in internationalist or community solidarity activities. If the U.S. labor movement could build international solidarity ties into all its routine educational and bargaining conferences, as well as regularly sponsor tours to and from foreign countries, the strangeness of the terrain and the difficulty in developing connections across borders would decline. All of these suggestions are merely ways to hasten and deepen a process that has already begun. The history of the U.S. labor movement leads me to believe that greater development of international ties will occur on a mass scale only if internationalism is built in such a way that pragmatic results are relatively immediately apparent. Solidarity will not grow automatically out of theoretical necessity or simple objective conditions. It must be built in a manner that makes the advantages fairly transparent to workers.

Notes 1. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 18, 19. 2. Steven K. Vogel, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 3. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975); Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor, Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1969); Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1992). 4. Richard Barnet, “Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, December 10, 1994. 5. Bruce Nissen, “U.S. Workers and the U.S. Labor Movement,” Monthly Review, May 1981, 17, 30; Samuel Bowels, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984); Bruce Nissen, “A Post–World War II ‘Social Accord’?” in U.S. Labor Relations, 1945–1989: Accommodation and Conflict, edited by Bruce Nissen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990).

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6. Harry Browne and Beth Sims, Runaway America: U.S. Jobs and Factories on the Move (Albuquerque, NM: The Resource Center Press, 1993); Kate Bronfenbrenner, “We’ll Close! Plant-Closings Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” Multinational Monitor, vol. 18, no. 3 (March 1997). 7. “We Have No Quarrel with Mexican Workers,” UAW AMMO, vol. 28, no. 4, 16. 8. “Shailor to Head International Affairs Department,” Working Together, September–October, 1996. 9. Kenneth S. Zinn, “Labor Solidarity in the New World Order: The UMWA Program in Colombia,” Labor Research Review 23 (Spring–Summer 1995). 10. Larry Cohen, “Mobilizing Internationally: Global Employee Network Pressures Multinational to Reverse Anti-Union Strategy,” Labor Research Review, vol. 12, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1993); Larry Cohen and Steve Early, “Defending Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy,” in Which Directions for Organized Labor?— Essays on Organizing Outreach and Internal Transformation, edited by Bruce Nissen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 11. Peter Seybold, “The Politics of Free Trade: The Global Marketplace as a Closet Dictator,” Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 7 (December 1995). 12. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 13. David Brooks, “The Search for Counterparts: A Labor-Community Agenda Must Cross Borders as Well,” Labor Research Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1992), 83. 14. Martin Khor, “The World Trade Organization, Labor Standards, and Trade Protectionism,” Third World Resurgence, May 1994. 15. Lance Compa, “ . . . And the Twain Shall Meet? A North-South Controversy Over Labor Rights and Trade,” Labor Research Review 23 (Spring–Summer 1995). 16. Ray Marshall, “Introduction,” in Mask of Democracy, edited by Dan La Botz (Boston: South End Press, 1992). 17. Barry Carr, “Labor Internationalism in the Era of NAFTA” (Presentation to the Conference on Labor, Free Trade, and Economic Integration in the Americas: National Labor Union Responses to a Transnational World, Duke University, August 15–27, 1994). 18. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “American Labor: The Promise of Decline,” Z Magazine, May 1988. 19. Joe Uehlein, “Using Labor’s Trade Secretariats,” Labor Research Review, vol. 8 (Spring 1989). 20. David Moberg, “The Resurgence of American Unions: Small Steps, Long Journey,” WorkingUSA, May–June 1997, 30. 21. Robin Alexander and Peter Gilmore, “The Emergency of Cross-Border Labor Solidarity,” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 28, no. 1 (July–August 1994); Dan La Botz, “Making Links Across the Border,” Labor Notes, Larry Weiss, August 1994, “UE/FAT Alliance Shows Solidarity Is a Two-Way Street,” in Working Together: Labor Report of the Americas (Minneapolis: Resource Center of the Americas), May–June 1995. 22. Tom Laney, “The Cleto Nigmo Memorial Agreement: UAW Local 879 Adopts Organizer,” Impact: The Rank and File Newsletter (Youngstown OH), February–March 1994. 23. “Steelworkers Humanity Fund Shows the Way,” Working Together: Labor Report on the Americas (Minneapolis: Resource Center of the Americas), Spring 1997.

14 A Strategic Organizing Alliance Across Borders Robin Alexander and Peter Gilmore

The economic misery and devastating health and environmental hazards faced by workers on the U.S.-Mexican border have their origins in neoliberal economic policies that fostered the integration of those economies and predated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by many years. In the 1990s, the number of maquiladora factories along the U.S.-Mexico border has grown to over 4,000 plants, and the number of workers has increased from 100,000 to almost one million.1 This maquiladora workforce is overwhelmingly female and is poorly paid. A 1993 study by the Inter-Hemispheric Resource Center estimated that U.S. corporations had moved as many as 180,000 U.S. jobs to Mexico during the previous twelve years, primarily to take advantage of low wages and poorly enforced environmental controls south of the border.2 Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, U.S. companies have continued to move south at a rate of nearly one a day. Although it clearly understates job loss, by December 1997 the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Program had certified that more than 150,000 jobs had been lost due to NAFTA-related imports and plant shut-downs. This number is undoubtedly low, as DOL denied certification in over half of the cases where petitions were filed; the Economic Policy Institute had previously estimated that the number was over four times that reported by the DOL. Yet even this massive influx of jobs has not solved the crisis faced by Mexican workers.3 Real wages in Mexico fell by 60 percent in the 1980s; the December 1994 devaluation resulted in another 40 percent plunge in the value of the peso. In late 1998, the minimum wage was approximately $3.00 a day.4 Meanwhile, the destruction of small and medium-sized Mexican firms, exacerbated by NAFTA and the subsequent devaluation, has left millions of Mexicans either unemployed or marginally employed. 255

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Until 1990, membership in the major labor federations in Mexico such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) carried with it mandatory membership in the ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). This is still effectively the case. Because of government domination and corruption, the “official unions,” as they are known, are undemocratic and generally provide little in terms of benefits for their members. “Ghost unions” and “protection contracts” are prevalent both in the interior and in many border cities. Before workers are hired, companies will often purchase contracts from one of the official unions. The workers will have no idea a union exists, and the contract will remain in a drawer and will be brought forward in the event that the workers attempt to organize. Although Mexican labor laws are generally much better than those in the United States and appear to provide ample protection for workers, government hostility renders them virtually meaningless when workers are attempting to organize independent unions.5 The Mexican government has enormous power to intervene in the labor movement, to remove and replace union leaders, to declare strikes illegal, to seize workplaces militarily, to grant or withhold legal recognition, and to delay the proceedings by which workers can change union representation. Basic human rights such as free speech and association are frequently violated with impunity. In the border area, where the government has ensured special protection to the maquila plants, the violation of workers’ rights is particularly notable. Along the border, the intricate relationship among unions, political parties, and government again distorts the perception of worker power. The border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa are virtually 100 percent organized by official, or government-dominated, unions that provide little in the way of protection to workers. And there is no mistaking the position of maquila owners farther to the west, in Ciudad Juarez. A sprawling city of some 1.2 million people, Cd. Juarez is a kind of maquiladora success story. The fast-growing city is home to 235 maquila plants, many of them state-of-the-art facilities, employing more than 175,000 workers, many of whom live in underdeveloped neighborhoods without paving or utilities. Employers like General Electric have continued the strong anti-union tradition that distinguishes Cd. Juarez. Even the official unions are unable to claim representation rights at more than a few plants, and there has never been a successful drive by an independent union. In the face of extremely harsh conditions and a viciously anti-union atmosphere, workers have developed a tradition of using wildcat strikes to address the worst conditions. The challenge that has confronted independent unions in Mexico for more than half a century is disheartening in itself: how to organize effectively in the face of opposition by employers, official unions, and the government.

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When we add to this challenge the issues of globalization, the decimation of national industry, and the imperative to organize transnationals, the work ahead appears daunting indeed. But in situations of crisis there are also opportunities. In the dusty streets and sleek, modern plants of Cd. Juarez, an independent Mexican labor federation and a progressive U.S. union confront a status quo of low wages, demeaning working conditions, and corporate control. The organizations are the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). At a General Electric (GE)-owned motor production plant jointly targeted by the UE and the FAT, union organizing by the FAT and solidarity by the UE set the stage for the first labor complaints filed under NAFTA and Mexico’s first-ever secret-ballot union representation election. Although the company won that election, the unions have not abandoned Cd. Juarez and its workers. As a step toward changing the antiunion culture of Cd. Juarez, the FAT opened a workers’ educational and legal assistance center in that border city.

Building Real Solidarity The UE-FAT Strategic Organizing Alliance is possible because both labor organizations share a tradition of independence and a history of militant struggle and grassroots democracy. A federation of unions, cooperatives, farmworkers, and community organizations, the Frente Autentico del Trabajo possesses more than three decades of experience in creating alternatives to the status quo. The FAT is steadfastly independent of Mexico’s official unions, government, and church. “When we begin an organizing campaign,” says Benedicto Martinez, a national FAT leader, “it is with the knowledge that we are taking on not only the company, but the government, and official unions as well.”6 FAT-affiliated unions represent workers in more than half the states of Mexico in a wide variety of industries, including textiles, garment, shoemaking, rubber, auto parts, agriculture, and construction. Although modest in size (with a total membership of approximately 50,000), the FAT has an influence that greatly exceeds its size because of its principled determination to create independent, democratic unions under extremely adverse conditions. Over the years, the FAT has provided crucial organizational support to many parts of the independent union movement formally outside the federation as well as to democratic currents within the official unions. The FAT was a key founder and leading participant in the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade (RMALC), a coalition of more than

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100 Mexican organizations that opposed NAFTA, and that continues to promote alternatives to such commercial agreements. Opposition to free trade as conceived and promoted by transnational big business in its own interests provided the crucial, initial link across the border between the UE and the FAT. The Pittsburgh-based United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) unites a diverse membership, from assembly workers and welders to social workers and scientists, on the basis of working together in a democratic, rank-and-file union. The union’s commitment to democracy is encapsulated in its slogan, “The members run this union.” Although affiliated with the CIO in its early days (and then expelled), the UE has steered an independent course for nearly half a century. When a corporate official accused the UE in the early 1980s of being “out of step,” a UE leader retorted defiantly, “We’re in a different parade, marching to the beat of a different drummer.”7 The UE often seemed to be in a parade of its own with regard to trade and international issues. When other unions preached “Buy American,” the UE focused attention on U.S. corporate investment overseas. As corporations like GE sent thousands of jobs south of the border, the UE refused to blame Mexican workers, recognizing that such a condemnation only allowed U.S. companies to avoid responsibility. The UE calculates that some 10,000 members have lost their jobs as U.S. corporations shifted production to Mexico. Initially the UE and the FAT worked together in a cross-border campaign against their governments’ approval of NAFTA. Inevitably, discussions led to a new kind of cross-border solidarity that backed high-sounding phrases with deeds. In the Strategic Organizing Alliance created by the UE and the FAT in 1992, the two organizations agreed to target transnational corporations operating in Mexico that have a bargaining relationship with the UE in the United States. For both organizations, the alliance was founded on a kind of principled self-interest, with each recognizing that the members’ interests would be best served in making common cause with potential allies across borders. Although organizing remains the key element, the alliance also came to involve grassroots education and building solidarity by promoting contact among rank-and-file workers, especially those employed by the same transnational corporations and industries in Mexico and the United States. The UE-FAT alliance also aims to promote the organization of independent unions, protect the human and labor rights of Mexican and U.S. workers, and build the foundation for trade unionists to work together to improve wages, benefits, and working conditions on both sides of the border. Seven years after the alliance was created, the UE’s commitment to the day-to-day work of building real solidarity is still derived from its

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focus on the big picture. Responding to questions from members as to why the UE regards international solidarity work as so important, the union’s general secretary-treasurer, Bob Clark, said the answer was simple: “We live in a global economy.” After first hearing that expression ten years earlier as a rank-and-file leader negotiating with the Allen-Bradley Co., Clark said, he quickly discovered that what it really means is “cheaper labor”— the ability of bosses to get the same work done for less, here or anywhere in the world. The UE has been and will remain “front and center on this question,” the union officer declared. Both the UE and the FAT recognize that when conditions facing workers are tough, women bear a disproportionate burden. Over the years, the UE has fought vigorously for the rights of women. The UE was also the first industrial union to elect a woman as one of its top officers, and today women hold significant elected and appointed posts within the union, including general counsel, director of international labor affairs, and positions on the union’s general executive board. The FAT shares the UE’s perspective, and at its 1993 convention initiated a discussion that led to an ambitious women’s project. The FAT has also elected an extremely impressive woman, Bertha Lujan, as one of its three top officers, has created a women’s organization within the framework of the FAT to increase the visibility and participation of women, and has provided the initiative and support for projects in both Central and Northern Mexico. In 1996, both organizations made great strides in their internal work with women. The FAT organized its first national women’s conference, and for the first time the UE and the FAT exchanged delegations of rank-and-file women. The second women’s meeting took place in 1997, and additional women’s exchanges deepened the relationships that had previously been established. In 1988, the FAT began two major national campaigns focused on women, and held a week-long training conference for women in leadership positions in the various sectors and geographic regions of the organization. Two women from the UE participated, and the women from the FAT are reproducing that training for women in their own areas.

Making the Road as They Walk The work of the UE-FAT Strategic Organizing Alliance can be viewed as occurring in two phases. During the initial stage, members formed the alliance, chose the Cd. Juarez/Chihuahua area as the focus for their organizing activity, selected target plants, evaluated them, and initiated two organizing campaigns. When workers in the targeted plants were fired, alliance members, together with the Teamsters union, filed the first complaints under the labor side agreement of NAFTA. The complaints focused attention

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on both the egregious company violations and the deficiencies in the labor side agreement. They also paved the way for subsequent cases that focused attention on the problem of interference by the Mexican government in the union registration process. Although this phase was invaluable in terms of developing the relationship between the two organizations and evaluating the conditions on the border from an organizing perspective, the lack of a union culture and the fierce opposition by the companies and the Panista government led members to conclude that an alternative to a plant-byplant organizing approach was needed. During the current phase, the FAT and the UE have shifted the focus of the organizing work, expanded both the organizational and educational components, and worked on building infrastructure to support their work financially and in terms of solidarity. There is also a strong emphasis on leadership development to ensure full, meaningful participation by women. The UE and the FAT believe that all of their projects illustrate their commitment to exploring new approaches founded on a grassroots perspective. The heart of the UE-FAT relationship is organizing, and this will remain true in the years ahead. This work now includes an organizing team based in Mexico City, a trinational, U.S.-Mexico-Canada organizing project, and the Workers’ Center for Labor Studies (CETLAC) in Cd. Juarez. The organizing experience obtained by the alliance in Cd. Juarez had led members to the conclusion that it was necessary to establish a center to educate workers about their rights, provide legal assistance designed to promote the development of workers’ organizations, and consistently put forward a different vision of how unions should and can operate. After several long years of planning and fund-raising, CETLAC opened its doors on September 28, 1996. The FAT hosted the official inauguration in Cd. Juarez with some 120 Mexican, U.S., and Canadian unionists and other supporters in attendance. The program opened with a panel discussion on the effects of NAFTA on the workers of all three countries. Speakers discussed the decline in employment and the deterioration of wages but also noted that NAFTA had led unions to create new international relationships. There were also cultural presentations: a bilingual poem by noted author Benjamin Alire Saenz and a one-woman dramatic reading about maquila workers. A second panel focused on international labor solidarity. “We have a new era of international labor solidarity,” said Bertha Lujan of the FAT, “as shown in the worker-to-worker, and factory-to-factory approach of the FAT and the UE, as well as in new approaches to organizing working women.”8 Although the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and the Social Security Workers Union were members of the official Congress of

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Labor, both unions had come to know the FAT through their participation in the Foro Group.9 Both sent representatives to the CETLAC inauguration. As little as a year earlier, their presence would have been unthinkable. In connection with the inauguration of the workers’ center, Professor Dale Hathaway wrote a short history of the FAT that was published by the UE in April 1997. The initial work of the center involved dealing with the administrative and logistical necessities of getting a new organization up and running, establishing relations with other organizations, and organizing a class schedule and attracting maquiladora workers to the classes. The center now has four full-time staff people who are hard at work conducting classes, working with maquiladora workers, and striving to provide an alternative vision of how trade unions operate. In addition to its regular work, in the spring of 1996 CETLAC cohosted a labor symposium with the University of Juarez that featured Nestor de Buen, Graciela Bensusan, and Arturo Alcalde, some of the foremost labor authorities in Mexico. More recently, CETLAC conducted an intensive training session for organizers in the border region. UE-FAT’s most significant organizing campaign in 1998 involved the trinational alliance around Echlin, a transnational auto-parts manufacturer. That spring, unions from the United States and Canada representing workers at organized plants and representatives of the FAT’s metalworkers union gathered in Chicago to pledge their mutual support in negotiations and organizing. The FAT was the first union to run a campaign. At an election where 50 of 300 workers had been fired, where workers had to vote out loud, and where 170 armed thugs had been brought in the night before, the outcome was no surprise. But what was new was that the FAT is part of Echlin, now an alliance of ten unions from the United States, Mexico, and Canada that represent workers at the same transnational, and that have pledged to support each other in negotiations and organizing.10 The FAT was the first union to run a campaign and to call on the alliance for assistance. We filed complaints under the labor side agreement of NAFTA that were signed by some fifty organizations from all NAFTA countries, as well as by the AFL-CIO, the Canadian Labor Congress, and the newly formed National Workers Union (UNT). It was the first time that labor federations from any of the three countries had participated in a complaint under the labor side agreement of NAFTA. Bob Kingsley, UE Director of Organization, led off the U.S. hearing with a powerful statement in which he explained, “We formed this alliance in the belief that we cannot allow workers in our three countries to be pitted against one another in a race toward the lowest labor standards. Instead, we intend to use the strength of union solidarity across national borders to protect ourselves from corporate exploitation across those same national boundaries.”

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An excellent decision recommending ministerial consultations has been handed down by the U.S. National Administrative Office, as well as a strong decision in the associational rights part of the Canadian case; a decision on the occupational health issues is expected early in 1999. It is important to emphasize that the UE views its work as a binational partnership that benefits workers on both sides of the border. In this context, it should be noted that one of the demands in the Echlin campaign is that the company sign a code of conduct that will apply in Echlin’s plants in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Similarly, although the UE has had occasion to support the FAT in a number of campaigns, the relationship is definitely a two-way street. The FAT provided critical support for a successful UE organizing campaign in a Milwaukee foundry. At the UE’s request, a rank-and-file activist from the FAT traveled to Milwaukee for two weeks in December to accompany UE organizers. In meetings with the workers, who were predominantly of Mexican origin, this activist was able to speak from his own experience, telling the workers that the UE is a democratic union, unlike the official unions in Mexico. More recently, Benedicto Martinez, one of the FAT’s national coordinators, attended a UE convention. While at the convention, he joined workers in Chicago during the first day of their strike and met with workers at another plant who had an election scheduled for the week following the convention. That election also resulted in victory. The alliance’s cultural and educational work has also moved forward. On the artistic front, in 1997 labor muralist Mike Alewitz from New Jersey and community muralist Daniel Manrique Arias from Mexico City produced murals at the FAT’s headquarters in Mexico City and at the UE district hall in Chicago with a common theme of cross-border labor solidarity. The planning and fund-raising for this project also took several years. The muralists met in the spring of 1997 in Mexico City, where Alewitz was the principal artist on a mural entitled “Sindicalismo sin Fronteras” (Trade Unionism Without Borders) in the FAT’s auditorium, and Manrique was the principal artist on a mural entitled “Marcha por la Autogestion” (March for Self-Management) in the area used for celebrations. The inauguration was timed to coincide with the FAT’s national meeting in April and couldn’t have been better. Hundreds of workers, artists, and intellectuals gathered for an appropriate dedication. In the fall, three young muralists from the Chicago Public Art Group assisted Manrique in Chicago on a mural entitled “Hands in Solidarity, Hands of Freedom; Manos Solidarios, Manos Libres.” Meanwhile, Alewitz painted a mural in commemoration of the UPS victory at Teamster City, several blocks away. The dedication ceremony brought together a wide variety of organizations and individuals to focus on some of the problems facing workers and immigrants and generated much energy and enthusiasm. We have little doubt that we will continue to see the impact of this project.

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The UE is the only union in the United States to employ a labor cartoonist on staff, demonstrating the union’s recognition of the importance of art within the labor movement. Nevertheless, this project represented a bold new approach: uniting U.S. and Mexican artists, labor, and community struggles and viewing art as a way of moving their work forward and reaching new communities at the same time. Thanks to Steve Dalber of Labor Beat in Chicago, a half-hour video documents the production of the Mexico City and Chicago murals and provides insight into our work. The UE and the FAT continue to use worker-to-worker exchanges to deepen understanding and relationships on both sides. These exchanges demonstrate that the most effective way to educate workers in the United States and in Mexico—and to motivate them to educate others—is through direct contact with each other. Instead of the larger size of the five previous delegations, the UE now organizes smaller, more frequent exchanges, in which workers stay in particular cities for a longer period of time. Again, there is an emphasis on women. On one recent trip, two women from the UE spent three days with their sisters at the FAT women’s center in León, accompanied them to the second national women’s meeting, and remained for the FAT’s national congress. According to Marianne Hart: “The experience was overwhelming . . . both in terms of what I learned, the breadth of the work the FAT does, and their commitment to organizing. On a personal level I was able to share very personal experiences and feelings with women from the FAT because they were so open and generous. There were no walls between us. This experience actually made solidarity without borders real for me.” The experience has had a similar impact on the Mexican workers. Juan Sauza, a rank-and-file worker from a cooperative just outside Mexican City that makes window glass, observed: “I learned that although a nation may be very powerful it does not mean that the people don’t have a lot of problems. It is only by getting to know people like the brothers and sisters in the UE and others in the United States and Canada that we can really begin to work together.” Over time the UE has also developed an extensive solidarity network in the United States. This network is composed of local unions, other organizations, and activists who support our cross-border work through small financial contributions, through targeted letter writing and petition campaigns, by hosting delegations, and in various other ways. More recently, organizations have been working with the UE to develop geographical bases of support for the organizing work of the FAT. The UE has also established an international Web page, which can be viewed at http://www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect/. Since January 1996, author Dan La Botz has edited the Mexican Labor News and Analysis, which is published electronically every two weeks. It focuses on labor and related

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events in Mexico and is the best source of Mexican labor news available in English. In January 1997, the UE was named Labor Web Site of the Week. Perhaps most significant, the UE and the FAT have developed an excellent relationship based on mutual respect and trust and an innovative organizing model that may serve as an example to others in the labor movement.

Conclusion Given the growth of transnational corporations, it is imperative that workers begin to think about how to support the work of unions in other countries. If workers face their common employers together, they can succeed in improving wages and benefits everywhere. However, if they permit the transnationals to pursue a low-wage strategy and play workers off against each other, they share a future of common misery. The UE’s work with the FAT represents one model of how two labor organizations can benefit from working together. The relationship has worked for a number of reasons. The two unions share a similar organizational approach: a common commitment to building democratic unions controlled by their members. In this sense, the UE principle of rank-andfile unionism is strikingly similar to the broader concept of “autogestion,” or self-management, that the FAT applies throughout its organization. Second, both organizations are pragmatic, accustomed to working with limited resources, and neither is bureaucratic. These qualities have allowed them to move forward rapidly, evaluate the work as they proceed, and make changes where warranted. Third, their work involves real, important projects with tangible results. Fourth, members from both unions have come to know and like each other as people, as trade unionists, and as part of a movement for workers’ rights. Last, and perhaps most important, the relationship from the beginning has been based on mutual respect and has become firmly based on mutual trust, a product of working closely together over time. There can be no doubt that this alliance has benefited both organizations and has inspired many other locals and activists to participate with these organizations or through their own initiatives. The UE and the FAT welcome that participation because they believe that the future of the labor movement depends on it. Together they are creating the road upon which they are walking. Adelante!

Notes 1. According to the Mexican Institute of Statistics (INEGI), Mexico’s manufacturing sector grew by 13.8 percent in the first half of 1998, bringing the total

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number of maquila workers to 981,302. (“Incremento de 13.8 percent del empleo de maquiladoras de exportación,” El Financiero, August 31, 1998.) Meanwhile, the Mexican Secretary of Commerce (SECOFI) has reported that Mexico now has 4,119 maqulia plants. (Verónica Garcia de León, “Se han instalado 4,119 maquiladoras en el pais,” El Universal, October 24, 1998.) Maquiladora employment grew 18.2 percent in 1995 and reached 818,062 in January 1997, an increase of 125,920. Of these, 231,500 work in the state of Chihuahua; 171,800 in Baja California; and 70,300 in Tamaulipas. The rest work in Coahuila, Sonora, Nuevo Leon or in other states. (Tomas de la Rosa, “Rompe record empleo en maquila,” and Table “Motor de trabajo,” in Reforma, March 27, 1997.) On the average, every month five new maquiladoras are established in Mexico. Most are textile, electronic, or chemical and manufacturing plants. The total number of maquiladoras is now 3,403: 710 in electronics; 915 in textiles; 106 in food; 67 in leather and shoes; 384 in furniture; 236 in chemicals; 226 in automotive; 197 in services; 52 in toys; and 510 in other areas. In 1995, 465 new maquiladoras were established; in 1996, 548, resulting in 100,000 new jobs. This was from an investment of US$871 million. Exports from this industry amount to between US$35 billion and US$36 billion, or one-third of Mexico’s total foreign sales. (Patricia Munoz Ríos, “Se estableen 5 maquiladoras cada mes en el pails,” La Jornada, March 7, 1997.) 2. Between 1993 and 1996, Mexico suffered 1,707 chemical accidents, of which 81.4 percent had to do with leaks or spills and 9 percent with fires, according to the Federal Prosecutor for the Protection of the Environment (Profepa). Of these, 42 percent had to do with PEMEX, the Mexican Petroleum Company. (Angelica Enciso, “Mil 707 accidentes con sustancias quimicas en 1993–96: Profepa,” La Jornada, March 2, 1997.) Meanwhile, the National Institute of Ecology (INE) found that 65.3 percent of the 1,408 maquiladoras surveyed could not show the final and legal destination of dangerous toxic waste. Such waste is now estimated at 16,054 tons annually. Nearly one-third of the plants return their toxic waste to the United States, and 5.4 percent have legal locations in Mexico. The rest have no explanation of what happens to their poisonous industrial by-products. (Ethel Riquelme F., “INE 65.3 percent de 1,408 Maquiladoras no Puede Comprobar el Destino De Desechos Toxicos,” Excelsior, April 4, 1996.) 3. In 1996, Mexico exported goods to the United States worth $72,963 billion, while the United States exported only $56,761 billion in goods. This surplus of $16,202 billion was 5 percent higher than that of 1995. (“Logra Mexico segunda marca historica con EU,” Reforma, February 20, 1997.) 4. By the close of 1998, the minimum wage would have lost 20 percent of its purchasing power when compared to 1997, according to a spokesperson for the labor sector of the National Commission of Minimum Wages (CNSM). (Elizabeth Velasco C., “Mermara el minisalario mas de 20 percent of ‘98,” La Jornada, October 21, 1998.) The metropolitan area of Mexico City has 20 million inhabitants, 38.3 percent (7,160,000 people) of whom live in “moderate poverty,” according to Sara Gordon and Rene Millan of the Research Institute of UNAM. Another 7 percent, or 1,400,000, live in extreme poverty. (Cynthia Rodriguez, “Probres, 38 percent de capitalinos,” Reforma, March 12, 1997.) Inflation obviously compounds the problem. During the first two months of 1997, inflation reached 4.29 percent according to the Bank of Mexico. (“Llega inflacion 4.29 percent durante 1997.— Banxico,” Reforma, March 8, 1997.) Another study by an organization called World Vision reports that Mexico has 27 million poor people, 80 percent of whom live in conditions of extreme poverty. (Fabian Munoz, “Hay en Mexico 27 millones de pobres,” Reforma, March 2, 1997.)

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The Program of Cooperation with Mexico 1996–2001 of UNICEF reports that about two million children less then five years old suffer from malnutrition. The problem is worse for Indian groups, where 35.8 percent of the children are malnourished. (Fabiola Martinez, “Sufren desnutricion 2 millones de ninos,” La Jornada, March 10, 1997.) The Mexican Instutiute of Nutrition reports that 50,000 children in the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area suffer from malnutrition. (Alejandra Bordon, “Alerta: 50 mil niños sufren desnutrición,” Reforma, March 14, 1997.) 5. In 1917, the Mexican constitution gave workers the right to organize and strike. It provided for a living wage, eight-hour day, mandated profit sharing, minimum health and safety standards, etc. It was the most progressive labor law of its time anywhere in the world. 6. Author interview, September 1998. 7. Author interview, July 1997. 8. Author interview, September 1996. 9. The Foro Group (so-called because it originally came together to hold forums on trade unionism, etc.) was composed of twenty-five unions, ten that were members of the Congress of Labor and fifteen that were independent unions. In September 1996, the Foro Group published a document that set forth the views of the participating unions about their relationship to other unions, civil society, and the government, and criticized privatization and NAFTA. The Foro Group operated on consensus—thus preventing the large official unions from totally dominating. In late November 1997, the majority of the Foro unions, together with some 175 other union and peasant groups, celebrated the formation of a new labor federation—the Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), or National Union of Workers. This is an extremely significant development, as the new federation is critical of the government’s neoliberal economic policies and the way unions have been tied to the government, and represents a break with the historic relationship that has existed between the official unions and the government. Benedicto Martinez, general secretary of STIMAHCS and a member of the national leadership of the FAT, was elected as one of seven vice presidents of the new organization. His election represents a recognition of the FAT’s role throughout the Foro process. 10. Echlin was purchased by the Dana Corporation in 1998; the Echlin Workers’ Alliance therefore evolved into the Dana Workers’ Alliance and has expanded to include additional locals.

Conclusion: Union Democracy and Social Unionism Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings

The chapters in this book express a sentiment among the authors that a transformation in U.S. labor is desperately needed if the labor movement is to survive into the new millennium. The contributors have set forth new directions and visions to spur debate both inside and outside U.S. unionism. How might this transformation come about? What will the labor movement look like by the year 2010? What could be the guiding ideology of a transformed U.S. labor movement? Can unions organize around the principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all”? Will the AFL-CIO have the ability to call for a national strike when the need arises? Will labor be able to counter the ongoing attacks corporate America is waging on the workers of this country? Change within the labor movement will have to come from within, with reform forces pushing an agenda of union democracy and social unionism to counter the economic and political dominance of transnational corporations. No longer can labor afford to circle the wagons while clinging to a top-down approach. Most labor leaders during the twentieth century have adopted the philosophy espoused by Dave Beck, autocratic expresident of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), when he said, “I’m paid . . . to run this outfit. . . . Unions are big business. Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy? Would any corporation allow it?”1 For labor to thrive in the decades ahead while corporate America is pushing its “profit over people” agenda, reformers must turn to truck drivers and bottle washers to demand more progressive unions. By building democracy within U.S. unions, the rank and file can push the labor movement to challenge the power and prerogatives of capital itself. Through a social transformation led by the labor movement, working people can em267

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brace a more egalitarian principle of grassroots mobilization and a more communitarian principle of caring and sharing. Can transformation take place through the new leadership of the AFLCIO? Herman Benson and other contributors praise John Sweeney for his initiatives in funding, organizing, and political campaigning as well as for his ability to get more media attention and for programs like Union Summer. However, not only Benson but Jane Slaughter, Michael Eisenscher, Kim Moody, and Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello see the AFL-CIO as continuing to alienate its members in the decisionmaking process. If the voice of the rank and file remains silent, the contributors believe that real transformation will fail. As Eugene Debs argued in 1910: “The power of the boss is the weakness of the movement. This power vanishes with the strength of the movement. The true leader uses all his power, not to rule others, but to impart the power and intelligence to them to rule themselves.”2 Since 1910, little has changed in most unions to dispute Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy. Benson argues that “the AFL-CIO and most of its affiliates have been . . . on the side of limitation and repression.” These old ways of governing unions must come down as the Berlin Wall came down in East Germany. Democracy is the foundation for unions to regain momentum in the first decade of the new millennium. Eisenscher points out that both the solidarity of workers and the accountability of their leaders are vital components of any lasting union resurgence. Is union democracy a panacea for the survival of the labor movement? Reform movements over the past thirty years have shown that when democracy prevails, organizations can become more viable and unified. Benson, Ray Tillman, and Steve Downs and Tim Schermerhorn explain various ways in which this strengthening has been achieved. But broadly based reform movements are not the only formula for a revitalized labor movement. Peter Downs and Staughton Lynd show how both individual workers and union locals can help produce essential change by challenging union autocrats and corporate America. Lynd argues well for devolving power and activism to locals. Ken Paff, the national organizer for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), tends to agree with Lynd but also points out that “you’re dealing with multinational corporations, and we need more coordination and a strong international to deal with them.”3 The decentralization of national unions is an issue on which not all dissidents and reformers agree. Anna Zajicek and Bradley Nash use the case of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to argue that what is most needed is a healthy combination of decentralization and centralization. What the contributors do agree on is the need for grassroots democracy both to inform leaders and to hold them accountable at all levels— local, national, and international. Most of the authors agree with Lynd

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when he posits (in Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below) that “trade unions, as they exist in the United States—top down, bureaucratic, inefficient institutions that mirror the capitalist corporations which they purport to challenge—are part of the problem, not part of the solution.”4 They also agree with Bruce Nissen, as well as Robin Alexander and Peter Gilmore, that union thinking and union organizing must expand across national borders. The power and reach of transnational corporations dictate a key aspect of union transformation: international workers reaching out to one another to avoid being divided and conquered by their own parochial self-interests. Ways to avoid this pitfall and realize working-class solidarity are historically illustrated by Peter Rachleff, Jane Williams, and other contributors. Some of the authors mention the political possibilities for unions offered by progressive third parties like the New Party, the Labor Party, and the various Green Parties. At the very least, labor would be wise to serve notice to the Democratic Party that unions cannot be counted on to support a traditional party that seems increasingly friendlier to owners than to workers. At the same time, if labor is to make serious overtures to third parties, the latter must in turn offer progressive workers an alternative that is authentically transformational, inviting both grassroots citizen involvement and dramatic improvements in social policy. What lies ahead for U.S. unionism? Union partisans should not ignore the possible effects of the recent decertification of Ron Carey as reform president of the IBT. With the Carey fiasco coming on the heels of the successful UPS strike, union dissidents got a dish of sweet and sour on their New Year’s plate for 1998. The Teamsters for a Democratic Union had played a vital role in the victory of John Sweeney’s New Voice slate at the top of the AFL-CIO. Carey and the TDU, along with Sweeney’s New Voice, have given hope to union dissidents in their struggles against their own unions’ autocratic structures. Now that James Hoffa Jr. has won the government-mandated IBT election, the setback for union reform is real but minor in the long run. As in postcommunist countries and throughout most of the world, as well as in unions, the momentum for democratic change seems irreversible. Any turning back to autocracy is likely to meet renewed opposition. A fatalistic belief in the Iron Law of Oligarchy goes hand in hand with a straw man of democratic perfectionism. But as Michels himself argued over eighty years ago, the point is “not whether ideal democracy is realizable, but rather to what point and in what degree democracy is desirable, possible, and realizable at a given moment.”5 If democracy is to be dramatically increased in the near future, union reformers should first encourage the kind of representative democracy that exists in the governing bodies of the United States. Even this form of liberal democracy antagonizes

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entrenched leaders in most unions, who still deny the rank and file a real voice in the decisionmaking process. Representative democracy, along with a members’ bill of rights included in all union constitutions, would allow all rank-and-file members the right of free speech, the right to vote, and the right to form political associations within the organization itself. It would also permit the members to choose their own leaders through one-member, one-vote, secret-ballot referendums with legitimate opposition factions, caucuses, parties, or slates. Nevertheless, reformers must establish a platform that would allow for more rank-and-file democracy in years to come. Historically, old regimes that stubbornly resist liberal change have often earned themselves more radical change. As globalization and the greed of international capital drive workers to greater marginalization and desperation, transformative change may become not only possible but irresistible. We must confront squarely the logic underlying Michels’s own disappointment with the democratic prospect, spurred by his experience within the German Social Democratic Party. Michels argued that the “dilemma facing those who would attempt to achieve democracy, lies in the necessity to organize. Thus if democracy requires organization, organization requires leadership and therein lies the crux of the democratic dilemma.”6 He went on to observe that “it is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators.”7 Therefore, in his judgment, representative democracy soon becomes not democracy at all but a thinly disguised form of oligarchy. On a larger scale, Michels argued that when an organization becomes more specialized, membership participation diminishes and the members tend to allow the formation of an organizational oligarchy. J. David Edelstein, who has examined cases of self-managed labor unions, argues that “democratic reform of a national union under capitalism is a major undertaking and, some would argue, an almost impossible task.”8 Edelstein goes on to advocate, however, that workers trying to form such a worker democracy continue their struggle, which will in any case “develop the ideal of democracy and keep it alive.”9 History has shown that even oligarchical forms of democracy, such as U.S. capitalism favors, can be pressured to allow important benefits for ordinary citizens and the working class, including higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, expanded benefits, and social policies of income redistribution, public works, environmental protection, and other collective goods. Two key rationales, therefore, must dissuade reformers from letting Michels’s Iron Law become a self-fulfilling prophecy of pessimism. First, even oligarchically tainted democracy gives the working class a better deal than straight capitalist oligarchy. The hard-won benefits listed

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above are well worth fighting for, and representative democracy has been a key part of the solution. Second, and potentially even more important, today’s mass education and communications technology make both the workings and the tragedies of elite dominance more visible to ordinary citizens in postindustrial societies. Today’s rising cynicism toward elite institutions could become tomorrow’s rising tide of democratic transformation. But unions, like other institutions, must devise ways to involve ordinary workers and citizens in governance on a regular basis. Politically, the people cannot afford to sleep between crises, for the price of lasting democracy is eternal and active vigilance. Michels and a century of experience have alerted us to the danger that specialization and centralization may undermine our sense of community responsibility: “Let them take care of it for us.” It is up to democrats to learn the lesson, to take power back from them, and to give government by the people its best chance. It is possible that the more fully democratic forms practiced during earlier times in Crete, Athens, and New England town halls, as well as in many indigenous cultures, were fated not so much for ultimate demise as for a centuries-long wait for new conditions to arise that might challenge the perpetual power of oligarchies. Perhaps Michels’s considerable acumen would have produced different conclusions, or at least different possibilities, had he lived a century later. A majority of U.S. labor unions practice a form of plebiscitarian democracy in which the electorate is asked only periodically to signify its approval or disapproval of the actions of its leaders regarding issues like collective bargaining agreements or reelection through the convention processes. By contrast, the emphasis on representative democracy—as a step toward a more radical democracy—would allow factions to express their points of view and to implement those views if they are embraced by the majority of members. A related question is whether worker democracy based fundamentally on the membership rather than the leadership is possible in the labor union movement. One example put forward by Staughton Lynd is “solidarity unionism,” which relies “not on a technical expertise, or on numbers of signed-up members, nor yet on bureaucratic chain of command, but on the spark that leaps from person to person, especially in time of common crisis.”10 Another example is that of the Spanish longshoremen union, La Coordinadora, a small organization of 8,000 members that remains demo cratic without a single full-time official and only two paid employees. These union dockers “run the union on a rotating part-time basis, with time off to do this guaranteed under Spanish law.”11 One of the main ideas behind union democracy is its affinity with social unionism. Reformers and theorists alike argue that a democratic union will “give its members such a taste for democracy that these men and

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women will expect other organizations and situations they encounter to be democratic as well.” As in the early days of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and presently with the Teamsters, a more democratic union is usually concerned with such issues as the health and safety of its members, environmental protection, and the impact of job loss on the larger community. Social unionism of the 1930s and 1940s was abandoned for the concept of business unionism when the CIO merged with the AFL in 1955. Business unionism is based on a centralized administration and powerful leadership and focuses largely on bread-and-butter issues, economic questions of wage and fringe benefits, rather than working conditions, speedup, distribution of profits, relocation, and social justice. Today, reformers continue to argue that business unionism is the major cause of the decline of the labor movement. Moreover, union reformers remind those clinging to the business part of unionism that it is social unionism that used representative democracy to win passage of the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, workers’ compensation, and Social Security. In other words, labor’s earlier social agenda led to great public-policy victories whose benefits Americans still enjoy today. Business unionism will not disappear overnight. Although the new leaders in the AFL-CIO have espoused the goals of social unionism during their first term in office, they seem to have put the social agenda on hold in their effort to fight off right-wing legislation aimed at destroying the power of labor. It is worth noting some of the key components of social unionism: •Labor-management relations: Labor and management have fundamentally different positions, and unions exist because of the conflict between worker and boss, labor and capital. It is labor, not corporations, that creates the wealth. Unions must set their own agenda on how to work with the corporations, not the other way around. •Corporate location: Workers and communities need to have a voice in the closure and movement of corporations and their investments. •Social agenda: Labor needs to set the social agenda “that makes housing, jobs, income, national health, and education political priorities.”12 •Global unionism: Unions must create and develop international sector unionism uniting employees who work for the same corporation worldwide. This approach would include organizing across national borders and coordinating collective bargaining. •Labor reform: Reformers need to demand governmental action to

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make it easier to unionize and extend human rights to the workplace. • Building coalitions: Unions should build coalitions with groups that promote and defend working people, single parents, and pensioners and their needs. • Shorter workweek: Unions should fight mandatory overtime by forcing corporations to hire more full-time workers.13 Is there a place for social unionism in the U.S. labor movement and the U.S. society? As Congress moves to the right and the gap between the wages of workers and salaries of management widens, reformers want the working class to call for a stronger social agenda. As corporations try to set the agenda for the United States in the next century, some scholars and labor activists see a clear parallel with the United States of the 1920s, when corporations dominated the political agenda and labor was forced to champion a progressive agenda. In turn, these partisans argue that if progressive forces are to have a voice in setting the U.S. agenda, labor must again step to the forefront in the debate. To transform unions and win over the working class, labor must adopt a more social-unionist philosophy when dealing with both the corporations and the community at large. Business unionism in the United States has lasted for more than a century, and social unionism appears unlikely to replace it in the near future. The ascendance of social unionism is not inevitable, but it is possible. Perhaps if reformers can find a way for social and business unionism to coexist while labor tries to revitalize itself, they can help the cause of union democracy and social justice get moving again on the road to democratic transformation.

Notes 1. Dan La Botz, Rank and File Rebellion (London: Verso Press, 1990), 121. 2. Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters, and Democrats (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 205. 3. Ken Paff, national organizer for TDU, telephone interview, January 30, 1995. 4. Staughton Lynd, Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1992), 46. 5. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1962), 366 (originally published in Germany in 1911). 6. Ibid., 62. 7. Ibid., 364. 8. J. David Edelstein, “Modeling Union Democracy,” Against the Current 49 (March–April 1994), 45.

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9. Ibid., 16. 10. Lynd, Solidarity Unionsim, 34. 11. Edelsteine, “Modeling Union Democracy.” 12. Kim Moody, “A New Vision for a New Direction: A New Kind of Unionism,” Labor Notes 93 (November 1986), 7–10. 13. Elly Leary and Marybeth Menaker, Jointness at GM: Company Unionism in the 21st Century (Woonsocket, RI: New Directions Publication, 1992), 56–62.

Selected Readings Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975. Alexander, Robin, and Peter Gilmore. “The Emergence of Cross-Border Labor Solidarity,” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 28, no. 1 (July–August 1994). Anderson, John. From Sit-downs to Concessions: Fifty Years of the UAW. Chicago: Bookmarks, 1985. Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Associated Press. “Teamster Chief Was Scammed, Lawyer Says,” Denver Post, January 1, 1998. Baratz, Morton S. The Union and the Coal Industry. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1955. Barnard, John. Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little Brown, 1983. Barnet, Richard. “Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, December 19, 1994. Benjerman, Paul. “Why Labor Must Oppose Jointness,” The Organizer, vol. 5 (June 1995). “Big Union—Big Challenge,” The Voice of New Directions, September 1995. Bohm, Suman. It’s Clean Up Time: Stop the UAW’s Decline. St. Louis, MO: A New Directions Publication, 1991. Bowles, Samuel, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf. Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Brecher, Jeremy, and Tim Costello. “American Labor: The Promise of Decline,” Z Magazine, May 1988. ———. Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Brill, Steven. The Teamsters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Bronfenbrenner, Kate. “We’ll Close! Plant Closings, Plant-Closing Threats, Union Organizing and NAFTA,” Multinational Monitor, vol. 18, no. 3 (March 1997). Browne, Harry, and Beth Sims. Runaway America: U.S. Jobs and Factories on the Move. Albuquerque, NM: The Resource Center Press, 1993. Cantor, Daniel, and Juliet Schor. Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America. Boston: South End Press, 1987. Chester, Eric. “The Lessons of the Detroit Strike,” Industrial Worker, vol. 5, no. 3 (June 1997). Cobble, Dorothy Sue, ed. Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. Ithaca: ILR Press, 1993. Cohen, Larry, and Steve Early. “Defending Workers Rights in the Global Economy.” In Which Direction for Organized Labor?—Essays on Organizing, Outreach and Internal Transformation. Edited by Bruce Nissen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cohn, Samuel. When Strikes Make Sense—and Why. New York: Plenum Press, 1993. Cormier, Frank, and William Eaton. Reuther. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. Cowie, Jefferson R. The Search for a Transnational Labor Discourse for a North American Economy: A Critical Review of U.S. Labor’s Campaign Against NAFTA. Durham, NC: Duke University Working Paper Series in Latin American Studies, Working Paper No. 13, May 1994. Craver, Charles B. Can Unions Survive? The Rejuvenation and the American Labor Movement. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Crowe, Kenneth C. Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993. Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad Press, 1972. 275

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———. Teamster Power. New York: Monad Press, 1973. Downs, Peter. “Rebuilding the Unions,” The Progressive Review, February 1992. Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren van Tine. John L. Lewis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Early, Steve. “New Organizing Should Be Membership-based,” Labor Notes, April 1996. Edelstein, J. David, and Malcolm Warner. Comparative Union Democracy: Organization and Opposition in British and American Unions. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978. Eisenscher, Michael. “Critical Juncture: Unionism at the Crossroads.” Paper presented at the Center for Labor Research, Working Paper and Public Forum Series, University of Massachusetts–Boston, May 1996. Fantasia, Rick. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Feldman, Richard, and Michael Betzold, eds. End of the Line: Autoworkers and the American Dream. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. Fetherling, Dale. Mother Jones the Miners’ Angel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. Fine, Sidney. Sitdown: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Fisher, Stephen, ed. Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Fox, Maier, B. United We Stand: The United Mine Workers of America, 1890–1990. Washington, DC: UMWA, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1927, 1961. Gaventas, John. Power and Powerlessness: Acquiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Geoghegan, Thomas. Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Georgakas, Dan. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Goldberg, Michael, J. “Cleaning Labor’s House: Institutional Reform Litigation in the Labor Movement,” Duke Law Journal, 1990. Green, James, ed. Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Gruelle, Martha. “Brotherhood Forever,” Labor Notes, September 1996. Harris, John Howell. The Right to Manage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Hartley, Robert C. “The Framework of Democracy in Union Government,” Catholic University Law Review, vol. 32, no. 13 (1982). Howley, Jon. “Justice for Janitors: Organizing in the Contract Services,” Labor Research Review, vol. 15 (Spring 1990). Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Kennedy, Robert. The Enemy Within. New York: Harper, 1960. Kochan, Thomas A., ed. Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Kochan, Thomas A., Harry C. Katz, and Robert B. McKarsie. The Transformation of American Industrial Relations. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Koeppel, Barbara. “Victor Reuther: ‘We Need a Union That Acts Like a Union Again,’” The Progressive, December 1989. La Botz, Dan. Teamsters for a Democratic Union: Rank and File Rebellion. New York: Verso, 1990. ———. A Troublemakers Handbook: How to Fight Back Where You Work—and Win. Detroit: Labor Notes, 1991. ———. “Making Links Across the Border,” Labor Notes 185, August 1994. Laney, Tom. “The Cleto Nigmo Memorial Agreement: UAW Local 879 Adopts Organizer,” Impact: The Rank and File Newsletter (Youngstown, OH), February–March 1994. Leary, Elly, and Marybeth Menaker. Jointness at GM: Company Unionism in the 21st Century. Woonsocket, RI: A New Directions Region 9A Publication, 1992. Lowi, Theodore. The End of Liberalism. New York: Norton, 1969.

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Lynd, Alice, and Staughton Lynd, eds. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1981. ———. We Are the Union: The Story of Ed Mann. Youngstown, OH: Solidarity USA. Lynd, Staughton. “Where Is the Teamster Rebellion Going?” Radical America, vol. 13, no. 13 (March–April 1979). ———. The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings. San Pedro, CA: Singlejack Books, 1982. ———. Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1992. ———. Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical’s Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. ———, ed. “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Maltby, Lewis. A State of Emergency in the American Workplace. New York: ACLU, 1990. Mann, Eric. Taking On General Motors: A Case Study of the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Marks, Gary. Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1989. Marquart, Frank. An Autoworker’s Journal: The UAW from Crusade to One-Party Union. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Marshall, Ray. “Trade Link Labor Standards.” In Mask of Democracy. Edited by Dan La Botz. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Michels, Robert. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: The Free Press, 1962. (This book was originally published in Germany in 1911.) Mishel, Lawrence, and Jared Bernstein. The State of Working America, 1994–95. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. Moberg, David. “The Resurgence of American Unions: Small Steps, Long Journey,” Working USA, May–June 1997. Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. London: Verso, 1988. ———. “Building a Labor Movement for the 1990s.” In Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community. Edited by Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990. Moody, Kim, and Simone Sagovac. Time Out: The Case for a Shorter Work Week. Detroit: Labor Notes, 1995. Moore, Marat. Women in the Mines: Stories of Life and Work. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Nader, Ralph, ed. Whistle Blowing. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972. Nissen, Bruce. “U.S. Workers and the U.S. Labor Movement,” Monthly Review 100, May 1981. Nissen, Bruce, ed. U.S. Labor Relations, 1945–1989: Accommodation and Conflict. New York: Garland Publishing, 1990. Nixon, J. Peter. “Justice for Janitors Mobilizes Against Tax Breaks for the Rich,” Washington Socialist, April 1995. Nyden, Paul J. “Miners for Democracy: Struggle in the Coal Fields.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975. Parker, Mike, and Jane Slaughter. Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering. Detroit: Labor Notes, 1994. Perry, Charles R. Collective Bargaining and the Decline of the United Mine Workers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Perusek, Glenn, and Kent Worcester, eds. Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s–1990s. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. Pratt, David. “Teamster Dissidents Oppose Federal Trusteeship,” Labor Notes, July 1987. Preis, Art. Labor’s Giant Step. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978. Rachleff, Peter. Hard-pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1993.

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Reuther, Victor. The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Roosevelt, Theodore. Documentary History of the United States. Edited by Richard A. Heffner. New York: New American Library, 1985. Roper Center. “Transformations of the American Labor Movement,” The Public Perspective: A Roper Center Review of Public Opinion and Polling, vol. 5, no. 5 (July–August 1994). Sargent, John, and Nick Migas. “How the International Took Over.” In Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. Edited by Alice and Staughton Lynd. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988. Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Seltzer, Curtis. Fire in the Whole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Seybold, Peter. “The Politics of Free Trade: The Global Marketplace as a Closet Dictator,” Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 7 (December 1995). Slaughter, Jane. “UAW Watchdog Body Labels Union a ‘One-Party Institution’ and Says That’s OK,” Labor Notes III, June 1988. Smith, Page. America Enters the World: A People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I, vol. 7. St. Louis, MO: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Spencer, Charles. Blue Collar: An Internal Examination of the Workplace. Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1978. Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the Great American Obsession. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Turner, Lowell. Democracy at Work: Changing World Markets and the Future of Labor Unions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. UAW New Directions Constitution and By-laws, October 1989. Uehlein, Joe. “Using Labor’s Trade Secretariats,” Labor Research Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989). Union Democracy Review: 1972–1981. Nos. 1–26. Brooklyn, NY: AUD Publication. Union Democracy Review: 1982–1985. Nos. 27–49. Brooklyn, NY: AUD Publication. Union Democracy Review. “That Labor-Intellectual Alliance,” no. 110 (January 1997). United Auto Workers. Constitution of the International Union, United Automobile Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America UAW, Preamble. Velasquez, Baldemar. “Don’t Waste Time with Politicians—Organize!” Labor Research Review, Spring–Summer 1995. Vogel, Steven K. Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Weiss, Larry. “UE/FAT Alliance Shows Solidarity Is a Two-Way Street.” Working Together: Labor Report of the Americas. Minneapolis Resource Center of the Americas, 1995. Westin, Alan, ed. Whistle Blowing! Loyalty and Dissent in the Corporation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Wilson, Woodrow. Documentary History of the United States. Edited by Richard A. Heffner. New York: New American Library, 1985. Yates, Michael. “Does the U.S. Labor Movement Have a Future?” Monthly Review, vol. 48, no. 9 (February 1997). Zajicek, Anna M. “Labor Activism and Industrial Relations in the Coal-mining Industries of the United States, Great Britain and Poland.” Ph.D. diss., Blacksburg: Virigina Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1995. Zajicek, Anna M., and Bradley Nash Jr. “Community Empowerment and the Future of U.S. Labor Unions: Lessons from the UMWA.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, New York, August 17–20, 1996. Zinn, Kenneth S. “Labor Solidarity in the New World Order: The UMWA Program in Colombia,” Labor Research Review, vol. XIV, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1995).

The Contributors Robin Alexander is the director of International Labor Affairs for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). She is responsible for the cross-border organizing campaign being conducted by the UE and the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (Mexico’s only independent labor federation) through a strategic organizing alliance. Alexander drafted the first complaint to be filed under the Labor Side Agreement of NAFTA, known as NAALC. Herman Benson is the founder and executive director of the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), a nonprofit foundation devoted to promoting the principles and practices of internal union democracy. He has edited the AUD publication Union Democracy Review since 1972 and is the author of several books, including the Democratic Rights of Union Members: A Guide to Internal Union Democracy (1979). In 1992, Benson was honored by the Metro New York Labor Press Council for his long commitment to helping the union movement rid itself of corruption and to helping rankand-file members gain a voice in running their unions. Jeremy Brecher is the author of eight books on labor and other social movements, including Strike! His most recent projects involve his collaborations with Tim Costello, which include Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community and Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Brecher serves as humanities scholar-in-residence at Connecticut Public Television and Radio, a position supported by the Connecticut Humanities Council. He recently won two Emmy Awards and the Edgar Dale Screenwriting Award for The Roots of Roe. Tim Costello was a truck driver and a workplace activist for more than twenty years and a union representative for SEIU Local 285 in Boston for four years. He is currently organizing Northeast Action’s Massachusetts Jobs Project. Michael S. Cummings is professor and chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado at Denver. While completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he became active in political groups promoting social and economic justice. A member of the American Federation of Teachers, he has encouraged union-organizing efforts among full- and parttime college faculty. His book Beyond Political Correctness: Social Transformation in the United States will be published by Lynne Rienner in 1999. 279

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THE CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Downs is a union activist and writer with over 100 published articles that have appeared in The Progressive, Commonweal, Z Magazine, and Against the Current. Downs is a member of the New Directions Movement in the UAW and is a former recording secretary of UAW Local 2250. By helping expose election fraud in his local union, Downs has won membership backing for election reforms and forced the union to rerun some local elections. Steve Downs is a train operator in the New York subway system and founder, with Tim Schermerhorn, of the New Directions caucus of the TWU Local 100. Downs has represented train operators on the Local 100 executive board since January 1992. Michael Eisenscher is a doctoral candidate in public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. For the past 25 years, he has been an organizer, negotiator, labor educator, and consultant for a variety of unions. He is presently the coordinator of the Project for Labor Renewal in the Bay Area of California. Eisenscher has published articles that have appeared in Z Magazine, Dollars and Sense, Labor Notes, Economic Notes, and the Boston Globe. Peter Gilmore has been the managing editor of the UE News since 1987 and on the staff of the newspaper since 1977. He is the author of Another Voice, Another Vision: Labor Parties in American History and Refuse to Lose: Eminent Domain and the J. C. Rhodes Campaign. With Robin Alexander, Gilmore coauthored an article on cross-border organizing for the NACLA Report on the Americas, which was later anthologized. Staughton Lynd has been a director of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, a history professor, and a legal services attorney in Youngstown, Ohio. He and his wife, Alice Lynd, edited Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, third edition (1988) and are presently local education coordinators for Local 377 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Lynd is the author of The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings (1982), Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (1992), and Labor Law for the Rank and Filer, or Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law, second edition (1994). He also edited “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (1996). Kim Moody is the director of the Detroit-based Labor Notes and is one of the most respected labor journalists in North America. He works closely with the rank-and-file anticoncession movement and has been on the scene of most current labor struggles. His work has been published in such periodicals as Labor Notes, New Politics, Against the Current, and The Progressive. Moody is the author of the acclaimed book An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (1988).

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Bradley Nash Jr. recently completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Nash is an instructor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, specializing in political sociology, inequality/stratification, and work and organizations. He has published articles in Electronic Journal of Sociology and Sociological Inquiry. With Anna Zajicek, Nash coauthored “Re-Shaping the Future: The Transformation of UMWA Structure and Strategies in the 1980s” in Undermining Labor: Coal Miners and Their Unions in the United States and Great Britain, edited by Mark Wardell (forthcoming). Bruce Nissen is a program director at the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He is the author of Fighting for Jobs: Case Studies of Labor-Community Coalitions Confronting Closings (1995) and the coeditor of (with Charles Craypo) Grand Designs: The Impact of Corporate Strategies on Workers, Unions and Communities (1993) and (with Simon Larson) Theories of the Labor Movement (1987). Nissen is currently researching international labor alliances and domestic organizing strategies. Peter Rachleff has taught American history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, for fifteen years. He is the author of Black Labor in Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (1989); Hard- Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (1993); and “Organizing ‘Wall-to-Wall’: The Independent Union of All Workers, 1933– 1937,” in editor Staughton Lynd’s “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternate Unionism of the Early 1930s (1996). Rachleff is a member of the National Writers Union (UAW) and the Workers Education Local 189 (CWA). Tim Schermerhorn is a train operator in the New York subway system and a founder, with Steve Downs, of the New Directions caucus of the TWU Local 100. Schermerhorn has served as vice chair of the train operators division and has been the New Directions candidate for president of Local 100. Jane Slaughter is a labor writer and educator in Detroit. She is the co author, with Mike Parker, of Working Smart: A Union Guide to Participation Programs and Reengineering and was a staff writer for Labor Notes for sixteen years. She writes about labor issues for many publications and has spoken for union and university audiences in Canada, England, Germany, Mexico, Guatemala, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Ray M. Tillman is currently the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 642 in Boulder, Louisville, and Lafayette, Colorado, and the director of education of the State Association of Letter Carriers. In 1994, Tillman ran for national assistant secretary-treasurer of

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the NALC on the opposition slate New Generation Leadership (NGL), the first legitimate opposition slate in the NALC in fourteen years. He is a cofounder of NALC NEW VISION, a reform movement within the NALC, and has written several articles that have appeared in Labor Notes. Jane Williams is a doctoral student in cultural studies at George Mason University. In 1996, she presented papers on the Justice for Janitors campaign at the Institute for Culture and Society and at the North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University. Williams teaches literature and composition at George Mason University with an emphasis on American culture. Anna M. Zajicek is currently assistant professor at the University of Arkansas in the Department of Sociology. Zajicek has co-written several articles that have appeared in Social Problems, Journal of Aging Studies, Rethinking Marxism, and The Wisconsin Sociologist. In August 1996, her papers “Community Empowerment and the Future of U.S. Trade Unions: Lessons from the UMWA” and “Gender, the State, and the Social Constructions of Dependence: The Case of Poland” were presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in New York.

Index 251, 268, 272; collapse of, 10; Committee on the Future of Work, 84n4; Department of Corporate Affairs, 69; Department of Field Mobilization, 68, 69; Department of Public Affairs, 69; exclusion of workplace issues in, 108; inaction in, 11; International Affairs Department, 69; international work, 19; lack of democracy in, 22; loss of members, 93; membership in, 10, 14, 45, 46; new leadership, 67–83; New Voice, 9–25, 50, 67, 71, 99; organizing activities, 50–52; Organizing Institute, 10, 13, 68, 94, 106; overseas activities, 19. See also Congress of Industrial Organizations American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), 30, 37, 51, 94, 99 American Federation of Teachers, 104 American Gas Machine, 88 American Institute for Free Labor Development, 19 American Nurses Association, 104 American Postal Workers Union, 21 Anarchism, 248 Anderson, John, 130 Apartheid, 19 Appalachian Committee for Full Employment in Southeast Kentucky, 224 Arbitration, 62, 173, 174, 187; binding, 170, 176; neutral, 194; rights to, 72 Arts, labor, 13 Association for Union Democracy (AUD), 38, 40, 41, 104 Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), 34 Atkins, C. T., 34 AT&T, 108 AUD. See Association for Union Democracy Authoritarianism, 19, 39, 117, 137, 138, 139, 144, 151, 223

Abel, I. W., 41, 43 Accountability, 2; establishing, 2; by leadership, 113, 139 Activism, 103; community, 89; crossunion, 10; direct, 89, 92; disagreements over, 104; grassroots, 12; intra-union, 104; local, 13; mass, 78, 91; rank-and-file, 3, 55–57; workplace, 89–90, 92 ACTU. See Association of Catholic Trade Unionists Adolph Coors Corporation, 120 A. E. Staley Corporation, 10, 16, 53, 54, 59, 71, 84n12, 102, 108, 198 African Americans, 65, 89, 98, 104, 168, 170, 179, 181, 197, 213, 214, 215 AFL-CIO. See American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations AFSCME. See American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Alcalde, Arturo, 261 Alewitz, Mike, 262 Alexander, Robin, 4, 255–264, 269 Allen, Robin, 210 Alliances: broad-based, 242; classbased, 243; cross-border, 4, 70, 78, 239–252, 255–264; face-to-face contact in, 244; labor-academia, 68, 163; labor and the poor, 20; laborcapital, 240–241; language barriers to, 244; multicultural, 104, 110, 215; principles of, 249–252; with rankand-file, 249; Strategic Organizing Alliance, 258; trinational, 260, 261 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 127 American Arbitration Association, 187 American Civil Liberties Union, 119–120 American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 1, 3, 9–25, 27–46, 49–60, 141, 192, 213, 240, 242, 250, 283

284

INDEX

Autocracy, 38, 39 Automation, 66 Baker, Ray Stannard, 123, 124 Bangladesh, 250 Bargaining: capital power in, 17; collective, 14, 15, 25, 36, 70, 76–77, 111, 199, 219, 225, 229; concession, 234, 241; coordinated, 73; decentralization of, 219, 229; demands on management, 76–77; fragmentation, 113; impotence in, 50; membership participation in, 71; process, 71; productivity, 62; resources for, 16; traditional, 14 Basic Steel Contract, 199 BCOA. See Bituminous Coal Operators Association Beck, Dave, 127, 140–143, 267 Beiber, Owen, 154, 158 Benefits, 64, 98, 155, 176, 177 Bensinger, Richard, 68–69, 75, 78, 87, 93 Benson, Elmer, 92 Benson, Herman, 2, 27–46, 268 Bensusan, Graciela, 261 Beverley Corporation, 94 Bier, Sally, 130 Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA), 223–224, 226, 228, 233 Blacklisting, 45 Black Lung Association, 224 Boeing Aircraft Company, 102, 104, 108 Bohm, Suman, 158, 159 Boston University, 127–128 Boycotts, 88, 198 Boyle, Tony, 33, 37, 38, 39, 139, 223, 225, 234 Braverman, Harry, 112 Brazil, 19, 20, 157 Brecher, Jeremy, 2, 9–25, 268 Brennan v. Bachowski, 45 Bricker, Ed, 121 Bridgestone-Firestone Tire Company, 10, 251 Brimmer, Andrew, 209 Brookwood Labor School, 129, 162 Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers, 51 Buban, Tim, 148 Buchanan, Pat, 17, 245

Buen, Nestor de, 261 Bureaucracy, 6, 12, 43, 64, 107, 111, 123, 124, 129, 139, 171 Burrus, William, 21 Business for Social Responsibility, 57 California Nurses Association, 104, 108 Campaign 96 Fund, 15 Camp Solidarity, 54 Canada, 20, 260, 261; Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, 251–252; National Workers Union, 261 Canadian Autoworkers Union, 159, 251–252 Canadian Labor Congress, 260, 261 Canadian Union of Postal Workers, 251–252 Canadian Union of Public Employees, 251–252 Canadian United Steelworkers, 251–252 Capital: accumulation, 5; concentration of, 220; diversified, 220; dominance of, 222–223; flight, 66; foreign, 232; generation, 225; global, 240; intentions of, 114; international, 220; investment, 66; labor and, 1, 64, 66, 78; markets, 69; strategies, 16; transnational, 68, 78, 244, 245; union leaders’ relation to, 52–53 Carey, Ron, 6, 7n12, 32, 56, 97, 99, 104, 105, 106, 109, 142, 144–145, 147, 148, 149, 269 Carr, Oliver, 203, 209, 210, 211, 213 Caterpillar Corporation, 10, 71, 84n12, 102, 108, 121, 133, 152, 157, 198 Ceci, Greg, 211 Center for Responsive Politics, 69 Center for Strategic Campaigns, 16, 19 Center for Workplace Democracy, 108 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 19, 240 Central labor councils (CLCs), 15, 50, 106 Central Labor Union, 193 Change: and conflict, 107; culture, 76–78; dynamics of, 97–114; economic, 100; institutionalization of, 107; labor movement, 10; leadership, 70–74; organizing for,

INDEX

87, 88, 93; political, 248; process of, 107, 111; social, 215; workplace, 58–59, 104 Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 1, 11, 15, 20–21, 49, 67, 68, 99, 106, 110 Cherkasky, Michael, 149 Chicago Public Art Group, 262 Chrysler Corporation, 103, 121, 151, 152 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations Clark, Bob, 259 Clark, Kenneth, 5 Class: analysis, 78; conflict, 111; consciousness, 159, 246, 247; interest, 61, 113; middle, 61, 112, 246; militancy and, 2; solidarity, 248; struggle, 88; underplaying, 112; working, 5, 97, 102, 112, 113, 159, 245, 247, 248, 251, 269, 270 CLCs. See Central labor councils Clinton, Bill, 15, 52, 53, 55, 59, 243 Coal Employment Project, 230 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, 21 Coalition of Concerned Transit Workers, 167, 168 Columbia University, 68 Committee of Concerned Transit Workers, 167, 168 Committee on the Evolution of Work, 30 Committees for Political Action, 172 Committee 2,000, 23 Commons, John R., 111 Communication: horizontal lines of, 81; improved, 112; products, 112 Communications Workers of America, 106, 192, 198, 244 Communism, 19, 88, 119, 121, 124, 127, 129, 143, 144, 150, 167, 171, 188n1, 240, 248 Community: activism, 89; development, 16; diversion of investment in, 21; labor connections to, 77; mobilization, 200; opposition in, 224; organizations, 2; political participation in, 129; priority over markets, 78; pursuit of employers, 66; responsibility, 271; solidarity,

285

230–231; ties to labor, 78; unionism, 14 Conboy, Kenneth, 149 Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico (CTM), 69–70, 244, 256 Conflict: change and, 107; class, 111; institutionalization of, 111; internal, 111; labor relations, 102; management, 62; support for, 108 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 29, 95, 100, 123, 125, 129, 258, 272. See also American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations Congress of South African Trade Unions, 19 Consolidation Coal Company, 224 Constitutions, 38, 45 Consumption, 5, 65 Continental Airlines, 109 Contingent work, 16, 21, 77 Contracting out, 204–208, 212 Contracts: annual, 194; arbitration and, 170; concessions, 65–66, 72, 118, 151, 152, 153, 174, 219, 222; local, 140–143; model, 194; multiyear, 63, 83n3; negotiating, 140–143; nullification of, 205; protections in, 72; rank-and-file ratification, 22, 38, 172, 175, 226; rejection of, 169, 174, 176, 177; self-serving, 131; settlements, 83n3; two-tier, 65–66; violations, 194 Cooperatives, consumer, 13 Corporations: anti-labor, 58, 63, 108; capitalist, 269; decentralization of, 9; foreign relocation, 66; global, 17; irresponsibility of, 17; labor market shaping by, 97; mergers, 232; multinational, 4, 65, 219, 220, 232, 239, 240, 242, 251; reinvention of, 67; restructuring by, 66; servility to, 118–120; tax burden shifts by, 65; transnational, 69, 240, 242, 251; vertically integrated, 24 Corruption, 4, 32, 105, 131, 139, 140–143 Costello, Tim, 2, 9–25, 268 Council for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 102 CTM. See Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico

286

INDEX

Culture: business union, 64–65; change, 76–78; new labor movement, 24; organizational, 62, 67–68, 70, 76, 83n2; service model, 64–65; of solidarity, 220 Cummings, Michael, 1–7, 267–273 Currency: devaluation, 255; dollar supremacy, 63 Dalber, Steve, 263 Daley, Richard, 40 Davis, Martin, n12 Davis, William H., 126 Debs, Eugene, 24, 30, 268 Democracy, 55–57; grassroots, 1, 13, 268; internal, 2, 45, 110, 137–139; labor movement, 5, 13, 225–228; liberal, 269–270; plebiscitarian, 271; representative, 269–270, 271, 272; suppression of foreign, 63; union, 27–46, 110, 117–133, 225–228; worker, 271; workplace, 5 Democratic Ford Workers’ Movement, 251–252 Democratic National Committee, 149 Democratic Party, 2, 15, 16, 52, 53, 59, 60, 67, 69, 107, 172 Demonstrations, 29, 54, 72, 91, 175, 177, 203, 211 Depression, 89–90, 102 Deskilling, 58 Despres, Leon, 40 Deunionization, 66 Development: community, 16; costs, 63; economic, 16, 78; sustainable, 78 Dobbs, Farrell, 193, 194 Donahue, Tom, 10, 11, 27, 29–30, 31, 106 Downs, Peter, 3, 117–133, 268 Downs, Steve, 167–188, 268 Downsizing, 1, 9, 28, 57, 101, 102, 174 Dunlop Tire and Rubber, 102 Du Pont Corporation, 232 Early, Steve, 192 Easterling, Barbara, 106 Eastern Airlines, 121–122, 172 Economic: changes, 100; competition, 240; development, 16, 78; expansion, 62, 64–65; growth, 25, 63; integration, 239; internationalization,

239; justice, 78, 79, 107; nationalism, 19; opportunity, 219; security, 230–231; supremacy, 63; transformation, 6 Economy: capitalist, 239; free market, 9; globalization of, 1, 18–20, 239; national, 9, 24; political, 5; regulation of, 9 Education: economics, 68; labor, 13, 18, 68, 129; mass, 271; voter, 69 Eisenscher, Michael, 2, 5, 61–83, 268 Elections: contested, 1, 22, 36, 37, 55, 99, 117–118; decertification, 75, 85n15, 94; direct, 104, 141, 142, 173; disinformation campaigns in, 155–156; electronic roll-call voting in, 159; fraudulent, 37, 40; government supervised, 142; local, 142; national, 142; nullified, 148–149; outcome appeals, 187; rank-and-file, 56; referendum voting in, 140; reforms, 35; rights to, 129; secret ballot, 104; supervised, 75; violations, 153–154 Electronic Data Systems, 121 Energy Information Agency, 232 England, 232; labor education movement, 18 Environment: degradation of, 5; protection, 6; union-free, 66 Europe, 101, 222 Exports, 63, 265n3 Exxon Company, 232 Farm Labor Organizing Committee, 244 Farrington, Frank, 124 FAT. See Frente Autentico del Trabajo Firing, 119–121 Fites, Don, 108 Fitzsimmons, Frank, 139 Fletcher, Bill, 68, 78 Food and Commercial Workers Union, 104 Ford Motor Company, 52, 133 Fox, Arthur, 39 Fraser, Douglas, 151 Freeman, Joshua, 188n1 Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), 70, 251, 257, 258, 260, 261, 266n9 Friedman, Mike, 143

INDEX

Fuller Company, 123 Galindo, Faustino, 210 Gannett newspapers, 54, 71 GAP Corporation, 243 GATT. See General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade GE. See General Electric Gellert, Dan, 121–122 Gender issues, 4, 11, 21, 68, 78, 98 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 19, 243 General Electric (GE), 120, 256, 257 General Motors (GM), 52, 59, 83n3, 97, 103, 104, 108, 120, 121, 122, 125, 155, 156, 199 Germano, Joseph, 40 Gibbons, Harold, 194, 195, 196 Gilmore, Peter, 4, 255–264, 269 Giuliani, Rudolph, 184 Glenn, Wayne, 54 Globalization, 17–18, 28, 62, 64, 157, 239–252 Gompers, Samuel, 22, 122, 124, 185 Government: intelligence funding, 69; intervention, 62, 142, 240, 256, 260; military subsidies, 63; policies, 240; programs, 63; regulation, 63, 122–123 Green, Lloyd, 36 Green Party, 269 Grievances, 62; arbitration of, 72, 170; mass, 153; patterns, 132; procedures, 125; resolution, 70, 77 Grygiel, Chris, 119 Hall, Ken, 149 Hall, Sonny, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181 Hall v. Cole, 45 Hanna, Mark, 124 Harold, John, 34 Hart, Marianne, 263 Harvard Trade Union Program, 120 Health Benefit Trust, 176–177, 180 Health issues, 6, 13, 20, 108, 155, 162, 174, 175, 184, 195, 197, 204, 212, 223, 241, 262 Hell on Wheels, 167–188 Highlander Folk Center, 13, 18, 162 Hillman, Sidney, 127, 137, 138, 139

287

Hoffa, James, 97, 137, 138, 139, 140–143, 147 Hoffa, James Jr., 105, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 269 Holmes, Linda Kaye, 214 Hormel Company, 10, 87, 88, 91, 198 Hotel Workers Union, 104 Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union, 123 IBEW. See International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers IBT. See International Brotherhood of Teamsters Imports, 245, 255 Income: distribution, 162; middle, 102; redistribution, 101, 102 Independent Bituminous Coal Bargaining Alliance, 233 Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW), 87–92, 89, 90, 91, 95 Industrial Union Department, 10 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 88, 89, 93, 95, 129, 200 Inland Steel Company, 197 Institutional Revolutionary Party, 256 Internal Revenue Service, 41 International Affairs Department, 19, 20 International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, 160 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), 36–37, 104, 196 International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), 10, 31, 42, 43, 81, 94, 97–99, 105, 106, 191, 193–197, 267, 269, 272; expulsion from AFL, 32, 141; history of, 140–143; reform of, 56, 139–150; UPS strike, 49, 56, 70, 73, 97–99 International Chemical Workers Union, 51 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, 249 Internationalism, 243, 248 International Labor Rights Research and Education Fund, 20 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 241 International Monetary Fund, 19 International Paper Company, 121, 198

288

INDEX

International Socialist, 143 International Trade Secretariats, 249 International Typographers Union, 127 International Union of Operating Engineers, 94 Iron Law of Oligarchy, 6, 111, 138, 268, 269 IUAW. See Independent Union of All Workers IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World James, Willie, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188n5 Jobs with Justice campaign, 10, 13, 192, 197, 242 Johnson Controls, 103 Joyce, James, 30 Justice for Janitors campaign, 3, 53, 56, 93, 104, 203–216 Kaiser Permanente, 57–58, 71, 108 Kausler, Kurt, 117–118, 131 Kelley’s Army, 129 Kennedy, Robert, 36 Kennedy, Thomas, 223, 234 Khor, Martin, 247 Kilmury, Diana, 144–145, 146, 150 Kingsley, Bob, 260, 261 Kirkland, Lane, 10, 11, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 84n4, 141 Knight-Ridder newspapers, 54, 71 Knights of Labor, 25, 89, 93, 95, 221 Kohl, Robin, 131 Labor: academia and, 68, 163; adversarial relations with corporations, 63; arts, 13; capital and, 64; child, 162, 272; community connections, 77; crises, 62; discipline, 64; disputes, 77; education, 13, 18, 68; global, 19–20; history, 110; identity, 203–216; international cooperation, 20; laws, 20, 53; legislation, 221; markets, 97, 104, 111; organized, 4, 20, 28, 30, 49, 50, 52, 59, 62, 67, 70, 74, 100, 107, 111, 220; political strategies, 14–16; and politics, 59–60; power, 28; priority over capital, 78; process, 62, 63; public image of, 10, 20, 22,

44, 89, 90; purge of leftist elements, 62; relations, 61, 63, 102; relation to capital, 1; response to globalization, 240–241; restructuring, 203–216; rights, 247–248 Labor force: cooperative assurances, 66; cutting, 101; demographics, 66; fragmentation, 98; impermanence, 98; minorities in, 77; segmentation, 65; shifts, 66; women in, 9, 88–92, 101, 227 Labor Health Institute, 195 Labor Institute, 18 Labor Institute for Public Affairs, 17–18 Labor-management: accords, 61; collaboration, 58; cooperation, 108, 152; Japanese model, 152; partnerships, 57–58, 102, 108, 113, 151; relations, 57–58, 61, 62, 83n1; team concepts, 152 Labor-Management Positive Change Process, 233 Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), 34, 36–37, 45, 64, 129, 138 Labor movement: change in, 10; civil liberties in, 36; community ties, 78; decline of, 11, 28, 61; defining, 24–25; democracy in, 5, 13; foreign, 69, 251; initiatives of, 12; insurgency in, 42, 43; racism in, 5; rebuilding, 78–79; relevancy of, 11; resurgence of, 2, 9–25, 27–46, 49, 87–95; role of, 20–23; top-down control and, 23; turning points in, 24 Labor Notes, 10, 39, 56, 102 Labor Party, 16, 52, 269 Lambda Electronics Inc., 120 Landrum-Griffin Act. See LaborManagement Reporting and Disclosure Act Lane, Dan, 16 Latinos, 65, 98, 103, 104, 168, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215 Lawe, John, 168, 169, 170 Layoffs, 75, 101, 155, 183, 200, 241 Leadership: accountability by, 113, 139; autocratic, 19, 38, 39, 117, 127, 137, 138, 139, 151, 223; challenges to, 141; changes in, 70–74;

INDEX

grassroots, 22; interest in working conditions, 58–59; local, 145; membership hostility to, 4; militancy views, 53–55; national, 228; opposition to, 43, 151, 167–188, 223; out-of-touch, 67; political, 106; rank-and-file, 112; reform-oriented, 1; relations with members, 80–82; responsibilities of, 64; self-interest of, 73, 138; technical indispensability of, 137–138 Leary, Elly, 128, 131 Leedham, Tom, 149 Leitz, George, 179 Lester, Richard, 111 Levy, Paul Alan, 39, 104 Lewis, Glenda, 205 Lewis, John L., 12, 29, 37, 38, 39, 125, 127, 137, 138, 139, 220, 221, 222, 234 Lippman, Walter, 117–118 LMRDA. See Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act Lockouts, 16, 53, 84n12 London-Wadlin Act, 188n2 Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, 14 LTV Steel Company, 198 Lucy, William, 21 Lujan, Bertha, 259 Lynd, Staughton, 3, 191–201, 268, 271 Mack, Corine, 182 Madden v. Atkins, 34 Management: acceptance of unions, 63; collaboration with labor, 57–58; conflict, 62, 63; human resource, 64; independence from, 122; militaristic, 98; prerogatives of, 63, 76–77 Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority, 167 Mann, Ed, 200 Manrique Arias, Daniel, 262 Maquiladora factories, 70, 102, 243, 255, 256, 264n1 Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, 31 Markets: allocations in, 125; capital, 69; capitalist, 62; expanding, 63; foreign, 63; foreign exchange, 239; free, 5, 9, 17, 240, 248; global, 63;

289

influence, 64; labor, 97, 104, 111; open, 241; priority of community over, 78; product, 111; relations, 241; saturation, 65; shares, 65, 97; values, 6 Marquart, Frank, 129 Martin, Homer, 150 Martinez, Benedicto, 257–258, 262, 266n9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 111 Masters, Mates & Pilots Union, 34 Mattingly, Bob, 145 McBride, Lloyd, 41 McClellan Committee, 33–34, 36 McDonald, David, 40, 43 McDonnell Douglas Corporation, 120 McEntee, Gerald, 31 Meany, George, 34, 36, 100 Mechanization, 222 Media: attention, 49, 211; strategies, 15 Metz, John, 149 Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade, 257–258 Mexican Telephone Workers Union, 260 Mexico, 21, 52, 133, 200, 250, 260, 261; alliances with, 244, 245, 246, 247; Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico, 69–70, 244, 256; Congress of Labor, 260–261; Council for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 102, 243; currency devaluation in, 255; Democratic Ford Workers’ Movement, 251–252; Farm Labor Organizing Committee, 244; Federal Prosecutor for the Protection of the Environment, 265n2; Frente Autentico del Trabajo, 70, 251, 257, 258, 260, 261, 266n9; ghost unions in, 256; Institutional Revolutionary Party, 256; labor laws in, 256; labor movement in, 244; manufacturing sector, 264n1; maquiladora factories, 70, 102, 243, 255, 256, 264n1; Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade, 257–258; Mexican Petroleum Company, 265n2; Mexican Telephone Workers Union, 260; National Commission of

290

INDEX

Minimum Wages, 265n4; official unions, 257–258; Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, 256; Social Security Workers Union, 260; union-building in, 4; Union Nacional de Trabajadores, 266n9; wages in, 255; Workers’ Center for Labor Studies, 260 MFD. See Miners for Democracy Michels, Robert, 6, 111, 137, 268, 269, 270, 271 Michigan Blue Cross and Blue Shield, 130 Midland Steel Corporation, 130 Militancy, 103, 110, 114, 150, 153, 171, 224, 226, 227, 234; class-based, 2; containment of, 63; growth of, 65; local, 4; member mobilization and, 53–55; pressures for, 29; promotion of, 53; rank-and-file, 2, 12, 220, 222; workplace, 2 Miller, Arnold, 225, 227, 234, 235 Miller, Harold, 227 Miners for Democracy (MFD), 33, 37, 38, 43, 110, 139, 191, 220, 225 Minnesota Farmers’ Holiday Association, 193 Minorities, 21; mistreatment of, 212; tokenism issues, 21; underrepresentation in union leadership, 197 Mitchell, John, 124 Montgomery, David, 112 Moody, Kim, 3, 97–114, 268 Motormen’s Benevolent Association, 167, 168 Movements: democratic, 20–23, 37–42; dissident, 34, 162; labor, 2; labor education, 18; mass, 29; multicultural, 89; opposition, 104, 137, 167–188; reform, 2, 137–163; social, 107, 230; workers’, 30 Multicultural Alliance, 104, 110 Multinational corporations, 4, 65, 219, 220, 232, 239, 240, 242, 251, 268 Multiracial Alliance, 55 Multiskilling, 58 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement

Nash, Bradley Jr., 3, 219–236, 268 Nash, Jere, 7n12 National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement, 228 National Civic Federation, 124 National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers, 221 Nationalism, 19, 240, 249 National Labor Committee in Support of Worker and Human Rights, 20 National Labor Law Center, 39 National Labor Relations Act, 64 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 14, 54, 64, 69, 75, 92, 192, 206, 207, 210, 211 National Lawyers Guild, 39 National Master Freight Agreement, 140, 194, 199 National Press Club, 108 National Workers Union, 260, 261 National Writers Union, 51 Native Americans, 65 Neal, Arlene, 205, 207 Neoliberalism, 100, 212, 215, 239, 248 New Democrats, 15, 17 New Directions Local 100, 172–188; approaches, 177–181; Caucus of Transit Workers, 3 New Directions Movement, UAW, 3, 128, 150–162; agenda, 158–159; current prospects, 159–160; future prospects, 160–162; history of, 152–156; internal principles, 158–159; philosophy, 156–158; political structure, 156–158; setbacks, 154–155 New Party, 16, 269 New Voice program, 1, 3, 9–25, 50, 67, 71, 99, 269; Campaign 96 Fund, 15; Center for Strategic Campaigns, 16, 19; Labor Center for Economic and Public Policy, 14; Labor Institute for Public Affairs, 17–18; militancy and, 53–55; National Labor Political Training Center, 14; public affairs work, 17–18; sections, 13–24; Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project, 19; Union Fall, 16; Union Summer, 16, 50, 268 New York City Housing Authority, 35

INDEX

291

Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, 51 Ojeda, Marta, 102 O’Leary, Charles, 10 Oligarchy, 3, 6, 138, 270 Opryland Hotel, 121 Organizations: autonomous, 158; community level, 2, 191, 224; dissident, 139; grassroots, 112; issueoriented, 156; oppositional, 224; rank-and-file, 112; specialized, 270 Organizing: budgets for, 13; to change, 87, 88, 93; cross-border, 255–264; expansion of, 269; failures, 66; innovative efforts, 75–76; mass, 109; multiunion, 13; new members, 3, 14; pace and scale of, 13–14; rank and file, 109, 117–133, 148; representational specialization in, 76; resources for, 68, 92, 93; restrictions on, 55, 56; service sector, 203–216; Strategic Organizing Alliance, 258; strategies, 14, 51; the unorganized, 49, 50–52, 77, 106, 148, 161; volunteer, 109 Outsourcing, 1, 9, 52, 102, 104, 160, 204–208, 212 Overnite Transportation, 109 Overtime: forced, 155; premium pay for, 194

Parks, Sam, 123 Party for Union Democracy, 34 PATCO. See Profession of Air Traffic Controllers Organization Payless Shoe Source, 120 Peabody Coal Company, 124 Pensions, 98, 179, 180, 184, 195, 205, 223, 241; three-tier system, 168 Perlman, Selig, 111 Perot, H. Ross, 246 Phelan v. Plumbers Local 305, 45 Phillips–Van Heusen Corporation, 243 Pittston coal strike, 10, 54, 231 Poland, 19, 119, 143 Political: access, 61; action, 6; campaigns, 49; change, 248; coalitions, 13; empowerment, 219; endorsements, 70; influence of unions, 49–60; leadership, 106; opposition, 45; participation, 6; power, 59; process, 77; resources, 6; right, 27; strategies, 14–16; third parties, 15–16 Presser, Jackie, 139, 140, 141 Privacy issues, 120–121 Privatization, 160, 204, 205 Production: capacity, 65; capitalist relations of, 61; control of, 62; costs, 52; decline in, 65; efficiency, 62; gains, 64; just-in-time, 52, 58, 103; lean, 58, 59, 100, 108, 111, 114; lines, 125; mass, 10, 29, 59; mobile units, 9; outsourcing, 9; priorities of, 5; rationalization of, 65; shifts, 197; systems, 65 Professional Drivers Safety and Health Organization, 42 Profession of Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), 66, 151, 199 Profit: decline in, 65; distribution, 272; margins, 65; rates, 63, 65 Protectionism, 19, 240, 241, 245, 246 Public Citizen Litigation Group, 39 Public Citizens Global Trade Watch, 249 Pullman strike, 24

Paff, Ken, 105, 140, 141, 142–143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 268 Painters Union, 34–36 Pan American Airways, 172

Quality circles, 58 Quality of Work Life programs, 152 Quill, Mike, 167, 188n1, 188n2 Quindall, Barbara, 148–149

New York Transit Authority, 109, 167–188 Nike Corporation, 243, 250 9-to-5 organization, 68 Nissen, Bruce, 4, 239–252, 269 NLRB. See National Labor Relations Board North American Aviation, 126 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 10, 15, 19, 53, 242, 243, 255, 260, 261, 266n9; job loss and, 245, 246; opposition to, 21, 242–243, 244, 245, 257–258 North American Metal Workers Federation, 161 Nussbaum, Karen, 68

292

INDEX

Rachleff, Peter, 2, 24, 87–95, 269 Racial issues, 5, 68, 78, 98, 195, 213, 214, 215, 227, 245, 247 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 43, 141, 142 Racketeering, 34, 42, 123, 124, 140–143 Rank and file: activism, 3, 55–57, 167–188; contract ratification, 22, 38, 172, 175; control by, 55–57, 167–188; decisionmaking by, 77, 138–139, 220, 233; democratic unionism and, 55–57; empowerment of, 2, 95, 184–186; insurgencies, 12; leadership, 112; leadership fear of, 100; militancy, 2, 220, 222; negotiation and, 22; organizing, 112, 117–133, 148, 167–188; participation in rebuilding, 78–79; political participation of, 6; in recruitment efforts, 57; strike participation, 73; unauthorized actions by, 199; unification of, 229; union responsibilities of, 22 Rarback, Martin, 35 Rasnick, Ben, 36 Rauh, Joe, 38, 39, 40, 41 Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation, 251 Reagan, Ronald, 66, 141, 228–231 “Real Teamsters,” 145 Reform: election, 35; grassroots, 3; health care, 53; labor law, 15, 207; local, 3; movements, 2, 137–163; organizational, 22; politics of, 9–13; pressures for, 29; union, 1, 130 Reich, Robert, 68 Republican Party, 16, 67, 124, 172, 211, 245 Reuther, Walter, 29, 42, 127, 151, 157, 194 Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, 256 RICO. See Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Rights: arbitration, 72, 170; autonomous, 38; civil, 21, 119, 121, 143, 195; contingent workers, 21; contract voting, 38; defense of, 219; of dissidents, 39; due process, 120;

election, 129; federally protected, 34, 36, 38, 40; human, 14, 125, 162, 248, 256; investor, 242; labor, 242, 247–248; membership, 45; organizing, 133; seniority, 173; to strike, 194, 227; to union formation, 34; universal, 248; voting, 141; to work, 66, 98, 197; workers’, 14, 38, 45, 192, 242, 256 Rockwell International Corporation, 120, 121 Romay, Val, 122 Roosevelt, Franklin, 125, 126 Roosevelt, Theodore, 122, 123, 124 Rosenthal, Steve, 69 Sadlowski, Edward, 40–42 Safety issues, 6, 13, 155, 162 Salzhandler, Solomon, 36 Salzhandler v. Caputo, 36, 45 Sanchez, Cesar, 215 Sauza, Juan, 263 Scabbing, 53, 54, 91, 102, 197 Schermerhorn, Tim, 3, 167–188, 268 Schneider, Judith, 40 Schneiderman, Marilyn, 68 Schonfeld, Frank, 34, 35 Seda, Damaso, 179, 180, 181 Seniority: disputes, 194; rights, 173 Service Contract Act (1965), 205 Service Employees International Union, 1, 11, 44, 50, 51, 53, 55, 92, 94, 99, 104, 108, 110, 206, 212; Justice for Janitors campaign, 3, 53, 56, 93, 104 Sexual harassment, 14, 212, 227 Shaffer, Ron, 212 Shaiken, Harley, 161 Shailor, Barbara, 69, 242 Shanker, Albert, 31 Shell Company, 232 “Shop-ins,” 88 Shutdowns, 155, 156, 197, 255. See also Speedups Slaughter, Jane, 2, 49–60, 268 Slowdowns, 88, 89, 153, 173, 174. See also Speedups Social: accord, 241; agendas, 163; change, 2, 215; compacts, 241; conscience, 250; contracts, 57, 61, 63–64, 83n1; inequalities, 245;

INDEX

justice, 3, 35, 45, 78, 79, 107, 242, 250; movements, 6, 107, 230; problems, 113; process, 107; services, 224; transformation, 6, 267; welfare, 27–28, 63, 240 Socialism, 88, 111, 124, 143–144, 150, 222, 248 Social Security Workers Union, 260 Solidarity, 79, 98, 107, 131, 157, 171, 200, 222, 224, 260; building, 2, 257–259; commitments to, 70; community, 230–231; cross-border, 68; culture of, 220; internal, 3; international, 78, 260; living, 132–133; national, 72; operations, 12; unionism, 271; working class, 269 Solidarity Day III, 54 Solidarnosc (Poland), 19, 119, 143 Solomon, Larry, 152 South Africa, 19, 51, 157, 230, 232 Southwest Airlines, 109 Speedups, 58, 59, 65, 100, 155. See also Slowdowns Standard Oil Company, 123 Starbucks Coffee Company, 243, 250 Stern, Andy, 44 Strike News, 90, 91 Strikes, 29, 65; A. E. Staley Corporation, 10, 16, 53, 54, 59, 71, 84n12, 102, 198; Boeing, 102; breaking, 12, 23; Bridgestone, 10; Caterpillar, 10, 71, 84n12, 102, 152, 157, 198; coal, 193, 222; concessions in, 52, 72; decline in, 102; Detroit newspaper, 10, 16, 54, 71, 72, 73, 84n12, 198; Dunlop, 102; fear of job loss and, 102; general, 193; General Motors, 52, 59, 97, 125, 155; Hispanic workers, 102, 103; Hormel, 10, 198; immigrant worker, 102, 103; leadership interference in, 54; legality of, 125; local, 3, 59; martial law in, 126; miners, 221, 222; Pittston coal, 10, 54, 231; post-war, 29; Pullman, 24; rank-and-file participation, 73; right to, 194; scabbing in, 53, 54, 91, 197; selective, 229; sit-down, 29, 87, 88, 89–90, 125; spontaneous, 29; strategies, 73, 229; support for, 3,

293

16; transit, 169; union defeat in, 10; United Parcel Service, 49, 56, 70, 73, 97–99, 140, 145, 148; wartime, 125; WCI Steel Company, 102; Wheeling-Pittsburgh, 102, 108; Wildcat, 100, 138, 168, 224, 235, 256 Strutwear Knitting Company, 194 Subcontracting, 98 Sweatshops, 250 Sweeney, John, 1, 2, 3, 10–11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 67, 69, 70, 71, 78, 80, 84n4, 87, 99, 100, 106, 107, 108, 110, 192, 198, 269 Taft, Philip, 111 Taft-Hartley Act, 64, 66 Target stores, 120 Tariffs, 241 Taylor Law, 169, 174, 188n2 Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), 3, 32, 56, 98, 99, 105, 127, 139–150, 191, 268, 269; future plans, 147–150; history of, 139–143; political elections and, 146–148; political philosophy, 143–144; Rank and File Education and Legal Defense Foundation, 141; setbacks, 148–149 Technology: communications, 271; dislocations, 66; electronic, 66; lines of communication and, 81; transportation, 239 Third World Network, 247 Thompson, E. P., 112 Tillman, Ray, 1–7, 137–163, 267–273 Tobin, Daniel, 193 Total Quality Management, 100 Trade: fair, 241; free, 240, 241, 258; international, 63; managed, 241; relations, 248 Transit Workers Coalition, 167, 168 Transit Workers Union (TWU), 109, 167–188; International Committee on Appeals, 187; Members for Democratic Trade Unionism, 167; United Motormen’s Division, 168; Unity Slate, 167, 181 Transnational Corporate Monitoring Project, 19

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INDEX

Transnational corporations, 69, 240, 242, 251 Transnationals Information Exchange, 251 Transport Workers Union, 104 Traveler’s Group Insurance Company, 101 Trbovich v. United Mine Workers of America, 41, 45 Treaty of Detroit, 83n3 Treminio, Ester, 210 Trotskyites, 88 Trumka, Richard, 1, 11, 29, 33, 38, 43, 49, 54, 67, 99, 106, 110, 221, 228, 230, 232, 233, 234–235 Tucker, Jerry, 6, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163 TWU. See Transit Workers Union UAW. See United Auto Workers UE. See United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers UFW. See United Farmworkers Union UMW. See United Mine Workers “Union Cities” program, 68, 106 Union Democracy Review, 39 Union Fall, 16 Unionism: associational, 14; business, 11, 62, 64–65, 105, 108, 113, 123, 126–127, 131, 139, 140–143, 151, 162, 222, 223, 227, 230, 241, 272; community, 14; social, 2, 11, 12, 61, 113, 151, 152, 157, 162, 194, 213–215, 215, 267–273 Union Nacional de Trabajadores, 266n9 Union of All Workers, 161 Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, 250 Union(s): as “another boss,” 22; authoritarianism in, 39; autocracy, 6; autonomy in, 158, 222, 226; busting, 54, 57, 66, 197, 241; centralization, 4, 76, 140–143, 151, 157, 162, 220, 221–225, 231–234, 268; community roles, 2; complacency in, 100; concessions, 52, 72, 118, 151, 152, 153, 219, 222; constitutions, 38, 45, 127, 140–143, 155, 156, 221; craft, 10, 193; decentralization, 4, 140–143, 220, 224, 231–234, 268; decertification of, 94;

decisionmaking in, 77, 111, 138–139, 220, 233; decline of, 220, 223, 233; democracy, 27–46, 110, 117–133, 267–273; dissident, 4, 139, 140; factionalism, 144; general, 51, 193; “ghost,” 256; growth of, 51, 64; hierarchies in, 50, 182; horizontal lines of communication in, 81; independent, 122; industrial, 51, 89; internal strife, 221–225; international, 106, 128–129, 143, 157; labor, 137; legitimacy of, 63, 125; local, 3, 73, 92, 93, 129, 140, 152, 191–201, 220; male-domination of, 4; membership density, 74–75, 85n13, 103; mergers, 160; militant, 220, 234; mobilization, 53–55, 73, 97, 105, 188n6; national, 3, 4, 73, 106, 127, 140, 191, 198, 228–231, 270; need for internal transformation, 61–83; official, 256–258; opposition to leadership, 12, 139–163, 167–188; organizing model, 188n6; passive memberships, 71, 105–106; policy shifts, 241; political influence of, 49–60; political participation, 77; power limitations on, 71; public opinion on, 4, 10, 20, 22, 44, 89, 90; racketeering, 123; reform of, 1; relations with members, 74–76; representatives, 71; self-managed, 270; service model, 62, 64–65, 104, 112, 188n6; shop steward system, 194; social change and, 2; staff-dependent, 76; strategies, 226; structures, 219; survival of, 219; trade, 13, 19, 111, 124, 220, 269; in trusteeship, 127, 141, 198. See also Unionism Union Summer, 16, 50, 268 United Auto Workers (UAW), 42, 51, 52, 83n3, 103, 104, 117, 125, 128, 129, 130, 133, 139, 196, 241, 244, 251–252, 272; Administrative Caucus, 151, 153, 154, 159; Friends Social Club, 154; International Executive Board, 154–155; New Directions Movement, 3, 128, 150–162; Progressive Caucus, 150; Public Review Board, 127, 154–155; Unity Caucus, 150, 151

INDEX

United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), 52, 250, 251, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263 United Farmworkers Union (UFW), 73, 74, 81, 93 United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, 117–118, 198 United Mine Workers (UMW), 3–4, 11, 29, 37–42, 51, 54, 99, 110, 123–125, 129, 138, 219–236, 268 United Paperworkers International Union, 54, 198 United Parcel Service (UPS), 49, 56, 70, 73, 97–99, 131, 140, 145, 148 United States: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 101; Department of Commerce, 123; Department of Housing and Urban Development, 205; Department of Justice, 141; Department of Labor, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 68, 98, 101, 122, 129, 131, 153, 154, 180, 186, 205, 255; foreign policy, 19, 63, 78, 240 United States Service Industry, Inc., 209–211 United States Steel Corporation, 123, 198 United Steelworkers of America (USWA), 40–41, 43, 51, 104, 129–130, 161, 196, 197, 198; Organization for Membership Rights, 43 United Workers of America, 160 USWA. See United Steelworkers of America Values: communitarian, 2; democratic, 2; market, 6 Vitale, Mike, 131 Volunteer organizing committee (VOC), 192 Wage(s), 57, 63, 162, 223; competition, 28; costs, 64; cuts, 94, 117–118; decline in, 65, 67, 101, 169, 197, 205; demands, 194; equity, 14; freezes, 117–118, 168; gaps, 163; industry-wide rates, 125; “living,” 49; minimum, 255, 265n4; parttime, 98; productivity-factored adjustments, 83n3; raises, 35; real,

295

10, 65, 101, 255; rising, 65; system, 200–201; tiered, 142, 200 Wagner Act (1935), 34, 64, 85n13 Wal-Mart, 120 Walt Disney Corporation, 243 War Industries Board, Industrial Relations Council, 124 War Labor Board, 125, 126 War Production Board, 125 WCI Steel Company, 102, 197 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 111 Weill, Sandy, 101 Weingarten, Reid, n12 Westinghouse Corporation, 132 Whipsawing, 154, 161 Williams, Jane, 3, 203–216, 269 Wilson, Dow, 35, 36 Wilson, Woodrow, 119, 124 Winpisinger, William, 199 Wisconsin School, 111 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Women, 263; disproportionate burden of, 259; in labor force, 101, 227; underrepresentation in union leadership, 197; union departments for, 68; at United Parcel Service, 98; in workforce, 9, 88–92 Woodcock, Leonard, 151 Woodland, Angela, 213, 214 Woolworth’s, 87, 88, 90, 95 Work: contingent, 16, 21, 77; contracting out, 58; equalizing, 200; fear of losing, 102; greenfield, 66; for hire, 117–119; hours, 101, 161, 205, 272; intensification of, 102; jobbing out, 52; low-skilled, 65; nonstandard, 101; part-time, 56, 97, 98, 99, 101, 210, 212; personnel supply agency, 101; public-sector, 100; pursuit of, 66; regimentation of, 58; rules, 62; sharing, 200; standards, 58, 155; stoppages, 88; temporary, 101; time patterns, 101; union-avoidance, 66 Worker Education Center, 162, 163 Workers’ Center for Labor Studies, 260 Workers Educational Center, 6 Work Experience Program, 183, 184 Workfare, 183

296

INDEX

Workplace: abuse, 210; activism, 89–90, 92; alienation, 65; arbitration in, 194; change in, 58–59, 104; conditions in, 162, 168, 205; democracy, 5; deskilling in, 89; employee surveillance in, 120–121; high-performance, 108; labor problems, 65; militancy, 2; power, 89, 110, 112; problems, 113; union role in, 77 “Work Smarter” program, 175, 176, 177 World Bank, 19 World Trade Organization, 243

Worley, Kenneth, 153, 154 Wurf, Jerry, 37 Xenophobia, 247 Yablonski, Chip, 153 Yablonski, Jock, 33, 37, 39, 224, 225 Yates, Michael, 5, 6 Yettaw, Dave, 155, 156, 159, 161 Yokich, Steve, 161 Young Workers’ Task Force, 21 Zajicek, Anna, 3, 219–236, 268 Zander, Arnold, 37

About the Book

What’s wrong with U.S. unions, and what could make it right? These are the questions addressed by nineteen partisans—union dissidents and noted scholars—of union democracy. Agreeing that any long-term solutions must come from the grassroots of the union movement, they argue for expansion rather than contraction, militancy rather than accommodation, and internal democracy rather than oligarchy. To break the stranglehold of business, union, and government elites, they emphasize, ordinary workers must be energetically recruited and actively involved in the management of their unions. Ray Tillman is president of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 642. Michael Cummings is chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado at Denver.

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