Our Labor Leaders Need French Lessons

Bob Fitch is a former union organizer and former consultant to CWA Local 1180. Presently, he teaches in NYU's Metropolitan Studies Program.

THIS WINTER, ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC, two broadly similar budget-cutting packages were offered by two balding conservative politicians. Both austerity plans -- one for France, one for New York -- won initial rave reviews from their respective Establishments and from the media. But the political outcomes were startlingly different.

In France, public sector unions, written off by U.S. academic experts as hopelessly small, weak, divided and in terminal decline, sparked a successful national revolt. Transportation workers shut down trains and subways across the country. Postal workers struck. Students, staff, and faculty occupied buildings and closed down the universities. At the University of Metz, students even held a top education official hostage. After three and a half weeks of rising tempers and falling bond prices, the regime of Prime Minister Alain Juppé backed down.

In New York City, by contrast, public sector union leaders charted a strategy of appeasement. Zigging and zagging behind a flying wedge of municipal union leaders led by DC 37's Stanley Hill, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was able to sweep aside a numerically strong but fragmented labor opposition. Workers apparently voted down a 60-month contract with no pay increases for the first two years and weak job-security provisions. But Hill got to count the ballots in secret. He says his side won. Yet he refused to make the results of the local elections public. Now the mayor's gotten most of the austerity measures he asked for, plus a pay boost from $130,000 to $165,000 for himself. It even seems as if he can count on the active support of Hill's 125,000-member, largely African American union for his upcoming reelection campaign. (Hill has already contributed $2000 to Giuliani's campaign.)

How did Giuliani manage these stunning victories while Juppé, his even balder counterpart, failed so ignominiously? Last year, conservative Jacques Chirac won the presidency promising jobs, jobs, jobs. Then he appointed Juppé, who proceeded to cut them. Juppé started with doctors and railroad workers. He proposed increasing copayments for drugs, increases in social security taxes, increases in retirement age, massive hospital closings, and transportation cutbacks. Some say Juppé flopped because he was seen as an arrogant technocrat, with no concern for the little people he was calling upon to make sacrifices. Surely, though, it was Giuliani who gave the master class in arrogance when he unilaterally raised the salaries of all the top city pols up to 28% and top city managers 7% while demanding the salaries of starting city workers be cut by 7%.

Others say the problem was that Juppé's plan was too comprehensive. He cut too much, all at once. Salami tactics -- slicing off a little at a time -- would have been better. But Giuliani's austerity targets were also huge and comprehensive. They broadly overlapped with Juppé's cuts in welfare, transportation, education, health care.

Giuliani tacitly endorsed the biggest subway fare hike in history as well as defended Governor George Pataki's massive cuts to SUNY and CUNY and slashing of grants for middle-income and poor students. The mayor announced a plan to sell off public hospitals, and to attract buyers, he ostentatiously refused to give hospital workers, even the highly qualified, two-year job-security guarantees he promised other city workers. In his contract with city workers, he extracted an agreement from DC 37 -- which represents 125,000 city employees -- to replace public sector workers with an estimated 40,000 welfare recipients who will work just for their welfare checks -- while giving city employees "double zeros" -- no pay increases for the first two years of a five-year contract.

The two austerity programs -- Giuliani's and Juppé's -- boiled down to the same message to public sector unions: "Decommission all your weapons and surrender." But in New York, labor conflict was mainly restricted to a single incident at DC 37's Barclay Street headquarters -- when a contract ratification meeting turned into a nasty confrontation between a couple of senescent leaders and hecklers. In France all hell broke loose.

The Sequestering of Aunt Nicole

IN NOVEMBER, FRENCH RAILROAD WORKERS, CREATING A HISTORIC ALLIANCE between the Communist-affiliated Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the anti-communist Force Ouvrière (FO) trade union federations, shut down the nation's transportation system. For more than three weeks, trains and subways stopped running. Parisian traffic snarled. Commuters bought mountain bikes and in-line skates to get to work. Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the nearly empty downtown department stores turned sepulchral.

Workers were joined by students. Throughout France, anars and trotskis, together with more mainline Socialists and Communists, shut down universities. Some campuses remained closed for over a month. To calm the uprising of 17,000 students at Metz who had seized campus buildings, the Minister of National Education sent a top aide, Nicole Ferrier. But the strikers took "Aunt Nicole" hostage. Mme. Ferrier eventually escaped and fled the campus by car.

After three tumultuous weeks, despite nearly unanimous press support and strong initial backing from mainstream political leaders from the conservatives to the Socialists, Juppé was clearly losing it. In November he'd said 2 million demonstrators would force him to back down. On December 12, unions and students finally reached that number in giant demonstrations from Marseilles to Paris, protests they called "the Juppéthon."

At this point, Juppé could at least take consolation from the failure of the strike to spread to the private sector. But bad omens began to appear from the sacred Temple -- falling bond and stock prices on the Bourse. Garbage was beginning to pile up. And speculation mounted over whether the strikers would turn the country dark by shutting off the nation's power system. Meanwhile, the public, while greatly inconvenienced by the strikes, remained solidly behind the unions -- with approval ratings never falling below 55%. Finally, the following week, Juppé withdrew the part of his plan that directly affected the unions and entered into negotiations with union leaders over his broader austerity plan with union leaders.

Why then -- if arrogance and austerity were in rough equilibrium in Paris and New York -- did the two plans play out so differently? If the elites' actions can't be readily distinguished, then the answer must be found in the superior ability of the French unions to mobilize their members and win over the public.

Yet few American academics who study them find this explanation credible. At a conference on French unions sponsored by NYU's Center for European Studies and Columbia's Institute on Western Europe, held here in February, U.S. specialists read papers on the "Decline of Militantism" as if nothing much had really happened in December. Indeed, ample evidence was marshaled by the experts to explain why the December events could never have taken place.

In France, it turns out, union membership is actually lower than in the U.S., and much lower than union membership in New York. Only 8% of French workers belong to unions. And in the French public sector, it's only 20%. In New York, there are more than double those shares.

During a break in the conference, Georgetown political science professor Anthony Daley stood in the Washington Mews, explaining to me that French unions are hobbled by an over politicized multi-union system that prevents common action. The unions rely on voluntary dues from their members, so they have no money and can't afford to hire truly professional staffs. "Do you know how many people the CGT has to study the entire European community?" Daley asked. "Only eight," he replied in a shocked tone.

Yet, despite the lack of an ample well-paid professional staff, the French public sector unions still managed to shut down much of the country. Our public sector unions employ armies of highly paid professionals. At DC 37, it's not only elected union officials who make up to a quarter of a million a year.

Six-Figure Socialists

THERE ARE A DOZEN NON-ELECTED DC 37 STAFFERS who make over $100,000. Ten more are in the over $90,000-a-year bracket. Besides Hill, the executive director, who makes $245,000, there is his "assistant," Brenda White, who makes $124,000. There is DC 37's "director," who makes $113,000, and various "assistant division directors" who make $99,000. The editor of the DC 37 paper makes $105,000. His assistant makes $72,000. And the staff economist earns over $100,000 -- three times more than the head of the CGT or the head of the FO.

Yet the likelihood of these six-figure socialists organizing a militant movement to block the march of austerity lies somewhere between remote and unimaginable. How come?

Our problems touch. But in the ability to fight back against our respective Establishments, we might as well be on different planets -- not just different continents.

It just may be that the "weaknesses" of French unions are really their strengths. And the supposed strengths of New York unions -- gushing cash flow, huge, highly paid professional staffs, automatic dues checkoff, exclusive recognition of single unions -- represent a dead weight anchoring them to the status quo. And separating them from the concerns of members.

France, like much of Europe, has a multi-union system. Workers become members of unions only if they choose to join, not because the boss has granted a single union exclusive bargaining rights. Joining a union is an act of political identity. Three main union federations -- Communist, Socialist, and centrist -- compete for the political allegiance of workers on the job and in work-council elections.

"There's been a left-right split since the French revolution," points out Herman Benson of the Association for Union Democracy, a Brooklyn-based workers' rights advocacy group. Common political allegiances enable people inside and outside the workplace to see beyond narrow union issues. "The French," he explains, "don't see cutbacks as a separate labor issue. For them it's a social issue. And the unions aren't looked upon as big labor.' It's not like here where the bureaucrats sit back, isolated from the members, and don't give a shit," says Benson.

Deeply political, but with no automatic cash flow or contractual right to get workers fired if they refuse to pay dues, French unions must address the concerns of the members each month to get their support. "We have these little books," explained Jean-Pierre Page, a former Air France worker who serves as head of the International Department of the CGT. "Every month we go around to the workers in the factory or the office and ask them to buy a stamp and paste it in their book."

This stamp gathering, or philatelisme, as it is sometimes jokingly called, doesn't take much out of the workers' pay: anywhere from half a percent to 1%. And it's not enough to allow leaders and staffers to get rich. "We make the equivalent of $2400 a month," volunteered Page, "about what a skilled worker in the Paris region makes." This amount is a ceiling for labor leaders. Louis Viannet, the head of the CGT, makes no more. Page offers: "We are poor, but militant."

In New York, like the rest of America, we have monopoly unions. Even nonmembers -- the so-called provisionals -- must pay dues to a single union that represents everyone. All city workers covered by collective bargaining agreements have money deducted by the city from their checks. It goes directly to the union. In 1994, DC 37's income was $66 million.

With these huge sums at stake, union leaders take the checkoff very seriously. I once asked Barry Feinstein, just after he'd been forced to step down by the Justice Department as chief of the powerful Teamsters Local 237, "What was the formative event in the history of municipal unionism?" A French unionist might have said the mass sit-down strikes of '36 that won French workers the two-week vacation. Or further back, the lost railroad strike of 1920 for nationalization in which 20,000 cheminots were fired and their leaders imprisoned for years. But Feinstein said unhesitatingly, "When Mayor Robert Wagner gave us the dues checkoff."

Unfortunately, Feinstein's historical analysis is all too accurate. Unlike in France, where the unions must rely on the members, in New York successive reformers have failed to uproot a tradition that forced weak unions to rely on a strong mayor. And not just for the dues checkoff.

Collective Begging Revisited

JERRY WURF, WHO PUT DC 37 ON THE MAP nearly half a century ago, saw the degenerative process of domestication at work even then. He called it "collective begging." Municipal trade union leaders, like corrupt courtiers, sought to develop ties to Democratic Party clubhouse hacks in order to gain influence with the mayor and get back petty perks for themselves. Henry Feinstein, Barry's father and Wurf's predecessor, was a city chauffeur who managed to arrange a deal whereby he got driven around in a limousine provided by Mayor Wagner. "Can you imagine that," recollected Wurf in an interview with DC 37's official historians, "a chauffeured chauffeur?"

Wurf begat Victor Gotbaum, who begat Stanley Hill. Hill took control of the union in 1986, which by then had grown to close to 120,000 members. At $245,000 a year, Stanley Hill can afford to send a chauffeur to drive the mayor around. But despite its growth in conventional terms -- more members, more dues, more staff, bigger budget -- DC 37 has devolved to a position not much different from the one it held in the pre-Wurf period. What's changed is that Henry Feinstein and his buddies were subservient to a mildly liberal Democratic mayor. Hill and his crowd kowtow to a fiscally conservative Republican.

A recent issue of the Public Employee Press has a picture of Board of Education Local 372 President Charlie Hughes being hugged by the mayor. Hughes's feeble grin suggests he is only a bit more enthusiastic than journalist Pete Hamill was with being kissed by erstwhile Post owner Abe Hirschfeld. But what's Hughes going to do? Quit his $179,000-a-year job? Tell Giuliani to beat it? Hughes knows that individual unions can grow, shrink, or simply disappear at the mayor's pleasure.

Perhaps it's only anecdotal, but it seems that good things happen to union leaders who support the mayor. The head of the firefighters union endorsed Rudy's election. Now he's the fire commissioner. And when Rudy and the Policemen's Benevolent Association (PBA) were in their post-mayoral election honeymoon phase, the mayor bolstered the PBA by dissolving the transit cops union and the housing cops union, adding 7,000 dues-paying members to the PBA. Then there's Hughes himself. Because he represents so many part-time workers, Hughes's union is being used by the mayor as the wedge for the introduction of workfare people into the civil service system. But Hughes will get more dues-paying members out of the deal.

On the other hand, bad things seem to happen to leaders who oppose the mayor. Tony Bernardo, president of the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) Local 2507, fought the merger of EMS into the fire department. Last month he was dismissed from the EMS. The EMS charged that he'd driven an ambulance without a valid license in 1988, and that this February he'd left his post to attend a meeting at the Office of Labor Relations.

Arthur Cheliotes, president of Communication Workers of America (CWA) 1180, has been the most outspoken critic of Giuliani's austerity plan. He's promoted a tax-the-rich counterplan that shifts the burden to Giuliani's chief backers -- the real estate rich. Perhaps coincidentally, he's also lost the most members to city budget cuts: CWA has dropped from 9,500 to 7,000. A union with less than 3% of all city workers has taken about 15% of the cuts. But Cheliotes remains unrepentant. "Did they come after us?" he asks. "Yes. Did we beat them back? Yes."

Cheliotes remains exceptional. Typically, the municipal union leaders who survive in the political ecology of New York City are the least militant, the least responsive to members, the most anxious to pile up huge compensation packages and surround themselves with fabulously paid staffers whose main talent is unblinking loyalty to the chief.

The striking difference in combativeness between French and New York officials illustrates Darwin's distinction between artificial and natural selection. In France, labor leaders are produced by natural selection. They develop traits that are the product of free competition between union confederations for rank and file members. When Nicole Notat, head of the centrist union federation CFDT, backed the Juppé plan, her railroad members simply deserted her. Now they've formed a new autonomous railroad federation. French leaders must either lead where members want to go, or get trampled by those looking for another union.

In New York, leaders are the product of artificial selection. They're bred by City Hall for certain desirable traits -- the chief one being docility toward their handlers. Competing with each other for the mayor's favor for the right to graze on members' dues, our public sector union leaders increasingly resemble what's happened to fat-tailed sheep. These creatures, who are raised for their tasty, marbled mutton, are now so heavy, they can't even mate without assistance.

The return of collective begging certainly hasn't paid off for the members, who in salary terms have regressed to the pre-'60s days when private sector workers made substantially more than unionized city workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that private sector secretaries make $80 a week more than public sector workers. Private sector clerks, $60 more. Security guards represented by DC 37 now make less money in real terms than they did a quarter century ago.

Today, starting city clerks make only $17,000. Under the terms of the new contract they will make 7% less. How can Hill justify pay increases for top officials and staff and pay cuts for workers? I asked Hill, "How can you have a 5-1 or even a 10-1 gap between union staffers and the people who pay their dues. Is that fair?" "It has nothing to do with fairness," Hill explained. "A staff person has to deal with the services. We have guys who give tons of services that are outstanding. You look at the time, the incredible amount of skill and time that goes into that service. We've got a staff that works seven days a week. We bring in the best people and we feel very confident that they do an outstanding job."

Hill also feels that he negotiated an exemplary contract, given the nature of the period -- though many of his members still don't agree. The true measure of a contract's worth is not what the critics think but what the workers who have to live under the contract think. And as far as this latest contract goes, only a handful of top officials will ever know what the members truly thought of the deal. Hill says his members approved the pact 19,513 to 14,438 but he refuses to release the results in individual locals. If Hill didn't "steal" the votes to win, he gave a good imitation of someone who feared scrutiny. If he had nothing to hide, why did he refuse requests to allow the American Arbitration Association to count all the votes?

As reported in Union Democracy Review, the presidents of two AFSME locals accused DC 37 officers of manipulating the ratification vote. They cite Hill's refusal to break down the vote by locals, to repeated extensions of the voting period "and an unusually large and suspicious turnout recorded from one big local which voted late and overwhelmingly for the contract."

French Lessons

IF NEW YORK MAKES US CYNICAL ABOUT THE CAPACITY of working people to organize their own affairs, then at least, as Bogart said, "We'll always have Paris." At the Gare du Nord and Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris and at railroad stations across France, workers met each day to discuss the tactics and strategy of the strike. As Georges Seguy, the former head of the CGT, told me in an interview, "The meetings were open. Anyone on strike had a right to speak -- CGT, FO, CFDT -- as well as workers who didn't belong to any union. They not only met and debated -- each day the workers voted by secret ballot whether to carry on their strike."

Paul Barets, a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, argues that in some ways, December '95 was a big advance over the great May '68 revolt that toppled De Gaulle. In '68, the students and workers spoke a totally different language of opposition. The students insisted on "All power to the imagination" while the workers demanded longer vacations.

In '95, however, the workers spoke out not just for their own narrow demands -- like keeping retirement at age 50 -- but for increased benefits for students, young workers, for the unemployed, for the lowest paid workers in the society. They marched under slogans like "37 and a Half for Everybody" and "All of Us Together, Yes!" Meanwhile, the students not only shut down campuses, they used their free time to collect funds for the workers and presented their collection at a ceremony for the traminots at Austerlitz.

The French December shows what can happen when walls between unions and workers, and workers and society, begin to crack. The strikers left their workplaces to meet with other strikers and even to try to convince other nonstriking workers to join in the movement. As Professor Barets puts it, December demonstrates "the depth of a movement that refused to be imprisoned in the demands of a single corporation."

Appeasement means pursuing concessions at someone else's expense: it's how our corporatist union leaders earn their living. By turning unions into insurance companies, by atomizing workers into consumers who purchase union services with their dues, municipal union leaders have made the exercise of solidarity not just unfeasible but almost unimaginable. New Yorkers need more than a raise. We have to learn how to resist a bald-headed bully. Perhaps we could begin by learning some French.

BUT WHILE THE FRENCH DECEMBER SHOWS THE IMMENSE POTENTIAL of mass action, DC 37's winter fiasco illustrates the fragility of the bedrock assumptions on which American trade union leaders have built their regimes. How do our trade union bosses understand the nature of leadership and membership? To what extent do they think the members can be expected to participate in the life of the union? Who should leaders turn to for role models? It turns out that our trade union tops have been thinking quite rigorously about these questions for some time. They are all addressed by the official historians of DC 37, Jewel and Bernard Bellush.^*

The Bellushes write as disciples of Mancur Olsen, author of The Logic of Collective Action. By the early 1970s Olsen had earned a national following in higher trade union circles by proving logically that mass participation in modern organizations could never happen. At least if actors behaved as they do in economics textbooks -- as rational individuals maximizing their utility functions.

D.C. 37, write the Bellushes, exemplifies Olsen's non-participatory logic:

Because of its success in attaining the agency shop and dues checkoff, large numbers of workers automatically become members. Thus the union acquired a stable membership and a secure source of financial support. Participation, as a result, appeared less urgent.

In order to stimulate rational individuals to participate in the life of the union, they argue, you have to give each of them "separate and selective incentives." A system of perquisites and payments, i.e., a reward system "similar to the old style clubhouse" has to be put in place. Invoking Tammany Hall fixer George Washington Plunkett, they conclude,"When a man (sic) works in politics, he should get something out of it."

So it seems as if those annual winter vacation trips to Bermuda -- actually, this year it was Israel -- by the staff and leaders of DC 37 are the practical outcome of what the Bellushes, following conservative guru James Q. Wilson call "exchange theory." Explicit in exchange theory is the proposition that union leaders model themselves after capitalists. The aim of "exchange theory" is to create a leader-follower relationship like that of businessmen and their customers. The union leader, say the Bellushes, is the entrepreneur who provides "the initiative and the capital." The union leader, as capitalist, sells "services" to the members. And because the services are of such high quality, as Stanley Hill explained to me, the rewards to the staff and the leaders must be proportionately high.

Now while Stanley Hill may be an entrepreneur in the Bellushian sense. He is decidedly not an entrepreneur in the classic Schumpeterian sense: he doesn't undertake anything new; he hasn't created any new product; or introduced any new organizational methods -- unless giving cash to Giuliani is considered a path-breaking novelty.

Hill doesn't upset and reorganize organizational structures: he's a standpatter who insists that measures to improve democratic participation and transparency are impossible because they violate the rules. In this respect, Hill simply follows Gotbaum. The American labor movement has a thousand Gotbaums. And ten thousand Hills. Indeed, this is the value of the Bellushes' work: it reveals the extent to which the practice of trade union leaders is the product of theory. Union leaders have tried, self-consciously, to use capitalists as their role model for organizing relations with their members.

But the union boss as capitalist is an even less justifiable figure than the capitalist exploiter he once claimed to combat. The real capitalist can at least argue he provides the worker with a job. (In German, he is called an arbeitgeber) The capitalist can provide the jobs because, initially, he either has capital or borrows it somewhere.

The union leader's "capital" by contrast, is appropriated from the members. It comes to the union leader by means of an agreement with boss and comes from the workers' check. Moreover, the consumption of the services the union leader provides is forced. Dues check-off compels workers to buy services from a particular union whether they like it or not. Add to this, the lack of accountability through the ballot box of the leaders to the members and the model of union leader as entrepreneur begins to resemble serfdom more than capitalism.

Indeed, in New York's mob-run unions -- mason tenders, carpenters, plumbers, carters -- where the crime families control not only the union but have their hooks into the industry as well, the serfdom model isn't all that far-fetched. The Five Families have created a kind of criminal aristocracy based on supreme values of family and honor. They offer "protection" to their clients. And they will defend their territories to the death.

Civil service unions like DC 37 however stand as remote from the organized crime model as they do from true entrepreneurialism. But with a stretch of the imagination, you can understand why AFL-CIO thinkers imagine they're entrepreneurs. Or at least descended from entrepreneurs. They get capital to hire organizers and staff from the international. Then the Jerry Wurfs and Lillian Roberts go out to win representation elections which, if successful result in the creation of cash flow.

THE ORIGINS OF LAWS LIKE NEW YORK'S "LITTLE WAGNER ACT" or the Wagner Act itself, laws that legally protect entrepreneurial activities, have been conveniently forgotten by the apostles of trade union entrepreneurialism. It wasn't labor leaders who got the Wagner Act passed. Nor was it the product of mediocre Tammany hacks like Robert Wagner. The Wagner Act got passed in 1935 because -- the U.S. -- like France at the time -- was in the midst of a mass movement of factory occupations. And the bosses wanted their factories back. Granting union recognition to CIO leaders who publicly deplored sit-down strikes and advocated collective bargaining -- seemed preferable to chaos or further radicalization. The Wagner Act sailed through Congress.

Ultimately, in other words, it was mass action by rank-and-file workers that created the "capital" for today's union leaders. Mass action built the unions. Re-building them on the principles of radical individualism is destroying them.

Game theory itself explains why individualism doesn't work as an organizing principle of trade unionism. Union leaders find themselves regularly trapped in what game theoreticians call," the prisoners' dilemma." In the classic prisoners' dilemma, if prisoners can avoid squealing on each other, they'll get off. But they are isolated from each other, in different cells. The incentive, for the individual rational actor, concerned only with his own survival is to confess and let others suffer the consequences.

New York City's municipal union leaders, imprisoned in the mentality of rational individualism, each in their own organizational cells, predictably give each other up to Giuliani the jailer. They behave exactly as game theory predicts: each tries to shift the burden of austerity onto the other union leader.

The point then is not to try to cast Stanley Hill into the seventh circle of trade union Hell, reserved for terrible twisted traitors. It's rather that he is the human, all-too human product of institutions whose individualistic premises cause them to fail in predictable ways.

Nor is DC 37 itself a bad union by American standards. On the contrary, DC 37 operates as a large and representative component of -- whose president, Gerald McEntee is widely credited with initiating the reform movement that toppled AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland.

DC 37's characteristic problems however, illustrate the shallowness of the AFL-CIO's reform agenda. Newly elected President John Sweeney has staked out organizing the unorganized and electing Democrats as his top priorities. Twenty million dollars will go to hire new organizers. And thirty million to elect new Democrats.

Here in New York though -- and in most cities across the country -- has the problem unions faced been that there weren't enough Democrats? The City council has been overwhelmingly Democratic as far back as anyone can remember. Of course some now will point to the present Republican occupant of City Hall as the source of the unions' problems. But not those who remember the fiscal crisis of the '70s -- when two Brooklyn Democrats with strong ties to municipal labor were elected Governor and Mayor -- and combined to lay off 66,000 workers.

THE COMPARATIVELY LIMP POSTURE OF MUNICIPAL UNIONISM when confronted by any determined adversary also suggests that the principal problem with American unions is not that they lack members. Low union density is merely a symptom of deeper problems. It's not even ultimately that U.S. labor laws are stacked against organizing.

Of course America's labor laws are a disgrace: more appropriate to the days of the Robber Barons and the Ludlow Massacre than a country that sees itself as the world's premier exemplar of "human rights." But when the legal framework makes union recognition easy -- as is generally the case with city, state and municipal workers -- when union density approaches European levels of 50% and more, we still don't have European levels of combativity.

"That's because this is America, not Europe," many will argue. "We don't have the French tradition of revolution -- or their reverence for egalité and fraternité. Our historical tradition is based strictly on liberté and the pursuit of individual happiness. Our rebels up in Montana are perfectly in American character when they call themselves the Free Men.' So don't blame union leaders for the way our unions have turned out. They are co-dependent with the members. As much as anything leaders do, members shape the unions by their fierce devotion to personal rather than public life. And that's not going to change."

Certainly it's not going to change if labor activists inspired by collectivist values do nothing. We can use history as a pillow or as goad. We can lament the fact that the French had four revolutions between 1789 and 1871 while we were shut out. Or we can recall proudly that by 1935, American workers weren't organizationally all that far behind the Europeans. And in many respects -- incidence of strikes, strike militance -- American workers were in the lead.

Yes, for more than a century, we've had the racist, business-oriented AFL. We had the CIO that by the late 1940s was more interested in kicking Communists out than in bringing workers in. And in a surprisingly large portion of the trades, trucking and food service industries we've had organized crime running unions. But the U.S. has always had people and organizations that challenged them for the soul of the labor movement.

We had the IWW, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Farrell Dobbs. We've had leaders, movements and organizations based on worker participation and mass action. That American counter-tradition continues today with Ken Paff and the TDU; Wing Lam; Jo Anne Lum and the Chinese Staff and Restaurant Workers' Union. Unlike the efforts of official reformers who seek to preserve the AFL-CIO's top-down structure while expanding its organizational influence, they seek to base American trade unionism on different principles.

The future of trade unionism depends on which principles prevail -- those of Hill, Sweeney and Mancur Olsen or those of Paff, Wing Lam and Georges Seguy. No one can know what's going to happen in the future. But we can know at least which set of principles are consistent: which are based on the potential of solidarity; and which are predicated on the dissolution of solidarity and the impossibility of mass action.

We need to understand that the different state of the labor unions on the two sides of the Atlantic emerges less from historical inevitability than from different kinds of choices made by thousands of people who have formed commitments to contrasting sets of organizational principles. If we are dissatisfied with the conditions on this side, we need to clarify our commitments and concentrate our energies: how, right now, are we using our leverage? Who are we working with? Whose side are we really on?

A shorter version of this article appears in the April 16, 1996 Village Voice.

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Note

* Union Power in New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (Praeger: New York, 1984). return

Contents of No. 21