Changing the Guard at Top
Not the Key to Labor's Revival

IN Taking Care of Business, Paul Buhle fills a huge gap in our grasp of the role of the three key leaders in the history of the AFL. Buhle's focus is chiefly on the relationship between three of the four AFL presidents, Samuel Gompers, George Meany and Lane Kirkland, and the American state and its two principal political parties. The point of his analysis is that the dominant brand of American labor's practice, business unionism, relies as much on the patronage of the political directorate as on collective bargaining and the grievance and arbitration procedures.

What emerges from Buhle's portraits is a key ingredient in the age-old puzzle of why unions have remained what C. Wright Mills once termed a "dependent variable" in the political economy. Buhle emphasizes the subordination of the leading labor federation and its affiliates to U.S. foreign policy and, since the early twentieth century, to the Democratic party. He argues that the party's pro-labor sentiments were always modified by its own conservative proclivities, by the centralist pull of the corporate capitalist- dominated political climate and, of course, by the periodic right-wing attacks on the labor movement.

As Buhle makes clear anti-radicalism was a strong motivation for the leadership's alliance with the Democrats, especially at the turn of the century when Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists proposed a substantially different course for the labor movement than that of Gompers and his craft-union associates, and had a powerful presence both in and out of the AFL. Indeed Gompers was defeated by a left-led coalition in 1893 but regained office in the next election. Still, in 1908, a Socialist candidate mounted a serious but losing challenge to his leadership on a platform directed not so much to the narrow craft union approach as to the Federation's implicit support of capitalism and the capitalist parties. In the first decade of the century Gompers adamantly refused to organize the millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in industrial unions, prompting leading socialist and labor mavericks to form a revolutionary industrial union, the IWW, which among other virtues declared the principle of inclusion, especially of blacks and Asians who the AFL had all but openly spurned. While the bulk of socialists and syndicalists remained in the AFL because they opposed dual unionism, in two decades of labor insurgency between 1890-1910, including the appearance of mass industrial unions, Gompers succeeded but was hard-pressed to retain his dominance of American labor.

The Gompers chapter is admirable in its sweep. Not only does Buhle cover the chronological ground but he carefully delineate Gompers's key role in the making of business unionism. In contrast to the Knights of Labor, whose conservatism was partially redeemed by its inclusiveness and its commitment to grassroots democracy, and to the radicalism of the Socialist-led unions and the revolutionary unionism of the IWW, Gompers haughtily disdained any program that went beyond the immediate interests of the most skilled workers and insisted that unionism meant little else but the quest for a better life within the existing social system. Far from images inherited from prior accounts, Buhle shows how, in his quest for a secure birth within rampant capitalism, Gompers curried favor not only with the large corporations but also with the Wilson administration whose war aims Gompers fervently supported. If organized labor got some benefits from its pro-war stand, notably the rapid unionization of the meatpacking industry, the price was the abandonment of the Federation's electoral nonpartisanship, which by 1917 was, in any case, merely a remnant. Buhle demonstrates how, more egregiously, Gompers virtually sanctioned Wilson's anti- radical repression, which spilled over from its wartime imprisonment of Debs and others who opposed U.S. intervention to the early post-war period into the explosive 1919- 1920 period of mass strikes and the bolshevization of the left-wing of the Socialist Party.

Buhle's third subject, Lane Kirkland, emerges as a labor leader of a new type, one who is bred within the intersecting bureaucracies of the trade unions, government and corporations. As Meany's hand-picked successor, he assumed the Federation presidency in 1979, and owed his rise almost entirely to the patronage of his boss. Kirkland was among the first of a growing layer of union leaders whose careers are forged primarily in Beltway politics or in the staff bureaucracy more than on the shop floor and the picket line. Buhle chronicles Kirkland's utter inexperience as a trade unionist and reveals him to be, primarily, an operative of the agencies responsible for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, not a representative of union members -- let alone the American working class as a whole. In Millsian fashion, Buhle traces Kirkland's personal as well as political ties to large corporate and government officials. In fact the cumulative effect of his account of Kirkland's frequent attendance at parties and other gatherings of the foreign policy elite leads to the conclusion that Kirkland spent more time in the ruling circles pursuing America's cold war interests than with other union officials, least of all attending the economic and social problems of union members.

Of the three portraits, the Meany chapters constitute an original and absorbing monograph on the shaping of the post-World War II trade union movement. Meany is shown to be the architect of organized labor's public and political life for most of the post-war era. He developed the policy of the tri-partite alliance of the unions, government and corporations, originally instituted by Gompers during World War I in behalf American international interests. In the service of the national state, under his guidance the AFL-CIO rarely if ever took issue with the president and the executive branch, and frequently sacrificed its own agenda for strengthening the welfare state when he perceived it was in conflict with America's global interests. Since the "post- war" era was marked by a plethora of United States military engagements there were many occasions to declare that the interests of national unity overrode labor's parochial interests. As a result, Labor's agenda -- the repeal of Taft-Hartley, more public housing, an adequate social security system including national health care insurance, and a liveable minimum wage -- was often sacrificed on the altar of patriotism.

MEANY EMERGES IN BUHLE'S ACCOUNT AS A SUPERB, AUTOCRATIC LABOR POLITICIAN whose career was forged in the schismatic environment of New York's labor movement during the second of the two great periods of its growth, 1930-45. As state AFL president during the CIO's meteoric rise in the late 1930s, with the key role played by radicals, especially the Communists, Meany made himself a bulwark of AFL orthodoxy claiming that the industrial unionism of the CIO was little more than a Communist conspiracy.

Buhle insists that Meany is not identical to the gruff public stereotype of the traditional conservative labor leader, but was a shrewd and nimble trade union politician. Attentive to the winds of ideology and social change within his generally conservative framework, he could go left as well as right in his quest for power. He was as capable of railing against large corporate power as he was of capitulating to it when the chips were down. During the New Deal he could invoke the threat of a labor party to advance the interests of craft unions and was much more independent of the Roosevelt Administration than his presumably more radical CIO counterparts who, for the most part, were glued to the Administration.

Meany was elected AFL secretary-treasurer in 1939 and in 1952 succeeded William Green who had, in effect, surrendered the reins of power several years earlier. No sooner had he taken office than he began to court Walter Reuther and other leaders of an exhausted and severely compromised CIO -- compromised among other things by its surrender to the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, by its relentless purge of the CP-controlled unions and by the no-raiding agreement with AFL unions negotiated in 1953. Rhetoric aside, most CIO affiliates had drifted closer to business unionism and were barely distinguishable politically from most AFL unions. In fact, despite the CIO's public support for the NAACP and civil rights in the South, on the crucial issue of equality at the workplace the two federations were embarrassingly lacking in commitment. While, in comparison to Gompers and Green, Meany expressed public approval of the struggle for civil rights, he was, as an old building trades official, as ambivalent about racial equality as he was about fighting corruption among some of the affiliates, according to Buhle.

As AFL-CIO president, Meany fostered increased centralization. He maintained tight control over affiliates on issues of domestic as well as foreign policy. He also strengthened its alliance with the State Department and the CIA, throwing considerable resources into Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America in an effort to thwart left-led guerilla and trade union movements. With only a few -- and then only partial -- exceptions, the former CIO unions were only too pleased to join.

While I was on the staff of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), I remember $300,000 given by the CIA to the Kenyan Oil Workers' leader Tom Mboye through the International Federation of Oil and Chemical Workers to buy the largest daily newspaper in Nairobi. The generous gift caused the union's president, O. A. Knight, the OCAW and IFCW president to retire when members of the American union's rank and file international executive board learned of the deal. Similar activities were conducted by many other unions such as the UAW, Communications Workers, and the ILGWU.

DURING MEANY'S TENURE, THE AFL-CIO WAS A MAJOR FOREIGN POLICY PLAYER in the practical as well as the ideological realm. Buhle tells the story of how Garment Workers president David Dubinsky introduced the union's master spy, deposed Communist Party General Secretary Jay Lovestone, to Meany who eventually hired him to head the AFL-CIO's Labor's League for Human Rights, the Federation's espionage and anti-communist international agency. Lovestone's operations were considered indispensable to the anti-radical and anti-communist efforts of the United States government in the pursuit of Cold War aims. Institutions such as the American Institute for Free Labor Development were instrumental in recruiting and training Central and Latin American trade unions for counter-insurgency among peasants and urban workers and played an important role during the war in Vietnam.

Unlike some on the left, Buhle has no scales on his eyes when it comes to Walter Reuther. He remarks that Reuther "ruthlessly crushed all internal opposition" within the UAW, accuses him of accommodating to the auto companies on shop-floor conditions and of being as deeply ambivalent on the race question as was Meany, whose hostility to the 1960s civil rights movement's use of tactics such as civil disobedience was as apparent as it was scandalous.

Nonetheless, Reuther's battle to force the AFL-CIO to play a more aggressive role on domestic issues and to reverse its full-throated backing of the Vietnam war led to the UAW's withdrawal from the Federation. It was Reuther's finest hour since a quarter century earlier when he called for a partial breach of the no-strike pledge during World War II. Unfortunately, as Buhle points out, Reuther was only half-hearted in his resolve to build a new labor movement. Having purged many labor militants and built a powerful top-down machine in the UAW, he was obliged to seek reform from above. For Reuther, as for Meany, the membership remained clients of a leadership that acted, alternately, as exemplars of tough love disciplinarians and as service providers. Of such roles social movements are not made.

IN HIS ACCOUNT OF THE 1995 CHALLENGE TO KIRKLAND BY JOHN SWEENEY and his allies Buhle at first keeps his perspective. As president of the large Service Employees union Sweeney presided over a doubling of its members to more than a million. But, Buhle points out, most of these gains were the result of mergers rather than new organizing activities. Sweeney was prone to the dubious practice of "double dipping" -- collecting more than one salary -- (Buhle terms this a "common though misguided practice") and he was as harsh on his internal opponents as any other international union president. Sweeney's announcement that he would oppose Kirkland forced the faithful Meany supplicant to retire and, with the help of the State, County and Municipal Employees, the new administration of the Teamsters, the UAW, Steelworkers and Machinists defeated AFL-CIO secretary treasurer Tom Donahue who was sponsored and surrounded by hard-bitten anti- radicals such as Al Shanker and Morty Barr of the Communications Workers, two the leading foreign policy wonks of the Federation.

In fact, perhaps Sweeney's most dramatic departure from the policies of his predecessor was the new turn in international relations. Although under pressure from labor progressives Kirkland had challenged NAFTA in 1993, the International Department remained in the thrall of the American corporate interests abroad. Shortly after assuming the presidency, without renouncing the 50 years of faithful service to the CIA and other U.S. foreign policy agencies, Sweeney revamped the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department to make it less an instrument of American foreign policy and more an arm of American labor's interests on such matters as sweatshops, international child labor and trade policy. At this writing, Sweeney has declared that the Federation would not support the Free Trade agreement of the World Trade Unionization unless workers rights were strictly observed and enforced throughout the globe.

Buhle praises the new AFL-CIO leader for putting new energy into organizing, especially the founding of an Organizing Institute to bring thousands of young organizers into the task of rebuilding labor's depleted ranks, and encouraging local and regional initiatives in the same direction. While Buhle recognizes that only a new horizontal unionism based on rank and file insurgencies can reinvigorate the labor movement, that is, a movement based on communication among rank and file and local leaders across occupations and industries, the new AFL-CIO leadership gets off pretty easy. Buhle notes that the new leadership is consistent with the long tradition of labor's political dependence but does not explore, in any detail, the consequences of the continuity of labor's ties to the Democratic party in a period when the DP has adopted openly center-right programs and policies. Not the least of these are the relatively minor reforms in the administration of the National Labor Relations Act and the foot- dragging by the Administration on health care, minimum wage, and its openly reactionary free trade policy.

Nor does he pay enough attention to the persistence of the Federation's benign attitude toward corruption among some of its affiliates. Noting the DC 37 scandal of gross misappropriation of union members' dues and of brazen ballot stuffing to retain power (p.250) and the autocratic practices of many unions, including many in the so-called "progressive" camp, Buhle hesitates to draw the conclusion that the promise of the 1995 election remains largely unfulfilled -- and perhaps can't be fulfilled as long as the unions are more a series of insurance companies and collaborationist institutions than a movement of solidarity and change. Despite the richness of Buhle's narratives, the book suffers from a certain lack of appreciation of difference, in the first place between what goes on at the top and what goes on in the international unions and at the local level.

Having said this, Taking Care of Business remains a major object lesson for those who cling to the illusion that changing the guard at the top is the key to rebuilding labor's waning strength.

Contents of No. 28