Union Democracy and the U.S. Labor Bureaucracy

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS makes fascinating reading. Buhle's immense knowledge of labor, immigrant, and radical history, including his familiarity with vast amounts of oral history material, allows him to paint perhaps the fullest, richest, and most fascinating account of the reactionary bureaucratic leaders who have dominated the AFL and the AFL-CIO from the 1890s until the 1990s. His exposure and critique is unrelenting, following in the tradition of Eugene Debs who asserted that the role of the Gompers leadership was "to chloroform the working class while the ruling class went through its pockets." In his areas of specialty, Buhle knows many of the nooks and crannies, where dirt, corruption, and even dead bodies are hidden. In his portraits, Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and Lane Kirkland turn out even worse -- not only than their traditional apologists paint them -- but even than their harshest critics have claimed.

Buhle's case against them is as follows: They have misled the working class in a variety of ways, usually in having unions follow the most narrow, racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, approach to all issues. They have used much of their energy and workers' own resources to support the most reactionary forces at home and abroad, stifling progress everywhere. In doing this, they have conspired with employers, the police, the government, and the CIA, even been complicitous in mass murder, much of which was too embarrassing even for them to admit openly. But, worst of all, they have done this anti-democratically: demobilizing workers, persecuting critics and oppositionists, while repressing alternative strategies that seemed to be majoritarian views at certain points in time.

Buhle is especially good at exposing and debunking many of their allies. Not only is he sharp in carving up operatives like Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown, Max Shachtman, and others. He is lucid in exposing right-wing social-democratic henchmen including Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Penn Kemble. But his most valuable service in this venue is in unmasking the dirty politics and CIA connections of those still held in high esteem by liberals. These include Arthur Goldberg, former Steelworkers and CIO counsel and Supreme Court Justice, and those more mainstream social-democrats like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, who played such important roles in the Democratic Socialists of America as elder socialist statesmen with alleged credible left- wing histories.

The book's fascinating details and descriptions make it well worth the read. Yet, it has larger claims, among which is to explain, "the suffocating authority of the labor bureaucracy" in the U.S. (4), and what accounts for the dominance of people who "were less labor representatives than labor controllers" (13). The book promises that the discussion of the labor bureaucracy will speak "to many larger issues." (5). Finally, the book, with its many references and discussions of the 1995 change in the top AFL-CIO leadership, implicitly promises to answer the question of the degree to which this "new" leadership has broken with the past.

For these questions, however, I will argue the book does not fulfill its promise. These issues are under-theorized, under-analyzed, and ultimately not addressed. In the only real discussion of possible explanations for the dominance of the reactionary bureaucrats in the U.S. (in the introduction), Buhle notes several possible theories. These include 1) the traditional labor history view (today asserted in Robert Zieger's work), that the leaders reflect the general backwardness or conservative views of rank- and-file workers, a view which Buhle quite naturally rejects; 2) tampering by outside authorities, which accounts for a good deal of the fascinating descriptive material in the book; 3) fundamental flaws in leadership. (13) The book implies that the second and third are the main reasons, and that they are somehow "connected to the creation of empire." (15) Yet, little of this is analyzed in the course of the book. An additional traditional theory -- that it is misleadership among oppositionists and the left, a view raised by radical labor leader William Z. Foster, for example, before he joined the CP -- is not discussed at all.

Part of the reason the book has trouble grappling with these issues is its analytic framework. Almost everything in the book is judged from one overriding, unqualified principle, that of union democracy and worker control. Let me begin by saying that I believe that this is an important fundamental principle for socialists. Mass participation and control can lead to class interests being expressed more clearly, straying leaders held in check or removed, greater militancy, empowerment of individuals, expansion of their human potential, and in many cases to growing class consciousness and solidarity. But workers control, particularly local control, at times has its negative aspects and can come into conflict with other important principles. First, there are the problems the early Bolsheviks faced in Russia, when confronted with the desires of many workers who believed what Buhle extols, "a socialism of unmediated workers' power." (148) Railway schedules, to take one famous example, had to be set nationally and rationally, and could not be controlled by local groups of railway workers. Coming closer to home, there has been a dark downside, to some of the old IWW traditions of local, workers' control.

The old split in the Wobblies between those who wanted local autonomy and those who wanted a strong national office (a dispute won by those favoring the latter in the 1913 IWW convention) was replayed in parts of the CIO. In the International Woodworkers of America, led initially by Communists, the oppositionists, largely coming from IWW localist backgrounds, opposed giving funds and supporting organizers to be assigned by the national office. They believed that current locals and districts, whose overwhelming membership was in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, should hire their own organizers and consolidate their own affairs. Their arguments were couched in unimpeachable, worker democracy, worker control, and anti-bureaucratic rhetoric. What this meant in practice, however, was that the IWA right-wingers opposed and successfully undermined the attempts of the national office to assign organizers, and to attempt to organize the majority African-American woodworkers in the South. To the uncharitable, many of their arguments against organizing the South appear racist. During Operation Dixie, in 1946 and 1947, even right-wing CIO leaders were aghast at the IWA's willingness (now controlled by the ex- IWW anti-communists) to simply abandon militant interracial locals in the South.

The situation in the Sailors International Union/Sailors Union of the Pacific was arguably worse. Local democracy, job control, and anti-bureaucracy for the top leadership and numerous activists, steeped in the IWW tradition, meant in both theory and practice (and, of course, there were undoubtedly exceptions) the exclusion of African-American seamen from union ships. I am often amazed at reading accounts by older anti-Stalinists -- who participated in and supported this union -- who extol its greater militancy than the CP-led interracial National Maritime Union (with its many Black and Latino leaders), without mentioning the SIU's racism, viewing it as a minor glitch, or only raising it in passing. In the United States, as in South Africa (which under apartheid also had some very militant, democratic, white exclusionary unions), racial exclusion always trumps everything else.

NOW THERE IS MUCH TO EXTOL IN THE TRADITION of the Knights of Labor and the IWW (including the many examples of interracial solidarity) both of which Buhle looks to for historical guidance, precedence, and inspiration (252). I largely agree with him in this respect. What I find most surprising, however, especially given his many positive remarks, is his failure, or unwillingness to include the left-wing unions of the1930s in this same category. Now, Buhle is not at all an old-style anti-communist who refuses to recognize the positive features of the CP. Like many of our generation, including myself, he is able to appreciate the exemplary activities of the CP-led unions, despite fundamental disagreements with Stalinism. He notes the United Electrical Workers' stance on women's issues, the racial egalitarianism, the large numbers of non-whites in many unions, the gayness of the CP-led Marine Cooks, and other notable features (128). Yet, somehow these unions are not the models for solidarity that the IWW and the equally contradictory Knights of Labor (who often opposed Chinese workers on racial grounds and whose leadership opposed strikes) were.

Such a stance is wrong-headed. The CP-led unions were indeed contradictory. On the plus side (and here, we have much to learn), they were in most cases highly militant, mobilizing, based on strong rank-and-file participation, and were far more democratic than most of the non-Communist led unions, especially those in which the left was not a strong presence. On the issue of race (historically, the defining political issue in U.S. politics), they were in a class by themselves. Militant commitment to racial egalitarianism was not a characteristic of the left or the CIO in general, as Buhle, along with others, sometimes implies (108, 166). Those few socialists who were deeply committed to racial egalitarianism (e.g., Highlander's Miles Horton) were often isolated and skewered by their former comrades. As Martin Glaberman notes in his book, Wartime Strikes, even during World War II (their low point) CPers were better than other leftists in the plants on questions of race. Perhaps the one non-Communist radical who stands out as exemplary on race questions (who is referred to incorrectly by Buhle as "relatively progressive" p.179) was the United Packinghouse Workers president Ralph Helstein. The CP, of course, also had its downside, of which I have written extensively. It tailed FDR after 1936 and helped sabotage efforts for a labor party; its ultra-collaborationist stance during World War II (often disregarded at the local level by CPers in Food and Tobacco, Packinghouse, and other unions) had more than a few disgusting moments; its unmitigated support for the horrors of Stalinism and the hounding of its political enemies were vile. One of the most difficult and complicated questions for those of us who are critics of Stalinism is coming to terms with the complex heritage of the CP, since its best activities during the 1930s and 1940s are models that all socialists should try to emulate.

There are a number of other issues where I think Buhle has got things somewhat wrong. Some of them, if corrected, might mesh well with his arguments. Many have to do with his analysis of the CIO. Most important perhaps are certain myths about the UAW in general and Walter Reuther in particular. The UAW was not necessarily among the most advanced unions on certain issues, especially with respect to race. I have discussed this issue at length in my pieces on "Race and CIO," relying in part on Toni Gilpin's excellent work on the CP-led Farm Equipment union, which among other things compares UAW racial practice in farm and construction equipment unfavorably with that of the FE. The FE and many other left unions were far more aggressive in fighting against racial discrimination at the workplace than much of the UAW. The situation only became worse with Reuther's ascendency. The material, if not the analysis, is clear from Nelson Lichtenstein's recent biography. As Reuther began his ascendancy into the top leadership in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he built his caucus around the most racist, reactionary forces within the union, his social- democratic rhetoric, and leftist fellow-travelers notwithstanding. While the Reuther of the 1950s and 1960s had changed from the 1930s, he had not changed from the Reuther of the 1940s. So Buhle, like Lichtenstein, is wrong to think that radical impulses and possibilities (and even substantive commitments to civil rights within the labor movement) existed for Reuther, after he built his virtually all-white, conservatively based, bureaucratic caucus (175, 177, 188). A structural analysis of Reuther's caucus, rather than his rhetoric, tells the story.

This issue is, of course, important in many ways. One small part has to do with Buhle's uncritical extolling of the Workers Party. Its extreme anti-communism led it not only to support the racist leadership of the SIU against the far more egalitarian CP-led NMU, but to support the authoritarian, bureaucratic, and racially less progressive (to put it politely) Reuther group. It did this, along with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1946, when Reuther won the presidency. The SWP criticized itself after the election and broke with Reuther for all the right reasons. The Workers Party continued to support Reuther in the 1947 election, where his regime (whose dictatorial character Buhle describes in the harshest of terms) was consummated. Any honest balance sheet must take into account the dark side and theoretical weaknesses of all traditions from which one wishes to identify and learn.

The mistakes made in dating the growing problems in the UAW and the CIO is generally based upon not recognizing the contradictions within the CIO from the beginning. The bureaucratic, corporatist approach was present as one part of the CIO from its inception, a heritage from the Gompers era. Top CIO leader Sidney Hillman, e.g., wanted to organize southern textile workers during 1937 and 1938 by first convincing employers of the benefits of having a stable union. Philip Murray's steelworkers could be similarly analyzed. Reuther was clearly in this camp by 1940. Thus, Operation Dixie did not weaken and fail in 1951 because of the purges in 1949 and 1950 (as Buhle argues, p.129), but in 1946, shortly after it started, as the dominant right-wing CIO leadership, put their most racist, bureaucratic, and unimaginative cohorts in charge of the campaign. Buhle also wrongly attributes the AFL-CIO's later failures in new organizing to their declining public image, rather than to their lack of effort and resources, along with their class collaborationist orientation.

ONE FURTHER ISSUE MUST BE EXPLORED HERE, albeit briefly. Buhle, like many leftists, is torn in evaluating the changes in the AFL-CIO since 1995, between seeing the openness (at least in terms of staffing and alliances) of the new leadership to leftists, their seeming commitment to organizing, on the one hand, and their deepening embrace of the Democratic Party, along with their lack of interest in rank-and-file democracy, on the other. A more structural analysis of the coalition that pushed for the election of the Sweeney leadership, however, will show that these things are two sides of the same coin. As Buhle notes, much of the impetus for what was really a palace coup, came from the public sector unions. The old guard on the other hand was most strongly based in the construction unions. Most construction unions are active in local markets. Overall decline of national union density and lack of influence in the Democratic Party does not affect their collective bargaining directly, as long as their local organizations are strong. Public sector unions, on the other hand, at least as presently oriented, get most of their benefits from legislative lobbying and political alliances. When their allies, particularly within the labor movement, grow weaker, they have less leverage. Kirkland's numerous foreign junkets, lack of concern for declining membership, withdrawal from Democratic Party gamesmanship (all of which Buhle notes), were especially disconcerting to public sector unions. So, their agenda required increased organizing and greater involvement in the Democratic Party. They are also smart enough to know that radical youth can be a big aid in new organizing. Some of the industrial unions have similar agendas, but with different political concerns along with growing dismay about the isolation of labor unions, in part made possible by the anti-union environment nationally, allowing, e.g., for the weakening of the UAW, in a previous stronghold, like Caterpillar. Such changes in leadership orientation may indeed provide new openings for insurgent movements and other important activities. Yet, there is little basis for thinking that the new leadership is more committed to rank-and-file democracy or to a break with the Democratic Party than was the old leadership, no less a more radical departure in a host of other venues.

This said, Paul Buhle's book is a good start, giving us a tremendous amount of useful material in understanding labor's history. His skewering of the reactionary leadership is on target, as is his tying them to the international strategy of U.S. imperialism. He is less clear on showing how the empire may have aided in the corruption of segments of the U.S. workforce, particularly on racial issues. And, finally, one needs to be clear on what alternative leaderships might have done differently that could have aided in dislodging the type of right-wing labor leaders we have all grown to detest.

Contents of No. 28