A Powerful Indictment Lacking Balance

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS is a work of enormous breadth and scope, a well-written book, filled with an accessible exposition of events and people, both recent and distant. The overriding theme is a powerful indictment of the American labor leadership (there is an implicit assumption, never articulated that foreign trade unions do not behave as badly) as distant from the rank and file, bureaucratic, frequently corrupt and racist.

Much of Buhle's book and analysis hits the mark, but a good deal does not. Wide-ranging, readable and provocative, his work is nonetheless excessively simplistic. Buhle chronicles well the conservatism of Samuel Gompers, and his "stout" resistance toward, for instance, the Adamson Act of 1916 which established the 8-hour day on the railroads for locomotive engineers. For Gompers, the regulation of hours by legislation was, in Buhle's words, "anathema."

Similarly, Buhle reminds us of George Meany's early opposition to social welfare legislation so elemental as unemployment compensation benefits. This approach, predicated upon the view that autonomous unions and collective bargaining were necessarily compromised by legislation on subject matter also addressed at the bargaining table, has helped erode the status of American workers, both organized and unorganized. It has surely been a factor in the tardy development of both the American labor movement and an effective social welfare system in this country.

And the role of race gets a good deal of attention as well -- and properly so. The hostility of the American Federation of Labor in the time of Gompers -- through the positions taken by the modern labor movement's founder himself -- toward Chinese workers is well documented. The AFL policy toward black workers is of a similar vintage. Here again, Buhle has Gompers on record, expressing himself unsympathetically to the cause of racial equality.

Buhle notes the exclusionary practices of the craft unions and the way in which apprenticeship programs, tests and procedures devised to determine admission to them, were used to exclude black workers. His review of the conflict between black workers and the union movement in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the part of unions and employers on account of race and other criteria is a valuable one. As he notes, this conflict took the form of industrial as well as craft union protection of institutional practices which suppressed the upward mobility of black workers. Seniority disputes involving promotion, transfer, and protection against layoff were all issues which pitted the unions against black workers. And Buhle rightly observes the attitude of union leaders who aligned themselves with polite black ministers in the South challenging Jim Crow as entirely different from their position vis-a-vis black trade unionists who sought positions of leadership in their labor organizations, sometimes swelled with substantial black membership. When it came to internal practices, it was quite difficult to get the unions to place Martin Luther King's March on Washington rhetoric into practice.

Buhle also describes in vivid detail a wide variety of foreign misadventures by the AFL-CIO -- Guatemala, Brazil and Chile standing at the top of the pile. He also notes the pathetic attempt of the federation to give status to Chief Buthelezi of South Africa to head off the seemingly radical African National Congress. The ANC's alliance with the South African Communist Party alternately frightened and infuriated the AFL-CIO. And, particularly in Central America, the Cold War Meany stance frequently translated into the emasculation of trade union and worker rights in those countries.

That said, however, there is something missing here -- not in the excellent treatment of historic union positions on social welfare and race (though in the latter area the discussion is not as balanced as it should be) but in its sweeping characterization of organized labor's behavior generally. Granted, the trade union movement in immediate post-World War II Europe should have been more transparent and less clandestine. But is there nothing of a laudatory nature to be said about the Marshall Plan which meant the difference between starvation and life for so many in Western Europe? Was it not a well-conceived idea? One is hard put to find this unassailable truth acknowledged anywhere by Buhle. Would it have been better to allow an aggressive post-World War II Soviet Union to pick up the pieces in that part of the world? Was not this particular AFL-CIO foreign policy initiative in the interest of working people in Europe and throughout the world?

Moreover, though Meany's support for the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is mentioned, it is quickly dismissed as self-congratulatory. (Indeed, I have noted in my own writings the contrast between the post-Title VII stance of the AFL-CIO and the position taken prior to its enactment.) And contrary to Buhle, President Nixon's formulation of the Philadelphia Plan requiring the hiring of black tradesmen in the segregated construction trades appears to have been motivated by his attempt to divide blacks from the unions in a period when Meany's hostility to affirmative action generally was just plain nasty. The policy was right and the motivation was wrong -- but in the interest of honesty and accuracy Buhle should recognize both realities. Buhle's well-founded criticism of Meany does not allow him to perceive the malevolence of Nixon.

And, more generally, the rank-and-file worker is always shortchanged by union officialdom in Buhle's view. The breakthroughs obtained through collective bargaining in automobile, steel, longshore and other industries are pushed to one side. The gains from Democratic Administrations in social welfare policy and education -- and in the labor policy arena in the Clinton Administration are flat-out ignored.

I find the conclusion -- and many remarks in the book of similar nature --which states that "labor's national leaders, with a few admirable exceptions, have stood in the path of hopeful developments" and that the union members have "lost" and been "diminished" to be rather facile.

Moreover, the view that the answer lies in the "old Wobbly fashion: ordinary working people acting as their own leaders" is a romantic ideal, notwithstanding the curmudgeonly and conservative nature of past AFL-CIO leadership and some of the major unions in the United States. Plenty of union leaders do an adequate and sometimes more than adequate job at the bargaining table and in politics.

ONE GETS SOME SENSE OF THE AUTHOR'S APPROACH when he discusses Gompers's position vis a vis the Wilson Administration and World War I. It is Gompers who is either victimized or who ingratiates himself with government, the worker who loses out in the process. The emergence of the War Labor Board and its awards providing for union recognition gets a sleight of the hand, as Buhle states that its awards eventually provide for "arbitration" rather than recognition, without any explanation whatsoever. Moreover, no connection is made between that period and the emergence of new machinery during World War II which results in the recommendation and award of grievance-arbitration machinery as well as union security agreements requiring membership as a condition of employment in the emergency conditions of that period. The relationship between unions and governments in the time of both wars brought advances for the labor movement, yet Buhle takes very little account of them. Indeed, it may be said that the War Labor Board plays a comparable role to that of the National Labor Relations Board itself in protecting workers during their growth period of the 1930s and 1940s. Again, the book is silent on this.

Moreover, Buhle states that unions have themselves "substantially" to blame for their decline. It is true that union lethargy in the form of inadequate expenditures for organizing the unorganized is a factor in union decline. George Meany, presiding over a federation which had taken little interest in involving itself in organizational activity until the election of John Sweeney in 1995, spoke contemptuously of the paucity of union members. His view, particularly as expressed in the late '60s and '70s, was that the size of union membership had nothing whatsoever to do with union power and influence. But there is much more which is responsible for union decline -- factors which Buhle failed to take into account or minimizes.

In the first place, whatever organized labor's involvement in the United States's adventures abroad, the fact of the matter is that globalization of our economy has emerged through forces which have little to do with labor management relations in our own country. And long before the debate on NAFTA, the ability of American employers to relocate beyond the nation's boundaries had a deleterious impact upon collective bargaining in this country.

The change in the employment relationship through the emergence of contingent workers, independent contractors and, perhaps even more important, the prominence of undocumented workers who are afraid to protest bad employment conditions because of their fear of deportation, all have contributed to an environment hostile to organizing. One great change in American union attitudes relates to immigration policy with the labor movement, previously advocating an exclusionary approach. Today's unions which attempt to organize -- the United Farm Workers is just one example -- have shifted their ground diametrically on this subject.

And, as I know from my own academic work and my involvement in Washington in recent years, the law itself and its promise to promote the collective bargaining process has proved to be ephemeral. Contrary to the manner in which Buhle belittles labor law reform initiatives, they were and are significant and were and have been supported by most national representatives of the Democratic Party.

Moreover, as a labor lawyer and a law professor, I find some of Buhle's comments on the National Labor Relations Act rather puzzling. He seems to have accepted the view that the National Labor Relations Act somehow limited the way in which employees can organize into unions. This point of view is mirrored by newspaper headlines which say, for instance, that Labor Board decisions "allow" hospital interns and residents to join unions -- when nothing in the United States prohibits them joining unions and all that is involved in the intervention of law is a compulsion which is thrust upon the employer to recognize and bargain with unions which are selected by a majority of the workers. Buhle seems to buy into the idea, without articulating it, that somehow the law has impeded the development of unions in this country.

Workers are always free to organize without the law and to put whatever pressure they can bring to bear upon the employer. But the fact of the matter is that most workers and unions need the law, notwithstanding its numerous imperfections, as a vehicle to obtain the collective bargaining process and the right to participate in wages, hours and working conditions. The law's role remains valuable.

True, as Buhle states, the unions have played a role in their decline but much more is involved. The changing composition of industry -- employers have ferociously resisted unionization in the service sector where productivity increases do not allow them to pass along increased cost to the customer -- has altered matters fundamentally. So concerned is Buhle with the cast of unattractive characters whose lifestyle he describes in considerable detail that he loses sight of these factors.

Buhle's book is a provocative one and compulsory reading for all who regard themselves as committed to this field and to the principles of democracy in the workplace. And it is a real page turner. For instance, at one point Buhle has this to say in describing William Casey, CIA chief, Lane Kirkland, Bayard Rustin, Albert Shanker and their involvement in Africa and Latin America:

During happier Cold War days, at least for the credulous, this story would read like a spy novel or film, a sort of Hunt for Red October carried out among peasants, peaceniks, environmentalists and rebellious trade unionists.

Taking Care of Business itself has that flavor and that undoubtedly should hold the interest of many readers. But its lack of balance in treating the subject of the American trade union movement's record in both collective bargaining and politics requires us to proceed with caution.

Contents of No. 28