They Won and We Lost -- But Why?

THE DEFINITIVE BOOK ON AMERICA'S CORPORATE- FRIENDLY LABOR LEADERSHIP has just been written. That alone is good news. What makes the publication singular is that its author is a graduate of the New Left, which drew inspiration from C. Wright Mills's admonition to abandon the "labor metaphysic" if it hoped to develop a world view and a politics that were genuinely emancipatory. Accordingly, New Leftists went on to create a radical movement disdainful of most U.S. labor organizations, though certainly not their better traditions and victories. So it wasn't predictable that the young radicals of the 1950s and 1960s would, in later decades, contribute so large a number of activists and staffers to every contemporary union, community, and environmental struggle in the last 25 years.

But that is prologue. Not only are former student radicals now ensconced in unions at every level, but Paul Buhle, one of the New Left's best, the founding editor of the SDS history journal Radical America, author of Marxism in the United States and an editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left, would write one of labor's most comprehensive histories.

Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor will become the standard work on the labor movement leadership of the twentieth century.

All the heroes are here, and the villains too, and their stories are told by a writer with a grasp of the facts, a feeling of connection to the events, and a narrative style that makes the book as gripping as its content is exhaustive.

Now, that is, as Brecht said, the praise that precedes the panning. Because the book has gaps and gaffs that make its argument -- that the rise of business unionism was not inevitable or its future secure -- contentious where it should be definitive.

Some backers of the current national leadership will find his treatment ungenerous if not viperous, and we failed to get any AFL-CIO staffer to contribute to this symposium. Buhle may understand socialism, the corridor gossip on him goes, but he's clueless about what unions do or about the deals even decent unionists must cut to live to fight on.

Others will think Buhle suspends his critical judgment and gives the New Voice insurgents and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney a free ride. Sweeney was a colorless timeserver, double-dipper, and notorious faction balancer when he headed the Service Employees union before leading the coup that gave the AFL-CIO a new cachet if not a new life. And Buhle's treatment of Laborers leader Arthur A. Coia, (Buhle gives him the wrong middle initial), the only labor top to actively support NAFTA and widely viewed as the bought Clinton Administration shill in labor circles, is remarkably and unnecessarily supportive if not adulatory. Coia is no hero, and being the swing vote for Sweeney does not make him one. For critics of Buhle, the "tragedy" of American labor, its cronyism, its patronage machines, and its trivializing of democratic union rights, will manifest itself under Sweeney and any likely successors, possibly well into the new century.

And then there are the usual scattered, niggling slips and howlers that get in the way of a story worth telling. Buhle faults the 1977 steel challenge of insurgent Ed Sadlowski for never reaching beyond "Big Steel," when he means "basic steel," whose workers were even then a minority of the union. ("Big Steel" was the name for U.S. Steel.) Bill Kornblum has written persuasively that the election was largely stolen, but Buhle does not cite Kornblum. And Buhle's charge that the insurgents had "no real program to meet the threat of factory shutdowns" asks the impossible. The first major plant closing, in Youngstown, would not be announced until six months after the race, and no one, including Fortune magazine, anticipated Steel's collapse.

But few would deny Buhle's observation that key elements of the old AFL-CIO leadership's ethos -- its racism and exclusionary practices in a highly variegated working class, and its seamy involvement in destabilizing unions overseas that threaten corporate hegemony -- are not of the same order as they were earlier in this century.

And Sweeney was not just the beneficiary of a new sensibility, but rose to be its tactician.

BUHLE RIGHTLY EMPHASIZES HOW EMPIRE ABROAD AND RACIAL AND ETHNIC EXCLUSION AT HOME constituted the primordial soup in which a revanchist leadership seeking -- hamhandedly and unsuccessfully -- to be an equal partner with business could fester, but he offers no seamless theory for why the national labor leadership was historically so craven, so callous toward the unorganized, and ruthless toward socialist critics. Nor does he tell us why, with rare exceptions, it was so late in seeking the help of "friendly enemies," in the face of a decades-long corporate assault following the 1970s recession. The old leaders never quite understood that fighters for working people such as the late Burton Hall, or Herman Benson or Herbert Hill -- regular writers for this and other left periodicals -- had to be made into allies, too,

That common-sense notion of cultivating friends and working on things with which you could agree is something a mainstream political hack understands. It was a staple of Tammany Hall politics, and even Lenin recognized that opponents in contingent situations could be "useful idiots." Not so the old AFL-CIO tops. How could they have been so thick, and so ultimately destructive in presiding over the decline of a labor movement that now represents just ten percent of the workforce?

And of course it is problematic to write a history of labor by looking at the dead AFL-CIO presidents, a group of men who led few or no strikes and, in Lane Kirkland's case, never organized a union, negotiated a contract, or even grieved a health and safety violation. Whatever they were, those peculiar birds nesting in the AFL-CIO aerie were too removed from the lives of workers and front-line officials to be considered "leaders."

Buhle's fixation on casting the battle between labor's socialists and accommodationists in almost apocalyptic terms, as a battle between the forces of light and darkness, doesn't help, either. Now that is my old-time religion, too, and we all suffer because Gene Debs could not defeat the Gompersian anti-Christ. But our collective history consists of more than vindicating the pre-war socialists. Surely the tragedy of American labor is the inability of any type of unionism, even honest and militant unionism by people who were far from socialist, to wrest more concessions from corporate America.

A real history of labor must allow that, when workers bargain, strike, engage in job actions, or corporate campaigns, they rarely do so to destroy their employer. What they do is class struggle, too, and their history is more than a battle between socialist idealists and renegades.

Buhle is right to say that creating new "models of solidarity" means returning to the vision and courage of the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World, "whatever their practical weaknesses." But they were not, as Buhle says, "in considerable part destroyed by the machinations of Samuel Gompers's AFL." State and vigilante terror played its part, too. They were destroyed not because they were outcoached, but because Capital had the better team.

Ultimately, Buhle never successfully answers the problem he himself raises, that "the presence of a forceful, avowedly, institutionally, and, on a broad spectrum of issues, politically conservative leadership at the center of labor's institutions is practically unique in the United States." Why is internal union life -- forget the easy sociological explanations about escaping from the tedium of work -- so self-interestedly petty and fractious? How did we get to a situation where working people, even today and in so many industries, must make their peace with the mob, or where, as Buhle says, "the ILA was less a union affiliate than a branch of organized crime."

Why do unions so often resemble dysfunctional families, where a key to social mobility is sitting through mind-numbing meetings, accepting brutality, enduring thugs lightly, and kissing rings. Why did my own father, who as a young immigrant with limited English and who was made ship recording secretary by his crew of merchant seamen because he was even more literate than they, have to learn the Americanizing lesson "that you cannot win unless you run on a ticket." This, after bravely contesting for patrolman -- and doing surprisingly well -- on no one's ticket but his own.

I DON'T PRETEND TO HAVE THE ANSWERS ABOUT WHY THINGS WENT SO WRONG. Like George Bernard Shaw or Robert Merton, I haven't trafficked in big ideas in years. But what is troubling about the book is that the elements here in themselves do not constitute an explanation, either.

Surely a part of the answer lies in the centralized, institutional structure of collective bargaining and national contracts. Or the fact that unions present themselves as experts in negotiating rather than as organizations for collective action. Or that democracy and workers control are treated even by those with a Marxist bent as luxuries instead of -- as Gramsci and so many others insisted -- venues for training people to run the world differently.

The race need not belong to the swift, but what is it about our history that predisposes those carrying the most baggage or the most meritocratic pretensions to win so many of the big fights?

And of course race and empire were fundamental to shoring up stability and dividing working people, as Buhle shows. But those are the preconditions for business unionism, not the explanations.

So there is no "why" buttoned down here, as in why is there no class-struggle unionism in the United States. But you needn't look further for the who, what, when, and where of an actually existing, horrific history of union blunders, careerist excesses, and squandered opportunities. It's mostly all in here, and it will be a long time before Buhle's work is improved on or eclipsed.

Contents of No. 28