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STAUGHTON and ALICE LYND have edited The New Rank and File, personal histories by labor organizers active in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It will be published by Cornell University Press in Fall 2000.
ON ITS BACK COVER, Taking Care Of Business tells us -- in words presumably approved by the author -- that John Sweeney's election as president of the AFL-CIO signified "the disruption of Cold War business unionism" and was "a significant turning point" in the history of the labor movement.
The message that change in the labor movement comes from the top down is also suggested by the way the book is organized. Taking Care Of Business is a series of chapters, each devoted to the term in office of a particular president of the AFL or AFL-CIO. In the 1960s, New Left historians developing "history from the bottom up" poured scorn on conventional narrative histories of the United States that told the nation's story in a sequence of chapters each devoted to a particular Presidency. By organizing the story around a series of individual leaders, this narrative device not only trained the historical spotlight on "great white men" (as Jesse Lemisch put it) but also implied that what was needed was a new man at the top.
As in the case of histories of the United States, the not-so-implicit thesis of Taking Care of Business is that labor needed a new leader and may have found one in 1995.
THE BELIEF THAT A NEW MOSES MIGHT LEAD THE LABOR MOVEMENT across the Jordan River is hardly original. Eugene Debs once commented that if he could lead the movement into the Promised Land, somebody else could lead it out again. The arguments made in Taking Care Of Business on behalf of Sweeney have been made on behalf of John L. Lewis (by Saul Alinsky), Walter Reuther (by Irving Howe), I. W. Abel (by John Herling), Arnold Miller and Ed Sadlowski (by a variety of liberal pundits), and Ron Carey (by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union).
What is startling, and saddening, is to find these familiar arguments made on behalf of "a middle-of-the-road union leader with a personal history somewhat muddied by the . . . practice of double-dipping" (p. 244) in a book written by our comrade and brother, Paul Buhle.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buhle founded and edited the journal Radical America. The magazine made an extraordinary contribution. In its pages a New Left theory of the labor movement was roughed out.
In Radical America, George Rawick wrote about "workers' self-activity," with particular emphasis on wildcat strikes. Stan Weir reported on La Coordinadora, a union of Spanish longshoremen that operated effectively without fulltime staff. Marty Glaberman unearthed the fact that, during World War II, many rank-and-file members of the UAW voted in a union-sponsored referendum to continue the no-strike pledge, but voted with their feet in a contrary direction by taking part in unauthorized direct actions.
The magazine published early versions of the oral histories that grew into the book Rank and File, edited by Alice Lynd and myself. Similarly Jeremy Brecher, Peter Rachleff, Mark Naison and many others tried out their ideas in the hospitable forum that Paul Buhle provided.
A consensus took shape. Radical America was skeptical about electoral campaigns for top union office. Instead the magazine emphasized actions that workers could take on their own initiative: its themes were self-activity (Rawick), working-class agency (E. P. Thompson), the emancipation of the working class by workers themselves (Marx). The organizational face of this practice could be glimpsed in steward councils, as in Great Britain during World War I; parallel central labor unions, like the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917; local general strikes, for instance in Seattle in 1919, or Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934; and, as advocated by Lotta Continua in Italy, general assemblies of workers on the shop floor. The occupation of factories by 10,000,000 French workers in 1968, and later, Polish Solidarity, were viewed as confirming contemporary events.
Paul Buhle also explored the work of C. L. R. James. More than anyone else writing at mid-century, the West Indian Trotskyist provoked new thinking on the Left about both trade unions and the structure of a workers' party. The pamphlet "Punching Out," drafted by Glaberman and first published by James' organization in 1952, argued that under a collective bargaining agreement with a no-strike clause, union representatives become cops for the boss.
As to a workers' party, James, while defending the practice of Lenin in its place and time, argued that the workers' movement had outgrown the need for a vanguard party and that the working class as a whole should now act for itself.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 seemed to James and his colleagues to prove these ideas experimentally. Without a vanguard party, without even a workers' press, and in the absence of war or depression, the workers of Hungary organized themselves into councils, overthrew a government, and would have completed a revolution but for invasion by Soviet tanks.
Paul Buhle has not forgotten the labor theory of the New Left. He invokes it rhetorically, especially in his introduction and conclusion, where one finds references to the "ideals of the Industrial Workers of the World" and to "legacies of solidarity" associated with the IWW and the Knights of Labor, such as the strategy of "working to rule" and the vision that "an injury to one is an injury to all."
Indeed he remarks:
The reversal of 1995 lacked one decisive element. The new leaders did not stand at the head of -- or invite -- anything like 1940s-style antibureaucratic unrest or Wobbly manners back into their ranks. It remained to be seen, therefore, how leadership could rebuild the labor movement without tapping vast unreleased energies and hidden talents from below.(205)
This is a curious composite of metaphors. The New Voice leaders are first presented as officers who missed an opportunity to "stand at the head of . . . antibureaucratic unrest," surely a problematic undertaking. Then they are pictured as "rebuild[ing]" a structure with inert materials. Finally these same leaders are viewed as "tapping" (or not tapping) the molten energies of the rank and file. None of these metaphors suggest what any reader of Radical America or C. L. R. James would have expected: the self-organization of workers, the self-emancipation of the working class.
Has Buhle abandoned this project? And if so, why?
SWEENEY HAS BEEN PRESIDENT OF THE AFL- CIO for four years, that is, for a period equal to the first term of a president of the United States. Three or four years ago it may have been appropriate to view him in the context of what seemed to some "possible" (see pp. 16 and 248) or to characterize this or that failing as a "post-Kirkland hangover" (p. 299, n. 84). Surely it is now fair to evaluate him on the basis of what he has or has not done.
Remarkably, Paul Buhle's own list of Sweeney's deficiencies is not a short one. The New Voice, Buhle concedes,
Buhle, I feel sure, also deplores the fact that, notwithstanding rhetoric about "blocking bridges," Sweeney failed to respond to pleas for help from the Detroit newspaper strikers until after the strikers had unconditionally offered to return to work; and is distressed about Sweeney's decision to celebrate Labor Day 1999 by ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
The critical issue is what these deficiencies mean, or to say the same thing in another way, to explain why Paul Buhle and so many others on the Left continue to voice hope in Sweeney despite his demonstrated shortcomings.
AT ONE POINT IN HIS JOURNALISTIC NARRATIVE, Buhle pauses to ask some crucial analytical questions: Why has the American labor movement produced leaders like Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland? What is the explanation for declining union membership and the movement's loss of moral authority? "Was it corruption, poor leadership, conservatism, or something more subtle . . . ?" (p. 201).
His answer is -- in my opinion -- stunningly accurate: "Even had the AFL-CIO been led by progressive, idealistic men and women, it is hard to see how a labor movement committed to the dogmas of business unionism could have avoided the impasse" (p. 202).
The problem then becomes why Paul fails to see where this accurate analysis must lead him when it comes to Sweeney and the New Voice group. Let us concede, as I do, that Sweeney and the men and women around him are progressive and idealistic as compared to the AFL-CIO leaders whom they replaced. It is Buhle's own analysis that requires us to insist that so long as these new leaders are committed to business unionism, the labor movement that they lead will continue to be essentially what it has been up to now, and will continue to "take care of business."
And surely, the New Voice leaders are committed to business unionism: to what labor historian David Brody calls "workplace contractualism," the goal of signing collective bargaining agreements complete with management prerogatives and no- strike clauses; to the dues check-off as the indispensable foundation of union bureaucracies; to quantitative increases in union membership ("union density") as the critical indicator of labor well-being; and to the capitalist system as the inevitable context of all of the above.
Show me anything that Sweeney has said or done inconsistent with the foregoing "dogmas of business unionism."
I believe that Buhle misses the logical consequences of his own analysis, perhaps in part because of several misjudgments.
Buhle exaggerates the causal linkage between an inclusive approach to race, gender and nationality on the one hand, and labor radicalism on the other. He fails to see the possibility of what one might term inclusive business unionism. John L. Lewis illustrates this species of the business union genus. Like Sweeney, Lewis believed in organizing new members but did not believe in union democracy. Like Sweeney (see p. 245), Lewis worked with leftists but only when they implemented his agenda and only so long as it suited him. Like Sweeney, Lewis undermined efforts to create a labor party. And like Sweeney, Lewis reached out to black, foreign-born, and female workers but only to organize them into business unions.
A second consideration that may blind Buhle to the logical consequences of his own analysis is his enthusiasm for top-down institutions like the Organizing Institute (p. 258). Buhle notes that the institute sponsored "student blitzes" and that this organizing style "tended to obscure the difficult problems of establishing and building from a local support base among the workers to be unionized." This bland critique greatly understates the harm done by this blitz organizing.
The objective of such organizing is to increase the number of workers who belong to unions and the amount of dues they pay. Far from consulting workers, devising strategy with them, or otherwise empowering potential union members, the blitz organizer induces workers whom he or she hardly knows to vote for a union the worker has barely met.
Typically the blitz organizer is recruited from a college campus, is trained at a central think tank like the Organizing Institute, and has never labored at the worksite sought to be unionized. He or she is likely to be parachuted into an unknown setting and to check out of the motel the day after the NLRB election, win or lose. The Organizing Institute is an expression of business unionism, not a "hopeful" departure from it.
Finally, Buhle seems not to see the extent to which AFL-CIO unions continue to practice labor imperialism, Sweeney style. In Puerto Rico, for example, AFSCME, SEIU, and CWA are hustling to enroll Puerto Rican members. Sweeneyism in Puerto Rico is reminiscent of what Buhle describes as Gompers's "insist[ence] upon the right to create AFL-style unions" in Puerto Rico and the Philippines (p. 77) or of the attempt by AFL leaders in the late 1930s "to establish their own imperial affiliate in Mexico" (p. 137). Canadian workers showed what they thought of "international" unions headquartered in the United States when they left the UAW. The path to the future is being charted outside the AFL-CIO in horizontal relationships like the "strategic alliance" between Mexico's Frente Autentico del Trabajo and the United Electrical Workers.
WAITING FOR SWEENEY WILL PROVE TO BE A DEAD END. My deepest concern about Taking Care Of Business is that it nurtures the essentially liberal -- not radical -- mindset of suspenseful waiting to see who will be elected leader, and then when that leader has been chosen, to see whether he or she lives up to pre-election promises.
Surely such a scenario is disempowering. It prompts us to look outside ourselves for leadership, and to forget that it is pressure from below that causes the Sweeneys of this world to act. We do not belong bowing and scraping at the door of the throne room. The very last words of Taking Care Of Business affirm that the answer to the problems of the labor movement is "ordinary working people acting as their own leaders." Left intellectuals should be accompanying them in that task.