Business Unionism Still Rules

PAUL BUHLE'S Taking Care of Business is more than a lively look at labor's living dead, Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland; it is an important piece of the puzzle of a labor federation almost unique in the world in its 100- year embrace of capitalism, its purposeful use and lingering tolerance of racism, and its enthusiastic enlistment in American capital's imperial project from the Spanish- American War through the bombing of Yugoslavia. I say the "living dead" because although with the death of Lane Kirkland in August all three are dead, the weight of their reign lives on in countless visible and invisible ways.

Buhle's book is particularly valuable because it offers a political history of the struggle over the decades that produced business unionism as we know it today. Particularly in the Gompers era, when the opposition was both larger and more socialist in character, we can see the triumph of business unionism not as some inevitable process of maturation, but as the conflict of human actors at all levels of the movement -- albeit in shifting economic and political settings that often favor the "pure and simple" unionists. Alternative directions, however, arise again and again in varying degrees: mightily in the 1930s with the CIO, promisingly in the late 1960s with organizations like DRUM and in the wildcat strikes, and again in our own time with rank and file groups like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (and many others) and finally the 1995 victory of the "New Voice" slate.

Of course, Buhle is writing history, and the outcome by the mid-1990s was not much in doubt: business unionism still rules and, indeed, penetrates deeply into the fiber of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates. To the central question of how business unionism triumphed not only once, under Gompers, but over and over, Buhle offers three major answers: the labor leadership's embrace of racism, imperialism, and capitalist politics in the form of the Democratic Party. All three are, of course, intimately related in the history of the working class in the U.S. In fact, the embrace of American capitalism requires at least the tolerance of all three. And embrace it they did.

While Taking Care of Business is more an historical narrative than a theory, Buhle strongly implies a causal relationship. The development of a racial form of craft unionism based on market control and exclusion, the enlistment in American capital's imperial project at least from the Spanish-American War on, and the covert/overt alliance with the Democratic Party (itself a carrier of both racism and imperialism) all called for the bureaucratic insulation of leaders who now devoted time, effort, and resources to things their "pure and simple unionism" appeared to consider unimportant.

As Buhle shows, these kinds of activities, conducted as they were within range of the real centers of power in the U.S., became increasingly how the AFL and then the AFL-CIO defined their function within the broader labor movement. It was not the general staff of some industrial army, the coordinator of centralized bargaining, or the ideological partner of some left-of-center working class party. Instead, it was the champion of U.S. capital in the struggle with rival capitals and later a rival social system.

It could, until recently, imagine that this alliance with U.S. capital at home and abroad and even its acceptance of its unequal class and racial structure cleared the way to successful collective bargaining. Its relative success in bargaining in the years after World War II only reinforced the link between the prosperity of the unionized minority and that of U.S. business worldwide in the minds of the Meanys and Kirklands. In a fanatically anti-Communist inversion of Lenin's theory of imperialism, their view of the world brought with it the illusion of influence and the increasing distance from the practice of unionism on the ground. Buhle chronicles this and the incredible sleaze and global immorality that flowed from it extremely well.

HOW, THEN, DOES BUHLE PROPOSE TO GET US OUT OF THIS MESS? To his credit Buhle avoids the temptation of presenting John Sweeney and the "New Voice" leaders as the saviors of the American working class after the dark ages of the Kirkland years. To be sure, Buhle sees the new AFL-CIO leadership as more alive, more genuinely concerned with growth, and more open to the left -- or some of the left. But he also recognizes that "the distance between the bureaucracy and ordinary union members has not been significantly lessened, nor has the historic dependence upon the Democrats been reconsidered." But if salvation is not to come from above, the conclusion of Taking Care of Business is not altogether clear about how the major changes needed to make organized labor a force for social change once again will come about.

The concluding chapter presents a collection of many of the "good things" going on in today's unions as indicators of a better future. Few have much to do with the "New Voice" team and many predate it in their origins, as Buhle points out. Still, there is no alternative picture -- only some pieces of the puzzle yet to be assembled, with others missing. Nor is it clear why some examples are chosen and others not. While Buhle clearly sees change coming from well below the heights of the AFL-CIO, we are left asking if a simple accumulation of "good things" at various levels is enough to undo the century of bureaucracy, racism, and inertia we have just read about.

Of course, no author is required to hand us the answer or predict the next rank- and-file upheaval. But more attention to and analysis of the various insurgent movements inside and around the unions might have given a clearer sense of the direction of the democratic, demographic, and political changes American labor so badly needs. There is, after all, much to be learned from the limited successes and even the more frequent failures of past and present efforts to move American unionism in a different, more democratic, inclusive, and progressive direction. A deeper look at some of the major rank and file movements like the Miners for Democracy and Teamsters for a Democratic Union, both mentioned favorably but scarcely examined as possible alternatives, and the handful of smaller, more democratic, politically independent, and socially-minded unions like the UE, the former OCAW (now part of PACE) or the ILWU would have offered a clearer way out of the business union mess.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, Taking Care of Business is a first- class piece of work and a lively look at many of U.S. labor's deadliest flaws and most lifeless leaders.

Contents of No. 28