Rupture or Continuity?

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS OFFERS THE BEST SINGLE-BOOK TREATMENT of the history of the U.S. labor movement yet written. Where most labor historians have counterposed the social and cultural history of working people to the institutional history of trade unions, Paul Buhle interweaves them in order to elucidate the very direction of the development of the labor movement. His framework is driven by his sense of purpose -- to understand why the U.S. labor movement has historically generated and been dominated by conservative leadership. At the center of his argument lies the ever-evolving but ever- present relationship between the institutional labor movement and business within the context of international economic expansion. "America's historic labor bureaucracy is, then, finally and without doubt connected to the creation of empire," he writes in his introduction. "Overlaid with an array of other factors including the character of racial and ethnic hierarchies, the changing rules of industrial production, and, to no small degree, the compelling need of leaderships to put down or co-opt challenges to their authority, the steady commitment to imperial aims has demanded an 'iron triangle' amounting to rules and practices against functioning labor democracy, as well as ferociously anti-socialist and pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric." (p.15)

Buhle uses this framework to organize the stories of not only the Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland leadership cadres, but also to explain the limitations of the internal alternatives represented by John L. Lewis in the 1930s and Walter Reuther in the 1950s and 1960s and the inability of external alternatives like the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, the Socialist Labor Party in the 1890s, and the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s to supplant the hegemonic forces within the labor movement. The result is a clear and compelling argument, richly documented, moving back and forth between the rank-and-file base and the leadership hierarchy. This is useful history, written not only to encourage the labor movement to understand its own history, but to be more effective in the present and the future.

Buhle stops short, however, of employing the very framework of his own creation to the new leadership cadre around John Sweeney, the "New Voice" team that assumed direction of the AFL-CIO in 1995. He enthuses that "the tottering of business unionism's hierarchy in 1995 was one of the most remarkable developments in all of U.S. labor history. It reversed, at least symbolically, the triumphal return of the Gompers machine from its temporary defeat just over a century earlier." (p.204) Rather than subject the Sweeney cadre to the sort of systematic analysis that he accorded the Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland groups, he raises some concerns about the top down character of the palace revolution that brought them to power and he scours the grassroots for other signs of "renewal." At heart he argues that this new leadership represents a break with the past. I wish that this were so, but my reading of recent events and my experience of the labor movement under the "new" leadership suggests far more continuity with the sordid history -- the "tragedy" -- of the past century that Buhle presents and analyzes so well.

I want to devote my contribution to this symposium to raising questions about how we might understand the place of the Sweeney leadership within the history of the AFL- CIO. Two recent events, both of which have occurred since the publication of Taking Care of Business, have probably pained Buhle as much as other progressive labor historians and labor activists. They certainly offer readers additional perspective on Buhle's optimistic interpretation of Sweeney et al. I want to start with a brief mention of them as a way to set a tone, but then I want to turn to a more in-depth discussion of the relationship of the AFL-CIO to a Mexican railroad workers' strike in 1998 and its implications for our understanding of the nature of the Sweeney leadership.

When Lane Kirkland passed away in August 1999, his death was marked not merely with due respect from the Sweeney leadership but with rhetoric so troubling that observers can only wonder how the "New Voice" team understands their relationship to the history presented so critically by Buhle. Was it really necessary for Sweeney to characterize Kirkland as "a warrior for the cause of working families," a "master builder of the modern American labor movement," and "a man of courage who stood for the rights of working people around the globe"? Is this the same man that Buhle describes as "a child not of labor experiences but of inside-the-Beltway policy maneuvers," a man with "no actual, personal history of unionism" (p.205)? That Sweeney's Kirkland bears so little resemblance to Buhle's makes one wonder how much Sweeney's Sweeney compares to Buhle's Sweeney.

Similar concerns are prompted by the other event, which occurred just this past week (mid-October) when Sweeney and the AFL-CIO leadership engineered an early endorsement of Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination. That Sweeney claims that he can organize support for Gore and, at the same time, build an anti-WTO, anti-free trade rally in Seattle suggests that he is the greatest contortionist since Harry Houdini. The truth, sadly, suggests that Sweeney and the AFL-CIO leadership have no intention of building grassroots anti-free trade demonstrations. Local union activists in the Twin Cities are already reporting in mid-October that individual labor organizations and central bodies are scaling back their commitments to send numbers of activists to Seattle in late November. It would appear that Sweeney and the national labor leadership are blowing smoke about their willingness to build a movement against free trade, in part at least, because it might embarrass Al Gore and his political colleagues. Taking Care of Business is replete with similar stories from the annals of the AFL-CIO leadership. There is ample precedent for Sweeney's duplicity on this particular matter.

That this duplicity should come in matters of foreign affairs, in relationship to the expansion of U.S.-based businesses and at the expense of workers both in this country and around the world, should cause alarm for readers of Taking Care of Business since Buhle's central argument is that the insertion of the AFL-CIO into the international agenda of U.S. business since World War II has been the most prominent factor in the incorporation of the labor leadership within corporate hegemony. The labor leadership's Gore/WTO stance indicates, then, not just any continuity with the AFL-CIO's history but continuity with a critical thread.

This brings me to the example that I most want to discuss, one even more troubling for those labor activists and historians who see Sweeney as representing a break with the past. These events did occur before the publication of Taking Care of Business but they receive no consideration in its pages. (For my account of these events, I am relying on articles published in Labor Notes and electronically in the internet newsletter, Mexican Labor News and on personal communications with people who participated in a trip to Mexico to meet with railroad workers or in union gatherings with them in the U.S. I want to be clear that the interpretation of these events and their significance is my own.)

On February 15, 1998, 3,200 railroad workers in Empalme, in the province of Sonora, launched a paro or work stoppage, paralyzing the Pacific North Line, which runs through seventeen states in western and northern Mexico. They were challenging the latest phase in the Mexican government's plan to privatize their state- owned railroad, FERRONALES. Almost a year earlier, the government had sold the Pacific North, a 6,521 kilometer route that services one of the country's major industrial areas -- including key factories owned by Ford, General Motors, and General Electric -- to a new private company called Mexican Railways, or FERROMEX, which includes the U.S.-based Union Pacific as a major investor. These moves on the economic chessboard reflect multiple items on the corporate agenda -- the worldwide privatization of state-owned enterprises; the international expansion of U.S.-based businesses; the integration of transportation systems on a north-south basis so as to facilitate free trade and the outsourcing of manufacturing work to Mexico; increased U.S. access to Mexican markets and labor; the reduction of the social wage earned by workers and the job security and workrule protections that they have struggled for since World War II.

FERROMEX had already informed its workers that it would terminate their labor agreement and only rehire some of them. The workers had good reason to fear the consequences. In 1988, Mexico employed 100,000 railroad workers, but by 1996 that number had fallen to 43,000. In one well-known case, when a consortium including the Kansas City Southern Railroad, bought Mexico's Northeast Railway, it retained only 4,500 out of 8,700 workers, cut crew size from six workers to three, extended the maximum continuous service time from twelve hours to forty [yes, forty), and reduced the union contract from 3,045 clauses to 38. In the wake of the FERROMEX buyout of Pacific North, union sources reported instances of extortion -- workers being told that they could retain their jobs in exchange for payoffs of five to ten thousand pesos ($625 to $1250) -- and the signing of individual personal-service contracts. It was rumored that the new owners intended to rehire only 2,500 out of the railroad's 13,500 workers.

For nearly a year, local unions representing Pacific North workers had fruitlessly tried to negotiate the terms of the transition from state management to private ownership. They received no support from their national union, the Mexican Railroad Workers Union (STFRM), which has long been a creature of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Mexican state. The state, the PRI, and the STFRM have all supported the privatization process. The protections guaranteed workers by Mexican labor laws have been ignored with impunity, while the bottom has dropped out of real wages, benefits have been cut, and job security has been undermined.

Even before the sale of Pacific North, a group of rank-and-file workers and local union leaders had created the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement. At the Committee's head was Salvador Zarco, a skilled shopworker and veteran of the militant student movement of the late 1960s. Zarco had been imprisoned for his role in the 1968 student strike at the University of Mexico, and, when he was released in the early 1970s, had become a railroad shopworker in his native Empalme. His workplace and community roots proved valuable when he and other workers began to organize against the pending privatization of the Pacific North. They launched an aggressive movement, reaching into the community and beyond it. They organized public meetings and protests against the privatization process, and they established relationships with the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent labor federation, the Jesuit Committee for Labor Reflection and Action (CEREAL), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which recently elected Cuahtemoc Cardenas mayor of Mexico City. They had also become part of a local community coalition in Empalme, the Broad Front of Social Organizations (FAOS). In November 1997, the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement and its allies organized a caravan of 2,000 workers; the group traveled throughout the northern and western states, discussing the privatization issue and distributing literature. These activities fostered popular understanding of the issues, but neither they nor the negotiations brought the Pacific North workers any protections.

In mid-February, the Empalme local voted to launch its work stoppage, which was illegal because it had not been called by the official national union or sanctioned by the national labor board. For three weeks, Empalme, the location of the line's repair shops, was the center of a popular movement that united railroad workers from a variety of crafts with telephone workers, miners, teachers, students, Yaqui Indians, community organizations, clergy, and even small-town mayors. The strikers and their supporters moved repair buggies onto the tracks in Empalme, threw switches, and set up a human blockade -- a planton -- on the main track. They also maintained a vigil at the shrine of Santo Judas Tadeo, the saint of miracles, along the main highway. So many participated in prayers at this site that truck traffic in the province was also blocked. All this activity was linked together by the Marcha de la Cazuelas -- the march of the pots and pans -- in which thousands of children marched through Empalme, banging on pots and pans, the "symbols of hunger and unemployment," according to the sixty-six-year-old widow who led them.

Strike leaders also held press conferences and organized demonstrations in Mexico City. They published a newsletter called El Petardo -- The Firecracker -- and distributed it nationally. When the national government responded by handing down felony indictments of the strike's rank-and-file leaders, the strike grew and spread. Other locals in Sonora stopped work, and the state legislature and the governor issued statements supporting the strikers. Workers in the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco held meetings and engaged in sit-ins, demonstrations, and other forms of protest. In Ciudad Juarez, workers met in "permanent assembly," announcing their intent to do so (i.e., to withhold their labor) until FERROMEX promised to rehire all the Pacific North workers. In another community, machinists threatened to "fix" their machines so they wouldn't work unless all the strikers got their jobs back. In the national legislature, congressmen from the opposition parties demanded an investigation into the privatization of the railroads. Executives of U.S. multinationals urged the government to end the strike one way or another so they could get their shipments moving.

The Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement also reached out to U.S. rail workers. Fearing government repression, they thought that intercession by the U.S. labor movement might bring them some protection. They invited U.S. rail unions and activists to bring a delegation to Empalme, and they explored the possibilities of a U.S. speaking tour by Salvador Zarco and other grassroots leaders. Given projects organized in the past decade by other U.S. unions, such as the United Autoworkers (whose St. Paul local has linked up with its counterpart at the Ford plant outside Mexico City), the United Electrical Workers (who have provided valuable support for the FAT, the Authentic Workers Federation and some of its local affiliates), and the Teamsters (who have supported efforts by Mexican Honeywell workers to unionize), and by trans- union organizations, such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, this was not an unrealistic expectation. Some of these projects had even taken root during the Kirkland years, and there were many reasons (well-detailed by Buhle) to expect even more under Sweeney's leadership.

Indeed, the appeal from the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement was well-received in the U.S. Several rail unions and the AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department assembled a team of delegates, including officials, staffers, and rank-and-file rail workers. They invited Dan LaBotz, a veteran activist and editor of the Mexican Labor News, to accompany them as interpreter. They flew to Mexico City, planning to go on to Empalme where they would meet with the strikers and their local leaders. Contacts began to be made across the U.S. for a tour by strike leaders which would follow the U.S. delegation's Mexican trip.

But the trip and its solidaristic goals began to come apart as soon as the delegation landed in Mexico City. There, they were met by none other than Jack Otero, the former director of AIFLD, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, a man who had been named as a CIA operative in James Agee's Inside the Company. Otero had been replaced as director of AIFLD by the Sweeney leadership, which had received much acclaim by progressives -- including Buhle -- for "dismantling" the structures through which the U.S. labor movement had interfered with grassroots union activism outside the U.S. and had funded, trained, and fostered anti-communist (and generally pro-U.S. corporate) union leadership. The new director of international affairs for the AFL-CIO, Barbara Shaillor, and her supporters in progressive organizations and the progressive media, claimed that the likes of Jack Otero had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Clearly, someone had neglected to tell Otero, who now described himself as an "independent contractor" working for the Transportation Trades Department and individual unions to "promote solidarity" with the Mexican labor movement! Otero warned the delegation that the strike leaders were communists who should be avoided and that international labor protocol required that they meet with the national STFRM leadership (who, I should remind readers, had opposed the strike and counselled rail workers to go along with the privatization agenda). Otero also dismissed as propaganda the claims by local activists in Empalme that Victor Morales, the leader of STFRM, was reputed to have had his opponents murdered and disappeared.

Otero's intervention paralyzed the U.S. delegation. After much discussion they opted to visit both the national leadership in Mexico City and the strike leadership in Empalme. The national leadership did announce its official sanction for the strike, and the Mexican government held back from military intervention. FERROMEX offered the strikers some concessions in job security and agreed to sign a formal contract, although it continued to contain the original wage, benefit, and workrule changes. The rank-and-file membership voted to accept the compromise and the strike ended. The AFL-CIO offered to organize a "tour" of the U.S. which would pair Victor Morales and Salvador Zarco (!) and which would be restricted to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. (there are few rail workers based in either city) and Chicago, where they would be taken to a baseball game. Despite requests from activists in the Twin Cities that Minneapolis-St. Paul (a major center for rail worker activism and U.S.-Mexican labor solidarity) be included on the tour, the AFL-CIO refused, expressing concern that activists here would intentionally "embarrass" STFRM President Morales. The tour never took place at all.

Months later, a regional gathering of the United Transportation Union in Houston invited Salvador Zarco to attend and address them. His speech brought the 500 delegates present to their feet time and again, and he spent several late nights sharing experiences with veteran rail labor activists. Unfortunately, this experience has not been repeated by other unions at other gatherings, or by the AFL-CIO or its Transportation Trades Department. The privatization of the Mexican railroads has continued, and Jack Otero continues to broker relationships between U.S. rail unions and their counterparts south of the border.

Where does this leave us? In Taking Care of Business, Buhle offers an insightful analysis of the development of the U.S. labor bureaucracy which explains their conservatism through their position, and the place of U.S. unions, within the project of expanding U.S. corporate interests around the globe. For most of the twentieth century, this strategy has brought higher wages and benefits and special privileges to the largely white male workers represented by those unions and their leaders. The shift in the global economy since the mid-1970s has pulled the rug out from under those relationships. Most U.S. workers have been losing ground for the past two decades, as have workers elsewhere in the world. Real wages have fallen and benefits have been reduced, while work hours, workloads, workplaces, and productivity have increased. Only global labor solidarity offers hope of positive change. Unfortunately, Buhle chose not to examine closely enough whether John Sweeney and the "New Voice" leadership are on a path to build that kind of solidarity. This is not just a question of "will" or "consciousness," as Buhle demonstrates so effectively in his analyses of earlier generations of labor bureaucrats. To respond to these questions requires systematic analysis of the place of the existing unions and the labor leadership within the hierarchy of the U.S. political economy, something that Buhle chose not to provide in Taking Care of Business. As a result, we still need more analysis, an analysis as rigorous and wide-ranging as Buhle's treatment of the Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland regimes. I hope that such analysis will emerge in this symposium and in readers' response to it.

Contents of No. 28