Endorsing the Lean Machine

PAUL BUHLE'S APTLY NAMED Taking Care of Business approaches the question of American business unionism from two angles: the AFL-CIO's relationship to race and to empire. He achieves this with a wealth of detail and clear politics, which I presume other contributors to this symposium will debate. I'll spend my time, instead, on two important facets of the union bureaucracy's politics that Buhle leaves to one side.

Monthly Review Press's jacket calls Taking Care of Business "the first comprehensive history of American labor leadership"; to fulfill that claim, Buhle's focus would have to be broader. Most of his discussion deals with the top leaders of the AFL or the AFL-CIO, but union members experience the phenomenon of bureaucratic and business unionism much more through their own unions than through the Federation. This is because, most importantly, the AFL-CIO itself does not bargain contracts with employers. When companies began demanding givebacks and installing labor- management cooperation programs in the 1980s, Lane Kirkland was not officially in charge of deciding whether the labor movement would accede or would organize members to resist (although one would think the presumed leader of the working class could have given a lead on the question).

Almost to a man (the word is used advisedly), international union leaders did go along with concessions on wages and working conditions, agreeing to them in national contracts, pressuring locals to sign agreements, or providing no support when locals wanted to resist. Again with almost no dissenters at the top levels, they signed on to labor-management cooperation programs such as "team concept" and "Quality of Work Life" that, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, invariably left rank-and-filers disgusted and cynical about the next "flavor of the month." Buhle doesn't address this central fact of unionism in the 1980s and 1990s, because by and large AFL-CIO leaders didn't. The AFL-CIO made no detailed statement on labor-management cooperation until 1994, long after the damage had been done (at which time the Executive Council endorsed such programs).

The second way that union members experience the workings of their Internationals is the response they get when they try to make changes beyond the level of the local union. It is here that they often run into career officials with a staff paid to contain dissent through cooptation or threats. A single example: at the United Auto Workers convention in 1992, a reform caucus called New Directions had put up a presidential candidate, Jerry Tucker. It was clear that Tucker would receive only a small percentage of the delegates' votes (five, it turned out), yet President Owen Bieber found the challenge so insulting that he instructed International Representatives to work the floor to intimidate voters. One delegate from a GM parts plant in Wisconsin was surrounded by these staffers. She had intended to vote for Tucker, but the reps warned that GM might decide to close her plant. Could she live with ruining her members' lives? You may scoff, correctly, at the notion that GM would base its investment decisions on the symbolic action of one union delegate far off in San Diego. But the reps delivered the vote for the man they referred to as their "boss."

This determination to hold on to power in the face of rank and file challenges has been a central facet of the bureaucracy since Gompers's day. Although Buhle makes it clear that he is for "anti-bureaucratic unrest [and] Wobbly manners," the question of democracy within the unions is outside his task. He touches on authoritarianism within the AFL-CIO itself when he mentions Kirkland's attempts to keep city-level central labor councils in line on El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s -- no solidarity with the "wrong" unions in Central America was allowed. And this reader was struck by how faithfully the various bureaucratic maneuvers are repeated over and over from the earliest years. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s reform movements in the UAW campaigned for the right to a direct membership vote for top officers. The ruling Administration Caucus argued against on the grounds that white members would not vote for blacks. Buhle reports that John L. Lewis used this argument in 1919.

SINCE HIS ELECTION IN 1995, JOHN SWEENEY HAS BROKEN WITH THE TRADITION that the head of the AFL-CIO should not lead the labor movement except in foreign affairs. While campaigning, his New Voice Team promised to orient the Federation toward just two priorities -- organizing the unorganized and electoral politics -- and he has done so. He has used moral suasion, financial incentives, and bureaucratic restructuring to convince union leaders to hire more organizers and to follow his lead on electoral work. The 1999 AFL-CIO Convention's decision to endorse Albert Gore more than a year before the 2000 election is one example of Sweeney's success at persuasion.

With Sweeney's two priorities in mind, we can examine how the AFL-CIO and its constituent unions are handling relations with employers. Here, it's helpful to return to Buhle, whose bottom line is that union leaders go wrong when they embrace capitalism, as Gompers, Meany, and Kirkland zealously did. Once they accept the right of capital to exploit labor, the game is set. In contrast, Buhle points to the Knights of Labor and the Wobblies, who "rebutted the claim of capital and government to set the standards for civilization."

At first glance, Sweeney's version of the embrace appears ambivalent. He is clearly willing to wage a fight against employers in order to organize the unorganized. When he was president of the Service Employees (SEIU), that union's Justice for Janitors campaigns often involved mass mobilization of potential members, even civil disobedience. (SEIU is just as happy to win recognition through legislation or by convincing the employer to voluntarily accept the union, as with the recent organizing of 74,000 home nursing aides in Los Angeles.) Once the union is legally recognized, however, Sweeney's and other top leaders' notion of the proper labor-management relationship changes. In an October 1999 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sweeney spelled it out: "We're going to be as militant as is necessary to represent workers, but at the same time we're going to be looking for opportunities to cooperate in labor-management partnerships."

In 1998, for example, Sweeney pursued a formal "dialogue" between corporate executives and union officials, with himself and Jack Welch of General Electric proposed as co-chairs. "Neutron Jack" presides over a company that in 1998 alone made five major plant closings or transfers of work to non-union or Mexican plants, and from 1991 to 1998 shrunk the union share of its U.S. employment from 39 to 25 percent. But Ed Fire, president of GE's largest union, the International Union of Electronic Workers (IUE), cited reasons for Sweeney's and Welch's "mutual respect": "Let's face it: GE made $8.2 billion a year profit. He's got to be doing something right." When he was newly elected, Sweeney appeared before many conclaves of concerned business executives, calling for a "social compact." The argument ran: corporate leaders should realize that recognizing unions is actually in their interest. Partnership with a union, along with a high-wage, high-performance workplace -- in short, "the high road" -- will yield greater productivity, quality, and therefore profits -- a win-win situation. This philosophy in effect rewrites labor's anthem, "Solidarity Forever." Instead of "There is naught we have in common with the greedy parasite," the new song becomes, "There's a lot we have in common..."

In 1996, Sweeney told members of Business for Social Responsibility, "We want to help American business compete in the world and create new wealth for your shareholders and your employees. We want to work with you to bake a larger pie which all Americans can share, and not just argue with you about how to divide the existing pie." With this scenario, there's no need to take from the shareholders to benefit workers.

The problem is that employers are not choosing the low road -- downsizing, using low-wage labor, busting unions -- because they are short-sighted or mismanagers. They do so because the market rewards low-road companies. It's no accident that Wall Street sends stock prices soaring when a company announces layoffs -- fewer workers doing more work. Employers see no point in experimenting with the high-morale strategy when they can gain good results with intimidation, overwork, and insecurity.

An example of a company that follows Sweeney's version of the high road, and thus receives his blessing, is Kaiser Permanente, the huge health maintenance organization. Kaiser might appear to most people to be thoroughly low-road. The HMO has closed hospitals and departments, contracted out care, cut professional staff, and shifted work to non-licensed employees. A federal investigation cited severe deficiencies in Kaiser hospitals in low-income areas; one Kaiser union accused the company of "medical redlining." Despite this anti-worker and anti-patient record, the AFL-CIO announced a partnership with Kaiser in 1997, negotiated by Sweeney himself. The Federation would market Kaiser to unionists, and the company would give workers "input" on quality issues and -- the key clause -- remain neutral in organizing drives. The parties said their aim was to show that "labor-management collaboration produces...market leading competitive performance." It was the first time the Federation had agreed to promote the interests of a specific business on a national basis.

As part of their obligation to promote Kaiser, the unions agreed not to take actions that might damage the company's reputation, such as public opposition to closings or service cuts. Kaiser unionists who had campaigned and struck against cutbacks said the agreement would undermine both the quality of patient care and their ability to fight job loss. It seemed clear that the real prize here was the prospect of tens of thousands of new union members, won without resistance from management.

A remarkable July 1999 document from the Service Employees, titled "The High Road," carries the idea of non-confrontation into organizing campaigns. SEIU polled hospital workers and found, incredibly, that "most do not have negative feelings toward management." Advising staff organizers to avoid "stridency," the union warns: "Don't use words that conjure up images of conflict and struggle, such as power, strength, demand, fight, take on, stand up to, struggle, solidarity, beat, defeat, blame, fault, the 'boss,' union-busting." Do "reassure workers that the conflict ends when the campaign ends."

Let's just say, for a moment, that the SEIU is tactically correct, and that more hospital workers will vote yes with such a bowdlerized campaign. How can they win a decent contract, or build on-the-job organization, if their leaders try to deny them even the words with which to think about solidarity? (In fairness, "The High Road" also contains some sound organizing advice, although it assumes throughout that the brains and strategizing for the campaign come from professional organizers outside the workforce.)

Many observers see the labor movement's new emphasis on organizing as purely positive. They should consider whether unionizing by any means necessary actually advances class struggle. In Detroit, for example, when a new casino came to town, management, seeking to avoid further bad publicity, agreed not to oppose an organizing drive. Four unions negotiated at the international level on how to divide up the casino workforce. "Organizers" approached new-hires outside the workplace to sign cards for the "Detroit Casino Council." Signers did not even know which of the four unions they would belong to. Yes, it's better for these workers to be union members than not, and perhaps they will have the chance to build strong locals in the future (though most were dumped into existing locals). But it's hard to regard them as "organized" yet, in any sense that's meaningful. Dues-payers, of course, they are. Writing in the October 1999 issue of Labor Notes, Hetty Rosenstein, vice- president of a public workers local, says that she is "uncomfortable about what I hear from some new national leaders within the labor movement." She argues for a "mobilized and supportive worksite" where stewards, pickets, family members, signs and buttons are brought to press grievances, which are "microcosms of the labor- management struggle where we contest for power over our working conditions." Sadly, she reports that her friends and colleagues in many unions "are getting less support and resources from their national unions just at the point they expected to be getting more encouragement and support." The reason? The all-out emphasis on organizing new members, at the expense of attention to current ones. "If doing something that really works and builds real power isn't as important as organizing," says Rosenstein, "it is only less so by a matter of degree."

I would argue that it is as important, and that the reason the new AFL-CIO is not interested in on-the-job militancy is not simply because of a temporary decision to prioritize recruitment instead. Leaders' acceptance of capital's right to rule -- which Buhle posits as the first falling domino leading to all their other policies -- causes them to ignore or to acquiesce in management's sweeping changes in the way work is organized. Sometimes with the way eased through participation programs, sometimes by management fiat, workers have been subjected to reengineering, speedup, de- skilling (often called "multiskilling"), quality circles to filch their job knowledge, rigid standardization, increased contracting out, use of part-timers and temporaries, long and non-standard hours, computer monitoring, teams, just-in-time schedules -- in other words, what many call "the lean workplace." Jobs are more regimented, more stressful, with longer hours, than most workers can remember. Yet combatting the new workplace regime does not appear on Sweeney's to-do list, nor on the lists of union presidents.

In fact, Sweeney endorses the lean regime. He gave the Los Angeles Times "U.S. Steel" (which changed its name to USX in the 1980s) as an example of a high-road employer, citing a plant "operating with probably half the work force of 10 years ago." But USX was deemed "high-road" because the company had "invested in" the remaining workers, training them to use computerized equipment or to take other jobs when they were "attrited out."

This lack of understanding of members' life on the job is not new. Top labor leaders have always been more concerned with matters that can be easily measured -- number of cents per hour raise, number of jobs, number of members. What their members actually do for eight -- or ten or twelve -- hours per day does not percolate up very well. Yet the workplace is seeing more change today than at any time since mass production began, and the new AFL-CIO's neglect of or applause for this transformation undermines the Federation's recruitment message.

WORKERS ARE NOT IGNORING LEAN PRODUCTION; resistance to its dictates has been behind some of the notable labor struggles of the nineties: the A.E. Staley workers' revolt against the twelve-hour day; a dozen local strikes at General Motors demanding more bodies on the line, to relieve the speedup; the strike for full- time jobs to replace part-time ones at UPS. With its gently-worded organizing campaign "Voice @ Work" the AFL-CIO won't discover how much anger about insecure and stressful jobs is waiting to be tapped.

The hang-up is that for unions to challenge the dictates of lean production would mean challenging the methods that are wringing more profits out of the workforce. And, given the assumption that unions should make the pie bigger rather than win workers a larger slice, higher profits are the only means that labor leaders can imagine to win Sweeney's other slogan, "America Needs a Raise."

The two stated priorities of the AFL-CIO sum up clearly leaders' perspective on how unions are to increase their power in society: they must increase their numbers, through organizing, and they must elect friendly politicians. But large numbers do not translate automatically into power vis-a-vis the boss; muscle must be flexed in some way. Sweeney's record shows that his plan is not for now-larger unions to challenge employers directly. Unions are to collaborate, as at Kaiser, not confront. How, then, is a larger labor movement to transform itself into a powerful one?

Sweeney's answer is that larger unions will be better able to get out the vote. At the 1997 AFL-CIO convention, Sweeney announced that the Federation would seek to register 4 million members of union households by the year 2000. Jawboning the affiliates for Gore, Sweeney argued that early endorsement would allow the labor movement to help shape the Democratic Party's campaign message. By showing the politicians that labor can put them in office or unelect them, the thinking goes, labor will convince the Democrats to tilt in a pro-labor direction. Pro-labor legislation will then level the playing field in union drives, so that even more new members can be organized.

Thus Sweeney's two-point program hangs together: Workers are to organize, but not to confront the employers on the picket line or in the workplace. They are to become union members so that officers can more readily convince them to vote Democratic, or even better, to go out and work for the Democrats. This is the AFL-CIO strategy for worker power. Of course, with Democrats pushing the WTO, gutting welfare, and seeking to privatize Social Security, Sweeney's boast that his phone banks are turning out a larger percentage of the union-member vote becomes hollow.

Buhle argues that the need for strong class politics is as great as ever. He is not optimistic that the New Voice team will mobilize workers to challenge capital's prerogatives. He notes that the 1995 upset was initiated at the top and writes, "It remained to be seen...how leadership could rebuild the labor movement without tapping vast unreleased energies and hidden talents from below." Taking Care of Business makes crystal clear the consequences of a monopoly of power from above.

Contents of No. 28