Union Reform/Labor Support

UNION REFORM/LABOR SUPPORT. The aim of varied radicals since the inception of the modern Left—but defined in a bewildering and contradictory number of ways—union reform took on new salience in the post-1960 era of heightened labor bureaucracy and new youthful radical energies. For many among a New Left generation after the decline of the student movement, union reform became a riveting cause; for their successor generations, labor offered one of the few arenas for youthful idealism and an often harsh introduction into the real world.

By 1959, ten years of congressional investigation into labor racketeering brought the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Scattered union reformers faced overwhelming official opposition, but a network of activists began to cohere in the publication Union Democracy in Action. While the New Left proper conducted its activities on campus, often contemptuous of labor traditions, small groups of individual younger radicals joined others in mounting challenges among various unions. In 1970 Jock Yablonski’s leadership of the Miners for Democracy, and his murder at the hands of henchmen of United Mine Workers leaders, dramatized the changing situation: union democracy had become a life-and-death issue.

Here, the New Left diaspora found amenable currents for significant reform campaigns. Some groups, tied to Marxist-Leninist organizations of older or newer vintage, sought to “colonize” and recruit followers, with little apparent effect. Others published independent local newspapers, sometimes aided by established union reformers, around which they built popular if generally short-lived alliances. Groups of both types tended to dissipate after a few years, but individuals within them, now disaffiliated from any particular radical entity, remained vocal and credible advocates from within union ranks. Labor Notes, a Detroit monthly whose lineal predecessors led mostly back to the 1940s Workers Party, became a forum and loose organizational center for shared labor-reform research and information. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, closely allied with Labor Notes, proved the most popular and the most durable of the nationally organized union caucuses. The United Steelworkers reform campaign led by Edward Sadlowski, although short-lived, galvanized much of this energy.

By the later 1970s, the Community-Labor Energy Coalition, pieced together by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) labor figures such as International Association of Machinists president William Winpisinger among others, sought to respond to the “energy crisis” by spawning a proliferation of local labor-consumer groups. In many cities, now aging and long disaffiliated former New Leftists around labor (not infrequently business agents for white-collar, service, and health care trades) helped lead the creation of new labor-support entities. Continuing deindustrialization actually heightened assorted efforts at community coalitions, as around Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio. Of local groups with staying power, the Mill Hunk Herald gathering and the Mon Valley Coalition of Pittsburgh-area activists were outstanding, especially in the democratic production of their occasional magazine and in their good-spirited cultural experimentations in blue-collar life generally. In the long run, the lessening of strikes and the increased sense of job insecurity tended to dampen such coalitions, but not before the Solidarity Day March in Washington in 1982 had rallied a half-million union workers and their friends against “Reaganomics.”

Radicals now renewed a strategy familiar to the pre-1920 socialist movements of passing resolutions, this time against US military involvement in Latin America and especially against the entanglement of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in that effort. Several major unions including the International Association of Machinists, Screen Actors Guild, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and American Federation of Government Employees, recorded themselves as being in opposition to the AFL-CIO leadership on such questions. A landmark if only partial victory suspending AFL support for US policy on Nicaragua in 1987 marked how far labor had come since the nearly solid AFL-CIO official support of the Vietnam engagement less than twenty years earlier.

The collapse of the Kirkland leadership and its replacement by a Left-linked coalition in 1995 seemingly promised a stunning turnaround. As domestic membership sagged and disappointments loomed everywhere, the leaders of a half-dozen unions made clear that Kirkland’s retirement was overdue. This organized opposition, the New Voice slate, grew in substantial part out of a generation of Left-led local reform efforts. Opponents gathered around Service Employees’ president John Sweeney. Ironically, Sweeney’s victory would have been impossible without the Teamsters, whose return to the AFL-CIO Kirkland had helped manage, but whose new leader, Ron Carey, would prove short-lived.

At a generational level, Old Left veterans had been displaced in many categories such as supporters, advisers, and middle-level functionaries of the labor leadership by now middle-aged New Left veterans. During the home stretch of the AFL leadership contest, an exasperated Sweeney joined DSA in response to continual and thoroughly unfounded red-baiting by the Kirkland office. Some of Kirkland’s closest advisers and many of his senior supporters had long operated as officials or advisers of Social Democrats, USA or the Jewish Labor Committee, in either case self-avowed Cold War “social democrats,” most notably opposed to Affirmative Action, Detente, and all criticisms of Israel. Among the new team and its journalistic and academic boosters, membership in DSA had become a mark of measured reformed sentiments.

The victory of a Center-Left coalition had one decisive consequence closely related to this shift: the retirement of International Department officials known for their arch anti-Communism and their close collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency. The appointment of well-known younger Marxists, veterans of the anti-apartheid campaign, and community activists to high office and regional posts further signaled a remarkable change. In yet another historical departure, AFL-CIO officials encouraged and publicly supported in 1997 the formation of a new broad-front political Left support group: Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice. This group sponsored or cooperated in major conferences and events at many colleges and universities over the next several years, raising hopes high. A new generation of students active in the “No Sweat” campaigns around the use of logos, and active in a range of local labor issues, seemed to find support from reform-minded local and national labor officials. Then momentum slowed and stopped, leaving little behind and not even a shell of the SAWSJ.

Consequent withdrawals of major unions from the AFL-CIO, resulting in the formation of the Change to Win coalition, came with promises of labor reforms led by the most aggressive sectors, SEIU and the Hotel and Restaurant Workers. Dashed hopes, fractures in the new body, personal and political quarrels once more soon left nothing behind of the high promises. Major reform challenges by California hospital workers to high-handed procedures of SEIU leadership inspired a reform minded union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, that could not escape its limited origins or provide any example for major, successful union reform.

The new century brought some high notes. The Chicago Teachers Union proved exemplary thanks to Karen Lewis’s victory over AFT candidates. Her role as a public figure and a likely viable candidate against Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended with her illness. Out of this struggle, in part, came major victories of DSA in local Chicago elections. Elsewhere, teachers in and West Virginia, then Kentucky and Oklahoma, went on wildcat strikes for better pay during 2018, in effect actions contrary to union leadership.

Labor’s bureaucratic machinery nevertheless remained largely intact as the membership of unions continued to sag. Exhibiting a certain warmth toward Working Family Party supporters, organized labor remained wedded to the Democratic Party, with uncertain consequences, especially where progressives and socialists challenged centrist Democrats. Labor Notes continued to offer the example of radicals lending most of their energy to base-building and networking that might eventually produce a truly reformed labor movement, revitalized from the bottom up.

Bardacke, Frank. “Watsonville: A Mexican Community on Strike.” In Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s, edited by Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1988.

Buhle, Paul. “Lane Kirkland and the New World Order.” In From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order: Essays on Labor and Culture. New York: Garland Publishers, 1997.

Mann, Eric. Taking on General Motors: A Case Study of the UAW Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, 1988.

Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of U.S. Labor. London: Verso, 1988.