Labor's Overbearing Bureaucracies
Unions must deal with their own "900-pound gorilla"
by Charles Walker
During a national AFL-CIO organizing summit in January, president John
Sweeney called on more than 200 union officers and organizers to:
"Show us how to change the way we organize. Show us how to take our
struggles public...how to organize our own members to bring change...how
to outwit and outmaneuver the consultants...how to organize within, over
and around the law...how to begin changing the law."
Sweeney knows that organized labor is in crisis and may be fast
approaching a point of no return. Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell
University labor educator says, "Today unions are not even standing
still--they are rapidly slipping backwards" (Labor Notes, Jan '03).
Meanwhile, as union strength declines, workers' fortunes have fallen.
If today's workers received the same proportion of the gross domestic
product they once did, they would have several hundred billions of
dollars more in their paychecks.
Not surprisingly, the assembled officers and staff responded to
Sweeney's call with an abundance of ideas and plans. Not surprisingly,
none of the ideas and plans was new, or especially radical. Once
again, organized labor was urged to connect with community groups and
to demand that "friends of labor" politicians in the Democratic Party
actually come to the defense of workers. Someone suggested that unions
try to win members' loyalty by becoming more involved in shop floor
beefs.
Organized labor has been talking about its decline for several decades
now. In fact, Sweeney and his "New Voice" slate were elected to turn
things around, to give organized labor a new direction. Unfortunately,
for both organized and unorganized labor, Sweeney has not been able to
keep up with membership attrition, let alone make gains.
Sweeney rightly blames harsh anti-union laws for crippling organized
labor's ability to raise its numbers. What he doesn't say is that
organized labor should take a page out of its own history and emulate
the winning strategies of labor leaders of the 1930s. The best of
those leaders did not just denounce the anti-labor legislation--they
defied it.
Millions of American workers in the 1930s defied corporate property
laws when they joined "sit-downs" at their work places. Their defiance
of anti-labor laws helped unions organize nearly 35 percent of the
labor force. Many of the notable labor victories of the 1930s and
40s--strong union hiring halls, shop floor controls over the pace of
work and restrictions on forced overtime--have since been sold back to
the bosses by union officialdom. Just recently, AFL-CIO's Richard
Trumka oversaw a settlement for the West Coast dockers that failed to
defend their right to strike.
Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Thomas Geoghegan
(Which Side Are You On?), a pair of labor partisans, recently opined,
"We have no chance--for now--of reforming the labor laws that make
organizing so difficult.... Not in this Congress. Nor the next. Or
probably the next." (Nation Dec. 23, '02) If Ehrenreich and Geoghegan
are right that unions cannot expect help from the politicians to
overturn the anti-labor laws, and if Sweeney refuses to lead strikes
in defiance of anti-labor laws, then either Sweeney and company must
be pushed aside, or workers can forget about turning back the
anti-labor tide that is driving down their living standards.
The problem with organized labor is an in-house problem, a problem one
union activist calls the "900-pound gorilla" (Labor Notes, Jan '03).
No one at the Sweeney summit was talking about this gorilla, what
Ehrenreich and Geoghegan call the "overbearing bureaucracies" of
organized labor. Would-be union reformers, some of whom recognize that
organized labor is weighed down by an officialdom out-of-touch with
the ranks, seem to be unaware of just how profoundly bureaucratized
organized labor is.
The labor movement can no longer wait for the bureaucracy to clean up
its act, to begin its own self-reform. The overriding task always is
to organize, yes. But the gear that will turn the larger gear needs to
be organized first. In other words, today's challenge for union
reformers is to organize themselves and the ranks for a real
bottoms-up shake-up of organized labor.
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