Rethinking labor’s history and future

Writing recently in the London Guardian, Madeleine Bunting commented:tt t “Sit in a busy sandwich bar in any British city at lunchtime and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. Rather than fevered discussion about the election, the subject is far more likely to be office politics. While the plots and characters vary, the dominant themes don’t: the small injustices – the arbitrary, capricious exercise of boss power – and the wasting of time. The interplay of these conversations is deeply familiar: anxiety and a sense of grievance is met with sympathy and (perhaps) reassurance. And underlying it, accepted by both listener and speaker, is their complete powerlessness. The absurdity of some of these office dramas can only be likened to the court of an absolute monarch: a Louis XIV handing out goodies to his favorites, who run their fiefdoms with comparable patronage.”

Such conversations are repeated in spades across lunchrooms and dinner tables in the United States. Yet, as in England, U.S. labor unions are often regarded as even worse than the grievances they were once asked to redress. Union membership peaked 50 years ago and has been in steady decline ever since.

Many business leaders and their right-wing allies regard unions as obsolete, relics of an outdated class war. Union leaders respond that unions are dying because corporate employers and right-wing governments have decided they no longer need unions and have been willing to take any steps necessary, legal or not, to destroy them.

Union leaders’ accusations surely have elements of truth. Nonetheless, as North Berwick labor organizer and scholar Peter Kellman points out in “Divided We Fall” (The Apex Press), shortsighted union tactics and an insufficient strategic vision have played a role in their travails.

Unions have been far more successful when they deeply valued and expressed working-class solidarity. Kellman reminds us that at the same time (late 1980s) the union at International Paper (IP) was losing the most bitter strike in Maine history, United Mine Workers members at West Virginia’s Pittston Coal took on the corporation and won. These UMW members were heirs of a militant labor tradition going back to John L. Lewis. Like Lewis, they relied on sitdown strikes to rally community support. In addition, the union leadership, elected directly by its members, solicited assistance from workers all over the country.

In the Maine IP strike, however, the national union leadership was unwilling to encourage sympathy strikes at other IP facilities or a boycott of IP products. It feared alienating a company with whom it still had contracts at other locations. Yet, as Kellman points out, leadership’s quiescence was tantamount to letting a shark bite off your arm in the hopes it won’t take the rest of you later.

Ever since the New Deal, labor has relied on the kindness of strangers. It counts on government to hold free and fair union representation elections, but these elections are loaded against workers from the start. Even when corporations obey the letter of the law, they are free to advance the company message on company time. Workers are obligated to attend. Worse still, labor law makes the hiring of so- called replacement workers legal. The right to strike has become little more than the right to quit one’s job.

Government has played a major role in kicking labor in the teeth. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Law outlaws sympathy strikes, even though U.S. corporations enjoy the right to use other branch plants to replace production from plants idled by strikes, thereby whipsawing workers. Taft-Hartley also removes control of union pension funds from unions, thereby depriving them of another right that corporations enjoy, the right to deploy their capital to advance their own economic and political ends.

Labor needs a reinvigorated democratic ideal. Kellman recognizes that the most enduring forms of worker solidarity are not imposed but are rather the product of democratic debate among workers themselves. Debate is necessary both to energize workers and to expose the limits to prevailing policies and agendas. Unions can fall prey not merely to self-defeating forms of collaboration with authoritarian managements but also to internal discrimination based on race, gender and sexual orientation. Unions can build community support most effectively when they are democratic, nondiscriminatory and responsive to broad community needs.

A democratic labor movement does not mean government management of the workplace. Rather it is an assertion by workers of their right to free expression and a voice in day to day union and corporate affairs. There is ample evidence both that workers still want this and also that businesses can be at least as productive when they treat workers fairly. Toward this end, the kind of civil disobedience that characterized the civil right movement – including boycotts and sympathy strikes – remains both right and appropriate.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net