{"id":167,"date":"2008-04-29T13:33:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T13:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2008\/04\/29\/after-twelve-years-where-is-that-labor-intellectual-alliance-by-herman-benson-2008\/"},"modified":"2008-04-29T13:33:04","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T13:33:04","slug":"after-twelve-years-where-is-that-labor-intellectual-alliance-by-herman-benson-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2008\/04\/29\/after-twelve-years-where-is-that-labor-intellectual-alliance-by-herman-benson-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"After twelve years: Where is that labor-intellectual alliance? – by Herman Benson (2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThe following piece first appeared in New Politics (Vol. XI, No. 4, Winter 2008). <\/em>
\nCheer leading is not enough. It\u2019s time for those scholars, artists, and writers to take another look at what\u2019s happening in our labor movement.
\nWhen John Sweeney defeated Lane Kirkland and Tom Donahue to take over as president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, he proposed to lead the federation out of its doldrums. What resounded with promise was his call for \u201ca reborn movement of American workers, ready to fight for social and economic justice \u2026 a new progressive voice in American life \u2026changing the direction of American politics \u2026a vibrant social movement, a democratic movement that speaks for all American workers.\u201d
\nSweeney\u2019s program inspired an unusual outpouring of sympathy for the labor movement. Forty-three liberal and radical professionals, mostly from the universities, joined in a public manifesto proclaiming support for the new labor movement. \u201cAs intellectuals, educators, and professionals,\u201d they wrote, \u201cwe want to play our part in helping realize [Sweeney\u2019s] promise.\u201d The 43 were followed by hundreds of others who led pro-union \u201cteach-ins\u201d in universities around the country attended by thousands who came to signify a newly found allegiance to organized labor: students, scholars, historians, civil libertarians, writers, free lance intellectuals, civil rights leaders, along with union staff professionals, labor leaders, and a multitude of reporters. Representatives of most worthy social causes were there. (Only grassroots union dues-payers seemed missing.) In the spirit of the times, new labor-oriented magazines proliferated in the universities.
\nThose who organized the rallies united to create a new organization to cement their unity with organized labor: Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ, affectionately, Sausage). It was a moment of great expectations.
\nThree years later, in \u201cFalling in Love Again? Intellectuals and the labor movement in post-war America,\u201d Nelson Lichtenstein, history professor at the University of Virginia, an author of the 1995 declaration of 43, and a founder of SAWSJ, wrote of \u201cthis alliance between a leftward tilting labor movement and a social democratic intelligentsia,\u201d an alliance that was being consummated after decades of estrangement. He recognized that differences were inevitable. \u201cA certain distance will \u2026 always exist between America\u2019s critical intellectuals and the trade union movement.\u201d Nevertheless, he reflected, it was a \u201chealthy tension from which we can \u2026 \u2018bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old\u2026\u2019.\u201d
\nAfter a few years, the euphoria dulled somewhat; and then along came Andy Stern around 2004.
\nStern, who had replaced Sweeney as president of the big Service Employees International Union, set out to do unto Sweeney what Sweeney had done unto Kirkland and Donahue. Under Sweeney\u2019s stewardship, Stern declared, the AFL-CIO had failed to fulfill its promises; labor continued to decline in numbers and political power. He and his SEIU would lead the way where Sweeney stumbled. When Stern failed to convince a majority of top union leaders that he had an effective plan to rebuild and reorient the labor movement, he led a formidable group of unions out of the AFL-CIO, and along with the Carpenters which had left earlier, he founded a rival federation, the Change to Win Coalition.
\nBut this time, unlike 1995, there was no resounding echo from intellectuals to the renewed call for another crusade. What happened to SAWSJ? It seems to have vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but without fanfare. Apparently, life had become too complicated for mere enthusiasm.
\nFor a group that staked a claim to leadership in reinventing labor and restoring America, Change to Win was an odd multi-coupling, Earlier, three of its major affiliates had been on the Department of Justice\u2019s list of unions most heavily infiltrated by organized crime: the Teamsters, Laborers, and Hotel workers. The Teamsters union is still under active federal monitorship. The former suspect presidents of both the Laborers and Hotel workers, under pressure of law enforcement authorities, had been forced out and replaced by leaders with a reputation for integrity; but neither union experienced any internal reform upsurge. UNITE, another C to W affiliate, defunct as a clothing union, took refuge in a merger with the Hotel Employees. The Carpenters union, even before linking up with Stern, had already reinvented itself as a model of bureaucratic super-centralization.
\nWhile Sweeney\u2019s insurgent rise in the AFL-CIO was greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm by intellectuals who welcomed the opportunity to serve a reinvigorated labor movement, Stern\u2019s emergence as a new kind of leader meets with a muted reception because his promise for Big Change carries a mixed message: On the one hand, his drive to organize immigrants and minorities, the super-exploited of America, inspires a sympathetic response from social-justice liberal and radical intellectuals. On the other hand, his vision of the future labor movement (if you can properly characterize his erratic oscillations as \u201cvision\u201d) evokes puzzlement. It projects a highly bureaucratized top-down labor movement in which the influence of the rank and file is limited. Insulated from democratic control, its leadership is free to move unpredictably. While Stern\u2019s Change to Win delegation in China stands together with the dictatorial government\u2019s sponsored labor organization in a slap at Wal-Mart, Stern stands together with Wal-Mart in the United States, in a joint declaration for a never defined government-sponsored universal health care system.
\nFor unions in the Change to Win coalition, a concentration on organizing low-paid service workers comes naturally. The big industrial and manufacturing unions, which remain in the AFL-CIO, face a crisis of survival. They represent a layer of the working class that had once been reasonably well-paid and secure but now faces cutbacks in wages and jobs, global pressure from low-paid labor, plant closures, and a sharp drop in union membership. But the C to Win unions are concentrated in the expanding service sectors free from foreign competition. The Laborers \u2013 a C to W affiliate — organizes the unskilled section of the construction industry where minorities and immigrants, legal and illegal, can find work. The Carpenters union is reaching out to organize immigrants, documented and undocumented. (See Wall Street Journal12\/15\/05)
\nThe call to organize the unorganized has always been a motherhood affirmation, often proclaimed, seldom achieved. Back in 1961, in \u201cThe Decline of the Labor Movement, and what can be done about it,\u201d Solomon Barkin, issuing an early warning signal, wrote of the need for a \u201ctransformation \u2026as radical as that of the Thirties, when the dominance of the old crafts, with their \u2018aristocrats of labor\u2019 viewpoint, was swept away in a flood of industrial unionism.\u201d \u201cEthnic, color, and religious discrimination within unions must yield before the insistence on equal opportunity for all. Unions must intensify their pressure for economic, social, and political uplift for minorities, with special vigor for our current largest minority, the Negroes.\u201d
\n\u201cThere is no area,\u201d he concluded, \u201cwhere the shift in power and initiative is more urgent than in the field of organization\u2026. Vested rights of national unions must not be allowed to stand in the way of the transcendent interests of the movement as a whole.\u201d Barkin was the prototype intellectual, serving as research director of the Textile Workers Union. His 75-page work was published by the Fund for the Republic\u2019s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. No one seemed to pay attention. For forty years, the downward drift continued.
\nBut now? At last there was a difference. Stern\u2019s SEIU and others in the new coalition actually set out to put words into action. They insisted that the labor movement had to address the needs of those sections of the workforce neglected and most exploited: racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, healthcare workers.
\nIn its concentration upon the most neglected sectors of the working class, in words and deeds, Stern\u2019s appeal resonated among intellectuals, especially those who had criticized the labor movement precisely because they felt it had neglected the most oppressed. Many of those who had come out of the radical student movement of the sixties or were inspired by its tradition, had once looked down with disdain upon the organized working class as a privileged minority whose comfortable status depended upon sharing in the exploitation of the oppressed masses. And now, a labor movement under Stern\u2019s guidance was directing itself precisely toward those oppressed! It was only natural that Stern would begin with the moral support of intellectuals who had responded to the early appeal from Sweeney. He could enroll in his campaign civil rights campaigners and students who had been active in a roster of worthy social causes.
\nBut it turned out that there are more things in the Stern-SEIU philosophy than enrolling the oppressed.
\nStern emphasizes that the labor movement must increase its numbers massively if it is to be taken seriously as a political force. He is determined to get those numbers willy-nilly, not bound by any rigid preconceived rules on how that mass is to be recruited, retained, and deployed. It seems like a variant of an old watchword: peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must; almost anything goes.
\nIf employers resist, Stern\u2019s SEIU will mobilize mass demonstrations, call strikes, and rally support from the community groups like ACORN to pressure them to accept unionization. In the course of those battles, the union usually does more than improve its enrollment statistics; it raises the wages of those immigrants, women, and minorities who serve as underpaid janitors, sweepers, cleaners, and semi-skilled maintenance workers. It is this aspect of life in the SEIU-inspired Change to Win assemblage that has impressed older radicals and has provided young idealists with the opportunity to do something socially useful. But nothing is perfect — there is the other side.
\nFor employers who are willing to cooperate, Stern displays a soft side. If they accept unionization peaceably, he will hold out the hand of cooperation and provide a pliable brand of unionism. As he told reporter Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal, \u201cWe want to find a 21st century new model that is less focused on individual grievances, more focused on industry needs.\u201d That spirit of making unionism acceptable to employers was incorporated into agreements he signed with a West Coast nursing home employers association which agreed to accept the unionization of 42 of its affiliates if the SEIU agreed to stay away from 185 of its nonunion affiliates.
\nStern looks to work with amenable employers to restore union power. On a broader arena, he hopes to join with big business somehow to restore America\u2019s economic position in the world. And not with your ordinary CEO. \u201cMr. Stern told me,\u201d writes Alan Murray in the Wall Street Journal (5\/30\/07), \u201cthat he much prefers working with the buyout kings than with their public company counterparts. \u2018\u00cd\u2019ve been incredibly impressed,\u2019 he said, \u2018Compared with most of my meetings with company CEOs these men\u2026 have much more understanding of what we are trying to accomplish\u2019.\u201d It makes sense. Freewheeling managers of masses of workers and freewheeling managers of masses of capital can understand one another.
\nThis is a man hard to pin down. He is, by turns, militant and acquiescent. He is for \u201csocial change\u201d but in close cooperation with buyout capitalists. He renounces labor\u2019s dependence upon Democrats — which warms the blood of many progressives — but he projects not a rebellious surge toward independence but a willingness to work with Republicans. The element of ideological consistency that holds these contradictory ideas together is some notion of restoring labor\u2019s power, but in concert with cooperating employers. The cement that solidifies his base and enables him to fly off in all directions is good old-fashioned centralized bureaucracy. .
\nConsider Stern\u2019s dismissal of the importance of \u201cindividual grievances.\u201d In a reasonably democratic union, dues paying union members will naturally demand proper attention to their grievances, a concern which may not seem vital to impatient leaders who, remote from the job site, are preoccupied with what they are convinced are bigger things. If job stewards are elected by the rank and file (in an honest count), if local officers are truly dependent on the members because they face the real possibility of organized opposition, they will be sensitive to membership demands and less likely to jump to attention at orders from above. That helps explain why the Stern forces disparage the advocacy of union democracy and rely heavily on appointing officers of huge new locals.
\nStern wrote, \u201cWorkers want\u2026.strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual historical, mythical, democracy.\u201d As Steve Lerner, a Stern braintruster, put it, \u201cConsidering union democracy as only a question of how a union is governed is too narrow\u2026. If only 10% of workers in an industry are unionized, it is impossible to have real union democracy because 90% are excluded.\u201d However, if members must wait for democracy in their unions until democracy permeates industry, they may have to wait forever.
\nTo pursue a flexible maneuverist course, to be free to jump from here to there, Stern would create or recreate the labor movement in the kind of bureaucratic mold that allows the leaders on top to free themselves from interference by the rank and file below and deploy the new union power as they see fit, presumably in the best interests of those oppressed and voiceless masses below awaiting liberation into the future industrial democracy. In that view, industrial democracy appears not as an achievement of democratic unionism but as a far off pie-in-the-sky substitute for it.
\nTo achieve great goals, Stern seems convinced, unions must be bureaucratized. Locals are merged into new huge sprawling units with geographically extensive jurisdiction; and, as permitted by federal law, the officers of these new locals are appointed, not elected. The structure becomes so broad and so complicated that it is difficult for any local-wide caucus, independent of the officialdom, to take shape. The room for rising outside of the power structure is narrowed. It becomes increasingly difficult to achieve any paid position without approval of the top officialdom.
\nMonopoly control over all paid staff is carried to ultimate perfection in the Carpenters union, an affiliate of Change to Win. In that union, no one, appointed or elected, can hold any paid position in the locals or councils without the endorsement of the top Executive Secretary Treasurer of the council. Locals are not permitted to pay their own elected officers. The SEIU has not reached that peak of organizational perfection, but it moves inexorably in that direction.
\nIn June 2006, the SEIU announced that its International Executive Board had decided to merge all 600,000 members in California into a few new mega locals. The decision was to be submitted to a statewide membership referendum. We have heard of show-trials. This was a projected show-referendum. Anyone in a position of authority was required to support the IEB decision; none of them could oppose it. As the directive put it:
\n\u201cAll local unions, union officers, and assigned staff must fully cooperate in the implementation and transition process to assure that this decision is carried out in an orderly fashion\u2026. No union funds, resources or staff may be used to oppose, interfere or undermine in any way the IEB determination in this matter.\u201d We assume that any rank and filers, without office, could use their limited individual resources to campaign against the plan on their free time and try to reach those 600,000 scattered over the whole state.
\nLocal 521, with over 45,000 members is one of those new locals with an appointed, not elected, leadership. (Five two one = five locals into one.) Applicants for appointment to the new executive board must signify their acceptance to an eight-point \u201cCode of Conduct\u201d which in addition to various harmless declarations includes the following: \u201c2. I will not \u2026engage in personal attacks on other members, staff, or leaders at union meetings, in the press, or other literature or venues. I will be mindful that e-mails could become public, and will not disparage other leaders, staff, or members in any such way that could become public either intentionally or not\u2026 3. \u2026Once a decision has been made, I will support that decision to members and others. I am not giving up my right to speak and make my position clear, but as a member of the board or committee, I will support the decision once it has been made. 4. I will not \u2026take \u2026 legal action against the union or its leaders and other committee members for actions they take in their legal role as leaders, as long as I remain a member of this appointed board or committee.\u201d
\nWhere critics are effective in making their case, unload the opponents. In Massachusetts, where the SEIU completed its familiar surgical process of carving up and rejoining the parts of nine locals into one new 13,000-member Local 888, complete with an appointed officialdom, University of Massachusetts employees organized a caucus to campaign for the kind of democratic setup they had enjoyed in their old locals. After a thousand members petitioned the international for the right to elect officers and stewards, the SEIU solved its problem by getting rid of 2,300 of those university employees. They were subtly encouraged to leave the SEIU and join the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
\nAs small locals were merged into large locals and large locals into jumbos, complaints mounted from rank and file activists and local officers of a \u201ctop down\u201d management style by condescending leaders, often appointed from above. But these objections could be discounted as gripes from the usual suspects: from inveterate malcontents or from old-fashioned dreamers who are comfortable only in intimate units and who feel out of place in the newly centralized power machines.
\nBut others began to ask questions. Under the auspices of the Committees of Correspondence a group of two dozen labor activists, a few in the upper ranks of their union hierarchies, met in New York in February 2007 for a full-day discussion on how labor could advance an effective program on health care, immigrants\u2019 rights, and the war in Iraq. This is a group that enthusiastically shares Stern\u2019s emphasis on the need to organize minorities, women and immigrants. Nevertheless even though the subject was not on the agenda some participants, according to an official report on proceedings, expressed misgivings over \u201csome leaders\u201d embracing \u201cpartnerships with employers\u2013 possibly another term for class collaboration.\u201d One union official feared that \u201csome unions which have a militant history are losing their democratic and militant character.\u201d Another \u201caddressed \u2018commandism\u2019 on the left and within labor.\u201d
\nJerry Brown was president of the SEIU\u2019s big New England Health Care Local 1199 and prominent in progressive causes. He is not keen about opening disputes in the labor movement to public scrutiny. In a review of a book by Andy Stern, Brown writes, \u201cMy only caveat about leaving the AFL-CIO was that the dispute was carried out in the pages of the New York Times, on 60 Minutes, etc.\u201d Now retired however, he seems somewhat free, if reluctantly, to mention some of what\u2019s been bothering him. After paying due respect to author Stern, his talents, and his contributions to the movement, Brown speaks his own mind on the key issues where he thinks Stern \u201cgoes off track.\u201d
\nOn partnership with employers: \u201cWhat is not explained is that the most successful efforts are the payoffs for years of struggle, strikes, and other conflicts with employers, conflicts that engaged many members and built strong membership organizations. In contrast, the SEIU recently has entered into cooperative relationships\u201d that deny \u201cemployees many of the basic workplace protections and rights that most traditional union contracts provide.\u201d
\n\u201cUnfortunately, some of these \u2018alliances\u2019 are highlighted by Andy as examples of a new way of thinking about our role and mission.\u201d
\nOn democracy and the rank and file: After paying tribute to Stern for leading \u201crallies, sit downs, marches, and even strikes,\u201d Brown goes on, \u201cUnfortunately, our approaches in other industries does not involve the members at all until\u2026. we deliver the employer some benefit\u2026. We have to ask ourselves if these methods can produce a real democratic workers organization or if it is more likely that they will produce a \u2018membership\u2019 that is as alienated from the union leadership as it is from the employers\u2026. the very antithesis of true rank and file unionism.\u201d
\nOn \u201cconsolidation of unions into ever larger units\u201d: \u201cLarger is often better\u2026. But how do we do this and still have workers make the crucial decisions in their own workplaces\u2026. How do we make sure there is real democracy in choosing and electing union officials? Andy continues to stress the importance of consolidation\u2026. He does not address the necessity of preserving effective democratic processes\u2026.\u201d
\nSummarizing the issues: \u201cWithout a question \u2026discussion and debate should take place at every level of SEIU.\u201d [Extrapolating the advice for the intellectuals, discussion should flow at every level in and around the labor movement.]
\nBut how many troops do these critics have? So far, all these complaints might be ignored by Stern or others impressed by raw power. Rank and filers speak with a small voice; radicals are reduced to strong opinions; Brown has moral force but no continuing clout. But what cannot be shrugged off is an insistent dissent from within the SEIU itself, from the United Healthcare Workers-West, a 140,000-member local in California.
\nAccording to the UHW-W, the SEIU agreement with an association of 284 nursing homes in California was not simply unacceptable; it amounted to \u201ccompany unionism.\u201d By implication, the criticism transcended the immediate issues of the California agreement; and the charge came not from perennial malcontents but from the responsible leaders of a major SEIU affiliate.
\nIn a detailed analysis of the agreement, UHW charged that negotiations had \u201cevolved into a substitute staff-driven process\u201d and \u201ca fundamental lack of membership involvement, running contrary to our constitution and bylaws as well as our standard practice.\u201d According to UHW the agreements banned the right to strike and provided only limited provisions for arbitrating disputes; employers retained the unilateral right to change the economic terms of the agreement; no provisions for paid vacations, holiday, or sick leave; no seniority; strict limits on the number of stewards, undermining \u201cwork site member empowerment and activism in the union.\u201d In summary, according to the UHW, the units created under the agreements \u201cmay come close to becoming \u2026 company unions.\u201d
\nTwenty thousand members signed petitions backing the UHW. The protests were so overwhelming that the SEIU was impelled to backtrack and reject renewal of the agreement. When so many unionists, directly affected, repudiate a key element in Stern\u2019s way, can our labor intellectuals fail to notice?
\nBack in 1995, when that gathering of radical and liberal academics and their thousands of sympathizers rallied for labor \u201cteach-ins\u201d around the country, life seemed simple. No need for intellectuals to over-intellectualize. They responded to Sweeney\u2019s call for change; they offered moral support to the new labor movement; they volunteered services; they helped restore labor\u2019s image as a force for social justice.
\nBut now there are more things than were dreamed of in 1995. Now come Andy Stern, the Teamsters, and Change to Win. They may succeed in building a stronger labor movement. Maybe. That is for the uncertain future. What is certain for the present is that they are already constructing the model of a new labor movement: more bureaucratic, more highly centralized, and more remote from the grassroots than ever before.
\nAt other times, such a trend might have provoked concern from freedom-loving, social justice intellectuals. So far, no. If the future of the SEIU and of our labor movement merits \u201cdiscussion at every level\u201d so does the future of the intellectual-labor alliance.
\nA special dilemma confronts those who were drawn to Stern and the C to W by their experiences in the New Left or out of its tradition. They sought social change through participatory democracy. They turn now to the labor movement, especially to Stern and the SEIU, to find a powerful force for social change. But where, they might ask, is the participatory democracy?
\nWhere do intellectuals fit in? In 1999, with the help of SAWSJ and its affiliated professors, the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute published \u201cFaculty @ Work,\u201d a 74-page letter-size, how-to manual for professionals in the universities who want to help restore workers\u2019 rights to organize. The guide offered a wide-ranging program of activism: classroom inspiration for students, opportunities for internships and jobs in unions, unionization of faculty, blue and white collar staff, and adjunct teachers in universities. Above all, educators could use their prestige to rally community support for union organizing campaigns, and put pressure on anti-union employers.
\nLinda Chavez Thompson, AFL-CIO executive vice president, called upon \u201cfaculty and staff\u201d to join \u201cin making the world a little more humane, fair, tolerant, and equitable.\u201d Sweeney wrote that \u201cSAWSJ, students, and faculty are pumping new life into our movement.\u201d
\nIn the euphoria of those days, little debate was in order; everything would surely work out; labor was newly on the march; it was enough to rally support. But that was ten years ago. Since then, with a split in the labor movement, what was once posed so simply has become complex. Are those SAWSJ enthusiasts to be public relations cheerleaders? Are they to offer their talents as professional technicians? What is their role as independent-minded, critical thinkers?
\nDiscussion on the fit between labor and intellectuals has persisted ever since there has been a labor movement.
\nBack in 1923, along with pamphlets by Scott Nearing, Stuart Chase, Norman Thomas, and Harry Laidler — intellectuals all — the League for Industrial Democracy published a 33-page work by George Soule entitled \u201cThe Intellectual and the Labor Movement.\u201d As a guide to how intellectuals might serve unions, it is remarkably similar in spirit to the AFL-CIO manual 76 later. In his brief introduction, Laidler reminded readers that \u201cmany years ago\u2026 Peter Kropotkin wrote his famous appeal to young \u2018intellectuals\u2019 to cast in their lot with the labor movement.\u201d I remember Kropotkin\u2019s \u201cAppeal to the Young,\u201d — which is still buried somewhere in my library— because, at 16, I found it so inspiring. \u201cThe never-ceasing struggle for truth, justice, and equality,\u201d wrote Kropotkin, \u201c will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.\u201d
\nBut author Soule was not to be diverted into any extended discourse on misty ideals. He was preoccupied with how intellectuals might find practical entry into the labor movement and how they would handle themselves once there. He cautioned, \u201c\u2026the intellectual who has a romantic picture of the labor movement should remember that the rank and file of those who compose it approach it from a different ground and with a somewhat different purpose.\u201d Once the intellectual sheds his illusions, \u201cIn the fields of trained technical assistance labor ought to expect much of the intellectual…. the intellectual can better aid the union by doing his own job well for the union than by trying to do the union\u2019s job for it.\u201d
\nSoule goes on to tell intellectuals, much like the AFL-CIO 76 years later, where they can find opportunities for professional service to unions: teach classes, provide legal, editorial, and accountancy expertise, publicity. Thirteen pages from commentators offer addresses for job opportunities and where to turn if intellectuals want to form their own unions. But in this preoccupation with technical and professional services, something was missing.
\nLabor needs intellectuals; intellectuals need labor. That their interdependence is once again accepted as established truth is one lasting benefit of Sweeney\u2019s rise in 1995. But no need for a union job mart for intellectuals. In the search for a practical niche for intellectuals in and around unions, the danger is that both sides will lose sight of the basic force that binds them together.
\nGus Tyler is an intellectual who was embedded in the labor movement as assistant president to David Dubinsky in the ILGWU. Back in 1973 in the American Federationist he wrote (even while cautioning against exaggerating the power of intellectuals) \u201c\u2026 the anti-establishment intellectuals who can be found on the campus, or in the media, or in social work\u2026. are educated, fairly affluent, articulate, and genuinely influential, they are a meaningful force in shaping public opinion in this country\u2026.\u201d It is that ability to help shape public opinion that makes intellectuals so valuable an ally; they provide a public stamp of moral approval for unionism and thereby reinforce its political and social power in the nation.
\nLiberal and anti-establishment intellectuals share with labor the goal of social change; they want a more just, more democratic, more equalitarian society. The labor movement offers the social power that can transform ideals from dreams into reality. That combination, the power of unions and the aspirations of intellectuals is the basis of their alliance.
\nIn January 1997, the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations invited academics who were in New Orleans for the annual conference of the Industrial Relations Research Association to a discussion on how to participate in \u201crestoring and renewing historic ties between the labor and academic worlds.\u201d In issuing the invitation, Sumner Rosen wrote of \u201c the hunger among students and teachers for a force on the side of economic and social justice with which they could connect.\u201d
\nThe intellectuals\u2019 chief value to the labor movement derives not from their talents as professional technicians or skilled PR writers — unions have been hiring all that kind of help they need— but from their reputation for sharing peoples concerns, for impartiality, for independent-mindedness, wearing no one\u2019s collar. (By jealously defending their \u201ctenure\u201d rights, academics preserve that reputation.) With their endorsement, the labor movement frees itself from the image of a narrow self-interest group and comes forward as a broad people\u2019s movement. That contribution is the intellectuals\u2019 key service to the labor movement; no other group can provide it as effectively.
\nUnions cannot buy that kind of service because once bought, it depreciates. People who suspect the motives of a hired mouthpiece can respect an independent voice. Intellectuals remain a valuable ally only by remaining independent and critical. Once they become kneejerk apologists, their value deteriorates. A successful alliance requires mutual respect: allies working in unison, but freely and independently.
\nThere\u2019s the rub. Can union leaders, always super sensitive to anything that might challenge their authority, even remotely, tolerate intellectuals who feel free to speak their mind. On the other side, will intellectuals, (aware of that depressing quality of labor leadership) refrain from speaking out frankly for fear of losing access to established union power? These questions are posed now precisely because this is a time of rapid change in the labor movement when discussion should be free and frank. There is the opportunity: expansion of union economic and political power. There is the danger: intensified bureaucracy and the suppression of union democracy. These are serious questions.
\nIntellectuals spring to the defense of one of their own against attack from employers. Kate Bronfenbrenner, an academic at Cornell, is one of the most prolific and insightful commentators on our emerging labor movement. Around 1998, she testified at public hearings on a bitter strike at Beverly Enterprises and sharply criticized the nursing home company. Outraged by what it charged was irresponsible meddling by an academic, the company delivered a stinging protest and filed suit against her. Because she was not a tenure-track faculty member at Cornell she was vulnerable; the fear was that the university might buckle under company pressure and invent a pretext to drop her from the rolls. Hundreds of professors, around the country, signed petitions on her behalf. Cornell got the message: it ended by coming to her defense; her job was saved.
\nBut how different the course of events when the need was for protest against pressure from influential labor leaders.
\nIn 1988, after another series of building trades scandals, the Cornell ILR Press published the interim report of the governor\u2019s Organized Crime Task Force on corruption and racketeering in the New York City construction industry. It was a remarkable product. It placed the blame for corruption impartially on crooked employers and union officials; if anything, more on employers: \u201cCorrupt contractors are equally, if not more culpable than corrupt union officials.\u201d It noted that union members themselves were victimized and recorded the efforts of reform leaders to oust racketeers. It pointed to union democracy as an antidote to corruption: \u201cOne possible strategy involves fostering union democracy by assuring workers control over their unions and assisting them in imposing accountability on their union officers. Democratic structures and procedures \u2026can make more likely the election of officials who work on behalf of their members rather than their own self interest.\u201d
\nTwo years later, the task force\u2019s final report was ready, but this time Cornell refused to publish it. High officials of the New York State Federation of Labor had denounced the publication of the earlier interim report. Cornell yielded to the pressure. No outcry of protest from academics, not even a public whisper. The final report had to be published by the NYU Press. (Its author, James Jacobs, is an NYU law professor.)
\n(In some respects, the final report was more remarkable than the first. It concludes with a tribute to union reformers: \u201c\u2026\u2019dissident\u2019 workers in many construction unions are willing to raise their voices against incumbent racketeers\u2026. We conclude by dedicating our Final Report to these courageous men and women whose faith in American values, institutions, and laws has been an inspiration to us during our labors on this project.\u201d P. S. Governor Cuomo postponed publication of the report for many months until an election was over. Then it was released without fanfare, filed, and forgotten.)
\nNo academic protest against Cornell\u2019s cave in? But, one might demur, that was five years before those 43 intellectuals cemented their alliance with labor. Consider then the case of Robert Zieger, who, in 2001 submitted a paper to Labor Heritage, entitled \u201c\u2018Black and White, Unite and Fight\u2019? Race and Labor in American History.\u201d
\nLabor Heritage is a glossy official AFL-CIO magazine that exudes a scholarly aura and makes space available to academics, especially to those who recount great labor struggles of the past canonized by time. Robert Zieger, a labor history professor at the University of Florida, is the author of \u201cThe CIO: 1935-1955,\u201d (a 500-page major work acclaimed as a \u201cclassic\u201d by David Brody) and of \u201cAmerican Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985.\u201d His credentials as acceptable writer for Labor Heritage received an inadvertent boost from Dan Botz who, reviewing Zieger\u2019s CIO book in the Marxist Against the Current, (9-10\/95) criticized him as a labor establishment spokesman. \u201cThis \u2026history is fundamentally an apology for the labor bureaucracy,\u201d wrote Botz.
\nHe had presented his piece, Zieger explains, \u201cto promote dialogue between academics such as myself and men and women active in the labor movement.\u201d It was accepted by Labor Heritage —at first. But to his surprise, some months later, Michael Merrill, director of the George Meany Center, informed him that, in an editorial change of heart, it was rejected. What bothered Merrill was not some individual inadequacy of Zieger\u2019s work but a heretical deviation from what was acceptable to the AFL-CIO. Merrill conceded that it \u201cdoes clearly and concisely present the currently prevailing conventional wisdom within the academic community about the labor movement’s record on race.\u201d But he noted that the paper \u201cdoes not fit with the new editorial direction\u201d and that it \u201cdoes not \u2026give sufficient credit to the diversity of [the labor movement\u2019s] record, especially in the AFL era.\u201d It was a blunt warning to \u201cthe academic community\u201d to toe a politically correct line if they want access. The implication is depressing: if labor\u2019s keepers of the seal cannot permit criticism of its past record, how much more intolerable will they find any frank criticism of its current practice.
\nZieger suggested that fellow academics \u201ctake my sobering experience into account.\u201d They didn\u2019t. There was no petition outcry against this union-imposed censorship.
\nWhat is the role of intellectuals in the new alliance? As hired hands or volunteer professional technicians, their value is minimal. In all their books and articles that abound from university presses, we don\u2019t read much about their practical work out in the field. They don\u2019t go out to organize. They don\u2019t spend time in the union office. They don\u2019t handle grievances. They don\u2019t canvass for votes. Some of their students, while still young and vigorous, may volunteer for the grueling work; but those professors, those academics, are celebrated for their writings and lectures on labor history, on the significance of new trends, estimates of progress, on the broad future of the labor movement as a force for social justice. They can best fulfill a role as labor\u2019s advocate when they also serve as labor\u2019s conscience.
\nBoth sides of this alliance have a problem. Labor leaders want to bask in the glow of support by eminent intellectuals. But, jealous of their power in their unions, they are sensitive to anything that might question it. They set limits; they want unalloyed endorsement, not frank criticism.
\nThose professionals and academics who have answered the union call — in the hundreds or thousands — are convinced that the labor movement, at last, is going their way. They are eager for access to that power. Unions pay tuition fees for union members to attend their classes. They direct their students to unions as paid interns. Unions back their publications. Eminent labor leaders endorse their conferences. Unions finance research projects. To safeguard those connections, which seem so vital to the cause of social justice, they need only to submit to a measure of censorship, preferably self-censorship, which is something that Robert Zieger discovered to his dismay.
\nBut there are flaws in the adjustments so essential to this happy coexistence. If labor leaders insist that intellectuals toe the official line, they risk destroying their credibility
\nas impartial advocates in the public arena. If intellectuals submit to those limitations, they risk losing their soul.
\nAll these overhanging questions arise because Andy Stern, a would-be savior of the working class, is constructing a new labor movement based on ambiguous and contradictory principles: organize the oppressed but insulate union power from the influence of the rank and file.
\nThe rising sector of the labor movement can be aggressive and then compliant; it focuses attention on neglected minorities and then treats them with contempt; it declares independence of the Democrats and seeks arrangements with the Republicans; it hails democracy in industry but derogates democracy in unions.
\nObjections can be anticipated: \u201cWe must be realists, not dreamers. There can be no perfect democracy. Unions must be centralized for battle against a powerfully organized foe. If workers can sometimes be manipulated into unions from above, why not? Sometimes it is necessary to maneuver or compromise or cooperate with employers. If in this dog-eat-dog world all this is necessary to build a stronger labor movement, so be it. Etc., etc.\u201d
\nIt is not merely a question of scrutinizing the validity of the details of Stern\u2019s program or practice. Obviously I have my opinion; others will have theirs. Each move taken by itself may be the cleverest scheme in the world. There have always been persuasive arguments for freewheeling realism, compromise, and opportunism. However, after all is said, intellectuals must ask, \u201cIs this what we had in mind? In this what those Scholars, Artists, and Writers expected when they responded to Sweeney\u2019s call for \u201ca reborn movement of American workers, ready to fight for social and economic justice\u2026a new progressive voice in American life \u2026changing the direction of American politics \u2026a vibrant social movement \u2026 a democratic movement that speaks for all American workers.\u201d In short, what kind of labor movement are we building?
\nIntellectuals are ready to serve the labor movement. But can the labor movement adjust to an alliance with outspoken, independent-minded critics. SAWSJ, where are you when we need you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}