<< Maybe somethings have changed since the days of Marx, but the role of unions seems about the same as ever. >>
If only that were so! Our tasks would be much, much easier to identify and carry out.
Many years ago I grappled with the problem of profound changes in the unions. Here is an excerpt from my 24-year-old Southern Conference Educational Fund article, "The American Labor Movement in 1974: Problems and Perspectives for the Left":
[Following a summary of published explanations for union membership decline during a period when strike activity had reached a 50-year peak . . .]
"All of the above factors are important, and help to explain the contradiction. But there is another factor which has received practically no attention, one which signals the onset of a new stage in the history of American trade-unionism. It developed gradually and quietly, but has finally matured.
"In the past, no matter how strong the conservative pressures became, the simple equations of dollars-and-cents business unionism forced unions, albeit reluctantly, to act like unions. In other words, no members equals no dues. No dues, no power. And so on. That explains why the CIO, even as it entered a period of decline, made a feeble attempt to organize the South, and why certain unions still do.
"In 1970, the assets of the American labor movement totaled more than $2 billion. Only a small handful of the world's largest corporations are that wealthy. (And control of that wealth is distributed about as equitably among trade unionists as the control of General Motors' wealth is distributed among stockholders.) Furthermore liabilities total only 10 percent of assets.
"(I have thought about this often, particularly when members of the United Steel Workers tell me how their union is trying to persuade them to end a strike and get back to work in order to end the 'drain' on the treasury -- the $10 weekly strike benefit.)
"But something else happened in 1970, a new plateau for the labor movement. For the first time ever, a majority of the income received by national and international unions came from profits on investments -- stock and bond dividends, interest on loans and bank deposits, rent on real estate holdings, etc. (The total was approximately $700 million, while income from dues or per capita tax, fees, fines, and assessments came to little over $675 million.)
"So unions don't have to have members any more, and investing the union's assets in securities actually brings in more profit than investing in organizing, for the first time in history. Actually, members are more expensive to have than it seems, since about half of the money they pay in (approximately $333 million in 1970) gets returned in the form of benefits from the national and international unions whereas none of the other does."
Today in 1998 I have chosen this one-sided excerpt for effect, from a more balanced and descriptive six-page single-spaced handout/talk presented to a South-wide labor organizers' conference. I wrote the analysis after having spent every month for the previous three years traveling from picket line to union hall in every Deep South state, from the five-state strike centered at Laurel, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama, against all the pulp and paper trusts; to citrus pickers and sugar cane cutters in Belle Glade, Florida; to the Farah plant at El Paso, Texas; to U.S. Steel workers in Fairfield, Alabama, and Louisville, Mississippi; to semi-trailer builders at Dothan, Alabama, to dock hands at Burnside, Louisiana; to the Mead plant in Atlanta; to poultry packers at Forest, Mississippi; to furniture workers in Panama City and General Electric workers in Tallahassee, Florida; to Del Monte workers in Crystal City, Texas, and dozens of others. My perspective at the time was optimistic, as was that of nearly every radical organizer in the South, based on the tremendous eruption of working-class self-activity. But everyone's party-line formula for dealing with unions had fallen flat, whether "boring- from-within" or "dual-unionist" (as nearly everyone refought the previous sectarian sideshow of the class war). These statistical observations reflected my personal attempt to understand the underlying cause of the dilemma, and to share it with my fellow organizers and comrades. To me, it was a perfect example of quantity becoming quality, of a category becoming its opposite. Evidently others agreed, because the article was widely reprinted, first in the National Lawyers Guild's Labor Newsletter, and from there in many other radical organizers' discussion bulletins. The editors of Monthly Review asked me to rewrite it for them in more academic style, which I regret I never found time to do.
The numbers came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics office in Atlanta. I have never returned to the BLS for an update. Perhaps Doug can enlighten us on the past three decades' worth of figures, and how they might require modification of my evaluation.
Any Marxist who fails to heed such major transformations is seriously challenged theoretically, whatever his or her credential or affiliation may be.
A separate but important auxiliary point was the theme of my 1973 SCEF talk/transcript, "The Roots of Class Struggle in the South," later reprinted in Radical America and by New England Free Press:
[following a summary of antebellum union struggles in the South, and their often disappointing results . . .]
"And this brings us to the point that's the big problem in studying labor history as union history, which is that the bulk of the work force of the South was not free white workers but was African slaves who were working on plantations. And they weren't allowed to unionize legally. Nonetheless, the strike, which was not a very powerful tool in the hands of white workers -- who could be threatened and replaced by black slaves -- the strike was a very important weapon which was used very effectively by slaves. And throughout the period in the 20 or 30 years before the Civil War, there were slave strikes over and over again . . . [examples] . . . there's no question in my mind that it was the most significant, and certainly the most victorious, kind of struggle going on among the working people of the South at the time."
See also my Deep South People's History Project pamphlet, "Mississippi's First Labor Union" (about the 18656 strike of the freshly emancipated Washerwomen of Jackson) for the difference between class struggle and organized labor. Phil Foner borrowed the documentation of that struggle from me to reprint in one of his books.
Ken Lawrence