I've seen 'em come and I've seen 'em go, If you knew, what I know, You would piss your pants,
Tell your Dad, I said hello.
Sincerely and fraternally,
Tom Lehman
Josh Mason wrote:
> Tom Lehman described a CounterPunch article as:
>
> >The best analysis of the current situation I've read from outside the
> >ranks of organized labor...
>
> Yes, that piece has been getting passed around and discussed here in
> the Corporate Affairs Department, with generally positive responses. I
> think it's on target as far as the Coastal Berries campaign goes. One
> thing I would add is that people I've talked to who spent time there
> emphasized that while the "Committee" was getting financial support from
> other growers, it did enjoy real support from a lot of the
> workers--there'd been a hiatus (not to say a failure) in UFW organizing
> work.
>
> The only factual quibble I have is with the claim that Richard
> Bensinger's "tenure as organizing director was marked by ... recruiting
> college students with no real experience as workers into the AFL's
> Organizing Institute." This isn't exactly false, but it's important to
> recognize that this approach had already been abandoned well before
> Bensinger left. For the last few years, at least 75 percent of the
> people entering the OI have come straight from the locals, and the
> number of college kids actually making it through the program and
> becoming organizers has been close to zero.
>
> I have a more serious problem with the conclusion, which blames the
> AFL's Organizing Department for labor's organizing failures; the
> department has "never been able to draw up a clear, bold, focused
> strategy and stick with it." A revived labor movement depends on greater
> decentralization and a shift in initiative to the locals and labor
> councils, which "struggle along, most of them with little money and less
> staff, to make something happen at the roots. They have victories that
> no one reports and that get little support from Washington because they
> don't reflect glory on the HQ staff. ... The hope for movement rests
> only with them-and with the links they can make with close-to-the-ground
> fighters beyond organized labor-just as it always has."
>
> This is the conventional left line on labor, and in my view it's dead
> wrong.
>
> Look, the American labor movement is already one of the most
> decentralized organizations on Earth. If shifting resources and activity
> closer to the ground, to the "grassroots," were the answer, we'd be
> winning every fight. The dominant fact about labor isn't stifling
> bureaucracy and a lack of local initiative but the exact opposite. All
> the initiative is local, and bureaucracy (as opposed to patronage jobs)
> is practically nonexistent.
>
> This localism is arguably labor's biggest problem, since it rules out
> any kind of "clear, bold, focused strategy" at a national level, and
> creates obstacles for union democracy as well.
>
> Very few local unions, and fewer labor councils, are "struggling to
> make something happen"; the good ones are representing their membership,
> and the bad ones, well.... And even if they are, is it enough just "to
> make something happen," or do you need a strategy as to *what* you want
> to happen, and the ability to systematically carry it out? If the
> latter, a bureaucracy might be helpful.
>
> Throughout the labor movement, there are plenty of smart people who not
> only agree with much of what they read in articles like this one or in
> places like Labor Notes, but may have given, dare I say, a little more
> thought than Alexander Cockburn or Jeff St. Clair (or even JoAnn
> Wypijewski, whose hand I detect in this article) to what labor needs to
> do to get back on its feet. The problem is, no matter what the analysis,
> there's simply no capacity to act on it.
>
> What have been organizing priorities at the AFL-CIO recently?
>
> --The strawberry workers campaign.
>
> --A campaign to organize southern poultry processors.
>
> --The "Hot Rock" joint organizing campaign between the building trades
> in Las Vegas.
>
> --The campaign at the Avondale shipyard mentioned in the CounterPunch
> piece.
>
> --A campaign to organize the service and maintenance workers (almost
> all temps) at Los Angeles International Airport.
>
> --The auto parts industry.
>
> --Joint organizing by the Machinists, the UAW and the Steelworkers
> (currently just in Wisconsin) looking toward their eventual merger.
>
> Anyone here disagree with those priorities? The thing is, almost every
> one of these campaigns has been frustrated by disinterest or active
> resistance at the local level--because they require local leaders to
> give up some of their privileges, because many locals refuse to take any
> kind of direction from the center, because they don't have the stomach
> for organizing, or because of old-fashioned racism. (Except for the last
> two, every one of those campaigns involves predominantly non-white
> workers.)
>
> Hot Rock was very successful, but the trades shut it down--ostensibly
> they didn't like paying for it, which I'm sure is true, but the idea of
> joint organizing also runs against a very strong tradition of local
> autonomy, and the new workers being brought in were mostly Latino
> (especially roofers) in what had been largely white unions. Poultry is a
> similar story--the campaign was dropped precisely because UFCW works the
> way CounterPunch thinks all unions ought to--with all the action in the
> locals and no direction from the center. The center saw the strategic
> value of the industry, and was happy to sign up the black and Latina
> women who work in it. The locals--with their base of mostly white
> grocery store employees--did not and were not.
>
> I could tell plenty more of these stories, but the point would be the
> same: localism and decentralization are the biggest enemy of organizing,
> of coherent strategy and of democracy. (The Coastal Berries campaign
> itself also supports this point, if you think about it.) Why
> the-left-such-as-it-is insists otherwise is an interesting question, but
> personally I'm convinced the search for grassroots authenticity is a
> dead end, at least for labor.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Josh
>
>