Big Labor's Little Problem
by JANE SLAUGHTER
At a "Lean Workplace School" for union members, sponsored by the monthly magazine Labor Notes in 1996, the discussion centered around how to fight employers' speed-up and worker-management cooperation schemes with real unionism. In the middle of it all, a mail handler from Colorado raised his hand and asked simply, "Why are all the internationals so awful?"
Everyone had a story to tell. The participants--from the Service Employees, AFSCME, Auto Workers, building trades--chimed in with a host of cases where the national or international levels of their unions had sided with management and screwed the members. Their answers to the mail handler's question ranged from "individual evil" to "power corrupts" to "money corrupts" to "bigness is bad."
Scholars have generated dozens of books--most of them laudatory--about the semi-unique phenomenon of the business-unionist US labor bureaucracy. Traditionally, they have seen the formation of a professional caste atop the labor movement as a natural and welcome consequence of maturation. As the passion of the early organizing days gives way to the administration of highly technical contracts, the "fervent idealist" and "democrat" give way to the "cold materialist" and "conscious autocrat," in the words of German theorist Robert Michels (who later became a supporter of Mussolini).
Paul Buhle's aptly named Taking Care of Business comes at the question of bureaucracy from the angle of the AFL-CIO's relationship to race and to empire. He argues that early AFL leaders, and some of those to follow, began with the goal of universal emancipation. But sooner or later they settled on a different goal: more money for certain categories of white male workers, enabled by US economic and military power around the world. Buhle calls this approach "cynical expectations to win abroad what has been given away at home." "No other modern empire," he writes, "showed the same capacity to shape... its labor leaders to such uniform purpose.... The steady commitment to imperial aims has demanded...rules and practices against functioning labor democracy."
(complete article at http://www.thenation.com/)