SEPTEMBER 1-15,1999
"Labor Stumbles": CounterPunch Article Stirs the Pot
Back at the start of summer we offered what we called a short history of why a militant labor movement won't come out of Washington HQ [see "Labor Stumbles", June 16-30]. It cited a few lowlights in AFL-CIO Central's organizing initiatives, media maneuvering and self-absorption the last of those also known by some activists as "creeping bureaucratic arrogance".
Our story provoked energetic responses within labor circles, including the AFL-CIO Corporate Affairs Department, whence Josh Mason unburdened himself of the opinion that what labor needs is more bureaucracy, not less. Mason then delivered the astounding disclosure that: "personally, I'm convinced the search for grassroots authenticity is a dead end, at least for labor".
We won't belabor the rest of Mason's bizarre communique. After all, what can you say about a person on staff who repeatedly refers to "Hot Rock" a curious mangling of HOTROC, the raggedy hotel and restaurant organizing project in New Orleans-when he's writing about the building trades organizing project in Las Vegas, actually known as BTOP? But take a moment to consider his conclusion quoted above.
Coming from a man within AFL hq (even if he is low-level) this statement has startled activists in the field. If "grassroots authenticity" is "a dead end", they're asking, then how do you explain:
* the 1989-90 mineworkers' struggle at Pittston, which relied on the extraordinary grit of the rank and file, their efforts at building solidarity with other unionists and with local people in the mining towns (including schoolchildren, who went on sympathy walkouts), and their discipline, despite serious privation.
* the recent victory of 5,000 textile workers at Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, North Carolina, after a twenty-five-year campaign for a union, a campaign that could not have succeeded without a tenacious core of workers within the plant who would not let the organizers (from what eventually became UNITE) walk away from the fight.
* the effort, under way as we go to press, of Overnite workers across the country preparing to strike after going five years without a first contract - five years during which workers who'd voted to join the Teamsters have had to stay together despite the absence of union benefits guaranteed by contract, and despite the firing of hundreds of union activists and leaders, and the commission of more than a thousand unfair labor practices as charged by the NLRB.
All of those struggles, of course, also depended on serious - sometimes, as in the case of the United Mine Workers, heroic commitments from the top. But the UMW would not have wagered its treasury; UNITE (and its previous incarnations) would not have spent years of time and millions of dollars in legal challenges; and the Teamsters (especially under its current retrograde chieftains) would not now be welcoming support troops from Jobs With Justice and labor activists nationwide if all of them did not have the pressure and the commitment of the ranks below. In fact, there's not a union in the country that can mount a successful battle without the wholehearted efforts of the workers-the very thing that gives a union authenticity. That truth is inscribed in the AFL/United Farm Workers' failure in the strawberry fields. the defeat that prompted our initial article.
A word on "bureaucracy". There's a difference between bureaucracy and leadership. The first pretends to speak for workers while in fact nourishing contemptuous opinions about the irrelevancy of the grassroots; the second listens to and represents workers, and recognizes that without the grassroots all its brilliant plans and well-paid lawyers are as nothing. The matter is simple: if you believe "grassroots authenticity" is a dead end, you're saying that ordinary workers aren't capable of struggle; and if they aren't capable of struggle, there can't be a labor movement, only labor institutions. This isn't romantic faith in the spontaneous generation of rank-and-file power; it's called an understanding of the dialectics of everyday struggle and movement building, something that's often missing at 16th Street in Washington (and in the top ranks of international unions) by people who ought never to forget that they survive off the dues paid by workers.
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[the original post]
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 1999 14:55:12 -0400 From: "Josh Mason" <Jmason at aflcio.org>
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