Look, I have no doubt that a lot of unions are run by mobster types who have turned their union into a private fiefdom. I haven't encountered any, but I'm sure they exist.
The main difference among unions these days, however, isn't one of "good" pwogwessive unions and "bad" reactionary ones. It's between unions which have a bureaucratic, top-down method of functioning while nonetheless speaking the language of militancy and unions which are democratically controlled from below by the membership. Jane Slaughter has a terrific term for the former: "militancy without democracy."
The local I worked for was a perfect example of this. Agressive orientation towards organizing the unorganized, making alliances with progressive political and community organizations, and generally casting themselves as the "good guys" in all things. But the union did nothing to empower its membership in meaningful ways, beyond using them as cannon fodder on picket lines and organizing drives. The shop steward's only job is to pick up the phone and call the business agent, who will then take care of things. When contract negotiation time comes around, you have a small "rank-and-file advisory committee" whose job is to basically rubberstamp whatever management and the bureaucracy agree to, and the larger membership, largely passive, votes it up or down (usually up, since the union's internal culture isn't conducive to building the kind of organizational capacity among its members that would allow them to effectively weather a strike).
The fact that you cite the early CIO as a "militant" organizing bureaucracy just proves my point. After initial militancy on the shopfloor, John L. Lewis and Philip Murray took over and told the workers not to worry their pretty little heads about it. When wildcats and quickies broke out on the shopfloor during WWII, union leaders were the most agressive strikebreakers around. As a result, you ended up with a largely passive membership in the era of post-war prosperity, perfectly accustomed to the "union as insurance company" model. By the late 60s and early 70s, an inchoate militancy returned to some of the younger folks in the ranks, but by that point it was too late. The downturn was about to come, rendering militancy ineffective in the face of capitalist retrenchment, and there was nobody to bequeath a "revolutionary continuity" (for lack of a better term) to young shopfloor militants anyway.
Dissent magazine and the social democratic ideas contained therein are rotting your brain, Nathan. Steve Fraser's biography of Sidney Hillman is superb history, but Fraser's views about union democracy are about as fucked up as one can get.
------Original Message------ From: Nathan Newman <nathan.newman at yale.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: June 21, 2000 1:31:23 PM GMT Subject: RE: Two Cheers for Bureaucracy (Re: Where was the Color at A16 in D.C.?
On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Alex LoCascio wrote:
> Nathan, baby, this is incredibly fucking naive. For bureaucracy's
tendency
> to create "vibrant organizational structures," please see:
> Better yet, try actually working for a labor union, then tell me about
> bureaucracy's salutory effects on labor and social movements.
As someone who has been both a staff organizer for a union, an elected executive board member of another union local, and now am employed at the legal department of another, I have full understanding of how fucked up some unions can be versus others. And the difference between a good union and a bad union is not bureaucracy. SOme of the worst unions are personal fiefs where friendly nepotism and good-old-boy personalism make a hash of bureaucratic responsibilities. If you want to throw books around, try reading Weber on the advance of bureaucracy over personalistic organization.
And the most vibrant organizing possible is dependent on strong bureaucracy backing it up. One of the longest strikes of this decade, actually of this century, was the Frontier strike out in Las Vegas (where I was once a staff organizer). For six years, workers walked that picket line and not one crossed it and in the end, the hotel folded and signed the union contract - essentially ending the last major gasp of resistance by the city's hotels (with the MGM making a short run at it). Now no bureaucracy on earth is a substitute for the commitment and militancy that kept that picketline going for six years, but just as truly it took a well developed bureaucracy to keep the strike benefits flowing for all those years, to help those strikers survive, and to keep organizers working out in the field keeping their spirits up.
As true, as various unions mount national and international organizing and negotiation drives, it takes a solid bureaucracy to bring disparate groups together to coordinate strategy, support those efforts with training and research and legal support, and fund long-term efforts to supplement the militancy mounted by various groups.
Of coures, bureaucracy is not a substitute for militancy but it is also not it's enemy, especially not the enemy of effective militancy that needs more than mindless action but requires real coordination.
What is required for effective bureaucracy are effective democratic controls and the subordination of the bureaucracy to elected officials. And it requires militant spirit, strong theoretical analysis and all the other good things required for social revolution.
But a lot of folks mindlessly trash bureaucracy when the real problem is the lack of the latter in a particular group. You can argue that bureaucracy itself kills them, but given the wideranging examples of militant organizing bureaucracies throughout history (from the early Catholic Church to the CIO), it just does not hold water.
-- Nathan Newman
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