>On Behalf Of Rakesh Bhandari
>
> Nathan, you mentioned that you had read the recent New Politics issue in
> which Jane Slaughter contributes some detailed criticism of Sweeney's
> accomplishments. I would appreciate your reply.
Since I read through the whole series of essays relatively quickly (at the bookstore), I don't remember her points specifically, so you'd have to cite the ones that most interested you.
There are the obvious areas where Sweeney has failed to make big reforms, notably in areas of union democracy which Slaughter is most concerned about. My view on that has always been that criticizing the union leadership for protecting their own power is a bit like complaining about the rain-- self-protection of power is pretty inevitable. Thomas Geoghegan, a lawyer who has spent much of his career suing labor leaders on behalf of dissidents, has a semi-sympathetic analysis of this in his view of the "fear of falling" endemic among labor leaders who get off the shopfloor through union politics.
Fighting for union democracy is, then, one of the most important tasks of the left in the union movement, which is why, despite other political disagreements, I admire and applaud the work of folks like Slaughter, Moody and other LaborNotes/TDU et al activists who serve labor democracy every day of their lives.
Where I disagree with them is in their inevitable linking of that anti-democracy nature of union officials to a set political agenda, since from Stalinists to Trotskyists to Gomperists, stomping opposition has always been popular among elected union leaders.
Slaughter's other major criticism of Sweeney is that while labor folks are militant in organizing, they give into class cooperation and "teamwork" when negotiating contracts. I think it was Slaughter who cited the Kaiser agreement as an example. First, as the keystone of indictment against Sweeney, the Kaiser deal is an interesting one, since it is with a nonprofit, so the class politics of compromise are a bit more complicated. It's also tangled up in some nasty feuding between SEIU 250 and the California Nurses Association (both of which deserve serious criticism for poor judgement and flatout childish feuding between their leaders).
But in substance, many of the more dramatic "cooperation" deals are not the traditional concessionary agreements that LaborNotes folks condemned in the 1980s and where they cut their teeth in criticizing team contracts. They are "negotiating to organize" where some degree of concessions are given in exchange for greater ability to organize the rest of the company's workforce and, through increasing union density, take on its rivals. CWA and HERE have probably done this most effectively, while other unions like SEIU are increasingly using it as a model. And this is not done somehow behind workers backs. When I was an organizer in Las Vegas back in 1988 and HERE was first beginning this strategy, I saw John Wilhelm (now HERE President) address a room of a 1000 union activists from the local where he put up a graph of declining union density in the city, said that if the union did not organize it would be in trouble, so the proposed bargaining strategy was to trade off job descriptions and create some degree of "flexibility" for employers in exchange for card-check agreements to assist organizing at new hotels. The results have been a doubling of union membership in right-to-work Nevada and very good contracts, all with a militancy of action that belies much of the flat description Slaughter and Moody sometimes make.
This goes to the heart of my problems with the LaborNotes folks-- they have incisive criticism of lack of democracy in unions and how they should be ideally run, but they are really theoretically and programmatically weak on organizing strategies. I find the average bull session at a good organizing local far more interesting on the subject than anything I read in their criticisms when they turn from their core democracy issues to organizing. Unfortunately, their criticism is a great "loyal opposition" check on abuse, but they don't really have a good program for what they would do radically different if they actually were in charge. Which is at least one reason why Carey and TDU had trouble holding back the Hoffa challenge, since it was not clear how their organizing program would differ from what Hoffa was proposing.
There are some amazing organizing strategies being developed by different unions across the country, from community coalitions to consumer alliances to workplace actions to consumer boycotts to shareholder actions, all debated with variations and subtleties that excite me far more that most of the sterile ideological debates usually used when a lot of people discuss unions. It was excitement over those issues that made me willing to suffer through three years of law school in order to help organizing folks implement those strategies.
The worst sins of the Meany-Kirkland eras was not that they were business unionists, since business unionism can do a heck of a lot for average folks. It was that they were dumb, unimaginative business unionists who let the union movement rot internally. What makes Sweeney and his administration exciting is that he is encouraging innovation across the board. Some of it will work, some of it won't, and everyone knows it will take a number of years to figure out which tactics work best, and then as employers respond, they'll have to create new ones. But the key change is that the movement is alive, innovating, and out of the slumber of death it had entered in the 1970s and 1980s.
And it was that change that I thought Slaughter and many of the other NEW POLITICS folks largely missed in their discussion.
> I worry that people are raising strategic choices between reform
> >strategies to a level of religion, where heretics will be burned and
> >excommunicated as soon as the opportunity arises.
>
> I thought it was the plodding Stalinist bureaucrats to which the AFL CIO
> leadership has an affinity that excommunicated and burned heretics or at
> least ensured that they would be ignored.
And changing that is again why Sweeney excites folks, since a wideranging diversity of activists and ideologies have flocked into union organizing departments, welcomed in a way that has not been true since the 1930s. It is precisely the focus on innovation in organizing that makes the unions so welcoming, since monolithic viewpoints are unlikely to create the complex and multidimensional strategies needed to organize in the hellish legal and economic environment of today.
-- Nathan Newman