>On Behalf Of kelley
> furthermore, i didn't type *labor* organizers but, rather, *professional*
> organizers. and i don't care how little they are paid or how hard they
> work, their assumptions were generally that white factory workers
> and rural
> residents were racist and sexist, more so than them and more so
> than people
> in urban/suburban areas and more so than professional/managerial strata.
> i'm a little older than you yoshie so this was more than 15 years ago, so
> we're talking a generation of activists and organizers who were still
> hanging on from the 60s. they were NOT single mindedly about labor, but
> activists from the daze.... they were people who'd grown up in
> the suburbs
> and been engaged in campus activism of the 60/70s. they were good and
> decent people. they were humans.
I appreciate the post Kelley. My experience in the same period was that it was a mixture of folks, from rank-and-file folks moving up into leadership in organizing and "business agent" positions along with the hired professionals out of college.
THe point that racism is as high or higher in the professional/managerial sphere is important; education does teach people the right things "to say" and "not to say", but that politically correct language (using that term in its old meaning of faux respect) often masks the real segregation of the suburbs that the attitudes are built on. Working class folks invariably have less freedom to segregate, so the conflicts that are inevitable among human beings naturally in our society get a gloss of racist rhetoric, but calling that conflict racist while absolving professionals for choosing conflict-free comfortable segration out in the suburbs is a suckers approach to race and class conflict.
A friend who went off to organize in Virginia told me the story of his first union assignment, a textile plant where a key leader was, if not a Klan member, damn close. My friend (ethnically Sri Lankan) was less than thrilled to find that this guy was a key leader in the department and one of the folks he had to deal with, and the feeling was mutual. But as the campaign went on, as the plant guy complained about the lies told by management in previous organizing drives and grappled with the need for unity of all the workers and my friend dealt with his initial assumptions, he and my friend worked together well to win the fight.
On the other hand, when conflict happens in academic and professional settings, when conflict involving race comes out, the professional types usually drop the pleasant language and racial conflict comes to the surface. Maybe they are not worse, but it is really impossible to compare given the greater ability of most professional class folks to escape the daily tensions that rub raw race and gender conflicts for most working class folks.
One last example-- the Las Vegas union local I worked at in the late 80s had a large staff hired over the years by older administrations, really screwed up administrations that included a flat-out mobster who was indicted. Yet the business agents were incredibly diverse, white, black, latino (no asians but working on it). No nice rhetoric involved-- just the attitude that if the housekeepers were black, better get a black agent in there. Same with a latino for the latino cooks. But it always struck me that, with none of the nice rhetoric, this business union local had far better affirmative action than any academic department I ever saw. And notably, the nice smaller staff of "professionals" (of which I was part) brought in by the International to help were all white.
But the dynamics of union politics is tough because of all these tensions, but some of the union bashing of Sweeney on down seems to derive from the assumption that union leaders are like other nonprofits - they can pick their rhetoric at will and then fundraise on that basis. But unions do have very real internal politics where all those tensions get reflected in trying to mediate them, while creating unity.
Union politics, at its best, a politics of addition that I think a lot of folks steeped in academic intellectual polarization have little respect for. And it's one where correct militant ideology competes with bare fear by workers of losing their jobs. Concessions to management, framed by leftists as cooptation by capital, are more often just a loss of nerve by a whole workforce unwilling to test corporate plant-closing threats. It's rough and wearing and raw.
-- Nathan Newman