As a union staffperson, the farther you can get from the beltway and closer to working with local unions in the field, the better. HQ politics tends to be byzantine and there is often a high turnover of staff there, common to all the internationals. The AFL being one more step removed from the local unions, is probably the hardest place to work.
-Andy English
-----Original Message----- From: Nathan Newman <nathan.newman at yale.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Monday, March 27, 2000 6:05 PM Subject: RE: Sweeney bashing (re: China and AFL)
>
>On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 TRox51 at aol.com wrote:
>
>> Some of us work for a living. If Newman would look at the AFL as a
>> real-life bureaucracy instead of through his dazzled liberal eyes, he
>> might be able to make sense of what is happening there. The new
>> organizing director, hired with much fanfare after Sweeney fired
>> Richard Benzinger last year, just left in frustration; his department
>> is now more demoralized than ever after having been lied to about
>> Benzinger's departure. Ask anybody in the second or third tier chain
>> of command at 815 16th Street about life at the federation, and you
>> will discover a deep rift between the leadership and the troops. Like
>> I said, the real organizing is going on outside the fed. This is not
>> conspiracy thinking.
>
>As I said, intermural fights within bureaucracies matter, but they are
>irrelevant to most of the ideological discussions about unions and trade.
>The fact that you and Patrick Bond can have such different opinions about
>Bill Patterson show that personality-based critiques often are just that,
>about personality clashes between different folks.
>
>I've said repeatedly that I am a fan and occasional writer for LABORNOTES
>and take the rank-and-file democracy critique of union bureacrats very
>seriously.
>
>The AFL bureacracy may not be the the most effective part of the union
>movement, but what does that have to do with the PetroChina campaign. If
>the AFL bureacrats are incompetent, then their campaign will fail. But
>the original complaint about the PetroChina campaign seemed to be that it
>might be effective and that would be a bad thing.
>
>Sometimes bad ideology leads to bad treatment of "the troops" but I've
>also known plenty of folks with right-on politics who were also shitty
>managers, and even the occasional person with shitty ideology who was such
>a good manager they accomplished good things despite themselves because of
>the great people they surrounded themselves with.
>
>Maybe I'm jaundiced on the bureacratic union issue because of my work as
>an organizer at HERE, which had a completely twisted combination of
>bureaucratic nepotism combined with good organizers surviving at the
>margins, with those margins slowly taking over the union. I also have the
>double jaundiced view of having been treated like shit from a pure worker
>perspective, partly due to personality clashes with folks from the good
>ideological wing of the organizing side. While doing other work since
>then, though, I've continued to work with HERE locals in Oakland and here
>in New Haven without assuming that bureaucratic and even internal employee
>disputes were the same as ideological disputes.
>
>I'm not even totally unsympathetic to the idea that the internationals are
>better places to work than the AFL offices. I pretty much decided to work
>at Communication Workers of America this summer on that basis.
>
>But I still don't see a connection between the venting of AFL office
>politics and the PetroChina campaign; there could be a connection but I
>haven't heard one made yet.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>