>All that is well-taken. I'm not on a mission re:
>union leadership and rank-and-file democracy. I
>have not followed such developments closely.
>It's great insofar as Int'ls are fomenting
>democracy in their locals; it does seem unlikely
>they would so so in each other's locals. That
>would probably convulse the Federation. We can
>see how it played out with the IBT.
It usually doesn't happen on the scale of the Teamsters, but the usual dynamic is that an undemocratic local in a region is screwing up organizing throughout an industry it is part of, so the other unions subtly and not-so-subtlely encourage rank-and-file activists to change the leadership at that union local. This is of course more likely to happen when the national leadership of that undemocratic local is not too favorable towards them either.
One way this comes out is literally in the realm of the lawyers. In the past, lawyers who represented unions did not represent rank-and-file challenges, since they might lose union clients if they did so. What the Guild lawyers noted is that this traditional attitude, which of course helped deny rank-and-file challengers access to some of the best lawyers in the labor field, has been giving way as unions are more willing to hire labor firms that also do union democracy work, although they usually don't hire firms doing union democracy work in that same union.
-- Nathan Newman