professional specialization) *have* to organize, each and every semester or quarter, and build organizing into their very structure. Members have to step up and run *their union*, instead of being bailed out by a professional staff. Which doesn't mean that folks won't ever make mistakes with their newfound power or that peace and harmony breaks out; but the long-term result is a much stronger, broader, deeper union, capable of a popular mobilization which traditional biz unions can only dream of.
- -- Dennis >>
I can't say that I buy this logic. First of all, if a union wins agency shop in its contracts -- and this is a basic demand -- the rate of turnover is really not that important: under agency shop, one has to opt out of being a member of the union, and even then, still has to pay a fee for the services of the union. This option is as open to grad unions as any other unions, and I would be very surprised if they did not seek to avail themselves of it, for reasons I present next. Secondly, I have heard similar arguments made with respect to automatic check-off of dues: that if a union did not have that option, and had to constantly go to the members to raise its basically operating funds, it would be more democratic. More likely, I am afraid, that it would have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on the most basic tasks of organizational survival, with a correspondingly diminishment in its ability to organize its members around important political and contract struggles and to provide basic services, such as grievances, etc.
I don't think that there is a magical formula, a particular structure of the workforce, that leads to a more democratic union. In this society, it requires a real and constant effort to establish and maintain a democratic culture in which members feel free to participate actively in a union. If there is any factor which supports such a culture, it think that it is a union organization and a contract which puts a great deal of real decision making power in the hands of the smallest, most local units of the union and in the hands of the individual member herself. This involves things as obvious as direct election by the members of all local union officials, from the local president to the workplace site rep., who do such things as negotiate contracts and represent grievants; it also involves giving individual members control over such things as grievances on the earlier steps. But it could also involve a break with the industrial union model, of a system of elaborate, universal and bureaucratic work rules, in favor of the capacity of different departments/sites to establish systems of democratic governance with all kinds of variety and difference, the one from the next.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --