> I very much hope that I'm completely wrong in what I'm about to argue,
> but it is a possibility to which leftists and friends of labor (meaning
> the persons who labor, not the organizations that 'represent' them)
> ought to give serious thought.
>
> Unions are actively progressive only during the stages in which the
> primary struggle is to achieve recognition and legality. Once
> established they are (with marginal exceptions) merely more or less
> effective bargaining agents for more or less marginal gains of a
> minority of the total work force. And in the U.S. they have become
> (again with only marginal exceptions) ineffective even for these
> purposes and, on the whole, agents of reaction at best a lesser evil
> rather than a minor friend of the working class. I offer Nathan's
> arguments in this and related threads as evidence for this. I hope I'm
> wrong.
---------------------------------
You won't be surprised to learn, Carrol, that I disagree with your
characterization of the labour movement.
I certainly wouldn't describe unions as "agents of reaction" - a term I reserve for those who want to roll back existing rights and benefits. The labour movement as a whole wants to improve them. It still has, for example, as good or better a position than any other large American institution with respect to the struggles for affordable health care, education, day care and housing; opposes tax concessions to the rich and the corporations which divert revenue from popular needs; and broadly supports the goals (and sometimes actively works with) the social movements representing women, gays, ethnic and racial minorities, environmentalists, etc. It's foreign policy is not reactionary, either, as it was during the Vietnam war. Today, it broadly supports the movement against the war in Iraq and for a European-style US foreign policy which is more accomodating to nationalist and populist regimes abroad.
The unions don't speak out as strongly or mobilize their members in support of these causes as you and all of us on the list would want, and they are not opposed to capitalism. But whereas this leads you to see the behaviour of unions as somehow apart from and in opposition to the immediate interests of US workers, I still see unions as integral to the working class, and their policies and behaviour (in both the collective bargaining and political arenas) as being a pretty accurate reflection of the current consciousness of the class - and it's most union- and politically-conscious layer at that. To persuade me otherwise, you'd have to demonstrate that there is a lot of working class discontent coming from the left inside and outside the unions, and impatience with their current leaders. You could have demonstrated that in the 30s, when such a left existed and there was a serious internal struggle between Marxists and liberals/social democrats for leadership of these organizations, but you couldn't point to anything remotely similar today. In this context, I think you should be more charitable to Nathan, who I don't know personally, and others who work for or advise the unions because they have to take this level of consciousness into account in developing policy.
I also believe that if we ever return to the conditions of the 30s, then you would probably see a renewed militancy within the trade unions and in the actions they would take and the demands they would place on the state to restore lost jobs and income. People generally turn to what's closest at hand and where they can find the resources to respond to a crisis, and I would expect that, in the case of working people, even among the great mass of those who are presently unorganized, large numbers would turn first to the unions, including new organizations which would form alongside the existing ones. I think this process would also be accompanied by ideological and tactical splits at all levels of leadership, and that such developments would provide opportunities for the left to intervene and influence the internal life of the unions in a way it can't do at present.
In short, I'd urge you not to view the unions in too static and ahistorical a way, or to make the mistake that they are in contradiction to the current conscioussness of the workers rather than a mirror of it.