*ONE HAS TO ADMIRE THEIR PERSISTENCE.* *Labor Notes, *the flagship journal of the domestic labor Left, professes itself to be “the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back into the labor movement.”<http://www.labornotes.org/about>Though stylistically about as riveting as the phonebook, for more than three difficult decades *Labor Notes* has critically observed and recorded organized labor’s endemic corruption, democratic shortcomings, and gross ineptitude in organizing workers in the private sector, where today only 7.2 percent of Americans are unionized. In a typically journalistic manner, most of these problems are blamed on the perfidy of individuals: union staffers and leaders insufficiently committed to class solidarity and grassroots participation. Similarly, the striking decline in union strength is attributed to deindustrialization and the hypermobility of global capital in the neoliberal age. What is needed, according to this standard *Labor Notes* narrative, is new currents within the labor movement to bring to power more dynamic actors capable of meeting the challenges of the new century. In his new book *Solidarity for Sale*<http://www.amazon.com/Solidarity-Sale-Corruption-Destroyed-Undermined/dp/189162072X> longtime labor activist Robert Fitch <http://www.solidarityforsale.com/> begs to differ.
“Corruption,” Fitch argues, “flows from the retarded development of American unions, which still haven’t broken out of nineteenth-century models of labor organization” (ix). Modern labor’s rot began at its genesis, Fitch claims. It derives from the exclusionary craft unionism initiated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A century ago unskilled workers, minorities, and women were willfully neglected, while mainstream unions opposed even the most rudimentary social democratic legislation to benefit the wider working class. The famous AFL president Samuel Gompers even opposed eight-hour workday legislation on ideological grounds, differentiating the AFL from European unions that he saw as “espousing an effeminate social welfare philosophy as well as a primitive egalitarianism” (40). The AFL was concerned with wages. The mixture of this self-interested “business unionism” and the conditions in certain sectors of the economy like the textile industry, where craft unions predominated and employers were numerically small enough to be cajoled, facilitated the rise of job-control unionism. This rendered workers subservient to union officials doling out jobs, which in turn reinforced an insular culture of loyalty predicated upon fear rather than solidarity. Though defended by many progressives, Fitch sees this uniquely American development as noxious, making domestic unions highly susceptible to penetration by organized crime.
Stretches of Fitch’s account read like a crime-noir novel. Questioning the founding narrative of big labor, a tale that conveniently begins with the struggle for the eight-hour day and ends with the New Deal, Fitch airs dirty laundry with the cheek of a muckraking journalist. While such tales of the corruption and mob-dealings of figures like Sam Parks, Cornelius “Con” Shea<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Shea> , Jimmy Hoffa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa>, and Ron Carey<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Carey_%28labor_leader%29> are not entirely ignored by other members of the labor left, they are typically consigned to the realm of anecdotal gossip. In Fitch’s narrative, these are not just the failings of unsavory individuals, but of structurally compromised institutions.
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