Have you tested your "socialist" idea to restructure the union from the bottom up along membership friendly lines, and how has it worked out in practice?
Marv Gandall --------------
Pretty snide, but nevermind. Yes, not in a union but in community organization under various public and private grants including Obama's ARRA. I spent nearly a year battling the org to get elementary components together to form a community maintenance shop and failed---thanks for asking. And it was the case that there was tentative community support more than within the `leadership' who fundamentally didn't understand the process. The failure was driven by a board of directors who were business oriented old men and put there for their ability to get funding or get local political party support which they had.
My immediate boss was a former president of the electrical workers local in Richmond and I spent hours explaining how this was supposed to work. It's like he never heard of most of it...thought I was dreaming. Sure, but what else is going to work? He was used to his boss position, but at least he had a positive attitude. So I'd outline what to do and what we needed in tools and he would advocate to the assistant director in charge who would uniformly dodge the requests with an amazing and ingenius skill to say no without really saying no. He was an old hand at the NGO business. What our ass. director was doing was positioning us to take the fall when the project failed. It's a classic business management technique to blame the in line worker for failure when it was a management problem. Really beautiful in its way to illustrate what was wrong in-depth with almost our entire economy.
So, yeah Marv, I've been very close to these problems and recently. It would have helped a great deal to have some outside organizational support...
CG