[lbo-talk] Obama: let my Teamsters go!

[Mark Rickling]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I was being provocative.  Unlike the Sparts I believe that in some respect
>  these are strategic and tactical issues.  NLRB recognition and regulation is
>  a different matter from a court ordered trusteeship over a whole union or a
>  local.  The former a union can live with and use just so it doesn't become a
>  fetish.  The latter has always been a bad deal.  I don't know of an
>  exception.  Do you?

I agree; even though the labor movement embraced the state long ago
Teamster-style trusteeships are not a necessary concomitant of that
embrace. But there are those in academia and elsewhere who argue that
this was a bad move and labor's current predicament can be traced, at
least in part, to that embrace. I don't agree, but there is something
to the argument that the legalistic process of collective bargaining
tends to make workers spectators in their own drama, as one historian
puts it.