Unions and Democracy: Replies to Steve Fraser
Aronowitz, Stanley
THERE MAY be no more contentious issue in today's labor movement than union democracy. Almost everybody agrees that members should have the right to elect officers, hold regular meetings, and...
...But not everyone agrees that a vital labor movement needs an active rank and file that participates in running its own unions—by making policy decisions and by taking the lead in organizing, bargaining, and other activities such as education and political action...
...contract settlements are hotly debated among the members...
...some are open father-son affairs...
...In most locals, elected officials can serve in perpetuity and the union maintains a large staff of appointed officials at both the local and the national levels to administer its day-to-day affairs...
...in America that has meant (and . . . continues to mean) immigrants, blacks, and women...
...Almost everybody agrees that members should have the right to elect officers, hold regular meetings, and approve contracts negotiated by their leaders...
...What is at stake in the fight for participatory democracy is the future of the labor movement...
...Consequently, genuine rank-and-file union democracy might be destructive to unions and to labor's more progressive social platforms...
...Twenty years later, union members were deprived of this choice by the famous Article 20 of the new AFL-CIO constitution, which prohibited competition among affiliates...
...In contrast, the NEA has a highly decentralized style of governance...
...And after the union achieves bargaining rights in hotels, garment factories, strawberry fields, and other low-wage sites, unless members are vitally engaged in the bargaining and grievance process, unless they take hold of the life of the union, it will quickly disintegrate into an insurance company or, worse, a social service agency...
...My own observation confirms one of Fraser's insights...
...Although unions are technically voluntary organizations, in reality, according to Goldberg, they are best characterized by the metaphor of an army, with its chain of command and iron discipline...
...Whatever Fraser's democratic sympathies, we are entitled to read his argument as a defense of the existing leadership...
...Many bigcity locals of construction, small manufacturing, and public and private service employees are run as self-perpetuating fiefdoms...
...In many industries collective bargaining has given way to collective begging...
...Many workers will not join unions unless they have a genuine sense of ownership of their organizations...
...Lacking the power, but also the will, to combat flagrant violations of labor standards, the union settles for less than half a loaf...
...the bureaucracy is the legitimate offspring, at least in the case of strong CIO-like upheavals...
...Steve Fraser has done a service to the debate by publishing a cautionary, even critical article about union democracy ("Is Democracy Good for Unions?," Dissent, Summer 1998...
...Unions are not political parties of the social democratic or labor type but instead are "natural monopolists" in the labor market, "prone to defend the interests and express the democratic will of their existing members by excluding others...
...Often, union leaders who attempt to break with these exclusionary practices are "democratically repudiated" by the rank and file...
...The full-timers run the union...
...Their best chance for deliverance from arbitrary union practices is to throw the rascals out, and they have never ceased to exercise this option...
...In some cases, such as New York City's District Council 37, financial corruption is rife, even among unions that might be considered socially liberal...
...Often the upheavDISSENT / Winter 1999 81 als of the 1930s were not only expressions of discontent with the way employers trampled on workers' rights...
...they were also directed against craft unions and their leaders, who scorned the project of organizing semi-skilled workers or forced them to conform to craft rules in order to gain entry into the House of Labor...
...and what I call strong or participatory democracy...
...major decisions are taken only after wide consultation with the rank and file...
...Sometimes the abrogation of union democracy is more subtle...
...In other sectors, not caring a rat's ass will surely turn off potential members...
...Some excellent organizers in the South and in Las Vegas "don't care a rat's ass about union democracy" and have made gains anyway...
...There are two models of union democracy: democracy by consent, where the rank and file has formal, but little substantive, power over union affairs...
...Honest, militant unionism is today intimately intertwined with the demand for democracy...
...However, the issue is not whether a bureaucracy has formed, but whether an isolated caste of union officials has developed, with its own interests and outlook—officials who operate as enlightened despots and view union members as mere clients...
...His argument boils down to two points: (1) Some of the most effective union leaders, "utterly devoted to organizing, tactically creative and militant, and who've achieved remarkable success...don't care a rat's ass for union democracy...
...2) Advocates of union democracy have misconstrued the nature of trade unions...
...Indeed, the distinction between those who favor a leadershipcontrolled labor movement and those who advocate rank-and-file power may be the great divide of the 1990s...
...Recent union victories against USAir and United Airlines were spearheaded by rank-and-file organizers...
...Fraser repeats the most celebrated argument against union democracy, offered at the time of the 1955 AFL and CIO merger by Arthur J. Goldberg, the general counsel of the Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO...
...The recently collapsed merger between the AFT and the National Educational Association (NEA) illustrates the difference between the two kinds of union de82 DISSENT / Winter 1999 mocracy...
...Since 1955, dissatisfied unionists have effectively lost the option of dumping their existing collective bargaining representative, unless they choose to form independent unions outside the AFL-CIO...
...and even with a revived organizing agenda union density continues to slip...
...In short, the revival of solidaristic unionism entails a new and perhaps unprecedented level of rankandfile participation...
...The inadequacy of democracy by consent is particularly apparent in many large city unions...
...the most important advances in white-collar and professional organizing, labor's best-kept secret, were rank-and-file successes...
...In locals of the Service Employees International Union (SE IU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Transport Workers, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Construction Trades, caucus movements seek to recapture control of their own unions...
...The membership is rarely, if ever, directly invited to participate in policy debates, but is presumed to have consented to policy decisions made at conventions and other meetings by representatives...
...But these victories are mainly among the working poor, many of whom are recent immigrants...
...STANLEY ARONOWITZ's latest book is From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future...
...And, he insists, the bureaucracy that emerged with the broad industrial union upsurge of the 1930s was the product of pressure from below: "The rank and file is complicit in the creation of the bureaucracy...
...In locals consisting of a large number of relatively small units, the business agents and the business manager usually enjoy near-absolute power...
...The AFT is a highly centralized, professionally run organization...
...in the face of autocracy, it is the only recourse for dissenting unionists...
...Fraser effectively demolishes the illusion of the dichotomy of a "virginal rank and file and a venal bureaucracy," but with his neat, stereotypical identification of union democracy with the mythic "New England town meeting," he has dismissed the alternative of strong union democracy...
...indeed, the burden of his article is to place reliance on visionary leaders...
...DISSENT / Winter 1999 83...
...In short, one of the crucial reasons for the merger's failure was the different conceptions of democratic participation between the two organizations...
...He may be right to argue that labor bureaucracy is an organic outgrowth of rank-and-file upheaval...
...Union democracy is not a leftist pipe dream...
...Although there was agreement at the national level and the AFT could be counted upon to routinely approve the merger, many at the NEA convention spoke against it on grounds of democratic difference...
...Although it is true that radicals are often found in the ranks of the opposition (a fact that Fraser seizes on to belittle union democracy), these movements could not have gotten to first base without broad membership support...
...And most elected NEA officials return to the classroom after their term is completed, so they consider themselves on temporary leave when they serve in full-time office...
...The national leaders and many local officers are subject to term limits...
...THE PROBLEM of participation should not be framed entirely in moral or in procedural terms...
...When unions deprive the rank and file of choice, when leaders favor mobilization but not participation, they succeed only in driving a deeper nail in labor's coffin...
...Despite some signs of life, American unions remain deeply troubled: they represent a smaller proportion of the privatesector workforce than they did in 1934, three years before the Labor Relations Act took effect...
...The AFT may not be formally autocratic, but it is fair to characterize its modus vivendi as anti-Stalinist democratic centralism...
...In others, notably the construction trades and the Teamsters, only the determined intervention of "outsiders" like the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) and the government has succeeded in restoring a measure of rank-and-file control...
...indeed consider it an actual hindrance where a state of undeclared war against employers demands discipline, secrecy and decisive action by small groups of outsiders less subject to daily intimidation...
...Since most unions can no longer claim that they are capable of protecting the jobs of union supporters in organizing campaigns, let alone the jobs of their own members, and since the task of organizing is awesome in the current political environment, some unions have found that calling on their own members to take a leading role in organizing is the most effective way to overcome fear among nonunion workers...
...Unlike European workers, who can choose between competing federations, American workers are condemned to seek union democracy of a different and perhaps more radical type...
...The widespread disaffection of many workers from unions may be the result of their perception that unions have become client-based institutions and exclusionary institutions in which members are to be "serviced...
...If mighty unions could once promise—and maybe even deliver—the moon, those days are gone, perhaps forever...
...Money may not find its way into a business agent's pockets, but the union has, in recent years, averted its eyes and collected handsome sums for its inattention...
...Although Fraser vaguely favors a "democratic" labor movement, he remains unconvinced that union democracy is vital to labor's revival...
...WHICH EXPLAINS why, from the Steelworkers insurgencies of the late 1950s to the Miners for Democracy movement in the 1970s to the long march to elect a democratic, militant Teamsters leadership in 1991, union democracy has become a program of the militant rank and file and of a section of secondary leaders as well...
...The union leaders might observe the requirement to procure membership consent for a proposed contract settlement but refuse to grant the opposition access to mailing lists, the union newspaper, and other forums in order to present their views...
...Today's unions can make only one sound promise: that if workers in union and nonunion shops take the initiative, the organization's resources, full-time organizers, and rank-and-file union members will support them...
...In New York City's garment center, union misfeasance takes a different form: the leadership concedes substandard wages and working conditions to the employer—in effect, sanctions sweatshops—in return for employer payments to the benefits fund...
...Democracy meant, in the first place, that workers could form unions of their own choosing...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
