Apathy and Other Axioms: Expelling the Union Dissenter from History
Benson, H. W.
When Cesar Chavez came to organize farm workers, his cause was applauded by every labor and liberal group; when Joseph Yablonski stepped forward to lead insurgent miners and was murdered,...
...Limping and creaking, America survives as a democracy because it guarantees you, and all the other activists, the right to be heard...
...And suppose when you tried to run for office, you were barred from the ballot, or the votes were stolen, and all this was the experience first of one and then another...
...When he wrote that condescending letter, his own civil liberties organization had about 20,000 members of whom only about 200 ever bothered to vote in its annual elections...
...The influence of these "practitioners," says Brooks, has led to "the bureaucratization of research and writing...
...and there was one probable part-time FBI agent...
...But in the last 20 years, laborite intellectuals have turned away from that nasty problem...
...Who does...
...for those in universities, a subject for sympathetic study...
...All of which sadly illustrates the great paradox of the labor movement: its attitude toward democracy...
...Johnson by Nixon, etc...
...As long as the observer perches atop a tree, gazing at the scene below, these ideas remain abstractions subject to comment by scholars on other trees...
...The night you held your first insurgent political meeting, suppose a lurking character jotted down the names of those who came and you got a threatening phone call...
...Probably worse...
...in critical instances where there are rival slates, elections are suspect, even stolen...
...What is to be done...
...Can it really be true...
...The mass of voters is ill-informed, swayed by narrow interests, often manipulated by demagogues...
...Not surprisingly, where it depended on him for enforcement, the law was a failure...
...Proportionately, there is probably more sustained involvement by workers in unions than by all the people in politics...
...But that's not the point...
...No problem...
...And for what...
...Labor Department into challenging the UMW election...
...The IAM reformers said nothing about industrial justice, or any broad social program...
...It can exist only in a democracy...
...In union circles it may seem justifiable to overlook the rights of dissidents in the interests of labor power...
...In comparison, 214 rank and filers, who must fight hard just to speak up, may appear, at best, like impractical idealists if not mere cranks...
...Yablonski was surely mur dered because he led that battle...
...He was really a great guy, a former militant coal miner who must have gone to the FBI after consulting his conscience and his church...
...Why, comes the nagging question, sacrifice a chance to shape real events in cooperation with strong leaders of a real mass movement just because they bully their members a bit...
...and, to do that, they needed in ternal democracy...
...Inside the labor movement and all through the country there came mounting demands that unions become more democratic and honest...
...From quite a different standpoint, such a mood plagues even the American Civil Liberties Union where some spokesmen, vigorously antiestablishment, are ready to diverge from the nonpartisan civil libertarian ACLU traditions to promote their selected socialpolitical aims...
...others drifted off into the universities...
...Modem collective bargaining, a delicate art, involves complex and highly technical subjects beyond the grasp of the average unionist...
...Even with the "apathy" of the electorate, democracy survives in the country...
...It is a question loaded with difficulties...
...but that got nowhere...
...What's missing from most treatises on union democracy is...
...There are at least 15 million union members in the United States...
...If union officials, and members, are sometimes narrowmindedly out for what they can get, we must blame the acquisitive mores of our business society...
...In five or six years, 75 experts produced some 40 works without ever reaching the heart of the matter: what is the extent of antidemocratic and corrupt practices in unions...
...Union dissidents and reformers were hardly noticed: invisible men...
...That bureaucratization, I would judge, has reached a high point at Harvard University where a Labor History Project produces histories of various unions subsidized by the very unions that are the subject of the research...
...Rubber Company...
...In 1958, the McClellan Committee reported on that local: "The testimony revealed a pattern of continuing intimidation of union members and their APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS subjugation through violence and undemocratic procedures...
...So far, as a political reformer you're starting out no better than most union reformers, no better, say, than Frank Schonfeld who could assemble all of a half-dozen painters at his first meetings-25 at public "rallies," and 100 at "mass" meetings to reform the Painters' Union in New York City...
...Their attitude here resembles that of many more millions toward affairs of state...
...If, however, it was commonly agreed that blacks were indeed inferior, there was no need to do anything drastic...
...At the 14th annual meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association in 1961, Brooks noted that union officials are not really interested in serious labor history...
...Some of the documentation is on file with the Labor Archives at Wayne University (Benson collection...
...Yet what springs to mind is that these considerations, however weighty, are not unique to democracy in unions...
...In our list of the liberal-laborite's misgivings about union democracy, one has been omitted—one that transcends all the others...
...When his monograph appears, complete with charts and footnotes, it reports the fundamental problem is that the local citizens are apathetic and apparently nothing can be done about it...
...When it comes to matters of union democracy, the volumes in the series he edits are suffused with his own spirit of accommodation...
...And he had a constituency of 10,000...
...Have liberals discovered in the labor movement, of all places, one area where the normal standards of democracy do not apply...
...Nationally, we had friends in the research and educational departments of a few unions...
...Above all, however, the prevailing idea of apathy serves, in labor relations, the same function that the notion of the innate inferiority of black slaves once served in race relations...
...They shared more than common ideals...
...the masses were outside...
...they protested favoritism and demanded fair hiring...
...In the mid-1920s and early 30s, intellectuals identified themselves, as radicals, with the labor movement, wrote with feeling about it, and even joined it...
...they analyze the leadership...
...On the other hand...
...If you are fired for organizing a union, you can, naturally, get help in the labor movement...
...Critics and crusaders were once supplied by the radical groups within the labor movement: Socialists, Communists, Wobblies, assorted progressives...
...today, mostly, that concern is missing...
...You and your colleagues could still work and make a living...
...If there is corruption in unions, the argument goes, there is far more in business— more bank employees are indicted for embezzlement than union officials...
...It's that apathy again...
...That single fact reveals more about the state of union democracy than a whole library of Harvard productions...
...From a few labor leaders came clumsy mutterings lest "labor" be blamed...
...They examine the membership...
...Pulp and Paper workers in two AFL-CIO Internationals...
...you enjoyed or endured your family as before...
...Only a small percentage of the industrial working class was in unions...
...The actual labor movement, not the one they anticipated, mocked their dream...
...In 1935-37, when insurgents fought on the East Coast against the corrupted official dom of the International Seamen's Union, their ordeal was chronicled in the radical press and recorded in books...
...It is impossible to maintain the posture of friendly critic within the labor movement unless there is some expectation that criticism can affect the course of events...
...if you'd like to change the basic character of the social order, one or another party offers a membership card...
...All this is commonplace to the point of tedium in discussions of government...
...A few years ago an attorney, who is a director of a prominent civil liberties group, received a letter from a friend urging him to assist some of the "many fine unionists who need legal help in defending their legal, democratic rights in their unions, usually against crooked officials...
...they expected fair trials...
...As a rule, workers are not concerned with the lofty issues that entrance idealists...
...Employers can offer gifts, favors, joint business ventures, quick deals, and executive jobs...
...two of a disappearing breed—the self-educated, skilled, radical worker who, with their insistent cries for industrial justice, were once the leavening agents of the labor movement...
...if the officials are crooks and dictators, that may be what they want...
...A man can't get too far ahead of his times...
...But for James Morrissey there was no citizens' committee when he was almost killed outside the NMU hall during his campaign against Joe Curran...
...They wanted their rights...
...Yet that absurdity is usually the basis of labor "history" when it comes to recording the story of union democracy...
...An impressive concentration of resources on 212 H. W. BENSON problems of union democracy was announced in 1957 when the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Fund for the Republic) launched its Trade Union Project as one phase of a wider study of "the basic issues underlying civil liberties and civil rights...
...It is not a new idea...
...Union administrators are responsible for vast sums in welfare funds and union treasuries and make decisions affecting the lives of thousands...
...the United Mine Workers had come under control of the Lewis machine which wiped out the union's democracy...
...otherwise, with only few notable exceptions, labororiented liberals turned away...
...And that control can be exercised effectively only if the fundamental rights of civil liberties are available...
...Their association was not with the labor movement as it was, but with what they felt it would become...
...So far, not one labor leader is among them...
...The Miners for Democracy are the first of the new labor insurgents to send shock waves of conscience rippling through the world of liberalism...
...factory workers were not organized...
...It is The Apathy Axiom...
...but where's the majority...
...The intricacies of economic life, for example, can be turned as easily against the labor movement as against the labor rank and file...
...Most writers seem APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS convinced that the fundamental defect of union democracy is membership apathy...
...they wanted impartial grievance procedure...
...All these ineluctable circumstances, it is suggested, constitute a formidable barrier to union democracy and explain why it is superficial to decry its lack—just as it would be futile to complain about the height of a mountain or the depth of an ocean...
...The new insurgents were not motivated by ideologies...
...What failure of sensitivity makes them incapable of responding adequately to this labor struggle...
...At a spectacularly successful event, you soar to H. W. BENSON 100...
...lithe big hopes had evaporated, who could bother with small ones...
...Dissent has not disappeared from the labor movement, it has only lost its publicists...
...A nuclear physicist can win the Nobel prize without ever knowing about work in an African uranium mine...
...218 Thousands of retired workers donate their time...
...racketeers swarmed all over...
...We had nothing to do with initiating the strikes...
...Democracy is kept alive by minorities, dissidents and reformers who disapprove, call for changes, and sometimes try to upset 220 a ruling regime...
...is there a connection between the two...
...What flaw...
...The experience in Local 138 is typical...
...and they come to accept the labor movement as it really is, not as it should exist in imagination...
...Whatever its value in orienting us in an imperfect world, the stance of "sophisticated tolerance" is upset by the dilemma of union democracy...
...Our nation's democracy might enter a new golden age if all plunged into politics...
...Give them steady jobs at good wages and conditions, and they will truckle to any leadership that brings such blessings...
...In hard cases, like the murder of dissidents in the Miners' or Painters' unions, they often say nothing...
...It is these prolabor intellectuals, not the hostile critics, who create the prevailing aura around the subject of union democracy...
...Some issues are still available from: UDA, Box 62 Knickerbocker Station, New York, N.Y., 10002...
...If you don't succeed at first, you can try and try...
...West Virginia doctors, outraged by the indifference of union and government officials to spreading black lung, helped form the Black Lung Association...
...These harsh words, from 40 years ago, seem very much like the strictures of contemporary radicals who write unions off as contented and corrupt...
...In those days, radical intellectuals and radical workers were bound in a fraternity nowhere dreamed of in contemporary talk about a new "alliance...
...they'd never dream of telling him...
...Obviously this is not a man likely to upset the delicate balance among his various interests by rash observations on the rights of union members vis-h-vis their officials...
...Access to the membership by insurgents can be blocked...
...The same embarrassed silence followed the 1965 murders of Dow Wilson and Lloyd Green, two leaders of a Painters' Union reform movement in California...
...The virtual disappearance of such tendencies from unions is one of the big facts of labor history, noted but not adequately assessed...
...The ACLU experience, because it involves civil libertarians, warns that it is not easy to stick to democratic principles when you take sides in social struggles...
...After the plant was shut down by an MESA-called strike and taken over by the Navy, these events became front-page news in Detroit...
...A citizens' committee, set up by Walter Gellhorn and Sterling Spero, held hearings attended by 380 seamen where charges against the officials were aired in public...
...They are aware, indeed, of misdeeds committed by labor or in its name...
...At the Senate rackets hearing of 1958, he denounces DeK...
...Nor is the ferment inside the miners' union some divagation from the norm of labor events...
...not every cook and bottle washer can run a union today...
...Copies of Union Democracy in Action were enclosed, telling how rank-and-file union members formed committees, issued handbills, ran opposition candidates, paid for all this out of their wages, and were victimized by blacklisting, fines, trials, suspensions, violence, threats—and how elections were stolen, and how these men continued to fight for years...
...Jacobs, it should be remembered, was staff director of the Center's Trade Union Project when his piece appeared in the Reporter...
...Among the project's publications were some arrant apologias for union officials who suppress internal democracy...
...there was one deeply religious young worker who had just joined out of strong moral convictions only lightly tinged with politics...
...Faced by that choice in government, liberals and laborites unhesitatingly opt for democracy...
...The Center's Trade Union Project recruited a broad group of scholars sympathetic to unionism, many with a liberal or radical background...
...He has obviously won the confidence of labor leaders, government officials, and employers, a formidable achievement climaxed by his presidential appointment to head the Construction Industry Wage Stabilization Board...
...It took me a long time to admit that to myself...
...But our modest presence was blown up into a big thing because we were part of an active national movement...
...None of this offsets the democratizing role of labor in society...
...An eminent foundation assigns a scholarly political scientist to survey your neighborhood...
...but in addition he knows that if he faced forthrightly the issue of internal democracy, his relations with labor leaders would be poisoned and his ability to influence the course of the labor movement through those leaders hopelessly jeopardized...
...Comparing unions to governments, which face war and revolution, he said, "The constraints which by common consent we accept temporarily in the political arena when such conditions exist may perhaps explain and justify the existence of similar, although permanent, restraints in the practice of union democracy...
...It is customary these days for friends of the labor movement to insist that intellectuals are overwhelmingly antiunion, even to add morosely that there is no prolabor current in APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS American intellectual life...
...they sought to get rid of crooks...
...Yesterday's oppositionist was often part of a larger movement and was sustained by it...
...one convicted official...
...Labor literature proliferated just when intellectuals were losing interest in workers...
...They are the lasting issues of democracy in government, bearing upon the interrelations between any electorate and their officials...
...With a divided soul, laborite intellectuals approach the challenge of internal union democracy...
...Our good attorney brushed all this off with...
...It is a matter of living and coping with them...
...Ciepley, for example, had never been touched, even slightly, by radical politics and joined the SP only while he was active in the reform union battle...
...The use of mailing lists was denied to oppositionists until the law made them theoretically available to all candidates...
...When the grim tale of thievery and personal enrichment by officials of some big unions was spread on the public record and played before TV audiences, together with accounts of stolen elections, arbitrary trusteeships, manipulation of much money and many men—after two years and 20,000 pages of testimony—George Meany admitted he was astonished at the extent of corruption and vowed to act against it...
...for that, they had to change the UMW officialdom...
...So far, this must sound rather gloomy, and it is...
...His reply: "Of course...
...You can't even get much help from a civil liberties organization...
...It was not the rearguard action of an old war, but the sign of a new awareness...
...My heart is broken when I have meetings of the Reform Group of Local 138...
...In 1958, leaders of a reform caucus in the LAM Tool and Diemakers Lodge 113, Chicago, joined the H. W. BENSON Socialist party for a time but their new affiliation did not dominate their union activity...
...For one thing, there is ignorance...
...Admittedly, there is no reason to expect such massive participation in government— just as there is no reason for demanding it in unions...
...Seamen in the National Maritime Union, Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, and Masters', Mates' and Pilots' Union...
...America is plagued by poverty and pollution, corruption and crime, racism and violence...
...When he became secretary of labor, he was supposed to enforce a federal law that provided for "political democracy" in unions...
...But notice: while you were deep into that political campaign, your life went on...
...The union insurgent of our day belongs to no radical tendency and is acclaimed in no party press...
...Any explanation of the course of American society in terms of a constant like citizens' apathy would be worthless...
...It is startling that labor intellectuals, who can cope with such issues when they are raised by conservatives in regard to the philosophy of government, become uncomfortable when these same issues arise in regard to unions...
...Civilized men might ponder whether slavery was morally sanctified and disagree like gentlemen...
...Leave the unions for a moment and get into a neighborhood where there are, say, 100,000 eligible voters...
...After Yablonski's death, his sons Joseph and Kenneth, both lawyers, went to work for the Miners for Democracy and, with Rauh, prodded the U.S...
...In 1958, the American Civil Liberties Union adopted an excellent position paper that was never seriously implemented...
...The next day, four tough-looking guys in a black Cadillac drove up to the playground and stared menacingly at your kids...
...Reformers in IAM Lodge 113, Frank Schonfeld and his friends in District Council 9 (Painters), Operating Engineers in New York, New Jersey, and California, Hubert Albertz in the Building Service Employees Union were all blacklisted for insurgent activity...
...The Association of Disabled Miners and Widows, founded in 1966, won a federal suit against the UMW on charges that it had mishandled welfare funds...
...Something deeper is involved than carelessness or lack of imagination...
...John T. Dunlop, director of the project, insists that this approach to labor history is "pioneering...
...Imagine, now, that the written record of all these events is lost, assuming there was any record to begin with...
...If so, their position toward the labor movement resembles the pose of totalitarian radicals who demand democracy unlimited in bourgeois society but insist that their own "socialist" states be exempt from these exacting standards...
...On the other hand, such a surge of activity might create an unprecedented crisis...
...I believe it is more important that others get involved...
...A series of unauthorized strikes by tire builders over piecework rate cuts led to a jurisdictional battle between the United Rubber Workers—CIO and the Mechanics Educational Society of America—Independent...
...The union insurgent was spurred on, his self-confidence bolstered by the writers and thinkers who ranked his activities high on their scale of values...
...This is the "cabal" that UMW President Anthony Boyle complains against, an informal collaboration of rank-and-file miners, political leaders, doctors, lawyers, and liberals, which has kept alive the movement for democracy in the United Mine Workers of America, the kind of collaboration that has been lacking elsewhere in the labor movement...
...Not to mention a nagging wife...
...The ACLU is broadening its concept of civil liberties to take in almost every sphere of human activity (including oceanic oil spills), without ever doing much about union democracy...
...if you want to fight for civil rights or black separatism, to resist cops, make and plant bombs, skip bail, evade, oppose, or even support the draft— there is always expert advice and practical aid available...
...Late in 1959, the publication Union De mocracy in Action, of which I am editor, be gan systematically to chronicle the activities of some of those union reformers...
...They don't know you exist...
...If labor was not likely soon to lead the way to a new society, who could be impressed by quarreling little groups squawking over humdrum details...
...If you destroy the right of a dissident minority to organize against the regime, the majority can easily be manipulated...
...From the caliber of its participants— eminent, talented, experienced—it appeared that union democracy (civil liberties in the labor movement) might at least receive an authoritative evaluation...
...In January 1971, a group of Charleston, West Virginia, lawyers set up the Coal Miners' Legal Fund to defend miners in conflict with the companies or the union...
...The last serious work composed in this spirit, was the UAW and Walter Reuther, by Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, which told about union democracy, convincingly, with sympathy...
...Everyone agreed on the necessity to organize a careful investigation...
...sometimes the faculty member became a labor leader...
...why sanctimoniously denounce in labor what we take for granted in society...
...but we got attention...
...In 1967, after 15 years of reform struggle in that same Local 138, William Wilkens wrote to prominent congressmen reminding them of their obligations to the men who had testified on conditions in the local: Letters to the esteemed Senator Robert Kennedy fall on deaf ears...
...And that explains why laborite intellectuals are uncomfortable with problems of internal union democracy...
...I don't think it is worthwhile for one man to devote too much of his life to correct a situation...
...True, millions may be inactive ("apathetic"), but there is an active cadre of hundreds of thousands...
...That was my own experience in the two years during World War II when I worked as a machinist in the Detroit plant of the U.S...
...Louis, and Cali...
...The critic writes off the labor movement because, he insists, it has betrayed its original promise...
...In opening the discussion on civil liberties in the labor movement for the Fund for the Republic, Clark Kerr suggested that it was too much to expect the labor movement to develop "participating" democracy...
...critics and crusaders...
...The oppositionist who is convicted on disciplinary charges finds himself in the ludicrous position of appealing for recourse to the very officials he has been combating, or worse, the officials who have been fighting him...
...Philip Taft can write the standard work on union government without knowing about men who are blacklisted or receive death threats...
...The fate of democracy depends upon the fate of the vociferous minorities...
...People might be killed in the crush...
...In the urgency of the moment, that seems justifiable enough...
...There it is: apathy...
...The choice is inescapable: either 216 (1) to overcome the weaknesses of democracy by strengthening the hand of a (hopefully) responsible authority, freed from the control of a (presumably) ignorant and irresponsible mass, or (2) to strengthen the effectiveness of democracy by lifting the level of enlightenment through free speech, free press, the right to organize—all the fundamental civil liberties available in a democracy...
...Democracy fulfills its function in political life because the majority is regularly shaken out of its lethargy by the provocation of all these agitators...
...He admonished the rank and file to do its duty and keep their unions clean...
...Often enough, I believe, to implant "apathy...
...There is none, if we are looking to whisk away these harsh realities...
...Basic civil liberties are protected in unions like the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the Newspaper Guild, where a man can say what's on his mind without fear, organize a caucus, and run opposition candidates...
...This list of troubles expresses the disquietude of serious observers, so that it would be presumptuous to dismiss them as inconsequential...
...they often shared membership in the same party or group...
...but that doesn't tell us very much about internal union democracy...
...You might get a little apathetic yourself...
...for their interests are not identical...
...we worked in the toolroom while the battles raged in production...
...In between, there are competing parties and groups...
...I must say that democracy never works unless those to whom it is extended exercise their franchise...
...Maybe not...
...Most of the new reformers were not radi cals...
...As he left, demoralized, he told the Committee: I have been a labor man all my life...
...But they are a minority...
...This conclusion follows from what I have learned in ten years of publishing Union Democracy in Action, based upon correspondence and conversations with union reformers in many states and upon a study of documents in their cases...
...For intellectuals still in unions, the labor movement became an institution to be served...
...A hundred flowers of democracy were to bloom in the gardens of labor...
...it should be able to survive in unions...
...2. If important segments of the labor movement are not democratic, or need not be, how do such conceptions square with the enlightened standards liberal intellectuals aplabor relations at Cornell University), "The Historical Relationship of Liberals and Intellectuals to Organized Labor in the United States," Cornell Reprint Series, No...
...Even before the AFL and CIO merged, labor reform was in the air...
...When the AFL and CIO merged, the new federation adopted unprecedented constitutional provisions authorizing disciplinary measures against corrupt affiliates and implemented the new policy by Ethical Practices codes...
...The Apathy Axiom passes over the intricate relationship between officials, masses, and dissident oppositions...
...Things are going well...
...In those days union insurgency was inseparable from the broader movement on the outside...
...James Wechsler, in the New York Post, suggested the formation of a broad citizens' committee on mine union democracy...
...The conception of sacrificing someone else's democracy (reluctantly, of course) to advance a worthier social cause is a familiar one...
...Let us assume that a majority of American citizens are apathetic to the big political and social issues...
...These are the reservations traditionally expressed by those who distrust democracy...
...What George Brooks wrote about history and "history" applies even more to writings about union democracy, in which the union insurgent often seems an invisible man...
...Once, while Goldberg was at a podium praising the Steelworkers' Union for its contribution to industrial democracy, Donald Rarick, an opposition leader, was at that very moment being beaten by thugs in the rear of the convention hall...
...More meetings, petitions, handbills, candidates, forums...
...Granted...
...There's a question...
...Those millions would rather spend time with their families than busy themselves with union work...
...most came to accept the labor movement as it was...
...it is often forgotten when union democracy comes up for analysis...
...Operating Engineers in Detroit, California, Long Island, and New Jersey...
...It would be insane to shake a remonstrating finger against a man because he cannot live without oxygen...
...If not, who needs civil liberties...
...I am completely fed up...
...start organizing a political reform movement to oust the dominant machine...
...Dissidence has not disappeared, but its character has been altered...
...These unions prove that union democracy is possible and that a strong union need not be dictatorial...
...His mathematics were defective...
...When you can no longer seek integrity in the house of labor, you can't get results in Government, I believe that the whole cause is worthless...
...Perhaps more education along these lines [is] necessary before an effective job can be done in carrying out the democratic process...
...When Cesar Chavez came to organize farm workers, his cause was applauded by every labor and liberal group...
...Building Service Employees in New York...
...While these events captured the imagination of writers, the radical groups dispatched their youth into factories...
...145, from Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, November 1963, pp...
...In 1959 Batalias testified before the House Labor Committee only to be badgered by liberal congressmen, especially James Roosevelt, who were eager to discredit him...
...Can democracy be sustained by workers in their own organizations...
...If some resources had been put behind an effort to keep track of union insurgency in the last 15 years, such a project would undoubtedly have compiled an astonishing record...
...How often do things like that happen in the labor movement...
...and that expectation was fast disappearing...
...And you —you were beaten on the head with a lead pipe, and fired from your job to be turned down mysteriously wherever you applied for another, arrested on trumped-up charges and fined, your home and printshop bombed...
...But how do they apply when a union dissenter is being beaten and stomped into the ground...
...It explains nothing because it "explains" everything...
...Yet it is enough to indicate how widespread were the stirrings in labor unions...
...he cannot be nagged out of it...
...Meanwhile, the link between radical groups and unions became increasingly tenuous and finally disintegrated...
...for the critic is generally not interested enough in labor to bother with union democracy as such...
...United Mine Workers...
...Unionists who instigate opposition, especially those who circulate handbills and hold caucus meetings, have been blacklisted, fined, suspended, expelled as disloyal...
...on crucial issues union members usually turn out in force...
...but they ignore the gadflies, the critics...
...And often it was...
...Painters in New York, California, District of Columbia, and Minnesota...
...More numerous than often realized, this group is particularly important 'Detailed accounts of reform movements in most of these unions and evidence for assertions made in this article were published in 40 numbers of Union Democracy in Action, 1960-71...
...While some "Left" literary intellectuals may be hostile to unions as they now exist, an army of labor-oriented intellectuals produces an enormous prounion output, from Harvard, the Fund for the Republic, and some 50 labor-relations centers in the universities...
...they didn't like backdoor deals and sweetheart agreements...
...their finest efforts seems feeble and futile...
...Local 138 officers were convicted of extortion and sent to prison, but continued to dominate the local...
...However, some civil libertarians have a capacity for responding to dissenters in trouble...
...Any self-respecting union will defend your right to denounce the president of the United States...
...There was me...
...Actually there were three of us...
...If he was alone like a moon walker, he felt that the team back home was monitoring his efforts...
...the union insurgent now is a lonely reformer...
...Like all worthy causes, this can bring you substantial returns in everything except money...
...The Apathy Axiom is just such an explanation applied to the labor movement...
...The individual radical might be working by himself in some grimy factory...
...The ruling politicians get lazy—that's human nature— neglect their constituents, can't handle the issues...
...My feelings have always been that the rank and file have not performed their obligations to the movement in general...
...Even those who had been radicals were now taking a new tack...
...Often the student-intellectual became a worker...
...That's how a band of students and a dissident senator forced a president of the United States to retire...
...If the members don't care, why must we...
...Job discrimination against reformers was so blatant in Local 138, Operating Engineers in Long Island, that for a time the NLRB took over control of the union's hiring hall...
...It helps to know that someone cares...
...How do we account for its popularity...
...Reform groups and individuals, seeded through the labor movement, acting in isolation, cut off from any unifying center, political or intellectual...
...fornia...
...the friend replies, wistfully, that it was self-deluding ever to have expected more...
...There was the murder of Joseph Yablonski, hard to shrug off...
...If you keep plugging away and stay with the issues, you may reach that inert majority and with a little luck, throw the other rascals out...
...By the mid-'50s, there were signs that a new kind of rank-and-file insurgent was beginning to speak out...
...It is the latest evidence of widespread activity among union men who insist upon using their democratic rights to reform their unions, even when it means severe sanctions against them—sometimes danger to their lives...
...Is a majority "apathetic...
...In Washington, D.C., Thomas Bethell publishes Appalachia Information and Coal Patrol, a nonprofit news service on miners' affairs, with sympathies for the insurgents...
...You make phone calls, visit homes, pass out handbills, announce a rally...
...that's an innate quality...
...The paradox of labor and democracy paralyzes the labor-oriented intellectual...
...When running for office of Senator, he comes to Long Island and praises him...
...The Apathy Axiom permits that kind of irresponsibility toward insurgents in the labor movement...
...Compelled to this unhappy choice, the laborite intellectual usually looks outward toward the social conflicts where events are decided rather than inward to mere squabbles over democracy...
...Life goes on...
...but the coaldiggers' struggle for elementary rights within their union has yet to break into the social awareness of labor-oriented intellectuals...
...The whole neighborhood would soon know about it and your friends might lapse into, say, APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS apathy...
...H. W. BENSON...
...The attitude of liberal-laborite intellectuals toward union democracy is shaped by their attitude toward labor unions, an attitude aptly described by Maurice Neufeld as "sophisticated tolerance...
...In that mood of disenchantment, there is often such a resemblance between friends of unions and critics that their positions can seem indistinguishable at a fast glance...
...but most people still don't seem to care...
...More than 100 professionals met at Arden House under the Center's auspices, for three days of talk on "Labor in a Free Society...
...because it includes large sections of the intellectual community in which genuine labor history might be expected to originate...
...it didn't fit old patterns, and there was no longer any interest...
...They care only for what he calls "labor history"—"the reiteration of union dogma, aimed at glorifying the union in general and the current leadership in particular...
...In November 1930, A. J. Muste excoriated the 50th AFL convention for its "tie-up with Hoover, the Republican party, and big business," for failing to organize, and for opposing unemployment insurance...
...The overwhelming impact of unionism is enlightening, civilizing, liberalizing—and all the other social goods...
...By and large, too many top officials of major unions treat their members in an authoritarian way...
...What appears as "apathy" in many unions is not the cause but often the result of a disintegration of democracy, the end product of the suppression of the dissenting spirit that is an essential ingredient of democracy...
...In society, the labor movement is the most effective single force for liberalism...
...To protect themselves against all the miseries of their trade, coal miners needed the support of a powerful union...
...Leaders and members share in the benefits of a strong labor movement, but not equally...
...but, in their tolerance, they accept the defects as unavoidable or as outweighed by more potent factors...
...But neither does the liberalizing effect of the labor movement upon the country's politics cancel out authoritarian practices within it...
...One daily newspaper reported the existence in the plant of a "small" group of 75 Socialists, which presumably was a factor instigating the crisis...
...The reappearance of union dissidence went unmarked by labor writers...
...In that same issue of Labor Age, Louis Stanley wrote, "The `golden' convention of the American Federation of H. W. BENSON Labor showed that the AFL was reposing securely in the house of American capitalism, happy that it had become a welcome guest...
...Paul Jacobs, even while writing a sympathetic account of their battle against Machinists' President A. J. Hayes, missed its significance as an example of a new trend...
...That's hard enough...
...Some voters, shaken loose, are beginning to listen...
...the missing link...
...Who could know that in a few years, brush, brambles, and vines would take over...
...Many of the most able minds in the field have extensive third-party commitments...
...Around 1950, intellectuals and union dis sidents went rocketing off in opposite direc tions...
...Even without such outside encouragement, a not-too-scrupulous man can find ways to benefit from distributing good jobs, tapping welfare funds, and dispensing favors...
...but they surely command respect and wield influence...
...When we pause to apply those theories that posit certain unique limits to union democracy, are these men justifiably, or inevitably, repressed...
...How would society endure...
...In 1958, before he became secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg told a conference of the Fund for the Republic that "there are H. W. BENSON serious questions about the extent to which it is proper to apply the standards of political democracy to internal union affairs...
...But criticize your business agent— and it's at your own risk...
...The officialdom customarily operates internally as policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, and final appeals court, even though that stark reality may be hidden behind a constitutional curtain...
...2 2 Maurice F. Neufeld (professor of industrial and H. W. BENSON Because they are sophisticated, liberal intellectuals realize that labor leaders, and their unions, never measure up to the lofty standards imposed by idealists...
...Here the orthodox labor defender faces an unpleasant choice: 1. If unions ought to be democratic, surely something should be done, or at least said, about the violation of members' rights where they occur...
...There were also rebel movements, which I could not report, in many Teamster locals, in Engineers locals, in the Steelworkers, the Hotel and Restaurant Union, in Carpenters locals...
...Nevertheless, as leader of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and editor of its Labor Age, Muste considered himself part of the labor movement and had dedicated himself to organizing a progressive wing within it...
...The miners' story of underground death, black-lung cancer, impoverished Appalachia, neglected pensioners has been too dramatic to be ignored...
...can that account for the fluctuating curve of American politics?—McCarthyism succeeded by the civil rights movement...
...if your civil liberties are violated outside the union, you can count on the American Civil Liberties Union...
...It does imply a continuing ambivalence, even equivocation...
...Painters, seamen, miners, steelworkers, machinists, operating engineers have all made complaints of serious election malpractices, backed by substantial evidence...
...Out of these clashing impulses, there follows a compendium of misgivings and notions: • Union leaders, on the average, are more socially responsible and enlightened than the rank and file...
...When it comes to union democracy, these labor-oriented intellectuals have trouble not because they are "practitioners" but because they run up against, and do not know how to cope with, the great paradox of the American labor movement—a movement democratic in external impact and often autocratic in internal life...
...APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS • An incumbent administration usually enjoys such advantages in resources, talent, influence, experience, that it can usually convince the membership that insurgents are irresponsible troublemakers...
...There were reports of struggles for union democracy among Machinists in Chicago, St...
...Jacobs noted, nostalgically, only a momentary flash of the good old days, though actually here was something new...
...it is almost always on the side of those who seek progressive social legislation...
...Unfortunately, their relationship to the industrial relations process precludes their acting in the role of historian...
...and under propitious circumstances, startling things happen...
...Officials in power dominate the election process and usually rule on appeals against themselves...
...it ignores the ordeal of the reformer and writes his effort out of history...
...After some participants had insistently posed hard questions about democracy and corruption, the officials' summary reported, "There was no consensus . . . in defining the extent of antidemocratic and corrupt practices in the labor movement...
...Ken Hechler, West Virginia congressman, stepped forward as an outspoken defender of the Yablonski movement, even though he earned the hostility of UMW officials in his state...
...they pertain to democracy in society...
...But those words meant something else in 1930, when labor progressives were confident that a resurgent labor movement would change the world...
...The issue is not whether the union majority is apathetic, but whether that putative apathy accounts for the low level of civil liberties in the labor movement...
...Nevertheless, from the standpoint of union democracy, the Project was a failure, a warning that there is something about this elusive subject that blunts the edge of critical talent...
...In 25 years, there has been a sharp shift in the intellectuals' attitude toward the labor movement, a change that leaves no room for the dissenter...
...Still, you keep at it...
...If, regrettably, other unions appear undemocratic, they caution against exaggerating such "superficial" facts when the labor movement is so profoundly progressive in other respects...
...Some laborite intellectuals remained in unions as part of the full-time staff...
...Ciepley and Rappaport [two expelled reform leaders] are both members of the Socialist party," he wrote...
...In respect to unions, they waver...
...today's dissenter is a lonely union reformer, unknown and neglected...
...As organized radicalism lost contact with the shops and as writers became indifferent, the link of collaboration between union dissenter and intellectual was broken...
...All the dangers and difficulties of democracy in unions—every one—are there in national life, only on a vaster scale...
...That beginning was the end...
...People are ignorant of computers, incapable of comprehending atomic physics, unable to administer modern industry...
...Vast resources are concentrated in the hands of a few, overwhelming the many with a sense of powerlessness...
...Union democracy is more than clauses in a constitution...
...Joseph Rauh, who became Yablonski's lawyer, is a former ADA chairman, a rapier-sharp attorney with skills finely honed 224 to deal with bureaucrats...
...Walter Reuther, who combined in his own person the qualities of worker and intellectual, assembled others like himself in the Reuther caucus...
...I have had it up to here...
...Clark Kerr put it succinctly: "Union memberships are traditionally apathetic except in some crisis, and very little can be done about it...
...even now, practical obstacles are placed in the path of insurgents, which vitiate the law's effectiveness...
...Sophisticated tolerance" does not mean uncritical apologetics—a fact that often confuses labor officials who interpret the absence of adulation as a sign of latent hostility...
...A New York Times profile (2/12/71) described him "as decidedly unacademic in the usual sense—a practical man, a wheelerdealer, a peripatetic troubleshooter...
...and it required a federal judge to enable Paul Jennings to replace James Carey...
...A dozen curiosity seekers show up...
...Goldberg's reflections about union democracy skip over such incidents...
...They stuck to the issues of democracy and corruption...
...If some unions, happily, are democratic, they see evidence of labor's civilizing role...
...Sometimes no one seems interested...
...Members who dared to speak out were faced with expulsion from the union and loss of their jobs...
...The only guarantee that officials will continue to serve the members at least as well as themselves is through membership control...
...Maybe...
...Somewhere he picked up the idea that union members don't participate, and by some odd logic, that relieved him of any obligation to be in terested in the democratic rights of those who do participate...
...Intellectuals were becoming "disen chanted" with the labor movement while the old breed of radical rank-and-file insurgent was becoming extinct, to be replaced by a APATHY AND OTHER AXIOMS new species of dissenter, not a political radical and not as sophisticated but just as militant, maybe more so...
...My first impulse is to go back to New York and try to save what personal belongings I still have...
...And so, laborite intellectuals made peace with the labor movement, reconciling themselves to its limitations, and stopped nagging for reforms...
...Like raggle-taggle rebels, the coal miners fighting for workers' democracy have never been acknowledged inside the labor movement...
...Perhaps a wisp of change is already in the air...
...Whether it can be aroused from its contentment depends upon the action of labor progressives...
...Now 75,000 local unions are serviced by executive board members, shop stewards, officers, delegates, committee members—the volunteer or lightly paid part-time activists...
...it utilizes all the mechanisms of democracy...
...What conclusions flow from the various conceptions of democracy...
...In the years that followed, like others in his group, he was beaten, expelled, blacklisted, and given a dreary runaround in government and in the labor movement...
...In 1952, Peter Batalias helped form a reform caucus in Operating Engineers' Local 138, Long Island...
...The black Cadillac, the lead pipe, the firings, blacklistings, fines, trials, expulsions, phony elections...
...All this represents only what could be pieced together by one editor in his spare time...
...What happens to them...
...Yet normally intelligent commentators can write about an important union, the Teamsters for example, and not face up to the tragic reality that in some locals a man organizing against the officialdom risks being shot...
...Weeks pass, they respond to your efforts with indifference...
...The union press almost everywhere is monopolized by the administration in power and glorifies the incumbents...
...The Apathy Axiom makes it unnecessary to dwell on the gritty details of internal repression...
...There are union reformers, many of them...
...This truth is a fundamental guide to American politics...
...it was the end of the line...
...Anxious to shield unions from hostile criticism, he guards against providing ammunition to the enemy...
...The AFL was in wretched shape...
...in the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), the election for International president was crudely stolen...
...Most writings about the labor movement have neglected this record of insurgency...
...Their hopes seemed near fulfillment when the CIO battered down the country's mightiest corporations and helped shift the balance of political power in the United States...
...membership meetings involving crucial issues, sometimes 2-4 percent of the membership actually vote...
...The rest remain at home, watch TV and busy themselves with affairs that you, in your newly aroused zeal, know to be trivially personal...
...Dunlop himself is an example of what Brooks calls the "labor practitioner," a mediator and consultant heavily in demand for all the services performed in labor relations...
...when Joseph Yablonski stepped forward to lead insurgent miners and was murdered, there was mostly silence...
...In all Detroit there were maybe 50 of us at our best...
...All of which can induce a man to neglect his constituents...
...Government involves more than a multitude on one end and ruling officials on the other...
...oppositions, politicians, muckrakers...
...sometimes they are even sharply antagonistic...
...But the same labor movement that insists so ardently on democratic rights for itself and for others in society too often denies those same rights to its own membership...
...But let's look more closely at this axiom...
...Things come up, like Vietnam, schools, corruption, filthy air, police, garbage, high prices, rents, slums, drugs...
...And when seamen, miners, painters, machinists, paper workers, teamsters, hotel workers, and others are denied democratic rights in their unions...
...If members exercised their democratic rights and had a closer measure of control over their leaders, would we be any better off...
...It is a disgrace to the union movement that at...
...When most commentators were skirting the implications of the murder, reporters asked Rauh if he thought the crime was related to the internal union fight...
...Unions may be hated and loved, feared and welcomed...
...In short, the problem is this: how do we handle violations of democratic principles in our own world...
...Teamsters tell stories about those cruising black Cadillacs...
...ply to most other spheres of social life...
...Musicians in New York and New Haven...
...They now saw inherent limitations rather than shortcomings...
...Nor are they so quixotic as to propose major changes...
...In the ACLU a different variety of social actionist finds it permissible to undercut certain rights of the labor movement in the interests of other goals...
...Absurd...
...Is it a passing flash or the first sign of changing times...
...Jim Morrisey had his skull fractured and was almost killed by a lead pipe outside the NMU hall...
...In one way, probably so...
...They give convincing, though fleeting, evidence of having acquired the information and understanding which are essential to a writing of history...
...Union democracy is the single most important issue in the campaign for election of a new UMW president," Yablonski wrote to UMW President Tony Boyle late in 1969, "I challenge you to grant full democracy to the UMW by removing your autocratic grip on the districts...
...yet this did not seem to constitute an insuperable obstacle to "carrying out the democratic process...
...Now let us, hypothetically, change all the rules...
...What, then, is the "answer...
...115-28...
...The Teamsters' Union was expelled, as were other unions...
...Robert Kennedy urged unionists to come forward with evidence...
...but he was warmed by an inner glow...
...Who, then, writes all those hundreds of books, monographs, and studies that are sympathetic to unions and union leaders...
...when the fight was lost, he left the SP and the labor movement...
...But, alas, in the process they have laid upon themselves such obligations of discretion that their voices are muffled...
...These practices are not nice to mention, but they happen often enough...
...We would have to be satisfied with "responsive" democracy, which would be good enough for unions...
...As works were commissioned and the papers and books published, the issue drifted out of sight...
...After public hearings by government investigators on New York waterfront crime and terror, the AFL ex 222 pelled the International Longshoremen's Association on corruption charges by nearunanimous vote...
...One excellent introduction to the subject is George Brooks's "The Relevance of Labor History to Industrial Relations...
...Labor unions are the principal institutions created by the industrial working class...
...But if modestly, even humbly, you try to establish democracy in your union and are whacked over the head, there is a void...
...But that was 1949...
...Expertise and experience are indispensable...
...Respond...
...They were all engaged fervently in the labor movement, or around it, in its struggles for recognition, in its internal politics...
...That level of union participation rivals anything in the nation...
...Except in those few unions with a functioning review board, trial procedure for union dissidents is a mockery of due process...
...The experience of union insurgents was part of the political experience of a generation of radicals...
...it signifies freedom for workers within the labor movement...
...Apart from the natural tendency of any official— any person!—to get jaded, careless, and lazy with age, union officials are drawn by a powerful gravitational force away from their obligations to the workers who elect them...
...But that right remains available...
...Your kids went to school, played in the street...
...but they have broken through the blackout that conceals other union reformers...
...Intellectuals, too, Brooks insists, often acquire an odd slant on labor history: I refer to the growing body of third-party practitioners who have become attached to the body of industrial relations—the arbitrators, legal advisers, actuaries, conciliators, mediators, public relations experts, and consultants...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
