A TROUBLED UNION AND ITS NEW LEADER
Kuttner, Robert
This is the story of a gifted and effective trade unionist who finds himself president of America's most battered major industrial union. The story raises the perennial question of how...
...no trade of wage concessions for greater union participation...
...his origins in the Canadian labor movement provide some clues to his openness...
...McBride struggled to cut his losses, fighting the company on one side and his militant rank and file critics on the other...
...Williams won that vote narrowly, but only by carrying the union's Canadian districts overwhelmingly...
...By 1982 there were 200,000 members on layoff, dozens of plants had shut down their furnaces permanently...
...It did everything but succeed...
...The company owned the whole town, and 169 they wouldn't let a Steelworkers organizer in," Williams says...
...He would stop in when the rank and file came off shift and buy one round of drinks, on his small per-diem allowance...
...People remembered him...
...Under Williams, the International has turned around 180 degrees," says Mike Stout, a griever at USWA Local 1397 at U.S...
...He grew up in Sarnia, on the southern shore of Lake Huron, the son of a United Church of Christ minister to a working-class congregation hard hit by the Depression...
...In 1937 U.S...
...Internally, the union steadily became more and more of a staff-dominated oligarchy...
...It was the model of the responsible trade union, exchanging shop-floor militancy for two decades of regular wage increases— and then found it lacked the solidarity to take a major strike...
...In such circumstances, the union had little leverage...
...He plans to hire about 100 new organizers...
...The plain fear, expressed privately by McBride, was that desperate members on layoff would scab, and that many others, grateful to still have jobs, would cross picket lines...
...Steel announced plans to import semifinished steel from Britain, the union's opposition took the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of full-page newspaper ads, warning that "The British Are Coming...
...Staff have particular influence over small locals that are not sizable enough to have their own staff operation...
...The legacy of those early shop struggles is a steel union more internally democratic...
...For some unionists, such as Bob White who recently led the Canadian Auto Workers out of the UAW, that reality means building a stronger national union movement in Canada, no longer tied to the apron strings of the AFL–CIO...
...The union constitution makes no provision for auto172 matic succession...
...Williams will have to take care that these positions are occupied by genuine organizers, and do not just become so much grist for the union's various patronage machines...
...After a generation of business unionism, in which the steel union traded militancy for ever fatter pay packets, there wasn't much left of worker solidarity at many plants...
...In the spring of 1983, exhausted by concession negotiations, McBride suffered a heart attack...
...As a consequence, the Canadian steel locals, to a greater extent than most American ones, were the fruit of hard-won, militant local organizing— they were built from the ground up, a key difference that persists to this day...
...Williams ran that year as part of the administration slate...
...Most Steelworkers under age 45 in the United States have never experienced a major strike...
...Williams is the first Canadian ever to head a major international (that is, U.S.-based) union...
...The second big difference is that the Cana168 dian labor movement is part of a functioning social democratic party, the NDP, and earlier of the CCE The NDP, which has formed the government in three provinces and is the official opposition in Ontario, gives the Canadian labor movement a somewhat broader agenda than most American union leaders have...
...Steel's own output, which the steelmaker deems unacceptable, a revitalized mill at Duquesne would use continuous casting technology to compete with imported semifinished steel products...
...On November 7, 1983, McBride suffered his second heart attack, which proved fatal...
...By temperament, he is rather more cerebral and outward-looking than many who sit with him on the AFL–CIO council...
...Over the years, three other unions have been chased out of town and the Steelworkers, to their credit, had stayed...
...The union's key staff person on the Danly campaign, interestingly enough, was Eddie Sadlowski...
...The "right to ratify" issue, long a divisive, symbolic demand for democratization, has been turned over to a basic steel conference committee, and Williams says he will go along with whatever the steel conference decides...
...The union's diverse rank-and-file groups failed to unite behind a candidate...
...In that respect, the steel union has resembled a single-party regime in a mildly authoritarian democracy, such as Mexico, Tanzania, or Cook County—blending a lot of local pulling and hauling, popular mobilization, and relatively free elections with the extensive use of machine patronage...
...But for Lynn Williams, a mark of coming of age is the fact that a Canadian can head a prominent International union...
...At this writing, District 6, Lynn Williams's old base, is headed by a radical who ousted a key Williams ally...
...It would be two more years before the election was held...
...In the mid 1930s, as a pre-teen, young Williams had many school friends whose fathers were out of work...
...Demands for procedural reforms were ignored...
...In its early years, Canadian labor was a stepchild of the bigger U.S...
...175...
...In the 1957 election, an obscure local leader named Don Rarick challenged McDonald, only to be vilified, red-baited, beaten up, outspent with dues money from the union's treasury— and still, he collected over a third of the popular vote for president...
...On the floor of a convention, local delegates 170 wear red badges, staffers wear blue ones...
...Williams's first years with the Steelworkers, interestingly, were not in steel organizing at all...
...Before Williams, the International actively discouraged worker/community buyout plans...
...When Sefton succumbed to cancer in 1973, Williams succeeded him as chief of District 6, then representing some 100,000 workers...
...But the organizing activity has been lackluster...
...At 60, Lynn Russell Williams is the freshest face to appear on the American labor scene in a generation...
...Once they found out you were from the Steelworkers, the police would put you on a plane and away you went...
...His mentor was a YMCA leader named Howard Conquergood, a veteran of CCF youth organizing...
...Rather, the contract is ratified by the conference of steel local presidents...
...From the early 1950s right up to the recession of the early 1980s, the USWA relied increasingly on an entente with the oligarchic steel industry, at a cost to its vitality as a labor organization...
...Thus, as a kind of topdown reformer in concert with the rank and file, Williams must thread his way among local fiefdoms that he doesn't entirely control, coopting here, tapping rank-and-file energy there, picking shots carefully, only selectively playing out-and-out hardball...
...In our union," Williams says, "you have a lot of members eager to accomplish something, and the establishment sometimes gets so concerned about maintaining a policy line that they frustrate a lot of people...
...If a district director was a close ally of Pittsburgh, he retained the practical right to do a lot of the hiring...
...As part of the new organizing drive, Williams created two new districts in the Southwest, and these, at least, can be built from the ground up...
...I didn't hear six stanzas of 'Hail to the Chief.' I don't see any manhandling of people hawking pamphlets opposed to the leadership...
...In 1956, after a very frustrating career as organizer in the retailing trades, Williams returned to the Steelworkers...
...In January of this year, the Steelworkers unveiled a comprehensive feasibility study proposing a takeover of U.S...
...In the hands of a conservative president, like the union's second president David McDonald or Williams's immediate predecessor Lloyd McBride, that structural compromise translated into a stultifying alliance between Pittsburgh and entrenched district directors, in which organizer positions went for local patronage, and rank-and-file militancy was discouraged...
...He could do everything better than 95 percent of the organizers I've seen, and do it perfectly...
...The whole point," he says, "was to win election as a Canadian...
...It was the first time that the International union threw its full weight behind a rank-andfile proposal to keep a mill operating through a worker-community buyout...
...His accession to the Steelworkers presidency is the culmination of a career dedicated to the belief that Canadians should not be the stepchildren of the North American labor movement...
...The changes in the posture of the International since Williams became president have not been revolutionary, but they have been significant: a willingness to experiment...
...His experience in retail organizing gave him a conviction that union membership must be pervasive, and his current strategy for reviving the Steelworkers is to "organize everything that moves...
...Canadian steel locals, for example, have always had rank-andfile ratification of contracts, something sought in vain by many American locals...
...Though Williams's background is that of a middle-class staff organizer, he thrived in a Canadian union milieu that is rather more participatory than many American steel locals, and he is by nature and experience far less fearful of rankandfile initiatives than his recent American predecessors...
...Another 200,000 were added through mergers with smaller unions, bringing total union strength to a peak of 1.4 million...
...At precisely the same historical moment, autos were getting smaller, economic growth was slowing, and new plastics and composite products were cutting into steel markets, irrevocably reducing steel demand...
...If I contribute anything, it's that I try to make room for everybody and use all these talents...
...Seemingly, Odorcich was the logical successor...
...I noticed a lot of little things at this convention," Sadlowski said, "things most people might not perceive...
...Today Canadian unions have come into their own...
...The theory is that this indirect democracy is better suited to the industrywide bargaining the union enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s...
...He had taken over the steel negotiations from the fallen McBride...
...It was a marvelous campaign," Williams recalls...
...The last major steel strike, a bitter and costly 116-day walkout in 1959, led to a labor-management determination to avoid mass strikes at all cost...
...At this writing, the company has just won a decertification election, though this will soon be moot when the mines are temporarily shut down pending a rise in the price of copper...
...The most powerful of these is the "right to ratify"—the demand that the membership have the final say over proposed contracts...
...There Williams became the most trusted lieutenant to Larry Sefton, the head of the Union's big District 6, which then included most of Canada...
...McBride, before his death, had told several executivecouncil members that he considered Williams the better man...
...In 1973, this was formalized in the Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA), under which the union essentially agreed to a no-strike pledge in exchange for regular wage increases tied to productivity plus inflation...
...It is a peculiar mix of the democratic and the oligarchic...
...By 1949, more than 5,000 employees had signed union cards...
...Yet the International's publicity operation was turned over to the rank-and-file people, and it performed well...
...He was so articulate, so persuasive, very convinced and very sincere...
...Williams, as secretary, was not directly involved in the steel negotiations, though he privately supported the leadership's concessions strategy...
...Bottled up in the Steelworkers' hierarchy are a lot of idealistic and talented people, and the advent of Lynn Williams has liberated enormous energies...
...Under a more venturesome president, like Williams, the relative decentralization to the district level leaves an immense amount of operating power in the hands of district directors—most of whom initially opposed Williams...
...Resolutions may be brought on any topic by any local, but all resolutions are referred to committee, and by the time they are brought to the floor they are invariably well sanitized...
...The Tri-State Conference on Steel is a rank-and-file caucus, with no official standing in the union...
...The Canadian soil, however, was much more arduous, the industry more resistant, and the political climate far less favorable...
...It was a mix of community organizing and social work, and permeated by the political spirit of the CCF, the forerunner of the Canadian New Democratic party...
...Meanwhile, nobody is lining up to organize high-tech workers...
...Yet the Canadian trade-union culture that nurtured Williams is rather more open, democratic, and progressive...
...Today thanks to a tougher, more unified, militant movement and a friendlier legal climate (union-busting is virtually illegal in Canada), the Canadian rate is close to 40 percent—while the U.S...
...The USWA constitution gave the International president control over all hiring and firing of staff...
...rate has dropped to 17 percent...
...But the combination of business unionism, staff domination, and the active discouragement of rankandfile energies by local district machines has added up to a union ill equipped to fight back when hard times came and industry-union detente flew apart...
...When U.S...
...Under his tenure, membership doubled...
...Although the first Eaton's drive ended in failure—at this writing, Eaton's employees are on strike to win union recognition—Williams stayed in retail organizing eight years before returning to the steel union...
...When the era of union-industry collaboration suddenly gave way to an era of concession-bargaining, the union lacked the militancy, the cohesion, or the strategic vision effectively to fight back...
...Three decades ago, both Canada and the United States had unionization rates of about 30 percent...
...Williams's opponent was International treasurer Frank Mckee, who tried to oust Williams by appealing to crude, anti-Canadian chauvinism...
...And when the executive board met on November 18 to name the acting president, they picked Lynn Williams...
...In late 1947, Williams was asked to sign on as the second of three paid organizers at Eaton's...
...In December, a thousand trade unionists picketed the company's New York corporate headquarters...
...labor federations...
...At the same time, the union has a history of rank-and-file upheaval, often unfocused and sometimes surprisingly effective...
...it has organized few workers since the mid-1970s...
...The study was prepared by the New York-based firm Locker-Abrecht Associates, which helped design the successful Machinists-Eastern Airlines deal...
...The leadership failed to negotiate any meaningful quid pro quos: no commitment by the industry to reinvest savings in steel modernization (U.S...
...Thus dissenting views are made to appear less influential than they often are...
...From the traditional perspective of the International staff, all of this political machinebuilding is necessary to keep control over what might otherwise be an undisciplined and ungovernable mass...
...The USWA today is a union marooned in declining, high-wage industries...
...The story raises the perennial question of how much difference one leader can make when historical forces are less than auspicious...
...Sadlowski's upset election to his own district directorship had come after the U.S...
...1977 saw Eddie Sadlowski, the popular director of District 31, mount a broadly based rank-and-file challenge...
...Williams was one of the founders of the modern NDP, has stood for the Canadian parliament as an NDP candidate, has served on the NDP board, and was a leader of the centrist faction that ousted a left-wing splinter a decade ago...
...Steel's Homestead Works who is a longtime critic of the International's isolation and a member of Tri-State's executive board...
...He is a doggedly persistent labor organizer as well as an idealistic, gentle, and incorruptible man...
...Over 100,000 new members were organized during the early 1970s...
...The generation of Canadian Steelworker leaders that Williams epitomizes stands for labor internationalism, social democratic politics, and hard, thorough organizing...
...By the late 1970s, several developing countries enjoyed both more advanced steelmaking technology and lower labor costs than their American competitors...
...The proposal would use eminent domain to create a public authority to run the blast furnaces and melt shop...
...Rather than competing with U.S...
...Some losing candidates for elective positions favored by the International also found their way onto staff jobs, which further tarnished the International's credibility with the rank and file...
...A more hopeful change is a new willingness on the part of the International to consider ideas on their merits, with far less worry about which faction thought them up...
...How173 ever, the top union leadership was distressed to learn that the organizers were consistently exaggerating how many signed cards they had, and the drive has essentially fizzled...
...A special election of the union's full membership was held in March 1984, to fill the remainder of McBride's term...
...Its responsibilities include liaison with foreign unions—the internationalism that Williams cherishes—and public relations...
...Locker-Abrecht also brought in a Pittsburgh engineering firm and used Data Resources, Inc., to estimate market demand...
...At the Phelps Dodge copper mines in Arizona, the company defied an industrywide settlement, and it succeeded in bringing in strikebreakers, with the connivance of the Democratic governor, Bruce Babbitt...
...It sheds light on the desperate condition of America's labor movement, after the collapse of the peculiar social contract known as "business unionism...
...I don't see any bugles blowing...
...In 1946, as a young university graduate committed to labor organizing, he took a bluecollar job at the John Inglis plant in Toronto, assembling hot water heaters...
...Today he is immensely popular on both sides of the Great Lakes, and favored to win the 1986 election overwhelmingly...
...If I'm right, then good things are going to happen...
...Williams's job in those years was very much like that of a circuit-riding preacher—keeping track of scores of locals, going to meetings four and five nights a week, helping to process grievances, negotiate contracts, and enlisting new members...
...His first assignment was organizing aluminum smelter workers in a bitter jurisdictional fight between the Steelworkers and the building trades at Kitimat, B.C., in the mountains north of Vancouver...
...There was a key difference between the early Steelworkers union in the U.S...
...And it put the Steelworkers on the offensive for a change, by tapping the reservoir of rank-and-file and community energies...
...At the Danly Machine Shop in Cicero, Ill., in another bitter strike in which management went all out to break the union, the Steelworkers successfully applied corporate pressure to Danly's parent conglomerate, the Ogden Corporation...
...an openness to the rank and file...
...The secretary is also in charge of the internal details of union life, at which Williams excels: administering contracts, labor education, personnel...
...Williams's most important recommendation was that the union give top priority to organizing...
...The union that Williams inherits epitomizes the weakened condition of American industrial unionism generally...
...It is a tribute to the democratic face of the union that this dissent surfaces at all...
...It added up to a tight machine...
...He is not a rank-and-file militant...
...If anything, he is the consummate staff man, having spent more than two decades as a staff rep in Ontario and then as director of the union's big District 6 (Eastern Canada), before being tapped in 1977 167 to run for the elected post of International secretary...
...They owned the hotel...
...Steel...
...In 1965, I. W Abel, then the union secretary-treasurer, finally capitalized on accumulated rank-and-file distaste for president McDonald's "tuxedo unionism," and narrowly won the union presidency...
...The study was released in late January, at a massive town meeting, and the news of it led the Pittsburgh papers the next day...
...One of the major Canadian labor struggles of the late 1940s was an epic campaign to organize Eaton's, Toronto's largest department store...
...no share of future profits or seats on company boards...
...And rather than relying on wage cuts, Locker-Abrecht calculated that more efficient deployment of manpower could cut production costs to a competitive $205 per ton...
...One Steelworker official told me proudly how the union was throwing resources into Ohio—to compete with several other internationals to enlist members of the state's civil-service association...
...The move was revolutionary in two respects...
...Despite the merger of craft and industrial union federations, into the AFL–CIO in the United States and the CLC in Canada, the leadership agreed to one final fair jurisdictional vote in Kitimat, which the Steelworkers won...
...During McBride's tenure, Williams served as chair of a committee on the future of the union...
...In past years, various rank-and-file activities on behalf of the unemployed workers in the Mon Valley and elsewhere, and various worker buyout schemes, received very little help from the International, whose officers were worried about getting into bed with union radicals who had been a thorn in the side of the International on other issues...
...Steel to delay imminent plans for demolishing the facility...
...As the most polished of the young organizers at Eaton's, Williams was put in charge of organizing the commission sales clerks, who were notoriously skeptical about unions and hard to organize...
...One Big Union is a great and venerable idea—but not ten big unions...
...The negotiations were taken over by the union's International vice president, a grizzled and cantankerous former foundry worker named Joe Odorcich...
...In helping to underwrite the study, the USWA worked in concert with the City of Pittsburgh, the Allegheny County Board of Commissioners, the local congressman, other mayors, Steelworkers Local 1256, and the Tri-State Conference on Steel...
...He went to funerals and weddings...
...no guarantees against further layoffs or shutdowns...
...A native of Ontario and a founder of Canada's New Democratic party, Williams is possibly the most interesting and promising Canadian export to the American democratic left since John Kenneth Galbraith...
...an emphasis on organizing and on corporate campaigns...
...This will give Williams an infusion estimated at some $18 million...
...Williams himself is double-edged...
...and in Canada...
...yet staff representatives hired by the International have immense power over day-to-day life of all but the largest locals...
...Steel's idled Duquesne works, a 20-year-old facility the steel company deemed not sufficiently profitable, once the most productive facility in the Monongahela Valley...
...Subsequently, Williams, then 32, came back East as the Steelworkers' chief man in the heavily industrialized Niagara peninsula, the scene of intense organizing...
...Too many staff jobs reflected patronage...
...In the late 1930s, Williams began leading youth groups in the working-class neighborhoods of Hamilton, through the local YMCA...
...I've known guys who were better at one aspect of organizing or another, but Lynn could do it all...
...Every established union cannot become the next transport and general workers union of the United States...
...In practice, a good deal of the rank-and-file energy that makes for a strong, democratic union was seen by the union administration as "opposition" activity to be co-opted or discouraged...
...And in 1977, when McBride was casting about for a Canadian to add to the ticket, Williams was the logical choice...
...and a new posture toward concessions that insists on quid pro quos...
...Under this umbrella, the steel union seemed to thrive...
...Between 1964 and 1981, Steelworkers' wages rose from 135 percent of the average industrial wage to a high of 164 percent...
...Williams took over last March as International president of the United Steelworkers of America, at a critical moment in the union's history, with membership down in just five years from 1.4 million to barely 700,000 in the wake of devastating plant closings...
...There is so much to do...
...In November 1983, after the sudden death of President Lloyd McBride, Williams was named acting president by the executive board, and then elected in his own right in a special membership election in March 1984...
...Steel recognized the union without a strike...
...The exercise is not without its pitfalls...
...and you can pick out scores of people wearing both color badges, indicating a staff rep who has obtained delegate credentials...
...And sources close to the negotiations say that Phelps Dodge's Arizona mines are likely to close down for a while, and when they reopen a settlement is likely, giving priority to laid-off Steelworker members...
...All year, organizers were supposedly a few weeks away from filing for an NLRB election...
...Ultimately, a settlement was reached and although the terms were only mediocre, on the key point of giving union members preference over strikebreakers the union prevailed...
...In exchange, Washington offered Pittsburgh protection from foreign imports, though without demanding in return any industry commitment to modernization...
...When the vote was finally held, in December 1951, the union narrowly lost...
...As bargaining began for the big American contracts up for renewal in 1983, Lloyd McBride became convinced that the union could not take a strike...
...Being in a preacher's house, often I'd come home from school and my mother would be feeding somebody," Williams recalls...
...After almost a decade in Pittsburgh, first as International secretary, then as acting president, and finally winning election as president in his own right last March, Williams still considers himself Canadian...
...and they have been more willing to strike...
...He actually lost the American districts by a few thousand votes...
...Williams struck back with a sophisticated corporate campaign against Phelps Dodge, putting pressure on the company's sources of financing...
...Maybe great things...
...The mechanisms by which the union establishment retained control were not especially subtle...
...He was incredibly mature for a guy in his twenties...
...Almost immediately Odorcich, Williams, and the union's treasurer Frank Mckee began taking soundings...
...Under David J. McDonald, the union's second president (1953-65), CIO-style militancy faded into sermons about "people's capitalism...
...With Abel having decided to step down in favor of a more electable candidate and staff resources uniting behind one unity candidate, even Sadlowski was beaten by 88,000 votes...
...It is no accident that Williams is from another country...
...It also provides a philosophical grounding...
...If somebody still wants to have a political fight, it is relatively easy to handle when you have a lot of good projects going...
...And as it happened, the September 1984 convention in Cleveland, Williams's first as union president, was also the occasion for the presentation of the committee's report...
...In practiced hands, such dull bureaucratic details are levers of union power and the ingredients of higher office...
...Williams, in effect, must rebuild an organizing capacity almost from scratch...
...This was "tripartism" at its worst...
...Equally bold was the proposal itself...
...Carrollton, a notorious company town, is admittedly difficult territory...
...Labor Department ordered an election overturned...
...While everyone was singing 'Solidarity Forever' in Toronto, we were kicking hell out of each other in Kitimat," Williams recalls...
...That year the Conservative Ontario labor board changed the law, requiring union members to pay a dollar as proof of membership...
...This is a prerogative that Steelworkers enjoy in Canada, but not in the United States...
...But soon Abel was seen as being as distant and autocratic as McDonald had been...
...The union he inherits epitomizes the double-edged character of the American labor movement...
...Once you stop concerning yourself with that stuff, you can start building a union...
...The Abel slate had campaigned on the pledge to "restore rank-and-file control over basic policy...
...Steel's lead, and union membership had ballooned to 650,000...
...The White House, under both Republican and 171 Democratic presidents, eager to avoid major strikes in steel, essentially encouraged the industry to buy labor peace...
...during that time Eaton's successfully manipulated the size of the bargaining unit and won over numerous employees with unexpected raises...
...By the early 1980s, the steel union found itself reeling from the effects of the deep recession...
...Last year I visited a showcase organizing drive of the Southwire Company, a large cable factory in Carrollton, Alabama, where Steelworkers have mounted an intense campaign...
...We need to get the district directors turned on to organizing, not to build a big, central organizing department," Williams says...
...He was tapped to go to a labor summer school, and soon found himself on the Steelworkers' payroll...
...On the other hand, District 31, Eddie Sadlowski's former territory, is back in moderate hands...
...Most conventions are well-orchestrated affairs...
...The strategy was like the Oliver Wendell Holmes "wonderful one-hoss shay, that . . .ran a hundred years to a day"—and suddenly collapsed all at once from multiple causes...
...By 1969, a second unknown challenger named Emil Narick almost toppled Abel, winning 41 percent of the vote, and carrying the basic steel locals nearly two-toone...
...The union administration candidate in 1977 was not Abel but Lloyd McBride, himself a district director, who had put together a diverse slate that seemed to stand for more openness and participation...
...A number of long-standing issues have come to symbolize rank-and-file resentment of the union establishment, particularly in the basic steel locals...
...But Williams, likable, capable, meticulous, disarmingly inoffensive, had the votes...
...It has raised its members' wages far above the industrial average—leaving the union defensive and unpopular...
...Since McDonald's time, an immense amount of rank-and-file energy in the Steelworkers has been consumed battling autocratic leadership, rather than building a union...
...an acting president must be named by the executive board...
...And it suggests some reasons for guarded optimism...
...At a USWA convention, small locals have disproportionate voting strength (a local gets one delegate for the first 500 members and one for each additional 500), and it is very common for staff reps to obtain credentials as delegates from locals that can't afford to send rank-and-file people...
...Eight years after his insurgent campaign for the union presidency, Sadlowski is now a union official on the District 31 staff...
...Twice rebuffed by the conference of steel local presidents during protracted negotiations, McBride finally sold a concession contract that cut Steelworkers' pay by $245 a month, suspended cost-of-living adjustments, eliminated several days of vacation, shaved fringe benefits, and in all saved the industry $3 billion...
...In many respects, then, the odyssey of Lynn Williams parallels that of the Canadian labor movement...
...By 1942, when the Steelworkers Organizing Committee officially became the United Steelworkers of America, at a founding convention in Cleveland, the smaller steelmakers had followed U.S...
...He succeeded in getting the convention to approve an amendment capping the union's strike fund, and using the excess to rebuild organizing staff...
...The Steelworkers have gotten their fingers burned going after supermarket clerks, public employees, and other nonindustrial targets considered the turf of other unions...
...In practice, it is the staff reps who process grievances and who have great influence over how well a local president can do his job...
...He gave speeches at the local Rotary Club...
...There was no friendly government and no Wagner Act...
...the union's International officers and its 35 district directors are popularly elected...
...A lot of local union presidents, good and bad, found their way onto union staff jobs in this fashion...
...The post of International secretary was tailormade for Lynn Williams...
...And Williams is hardly just another machine president of the International...
...The audacious proposal forced U.S...
...To understand something of what makes Williams so special, one needs first to consider the Canadian labor movement where he learned his politics...
...It was also common for staff reps to contribute money and time to help elect favored candidates for district director...
...A potential problem with the "organize everything that moves" philosophy is that other unions have the same idea...
...But it would be almost a decade before Williams again saw the inside of a mill...
...The Steelworkers, along with other new industrial unions, were underwriting much of the campaign...
...By 1981, the average full-time Steelworker was earning about $28,000 a year...
...Since taking over the union last March, he has been very hospitable to the rank and filers, most dramatically throwing his full weight behind the radical proposal by the rankandfile Tri-State conference to establish a public authority to seize and revitalize steel mills abandoned by U.S...
...Unlike Williams, he was an ethnic, a former factory worker, and of course an American...
...1977 was the year Eddie Sadlowski mounted a famous and ultimately unsuccessful rank-and-file challenge to the union administration...
...Steel's purchase of Marathon Oil came in 1982...
...Let's just go out and do it...
...Militant activity on behalf of unemployed Steelworkers and community alliances in the battered steel valleys were left, by default, to radical local activists, with the International watching skeptically from the sidelines...
...The remaining steelmakers were demanding unprecedented wage concessions...
...And the process of building a steel union was much more like the auto experience—bitter strikes, setbacks, and struggles...
...In the U.S., the new Wagner Act and the friendly Roosevelt administration offered a good organizing climate...
...It is a union with raucous rankandfile energies—which previous presidents have seen as an annoyance rather than an asset...
...Not until 1944 did Canada's Cabinet approve an Order in Council that gave Canadian unions the opportunity to win certification based on fair elections, along the lines of the Wagner Act...
...The miracle was that it damn near succeeded, despite overwhelming odds...
...Even under a Williams, who genuinely wants to stress organizing, the climate is difficult and the internal obstacles are great...
...He could do anything— write leaflets, speak to meetings, talk to people one-on-one, raise money...
...The Steelworkers have no substantial central organizing staff, and the local organizing staff is well known for deadwood...
...Domestically, "mini-mills," using scrap inputs, could underprice the big integrated manufacturers in several product lines...
...Whenever foreign competition threatened this rosy entente, labor and management jointly petitioned for more protection...
...Later Williams followed him into the fledgling Steelworkers union...
...Dissidents frequently capture local presidencies, and occasionally district directorships...
...The Steelworkers have not done much organizing since the mid-1970s...
...Williams was born in 1924, in Springfield, Ontario...
...But Abel's victory was as much a palace coup supported by most of the International officers, staff, and key entrenched district directors, as a real rank-and-file revolt...
...Williams also plans a series of indepth six-week organizing schools, something the union has lacked, and he has asked each district director to develop a long-term organizing plan, another first...
...Williams has also embraced another for174 ward-looking strategy, the "corporate campaign...
...Lynn was the best all-around union organizer I've seen anywhere," recalls Wally Ross, a fellow organizer on the Eaton campaign...
...Encountered at the Steelworkers' September 1984 biennial convention at Pittsburgh, Sadlowski said the most important changes in the union under Williams seemed symbolic...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
