COMMENTS: The Unions Try Self-Criticism
Bensman, David
The American labor movement is being battered by tides of change. Union membership as a proportion of the total work force is down; relative wages are declining; hard-won work rules are being...
...subsidized imports are wiping out whole domestic industries...
...And herein lies the crux of the problem...
...up ahead, there's a long road beckoning...
...Then, above all, it counsels labor leaders to listen closely to the needs and aspirations of the unorganized, so as to respond to their interest in such matters as pay equity, health, and safety...
...There have been inspiring stories of new labor tactics, such as the UE's mobilization of community support at Morse Cutting Tool in New Bedford, the Machinists' hardball bargaining with Eastern Airlines, and the Steelworkers' development of regional reindustrialization plans in the Monongahela Valley...
...2) gain a leading role in the formulation of our nation's trade, monetary, fiscal, regulatory, and industrial policies...
...Only a thin cadre of activists identified with the union and carried out its business...
...And achieving it will be impossible —unless American economic policy is completely redirected, so that fair-trade patterns are established, international monetary stability is set up, and the explosive and growing foreign-debt bomb is defused...
...Little wonder that the Reagan National Labor Relations Board feels free to overturn half a century of collective-bargaining practice...
...That bureaucratic system of functioning developed a life of its own, and it lives on still—now that labor's urgent challenge requires an entirely different mode of operation...
...Long-term contracts and well-developed grievance procedures leading to arbitration meant that most unions could function much like a business, collecting dues through a check-off system, and delivering services for which all too often the company received credit...
...THE REPORT BEGINS by summarizing recent losses in union strength and worker living standards but then it goes deeper, acknowledging that right-wing and corporate attacks have succeeded in branding the labor movement with an unattractive, undemocratic image...
...some seek new, "cooperative relations" with employers...
...LABOR WILL NOT be able to play a leading role in solving these problems unless it educates and mobilizes its membership to an extent not yet attempted...
...Practical suggestions include mobilizing retirees, maintaining contact with former members who have moved on to other jobs, and even providing insurance benefits and other services to workers not yet ready to join a union...
...Nonunion workers do not perceive unions as pursuing an institutional agenda drawn from the needs and desires of their members...
...Thus, centralized union bureaucracies developed and, inevitably, they discouraged participation by the vast majority of the membership...
...and Mondale's chief opponent, Gary Hart, made union-bashing a feature of his primary campaign...
...THIS IS ALL TO THE GOOD, and probably better than most observers of the Federation expected...
...Still: it's good...
...These flights from orthodoxy must inevitably challenge local union leaders to ask whether their traditional methods can be improved upon...
...LABOR'S RESPONSES have been quite diverse...
...And how much action will be taken in response to this report remains to be seen...
...One hopeful sign is a recent report issued by the AFL–CIO, written by its staff and entitled The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions: A Report by the AFL–CIO Committee on the Evolution of Work (Washington, D.C.: AFL–CIO, February 1985)—extraordinary both for the way it forthrightly faces up to labor's many problems and for the fact that it incorporates the research and suggestions of 19 scholars, who served as consultants to the committee and are listed in the report...
...Large corporations have gained the ability to shift their production facilities to low-wage, nonunion areas...
...labor's candidate Walter Mondale abandoned the AFL–CIO's industrial policy...
...The AFL–CIO report on The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions has little to say about the changing international economic patterns and the new political environment, and even less about the way these challenges necessitate the transformation of labor's strategy and mode of 392 functioning...
...the strong dollar has priced the output of unionized Americans right out of international markets...
...The report is a significant first step in the transformation of the American labor movement...
...Sixtyfive percent of such workers express agreement with the statement that 'unions force members to go along with decisions they don't like.' " This is strong stuff—not at all what the AFL–CIO published during the Meany years...
...Having established that labor faces new and serious problems, the report suggests an interesting variety of remedies...
...some are reverting to the militant, fighting style of the 1930s...
...Labor lobbyists can't get their full-employment economic program on the congressional agenda...
...and employers are sowing the seeds of future discord by insisting on two-tier wage scales...
...It calls on unions to cultivate intensively a positive public image and urges renewed efforts to educate activists...
...There have also been depressing examples of labor disunity and ineptitude, like the PATCO fiasco, and the TWU defeat by Greyhound...
...For a movement that has long been supersensitive to criticism from "outsiders" and unyielding in its insistence that its tried and true methods were fully adequate to the task, the report's publication seems more 391 than a breath of fresh air—more like a promise, a current of reform...
...The document's overall impact is to encourage self-criticism and experimentation...
...From the 1940s to the 1960s, when the labor movement made its real breakthrough in improving the living standards of working people, the adversarial but semicooperative relationship it developed with corporate America did not require the permanent mobilization of labor's rank and file...
...The rapid and profound internationalization of capitalist enterprises in the past 20 years, made possible by innumerable technological advances, necessitates that American labor do two things it never had to do before: (1) coordinate effectively with trade unionists all over the world so that corporations cannot play off one nation's workers against another's...
...Furthermore, the report recommends to trade unionists a good number of changes in how they customarily function—and does so in a way that leaves open the possibility that other new methods may prove beneficial...
...Now, the task of also convincing the members that they share important interests with workers in Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Europe will be more than difficult...
...Some unions seek to merge...
...achieving both is a daunting challenge...
...and two decades of slow economic growth have created a pool of unemployed workers, young and old, ready to work as strikebreakers...
...hard-won work rules are being surrendered...
...Labor has justifiably insisted on its right to be protected from unfair international competition...
...Perhaps that is only to be expected...
...Nevertheless, it must be stated that for all its virtues, the report stops short of getting to the roots of labor's problems...
...Accomplishing either of these tasks requires enormous effort...
...Unions today face not simply a need to develop new techniques for dealing with traditional challenges—but an entirely new economic environment wherein labor's accustomed strategies must be transformed...
...Matters are even worse on the economic front...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
