UNIONS: CAN UNIONS BE DEMOCRATIC? SOME ARE!
Benson, H. W.
David Carper derides the "fashionable fallacies" of those who "dissent against unions" but he has compiled a bulging anthology of his own. Consider his comments on union democracy. It is...
...The reply, at best, is...
...it is childish to make demands upon it...
...unions should and can be democratic...
...Not particularly...
...In the In ternational Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, it was a crime (before LandrumGriffin), subject to expulsion, for a candidate for convention delegate to pass out cards asking for votes...
...All of which would be depressing, if true...
...The task of winning democracy in unions where it is repressed is not the responsibility of the rank and file union reformer alone, nor of the decent union leader alone...
...In the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union where men were expelled nine years ago for passing out leaflets and meeting in caucus, handbills now flutter like confetti...
...What on earth does that mean...
...But it is false, all false...
...That explains the strange mood of his piece...
...Two tool and die makers recently risked expulsion from the IAM to sponsor a resolution for Public Review Boards...
...In the United Papermakers and Paperworkers, a newly formed Better Union Committee campaigns to invigorate the union's democracy...
...But he is talking to the wind...
...In the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, a new spirit of democratic and decent unionism has arisen as an example to the labor movement...
...With such a defender, who needs a hostile critic...
...in undemocratic unions they do not...
...Surely he would agree that the differences between the lead-pipe unionism of Teamsters Local 107 and the Public Review Board unionism of the UAW are hardly "irrelevant...
...at one and the same time, it seems more critical than the most critical, yet more apologetic than the most apologetic...
...It is all an illusion, he declaims almost with cynicism...
...And, to shuck off the nagging dis senter, he portrays unionism in its most crabbed, meager, limited, unattractive form as if this were its natural mode of existence...
...The dissenter exists to encourage democracy...
...he orders the intellectual to mind his own business and he dismisses as irrelevant the goals of the union reformer who strives for democracy...
...But Carper snips away at that link from two sides...
...Formal" democracy is "impossible" in, say, Russia...
...Surely Carper doesn't think so...
...He merely insists that it is naive to think they ever were...
...Others, uncomfortably adapted to unions as they are, have become apologists who discover good reasons for bad practices...
...This is a sorry business...
...Most of those he has in mind have vanished or lapsed into silence...
...others have been blacklisted...
...And they add, it doesn't have to be that way...
...CARPER WRITES about nameless dissenters...
...Is it all irrelevant, a pointless waste of time...
...rights not simply on paper but in reality...
...ists, A. J. Hayes keeps a Special Trial Board on tap to punish intolerable offenses like passing out handbills...
...Presumably, they are the radical, socialist intellectuals who still regard unions as an important force for social change, even for socialism...
...measuring unions by this standard, they call for a change...
...As he describes these anonymous critics, they seem to be persons who imagine that unionism can be decent, democratic, and socially enlightened...
...What is he driving at...
...The AFL was once accustomed to spirited debates...
...the International Ladies Garment Workers Union lost the lively democracy that prevailed at least into the postWorld War I period...
...Democracy in unions as in society at large, is a matter for constant effort, its forms decay and need to be reestablished...
...now custom prescribes a public unanimity among Federation officials...
...Where there is democracy in the union movement he must point to that and sustain and encourage it...
...Democracy, he insists is "irrelevant...
...It needs the assistance of the democratic-minded community...
...others have been expelled with or without convenient constitutional formalities...
...The United Mine Workers which once could boast of a vigorous democracy is now bureaucratized...
...Fortunately, we need not wait for that ingenious Thomas Edison...
...Some, disenchanted with labor, have abandoned hope in its basic potential...
...What makes this whole discussion of significance are the first signs of a reawakening of union democracy...
...it is a reality...
...Critics point out that some dissenting union members have been murdered, others have been beaten...
...they have moved in either of two directions...
...Who are they...
...Without seeming to notice, Carper has assembled a handy compendium of arguments for the justification of both types...
...Carper's refutation of their "fallacies" is curious...
...And "impossible" in England, too...
...As he puts it: . . if it is formal democracy the critics talk about, the devices by which the people who belong to an organization can actually exercise control over it, then the criticism is irrelevant, for this control in unions as in corporations, government, and any multimembered organization today is impossible and will continue to be until a Thomas Edison of the social sciences comes along and invents mechanisms that do not exist...
...unionism can have none of these virtues...
...RIGHT Now, however, he brushes all this aside...
...At any rate, the union reformers certainly don't think so, and in their active "dissent" within their unions they demolish "fallacies" about unionism and defend its good name in their own effective manner...
...We can seek in unions as in government certain tangible rights without which democracy is meaningless: the right to free speech and press...
...One elected officer, in fear of his life, was physically chased out of his office...
...There are, literally, hundreds of union reformers who fight in their own unions for the same rights that intelligent UAW members take for granted...
...irrel evant...
...Carper replies that formal democracy is impossible...
...Perhaps someone someday will devise a jet-age form of democracy, rich enough in subtleties to satisfy everyone...
...But he has a larger responsibility...
...In the International Association of Machin...
...It requires a bond of moral solidarity between the critical intellectual and the union democrat, a bond that can be re-established in the course of a national discussion on union democracy...
...If he were not so determined to shock his readers, Carper would agree...
...It is false, all false, he argues, that "unions are less democratic today than they once were...
...But union democrats need not seek consolation only in the past...
...Does he mean to say that unions are democratic today...
...In democratic unions these rights do exist...
...Carper would see right through the apologist for tyranny who would whip this notion up into a justification for the suppression of democratic rights...
...One trouble with the dissenter today is not that he criticizes unions but that he has failed to acknowledge democracy where it ctoes arise and to support the fight for its extension by courageous union reformers...
...others are intimidated into silence...
...the right to assemble in groups, parties and caucuses...
...Rival parties exist today in the International Typographical Union...
...Apparently Carper cannot see why there should be such a fanfare about democracy in unions when he finds that democracy in general is so rare and elusive...
...Union democracy is not the dream of an aloof critic...
...The "dissenter" whom he might convince would simply abandon the notion that unions are no longer democratic for the far more drastic one that they never have been...
...Vive la difference) If "formal" democracy is "impossible" in the UAW and in the Teamsters alike, it is enough to demand the "impossible" democracy of the UAW and to fight against the impossible "democracy" of the Teamsters...
...In Teamsters Local 107 in Philadelphia, men who opposed a forcible seizure of their union by thugs were beaten with lead pipes...
...to elect or remove representatives through peaceable, constitutional procedures...
...There is a difference between these forms of the "impossible...
...In the United Auto Workers Union, caucuses have the right to function freely...
...Where there is anti-democracy in unions, he is a thousand times right to point to it with revulsion...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
