HARD CHOICES

...Prospering corporations tolerated, and sometimes even welcomed, trade unions with the right attitude about free enterprise at home and Cold War abroad...

...The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and "PennPIC," the Pennsylvania Public Interest Coalition, recently sponsored a large rally and lobby at the state capitol in Harris-burg on plant closing and interest rate bills...

...A national officer of the Steelworkers union puts it this way: "If there is no party with which the coalition of the aged, the poor, trade unionists and all working people, the minorities, the women, the handicapped can identify, shouldn't this coalition abandon the existing parties and form its own—even if only to strengthen its bargaining position with the two major parties...

...Frequently the leadership is ahead of the membership on both political and workplace issues...

...We should also take care to keep labor in the labor movement—the workers whose needs and interests lie at its heart...

...A wholesale move into the Democratic Party would only bind the unions tighter to the corporate forces that have captured the DNC...

...The disappointments of the Carter years and the Democrats' failure to exploit Congressional majorities, the depredations of the Reaganites and the growing popular anger over the effects, and the continued floundering of the Democrats all give labor an opportunity, not to mention a reason, to move boldly toward independent political action...

...The card information will be computerized and made available for rapid-action writing, calling, and lobbying efforts along the lines already perfected on the Right by Richard Viguerie's famously successful direct mail operation and the U.S...

...The AFL-CIO called the Democrats' 1981 alternative tax plan a "giveaway to business" and backed instead a rump plan sponsored by Democratic liberals and supported by a handful of moderate Republicans...

...In what direction will all these pressures—the Reagan challenge, employer hostility, and rank-and-file sentiment for a fight—push trade union leadership...

...They could try instead to mobilize the members through ad hoc shop floor meetings, plant gate demonstrations, informational picketing, overtime bans, mini-job actions, and the like, relying on lawyers and arbitrators only as a last resort...

...The swarm of Democratic Party viziers and their attacks on Reaganomics at November's AFL-CIO convention made the annual meeting as much a party gathering as a national labor congress...

...The corporate hold on the Democratic Party is not going to be broken...

...I readily grant that good work has been done in the past by the unions, but what good purpose are they serving now...

...Massachusetts unions and Mass...

...Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers conventioneers voted in the fall to "develop a strategy that would not rely on the two principal parties...

...A serious consideration of independent politics has been under way in the labor movement in recent years and gathering force in recent months...

...With its own experience in reconciling conflicting demands for the sake of a common program, something trade unions do in every bargaining situation (representing the skilled and unskilled, those with and without seniority, day shift and night shift workers), the labor movement can lay a legitimate claim to the leadership of a lasting grass-roots movement...

...As one of the activists argued to union members in a successful bid for leadership: "How long, how long will you be content with the present half-hearted policy of your unions...

...who takes his seat on the right-wing Committee on the Present Danger...

...Similarly, union-company safety and health committees, or union-management productivity committees, despite their participatory trappings, can compromise the union structure and turn it into an arm of management...

...In a parallel development, many unions have moved away from earlier principles of one-steward-for-each-supervisor and the right to strike over grievances...

...Twenty-five years of postwar growth muted the consequences of the CIO's shift to the right...

...In fairness, it should be noted that many union leaders are sincere in their belief that they can better serve their members by making labor noises in the councils of the certified movers and shakers...

...Unions demanded and got a majority of the at-large seats on the Democratic National Committee in a DNC restructuring last year...

...Many union leaders at all levels, including the highest, work hard to promote the kinds of rank-and-file action I have laid out...

...the new ratio and a reliance on compulsory arbitration have entangled unions in a bureaucratic, delay-filled grievance procedure that takes problems out of the hands of affected workers and serves to alienate members from their union...

...Even his refusal to invite Ronald Reagan to address delegates to the recent AFL-CIO convention, which seemed to many like the least he could do, was an act of some significance, given the entrenched history of Federation deference to whoever sits in the White House...

...Unions are already eyed with suspicion...

...The temporizing and lack of direction among elected Democrats might also convince the unions it is time they moved into positions of power in the party...

...Most union leaders hope to travel both roads, regaining influence in the conventional councils of government, and activating the rank and file to supply the local pressure that has been lacking up to now...

...Unions can begin the move away from arbitration, and the glacial process of filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB and safety complaints with OSHA...

...It is not just the shock of the Reagan agenda that is pushing the unions into a corner...

...Where posible, and without falling into simple "workerism," independent candidates should be recruited from union ranks...

...The Industrial Union Department is taking steps to transmit occupational health films, produced by OSHA under Eula Bingham (but banned by the Reagan Administration's "Legion of Decency") by way of the Public Broadcasting System satellite for local showings...

...they have to go down to the ranks in an open search for union self-renewal that compels the membership to respond...

...They can encourage rank-and-file initiatives through the local publication of shop papers and through special bulletins, by calling small-unit meetings (to supplement general membership meetings) and holding lunch-hour assemblies, through more energetic stewards' council activity, through special contract preparation efforts, health and safety training, and so on...

...They speak for a shaky thirty per cent of the eligible workforce (the more commonly quoted twenty per cent takes into account the supervisors, the self-employed, and others who cannot be unionized...

...The federation's Industrial Union Department and the Sierra Club are assembling a statesbased "OSHA-Environmental Network" to defend occupational safety and environmental health laws...

...At the same time, the unions are trying to pick up the tempo of grass-roots political action...

...Ultimately, the choice is to stick with the membership or abandon it...

...This is not meant to be a blanket indictment of "union bureaucrats" or "mis-leaders," especially as it is written by someone making his living as a union bureaucrat...

...Chamber of Commerce...

...To play it safe, union leaders figure they must hold themselves out as respectable participants in the conventional game of power...

...Little can be accomplished overnight, even on the momentum of Solidarity Day, and it is neither necessary nor, perhaps, wise to proclaim in haste the birth of a new labor party...

...If polls are any guide, more union members now regard themselves as independents than as Democrats...

...In Britain, Perlman pointed out, union leadership passed to political activists "not because they were socialists, but because they made good on their claims as aggressive unionists...

...A number of unions are undertaking television advertising campaigns to develop awareness and support for union goals...

...f building permanent bridges to the black movement in the South to produce the kind of alliance that put Representative Wayne Dowdy of Mississippi in office in the first by-election following the 1980 general election, and putting such alliances to work for black candidates who can raise labor issues the way Dowdy pressed extension of the Voting Rights Act in his campaign...

...Organized labor had better soon realize that there is no substitute, no matter how sophisticated or grass roots in appearance, for genuine membership ferment...

...Many unions are taking on outside consultants and public relations experts to handle this work, and using professional pollsters to help develop the union's program and pitches to the membership...

...This is all to the good //these tactics are meant to supplement rank-and-file actions like Solidarity Day...

...The Federation is adding staff and funding to give seemingly tedious Federal budget issues the public airing they need...

...That labor is ultimately the most junior partner is lost on too many unionists...

...It results in the integration of American union leadership into a system of social control by elites, where public policy is thrashed out by competing circles of experts...

...In 1946 the CIO's "Big Three"—the steel, auto, and electrical workers—had won nationwide strikes for breakthrough wages and benefits in basic industry...

...The upbeat legend on a T-shirt making the rounds says, "Let's put the movement back in the labor movement...

...Then, too, there is the anti-labor tack openly taken by more and more employers—the wage cuts and takeaways, the plant closings and runaway shops, the abuses of the anti-union consultants...

...The AFL-CIO has announced it will probably back candidates in Democratic primary elections, reversing a hands-off policy of long standing...

...It is through the adoption of such go-along policies that American labor leaders have been slipping away from what Selig Perlman, in his 1920s classic A Theory of the Labor Movement, called "an aggressive, hard-hitting unionism" that won rank-and-file support...

...On the one hand, it is a profoundly conservative force, seeking no more than a "fair day's pay for a fair day's work" and incremental social legislation, all in a capitalist context...

...Sidney Lens's thesis in his companion piece is correct: The labor movement has to become more radical...

...But they could also be nothing more than a cultivation of the appearance of grass-roots activity for the sake of bolstering the labor leader's role in traditional political circles...

...I endorsing independent candidates in state and local primaries and general elections when credible showings seem possible...

...Any such move would foreclose union criticism of the party and the aggressive pursuit of alternative policies if, as is likely should the Democrats return to power in 1984, there is a rerun of Carter-style backsliding...

...One road—a few simple steps from the Mall site of September's impressive Solidarity Day rally—leads east to Capitol Hill, to a position of renewed strength and influence in the Democratic Party and in Congress...

...Strike activity, while not always the definitive measure of aggressiveness (there are other ways to fight) has been at the lowest rate in decades...

...The apparent smashing of the air traffic controllers' union, the virtual shutdown of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by the White House, the budget cuts that are tearing away fifty years of progressive legislation, and the social damage done in the highly unionized states and cities—these ought to be provocation enough...

...in many cases, the rank and file itself must be persuaded of its power...

...At any moment, society could turn on the labor movement and set it back a century...

...CIO merged with, and was absorbed by, the AFLin 1955...

...The result is an infinite variety of trade union practice in the United States...

...f and most important, stepping up union involvement and asserting labor leadership in coalitions that address themselves to the issues of daily life—utility rates, plant closings, oil and gas prices, occupational and environmental health, interest rates, state and local taxation—and forcing politicians of both parties to stop dancing or face independent opposition when their positions on such issues are found wanting...

...Fair Share, Connecticut unions and the Citizens Action Group, Ohio labor and the Ohio Public Interest Group, Illinois unions and the Illinois Public Action Council, California unions and the Campaign for Economic Democracy—all have found issues that unite them in cooperative efforts...

...How to do all this...

...On a wave of strikes and sit-ins, the CIO movement had swept six million workers into the steel, electrical, auto, rubber, and other industrial unions since the mid-1930s...

...Even if the fancy technology were tuned to a high pitch of perfection, it would be just a cover for politics-as-usual unless those in charge make an equivalent effort to shape up an independent, politically-minded movement of rank-and-file workers and their allies...

...That temptation must be resisted...

...After Reagan's autumn stumbles on budget issues and economic policy...

...The movement that built Solidarity Day can carry on to advance the idea of independent political work— that is, a break with the Democratic Party H picking fights over election rules and practices that discriminate against third or minor party candidates—signature requirements, media exclusion, and the like...

...A former high union official told Business Week that unions should stop making demands on employers and become "cooperative partners in the labor-management relationship...

...Union money accounts for a substantial part of the cash going to the DNC and Democratic candidates for the 1982 Congressional campaigns...

...For their part, union members have to see the link between action in the workplace and what their leaders ask them to do in the political arena...

...BY LANCE COMPA The rush of events since the election of Ronald Reagan has forced the trade union movement to confront hard choices for the first time in more than thirty years...

...In every case, it is local union leadership that is demanding an end to the "special relationship" with a Democratic Party that has consistently short-changed working people...

...Corporate influence could not be better reflected there than by millionaire banker-lawyer Charles Manatt, the DNC's new chairman, and the "Lexington Group" of conservative Democratic businessmen he is grooming to run for political office under the party banner...

...In many states and cities, local unions and hitherto conservative central labor councils and state federations are actively cooperating with consumer groups in issue-oriented battles...

...The AFL-CIO is setting up a video and data transmission network with state affiliates for information sharing and tactics coordination, and expects to establish a permanent PR department to exploit the latest innovations in communications technology...

...Democrats began hitting up the business world's political action committees for contributions when continued control of the House appeared likely...

...They could represent a real turning to the rank and file...

...Sometimes, the same people go in two directions at once, and necessarily...

...This rising tide of independent sentiment can be channeled into a political force smart enough to keep its options open without compromising principle or delivering the union vote into the lap of any party, new or established...

...But the movement that came together to build for the September rally can carry on to advance the idea of independent political action—that is, a break with the Democratic Party...

...Hospital workers, clothing and textile workers, and many other trade unionists are moving in the same direction...

...Above all, union leaders will have to re-integrate themselves into rank-and-file life...

...From there, the route is familiar: save the Davis-Bacon Act, fight tight money, salvage social programs without cutting military spending, and elect the likes of Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy, or John Glenn as President in 1984...

...When the risk of defeat appears to outweigh the likelihood of progress, though, many union leaders prefer jawing to fighting...

...The unions have gone the road of high-level influence before, but all their purported clout could not guarantee the passage of the mild Labor Law Reform bill of 1978, get Jimmy Carter re-elected in 1980, or hold the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to defeat the 1981 Reagan budget cuts and tax giveaways...

...But the problems of the 1970s—competition from a rebuilt Europe and Japan, the assertion of economic power by formerly compliant Third World countries, inflation spawned by Vietnam war spending, a rising percentage of structural unemployment with scandalous levels for minorities, youth, and women—could no longer be managed by the middle-of-the-road policies of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations...

...It was 1947 when the Taft-Hartley Congress threw down the last challenge to organized labor...

...An independent coalition of the groups represented at Solidarity Day can hammer out a political agenda and stand fast on the issues, ever on the lookout for candidates of either party or any party worthy of support, instead of tailing the Democratic Party apparatus...

...But he too easily draws the line between an allegedly moribund union leadership at the top and a militant rank and file and a secondary leadership straining to break free of the deadheads and do right...

...Even a matter as seemingly innocuous as negotiating a workplace code of conduct, which many unions do, can put a union in a position of being the employer's enforcer instead of the worker's defender...

...The California State AFL-CIO has, in two statewide conferences, dwelt on the prospects for independent labor action in state politics...

...The same alliance of labor, minority, and community forces that built Solidarity Day can turn that single event into an enduring movement for political action at the grassroots level...

...Can it really be so hard...

...This notion is no longer the exclusive property of labor intellectuals and Left academics...

...If the unions insist on a bigger voice in the Democratic Party and place more reliance on high-technology, expert-dominated, money-talking political organizing tactics, we will only move farther down a dead-end road and insure that the struggle is taken out of workers' hands and turned over to lawyers, consultants, publicists, and professional political operatives...

...The national AFL-CIO is working with the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition to head off the deregulation of natural gas prices...

...Federation publications have blasted the "sell-out" tactics of Democratic Party leaders...

...The true unionist policy of aggression seems entirely lost sight of...

...CIO unions at first pledged to stick together and fight back, but one by one, then in a rush, they broke...

...Now, by going down to the members and out to the country on a permanent basis, labor and its allies can enlist both organized and unorganized workers in its political program, and win over a good part of the middle class to a scheme of independent political action free of corporate influence and centrist party habits of mind...

...A labor-black alliance in Hartford powered by teachers, machinists, and hospital workers' unions propelled Thirman Milner to election as New England's first black mayor...

...To mobilize the rank and file and carry out the promise of Solidarity Day, however, trade unions have to risk a break with the elites...

...The inevitable dilemma is this: Union leaders find themselves in the uncomfortable position of managing worker discontent and fighting for worker rights...

...Each of these bodies in turn elects its own officers, stewards, committee people, executive boards, and so on...

...Independent efforts by electrical and auto workers from the Westinghouse and Boeing plants in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, helped return liberal Democratic Representative Robert Edgar to office in 1980 in a Congressional district with a 3-to-l Republican registration edge—a district which Reagan carried handily...

...Strikes aside, union leaders cannot go along with wage cuts, compulsory overtime, job combinations, joint ventures in labor-management cooperation, "quality of work life" projects, "quality circles," and other accommodations with management on workplace issues and then carry on a credible political struggle against conservative forces outside the factory or office...

...There are many potential pitfalls and contradictions between "calling up the ranks," a slogan of the September rally, and moving in a big way into the top councils of the Democratic Party...

...The Lane Kirkland who sits on the latest labor-management committee with the heads of Exxon, DuPont, General Electric, and other anti-union companies...

...II giving independent labor support to progressive Republicans like Jim Jeffords of Vermont, the only Republican House member to vote against the Reagan tax plan, and Charles Mathias of Maryland, who got labor backing in his last Senatorial contest against a right-wing Democrat...

...Solidarity Day organizers required each rally participant to turn in a "Grass Roots Enrollment" card with his or her name and address...

...We have a labor movement with a national AFL-CIO, fifty state affiliates, and hundreds of central labor councils...

...Taft-Hartley outlawed solidarity strikes, permitted employer campaigns against union organization, and required an anti-communist oath of union officers...

...What is most at stake is the hold of working people on their trade unions...

...The labor-backed candidacy of Frank Barbaro pulled 36 per cent of the Democratic primary vote and 13 per cent of the final in the 1981 New York mayoral race...

...Otherwise, the gulf between what's happening in the shop (labor's seeming acquiescence to the employer) and what's happening in the community (the conflict with the managerial class over a range of political issues) will make it difficult for union chiefs to spark broad-based political action...

...The new emphasis on state-of-the-art political tools—computerized lists, data networks, slick TV ads, polls, and the like—suggests a disturbing eagerness to substitute "high tech" political action and a reliance on a new breed of pro-union consultants for the less glittery but nonetheless vital work of breathing life into a people-to-people politics based squarely on the rank and file...

...who by all accounts never negotiated a contract or led a strike or chaired a local union membership meeting in his life—this same Lane Kirkland took Federation officials on a no-holds-barred tour of encounters with local union activists around the country last spring, responded to their pleas for action with the call for Solidarity Day, and refused to red-bait left-wing participation in the September demonstration...

...Independent political action is the alternative...

...Concretely, this means: f for progressive Democrats like members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other liberals who have refused to cave in to pressure from the Right, building independent labor support apart from the Party structure...

...Delegates to the 1980 Machinists union convention resolved to "join with other progressive and liberal groups in our society to determine the extent to which grass-roots support might be developed for an independent pro-labor party...

...in fact, the average union leader today is either hopelessly apathetic or supporting a policy that plays directly into the hands of the capitalist exploiters...

...These 150 or so unions are also broken down into thousands of regions, districts, councils, departments, and joint boards...

...Accordingly, unions have moved to expand their role in the Democratic Party...

...The United Electrical Workers, refusing to endorse Jimmy Carter in the 1980 general election, called for "independent political action leading to a new labor-led party that would end the reliance on so-called friends of labor who in the crunch vote for the corporations...

...So the labor movement, like everybody else, got Ronald Reagan in 1980...

...They tend to cut down a union's range of action in resisting unsafe conditions or speedups...

...It's a high-stakes gamble, but current conditions hold much promise...

...Without necessarily railing against capitalist exploitation, unions can lend substance to their political efforts by taking a tougher line on workplace issues...

...What we face is not a problem of stand-pat unionism but one of making the rank-and-file approach predominant...

...To head out in a new direction—and get to where it wants to go—organized labor will have to take a self-critical turn, encourage internal reform, and resume an aggressive struggle in the workplace...

...To start, trade unions would do well to look inward...

...Many union leaders are reassured by the image of respectability that flows from this kind of shoulder-rubbing with their opposite numbers in government, business, and the media who seem more than willing to treat labor as a partner in the agenda-setting process...

...There are some 150 national unions (several of them are outside the AFL-CIO), made up of 60,000 locals and 200,000 bargaining units...

...Now, one steward per 100 or 200 employes is commonplace...

...on high-tech communications and the like suggests a disturbing eagerness to substitute glitter for people-to-people politics The mixed signals given off by labor's leadership reflect tensions inherent in American trade unionism...

...Political action is best grounded in the ordinary practice of trade unionism in the workplace...

...Different styles and values contend, collide, and coexist at all levels, including the top leadership level...

...Another road leads north and west and south, toward a position of real strength in poor, working-class, and middle-class neighborhoods around the country...

...The erosion in recent years of union political strength parallels the turning away from a policy of aggressive struggle with employers...

...But it is something stirring within the labor movement itself that is pressing unions the hardest, insisting on fundamental decisions: a new rank-and-file militance in the trade unions...

...Ideology was fine, but results for the membership were what counted...

...they are now working to roll back the 1972 McGovern reforms and return power to the party professionals and their allies...

...Stung by the success of CIO militancy, the conservative AFL had organized almost as many workers...

...Afer purging communist and socialist-led unions in 1949, it was just a matter of time and mechanics before the Lance Compa is on the staff of an international union in Washington, D.C...

...The magazine, in the same issue, reported approvingly on a growing union acceptance of quality circles and quality of work life programs that might herald "an end to the adversary relationship...

...The AFL-CIO, despite its years as a broker of union influence among Democrats, has also given some independent signals in recent months...

...On the other hand, it is able to make qualitative advances only by hurling itself into conflict with employers and the Government, becoming at times a "school for socialism" in the process...

...In turn, they'll have to deliver— corporations, like politicians, can be bought, but not for nothing...

...They can't just call up the ranks...