On American Labor “Scholarship”

On American Labor “Scholarship”

Democracy in the International Association of Machinists
by Mark Perlman
Wiley, 1962, 113 pp. 

This little piece of work was commissioned by the Trade Union Study of the Fund for the Republic; and it is depressing to think that with the Fund imprint, it may become an “authoritative” work on the IAM. The IAM regime today is not the most anti-democratic in the labor movement but it can rightfully claim status as the most hypocritical, with the greatest gap between the professions of its President and the realities of its internal life.

The process of suppression inside the IAM has been recorded in detail in the publication Union D...