Steve Fraser Replies

Stanley Aronowitz, Herman Benson, and Gordon Haskell adopt an essentially similar approach in disapproving of my article on union democracy. It’s an old, if not particularly venerable one, which runs as follows: “If you don’t like the message, shoot the messenger.” My article tried to grapple with a wide range of reasons to explain why the quest for union democracy, on its face an unexceptionable crusade, turns out to be a highly complicated matter after all. I won’t rehearse those reasons here; dedicated readers can refer back to the original essay. But very briefly and selectively, they include: (1) the unique legacy created by the peculiar political and institutional history of the U.S. labor movement; (2) the more recent degeneration of American political practice into a form of high-priced, sound-bite mass manipulation; (3) the long-lived and ignoble practice of union democracy as a form of exclusion by local majorities defined by race or gender or nativity—union de...