The Labor Intellectuals
The Labor Intellectuals
The new militancy coursing through the labor movement has revealed the growth of a more expansive and democratic union culture.
After visiting the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City in 1947, C. Wright Mills wrote that the most impressive thing about the union was “the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.” While he considered union president Walter Reuther a dynamic leader, Mills was more impressed with the team of young men around him, the labor intellectuals who translated the radicalism and democratic enthusiasms of a boisterous rank and file into a set of concrete programs.
“One of the major clues to the politically disappointing history of American unions,” Mills wrote, “has been the absence of union-made intellectuals: men who combine solid trade union experience . . . with the self-awareness and wider consciousness that are the qualities of the intellectual. The key fact about the UAW is that there is a group of such men.”
Comparing them to the New York intellectuals—here he was undoubtedly thinking of Dwight Macdonald and writers for his magazine, politics—Mills called these UAW partisans “intellectuals without fakery and without neuroticism.” They were not academic strivers or little magazine impresarios. “The gap between ideas and action is not so wide as to frustrate and turn them inward; their ideas are acted out.” Unlike so many other intellectuals, wrote Mills, “they are not just waiting and talking their lives through.”
The union intellectuals with whom Mills identified were anticommunist radicals, many with either socialist or Trotskyist antecedents. Among them was Jack T. Conway, a University of Chicago sociology student who during the war made the transition from Hyde Park radical to chairman of the plant-wide bargaining committee at the giant Melrose Park B-29 factory. Thereafter he was a key Reuther political aide, and in 1946 and 1947 he orchestrated the defeat of the Communist-aligned faction in the UAW. “Ideologically, emotionally, I identified with the Reuther forces in the UAW from the very beginning,” Conway recalled. Another was Brendan Sexton, a Brookwood Labor College alumnus and Workers’ Defense League activist in the 1930s who later battled the Communists at Ford’s huge bomber local at Willow Run. In the early postwar years Sexton edited Ammunition, a UAW shop paper that carried monthly primers on grievance handling, as well as reviews of contemporary books by Ray Ginger, Sidney Lens, and Robert Staughton Lynd.
Walter Reuther’s brother, Victor, was also an important figure within this circle. He had attended college before traveling to the Soviet Union with his older sibling. When he returned to the United States, he helped organize workers on Detroit’s West Side. Always standing just to the left of the UAW president, Victor was the union’s educational director in the early postwar years, organizing workshops and conferences that brought upward of 2,000 of the union’s most committed cadre together for long weekends of debate and discussion.
Mills was disposed toward a certain group of young men with a particular politics. He was not praising Communist-oriented writers and activists like Irving Richter, the well-connected and highly effective UAW lobbyist who sought to sustain a postwar Popular Front, nor the writers Clancy Sigal and Elizabeth Hawes, active within the Communist-allied anti-Reuther caucus. And beyond the union, Mills was certainly not thinking of Betty Friedan, who authored the pamphlet “The UE [United Electrical Workers] Fights for Women Workers,” nor Esther Peterson of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), who studied the Swedish welfare state and sought to transpose some of its values and practices to the United States. But it’s clear that Mills was identifying an actual category of people who aimed to put into practice a set of ideas on the left margin of American social thought.
What are labor intellectuals? How do they function, and how has their role changed during the course of the last century? In his splendid biography of Daniel Bell, historian Howard Brick writes that intellectuals are best understood through “their role as creatures and creators of ideology.” They stand independent of any immediate institutional interest, although their sentiments may well cast them as partisans of any number of social movements and forces. In the more recent Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War, Brick and Christopher Phelps identify these independent thinkers and activists with “a dialectic of margin and mainstream,” which “entails a tension between two commitments: the willingness to hold fast for a minority view and the struggle to imagine and help fashion a new majority.”
One species of intellectual was very much identified with, and often employed by, the postwar trade unions. These institutions were not always free-wheeling places in which to work and think; most unions quickly became hierarchical bureaucracies. And yet, to the extent that radical intellectuals wanted to shift the tectonic plates that structured American capitalism, the unions seemed like the only social force with the requisite weight for that immense task. At various brief moments in the 1940s, both Mills and Bell believed the labor movement held near revolutionary potential, though they later abandoned this view.
The labor historian Selig Perlman argued in 1928 that intellectuals were incapable of resisting “an onrush of overpowering social mysticism” in their quest for a “new social order,” making them an alien presence in the unions. But in fact, men and women with an expansive and radical vision had long worked within the institutions of the American trade union movement. As Michael Kazin and Leon Fink remind us, many of the most prominent labor leaders of the Progressive Era spent most of their time writing and giving speeches, often of a transcendent character. Like Eugene V. Debs, A. Philip Randolph, and William Z. Foster, many edited a union or socialist newspaper early in their careers.
One labor intellectual of this sort was W. Jett Lauck, who came out of the college-educated middle class but was radicalized after serving on several high-profile labor boards before and during the First World War. Thereafter he worked closely with John L. Lewis and the Mine Workers. Lauck was not a socialist. In The Miners’ Fight for American Standards, which Lauck ghostwrote for Lewis, he wrote that trade unions were “an integral part of an existing system” called “capitalism.” But a union’s stable integration into that system, he argued, could only be achieved when wages were high enough to sustain expanding domestic consumption, and that required state regulation of an often chaotic market. Lauck worked to make this idea central to a variety of New Deal policies. By 1937 he was taking some of the credit for Lewis’s “evolution” from “a reactionary labor leader to a liberal constructive statesman.”
One contemporary of Lauck was J.B.S. Hardman, an individual Mills saw as a model for many union intellectuals. Exiled from Russia in 1908, he served as editor of the ACWA magazine, Advance, for two decades. There he advised union president Sidney Hillman on how organized workers in the garment trades—a “sick” industry that was as hypercompetitive, unstable, and low-wage as coal mining—could make use of the state to tame capitalist anarchy. In both coal and apparel, economic adversity led to inventive strategies for industrial planning and regulation even before the New Deal made such programs a partial reality.
Hardman, however, was later at odds with Hillman’s brand of labor statesmanship, breaking with the ACWA leader over the controversy engendered by the wartime news that Stalin’s secret police had murdered Henryk Ehrlich, Wiktor Alter, and other Jewish Bundists (Hillman failed to join in a public protest). Thereafter, Hardman played a leading role in founding the Inter-Union Institute for Labor and Democracy (IUI) and began editing a new postwar monthly, Labor and the Nation. The magazine gave voice to the ideas of socialist and social democratic staff intellectuals, journalists, and academics—a group that represented an important current within the unions and among labor’s close allies. The Institute announced that its publication aspired to “foster a group of dedicated intellectuals in the service of labor.”
Mills got to know Hardman at the end of the war when he began the research that would form the basis for his 1948 book on union leaders. Mills wrote a variety of articles for Labor and the Nation, and through Hardman he gained a more concrete feel for the texture of the labor movement. In The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders, which Mills dedicated to Hardman, he plays brilliantly with the contradictory character of trade union leadership, capturing the ACWA’s path from pre–First World War insurgency to late New Deal statesmanship.
Mills thought that the IUI might provide a vehicle through which radicals like himself could actually have an impact on the labor movement. “Many of the new research people,” he wrote in 1946, “are disaffected and morally unhappy: they will their minds to people they don’t like for purposes they don’t feel at one with. . . . What some of them really want is to connect their skill and intelligence to a movement in which they can believe; they are ready to give a lot of energy to an organization that would harness these skills in the service of the left.”
The labor movement of the immediate postwar years soon faded as a focus of radical hope. From Mills to Bell to Macdonald, left intellectuals came to believe that labor had been incorporated into a bureaucratic capitalist polity that constrained the working class and created an increasingly claustrophobic outlook for any other liberation impulse. If not the “labor lieutenants of capital” so often denounced by socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, labor leaders had become collaborators in a closed industrial system.
As Bell put it in his famous 1960 essay, “The Subversion of Collective Bargaining,” the great steel strike of the previous year generated combat of but a “mimetic” sort, “unreal because no economic loss can occur; in fact, each party, knowing in advance the price it will have to pay, pretty much gets what it sets out to get, and both end up with a profit—the corporation usually the greater gainer.” As for the ostensible key issue in the strike—the corporate attempt to weaken a section of the contract that limited managerial authority to undertake unilateral technological change—Bell called it “primarily a symbolic test of authority. There was no vital economic issue at stake.” In the mid-1960s Students for a Democratic Society reprinted Bell’s essay as a pamphlet, reflecting the New Left disenchantment with big labor. (Both Bell and SDS missed what was at stake in that giant 1959 labor confrontation: who controlled the shop floor, and who would reap the fruits of the higher productivity generated by technological innovation.)
Writing in Dissent in 1963, Harvey Swados, a novelist who had spent a year working on a Ford assembly line, reached the same sour conclusion as Bell. Auto industry management was determined to tighten the screws on one operation after another, while union leaders either looked the other way or sought to persuade workers that their very livelihoods depend on yielding concessions to make their employer competitive. Such “salesmanship” was directed not at the corporations or the public but at the membership. “One cannot complain, as one might with almost any other union, of an absence of intellect, or of lack of application of that intellect to the problems of our age,” concluded Swados. “What one can say, I think with justification, is that the UAW leadership no longer takes its own demands seriously.”
The trade unions would not transform society. But as the trench warfare characteristic of the 116-day steel strike in 1959 so well illustrated, they were essential to the defense of the working class against capital, even during an era of general prosperity. Clark Kerr, the industrial relations expert who served as president of the University of California, thought such class conflict was inevitable. However, he prophesized that the resultant struggle “will take less the form of open strife or revolt. Class warfare will be forgotten and, in its place, will be the bureaucratic contest . . . memos will flow instead of blood.” The unions still had to justify their existence, and someone had to write the memos and figure out what they would say. Those doing the writing and paper shuffling were drawn from the same cohort of labor intellectuals identified by Mills. They were not all cynics or time servers. And they would reproduce themselves in subsequent generations.
In an unpublished manuscript on the “cultural apparatus”—a matrix that included Hollywood, Madison Avenue, publishing, the academy, and even the world of industrial relations—Mills argued that the intellectuals doing this work were mainly “hacks,” with a few “stars.” This was a provocative formulation. But Mills was out to celebrate the “hacks,” or, to put it in more favorable nomenclature, the journeymen and women whose daily work routine came to legitimize, enhance, and over time even transform a set of cultural norms and ideological structures.
Were they intellectuals or technicians? Did their loyalty to a well-constrained institution limit their capacity for expansive thought? Consider the career of the UAW’s Nat Weinberg. He was a working-class intellectual who left school at age thirteen, finished high school and college at night, and finally received a BA in economics from New York University in his late twenties. A socialist in the 1930s, Weinberg attended Brookwood Labor College, where he met the Reuther brothers as well as his future spouse. Brookwood was a cadre school for the non-Communist element in the CIO; its library found a home in UAW Local 174, where the Reuther brothers were in the leadership. In the 1930s and early 1940s Weinberg served as an economist and teacher at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and various government agencies, including the Works Progress Administration, where he taught labor education. Reuther recruited Weinberg as UAW research director in early 1947. To the left of most UAW staffers, Weinberg was often said to serve as Reuther’s “conscience.” He hardly fit the conservative mold constructed by Mills, Swados, and Bell.
Weinberg was the architect of the UAW’s effort to use its collective bargaining leverage and political influence to do more than raise wages and secure what amounted to a private welfare state for those lucky enough to be union members. Reuther and Weinberg constructed a bargaining strategy that they thought might force the auto companies to the “left” in terms of how they lobbied the federal government and structured their production regime. In 1949 and 1950, when the UAW sought pension funding from the auto industry, Weinberg structured the demand in such a way that corporate pension payouts would vary inversely with the size of the government’s Social Security benefits. The UAW hoped to enlist the auto companies in the service of an expanded welfare state, since the Big Three would pay less if they successfully lobbied the government to make Social Security a more generous program.
A few years later Weinberg took the lead in an even more ambitious program. He originated the idea of a Guaranteed Annual Wage, later and more aptly called a Supplemental Unemployment Benefit. The concept was formulated with the objective of motivating the automakers to schedule steady work for their employees rather than lay them off during slack production season.
When it came to formulating and negotiating this program, Weinberg made the memos flow. He created a special task force that studied the experiences of other countries striving for employment stability, examined the great variety of state-level unemployment provisions, and charted the country’s employment and layoff patterns over a long span of years. The UAW created a Public Advisory Committee that included prominent economists, including Harvard’s Alvin Hansen and Seymour E. Harris. And the UAW inaugurated a huge propaganda effort, directed at both the public and the union rank and file. As with pensions, Weinberg and his team constructed the new benefit in the expectation that “the main purpose was not to get pay for idleness but to compel the industry, by imposing penalties for instability, to schedule steady employment for its workers, week by week throughout the year.” These bargaining proposals were on occasion backstopped by strike action, in the UAW and elsewhere, that was an order of magnitude larger than anything we’ve witnessed in recent decades.
Both the New York intellectuals and the New Left found all this pretty boring. Few saw American capitalism as anything but inherently stable, albeit culturally and socially stultifying. Dissent editor Irving Howe co-authored a study of the UAW and Walter Reuther in 1949, but thereafter his interest and hopefulness about labor matters rapidly diminished. When Howe commissioned Sidney Lens to write a piece on the merger of the CIO and AFL in 1955, the Chicago radical denounced the whole enterprise as a further bureaucratization of the union movement, one which increased the dependence of the new federation on the Democrats and limited its potential for independent militancy.
But capitalism was in flux, and the executives of America’s leading corporations did not want unions comfortably ensconced within a system of harmonious industrialism—a fact that was clear by the 1970s. Within the unions there was a similar shrinkage of political and intellectual ambition, even among the most adventuresome of the new radicals recruited to the unions in the years after the capitalist assault on labor had begun in earnest. Instead of thinking up a new set of Weinberg-like schemes for innovations in the world of collective bargaining, the new labor intellectuals came to focus on just one issue: how to recruit and organize a new set of workers into the unions in the face of a managerial and judicial counteroffensive that made such organizing so difficult.
In the early 1950s Walter Reuther had said of American workers, “First we organize them, that’s the easy part; then we must unionize them, that’s the hard part.” By that he meant we have to raise their consciousness, a task for internal union education. That would give Weinberg the mass support necessary to advance his ambitious bargaining agenda. But today, the singular task of the most committed union partisans is organizing per se. Given the opposition to labor—judicial, managerial, political, even cultural and racial—that is a radical and utterly essential endeavor, but it is not about directly transforming the contours of American capitalism.
It does, however, require a lot of labor intellectuals, or maybe just union staffers with a college degree and the ability to perform the kind of research one learns how to do in school. This new phenomenon became apparent to me a decade ago when I was invited to address the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) research staff at a coastal retreat in California. During its heyday, when the UAW represented over a million workers, the research staff consisted of Weinberg and a handful of old comrades. They read the annual reports of the principal companies with which the UAW bargained, figured out what they could pay, and constructed a bargaining agenda in response. So I was surprised when about seventy young and energetic researchers awaited my talk, brought together by a union with fewer than 200,000 members. What could they possibly do to occupy their time?
Unfortunately, they had plenty of work. HERE’s decision to create a cadre of corporate campaigners was based on the grimmest of circumstances. Traditional private-sector union organizing—signing up workers who want to join a union, winning a certification election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, and securing a collective-bargaining agreements in negotiations with the employer—had become incredibly difficult. Not a single hotel could be organized absent a campaign to bring so much financial, political, and community pressure on the employer that it would agree not to oppose unionization.
Those HERE researchers were not alone. From hospitals and grocery stores to municipalities and school systems, the effort to organize employees or bargain for those already in a union has been inextricably linked to a whole set of governmental and financing functions and policies, including zoning approvals, antitrust litigation, bank loans, and outright public subsidies. If an anti-union casino wants to expand, HERE staffers make sure there are plenty of zoning headaches; if a living-wage ordinance is on the ballot, the union generates reams of economic data to prove that it is needed. And in HERE and other unions, the work of these researchers has blended seamlessly with that of the union public relations operation and political mobilization. That work is done by the staff, not the rank and file.
In the old days, when the new industrial unions were brash and bold, the recruitment of such collegiate talent, no matter how well-meaning and dedicated, would have seemed anathema.
But that is not the case today. HERE, SEIU, and even the UAW are able to draw upon a vast cultural apparatus to bolster the kind of social and economic analysis and recruit the kind of activist organizers that unions need to revive their fortunes. In the era of Lauck, Hardman, and Weinberg, there were few pro-labor think tanks, university institutes, or social science researchers upon which unions could call for the ideas, reports, surveys, and legal briefs useful to organizing, bargaining, and internal education. But today a plethora of such institutions exist, and the people staffing that apparatus have buttressed the labor movement with research and advocacy that sustained demands for a higher minimum wage, more equitable hiring, comparable wages for women workers, better health provision, and labor law that promotes rather than hinders union organizing. Perhaps even more important, this world of academics and activists have offered a powerful critique of the latest iteration of the managerial mindset, including corporate advocacy of pseudo-participatory work schemes, “flexible” schedules that wreak havoc in the lives of millions in the retail sector, the growth of fissured employment and outside contracting, and the latest anti-union legal stratagems. At the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Harvard’s Center for Labor and Just Economy, the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and in publications like Labor Notes and New Labor Forum, labor intellectuals have over the last several decades filled some of the shoes worn by union staffers during the first half of the twentieth century.
But the unions can’t just outsource development of the ideas and proposals to keep them relevant to a twenty-first-century workforce and political economy. Such an arrangement puts policy analysis at a greater and more tenuous distance from the unions, something difficult and dangerous when organized labor finds that complex new problems, such as Hollywood’s deployment of artificial intelligence or the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicle manufacture, have to be analyzed and assimilated to the bargaining agenda during a strike or negotiation. Academics and other policy entrepreneurs have their own scholarly interests and careers, which may or may not coincide with what labor wants and needs in a timely fashion. Moreover, it is one thing for a think tank liberal or a university academic to offer ideas and evidence bearing on a bargaining issue; it is quite another, and far more potent, for a unionist to offer a similar proposal backed by the strike power and political weight of an organization representing hundreds of thousands of workers.
Happily, there is a big pipeline from which union-bred and union-trained technicians and idea-smiths can be drawn. The union movement today organizes knowledge workers and trained professionals as never before. And those with a PhD are not the only unionists who can assume the cloak of labor intellectual. The new militancy coursing through the labor movement has revealed the growth of a more expansive and democratic union culture. All that became clear during the 2023 strike wave and union mobilization, when a whole cohort of creative and energetic activists—in the Hollywood talent guilds, among Starbucks baristas, from the ranks of university grad students, and emerging out of the auto and teamster strike rehearsals and mobilizations—created opportunities for scores of unionists, college bred or not, to think comprehensively about how the labor movement can reshape the economic and technological terrain upon which it fights. If unions can take the offensive, winning big wage advances, progressive pay schedules, and recruiting new members and allies, then bold political and social ideas can once again find rank-and-file champions with the intellect and will to put them on the agenda not just of the union, but of the nation as a whole.
Nelson Lichtenstein’s most recent book is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism.
