Justice or Just-Us?

Justice or Just-Us?

E. Faue: Labor Justice, or Just-Us?

As the failed recall election in Wisconsin has reminded us, the labor movement in the United States has been on a downward trajectory for some time. Despite surges of public employee unionism, occasional rank-and-file militancy, the impact of civil rights and feminist organizing on workers, and even the innovative and inclusive labor campaigns that followed the integration of 1960s radicals into union ranks, the labor movement and its political influence continue to deteriorate. While it is possible to chalk up losses in union membership and density to economic forces and the effective opposition of employers and conservative politicians, fratricidal conflicts among labor’s progressive forces have played a crucial role. As Steve Early argues in his thoroughly researched The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, two unions that were responsible for dramatic gains in recent decades—the Service Employees International Union and UNITE-HERE—have been engaged not only in organizing the unorganized but also in raiding other unions, breaking strategic alliances, and taking over dissident locals. They have been at war with each other, even when opportunities to reform labor law and make new political gains demanded greater unity and even as political opposition has become more toxic and effective.

A richly detailed, straightforward, and compelling account of the recent collisions in the labor movement, Early’s book focuses on the union with the most spectacular, if controversial, record of growth and political influence—the SEIU. The book, which began as an exploration of the integration of Baby Boomers into the labor movement, evolved into an indictment of SEIU’s ascension into the ranks of Big Labor. Early’s chapter “Ivy League Amigos No More,” about friends Andy Stern, John Wilhelm, and Bruce Raynor going head-to-head over UNITE HERE and its relationship with SEIU and union federation Change to Win, provide some entertainment, but no reason to champion one side or cause in the fight. Imbued with the journalist’s duty to investigate, and his own partisan advocacy (combined with a distrust of that advocacy), Early finds few heroes here. Those that he does find are chiefly rank-and-file workers who found traction in the labor movement in the days before the Amigos Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor came to power.

For Early, it is not just disappointment in labor’s failure to take advantage of Obama’s election to pass the Employee Fair Choice Act (EFCA) and improve the terms Obamacare, or the moral scandal of a few SEIU leaders like Tyrone Freeman embezzling union funds, or even the paradox of a social movement of workers led by college-educated men (and a few strategically placed women, gays, and lesbians) in which rank-and-file workers get no traction on the road to leadership positions. He is deeply offended by the hypocrisies and contradictions of a democratic movement for social justice that doesn’t act democratically. Only United Health Workers (UHW-SEIU), later National Health Workers (NUHW), conduct themselves with the democratic values that Early champions.

WHILE THERE may be a dwindling number of academic defenders of SEIU, especially after Early’s critical assay of SEIU’s scholarly partners and partisans, I should mention a few points of argument—some of which are related to the generational character of Early’s story, some of which are professorial asides, and some of which are related to the undertow of a story in which SEIU does play a heroic role.

First, the civil wars in the labor movement to which Early refers are represented in the book by a major campaign, not the “universe of battle.” There have been and continue to be many battles in the long conflict known as labor history. Fighting over jurisdiction, strategy, personnel, money, and the right to label an organization or a leader “the voice of working people” or “the representative of the working class(es)” is both ritual and tradition in the labor movement.

So too are factional disputes among labor unions. Such fighting harks back not just to the labor reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s, like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Miners for Democracy, the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, and New Directions, but to the 1920s, when government repression and infighting in labor and on the left led to a splintering and decimation of labor’s forces. During the 1930s, the tremendous successes of labor bred competition over resources both between the AFL and CIO and among socialists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, and proliferating factions on the left. Even as far back as the 1880s, Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly disavowed workers engaged in major strikes and refused to back either the eight-hour movement or the Haymarket accused. In the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor helped themselves to the strongest trade union locals in the Knights while helping to dismantle its political opponents. The greatest personal injury that Samuel Gompers ever suffered or admitted was his defeat by a socialist opponent in one—count it, one—election for the presidency of the American Federation of Labor. His animosity toward socialism (and he had been an early Marxist) can be dated from his displacement. That animosity fed the fires of conflict in the labor movement for decades and probably fueled Gompers’s virulent dislike of socialists and his even more deadly opposition to the Industrial Workers of the World and any form of industrial unionism.

Internal conflict—even toxic, subversive, self-destructive conflict—is not news to labor historians, scholars, or activists. Some of what was going on then and now, we understand, is about ideological dispute, strategic disagreement, and tactical difference. Some of it has to do with the passions of partisanship and the belief that there is only one solution, one way, one method of achieving the goal—whether the goal is “more” (Gompers), social justice (pick your labor leader), or political success (Andy Stern, in Early’s telling). These conflicts were and are about purity, or clarity, or narrowness of vision. It is about “just-us” and “justice” confused. It is about undemocratic means to democratic ends and sometimes undemocratic means to undemocratic ends, all gussied up as union democracy.

What is and was afoot is the process of bureaucratization. When an organization begins to acquire power, develops routines for building and consolidating that power, formalizes arrangements and procedures that had been democratic but are inefficient in a larger organization, expands its domain, and increases its resources, it is fundamentally different than it was at its origins. In the hands of someone possessed of a powerful and even monomaniacal vision, with extraordinary skills and rich networks, an organization develops decision-making processes and operations that are anti-democratic almost by definition. The question has always been whether bureaucratization is an inevitable end for democratic social movements or whether it is, in fact, a necessary tool for those who seek to co-opt and subvert them.

IN EARLY’S account, the SEIU abandoned its earlier rank-and-file democratic ways and became an almost monolithic expression of Stern’s desire to make labor diverse and powerful. While community organizers and movement activists had brought to SEIU their passionate commitment to social justice, their experience in the labor movement had transformed that passion into a sensibility more mundane and less democratic. Stern’s ascent to power in the SEIU and in party politics symbolized the suppression of divergent, contradictory, and diffuse local initiatives in favor of a more bureaucratic, centralized, and top-down labor movement. It meant a Big Labor able to contend with an ever-more powerful and organized and definitely anti-union Corporate Elite. It meant mega-locals and mergers and trusteeships and Stern-appointed union officials. And it meant big salaries and the temptations to abuse power, and occasionally embezzlement and betrayal on both personal and institutional levels.

Commitment to diversity meant that SEIU organized undocumented workers; gave women, minority men, and gays and lesbians opportunities to become leaders; and focused on sectors of the workforce that had been long neglected and even spurned by the mainstream labor movement—health-care and home-care workers, janitors, and low-wage government employees. But it did not give its locals and members the leeway to choose a different path or to diverge from SEIU’s leadership.

This particular point, which Early concedes but diminishes in his story of SEIU’s misdeeds and authoritarian behavior, requires attention. It was not moral decadence or scoffing at democracy that led SEIU down this path. Nor was it that the people SEIU recruited were and are somehow easier to organize and dupe. Union democracy often fell short of the goal of equal rights for immigrant, minority, and women workers; and a union (local or international) that democratically votes to exclude members based on social criteria such as race, gender, sexual preference, religion, or ethnicity is only democratic for some. While not the whole story, SEIU did broaden labor’s base and extend union power to workers long excluded from the House of Labor, helping to offset some of its strategic losses in manufacturing by growth in the service sector.

Still, it is important to remember that the Baby Boomers who began this late resurgence in organized labor, at a time of general decline in labor union membership and the manufacturing and trade work that underwrote its Depression-era growth, were not of one mind. Some of the great divisions in the 1960s and 1970s Left were among those who trusted and celebrated the People and those who didn’t, between the community-organizing social democrats and those who trusted only the militant minority—between those who thought strategically about organizations and liked the rule of law and those who wanted to occupy the streets, resist routine, and dance their revolution. These strategic and tactical differences underwrite much of the internal conflict within the labor movement today.

Sometimes, of course, these differences involve personal alliances and personality conflicts. Viewed from a distance, it is possible to see that the war between Andy Stern and those who opposed him (the major story that Early covers) as between those who believe labor needs as big a stick as capital and those who say labor needs to be democratic in procedure and honor the local. It’s about whether labor will survive the political and economic assault against it in the past forty years and about the best means to do so. And it’s a bit about salvation. The passionate conflict has its origins in the Good Fight.

Early brings to this story his own partisan commitment to a democratic labor movement that can succeed in combating the right-wing attack on workers and effectively engage in collective bargaining. Whether SEIU, in its recent and possible future incarnations, can achieve that mix of democracy, diversity, and effectiveness remains an open question. Faced with a mobilized, empowered, and well-funded opposition, ready to take down the last bastions of labor’s power and committed to a politics of economic devastation, labor has to find the means to unite its divided ranks.

Elizabeth Faue is a professor of American labor history at Wayne State University.

Photo of Andy Stern with Jesse Jackson at a 2009 march (SEIU International, via Flickr creative commons)