A First-Rate Tool for Worker Activists

“Why Unions Matter” and the Labor-Radical Subculture

by Paul Le Blanc

Editors’ Note: This article focuses on the new book Why Unions Matter by Michael D. Yates (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 183 pages, $17.00. Paul Le Blanc teaches history at Carlow College and has been active in the peace and justice movements for many years. His book A Short History of the U.S. Working Class has just been published by Humanity Books. A shorter version of this article appeared in the May 1999 issue of Z magazine.
Wrapped in a beautiful cover featuring a colorful mural by working-class artist Ralph Fasanella is one of the best tools for working-class activists and serious students of the labor movement — the new book by Michael Yates, Why Unions Matter.

It is a clearly written introduction by a university economist who came from a working-class and union family and is himself a union member and a labor educator. Yates writes that “it is through teaching workers that I learned how to write a book like this.” We are all fortunate that he had such good teachers. He ably utilizes various academic “disciplines”—economics, sociology, political science, history—without all the jargon and pretensions and gives us a straightforward, sophisticated, comprehensive, and down-to-earth survey of the U.S. labor movement.

The main text of about 150 pages includes these chapters:

1. Why Unions?

2. How Unions Form.

3. Union Structures and Democracy.

4. Collective Bargaining.

5.  Unions and Politics: Local, National, Global.

6. Unions, Racism and Sexism.

7. The Tasks Ahead.

Thirty additional pages include an Appendix listing useful resources (books, periodicals, web sites, organizations, etc.), plus informative reference notes for each of the chapters and a good index that helps the critical-minded reader make better use of the book. Investing $17 and several hours reading time is the equivalent of taking a top-level course in labor studies.

Anyone who wants to understand today’s labor movement for the purpose of participating in it and helping to build it should read this book. It is a pleasure to read — punctuated with interesting personal stories and informative anecdotes, important slices of labor history, photos, cartoons, and graphs that all help to drive home key points.

For example, there is the obvious but here beautifully documented fact that unionized workers have higher pay and benefits than non-unionized workers. While the paycheck of non-union workers in general averages $13.35 an hour (plus 98˘ for insurance and 42˘ for pension), that of union workers averages $16.69 an hour (plus $2.24 for insurance and $1.15 for pension). The union advantage for blue-collar workers alone is even higher. The reader also receives tips on union organizing, a sense of how healthy unions are structured (Yates insists that democracy is a key to organizational health), and enlightening insights into the collective bargaining process.

Beyond “Bread and Butter” Unionism

But this book goes far beyond “bread-and-butter unionism.” Or rather, the point is driven home that organized labor must move beyond a narrow “pure-and-simple trade-union” framework if it is to be effective in meeting workers’ most basic needs. In fact, its very survival is dependent upon evolving into a more expansive social unionism, and becoming more inclusive than is reflected in the present majority white (80%) and male (60%) membership base.

Women and people of color represent dramatically growing sectors of the labor force.

Union membership, like the labor force itself, is diverse, and is becoming more so. The share of minority workers and women in total union membership is growing. Yet, union densities for all groups have been falling. If unions are to grow, if they are to meet the challenge of a multiracial and gendered economy, they must organize more women and more people of color.

The need for working-class unity in the face of immensely powerful employers — the notion that ”differences of sex and race must be set aside and ultimately seen for what they are — artificial barriers to collective action” — is tempered only by the fundamental notion that an injury to one is an injury to all:

No labor movement in this nation can succeed unless it challenges racial and gender inequality consistently. Had the labor movement made opposition to racism and sexism paramount many years ago, it is doubtful that the dismantling of the welfare state which we are now witnessing could have occurred.

Labor’s Need for Independent Politics

In fact, Yates argues, the future of the labor movement is dependent upon it becoming more than simply a union movement. Not only must it take the lead in the social struggles to advance the interests of each sector of the working-class majority, but it must recognize that “the Democratic Party has long since abandoned any allegiance to working people (indeed, its alliance with labor during the Great Depression must be considered an exceptional result of its own self-interest and the open revolt of workers). It is now a party of capital every bit as much as the Republican Party.”

To clinch this point, he tells us to “look at who funds both parties and who serves in the administrations of both parties — Wall Street financiers, corporate executives, and other assorted wealthy individuals, almost without exception.”

He concludes: “Labor’s need is to develop a politics of its own, an independent politics, one to which it holds no matter what policies are promoted by the two parties of capital. If it fails to do so, it may as well give up hope of revitalizing its cause.”

Dissolution of Labor-Radical Subculture

The dissolution of the labor-radical subculture was, to use Yates’s words, “a tragedy with far-reaching consequences, detrimental to the whole of labor, not just the American left.”

Yates’s account of this development reminds me of what I was told by a leader of the anti-Communist purge in the CIO, Father Charles Owen Rice of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. I interviewed him some years later for Fred Halstead’s history of the Vietnam era antiwar movement, Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War! (New York: Monad Publishers, 1978). Rice noted of trade unionists in and around the Communist Party that “there really wasn’t much you could fault them for on the way they handled their unions compared to the other CIO leaders.”

Noting their “twists and turns” on foreign policy issues, Rice concluded that “they should have been judged in the union movement on the basis of their trade unionism. I think the purging of the left-wingers, the total purging of them, the cleaning out of them from the labor movement, was tragic. I think it would have been much better, and would have been a much healthier labor movement, if we were able to have enough people of whatever persuasion remain in the unions and fight back and forth, as they were doing, and watch each other.”

One gets a sense here of the dynamic, pluralistic mix of “pure and simple” union moderates, Catholic activists, Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and others that flourished in the 1930s.

Pluralist competition contributes to democracy and to union militancy, of course. But the broad left-wing labor subculture also naturally generated a class consciousness, a sensitivity to the ideal of equal rights, a political vision and energy that had always been vital to the growth of the labor movement.

Part of Labor’s New Subculture

What is most important about Yates’s book is that it reflects, and will certainly contribute to, a process under way in the labor movement and the working class. It is a process he himself describes as involving “thoughtful, effective radicals…[who] play a part in the structures of the AFL-CIO, as well as in the national unions and central labor councils,” but a process in which there also is “a labor radicalization…[that is] dependent on the workers in locals across the country” who are fighting to build democratic, effective, socially conscious unions capable of defending the entire working class.

This developing labor-radical political subculture is in some ways comparable to developments which spanned the post-Civil War era through the 1930s, from the Knights of Labor through the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). An essential ingredient in the earlier labor subculture was the heterogeneous mixture of various left-wing currents and countercurrents — socialists and anarchists and populists and greenback-labor radicals, culminating in the early 1900s in an American Federation of Labor (AFL) one-third of which was under Socialist Party influence, and an Industrial Workers of the World whose goal was to replace the wages system with working-class control of the economy.

All of this was savagely pushed back during the pro-business, pseudo-patriotic era of “100% Americanism” from World War I through the 1920s. But when the economic depression of 1929–39 hit, an essential role in the labor upsurge, Yates tells us, once again “included [radicals of] many types: socialists, followers of the revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky, activists in A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party, and idealistic adherents of various other currents. A very high percentage were members of or close to the Communist Party.”

The vision and organizational skills provided by the left-wing groups, especially the relatively sizable Communist Party, were a key to substantial labor insurgencies and gains in the 1930s and 1940s. The left-led unions (in comparison with more conservative unions) — he documents — “won contracts which best enabled workers to protect their interests and build a basis for further victories against the employers….The unions which won better contracts also were usually the most democratic and subject to rank-and-file control.”

Yet the nature of the U.S. Communist Party set the stage for a complicated development. Yates observes that association with “Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin” was to discredit U.S. Communists. He adds that “the U.S. Communist Party was controlled in fundamental ways by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a relationship which sometimes damaged its work in the labor movement.”

This made it easier in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the onset of the Cold War rivalries between the so-called “Free World” U.S.-led capitalist countries and the Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, for anti-Communism to be used to drive out all openly left-wing influences from the ranks of organized labor. Non-Communist “moderates” within the CIO and AFL, seeking government favor and an accommodation with the business community, committed themselves to drive out the left-wingers (Communists first of all, but not only Communists) and make the AFL-CIO a “partner in progress” with the big corporations in what was to become an era of unprecedented economic prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s.

The combined smashing and withering and evaporation of this subculture in the conditions of the late 1940s to the 1960s didn’t seem to damage organized labor in regard to “bread-and-butter” gains for union membership, but the movement’s social idealism was in dramatic decline as many struggled for civil rights, social justice, and peace. And when unanticipated economic and political shifts put the working class on the defensive, the “partners in progress” orientation was suddenly exposed in all its pathetic inadequacy.

A New Consciousness Since the ’80s

The Reagan-Bush era of cutbacks, givebacks, and union-busting in the midst of spectacular corporate profits and declining living standards for the working-class majority had the affect of accelerating the development of a new consciousness and a leftward tilt within the labor movement. Over the past two decades there has been a process of decomposition and recomposition within the working class and within the ranks of organized labor. The process is hardly finished, but one aspect of it has been an all-too-slow but unmistakable recomposition of a labor-radical subculture. Prospects for its future seem improved by the objective economic situation.

“This is a more hopeful time for unions and the labor movement than any time in the past thirty years,” Yates writes. “The economy has been growing strongly, and labor shortages are developing in many markets. If the public response to the UPS strikers is any indication, unions are no longer viewed as just another special interest group.” He suggests that “what might motivate workers to become part of a movement is the possibility that the current system can be transcended and a new, democratic, egalitarian society built.” This implies “a working-class ideology, a labor-centered way of thinking and acting which is based upon the understanding that a capitalist society is not and cannot be a just one.”

Revolutionary Labor

Yates is positive about recent developments in the AFL-CIO leadership. “The new AFL-CIO is certainly a hopeful sign,” he writes, “and we are perhaps seeing the beginning of an upswing in union organizing as the New Voice Team puts its organizing model into practice.” But his vision goes far beyond. This becomes clear as he concludes his book with a “list of labor-centered principles” that he explains in his own words as follows:

1. Employment as a right. Unemployment not only wastes the output that the unemployed could have produced; it also wastes human beings and leads to a large number of social problems from arrest and imprisonment to murder and suicide.

2. Meaningful work. Human beings have the unique ability to conceptualize work tasks and then perform them. Yet most jobs utilize only a fraction of human ability. This leads to profound alienation and a hatred of work. Instead of seeing labor as the fulfillment of our humanity, we see it as a necessary evil to be avoided if at all possible.

3. Socialization of consumption. We waste enormous effort to purchase goods and services which ought to be provided by society. Examples include education at all levels, health care (including care of the aged), child care, transportation, and recreation (parks, libraries, playgrounds, gyms). It would be far more efficient to share responsibility for such public needs.

4. Democratic control of production. We pride ourselves on having a free society, yet nearly all workplaces are run as dictatorships. Shouldn’t we have control over the production of the outputs which we depend upon for survival? Why should the glass factory that dominated my hometown for nearly a century be able to pack up and leave without the will of the people being considered, much less being decisive?

5. Shorter hours of work. At the same time that hundreds of millions of people worldwide cannot find enough work, millions of others are working hours comparable to those worked during the industrial revolution. People are working too much to enjoy life. Why should this be so?

6. An end to discrimination. What possible justification can there be for the gross inequalities in jobs, incomes, housing, and wealth that exist between those who are white and male and just about everyone else? No just society can be built on a foundation of racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination.

7. Wage and income equality. I can think of no good reason why I should earn four times as much as the men and women who clean the buildings in which I labor and teach. Would I refuse to work if they earned the same as I do? How can it be justified that a CEO makes tens of millions of dollars per year? For what? Does anyone believe that no one could do these jobs for a lot less?

Unlike most academics, employers, politicians and union officials, Yates obviously believes that (a) such things are worth discussing seriously, and that (b) “average” working-class people are quite capable of seriously discussing such things, and that (c) if a revitalized labor movement reaches a level of genuine “maturity,” such discussions will animate the growing numbers of labor activists intent upon mobilizing their gath ering forces to transform the world. The implications of this go far beyond what the present AFL-CIO leadership seems able to articulate or even conceptualize.

As Yates concludes: “In grassroots organizing, based as it must be on rank-and-file control, in struggles for the hearts and souls of our national unions, in alliances with organizations and individuals committed to building the kind of society that is within our grasp, in battles with the employers, whose usefulness becomes less apparent each day, a new labor movement and a new social movement might be born. That is the hope for the future.”