One additional post this morning.   Since I was the one who threw the quote from Samuel Gompers into Josh's introduction to the blog -- who Jo-Ann, Harold and especially Bill then trashed -- I thought it worth exploring the significance of that quote a bit more (please reread it for a second and come back, we'll wait for you).

At one level, it's a reminder that labor has always been more than a simple parochial interest and has spoken for broader social issues from early on.  That's a message to non-labor progressives. 

And there's a complicated message for those arguing within the labor movements. 

While I place myself on the socialist end of the labor movement, one where I've argued for union democracy in magazines like LaborNotes and fought for a social unionist vision of labor-community coalitions and internationalist politics, I think that its worth understanding that even some of the "bad guys" in labor history had multiple messages. 

The Gompers quote -- stating the  radical demands for "less jails" and "less arsenals" -- makes a simple division between "business unionism" and "social unionism" a bit too easy to paint over a complicated set of divisions among workers and union leaders struggling to survive in the complicated, brutal environment of American corporate capitalism.

Why labor has sometimes stepped back from offering as broad a vision as we on the left would like is not just a story of good and bad guys.  Sometimes it was as simple as the fact that offering a vision could get you labelled a Communist; it's arguable that some "business unionists" pursued a more socially conscious policy than they were willing to publicly acknowledge.  It's easy to remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle in the Birmingham jail, but folks forget that AFL-CIO leader George Meany wired a large portion of the $160,000 bail money to enable the civil rights protesters to march again. 

None of this contradicts the fact that the crimes of segregation in some unions were horrendous and the violations of union democracy and just the deadening of social imagination by many labor leaders drained the labor movement of its energy. 

But that history is always multiple, with inspiring stories of struggle often embedded alongside the bad, and I may have an anti-romantic streak that would rather start from where we've come -- including old Gompers -- and build forward trying to sort out the good from the bad.

Similarly, in the debate today with the AFL-CIO, while I lean to the Change to Win coalition arguments, I recognize their are good people on both sides of the debate, and contra Bill, I think that there are glimpses of profoundly broad social visions emerging in the debate.  Yes, it can get reduced to prosaic budgetary fights -- which is frankly often a more real indicator of ideology than the words said -- but I see far more in the range of proposals laid out by various unions and groups within the AFL-CIO.  

I see real debates about how to make international solidarity a reality, an issue labor was struggling with a century ago in Gompers time, how to connect political struggle for social benefits to workplace organizing, how to balance strategic industry organizing with bottom-up mobilization, along with a range of other key issues of immigration, union diversity, and internal democracy. 

Of course we want more and should demand more social visions, but that's where the Gompers quote comes in, since asking for more vision, not just more money, has been part of the demand by labor for its whole history.  How much of that vision is delivered is always in question, but at this point, I prefer to highlight the positive as well as the negative as we try to stitch together the best of our history into a brighter labor future.