once more on Gompers
First, I want to join Harold in thanking everyone for getting this terrific blog started. It feels a bit like old home week in cyberspace, re-connecting with old friends and dare I say, 'comrades,' many of whom I spent decades working with in and beside organized labor. Nathan, you asked us all to re-read the quote, which I did, although it is of course a quote with which I'm long familiar (I included it in writing many a union official's speech). While it's true that Gompers appeals beyond the desires and needs of workers, the phraseology he uses actually does represent the problem of the old AFL philosophy.
What does labor want? he asks. They want (we want) more...of everything...less of prisons.
the problem was not in the desire, but in the struggle itself. I don't agree with Bill that what was needed--or would be needed now--is a Labor Party. But I do think that labor needs a strategy of coalition building not simply to demand more from government, society, business, but to work together to restructure the economy and political life to enable a different kind of life for all. That's precisely where Gompers and his ilk fell short. It's not about deal-making; it's not about accomodation. It's about providing the leadership and the vision as a movement to transform the workplace, the economy and the political scene so that labor is a catalyst offering a different way of life. At its best, that's what the social democratic movements did in Europe, with their backbone of trade unionism. Now, they and U.S. labor and others are all struggling in a new arena--a global one, where all the rules change, and the fact that the U.S. unions are so weak, drags down the entire global workforce.
To leap forward to today's controversies within the AFL-CIO, radical times call for radical measures. Perhaps that, too, is why Gompers sounded such a wrong note for several of us.
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Samuel Gompers did spearhead the second most successful union organization in American history, and did so in a climate and a politics (enormous numbers of small farmers, no Great Depression, et cetera) much more hostile to unions than was the climate and politics of the 1930s when the CIO was launched...
July 6, 2005 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jo-Ann says: "I don't agree with Bill that what was needed--or would be needed now--is a Labor Party."
I differ, at least in part. The working class of every other (Western) liberal-democratic country has had its own party and has at least somewhat more protection from the whip of the market than does the U.S. working class. The two factors are not unrelated.
Granted, the nature of the U.S. electoral system would have made it difficult for a U.S. labor party to supplant the Democrats (or Republicans). But at the very least the existence of such a mass party would have done much to inculcate class-consciousness in the minds of U.S. workers. It would have done something to diminish the myth of a classless society in the U.S. It might even have led to the implementation of socialized healthcare.
The last time there was a serious attempt at building a labor party in the U.S. was in 1935-36. Communist Party operatives did much to squelch this movement, as it conflicted with the "Popular Front" ideology eminating from Moscow.
The alternative to building a labor party -- one more likely to succeed, given our two-party structured system -- is building a disciplined "party" within the Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO has never attempted to do this. I had hoped that Sweeney, willing to reach out to non-labor left-of-center organizations, would have been interested in doing this. But this would have required making it plain that many Democrats are, in fact, labor's enemies. Sweeney never did this.
July 6, 2005 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps a better historical place to go is the Knights of Labor. They were able to join all kinds of labor and small producers and merchants together against large corporate interests. They were successful in the first big strike against the Gould railroads. The problem was that they never solved the issue of organizational design. They grew after the strike to resemble, even mirror, the organizational structures of their corporate bosses - to negotiate better. The result was that the coalition did not hold and they were crushed in the second strike.
So two questions must be examined simultaneously: who is likely to be "inside" this new boundary of interests and how is it to be organized: structure, use of authority and process of decision making. Seaparate the two and too often the organizational form dominates.
July 6, 2005 5:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
The very name 'labor' is, at this point, foreign to the bulk of the workforce: the (unrepresented) people in service jobs and cubicles.
Workforce representation.
Paycheck protection.
A helping hand.
Something like that--and redefining the mission, goals, strategy and tactics around the new vision, the new paradigm--would be the START of a return to relevance.
July 6, 2005 9:26 PM | Reply | Permalink