|
|
|
|
Taking Care of Business
The Untold History of the AFL-CIO
Taking Care
of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany,
Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American
Labor
by Paul
Buhle, published by the Monthly Review Press, New
York
reviewed by Jeff
Burman
Why has organized labor been held
in such low regard for so long? Why do so many working
people seem ready to associate unions with dark intrigues,
when the whole point of unions is to improve their
collective good? These are critical questions often politely
ignored by those of us who feel an affinity
|
|
In 'Taking Care of Business', Paul Buhle has written a scathing indictment of American Labor. He charges the AFL-CIO with several fundamental misconceptions and indignities running through much of its 115-year history.
From the beginning, the AFL took a conciliatory stance with industrialists and politicians. This need for validation, while offering short-term benefits, served to undermine labor’s role as an advocate of those who have suffered from exploitation. To make matters worse, the AFL (and later, the AFL-CIO) clung to a disturbing, insular disposition toward race, class and gender exclusion.
Buhle also accuses the federation of a partnership with the CIA to subvert post-war European unions that leaned too far from the AFL’s preferred model of ‘business unionism’. But perhaps the most fundamental indictment leveled at American organized labor was its simple failure to organize a broad-based political movement of wage workers. In the end, the AFL-CIO is redeemed by its recent coup d’état by John Sweeney in 1995.
Buhle is a professor of American Civilization at Brown University, and has written extensively on labor issues, including 'A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist', 'The Encyclopedia of the American Left', and nineteen other books.
Business Unionism
Organized labor suffered greatly from the work of a handful of outsized personalities who dominated the AFL-CIO and its predecessor, the AFL, since its inception in 1886. Buhle argues that labor suffered from a desire to work with its more powerful employers, adopting a system of business unionism that focused its efforts on incremental improvements, and refused to challenge the fundamental authority of business to exploit men, women and children. Buhle further argues that while many international labor movements sought to more equitably distribute the wealth created by workers, American organized labor sought the nod of credibility from its adversaries in industry, and at the same time spent inordinate amounts of energy purging idealists and radicals. While unions elsewhere cultivated a spirit of common purpose and human emancipation, American labor, especially within the AFL, cultivated a culture of exclusion focusing on skilled, white, male labor.
Scholars have argued that America’s failure to produce a substantial labor or socialist party is the result of our innate inclination toward individualism and class mobility. Others remind us of those, like Henry Ford, who paid their workers somewhat better, hoping to create more consumers. Buhle argues that ethnic and class divisions peculiar to our immigrant nation solidified in the early unions, and were further embedded through competition with more progressive unions. The "aristocracy of labor," as the early AFL was called, was made up of highly paid craft unionists who had the strongest qualifications with which to bargain and who were socially conservative.
From this milieu Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and was its president until 1926. His overriding priority was to mold American organized labor into an institution that would be cooperative, collegial and conservative. Capitalism was to be the inevitable and proper organizing principle in American society. Societal reform would come through progressive improvements in bargaining agreements, not direct political action.
While Buhle gives Gompers some credit for starting out with progressive ideals and later shedding them, George Meany emerged from a sector of the building trades "notoriously corrupt and clique-ridden."
Meany, a union plumber and a son of a union plumber, rose through the ranks of the New York State AFL until he was elected state president in 1934. In the depths of the depression, he opposed social welfare legislation, calling it undue government interference in union jurisdictions. Ironically, the only strike that Meany would lead was against the Works Progress Administration in 1935. He claimed that construction work covered by the WPA paid less than half the prevailing union wage. Principled though it was, Meany’s chief concern was craft privilege. He was elected secretary-treasurer of the AFL in 1939, and succeeded then-president William Green in 1953 by acclamation, without debate or ballot.
Communists and Spies
As European trade unions faced a rising tide of socialists and communists, Meany sent two key operatives overseas to interfere with strikes and union elections in the name of fighting communism. For example, when West German unions demanded "co-determination," a power-sharing plan for workers in business and government, the AFL responded "with particular horror." Meany’s operatives ultimately broke a citywide general strike in Berlin to insure more conservative policies. Buhle contends that this "vastly funded spook work" continued on five continents until 1995.
Meany’s emphasis on entrenchment at home and intrigues abroad paralleled the AFL’s indifference to organizing and its resistance to a growing civil rights movement. In 1960, when A. Philip Randolph criticized the Virginia AFL-CIO’s plans for a strictly segregated convention, Meany insisted that the federation was doing just fine, and should be complimented for its efforts.
Lane Kirkland succeeded George Meany in 1979, carrying on his predecessor’s interest in foreign affairs. Some efforts were promising, like support for the Polish free trade union movement, while others, in South Africa and Chile, were dreadful. In 1994, Kirkland’s AFL-CIO refused to fund a newspaper or a radio station for American workers, but found $660,000 for four radio stations in Russia. Tens of millions in union dues were squandered on cold war agitation that bore little or no fruit.
A New Voice
Buhle’s hammering of American labor skids to a stop with the New Voice Movement’s bloodless coup in 1995, by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President John Sweeney. With the promise of the AFL-CIO reinventing itself as a bona fide social movement, with its embrace of unskilled workers, progressives, minorities, and more importantly, its new insistence on advocacy, a new voice indeed has been formed.
Look what’s happened in a few short years. Instead of automatically delivering votes to democrats on Election Day, we now have informational campaigns to educate and involve union voters. Instead of shunning low-wage workers and immigrants, we’ve seen the remarkable success of campaigns like Justice for Janitors. There are even doctors, technicians and engineers joining unions, winning quality of life and job security fights. Where there was once complacency and retreat there is now a mandate (in the words of a recent AFL-CIO mission statement) "…to improve the lives of working families – to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our nation. To accomplish this mission we will build and change the American labor movement."
By any standard a new day has dawned for American Labor.
Jeff Burman is a Guild Board member
representing assistant editors.
He can be reached via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 22, No. 1 - March/April 2001
Guild Home | Magazine Home | Top of Page
Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700