Radical caucus movement (1960s-present) EXCERPT

Bill Fletcher, Jr. said:

The radical caucus movement represented an insurgent challenge to organized labor [in the late 60s/early 70s]. Through the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (and it's founding organization, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) was certainly the leading force in the movement, the caucus movement was very diverse, running the gamut from ad hoc groupings against the Vietnam War to union democracy movements, campaigns for racial justice aimed at both employers and unions, and semisyndicalist formations that sought either to replace existing unions or to transform them.

The caucus movement, being largely an outgrowth of the civil rights/Black Power movements and the anti-Vietnam War movement, was affected by the decline of those movements as well as by the 1973-74 recession. At this point, the caucus movement evolved in two different directions. The semisyndicalist efforts, such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, went into steep decline and disappeared, with some its members [sic] moving on to form Marxist-Leninist organizations.

At the same time, certain union-reform efforts began to emerge, such as the Miners for Democracy and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). The Miners for Democracy helped rid the UMWA of corruption and lay the foundation for a renovated organization. TDU helped jump-start the process of change and democratization in the Teamsters and remains an important force in that union to this day. The critiques by the caucus movement never entirely disappeared and continued to influence development both within the movement and in the so-called workers' center movement.

[The foremost journal of this tendency today is the widely-respected Labor Notes @ http://www.labornotes.org]

excerpted from Solidarity Divided (2008) p 35,36