In the preceding chapters on labor's development and consolidation up to the eve of the 1970s neoliberal assault, we identified Eugene Debs as a leftist, Samuel Gompers as a traditionalist, and John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther as pragmatists...
Today the dominant coalition of traditionalist and pragmatist union leaders continues to shape union culture, whereas leftists get co-opted or marginalized...
Each of these perspectives has its own way of answering three key questions:
- What are the constituencies of the union movement?
- Who are the (a) friends, (b) allies, and (c) enemies of the union movement?
- What is the geographic scope of our concern for the working class? [meaning, essentially, relationship to the nation-state -ed.]
He proceeds to break down the three groups like this:
He also provides the reader with an example of the way these interests may evolve in contest with each other:
The AFL-CIO's decision to admit undocumented immigrant workers provides a recent example of pragmatist unionists' broadening their view of labor's constituency. Before 1999, the AFL-CIO supported the employer sanctions provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, and most union leaders opposed the inclusion, or practiced the exclusion, of immigrant groups in U.S. Unions.
Leftists in the union movement helped bring about the AFL-CIO's dramatic shift, prompting the organization to call for repealing employer sanctions, demand full amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers, and promote equality with U.S. workers under existing labor laws.
The shift occurred mostly because of the increasing number of immigrant workers in sectors of the economy that the union wants to organize. Thus, pragmatic concerns drove some trade union leaders to change their stance on organizing immigrant, especially undocumented, workers.[quotes and content from Solidarity Divided (2008) p 36-38]
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