Three trends in U.S. labor politics EXCERPT

Bill Fletcher, Jr. said:

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:

1. What are the constituencies of the union movement?
2. Who are the (a) friends, (b) allies, and (c) enemies of the union movement?
3. 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]

Related posts:
Critique of Fletcher's 3 types
Leverage strategies (Solidarity Divided EXCERPT)
Radical Caucus Movement (1960s-present) (Solidarity Divided EXCERPT)

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

Leverage strategies EXCERPT

Bill Fletcher, Jr. said:

The Meany years [1952 to 1979] were also the time that the Teamsters, after being purged from the AFL-CIO for corruption, organized themselves into the largest amalgamated union in the United States, with nearly two million members.

The strategies that the Teamsters used then and that the SEIU uses today are not new. In the 1860s, William H. Sylvis (founder of the National Labor Union, the first attempt to create a national labor center) used similar techniques in an effort to control specific labor markets. The goal was to control wages and thereby reduce or eliminate competition between companies in the same industry.

[Also should be noted John L. Lewis' use of leverage strategies in the 30s...]

"Leverage" strategies, developed by socialist Farrell Dobbs, were responsible for the meteoric growth of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) during the late 1950s and 1960s. IBT grew rapidly under the pragmatist and often controversial leadership of James Hoffa, Sr.

Leverage campaigns, or what SEIU calls "pressure campaigns, require broad-based organizing aimed at unionizing large sections of a particular labor market and finding economic, social, or political circumstances that will pressure companies within that labor market to acquiesce to unionization.

Leverage or pressure campaigns may eschew NLRB secret-ballot elections and challenges when companies offer neutrality or voluntary recognition or enter into card-check agreements (in which they agree to acknowledge a union if a majority of employees sign cards verifying their union membership).

Strategically, such campaigns can also mover far more rapidly towrad a first contract than traditional organizing approaches can.


The importance of such strategies is clear because they offer an alternative to organizing one workplace at a time in an industry, which is a tremendous resource drain and can fail more broadly if individual companies either gain the support of other nonunion firms or cannot compete with nonunion firms. If industry-wide pressure campaigns are part of a strategy for social and economic justice, the workers' desire for unionization can align with broader social justice forces, expanding progressive conditions and the potential for building political power.

-excerpted from Solidarity Divided:

1111'''''(18

Sylvis said:

WE have heard and read a great deal about "the dignity of labor." It is a prolific theme with demagogues, politicians, occasionally attracts the attention of our most profound political economists. It also serves to ventilate the overcharged wisdom of many an egotist, who uses it as a stepping-stone to gain notoriety or promotion.

It is a remarkable fact, however, that those who flatter workingmen most, and hypocritically chant "the dignity of labor,"are the active agents in sinking it far beneath scientific and professional occupations, both of which are dependent upon and intimately connected with labor.

But let labor reach what standard of respectability it may in the estimation of effeminate non-producers, one thing is certain, it is the germ from which springs a nation's prosperity, and the only true fountain from which the masses can draw social happiness.

It is the motive power which keeps the machinery of society working in harmony.

It is the base upon which the proudest structure of art rests- the leverage which enables man to carry out God's wise purposes- the source from which science draws the elements of its power and greatness.

In short, labor is the attribute of all that is noble and grand in civilization.

(quoted from the essay "Prison Labor" in the Biography of William H. Sylvis)