Clyde Summers, 1919-2010

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Clyde Summers, who died in October at 91, played a central role in shaping union democracy law. He began with an academic's interest in union democracy, but he became emotionally involved after joining a committee to defend two machinists expelled from the IAM in 1958 and joining others in calling for a federal investigation of the murder of two reformers in the Painters Union in 1966. In 1972 he joined the Board of Directors of the Association for Union Democracy and from then on, became one of its key supporters. He chaired its Legal Review Committee, offered guidance to rank and file unionists and attorneys with union democracy problems, donated thousands of dollars over the years to finance the work of AUD, and was a key speaker at its conferences.

Michael Goldberg, a law professor and fellow member of the AUD Board, wrote “Present at the Creation: Clyde W. Summers and the field of Union Democracy Law” for the Employee Rights and Employment Law Journal's special issue in honor of Summers. Limited excerpts follow but we open with Goldberg's conclusion because it sums up his career so well:

Clyde Summers was arguably the leading labor law scholar of his generation, and his record of public policy activism and movement building - putting his scholarly ideas into practice in service to the cause of union democracy and industrial democracy -- may be unmatched by that of any legal scholar of his generation regardless of the field of law. The law of union democracy would barely exist were it not for Clyde, and it would certainly not exist in its present form. Nor would the labor movement. Even in its currently weakened state, the American labor movement would likely be in even worse shape than it is but for the periodic waves of democratic activism that arise from its members. And those waves of rank and file activism would have only minimal protection under the law were it not for the union democracy career of Professor Clyde Summers... [He] was part of an unlikely coalition of union reformers, political activists, and public intellectuals who banded together to create a movement to bring democratic reform to American unions … that eventually became embodied in the Association for Union Democracy, an organization he helped found and on whose Board of Directors he served for decades.

Summers' research at Columbia focused initially on the admissions policies of unions, and he wrote two articles examining the all too common union practice of excluding workers based on their race, gender, nationality, or political beliefs... [His] second law review article in the field of labor law led him "to the view that the right to join was more than the right to work on union jobs, the standard view, but the right to participate in the decisions of the union. [He] had moved from industrial democracy to union democracy." The most important theme in this early article for his later writings was the connection he drew between industrial democracy as embodied in collective bargaining and the need for democracy in unions themselves...This connection between industrial democracy and union democracy was not Summers' only reason for giving union democracy the importance he did in his career, but in his view, it was the most important of those reasons, and it is a relationship Summers returned to repeatedly in his writings... According to Summers, the most significant basis for the public's interest in union democracy is the role collective bargaining plays in the establishment of industrial democracy...

Summers support for union democracy was always linked to his strong support for the institution of collective bargaining and for the labor movement itself. Union members' rights, he wrote, “are not self-defining absolutes but are qualified by the union's right to survive." In presenting the labor union “Bill of Rights” he drafted for the ACLU, Summers asserted flatly that the democratic rights he and the ACLU championed for workers inside their unions could “flourish only if the workers' right to organize and bargaining collectively is effectively safeguarded.”

Alan Hyde, a former student of Summers and fellow advocate for union democracy has noted, Summers was not just a scholar, he was an “activist scholar.” “It is possible,” Hyde wrote, “that the United States Congress might have enacted democracy law without Clyde Summers, but it is certain that, had it done so, the results would hardly resemble the law we have.”

Five years after drafting the ACLU Report, Summers was asked by Harvard Professor Archibald Cox to serve on a committee of academics he was putting together at the request of Senator John F. Kennedy, the chair of the Senate Labor Committee, to help draft union reform legislation in response to the revelations of the McClellan Committee investigations...[T]he ACLU's Labor Union Bill of Rights, as drafted by Clyde Summers, was an important influence on the Bill of Rights that was ultimately incorporated into the Landrum-Griffin Act...Summers' advocacy for greater protection for union democracy... made enormous contributions to the theoretical foundation and practical framework for the tremendous sea change in the law of internal affairs that resulted from the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act...

In early 1960, Summers became involved in one of the first Landrum-Griffin Act cases to be filed. It involved the expulsion of two reformers in the Machinists' union who had had the temerity to challenge a trusteeship that had been imposed over their Chicago local by the International. Summers...had been recruited by Herman Benson to serve on a three-person committee [editor: one was Norman Thomas, the socialist reformer] to organize a legal defense committee for the two machinists...[T]his was the first occasion Summers had to work closely with Herman Benson, a former machinist himself who served as the legal defense committee's volunteer staff and went on to become the chief spokesman and organizer of the nascent union democracy movement, first through the publication of his newsletter, Union Democracy in Action, from 1960-1972, and then as the principal founder of the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) in 1969, serving as its long term executive director and editor of its newsletter, Union Democracy Review. Clyde Summers and Herman Benson spent the rest of their careers working together as the leading figures in the union democracy movement.

Over the next forty years, Clyde Summers played a role, sometimes up front, and sometimes behind the scenes, in almost every major union democracy struggle. In addition to serving as an informal consultant and advisor to the plaintiffs' lawyers in dozens, probably hundreds, of LMRDA and duty of fair representation cases, he served on the AUD's Legal Review Committee, which oversees the AUD's participation in litigation, authored many amicus briefs in important union democracy cases, and served as an expert witness in many other cases.

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------- You can buy a copy of Michael J. Goldberg's PRESENT AT THE CREATION: CLYDE SUMMERS AND THE FIELD OF UNION DEMOCRACY LAW 14 Employee Rights & Employment Policy Journal 121, 2010. For more about Clyde Summers' remarkable life and work, see the obituaries on the websites of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the New York Times. Some of Clyde's writing is available on this website, including:

• Democracy in a One Party State: Perspectives from Landrum-Griffin by Clyde W. Summers. Reprinted from Maryland Law Review. 1984, 44pp. $4.00
• Unions Without a Majority -- a Black Hole? by Clyde W. Summers. Reprinted from Chicago-Kent Law Review. 1992, 17pp. $4.00
• Union Democracy and Landrum Griffin, by Clyde Summers, AUD $4.00 USD

See also:

• Vindicating Clyde Summers, Unions and scholars petition NLRB: Make employers recognize non-majority unions http://aud2.uniondemocracy.org/pubs/udr/vindicating-clyde-summers-unions...
• Federal unions must let their members know and AUD's Brief to the Department of Labor http://aud2.uniondemocracy.org/pubs/udr/federal-unions-must-let-their-members-know-and-auds-brief-department-labor

Clyde Summers asked that donations to AUD be made in his name. Your contribution helps AUD continue its work in support of union democracy.