Militancy & union democracy: a radicals’ view

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From the mid 1960's to 1981 - the "long 1970s" of the book's title - a wave of strikes and other forms of militancy swept through the United States, leading a generation of student radicals to turn to the working class, seeking to root their dreams of socialist revolution "in our lifetimes" in the soil of real working class struggle, "at the point of production." For the most part, the editors and authors of these 13 essays are veterans of this "from-below" generation. Rebel Rank and File offers a sweeping analysis of the period with insight into the causes and dynamics of the struggles. 

The "from below" radicals went into the unions just as rank and file militancy rose to levels not seen since the 1930s and 40s. "There were 5,716 work stoppages in 1970 alone, involving more than 3 million workers. Contract rejections, collective insubordination, sabotage, organized slowdowns, and wildcat strikes were the order of the day, " writes Winslow.  In workplace after workplace and sometimes on an enormous scale, the rank and file rebelled, challenging not only their employers but also their union leaders. Chapters cover the farm workers, miners, teamsters, teachers, telephone workers, autoworkers and more.

What was driving the rebellion?

What makes Rebel Rank and File most useful is the analytical framework it provides for understanding the upsurge. Contrary to the common view of the 1950s and 1960s as a golden age for workers, an economic boom governed by a "Labor-Management Accord," the authors show the late 1950's to be a time of hard fought gains. From 1946 to 1956, notes Moody, "a greater proportion of total workdays [were] lost to work stoppages... than in any other comparable intervals after 1946."  Forced to tolerate unions during the war, US employers did not wait to fight back when it ended. Robert Brenner traces the "employer offensive" that is often thought of as beginning in the mid or late 1970s back to the early 1960s, when employers took a "new hard line" seeking to hold down wage increases. Most importantly, employers sought  changes in work rules and conditions, hoping to raise productivity and wrest control of the shop floor from the informal work groups and stewards that were a legacy of the union organizing drives of the 1930s and 40s. Brenner attributes the employer attack to the decline in profitability due to wage increases and the first signs of the impact of rising foreign competition.

As Judith Stein and Kim Moody show, not only was the "Labor-Management Accord" a myth, but the enduring illusion of a LM Accord was itself symptomatic of Labor's failure to develop a coherent economic program and union strategy. In a strategy "derived from a snapshot in time" as Moody puts it, union officials banked on a return to an "endlessly expanding" economy that would "allow union officials to continue to extract gains from the employers for the membership, while continuing to erode the independent power of the rank and file." When, in the late 1970s, the economy took a turn for the worse and the right wing surged to power with its economic strategy of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization, labor lacked the power and the vision to stop them or even fight back effectively.

The upshot

The rebellion of the "long 1970s" shook the employers, the union officialdom and the government, but it came to an end somewhere between the 1979 Chrysler bailout and the wave of concessions it unleashed and the crushing of the PATCO strike in 1981. The number of strikes fell, union membership fell, new organizing fell. The employers won and the unions did not change their basic strategy. With Reagonomics (and the embrace of neo-liberalism by the New Democrats), we entered the era of union decline that continues to this day and now threatens to take a turn for the even worse with the campaign to crush public sector unions. 

Dan LaBotz points out that the radicals who turned to labor failed to build a new working class revolutionary movement; they recruited only a handful of workers to their shrinking socialist organizations. Their main success was in recruiting themselves and other young radicals to the non-revolutionary cause of union reform, becoming reluctant experts in the mechanics of union governance, grievances, collective bargaining, and labor law. 

Why weren't they more successful? Kim Moody blames "the failure of independent rank-and-file organizations and other manifestations of the upsurge to transcend the framework of business unionism." But it's not clear what this means. Moody points to the fact that each reform group accepted the isolation of its efforts; they failed to build a single radical movement.

In the longer view, union democracy stands out as a theme. We see it throughout Rebel Rank and File, not only in the famous union democracy struggles -- the Miners, Teamsters, and Steelworkers but also in cases less often associated with union democracy, like the Farmworkers.

Steve Early addresses union democracy more explicitly. The movements of the 70s are to be credited, he writes, for "the institutions they created, the reforms they won within unions, the continued participation of many of their leading militants, and the continuing relevance of their ideas."  But the central question of our time, starkly posed by the drive to hyper-centralization and top-down authority in the SEIU and Carpenters unions, is the question of union democracy. Does labor need democracy, or not? Early, a champion of the democratic struggles in and outside of SEIU, knows the answer.

This is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this generation of unionists: the expansion of the realm of democracy inside US unions. They may not have transcended business unionism, but they helped build democratic unionism as a living movement, providing workers a new foundation for struggle. And so,  Rebel Rank and File has a happier ending than its authors may realize. 

As Herman Benson has argued, looking at the same period, "a reinvigoration of union democracy was effected... Each insurgency was impelled by unique interests and pursued its own course. Some disappeared, some have persisted, some were successful. They were mainly isolated from one another. Taken together, however, their cumulative force triggered an explosion of democratic activity inside the labor movement, legitimized the right to dissent, and thereby helped open a new stage in the life of our labor movement."