Three Theories on the Decline of American Trade Unions – and Their Implications; Part III – Internal Structure and Member Participation

[Fuerbach’s] doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the educator himself must be educated… The changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Marx, Theses on Fuerbach, #3 (my italics)

In Part 1 of this series, I addressed the onerous external conditions – globalization, capital flight and an increasing hostile state – the have contributed to the decline of the house of labor. I concluded, certainly, political, economic, and legal developments beginning in the neoliberal era have imposed heavy burdens on unions. Yet, for all of this, unions and workers continue to seek better wages and working conditions. Both historically and in the present-day, the choices they make matter to their success – or failure.

In Part II, I began to focus on those choices, discussing the turn away from militancy represented by the UAW-GM “Treaty of Detroit” which ceded management control of production in return for increased wages and benefits. In the long-run, though, when employers abandoned the “treaty” model beginning in the mid-1970s, unions found they had turned their own swords into plowshares; members no longer had faith in their own capabilities. That switch could not just be turned back on.

Here, I suggest why it’s so hard to turn that switch back on. In most unions, the fundamental pre-requisites – rank-and-file militancy, forms for (or even mandating) participatory democracy, leaders relinquishing control, and workers assuming increasing responsibility for their wages and working conditions – must be re-learned. Worse, there is substantial resistance to beginning this process. Then, I’ll also recount some instances where the switch stayed on, for at least several decades.

Let’s start with an idea that A.J. Muste coined in the 1920s: a union, he said, consists of “two extremely divergent types of social structure… that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.” In the union army, power is contingent on a steely unity of purpose, the “top-down” unfolding of thoughtful strategy and clever tactics, and swift mobilization of junior officers and rank-and-file workers upon command. I once heard Labor Notes’ Ellen David Friedman argue, for example, that while a strike seems to be “a moment in our union lives in which there’s the experience of democracy, because everyone is participating… yet they are often command-control moments where there is a lot of decision-making that comes down in almost a militaristic way.”

But what precedes that strike? How is it called, organized, ended? What do we mean by “participation” – is it something more than mobilization? What do union members learn from their experience? Advocates of the town meeting – I’m one - note that a union is a volunteer army in which workers choose whether to go into battle, or sit on the sidelines. My perspective is that a union can only sustain itself as a vehicle for class struggle over the long-term if its members are invited – and want – to be active contributors toward the shaping of the union’s course of action, agents of their own destiny.

This has usually been a minority view. While Muste coined the army/town meeting paradigm, he complained that “the mass is ignorant and fickle and emotional.” The union official – both “a general and a chairman of a debating society” – is stuck with a structure in which he needs “to win assent to his program,” and even, “‘put over’ on the meeting what he deems essential.” The program Muste describes is formulated by the general staff, then has to win the assent and cooperation of sometimes recalcitrant privates. I’m not a Muste expert – although I seem to have “re-found,” unearthed, this chestnut – but here, at least, Muste seems to be arguing that the town meeting is just an unfortunate obstacle to be overcome.

In an influential article, Kim Voss and Rachel Sherman looked at some California locals of the notoriously top-down SEIU and concluded that the key to “break[ing] out of bureaucratic conservatism” was “centralized pressure from the international union” and “an influx of outsiders,” displacing elected officers if necessary. Another prominent labor academic, Steve Fraser, argued that some of the best union leaders, “devoted to organizing, tactically creative and militant, and who’ve achieved remarkable success… don’t care a rat’s ass for union democracy [see below for what this term might mean]; indeed, consider it an actual hindrance where a state of undeclared war against employers demands discipline, secrecy, and decisive action by small groups of outsiders less subject to daily intimidation.”

Fraser’s most important work is a biography of a Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union for 32 years (!!! – until the day of his death). It should go without saying that most union leaders, having lived inside and climbed their union’s bureaucratic food chain, are predisposed toward a high estimation of their own abilities, and a belief that a corps of specialists knew better than the workers how to defend their interests. In some ways, this is not even wrong – a labor relations system based on the careful and meticulous expertise of contract bargaining and grievance handling, and compliance with labor law’s “web of rules” is likely to select for those characteristics, rather than the different skill set of successful organizing workers to fight management, which is most often learned and practiced in the workplace.

(Here’s the most common exception to that tendency: when a group of workers has to band together to form and win a union in the first place. Yet Daisy Pitkin’s On The Line, about organizing laundry workers in Arizona, is a sobering study in how a union’s leadership can co-opt that effort. Pitkin, interestingly, after a hiatus from the labor movement, is now field director for the seemingly quite decentralized Starbucks campaign.)

As unions play a powerful role in defining the form through which workplace problems should be addressed, workers themselves developed a belief in what David Montgomery bemoaned as “the cult of the expert,” ceding control of the organization of production to management and the remedy of abuse to union officers. Fraser’s discipline and secrecy become self-fulfilling prophecies: the experts at the union hall really do know more than the rank-and-file; the muscle memory for self-competence (and collective effort) atrophies, or is never built. It’s really hard to turn the power switch on, and keep it on, if workers don’t believe in themselves.

Is there any good news?

So, those choices made over decades are the bad news. Is there any good news? I’m going to suggest three ways to look at this problem: a sort of ideological framing, some experiences from the past that show this is not all delusional, and then some ways forward in the moment.

Directly responding to Fraser, worker-turned-academic Stanley Aronowitz pointed to the “unprecedented” union expansion of the 1930s (at a time of high levels of participatory democracy), to argue that experience showed that “unions are best able to wage class warfare when the rank-and-file has sovereign control over its basic decisions.” A further goal, which should speak to us today, is that the labor movement needs to “transform itself into a broadly democratic movement that prefigures the kind of society it seeks, in opposition to “tacit authoritarianism.” Paulo Freire urged activists “to help men to help themselves, to place them in consciously critical confrontation with their problems, to make them the agents of their own recuperation.

Are these just pipe dreams? Or can they be worked toward? Expansive forms of union democracy in which workers had more say over decision-making and action – and that resulted in more success – have been found in some communist-led or -influenced unions. During the early decades of New York’s Hospital Workers Union 1199, top-down and bottom-up each had a clearly demarcated role. Control over strikes, contracts, policy, and even the promotion of the next generation of leaders, were firmly in the unchallenged hands of a small group. Yet they also actively encouraged and taught shop-floor leadership, organization, and readiness to take workplace action. Workers saw the relevance of their participation in union activity where it mattered most, while leadership felt it also improved union-wide mobilizations, and thus power, for the aims it established. The top-down army was invigorated by localized bottom-up engagement, while in one notable case, those shop-floor activists coalesced into a union-wide effort to oust an ineffectual union president.

In the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the town meeting spoke and generals listened. Institutionalized procedures such as recall procedures, autonomy of locals, and two-way communication channels “facilitate[d] participation and voice by members” and created norms of self-activity. On the San Francisco waterfront, crews of workers practiced spontaneous disobedience, argued with employers, and knew “how to act when they think they are right and have been wronged… and not to accept an order simply because it is issued by powerful people” – including powerful union leaders. “Because of the deliberative process that preceded negotiations, strike votes, and contract votes,” Levi et al. argued, “the quality of the outcome seems to have been better… [and] appear to have enhanced both solidarity and militancy.” So, democracy and wage and workplace success were directly connected, at least for a time.

Looking at UAW’s (usually) left-led River Rouge Local 600, Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin saw “maximum participation by its members in the actual exercise of power within the union and in making the decisions that affect them… Control over initiation, formulation, and implementation of policy,” they argue, bred a virtuous circle, creating “political experience, skills, and political efficacy… substantive knowledge and political rationality” – seemingly negating Muste’s concerns of an ignorant rank-and-file.

The UAW leadership’s eventual crippling of that Local’s militancy was a warning to members of the communist-led Farm Equipment Workers at International Harvester, who rejected UAW overtures for years, preserving their greater freedom to contest management decisions and maintain industrial democracy. Comparing the contracts, shop-floor militancy, and the attitudes of Harvester workers in the FE with those in UAW-represented Harvester plants, Toni Gilpin found striking differences. The Farm Equipment stewards engaged in constant "extra-contractual shop floor activity,” wielding the contract "in the workers' defense, employing it when it [is] useful, abandoning it when [it] is not.”

And go back and look at my Substack post on workers’ control at 207^th St.

These are not utopian examples.

These are not utopian examples. There were of course problems along with successes, and for various reasons, none of them have lasted until today. But they give us a glimpse that a different kind of trade unionism is possible.

And think about the activists who were at the heart of these experiments in participatory democracy and working-class self-activity: were they aware that they were changing circumstances and human activity? Were they aware that by doing so they were engaging in revolutionary practice? Were they aware that they were also educating themselves, slowly, sometimes torturously, to build a different world?

In a final post on the subject, next week, I’m going to briefly recount some of my (ultimately failed) experiences participating in an effort to create that different form of trade unionism at TWU Local 100. And I’ll begin to unfold what I learned about the dilemmas and choices activists face when trying (to paraphrase Aronowitz) to prefigure the kind of society they seek within their union.