Talking/Acting: Union Democracy/Workers Power

In what may be an apocryphal statement, A.J. Muste, a socialist and pacifist active in the 1930s labor movement, is reported to have once remarked that unions need to function simultaneously as an army on the march and as a town hall meeting.  In other words, have an open, participatory character, yet still be able to act with decisiveness and cohesiveness.  A difficult balance to maintain, the temptation always exists to stress one side or the other.

During the debates leading up to the change-to-win (CTW) unions leaving the AFL-CIO, Andrew Stern, Service Employees (SEIU) president, made clear where his emphasis lies.  Rejecting any compromise solution to resolve internal differences, he was also rejecting the Federation’s consensus-based decision-making process.  Stern argued that this had left it incapable of making hard decisions, unable to act with the unity – the decisiveness – necessary in an anti-union era of corporate consolidation and right-wing government.  The alternative he envisions is a labor movement with a centralized leadership able to direct resources and command respect from affiliates on jurisdictional issues, on organizing and bargaining strategy.

As to objections that this is undemocratic, Stern dismissed them as irrelevant, stating on his website, “workers want their lives to be changed.  They want strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy.  Workers can win when they are united, and leaders who stand in the way of change screaming, ‘democracy,’ are failing to understand how workers exercise the limited powers they have in a country where only 8.2 percent of the private sector are in a union.”

Until more workers are organized, worker rights will be limited and working people will have little real power in society or on the job.  Thus, for Stern, the over-riding task is to organize more workers in systematic, strategic fashion.  A position that does contain a degree of truth, members’ power to decide what their union should do is of less importance when unions are weak for the reason that rights without the ability to act on them begin to lose meaning.  A degree of truth, however, is not the whole truth; the real question is whether unions can grow again without expanding internal democracy.  No matter how much labor concentrates its resources, it will never have the funds of a WalMart, a Tysons, a Marriott – unless added into the mix is worker solidarity.  Solidarity which can’t be commanded, rather, has to be built.  And that process of building requires those most affected by corporate greed, by union action, be part of the decision-making process.

Organizing itself appeals to workers on the basis of tangible needs for better wages, safer working conditions, security, and to intangible needs for dignity and respect; the struggle for material well-being through collective action is also an individual assertion of pride and self-worth.  Without the motivation of wanting to be accorded one’s rights, few would run the risk of a lost pay-check or a lost job that union activism too often costs.  The commitment to build an existing union local, enforce a negotiated contract on the job, to walk out on strike, requires a similar assertion of one’s rights, even when those very rights are being denied.  Flowing from this, the demand to be heard by management or government inevitably becomes a demand to be heard within one’s own union.  The kind of separation Stern implies is necessary, the idea that some rights can’t be asserted until others are won misses the deeper truth of the mutual dependence of all rights.

Stern is right, too, to reject a concept of democracy of talking, if unconnected to action.  Where he is wrong is seeing the way forward only through leadership from above, whereas of equal necessity is participation, initiative – and therefore leadership – from within the ranks.  That kind of participation, rather than simply staff-driven mobilizations, is key to union democracy and union effectiveness.  Labor does need to renew itself, rebuild and grow, but there are other ways to do so than that proposed by Stern.  One such alternative was suggested some months ago by recently-elected Communications Workers (CWA) President Larry Cohen when he said in an interview, “CWA believes that the [AFL-CIO] Constitution needs to be changed to make it fundamentally a local and state as well as a national organization.  Central Labor Councils should be the backbone of Federation and membership in them should not be voluntary.  You can’t have an optional labor movement.”  A statement which, if put into practice, would be an assertion, not an abdication, of strong leadership.

An army on the march can suffer from tunnel vision, attacking one pre-determined goal before seriously addressing any others; a not inapt characterization of Stern’s perspective.  The approach Cohen advocates is in this respect broader, as when he said in that interview, “… The issue is the virtual elimination of collective bargaining rights and the linkage between those rights and any modern democracy … The primary crisis is not about union membership.  We reject that.  The crisis is about American workers’ right to join and build unions.”

No formula or plan can erase the tension between leadership and membership, between narrower and broader issues, between the ability to act quickly and the need to decide widely – that is, between an army on the march and a town hall meeting.  The challenge that needs to be met is to uphold the content of democracy, to create many layers of authority and leadership that enable working people to expand the reach of what they can do.  Change in that direction will strengthen workplace and political organizing, will meet the needs of a movement in on-going conflict with those who profit out of workers’ lack of rights, while expanding those needed rights within labor’s own organizations.

--Kurt Stand, Petersburg, Virginia

Submitted to Junge Welt September 2005