SOLIDARITY DIVIDED: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice, by Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin. University of California Press. (2008) 324 pp. $17.97 (paper)

What’s ‘class’ got to do with it?

Labor’s survival hinges on unions reclaiming meaningful language

David Bacon, California Media Guild

01 Dec 2009

The Guild Reporter

At the beginning of Solidarity Divided, Bill Fletcher recalls a comment made at a union meeting in South Africa that sums up at least part of what makes the Congress of South African Trade Unions so different from the AFL-CIO. “ ‘Comrades,’ they began, ‘the role of the union is to represent the interests of the working class. There are times when the interests of the working class conflict with the interests of the members of our respective unions.’ ”

Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided’s co-author, use the quote to dramatize two important differences between our labor movements. South African unions talk about workers’ class interests, using words that still frighten unionists here. And COSATU militants not only see the potential internal conflicts that can arise, but believe that when they do, unions should put the interests of all workers before their own institutional needs.

Those are just two of many differences between U.S. labor and elsewhere. In France, workers imprison their bosses to force them into negotiations. El Salvadoran unions supported the guerrilleros during a civil war, even though it meant their offices were bombed and their leaders killed. In the Philippines, workers commonly erect tents at the gates of struck factories and live there until the strike is over. Even workers from Mexico and Canada use phrases like “working class” in ordinary conversation.

The purpose of Solidarity Divided is not to compare us unfavorably with labor elsewhere, but to ask questions that will make us come to grips with the problems that endanger our survival. And while the experiences of unions and workers in other countries can’t be transferred or copied, they can at least inspire us with the courage to face our own situation with realism and the determination to change it.

Solidarity Divided has been criticized by some activists for the dark picture it paints of the situation faced by unions in the U.S. While not hopeless, it certainly is sobering: few would argue that with only 12% of U.S. workers in unions there is no crisis. But the authors are not saying that U.S. workers can’t win today’s labor conflicts, even with that minimal level of participation. The continuation of the Bush era was defeated in no small part, for example, by union activists, money and votes. And workers can still win major organizing drives, as they did after a 16-year struggle at Smithfield Foods in North Carolina.

But in reality, our working class faces profound changes that have fundamentally undermined its political rights and standard of living. Over the last four decades, corporations have built an international system of production and distribution that links the workers of many countries, but in which workers have no control over the expropriation and distribution of the wealth they create. Moreover, this system has forced devastating and permanent unemployment on entire generations of U.S. workers, especially in African-American and Chicano neighborhoods. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic policies have displaced entire communities throughout the developing world, creating a reserve labor force of hundreds of millions that migrates within and across borders in a desperate search for work.

Fletcher and Gapasin wrote Solidarity Divided before the current economic crisis unfolded, which only highlights the problems they describe. Many elements of this crisis are structural and won’t disappear with the next turn of the business cycle, but corporations today are almost entirely opposed to any reforms in the current system, whether single-payer healthcare or the right to a job. When one considers the ferocity with which they battle the relatively minor changes in U.S. labor law proposed by the Employee Free Choice Act, it’s clear that the idea that unions should be encouraged—an ideal enshrined in the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act—is just so much meaningless verbiage.

Despite a desperate desire by U.S. labor leaders to revive mutual respect between corporations and unions, Fletcher and Gapasin observe, “that peace has not come. Nor can these leaders, nor anyone else, identify any sector of corporate America that intends to establish a new social compact with labor.”

Each month over the past half year, more than half a million people have lost their jobs. Banks have been showered with billions of dollars to keep them afloat, even as working families can’t get their mortgages renegotiated so they can stay in their homes. Yet there has been no national demonstration called by either labor federation to demand a direct federal jobs program, or that the bailout be redirected to workers instead of the wealthy—and certainly nothing approaching the direct action of French workers holding their bosses hostage.

Why is U.S. labor so conservative, if not downright timid? We, too, have a radical past. People in the U.S. also used to talk about the working class, debated the nature of capitalism and discussed strategies for radically transforming or replacing it. So what happened? Why is it now so difficult for labor to change?

One of the most valuable parts of Solidarity Divided is its examination of our history, establishing the fact that U.S. labor long had a left wing that advocated radical social change. But the left was purged in the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War, and the result was a lasting, fundamental reshaping of the relationship between left-wing activists and the power centers in today’s more bureaucratic unions. “Today the dominant coalition of traditionalist and pragmatist union leaders continues to shape union culture,” Fletcher and Gapasin write, “whereas leftists get coopted or marginalized. This situation limits the union movement’s scope and narrows unions’ political and social impact.”

Discussion in labor is difficult because the Cold War taught unionists that political differences beyond a limited range would result in marginalization at best, expulsion at worst. You can’t talk freely if you’re afraid for your career or your job. That Cold War straightjacket strengthened a hierarchical culture that evolved into something very different from the egalitarianism in COSATU or Salvadoran unions. In the process we forgot the Wobblies’ idea that we’re all leaders, equals among equals. Meanwhile, unions accumulated property, treasuries and political debts—and an interest in defending them, making institutional needs paramount.

Fletcher and Gapasin spend a great deal of the book analyzing the various efforts to change labor’s direction following John Sweeney’s election as AFL-CIO president in 1995. One important reason for the halting and incomplete nature of these changes, they conclude, was labor’s failure to come to grips with what had come before. Labor needed then—and still needs today—its own truth commission to publicly discuss the consequences of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.

Radical ideas, and the language to describe them, continue to be illegitimate because their suppression has been unacknowledged. After 1995, the prevailing attitude in national leadership was, “We don’t need to rehash the past. Let’s concentrate on where we’re going now.” It’s difficult, however, to determine that new direction if you can’t talk about where the old one was headed and what was wrong with it. Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in labor’s attitude toward U.S. foreign policy. In Colombia, the barriers to solidarity with its leftwing union federation came down, and unions like the Steel Workers became bastions of support for its embattled unionists. Yet next door in Venezuela, U.S. labor supported coup plotters against the radical regime of Hugo Chavez. Under pressure from U.S. Labor Against the War, the AFL-CIO publicly rejected U.S. military intervention in Iraq—yet the Democratic Party’s support for war in Afghanistan and for Israel’s attack on Gaza are greeted with silence.

Change is always uneven and incomplete, but the change process in U.S. labor has virtually stopped, leaving unions increasingly caught up in internal divisions and conflict. Solidarity Divided was written before the current internal struggle between SEIU and its California healthcare local, and its intervention into battles within UNITE HERE. But these are conflicts over the basic issues raised in the book, of class partnership vs. class struggle, and the right and ability of union members to control their own organizations.

Lacking agreement on how and why the power of unions was undermined by the suppression of the left, there has been no consensus on what should replace the old Cold War philosophy. Much of Solidarity Divided, then, is devoted to a description and analysis of the different ideas about how labor should be revitalized, some good, some at best ineffective, and some awful.

Both authors write as “participant observers,” Fletcher as a former highly-placed staff member at SEIU, then education director at the AFL-CIO and special assistant to Sweeney; and Gapasin as a local union leader, labor council head, and labor and ethnic studies professor at UCLA. They were there for many of the arguments and movements they describe, and they outline some of the most important efforts to get the union movement to change direction.

They pay particular attention to the “organizing model,” which was developed in opposition to business unionism, the prevailing union construct in which members pay dues and receive union services in exchange, as though a union were an insurance program rather than an organization built to fight the boss. But as the book notes, “reformers began to worship member mobilization and activism, certainly a component of a vibrant trade unionism, without much discussion of who should do the mobilizing, what the objectives should be, and what methods were appropriate.”

An even bigger problem with the organizing model is its lack of interest in educating workers about the nature of the society they live in. Such an understanding—that is, greater class consciousness—can lead to ideas for alternatives, either through radical reforms or even its replacement. This kind of education is part of the normal life of unions in South Africa and El Salvador, but it requires an investment of time and a real interest in how workers think.

In the U.S., however, the mobilizing model has produced unions that are directed by full-time paid staff, with workers playing a subordinate role. At worst, workers become almost irrelevant in a numbers game in which the size of the union is what counts, rather than creating an organization they can learn to use to challenge the employer.

Fletcher and Gapasin call for a new kind of unionism. “The current framework of U.S. trade unionism is so fundamentally flawed,” they write, “that a new framework is needed. With that new framework will inevitably come new organizational structures, but forging new structures without defining the moment and defining the framework would simply create new problems.” Arguing that the kind of structural proposals that led eventually to setting up the Change to Win federation are meaningless without a change in political direction, they call for discarding the body of ideas that guides unions today. They condemn the effort to reduce every problem to a question of pragmatic organizing tactics, while essentially seeking a strategic partnership with corporations and the government.

“We call this new unionism social justice solidarity,” Fletcher and Gapasin explain, contrasting it with “pragmatic solidarity,” which sees alliances only in terms of what they can offer to help unions win immediate battles. Using as examples the anti-apartheid movement, the solidarity movement with Central America, and even the broad opposition to WalMart, they declare that “social justice solidarity begins with an important assumption—that unions are workers’ organizations engaged in class struggle (whether they like it or not) rather than corporations.”

That may sound unsatisfyingly vague, but it’s unfair to expect the authors to come up with quick solutions to deeply-rooted problems many years in the making. And absent the kind of discussion they urge, any suggestions for a new direction are going to sound general. Their most important contribution is to pose the questions. The labor movement is full of intelligent activists, most with a deep loyalty to their class and a real commitment to social change. Any change in direction depends on their willingness to call for a much deeper discussion that can look for answers.

As Fletcher and Gapasin state in conclusion, “the U.S. union movement must become part of a new labor movement. To do so, unions must move left; they have no alternative.”

Solidarity Divided is a critical contribution to that effort.

David Bacon, a member of the California Media Guild, is an author, freelance labor writer and photographer and former union organizer.

Brian O'Neill

Topics in the book include hanging tough at the table; new tactics on grievances; aiding and mobilizing members on layoff; confronting financial strains; effective communications for a new day; where we are and how we got here. Published by Union Communication Services, Inc. (UCS); www.unionist.com

The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century, by Guild member Brian O’Neill, a columnist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A series of essays on O’Neill’s adopted hometown, the book’s original working title was “I love Pittsburgh like a brother—and my brother drives me nuts.” For more information, go to www.parisofappalachia.com.

Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by former CWA organizer—and frequent book reviewer for the Guild Reporter—Steve Early. A good complement for Solidarity Divided, by a long-time labor journalist, lawyer and activist with a keen ear for false notes and a rigorous analytical sense, Embedded describes how union members have organized successfully in the face of employer opposition. From Monthly Review, at www.monthlyreview.org.

Coming next issue: a review of David Bacon’s Illegal People, now out in paperback.