Save Our Unions
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Save Our Unions

Steve Early

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Save Our Unions

Steve Early

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About This Book

Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress bringstogether recent essays and reporting by labor journalist SteveEarly. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers,whether they’re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defendpast contract gains, or bargain with management for the firsttime. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writesabout cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizingand health care reform, and political initiatives that mightlessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroesand heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers tounion conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrationsof labor’s past and struggles to insure that unions still havea future in the 21st century. The book’s insight, analysis and advocacymake this an important contribution to the project of laborrevitalization and reform.

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PART I
REBELS WITH A CAUSE

The essays in this section have an initial focus on the historic reform movement victories that propelled rank-and-file militants and local union officers into top leadership positions in the United Mine Workers (UMW) in 1972 and the Teamsters twenty years later. I was fortunate to be a close observer of both developments and their aftermath as a national staffer of the UMW in the mid-1970s, a longtime supporter of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), and a member of Ron Carey’s Teamster headquarters “transition team” after Carey was elected International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) president with TDU support.
In the 1970s, shop floor unrest took shape under different social and economic conditions than exist today. It was a period of wildcat strikes and contract rejections votes, pioneering fights over occupational health and safety, and public discussion of worker alienation on the assembly line—“the blue collar blues.” Whether large or small, workplace struggles against recalcitrant employers and unhelpful union officials were sustained by what sociologist Rick Fantasia calls “cultures of solidarity.”1 These reflected a labor movement more muscular and self-confident at its industrial base, but already displaying signs of bureaucratic decay. Plant closings and capital flight, deregulation, and de-unionization soon laid waste to that traditional labor landscape.
The resulting decline in union density and rank-and-file militancy (a trend explored further in Part 2) has made it harder for the standard-bearers of reform to prevail over entrenched incumbents, whether at the national or local level in the Teamsters, Electrical Workers, Machinists, or UAW.2 (Staying on the right track, when and if elected to union office, remains a perennial challenge as well.) Some academics have now concluded that the larger-scale labor insurgencies of the 1970s were just a flash in the pan. In their view, the rank-and-file rebellion of that era left few lasting traces. It was merely the last hurrah of an old industrial working class whose problems were quite different from those facing low-wage earners in today’s “postmodern, global age.” Others, understandably concerned about labor’s current weakness, deem “the call to reform and democratize union governance” to be “less urgent now that the very survival of unions in any form no longer seems assured.”3
In reality, as shop floor observers like Greg Shotwell report, union structure and functioning continues to affect organizational performance. Employment conditions in restructured industries, like auto manufacturing, or deregulated ones, like trucking, are trending backwards toward those that prevailed in the pre-union era. When the difference between union and non-union shops becomes harder to distinguish, the appeal of unionization begins to dim. When members are angry, alienated, or disengaged, the internal and external organizing needed to strengthen unions is much harder, making overall labor movement survival (not to mention revival) more difficult. Even if the locus of workplace struggle today has shifted from the industrial hot spots of the 1970s to other sectors of the economy, the need for bottom-up change—through the creation of new unions or, where possible, transformation of older ones—is no less urgent.

1—WHEN UNION “OUTSIDERS” WIN

I was welcomed into the labor movement, four decades ago, while watching retired coal miners, stoop-shouldered and short of breath, trudge through a gauntlet of union goons on their way into an American Legion hall in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it became a formative experience.
Throughout the coalfields in December 1972 members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) were participating in balloting for national leaders of their union held under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The federal government was involved because the incumbent UMW president, W. A. (Tony) Boyle, had stolen the previous election in 1969. Not only was there massive vote fraud but, shortly afterward, Boyle also ordered the killing of his opponent, Jock Yablonski, who was shot by union gunmen in his home, along with his wife and daughter.
In 1972, Boyle was being challenged again, this time by a rank-and-file slate fielded by the Miners for Democracy (MFD). The MFD was a grassroots reform group created by Yablonski supporters after his death to continue the fight against corruption, violence, and dictatorship in the UMW. Like many other student radicals who have embraced the cause of labor, before and since, I was drawn to the scene of this workers’ struggle— or at least a small corner of it—by a mixture of idealism and ideology.
The MFD needed poll watchers to help ensure that, even with government oversight, there wouldn’t be a repeat of the ballot fraud that marred the 1969 vote. Inspired by Sixties notions about “participatory democracy,” I was committed to the idea embodied by the MFD—namely, that unions should be controlled by their own members. So I joined several other law students on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania’s dying anthracite coal region (where pensioners collected $30-a-month checks) so we could serve as MFD campaign volunteers.
As I tried to distribute MFD slate cards to UMW members at the Legion hall, it became obvious that the beefy entourage stumping for Tony Boyle did not appreciate my presence in Tamaqua. The Boyle men were clustering around union voters as they neared the door, reminding them of past favors, and escorting them in before they could be solicited by any meddle-some “outsiders.” During a moment of downtime from their last-minute handshaking and arm-twisting, they soon turned their full attention to me. “Doesn’t look to us like you’ve ever picked slate, have you, sonny?” one fellow snarled. “What the hell are you doing here?” another asked.
Egged on by a well-dressed UMW International rep—rumored to be part owner of a local coal mine—the hostile crowd closed in around me, pushing and shoving, grabbing for my MFD literature, and muttering darkly about “communists” who wanted to destroy the union. Just as I seemed destined for the fate of the Molly Maguires (radical miners who were lynched nearby a century earlier), a far more experienced and aggressive MFD volunteer named Ray Rogers arrived on the scene. He pushed his way into the middle of the scrum and liberated me from its clutches. (This timely intervention left me with lasting respect for Ray, whose subsequent career as a pioneering “corporate campaigner” has left its mark in many other labor arenas.)

Doing the Unthinkable

Later that same month in 1972, the UMW election ballots were counted by the Labor Department officials. Despite threats, intimidation, and red-baiting throughout the coalfields, UMW members did the unthinkable. They chose three of their own rank-and-file coal miners from West Virginia or Pennsylvania to become UMW national officers. The winners were Arnold Miller, Harry Patrick, and Mike Trbovich. Unlike the brave Yablonski, these local union activists had never served on the national union staff or executive board, but they carried the banner of union democracy and reform as best they could.
The labor establishment was deeply shocked and unsettled by their election. This kind of thing was just not done. Not a single labor organization (with the exception of the always independent United Electrical Workers) applauded Tony Boyle’s well-deserved defeat in his bid for reelection as UMW president. Even though Arnold Miller was running, at the top of the ticket, against a management-friendly incumbent—soon to be indicted for his role in the Yablonski murders—the MFD slate ousted Boyle by only 14,000 votes out of 126,700, hardly a landslide.
Then and now, contested elections in which local leaders challenge top union incumbents are few and far between. Rising through the ranks in organized labor normally requires waiting your turn, and when you capture a leadership position, holding on to it for as long as you can, regardless of the organizational consequences. For trade unionists who are ambitious and successful, upward mobility usually follows a long career track that looks something like this: shop steward, local bargaining committee or executive board member, local union officer, national union staffer, national union executive board member, and then national union officer—president, vice president, or secretary-treasurer.
Aspiring labor leaders can most easily make the transition from membership-elected positions, at the local level, to appointed national union staff jobs if they conform politically. Dissidents tend to be passed over for such vacancies or not even considered for them unless union patronage is being deployed, by those at the top, to co-opt actual or potential local critics. As appointed staffers move up, via the approved route, in the field or at union headquarters, they burnish their resumĂ©s and gain broader organizational experience “working within the system.”
If they become candidates for higher elective office later in their career, they enjoy all the advantages of de facto incumbency (by virtue of their full-time staff positions, greater access to multiple locals, and politically helpful headquarters patrons). Plus, in the absence of any one-member/one-vote election process, most seekers of union-wide office only have to compete for votes among several thousand usually docile national convention delegates. In unions that provide geographical representation on their board, candidates for regional leadership positions can even get elected, at conventions, with the support of just a few hundred local union delegates. Either way, candidates who are part of an “administration team” usually win over independents and rank-and-file slates, particularly in unions where all board members are elected “at large.”
In 1972, the Miners for Democracy (MFD) blazed a trail directly to the top, under admittedly abnormal circumstances. The UMW always permitted direct election of its president (and other top officers) but under conditions reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Syria under the Assad family. Only after passage of the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act were UMW dissidents able to challenge illegal trusteeships over local unions and entire UMW districts. They also had new legal tools to thwart the expenditure of dues money to help reelect incumbents, and they could seek DOL-supervised voting as a remedy for rigged elections. The MFD cause was much championed by the New York–based Association for Union Democracy, whose network of sympathetic lawyers has helped union members enforce their Landrum-Griffin rights for more than a half-century.4
From the vantage point of four decades later, the choice between Boyle and the MFD in 1972 should have been a no-brainer, given all that had transpired beforehand. But in the rough-and-tumble world of trade union politics, the advantages of incumbency can never be underestimated. As a grassroots organizing project, mounting an electoral challenge to any candidate backed by the national union establishment, no matter how discredited, is an uphill fight. Competitive elections—a.k.a. “this is what democracy looks like”—are far more celebrated in the breach than the observance in organized labor. Within labor’s top officialdom, there’s no announcement more pleasing to the ears than “reelected by acclamation.” Whether that’s healthy for the labor movement is another question.

Propelled by Militancy

The MFD victory and its tumultuous ten-year aftermath has been variously chronicled by former UMW lawyer Tom Geoghegan in Which Side Are You On?, labor studies professor Paul Clark in The Miners Fight for Democracy, and journalist Paul Nyden in his contribution to an edited labor history collection titled Rebel Rank and File.5 As Nyden notes, the election that thrust three rank-and-filers into unfamiliar jobs at UMW headquarters in Washington, D.C., “channeled the spontaneous militancy arising throughout the Appalachian coal fields” during the previous decade. In the 1960s, miners staged two huge wildcat work-stoppages protesting national contracts negotiated in secret by Boyle (with no membership ratification); in 1969, 45,000 UMWA members participated in a statewide political strike that accelerated passage of new federal mine safety legislation and creation of the first West Virginia program for compensation of miners disabled with black lung.
Candidates backed by the MFD, a group founded at Yablonski’s funeral in 1970, “succeeded in ousting one of the country’s most corrupt and deeply entrenched union bureaucracies” because they had key allies inside and outside the union, according to Nyden. In the coalfields, “wives and widows of disabled miners, the Black Lung Association, the wildcat strikers, and above all the young miners who were dramatically reshaping the composition of the UMWA constituted the backbone of the campaign.”6 Also aiding the MFD was a skilled and committed network of community organizers, former campus activists, journalists, coalfield researchers, and public interest lawyers, some of whom would later play controversial roles as headquarters staffers for the union.
The UMW had been run in autocratic fashion since the 1920s when John L. Lewis crushed the last major rank-and-file challenge to his leadership, organized by radical miners like John Brophy, Powers Hapgood, and Alex Howat. (Their failed campaign to oust Lewis in 1926 was waged under the banner of “Save the Union!”) When the would-be UMW saviors in the MFD took over forty-six years later, the weight of institutional history was heavy indeed. The ensuing tensions between those newly elected and the working miners who sent them to Washington can best be described now as a smaller-scale U.S. union version of the regional political turmoil that followed Arab Spring overthrows of long-reigning Middle Eastern despots.
The MFD candidates inherited formidable internal and external problems that would have been vexing for anyone in their shoes. They succeeded in the project of structural democratization and, for a time, more competent union administration. But membership expectations in the crucial area of contract negotiations and enforcement were not always met, despite a 1974 agreement with the national Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA) that provided wage increases of 37 percent over three years, a first-ever cost-of-living allowance, improvements in pensions and sick pay, strengthened safety rights, and job security protection. 7
Within the union, the conservative Boyle forces quickly regrouped and maintained their own baleful, disruptive influence. The three top MFD officers fell out among themselves, with the best and youngest of them— Secretary-Treasurer Harry Patrick—leaving the UMW after a single term of office in 1977. Arnold Miller’s weak and erratic presidency became an unmitigated disaster; in 1977–78, 160,000 miners had to battle UMW headquarters and the White House while shutting down the bituminous coal industry for 110 days. Highlights of that struggle included two contract rejections and a failed Taft-Hartley back-to-work order sought by Jimmy Carter.

A Discredited Experiment?

To this day, the MFD experience remains a Rorschach test for how one views regime change in labor, engineered from below. Some MFD veterans, who were ex-coal miners, blamed (and even red-baited) “the outsiders” for what went wrong. By the late 1970s, most of the college-educated non-miners, who were swept into influential positions by the MFD’s victory, left in frustration over the failings or political setbacks of their friends and allies. Some went on to work for other unions, most recently the Service Employees International Union.
Labor insiders, including those at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, viewed UMW turmoil as proof that “inexperienced” people should never be allowed to run a major union. On the labor left, the shortcomings of the Miller administration have always been attributed to its unwillingness to empower fully the rank and file. If only “the MFD hadn’t been disbanded” and top officials had been willing to embrace the right to strike over grievances and employed the militancy of the UMW’s wildcat strike culture, rather than clashing with it, the outcome would have been different.
Some semblance of stability and forward motion was not restored until a second-generation reformer, Rich Trumka, took over as UMW president in 1982, after defeating a former Boyle supporter who replaced Arnold Miller when he retired for health reasons in the middle of his second term. Trumka gained valuable experience as a headquarters legal staffer during Miller’s first term. He also had the street cred of working underground before and after his initial tour of full-time union duty in Washington. But even with steadier, more skilled hands at the helm and an inspiring strike victory at Pittston in 1989, the union now suffers from severe marginalization; its working membership today is less than 20,000. As former UMW General Counsel Chip Yablonski observes, not all of “its failings are self-inflicted.”
The coal industry moved west, principally to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where more coal (sub-bituminous) is produced than in all the coal states of the East and Midwest combined and nearly all of that coal is non-union. The UMW was totally unprepared to meet this sea change. Its efforts to organize miners in the West have been anemic, if not absent altogether. In the meantime, the multi-employer BCOA has fragmented, leaving the UMW with fewer and fewer companies with which to negotiate an overarching national contract. Many companies in the eastern coalfields are now operating non-union affiliates or subsidiaries
 but are impossible to organize after the givebacks in 1978 and 1981, which have not been reversed.8
In the 1970s and ’80s, high-profile challenges to the leadership of other, now declining industrial unions did not take the form of pure rank-and-file insurgencies of the MFD sort. Instead, they looked more like the campaign that Yablonski’s father courageously waged against Tony Boyle in 1969. In the United Steel Workers and Auto Workers, two dissident regional directors in the Midwest, Ed Sadlowski and Jerry Tucker, challenged their respective union establishments from the inside. Both called for reform while serving as national executive board members, after winning those positions in elections that were initially stolen. Both were forced out of top leadership positions after trying to move up or just get reelected. Tucker fell victim to tight control of convention delegate voting by the UAW “Administration Caucus,” which has ruled his Detroit-based union for six decades. With some former UMW reformers assisting him, Sadlowski ran strongly but unsuccessfully for USW president in 1977 balloting involving nearly 600,000 of the union’s then 1.4 million members.

The Teamster Reform Opportunity

A campaign like Sadlowski’s was impossible in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) when IBT leaders were chosen at national union conventions attended by a few thousand delegates and heavily influenced by organized crime. As part of the 1989 consent decree settling a controversial anti-racketeering lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, the IBT was forced to hold its first-ever membership election of officers and board members two years later.
Fortunately, the IBT was the longtime turf of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). TDU was well positioned to utilize the one-member/one-vote sy...

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