Thoughts on Union Structures, Labor History And Union Member Consciousness

By Nick Unger

Introduction

“Insurgent movements are not the product of hard times; they are the product of insurgent cultures.” Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment

The generation that builds it really gets it; they were there. But what of those who come later? How do they get the word? This is not a problem unique to unions. Tribes, religions, nationalities and countries, gangs, armies and political groups, all need transmission structures, creation stories and rituals to solidify identity and make membership a cultural force.

Two rival acculturation paths: education/indoctrination and periodic upheaval. The Jesuits, the medieval guild and 19th century British education systems represent the institutional approach: “Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.”   Building trades union apprenticeship programs are perhaps the best labor example of this approach to development of a distinct identity and culture.

There has always been skepticism over the permanent viability of institutionalized acculturation. Thomas Jefferson’s call for a rebellion every 20 years echoed 175 years later by Mao’s call for periodic cultural revolutions represent a more dialectical viewpoint, seeing destruction and construction as related consciousness developing processes. Popular education methodology starts with current problems, not historical traditions. “Freedom, freedom is a hard won thing; you have to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it, and every generation has to win it again.”

Today the overwhelming majority of union members – craft, industrial and public sector — was not part of an intense, potentially consciousness raising organized struggle to form their union. Can it be said that union acculturation structures have successfully passed on to the millions of today’s union members a culture, a way to look at things, an understanding of connections, of interests, of who we are and who else is out there? I think not.

This is a very big topic. It might be easier to start ongoing conversations broken up into more focused parts. Here are three among many: 1) The role of the Wagner Act (not Taft-Hartley) in setting in motion labor’s current consciousness deficit problem; 2) A quick look at different union models for making a first impression and saying goodbye; 3) Glimpses of new possibilities to make one less forlorn.

Part 1: The structure of American unions is not well suited to developing consciousness

Harry Van Arsdale Jr. concedes defeat

They’re making too much money to stop and learn about labor. There is too much overtime.” “We can’t teach them unionism in times like these. You have to do it.”

NYC Central Labor Council President and long-time IBEW leader Harry Van Arsdale Jr. was telling me why IBEW Local Union #3 added mandatory college classes to its apprentice program in the early 1980’s. “They” were the apprentices and all Local 3 electricians. “We” was his beloved union. “You” meant open radicals like me on the faculty of the Empire State College SUNY program that would later be named after him.

Van Arsdale told the apprentices a different, more personal story about his lifelong regret about never getting to go to college. Under his leadership union electricians made more than teachers and most white-collar workers, yet Van Arsdale was like a latter-day Wizard of Oz who knew a college degree was the widely accepted societal marker of intelligence, “a brain.”

He wanted every electrician both to be an educated, productive, valuable member of society and also to be viewed as one in a way he wasn’t half a century before. So every apprentice was going to get an accredited Associates degree along with their journeyman electrician’s union card whether they liked it or not.

Eighty years after a worldwide left debate over the proposition that workers by themselves could only develop trade union consciousness, not full revolutionary class consciousness, without the intervention of outside professional radicals, the most powerful labor leader in New York felt the strongest building trades local in the country could not even transmit basic trade union consciousness to the next generation of workers without the help of outside radical professionals.

Revisiting labor history: Institutional barriers to consciousness?

Structures matter. They make some outcomes more likely and other less likely. The structure of all American unions set in place under the Wagner Act made transmitting consciousness to succeeding generations of union members much less likely. Using this single narrow lens or yardstick also calls into question the familiar labor history narrative of “reactionary craft unions, progressive industrial unions.”

Some initial thoughts to spur discussion and investigation:

  • Craft unions always had an explicit us/them understanding that allowed for the development of at least rudimentary class-consciousness. (“Them” always could and usually did include other groups, sectors, races and genders.)
  • Industrial unions by contrast appear to have assumed the “us/them” relationship was so clear for industrial workers it did not even need to be mentioned. The CIO acted as if just working at Ford or US Steel would automatically, or to use an older description, spontaneously impose an understanding of class relations.

Compare the way the AFL and CIO introduced themselves.

  • The preamble to the AFL 1886 Constitution is more radical than anything the CIO would dare to write 50 years later: “A struggle is going on in the nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between capital and labor, which must grow in intensity from year to year and work disastrous results to the toiling millions of all nations if not combined for mutual protection and benefit.”
  • The Preamble to the first CIO Constitution in 1938 does not mention capital, instead bragging on themselves “… as the most powerful and progressive labor force in America.” Then, to drive home the point, “A new freedom has been brought by the Committee for Industrial Organization to American workers and it has forged the instrumentality whereby labor will achieve and extend industrial and political democracy.” The AFL, not capital, is the likely target of this analysis, the “them” to the CIO “us.”
  • Could the difference in tone partially be explained by the 1880’s business unionists of the AFL need to speak to a relatively conscious and insurgent working class in the militant language of the day with words like “struggle” while the late 1930’s social unionists of the CIO had to show the Roosevelt Administration they, unlike the titans of industry, fully grasped the cooperative “instrumentality” demanded by the Wagner Act?

So what can make one or another form of union “progressive”?

  • Unions have to be able to respond to the attacks from capital. This is both an ideological and an organizational imperative. In the 1930’s craft unionism was objectively reactionary in that, among other sins, it did not adequately deal with the organization of capital in mass production industries. Industrial unionism was objectively progressive in that it did.
  • The CIO organizing effort also was an organic component of the much broad progressive movement of the 1930’s with its broader social goals, so the CIO was “progressive” in its associations and connections as well as its industrial orientation.
  • Post World War 2 unions, first both the old AFL and the new CIO and later the merged AFL-CIO, had a much less organic relationship to the progressive upsurges of the past half-century.
  • One example. The Women’s Emergency Brigade was both a vital contributor to the success of the sit-down strikes that built the UAW and a direct connection between autoworkers in the plant and working class families in the community. Once the UAW became a recognized powerful component of political life in Michigan, the emergency seemed over. They disbanded the Woman’s Emergency Brigade before it could be a vibrant link between labor and the emerging women’s movement.
  • The unions coming out of the Wagner Act, be they old-AFL, old-CIO or new public sector, are not well set up to be part of broad movements. “Labor peace through collective bargaining” does not steer institutionalized labor to the barricades.
  • Didn’t the institutional of unions in American political life under the Wagner Act include a level of demobilization alongside recognition? Before then unions and organizing committees were organic components of the broader working class and its movements, tendencies and political trends. By the end of World War 2 that could no longer be taken for granted.
  • The exclusive bargaining agent form and wages/hours/working conditions function of American unions set forth in the Wagner Act served to structurally isolate the organized sector of the working class from the rest of the class. This took place independent of the ideology of the union leadership at any given time. Union halls were no longer to be “Labor Temples” for the entire labor movement. Dating labor’s troubles to the passage of Taft-Hartley prevents an overdue re-evaluation of the impact of the “poison pill” aspects of the Wagner Act.
  • These were not unintended consequences. House-breaking unions was a necessary element of saving capitalism from shortsighted capitalists. Far from simply being “labor’s Magna Carta”, the Wagner Act enforced labor peace with a highly visible state hand willingly accepted by a grateful labor leadership.
  • The Wagner Act followed by World War 2 transformed craft unions as well. Institutionalization virtually eliminated the “win or die” dynamic that saw craft unions shrink to almost non-existence during the bust in all previous boom and bust cycles. After WW2 there was only one kind of unionism in America, with no substantive challenge since.
  • Management is more willing to pay union reps to administer the contract than to maintain contact with members. The grievance procedure institutionalizes this partnership for production, lubricated by dues check-off and its bastard spawn, the agency shop.
  • Protected exclusive collective bargaining agent unions, be they craft, industrial or public sector, have built-in barriers structurally isolating them from the working class movements and communities they arose from.
  • There are no such barriers isolating unions from the electoral process. The road to union electoral politics was already well paved in 1935 while the road to continued insurgency was increasingly blocked. A permanent COPE structure was a logical expression of this reality as were the transitory, even ephemeral nature of future coalition efforts.
  • The rebirth of “labor-community” coalitions accepted as a given that labor means unions, and community is somehow different than labor. Both concepts are unfortunate offspring of the Wagner Act truce with one sector of working people.
  • This is not to deny that industrial unions, especially in their pre-1980 stronger days, did in fact often fight capital, build strength in the workplace and encourage, even join with progressive movements.
  • But what did they do to develop trade union or progressive consciousness among the new generations of industrial workers? To a great degree they carried on their objectively progressive traditions without paying heed to the need for greater focus on the subjective. It was far more difficult, and therefore far more important, for unions to focus attention and resources to develop progressive culture and consciousness in the 1950’s than in the 1930’s.
  • Industrial workers after World War 2 and then public sector unions starting in the 1960’s were no longer carried by a broad societal progressive pro-labor tide like that in the 1930’s. These unions would have to develop structures, “instrumentalities”, to replace that tide. On the whole they did not.
  • Craft union apprentice programs, as Harry Van Arsdale Jr. came to recognize, proved more attuned to a guild consciousness of the value of exclusive highly skilled labor than a recognition of the battle between labor and capital or of the commonality of interest with other working people.

Next: Unions never get a second chance to make a first impression & 50 ways to leave your union.

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Nick Unger is a veteran trade unionist and labor educator who has worked with and for every kind of union. Many of these questions come from examining the efforts to save the giant Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans for a book he is working on.

Photo by Elliott Brown via flickr (CC-BY).