“The Heart Blood of the Union”

David Dubinsky was a leading light of labor in the 20th century, heading up the International Ladies Garment Workers Union from before the New Deal upsurge until well into the 1960’s. He was also an inveterate splitter and eager faction fighter. Therefore, it is of little surprise to find a passage describing his relish in fighting one of the earliest staff unions in his autobiography, “A Life With Labor.”

It comes during his chapter on “Union Firsts” (many of which were actually pioneered by Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, a few of which are even acknowledged as such), while describing a union-sponsored Training Institute that took young college graduate and trained them to be paid staff organizers, working for the ILGWU. Quoted and highlighted in relevant part:

An even greater disappointment came in the early 1960’s when some of the institute graduates became the spearhead of a movement to organize a union within our union. They called it the Federation of Union Representatives (FOUR), and they demanded recognition as collective-bargaining agent for the I.L.G. staff on wages and working conditions. To me their demand indicated that they had total misconception of the institute itself. What disturbed me was not that they had grievances they wanted to discuss. That, of course, was legitimate….

What did bother me was the idea that they in FOUR, as officers of the union, should set up a union of their own and demand recognition from me as if the union were my personal possession. It was different with our clerks and bookkeepers. They were members of a union and the I.L.G. dealt with them in the usual way through collective bargaining. But the officers and organizers of our own union were different. I felt that they, as part of the heart blood of the union, could not form a union, because I was not an employer…So when some of the youngsters who had come from the Training Institute organized FOUR and asked for a meeting, I said: “Not on their life will I meet with them representing a union. If it comes to the point where the National Labor Relations Board orders me to do it, I will resign rather than be president of a union dealing with a staff union. They are not working for me, they are working for the union. And the union is not myself. The union is membership. I’m employed as well as they are, except I have a higher title.”

What I found most disheartening in the whole demand was that these young people in whom I and the organization had placed so much hope seemed to have embraced the Jimmy Hoffa philosophy that a union is a business. This makes the top officers of the union – the president and the general executive board – like the board of directors of a quasicorporation, rendering certain paid services. And the other officers of the union – organizers and business agents – are mere employees of the corporation, like salesmen and store supervisors.

The other theory of unionism, the one on which the I.L.G. had always operated, is that a union is a crusade, a movement, a banding together of working people to defend their interests and to promote the general welfare of the community and the world in which they live…By the same token, organizers and business agents are not paid salesmen and store supervisors working for a salary or a commission, but rather missionaries out to convert the unorganized and defending the interests of the membership they represent.

I had spent time in a Tsarist jail because I was part of a struggle to free people, not because I was paid to agitate. The founders of our union had starved themselves to sickness and death, faced beatings and crippling by gangsters, and had gone to prison because they felt that this was their duty to their consciences and to their fellow workers. Never did it occur to us that, in undertaking these sacrifices, we were grasping for a “job.”

…We fought the issue through the N.L.R.B., and in the end the staff union collapsed. It was a bitter struggle, but I am glad we did not take the easy way as many other unions did, to their considerable regret. So far as our own organization was concerned, it stood solidly behind my position. By unanimous vote, the 962 delegates to the 1962 convention approved our actions in the FOUR case…

I don’t think I need to belabor the point that 1960’s America bore little resemblance to Tsarist Russia, but it is worth pointing out that while Dubinsky stressed that the young union organizers were “officers” of the union, if they came from outside the ranks of the garment factories, they could not be constitutional officers. Indeed, they could not even be voting members. They were, in fact, staff. And if they were expected to kill themselves as though they were fighting Tsarist tyranny, while following policies that they did not even have a vote on, well no wonder they started rethinking the role of union staff and formed a staff union. While I myself am somewhat agnostic on the question of whether staff unions are good for the labor movement, I am convinced that they will continue to spring up as long as labor leaders muddy the waters with “officers” who are “members” when it suits them (i.e. when it poses no risk to their authority).

As Dubinsky noted, even by the early 1960’s the contentious issue of staff unions quietly vexed most union leaders. This staff-union-busting has been the dirty secret of the union movement since at least the time that Dubinsky writes (I have a memo from a former boss that could have been ghost-written by Dubinsky). It’s a bit of a surprise to find a plank in the 1962 Socialist Party platform supporting “the right of staff members in the labor movement to organize unions of their choosing.” Many party members at the time were either union staffers or officers (legitimate officers, elected and all), so the plank could be seen as weighing in on a family affair (Dubinsky had been a member of the SP until the early 1930’s, but he remained fairly close to the organization).

For the record, FOUR didn’t go away. I’m not too clear on the history, but when the ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) to form the Union of Needletrades and Industrial Textiles Employees (UNITE), one union had a staff union – FOUR – and there was much intrigue over whether the staff union would represent all of the staff of the newly formed international union. In the end, it did. And when UNITE merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees union (HERE), the same intrigue arose. This time it spread to the various locals. Some of the local leadership took a Dubinsky stand. These things happen.