“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”

The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.

I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.

Instead, since I’m trying to make my bones as an historian, this pull quote from George Meany–a very commonly cited one–caught my interest:

Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized? . . . Frankly, I used to worry about the membership, about the size of the membership. But quite a few years ago, I just stopped worrying about it, because to me, it doesn’t make any difference.

Along with Kamper’s interpretation:

I kept coming across that quote, and the more I looked at it the more I was sure that it was a misquote or taken out of context or he was joking or that there was some kind of mitigating factor, because surely, the titular leader of the American labor movement couldn’t have thought that, right? I ended up spending a few hours at the Minneapolis Public Library, where I pulled the microfilm of that interview in US News and World Report.

It wasn’t a misquote. It wasn’t taken out of context. It really was the President of the AFL-CIO saying he didn’t care about organizing members. Oh. My. God.

I think Kamper’s take on Meany, in this instance, lacks context. Unions were organizing. Lane Windham’s Knocking on Labor’s Door effectively validates the labor movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s for doing the work that we half-century-later armchair quarterbacks accuse Meany et. al. of abandoning. It’s just that union organizing drives–among southern workers, women and workers of color– crashed against an epic union-busting drive that we could only recognize with decades of hindsight.

Meany’s quote is a case of sour grapes, as unions began to lose more NLRB elections. Of course, the reason is that employers began to stretch the bounds of the law before realizing they could break it with impunity. Meany, who came of age in a time where people chose to be in a union and fought for it found it galling that workers would vote against a union.

And since unions were still delivering decent contracts for their members, he said “fie on them” to workers who would vote against unionization. But unions never stopped organizing. Meany’s words had no chilling effect. Unions just continued to organize and get clobbered until some got more strategic about campaign planning and targeting in the mid-1980’s, culminating in the Sweeney-era “organize or die” push.

I was struck by a question that Alex Press asked at a recent CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies event (in particular, this was a panel on HERE Local 11’s 1990’s organizing revival). The gist of it was, “how much of ‘new’ organizing is really new?”

As I shake off my sense of imposter syndrome as a “labor historian,” this is a question that I am exploring.

There is a continuity of organizing strategies and tactics in the labor movement, going back over a century. But there were definitely periods of transition. At the start of the 20th century, being a union organizer was dangerous; you could get beaten, run out of town or even killed. The most skilled were basically entertainers. Before radio and TV, union rallies were events. An organizer who would entertain and educate helped gain new recruits and activists. But they also made themselves a target for the bosses by being so publicly identified. William Z. Foster changed the game with the Chicago Stockyards campaign in 1916.

Reading Barrett’s and Johanningsmeier’s bios of him, I recognize some of my own work as an organizer. Secret meetings. Make a plan, give out assignments, assess your support. Revise the plan. Stick to the plan. Build towards a strike.

Union organizing went through another sea change when the government got involved and made rules; when there became card checks and elections to determine union support and certify and mandate union recognition and contract negotiations. All of the 1940’s, basically.

A major thread of my forthcoming history of NYC’s hotel workers unions, We Always Had a Union, is the evolution of this union from IWW & W.Z. Foster-style organizing to figuring out an organizing strategy that was not far from what Vinny Sirabella “learned.”

Union organizing evolved again through the 60’s and 70’s. Unions were responding to the hostile environment in the private sector and the make-the-rules-up-as-you-go-along early public sector. Here’s where I find Meany hilarious. He didn’t get it, and it made him mad. He hated the United Federation of Teachers’ drive for union recognition. I expect for this to be a centerpiece of a chapter of my next book, a history of the NYC labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. That the organizers were moving ahead with an election when a tiny minority of the bargaining unit were dues-paying members struck him as dangerous lunacy.

“How many members you got?,” AFT organizer Dave Selden remembers the AFL-CIO chief querying, on the eve of a strike threat in 1960. “Five thousand,” Selden lies. “How many teachers are there?” the old Bronx plumber demands. “Forty thousand,” Selden again lies (There were probably more than 45,000).

“They won’t pay dues to you, but they’ll strike for you. Is that it?” Meany thunders. Meany turns to the president of the NYC Central Labor Council, a natural leader who backed almost any union that got into a jam, the legendary Harry Van Arsdale Jr. “For Christ’s sake, Harry. Can’t someone blow the whistle on these guys?”

Of course, around this same time, even private sector union organizers began to promise, “You won’t pay any dues until we get a contract,” in order to recruit supporters in such a hostile environment.

The next big shift is that one that more of us are familiar with: the late 80’s, comprehensive campaigns, strategic research, Kate Bronfenbrenner’s research, etc. Pretty well-trod ground, in terms of historiography. We’re definitely in a new shift in union organizing strategies now. What does it mean? Beats me. Ask Eric Blanc. I’m going to focus on slightly older history for a little bit.