Late Night Labor Wars
Thank goodness for the Hollywood unions for providing a little basic trade union education for the American public. It’s been so rare to see aggressive, proactive union activity that most people clearly don’t understand how this stuff is supposed to work. The fact that most late-night talk show hosts are crossing picket lines to return to the air without their writers, while David Letterman gets to go back with his writers and their union’s blessing is inexplicably confusing to some. Apparently even some producers don’t understand. One anonymous weasel (presumably from NBC) whined, “Regardless of who technically owns what, they are now intentionally putting us at a competitive disadvantage.” That’s how this works, sweetheart. If the striking Writers Guild was affecting everyone’s business equally, how would that compel the producers to settle?
I’ve written about “me-too” agreements before. These are contracts wherein an employer agrees in advance to the terms of an industrywide agreement and buys its way out of a labor dispute. Whatever the other guys agree to, we’ll do the same. Just please don’t strike us. That is precisely the kind of contract that Letterman’s Worldwide Pants company, independently of the major networks, has signed with the Writers Guild. The other late night guys whine that Letterman’s getting off on a technicality (Letterman negotiated to own his own show when he moved to CBS, while Leno pushed Letterman out of the way to take over Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” on NBC’s penurious terms). Do not let them obscure the fact that they planned to put Letterman at a competitive disadvantage by crossing the picket lines to return to the air, while Letterman held out for his writers.
And why? Jay Leno is retiring in a few years, and could have stood his ground, except I suspect that he secretly hates unions. Carson Daly, who enthusiastically went back on the air first, is the kind of unprincipled, talentless careerist who cynically calculated that by being the only host presenting new programs that people might finally watch his dreck. And Conan O’Brien, I can only assume, was worried that NBC might take the promised “Tonight Show” away from him if he stayed out with his writers.
If all of the late night programs had stayed in reruns, they would have maintained their audience share. Yes, I’m sure there are less viewers overall for reruns, but the proportion of viewers would remain the same, so that all of the shows would lose revenue equally, and thus, in a way, not really lose out at all. But now David Letterman gets to go back with fresh, scripted material and access to all of Hollywood’s stars, while Leno, who is painfully unfunny even with his team of writers, has to vamp and ad-lib for an hour each night with only the help of his own wit and whatever college professor or book author he can scrounge up. If it does place not only Leno and Conan, but all of NBC at a competitive disadvantage, then it places pressure on the NBC-Universal corporate ownership structure to settle the damn contract. Which is exactly the trade union purpose of a “me too” agreement.
Is It Treason to Strike Against the Government?
Is it treasonous to go on strike against your employer? Most reasonable people would say no. But, given the opportunity, most Bosses would make it illegal for their employees to strike for better wages and conditions. The government, as employer of many thousands of public sector employees, is the only employer that has the ability to outlaw strikes by its employees. Al Shanker, who led New York City’s school teachers on a number of strikes between the early 1960s and the late 1970s, grumbled that the illegality of strikes and the steep fines and penalties incurred by city unions that strike anyway were a holdover from monarchistic thinking, and that there isn’t even the slimmest pretext of arguing for public safety or welfare in making them illegal. Shanker would point out that teachers at private schools would face no penalty if they chose to strike, even though such a strike would create the same kind of disruptions for parents as a public school strike.
Shanker’s point should be made again in the case of the Transport Workers Union, who are in court trying to get their dues checkoff reinstated, after it was canceled as a part of the hefty fines and penalties that were levied against the union after its 2005 strike. Even though the MTA, the technical employer of New York’s bus and subway workers, supports the union’s efforts to return to regular operations (apparently, the union’s inability to handle a backlog of grievances is harming the Authority’s ability to run the system), the Bloomberg administration is opposing it, demanding that union leaders “once and for all time declare unequivocally that they may not, and will not, ever again engage in a strike.”
What gall! TWU was actually the first union to be recognized and sign a contract with the city of New York. That’s because the union was first organized in the 1930’s when the city’s bus and subway lines were owned and operated by private corporations. The union struck for and won greater wages and benefits back then, and the strikes were 100% legal. The New York City Transit Authority took over in the 1950’s, and the transit workers became public sector employees and lost their “right” to strike. Same workers, same job, same union, same contract. First legal, then illegal, but not because the idea of a transit strike became “unsafe” or more of a disruption, but simply because the new Boss had the ability to set the laws that made the strike illegal. Good for TWU President Roger Toussaint for refusing to submit to Mayor Bloomberg’s monarchistic thinking.
Labor’s Cold Warriors: Meany, Dubinsky and Shanker
I’d prefer a better term for it, but I think of myself and my peers as being a part of the “Sweeney Generation” of the labor movement. We’re the kids who were recruited to beleaguered labor unions to organize greater numbers of workers as part of a grand movement for social justice (That was the idea, at least). It is hard to believe that if I had come of age thirty years earlier, I’d likely have viewed the AFL-CIO as the AFL-CIA – a pale, male and stale dinosaur that was to the right of most presidents of the U.S.A. in prosecuting the Cold War. Thanks to some inherited books, and Richard Kahlenberg’s new biography of Al Shanker, I’ve recently subjected myself to a history lesson on some of labor’s biggest Cold Warriors.
As head of the AFL-CIO from the time of the merger in 1955 until 1979, George Meany earned the enmity of the left as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the official labor movement: a cigar-chomping bureaucrat who planned Executive Committee meetings around golf games at Miami Beach, a sexist, homophobic coward who enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War but had to be dragged into the civil rights movement. Archie Robinson’s “George Meany and His Times” is a hagiography that might as well be a ghost-written memoir, fleshed out as it is with extensive quotes from public speeches and hundreds of hours of interviews that Robinson conducted with Meany. It is, as Robinson promises, “the real Meany,” so if the man comes off as repugnant as his negative reputation on the left, it’s his own fault, his own words. Take, for instance, Meany’s account of the 1972 Democratic national convention, the most liberal convention the party ever had:
“We listened to the gay lib people – you know, the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and legalize marriages between girls and girls…We heard from the abortionists and we heard from the people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odors of johns about them.”
Meany was a business unionist through and through. To him, it never seemed more than a job. On his first job as a Plumber’s union staffer: “there was a financial attraction there because the business agent’s pay was maybe twenty percent higher than a journeyman’s pay, and it was a year-round job.” On becoming President of the NYS AFL: “It was very tiring and all that, but, hell, I was a really young man and had no idea of going any other place. After one year in the job, they doubled my salary.” On being elected Secretary-Treasurer of the national AFL: “I was not looking for a change, but I got to thinking it over: After all, this is what I am doing. I am in the labor movement. This is my life, more or less, and this is definitely a big promotion.” On succeeding William Green as president: “I had been pretty much in charge of running the AFL from 1947 on. Green was perfectly content to let me handle it. So, when he died I felt that I was entitled to the job.”
Meany did not report any great revelation that caused him to oppose Communism. It was simply a matter of seeing that Communists were effective organizers and seemed determined to take over trade unions that made young Meany an anti-communist out of a sense of self-preservation for his well-paying jobs. In later years, he gave his anti-communism the intellectual veneer of preserving freedom, noting that Communist regimes turned independent trade unions into puppets of the state – a charge that is mostly true but which seems like a rationalization that he borrowed from others in order to cover for his own lack of ideological convictions.
David Dubinsky, at least, had an ideology, a core set of beliefs that guided his actions. Dubinsky’s autobiography, “A Life With Labor,” contains some welcome insight into how CP-front Trade Union Education League activists operated inside and outside of the ILGWU, and even provides space for “the other side,” in the form of Charles Zimmerman, an ILG Vice President who had started out as an opponent of Dubinsky’s in the 1920’s. Zimmerman describes the discomfort of following CP policy, as dictated from Moscow, which led party activists to embark on a dangerous strike policy that nearly decimated the union so that one Party faction could score points over another, and how Stalin and Bill Foster led Communists into the ILGWU to “bore from within” and then back out to form a “revolutionary” dual union and back inside the ILGWU again in the space of a few short years at the expense of a good deal of credibility and goodwill.
Dubinsky came out of the heavily-Jewish socialist movement on the Lower East Side that had as its pillars the Socialist Party, Jewish Daily Forward newspaper and the Amalgamated Clothing and the Ladies Garment Workers unions. For him, the battle with the Communists was ideological and stemmed from the very split of the CP from the Sp in 1919, over whether to follow directions from Moscow. Dubinsky’s anti-communism made him an inveterate splitter. After taking the ILGWU out of the AFL to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Dubinsky’s was the first union to split from the CIO, partly over the role of Communist organizers, and back into the AFL after CIO resources helped him rebuild his union. In New York State, he split from our splendid American Labor Party because he felt Communists had too much influence. The ALP was a “fusion” party, created to provide a second ballot line for liberal Democrats (indeed, the party was created in order to entice all those Lower East Side Socialists to vote for Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936, without having to cast ballots for Tammany Hall’s Democratic line), but the party also ran a good number of leftist independents – Socialists, Laborites and a few Communists – who won offices ranging from City Council to US Congress. The Liberal Party that Dubinsky created and which replaced the ALP became much more narrowly a Democratic pressure group, and steadily moved to the right along with the Democrats over the ensuing decades. In the end, after Dubinsky died, it became the power base for Rudy Giuliani.
Nobody carried the ideological load of anti-communism as defense of freedom as much as Al Shanker, who is given a glowing portrait in Richard Kahlenberg’s “Tough Liberal.” it is an excellent biography that is marred by Kahlenberg’s clumsy title refrain and enthusiastic party-line reporting on an obscure sect of the socialist movement, called Social Democrats USA, who influenced much of Shanker’s thinking (and who comprised much of his staff). SDUSA started out as the old Socialist Party of America, until, after a series of splits, “it finally got down to this small group that sort of agreed with each other,” in the words of Sandra Feldman. What they agreed with each other about was that it was more important to be against communism than to be for socialism.
Shanker is the father of teachers unionism, organizing the United Federation of Teachers union in New York City and leading the union to strike for collective bargaining rights and higher salaries in the early 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, he led the union on a series of divisive strikes against community control of schools, when a black-led community group took control of the public schools in the ghetto neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn. The strike left Shanker with a lasting reputation as a racist and as a man who, in Woody Allen’s satirical estimation, would use a tactical nuclear warhead in a contract negotiation. Kahlenberg successfully rehabilitates Shanker’s role in the dispute, documenting the community control group’s hard-line refusal to compromise and the simmering anti-Semitism of the group that fired and barred white, Jewish teachers from working in schools where the majority of students were black. Kahlenberg does a slight disservice in this account by not seeking to represent “the other side,” but otherwise makes a persuasive case that Shanker did the best that he could for his members under difficult circumstances, and that failure to protect unionized teachers from racially motivated terminations would have fundamentally weakened the movement towards teachers union organizing.
Kahlenberg points to Shanker’s example and finds a model for “tough liberalism” the Democratic party to emulate in order to recapture the votes of the white working class. Kahlenberg (and Shanker) emphasize a central focus on economic and class issues, and have no quarrel from me on that score. Furthermore, the author points to Shanker’s role in the education reform movement and finds in professionalism, shared governance and white collar unionism a prescription for a revitalized labor movement, and again I find room for agreement. However, when Kahlenberg lauds Shanker’s color blind emphasis on civil rights and promotion, he misses the special role of racism in this country that has reduced black Americans to a caste, a role that requires affirmative action to address. And, finally, when Kahlenberg praises Shanker’s “muscular anti-Commmunism” and calls for the left to return to a vigorous internationalism in moving other nation’s towards “democracy,” I see a history of imperialism and the folly of the kind of adventurism that leaves US Armed Forces stuck in quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq. Al Shanker left a proud legacy at the American Federation of Teachers. The last vestiges of anti-communism, however, are one part of the legacy that has to go.
“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.