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.
They Can’t Drive These Cars Themselves
Is the NYC cabdriver strike successful? It’s hard for me to say. The only time that I spend in Manhattan these days is a few minutes underground, switching from the Long Island Rail Road to New Jersey Transit on my way to Rutgers. The Taxi Workers Alliance, which called the strike over a city mandate that yellow cabs install credit card machines and GPS systems, claims that 80% of the city’s cab drivers stayed home. Mayor Bloomberg is pooh-poohing the extent of the job action. Strolling around Greenwich Village tonight, I saw exactly three cabs when I would normally see dozens more.
It’s easy to shake one’s head in confusion over the cause of the strike. What’s wrong with providing more consumer service, you may ask? Isn’t this fear of GPS a wee bit paranoid? Keep in mind the precarious position of most cabbies. They are not employees (and the Taxi Workers Alliance is not, in the strictly legal sense, a union). Through a bit of administrative sleight of hand, they are “independent contractors.” They pay the Boss (usually some company with enough capital to buy a fleet of cars and TLC medallions at tens of thousands each) for the privilege of “leasing” a cab. The cab companies are guaranteed their profits. The cabbies have to pay for gas and often repairs. When gas prices spike, cabbies take a pay cut. If a credit card reader breaks, the cost of repair will be tacked on by the Boss to the cabby’s “rent.” It’s a shitty, miserable existence that calls out for serious reform. In that light, the cabbie strike can be seen as a demonstration of frustration. If, indeed, 80% of the city’s cabs are off the streets for the next two days and work-a-day life in New York is upset enough to be remembered then, whatever the goals of the strike, the Mayor and TLC will give greater thought to the impact on cab drivers of their policies in the future.
More power to the cabbies, who have a pretty impressive organization, run by word of mouth and impromptu meetings at the taxi stands at the airports and train stations, and all places where cabbies gather, rest and refuel.
The strike reminds me of a story I’ve wanted to tell. Almost exactly three years ago, my dear friends and trusted co-workers at the union where we all worked formed a staff union, which was promptly busted. The whys and wherefores are not worth getting into now. These things happen. Shortly before the whole affair came to its inexorable conclusion, a few of us met (in Greenwich Village, actually) to try to figure out if there was any way we could salvage the situation. I was middle-management and excluded from the whole thing, so this had been the first time I had really spoken to two of my very good friends, Alan and Jacob, who were leaders of the staff union campaign, since the deal went down. We were joined by our beloved revolutionary sweetheart, Liz, who had actually quit the job and moved down to Washington, D.C. some months before and was in town for some reason or another.
Over sushi and Sapporo, we rehashed the series of decisions and events that brought us to the precipice of a complete staff meltdown (we still do this from time to time), and slowly a sense of fatalism fell over the whole depressing evening. Liz and I shared a cab back to Penn Station and the Long Island Rail Road. In the back seat, we commiserated over our disillusionment over how this organization, this labor union, that we loved and believed in could conduct a nasty union-busting campaign against its own employees that was so against our principles. As we talked, our cabbie held a conversation on the two-way radio. He had a thick Haitian accent and his voice was low, hushed and mellifluous – clearly intended to fade into the background and be unnoticed by his passengers. But here and there, Liz and I picked up on scattered words in between our own. “Power,” “money,” “the boss,” “the workers.” When he said, “They have all these cars but they can’t drive these cars themselves,” Liz and I looked at each other with a mix of terror and delight. We were overhearing an organizing conversation. The driver on the other end of the two-way radio conversation was getting cold feet about whatever job action they were planning, and our driver – the organizer! – was reassuring him and getting him back on the program.
“Of all the cabs we could have gotten into,” Liz grumbled. I took more pleasure in the experience and said something like, “The movement keeps rolling.” We sat in silence for the final five or six blocks and listened to our cabbie do his thing. At the MSG station entrance, we pooled our cash for the fare and a more-generous-than-usual tip. Liz handed the man his money and leaned over to say in an even, firm and warm tone, “You’re a very good organizer. Good luck.”
We got out of the cab and I said, “I’m going to write about this one day.” A sardonic smile crossed her face. “At least we got that out of it.”
Portrait of a Charming Man
It’s hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I’m not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he’s a high elder of the Mormon church, he’s just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so far as to twist the words of a leader of the hotel employees union to make the CEO of one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country sound like a good boss, well, that’s when I get mad.
The Marriott corporation runs an anti-union operation as pervasive and sophisticated as Wal-Mart’s. First-line managers are trained to call the corporation’s central union-busting office at the slightest sign of discontent. Corporate’s union busters fly in and do the usual mix of firings, captive audience and one-on-one meetings, and maybe even a slight raise in wages – all in order to keep the status quo of “on-call” employment with no job protection.
The author of the piece, Michael Rosenwald, interviewed the hotel division president of UNITE HERE, John Wilhelm, for the piece. Wilhelm presumably used the opportunity to speak at length about Marriott’s anti-union track record – such as the fact that only ten percent of its operations are unionized compared to better than 30% of Hilton and Starwoods, or the briefly-alluded-to 20 year fight to unionize San Francisco’s flagship Marriott hotel – but the author shallowly focused on the few positive things that Wilhelm could say about J.W. Marriott.
Like, for instance, his common man touch when dealing with employees on a personal basis. Okay, so the man introduces himself and engages in chit chat with the bellmen and doormen when staying at one of his hotels. Well, that’s nice…I guess. But is this only notable because most corporate suits act like total dickheads around the “hired help?” How about the doozy that in the three cities where UNITE HERE has managed to make dealing with the union a cost of doing business that Marriott “live[s] up to the terms of the contracts?” When does living up to the legally enforceable contracts you have made become laudable, or even notable? Only in the context of a company that breaks the law with impunity when resisting its workers’ rights to organize and improve the job.
The Washington Post owes readers a complete picture of Marriott’s union-busting human resources policies, or else it owes us their traditional silence on wrong-doing when praising a charming elder statesman.