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Champion of American Labor?

Too often Social Democrats are consumed by their grudges. Getting through the biographies they write about their heroes can be a tedious chore. Worse, the subjects of these biographies are poorly served by books that devote more attention to attacking enemies than defending their subjects’ virtues. Arch Puddington’s biography of Lane Kirkland is an egregious offender.

Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO following George Meany’s retirement in 1979 until he was pushed out of office in the mid-1990’s, presided over an enormously difficult period for American labor. The decline in union density was accelerated by open hostility from the Reagan-Bush administration and a cottage industry of aggressive union-busting consultants, while corporate globalization shipped millions of unionized American jobs overseas. Kirkland’s reputation is as something of a Nero-type character who fiddled with anti-Communist foreign policy while Rome burned.

That is certainly an unfair over-generalization, but “Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor” does its subject no favors by devoting several large chapters – almost half the book – to championing Kirkland’s Cold War diplomacy, while tacking on a few dozen pages at the end to document Kirkland’s trade union achievements. Otherwise, Puddington’s book is about settling scores, but even here there is little useful scholarship. Names are invoked as a short-hand. Bella Abzug, without explanation is singled out as an example of hated “New Left” style politics, while Henry “Scoop” Jackson is similarly name-checked as the Great White Hope of the New Deal coalition.

Kirkland is deserving of a critical re-evaluation from a serious biographer, particularly in light of the fracture of the AFL-CIO during the Sweeney-era. It is literally true, as Puddington briefly notes, that the AFL-CIO was never more united, or could claim a larger number of members, than on the tenth anniversary of Lane Kirkland’s tenure as AFL-CIO President, thanks to his assiduous courtship of the unions that left the fold during the Meany years. It is ironic that the large unions that Kirkland wooed back into the House of Labor – the Teamsters, Auto Workers and Miners – played pivotal roles in the effort to oust Kirkland from office a few short years later. Unfortunately for the reader, Puddington shares no insight into the breakdown of support that Kirkland suffered amongst these unions.

To his credit, Kirkland was an early and insightful critic of NAFTA trade policies, and could voice an opposition that was internationalist in orientation. And, contrary to the popular image of him, Kirkland did take modest steps to tun the tide of labor’s declining fortunes. Readers (including myself) may be startled by the reminder than Kirkland started the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute which has trained a generation of organizers.

Future labor scholars would be better served by a new Kirkland biography that pays more attention to these chapters of his life, as well as conducting a more critical evaluation his aggressive involvement in foreign policy. A key question to be explored is the influence of Kirkland’s career path on his executive decision-making. Kirkland was the first president of a labor federation to not only not rise from the rank-and-file or elected office, but to have never been employed as an organizer or Business Agent. Having never cut his teeth on the core functions of a labor union, could that have influenced Kirkland to focus energy and resources on foreign policy work that most union leaders would skip? Could it have deprived him of the political calculus to know when you’re losing the support of your board?

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It’s Hard To Find a Soft Cadre

In Michael Harrington’s remarkable deathbed autobiography, “The Long-Distance Runner,” he describes attempting to pick up the pieces of the shattered Socialist Party and a movement split between “Old” and “New” Lefts. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that he formed from his old wing of the party and the diaspora of unaffiliated socialists in the labor and feminist movements was structurally a “mass” organization (albeit, one with few illusions of attracting the masses to it) with a soft cadre at its center.

This terminology, Harrington notes, would be foreign to all but the .0001% of Americans who have spent any time in the organized sects of the left. A cadre are the people who give some internal coherence to an organization. The people who write and photocopy fliers, raise funds, sweep floors, attend meetings and caucus for votes, and so on and so forth. In a Leninist model, this cadre operates with a fairly tight discipline and a democratic centralist decision-making process. Translated to what my 14-year-old cousin would call “normal talk,” that means that the group has an internal debate, following which all members “toe the party line” and carry out the decision of the majority. It also means that no one can join the organization who is not vouched for by a member of the cadre. (Although we don’t use these terms in the context, political campaigns and union organizing campaigns follow similar principles.)

Harrington graduated from an arcane milieu of “anti-Communist, Leninist democratic sects.” Although DSOC (later, Democratic Socialists of America) took all comers, there was a soft cadre at its center – prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, as well as more anonymous volunteers – who nudged the broader organization towards its ecumenical bridge-building envisioned at its founding. One primary challenge, Harrington noted, is that each successive generation has less of a tradition of the movement and less ability to form a coherent cadre. The problem has obviously worsened in the two decades since Harrington published “The Long-Distance Runner.”

Harrington has the decency to note that the old Socialist Party died in a three-way split. Most scholars only deal with the two most prominent factions: Harrington’s and the majority Social Democrats who drifted towards the neoconservatism of Reagan and Bush. The third faction, which kept the name of the old party, provides little of scholarly interest. It is there that I cut my teeth politically. There is probably a paper to be written about the failed experiment of the new Socialist Party in attempting to recreate the mass-based party of yore without the benefit of an intellectual cadre, and, lately, without the benefit of a culture or tradition of the movement. Instead, each successive generation (a generation here being two or three years) joins the party cold after reading some inspiring speech of the long-dead Eugene Debs, and proceeds to engage in pointless faction fights over bureaucratic details (what is to be the name of the magazine, whom shall appoint the members of the International Commission) that are divorced from the actual politics of society.

We do need a socialist party, but first we need to rebuild the cadre for democratic socialism. The first step must be some kind of think tank, which can limit its membership to only the most serious and comradely of comrades, and pt out useful material (studies, statements, blogs, etc) that could find an audience in the greater number of Americans who consider themselves socialists but do not belong to any explicitly socialist organization. With a cohesive cadre and a modest audience, then, and only then, can we consider forming a new socialist formation that is open to any who would join it.

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Standing Up, Sitting Down

It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America’s battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss of over a hundred thousand members and the union’s relegation to the sidelines of the labor movement. The UE that survived those terrible fights of the 40’s and 50’s remained a leaner, meaner fighting machine; a union that prized democratic rank-and-file control, labor education, the long haul struggle and the value of a symbolic fight.

The tactic of the sit-down strike was expelled from the labor movement long before the Communists who perfected it. The great wave of sit-down strikes that formed the United Autoworkers, United Steelworkers and other mass production industrial unions of the CIO-era were contemporaneous with the legal fight over the constitutionality of a new law that enshrined labor’s legal right to organize. Many employers, declaring that the National Labor Relations Act overreached Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce, simply decided to ignore the law and continue to fire union activists in spite of government orders to recognize and negotiate with the duly-authorized unions they chose to represent them. The workers compelled the employers to recognize them and the unions they formed by taking control of the factories until the employers relented and began negotiating for good contracts.

The Supreme Court, in some respects, merely recognized the fact of this de-facto truce when they declared the NLRA constitutional in 1938, and ordered the reinstatement of all terminated union activists. However, the court attempted a balancing act by declaring that employees terminated for engaging in illegal activities in the course of their union activity were not entitled to reinstatement. Sit-downers – trespassers and thieves, all – could thus be fired for engaging in such a strike. Having won the legal right of a union recognition process in the NLRA, therefore, most unions abandoned the sit-down strike tactic and reached a tacit understanding with management that most employers respected until they resumed open warfare with the labor movement in the late 1970’s.

While management has spent the past thirty years firing union activists and shuttering factory gates as legitimate labor relations strategies, most unions have continued to respect the earlier understanding with management, to follow the rules of the National Labor Relations Act and to get their asses kicked. The UE has changed that, but, really, what did they have to lose?

What did they have to gain, you might be asking? Well, first of all, federal law requires a company to provide at least 60 days advance notice to its workers before closing a factory. Republic Windows only provided three. Fifty-seven days’ pay is not chump change when you’re facing unemployment. The UE’s contract with Republic further called for severance of a certain number of days paid for each year of service, which would provide a badly needed cushion to those workers at a time like this. And, finally, there’s the possibility that the layoffs and factory closing may not be necessary at all, that Republic may be preparing to open a new (non-union) factory, with new (non-union) employees a few states away.

By sit-downing in the factory the union has made it impossible for Republic to sell it. Would you buy a building that was infested with 200 angry union members? By focusing their wrath and the media glare on Bank of America, the bailed-out bank that initially refused Republic Windows the loan that would have kept it afloat, the union has harnessed the public rage over a $700 billion Congressional bail-out that has protected the interests of the rich investors who created this recession while screwing the rest of us. Desperate people who might otherwise have been portrayed as greedy union members are instead valorized as aggrieved community members.

Win or lose, the United Electrical Workers have provided a shining example of the potential of resistance to cut-backs in these lean times. I hope that my own union, which is formulating a public campaign to resist disinvestment in public spending, can galvanize the public with the fights we pick and the way we fight them.

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Belle and the Beeb

With the departure of Isobel Campbell and a turn towards straight-forward power pop, Belle and Sebstian morphed into a new band earlier in the decade. This was not a totally unwelcome development, as the genre is desperately in need of a savior and the band’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” and “The Life Pursuit” were two of the best releases in recent years. And, yet, we lost a delightfully idiosyncratic voice in the old B&S. Matador Records reminds of of what was lost in their recent releases of Belle’s sloppy seconds (to paint a vulgar picture).

2006’s sprawling collection of odds and sods, “Push Barman To Open Old Wounds,” consisted of more highlights than some of the band’s official LPs and paved the way for their new collection of BBC sessions. Most bands take advantage of the Beeb’s generous compensation package to pad their numbers and add back-up session players. Belle and Sebastian, already known for the expansive sound of their rock-n-roll chamber music choose an oddly pared down sound on these tracks, as if to prove they could take their music out of the studio and on the road. The collection includes four songs from 2001 that mark the transition from their earlier twee period to the later power pop years. Alas, they are no great revelation.

“The BBC Sessions” comes packaged as a two-disc set, although a sticker on the cover warns that the second disc, a live Belfast concert recording from 2001, is a “limited edition.” In front of a live audience, the band seems to come alive in ways John Peel could only dream of. You’d feel pretty good too if you could get a stadium of fans to sing along about “a girl next door who’s famous for showing her chest.” Covers include the Beatles, Velvet Underground and local heroes Thin Lizzy, whose “The Boys Are Back In Town” is a clear highlight, but in Belfast that’s a bit like singing the “Star Spangled Banner” and being surprised that people stand and remove their caps.