A Fighting Union Leadership Will be Built by Rank and File Activists

Not by Academics and Union Staffers.
 

UFCW local P9 Strike Hormel 1985-86 93% vote strike. UFCW national leadership replace local leaders with more compliant group

Note.

I was asked by a reader about some of the articles I had written about my views on the labor hierarchy and also some left currents within organized labor with whom I have differences with when it comes to work in the trade unions. I am republishing two of them from 2019 that are still relevant today and clearly explain my own, and some others connected to this blog,  differences with regard to trade union activism and work from currents like Labor Notes, the DSA leadership and other individuals who have the same approach, some mentioned here.  R. Mellor 5-1-21.

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
Editor, Facts For Working People
Member DSA

9-12-2019

Well I have finally found the time to read some of my Fall issue of Democratic Left, DSA’s national publication.  Naturally, as a retired rank and file union activist what interests me primarily is the DSA and our work in the organized labor movement.

Readers of this blog are familiar with the views that some of us around Facts For Working People have with regard to the Democratic Socialists of America and union work, as we have written numerous commentaries on this subject. With the rapid rise of DSA going from 6000 members to around 60,000 in such a short amount of time, it is inevitable that such growth will attract all sorts of individuals and political currents offering advice to working people about how to fight the boss. Labor experts from academia and those with former positions in the labor hierarchy will be prominent among them. I wrote in a previous commentary on this subject:

Working as part of the union bureaucracy, selected to do such work by the union bureaucracy, is not working on the shop floor. In fact it is a prerequisite to being selected for a job in the union bureaucracy by the union bureaucracy, not to have led movements on the shop floor, not to have built a fighting movement in the workplace or in the union rank and file.

In the same piece I responded briefly to a piece by Eric Blanc who I have known as a former student organizer for “Socialist Organizer” that describes itself as a “U.S. fraternal section of the Organizing Committee for the Re- constitution of the Fourth International.” Blanc is a now staff writer for Jacobin from what I can gather. In the piece in question he gave high praise to Jane McAlvey as a labor/strike strategist, She is also a writer in Jacobin.  Ms McAlvey is a former SEIU staffer, labor strategist and a Harvard graduate with a Phd and was brought in to the labor movement by the AFL-CIO hierarchy as far as I can see around the 1996 elections and the advent of SEIU’s John Sweeney.

As myself and others writing in Facts For Working People have pointed out, the leadership of DSA, with very little collective experience on the ground floor in the labor movement, has contracted out its trade union work to people like Eric Blanc and Jane McAlvey and the leadership of Labor Notes who have no real experience similar to the rank and file dues paying union members fighting the bosses in the workplace where the “rubber meets the road”. They offer all sorts of advice except how to respond to the labor hierarchy that will wage a relentless effort to crush any movement from the rank and file that threatens their positions and the relationship they have built with the employers based on labor peace. Having no alternative to capitalism, when it goes in to crisis their first (and only) strategy is to bail it out and this means suppressing militancy from below.

In Jane McAlvey’s article in the fall issue of Democratic Left, the class collaboration of the trade union leadership is barely mentioned if at all. She continues using the term union as a means of avoiding a direct conflict with the trade union hierarchy, her former employers. “As the corporate elite doubled down on union-busing through globalization, the trade union movement……”and “Unions shifted to a mobilizing approach…..” (my added emphasis). I am not saying we should never use this term but not as a means to avoid offending the architects of trade union policy which amounts to blaming the ranks equally. I shared my objection to this formulation in the piece I wrote in response to labor Notes’ Chris Brooks article on yet another defeated organizing drive at the VW plant in Chattanooga TN:

“…in this latest report Brother brooks again, when raising failed tactics and strategies, refers to the UAW as opposed to the UAW leadership. But the tactics are not developed by the UAW; they are determined by the leadership of the UAW. The only way the unions will be made into democratic fighting organizations and the unorganized will be organized, is if we look at the policies of the union leadership as distinct from what is in the interests of the union membership.”

Jane McAlvey has the same approach when she mentions the VW defeat writing that in “…. Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the United Auto Workers were out-organized in 2014 during the Volkswagen campaign…”

 

Again, the “workers” in the UAW, the rank and file of the UAW, were not “out-organized”. It was the leadership of the UAW that develop the disastrous strategy that led to three defeats at the Chattanooga plant, the UAW leadership is responsible for that defeat, not the membership.

The success of the teachers/educators struggles, which were illegal strikes and protests in right to work states and rank and file led, occurred because the established leadership was weak or not present.  While these struggles cannot be ignored by the trade union hierarchy or currents represented by Eric Blanc, Labor Notes and Jane McAlvey here, they will not place these facts front and center, they will not stress these points and build on them.

The AFL-CIO hierarchy will not do so, for the obvious reason that it threatens their positions atop organized labor and their relationship with the bosses based on similar world views----that there is no alternative to capitalism--- and these other currents, because in one way or another they are or have been part of the present hierarchy as staffers, organizers or in employed by them in some capacity. Consequently, they have no real base in the rank and file from which to challenge the leadership’s present course or replace them. The labor hierarchy is quite willing to use utilize the special skills that people from academia possess as long as the individual possessing them has no serious foothold among the ranks of organized labor.

I am used to this omission by now and to her credit I can see that Comrade McAlvey is trying to find the right road when she writes, “For those of us who want to seriously challenge the status quo, an elite theory of power isn’t going to work.”. I am in complete agreement with this statement but neither will ignoring the role of the hierarchy, or covering for it.

Comrade McAlvey writes further as part of her advice about increasing rank and file participation in strikes, the need to talk to every single person (an important point).  And then as if to stress her disconnect from working class people and the actual rank and file of the unions she adds, “We spend most of our time talking with workers who absolutely do not want to talk with us---that’s the hard and important work of organizing, engaging people who don’t want to be engaged.”

Comrade McAlvey might find it helpful to reflect on why is it when organizers like her spend so much time talking with workers apparently, they do not want to be engaged with her or others like her. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is their approach and message. Workers will engage with you if what you are saying has some real connection to their life experiences.

In another comment that reveals the disdain and arrogance that is so common among left academic types, Comrade McAlvey writes, “We need to have hard conversations with these people to help them come to understand that mass collective action is the only solution to any number of crisis in their lives.”  She adds further, “We must identify them and then test or assess whether they are indeed organic leaders.”  Does the comrade think workers don't know that our power or potential power lies in collective action, in working class unity and solidarity?

This is why she stresses organizers, socialists like her and no doubt former student leader Eric Blanc, should “…prioritize real leadership identification.” From what I can determine, this is the strategy these writers advocate that socialists and DSA should adopt in the labor movement, “experts” like Jane McAlvey, Eric Blanc and, folks at Labor Notes and others should use their expertise to select those they best determine are “organic” leaders. This approach is a disaster.

DSA: Building Roots in the Working Class is Key to Success

This way of relating to working class people and the ranks of organized labor, comes from a person who was recruited by John Sweeney and the AFl-CIO bureaucracy in 1996 after the first contested election in the AFl-CIO in the century, From there she was recruited by Andy Stern and the SEIU hierarchy.  I will stress once again, every class-conscious worker knows you do not get brought in to the labor movement through the good graces of its present leadership because you built a militant rank and file movement on the ground. Your role in these positions is to carry out and defend the concessionary pro-management policies of the bureaucracy. One doesn’t need a Phd to know that.

As far as experts selecting "organic" leaders, the movement throws up organic leaders, something we see all the time, especially when the class struggle breaks out in to the open like during strikes. Local P9’s battle against the Hormel corporation is one example and I witnessed it during the Cleveland Five’s battle with Freightliner and there are many others. But these are crushed by the trade union hierarchy and this is what Labor Notes, Jane McAlvey, Eric Blanc and others like them fail to address.

I should add one last point on this. Myself and others around Facts For Working People have been clear about our differences with the approach of Labor Notes and have numerous articles on our blog about that. However, Labor Notes has been around a long time and it is undeniable that Labor Notes has organized some very successful gatherings of rank and file workers and when I was in the leadership of my local we took advantage of some of the excellent material Labor Notes produced.

Incidentally, I would like to request from labor notes or Eric Blanc some articles or coverage from them about the vicious assault the labor hierarchy in Kentucky waged on the teachers, parents and their allies in Jefferson County and Louisville earlier this year. I pointed this out in these comments, which includes a video of the press conference the leadership of the Jefferson County Teachers Association called during which leaders from the Teamsters, SEIU and Afscme participated in a public condemning of the teachers that called in sick forcing school closures. This press conference occurred during a period when the state was harassing and threatening teachers with discipline for their actions demanding the names of the participants.