We Are the Union

Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing

Dana L. Cloud

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093418
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders.
We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.

1

Business Unionism and Rank-and-File Unionism at the Turn of the Millennium

It was the folks down at Boeing who were the ones who had to pull it off. Not anything the AFL-CIO did. If we could get them to do something besides just give real good speeches, then we’d be getting somewhere. If they want to do something with that 35 million dollars, don’t give it to the dad-gummed Democrats, so they can vote against us on bills, and give us NAFTA and give us GATT. Let’s get some money out there to the line. Then let’s actually do something. Let’s get some actual mass picketing taking place down there. Let’s stop the plant gates.

—Keith Thomas, Unionists for Democratic Change (Wichita, Kansas, 1998)

The history of labor in the United States since the latter half of the twentieth century has been, up until recently, a study in defeat. What will it take to beat back the ongoing employers’ offensive? Alongside tax cuts for the rich, real wages have stagnated, and consumer debt (totaling $2.6 trillion) is at record proportions, requiring 19 percent of the average consumer’s disposable income each month.¹ The economic crisis begun in late 2007 has sharpened the class divide, as the U.S. economy shed 2.6 million jobs in the last quarter of 2008 alone;² the official unemployment rate in the United States rose to about 10 percent by 2010.³ According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, of the approximately 45 million people in the United States without health insurance, more than a quarter are employed at large firms that are increasingly saddling their employees with the costs of health care.⁴ Meanwhile, worker productivity has grown steadily into the economic crisis that began in 2007.⁵ Workers have been working harder and harder, but for less and less in return.

Employers and politicians are quick to blame corporate overextension and layoffs on “costly” unionized workers, even though the relationship of union jobs to the economy is more complex. As Rutgers economist Paula Voos testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in March 2009 on pending Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) legislation,⁶ the capacity of unions to raise the wages and benefits of employees also serves to reduce broader income inequality, thus stimulating the economy by increasing the purchasing power of ordinary people. Still, unions are weak, while the need for them is increasingly urgent.

As labor reporter Lee Sustar explains, the combined effects of tax cuts, a foundering economy, corporate ruthlessness, and the cutthroat environment of global trade agreements have contributed largely to the weakness of unions today. However, the failure of AFL-CIO unions to bring new workers into unions (despite some lip service to organizing) and to put resources into winning strikes and supporting workplace actions must also bear some blame.⁷ Union leaders, rather than urge militancy, have formed partnerships with employers and politicians to avoid strikes. They have encouraged workers to accept concession after concession in contract negotiations. Perhaps part of the problem is that a great number of American workers do not regard their unions as having much to offer them anymore.

There was a time, however, when unions more faithfully afforded workers a great deal more control over their lives in the United States. In this chapter, I will describe two long waves of union development, the first beginning with the Knights of Labor and the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s and ending after the Great Depression and America’s entry into World War II. This early period is marked by the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a militant and democratic corrective to the exclusive craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The second long wave of union history has lasted from 1945 to the present and is marked by increasing bureaucratization and conservatism in the mainstream union movement. However, recent dissident struggles inside the mainstream unions have challenged entrenched leaders and demanded a return to a more activist role for unions.

It is not my purpose in this brief chapter to survey the entire history of the American labor movement.⁸ Here I describe the two manifestations of labor: the stagnant, recalcitrant sludge of the traditional union bureaucracy and the energetic movement that has risen out of the muck over and over again to assert the power of ordinary workers. The historical narrative I present suggests that American labor needs a new progressive push akin to the formation of the CIO in the 1930s if we are to see ordinary workers make real gains against the current employers’ offensive.

The chapter is organized as follows: First, I chronicle the two waves of the American union movement, telling the story of the rise of democratic unionism with the CIO and its subsequent decline in the postwar years. Then the chapter provides some examples from the 1990s and 2000s of instances in which conservative unions led workers to defeats, primarily because of the failure to prioritize rank-and-file action in favor of more administrative, legalistic, and consumer-oriented strategies. These examples include the defeat of paper workers at the Jay, Maine, paper plant in 1987, at Hormel in 1985–1986, and at A. E. Staley in 1994–1995. In contrast, the Boeing victory in 1995, the Teamsters’ victory at UPS in 1997, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) victory against automakers in 1998 show that democratic unionism can once again demand and win real gains for workers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the changing situation of labor today. My overall argument is that the story of the rise of the CIO provides an inspiring model of the birth of a fighting labor movement out of a period of fragmentation, exclusivity, and weakness in existing labor institutions. I mean to suggest that present conditions of economic crisis and the stirrings of a new militancy are ripe for a similar transformation.

From the Knights of Labor to the CIO

Although strikes are a fact of life whenever some people toil on behalf of others, the story of labor organizing and action in the United States begins in earnest after “wage slavery” replaced chattel slavery in the South and industrialization accelerated across the country. Spurred by industrialization and its attendant growing class polarization, workers on railroads and in factories began to recognize their collective interests and their collective power. Reeling from four years of economic depression, railroad workers across the nation struck in 1877 for higher wages in what has come to be known as the Great Upheaval. Although state and federal forces crushed these workers, their insurrection marks the beginning of large-scale industrial unrest in America. In 1886, railroad workers moved again. Led by the Knights of Labor (and the reluctant Terence Powderly), founded in 1869, the workers struck Jay Gould’s Southwest system and brought Gould to the bargaining table. Sharon Smith argues that the Knights fell apart after this victory, however, “because the power of American capital placed unendurable stress on the fragile movement, and because of the creation of an AFL eager to take labor in a narrower direction.”⁹

Nearly 500,000 U.S. workers struck in 1886 against nearly 10,000 employers in more than 1,400 separate actions. The strike wave culminated on May Day, 1886, in near-general strikes for the eight-hour workday in major cities across the United States. In Chicago during this struggle, the Haymarket bombing and subsequent unrest led to a wave of reaction against the movement. Even so, many thousands of workers won their demand for a shorter workday, and May 1 became an international workers’ holiday.

From the defeated Pullman strike of 1894 to the strike wave of 1919 among miners, dockworkers, railway workers, ironworkers and steelworkers, and many others, workers built organizations and learned lessons of strategy that would take them into the next decades. Not all of those lessons were happy for the workers. As David Montgomery argues in his classic history The Fall of the House of Labor, the period between 1865 and 1925 witnessed the rise of class-consciousness and worker militancy out of diverse groups and situations.¹⁰ Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management methods took hold concurrently with efforts of municipal, clerical, employer, and political organizations (including the Socialist Party) to institute labor peace through managerial science, union partnership with employers, wartime jingoism, state intervention, and corporate welfare-ism, all enabled by union officials increasingly operating as company mediators (and, notably, consistently opposed by the rank and file of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers). As a result, by the mid-1920s, labor organization as the home of working-class militancy had collapsed. The window was open for the formation of a more radical industrial unionism in the wake of the economic crash of 1929.

The Great Depression of the 1930s witnessed huge steps forward for labor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formed the National Recovery Administration, and section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act of 1933 granted workers the right to form and join unions. (Workers used this gain to argue that “your President wants you to join a union”; FDR would not have gone so far.) From 1934 until the entry of the United States into World War II, there were unprecedented strike waves among longshoremen, textile workers, autoworkers, truck drivers, and many others. Socialists, Communists, and anarchists were involved in organizing these strikes and pushing a resistant union leadership to more militant action. Farrell Dobbs and Philip Korth describe how Trotskyists were instrumental in the organizing of the successful Teamsters strike in Minneapolis in 1934. Korth quotes one worker as saying, “These people moved in gradually from the Socialist Workers Party to help, and I say without them there wouldn’t have been no victory.”¹¹ Korth summarizes the openness and commitment to widespread solidarity that made this strike successful: “In many ways Local 574 offers a model of how to organize a strike. Several tactics proved central to its success. Leaders recognized the importance of communications and of rank and file involvement. Frequent public meetings helped counter employers’ propaganda and newspaper accounts…. The strike demonstrated the efficacy of organizing industrial unions, undermining conservative labor traditions that relied on craft organization alone.”¹² Likewise, Steve Early notes that in the 1960s, radicals shifting from campus to labor activism were key to union strength in that decade.¹³ As I will argue in subsequent chapters, democratic reformers in the labor movement today often call on their unions for the tasks noticed by Korth: open communication, rank and file involvement, open and regular meetings, consistent production of counter-employer propaganda, education of workers in labor relations and history, and mass organizing.

Among the victories of this time period, the sit-down strikes in the auto industry were among the most effective, since employers and their armies cannot fire on workers sitting on their valuable machinery. And because workers were sitting in the plants, replacement workers could not take over production. The sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in 1936–1937 marked the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as an alternative to the conservative AFL unions, many of which played a strikebreaking role in the sit-down strikes. The CIO, founded by John L. Lewis in 1935, aimed to organize the unorganized in basic industries rather than abiding by the conciliatory and largely craft-based unionism of the AFL.

Genora Dollinger, a key activist in the Flint sit-down strike, describes conditions before the strike in the unorganized plant: “The plants were notorious for their speed-up systems. They had men with stop watches timing the workers to see if they could squeeze one or two more operations in…. The men just couldn’t take it. They would come home at night and they couldn’t hold their forks in their swollen fingers…. Combined with the bad conditions on the outside: poor living conditions, lack of proper food, lack of proper medical attention and everything else, the auto workers came to the conclusion that there was no way they could ever escape any of this injustice without joining a union.”¹⁴ She describes the process of organizing and fighting in the union as profoundly transformative, opening the doors for women and black workers to be involved in the struggle. And it was the successful occupation of the plants that was the key to victory:

When we got there we saw some big fights. Union men were throwing out the scabs and some of the foremen, and they said, “Hold that gate. Hold it, don’t let the police come through here!” We strung ourselves across that gate, and it was only a matter of a telephone call before the police were sent down. They wanted to push us aside. We said, “Over our dead bodies.” … The successful occupation of Plant 4, which joined the occupations at Fisher 1 and 2, broke the resistance of General Motors and negotiations began in Detroit…. On February 11 they signed a peace agreement recognizing the UAW as representative for the autoworkers. And on March 12 the first labor contract was signed.¹⁵

The victory at Flint won recognition for the new United Auto Workers union alongside improvements in workers’ wages, benefits, conditions of work, and hours and pace of work. It made the UAW the gold standard of the labor movement in the United States. By World War II, most large industrial companies recognized unions and their right to bargain collectively. As historian Sidney Fine writes:

The GM strike was really more than a strike. It was not only the “most critical labor conflict” of the 1930’s and perhaps in all of American history, but it was also a part, the most dramatic and important part of a vast labor upheaval that Fortune described as “one of the greatest mass movements in our history.” The successful outcome of the strike helped to determine that the decision-making power in large segments of American industry where the voice of labor had been little more than a whisper, if that, would henceforth have to be shared in some measure with the unions.¹⁶

Historians of the CIO are agreed that the CIO’s emergence and leadership from 1935 to 1955 was an impressive achievement for labor in the United States. Robert Zieger credits the CIO with focusing the huge waves of working-class activism that erupted in the 1930s, making labor an effective force in politics, creating permanent, industrial labor unions, and embracing the tasks of organizing black workers and women.

The CIO was founded by United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis, who broke from the AFL in 1935 over the question of industrial unionization. In the 1930s and 1940s, the CIO and its unions, including the United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Steel Workers of America (USWA), led some of the largest, most militant, and most successful union battles in U.S. history. In contrast to the exclusive trade unionism of the AFL, which denied participation to black workers and women, the CIO was for inclusive democratic unionism. Where the AFL failed to organize workers into strong, industry-wide units that could repel strikebreaking attempts, the CIO was for industry-wide action to win industrial democracy.

Many scholars and activists think of the period following the Great Depression as one of unmitigated decline for the CIO and its unions. However, contrary to popular memory and despite attempts by President Roosevelt (aligned improbably with labor leaders and Stalinists) to command production for wartime, the war years were not a quiescent time for labor. In his history of the CIO, Art Preis notes:

When the war came to a close on August 14, 1945, the American workers had chalked up more strikes and strikers during the period from December 7, 1941 to the day of the Japanese surrender three years and eight months later, than in any similar period of time in American labor history. During the war period there had been a total of 14,471 strikes and 6,774,000 strikers. These were far more strikes and strikers than during the whole first four years of the CIO—1936–1939. These strikes were largely isolated and quelled with little gains, but the belief that the war achieved ‘national unity’ of capital and labor, or negated the class struggle, was proved false. The immediate postwar upsurge of labor resulted in the most powerful strike wave ever known; the class struggle in America rose to a new peak.¹⁷

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “To Get to Boeing, We First Had to Take on the Union”
• 1. Business Unionism and Rank-and-File Unionism at the Turn of the Millennium
• 2. Not a Smooth Flight for Boeing and the Union
• 3. Enter the Dissidents
• 4. The Problem with “Jointness”
• 5. The 1995 Strike and the Rejection of the Second Contract
• 6. “The Feeble Strength of One”
• 7. Carrying the Memory of Agitation: A Dialogue between Keith Thomas and Dana Cloud
• 8. Communication and Clout
• Conclusion: The Beginnings and Ends of Union Democracy
• Notes
• Interviews and Archival Sources
• Index