Scott Walker and the Union Movement

While it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am heartbroken over the outcome of the move to replace Wisconsin's Scott Walker, it did serve the purpose of prompting me to consider why a majority of voters find him (and his like in other venues, such as Chris Christie and Paul Ryan), an acceptable leader.   How do we explain, progressives can often be heard to ask, why it is that large numbers--increasingly a majority--of Americans vote against their own interests? Those on the left do much head-scratching over why, in the heat of a financial crisis visited upon us by billionaire hedge fund managers, the average American expresses far more anger toward the guy down the block who happens to belong to a union.  Some write off this tendency as mere jealousy.  Your neighbor with a union card is a far more convenient target of opportunity than the one percent of his fellow Americans hidden from view in their gated, country club communities.  In fact, given the prevailing values of capitalist America, the one percent are actually respected and admired, just one lottery ticket away from being the neighbors you really deserve.  While those who occupy Zucotti Park are depicted as a lot of grungy malcontents in the financial district, the one percent are the true occupiers of Wall Street, a capitalist Valhalla synonymous with what was once called the Great American Dream.  The forty-eight percent of us who are either dismayed by or contemptuous of this attitude, however, may want to reflect on one significant reason the divide among us developed.
     Ultimately, the thread that runs through not merely the success of opportunistic demagogues on the right but also the Tea Party phenomenon and the general drift to the right in this country reveals the deep and lingering effects of a once fiercely debated issue in the American union movement, namely, the tendency to create what was called an "aristocracy of labor."  It is a dichotomy as old as the battles that once took place between the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O.  It helps to explain how during the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, teachers, rather than corporate felons, became public enemy number one.
    It is often pointed out that union membership in this country, once at 40% of the work force, has declined to the 12% or so who continue hold union cards.  Changes in the global economy, outsourcing, the nation's post-1960s social battles and the fact that unions were never exactly popular, have all contributed to this outcome, but the inherent conflicts in the history of the union movement have also played a large role. 
     Needless to say, throughout our history, the owners of American business did their best to block unions from forming in the first place and, where that failed, resorted to subverting or pacifying them the best they could.  Union organizers were characterized as communists, un-American, but because the union movement became an inexorable force growing out of the desperate economic conditions of the early twentieth century, it was seen as an evil better to tolerate than invite more dire alternatives.  This is not to say that the truce that came to exist between the big unions and goverment was not hard won.  Incidents of striking workers being clubbed, shot down or even massacred riddle our history.   If unions were never popular, the main culprit was obviously the unrelenting campaign against them spear-headed by business interests.  It is nevertheless important to understand that, for millions of workers, the unions were themselves the problem. 

     The popular 1950s film, On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando portraying the brother of a thug connected to a corrupt longshoreman's union, might serve as an icon of unionism's divided identity.  From the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa to the United Federation of Teachers' Al Shanker, a variety of union leadership evolved that often placed democratic unionists in opposition to their own leadership.  Many union organizers in the 1930s were in fact communists, but by the 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC, McCarthyism and the cold war had forced most radicals out of the movement.  This, of course, did not prevent anti-union interests from continuing to caricature unions as subversive and anti-American.  But the philosophical differences between the school of thought personified by Samuel Gompers, who put a premium on skilled workers, and the opposing view personified by the leadership of the C.I.O., that sought to include all workers, took a toll on the movement as a whole.
     We now have automotive plants and other industries relocating to the South where business need not worry about pesky unions and thus the cost of wages and benefits are minimized.  There was a time when this would have caused great conflict among workers, but now, they see themselves fortunate to just have a job; there is a Chinese boy or girl they are told, who will be happy to do your job for a small fraction of the hourly wage you demand. As a result, the union movement has become essentially moribund.
     Ever since Ronald Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers' union, there has been an inexorable campaign to entirely expunge an already hobbled union movement from this country.  Unions became a target of opportunity for the right wing, and they have taken full advantage of the historical moment.  Milton Friedman had a virulent hatred of teachers' unions and the full panoply of supposed "reforms", (Cf. Walker's use of this term, the right wing euphemism for rolling back any and all advances since the New Deal), such as charter schools, merit pay, elimination of tenure or, at its most extreme manifestation, as we have seen in Wisconsin, the elimination of collective bargaining for public employees' unions.
    So, yes, my fellow forty-eight percenters, there are good reasons why so many American voters seem to be voting against their own interests.  If the problem of educating working class Americans to who their real enemy is was difficult before the conservative counter-revolution, it has become far more difficult now.  If we really care, we will stop scratching our heads, and get out there and, yes, organize.  It won't happen by itself.

Public Employees' Unions

As most New Yorkers of a certain age can recall, there's a line in Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a comic look at a post-WWIII future, in which the character he portrays explains what happened with the line, "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."  It is ironic that the man who, in the early 1960s, saw it as his mission to wrest control of the teachers' union from radical leftists came to rule with an iron hand over the largest and one of the most fearsome union locals in the A.F. of L. -C.I.O.  Actually, a law known as the Feinberg Law had done most of Shanker's work for him.  In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the law, which was designed to prohibit communists from teaching in the New York City public schools, with dissenting justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter asserting that the decision ""turns the school system into a spying project." (Cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-rules-on-communist-teachers).   What likely prompted Woody Allen to pen his famous line, however, was Shanker's role in the 1968 teachers' strike, a strike that closed the New York City schools for three months and left scars that are still in evidence over forty years later.  
      One aftermath of that strike which might be considered a foreshock of Scott Walker's recent success at prohibiting teachers to participate in collective bargaining, was New York State's Taylor Law, which deprived teachers of a far more pungent right for unions--the right to strike.  (In another ironic footnote to these events, the single deciding vote for the law in the New York legislature was cast by a school teacher, Conservative Party member, Vincent Riccio.)  Without the right to strike or the right to collective bargaining, a union is no longer a union, it is at best a loosely organized professional organization.
     Shanker had always done his best to rein in the left of his organization.  The union's Delegate Assembly, which at one time had sent delegates in numbers proportional to the total on a school's staff, was reduced to two delegates per school when the DA proved too unwieldy by overriding  Shanker's opposition to its vote to have the union go on the record as opposed to the war in Vietnam.  The term of office for chapter leaders was lengthened, and, when thousands of teachers opposed the 1968 strike, the union's leadership was purged of dissidents.  Over 8,000 teachers were allowed to be "excessed," many of whom had also dissented from the union's tactics in dealing with the issue of community control.  So much for democratic unionism.  Even in a rank and file that consists of teachers, never a particularly radical bunch, after 1968 the UFT was effectively contolled by Shanker and his hand-picked loyalists who vigilantly guarded against the slightest manifestation of radicalism.  To the handful who knew Shanker's history, his affiliation with the virulently anti-communist Max Schactman socialists and his USIA connections, none of this came as a surprise.  The only militant unionists Shanker ever supported were the members of Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity (Solidarnoc) who contributed to the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.   In 1998, Shanker was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.
     The history of the United Federation of Teachers parallels the history of many unions in this country.  There is only one reason that public service employees' unions (PSEUs)continue to exist: it is not quite so easy to outsource police, teachers and fire fighters.   If they could, you can be sure, they would, especially in an era that has seen prisons and even the armed forces placed increasingly in private hands.  Though difficult to eliminate, there have been ceaseless efforts to tame the PSEUs.  Much of what gets in the media about the outrageous benefits enjoyed by the PSEUs is not only horror stories, it is just plain false.  In the UFT here in New York, for example, the city has just announced the introduction of Tier 6, the effect of which will be to see benefits gradually decline to a fraction of what the few remaining dinosaurs who entered the system fifty years ago are currently entitled to.   The work of rolling back wages and benefits has largely been done.  For the right, the only remaining task is to break the unions entirely.  It is no longer enough to use the older strategy of planting the seeds of self-destruction by ensuring that Medal of Freedom winners kept militants in check.