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Politics and unions. Is there a quicker way to revive the scent of ideological combat or to rouse labor’s cynics and dreamers than to utter those words in tandem? From the workingmen's parties of the 1880s through the Communist controversy of the 1940s to debates about allying with Democrats in the year 2000, no subject has occasioned more anger, bitterness, and hope. For most Americans today, politics conjures up thoughts more distasteful than inspirational as even progressive candidates feel compelled to chase after the big money. But government shapes the workplace and the power of organized labor in myriad ways–from safety inspections to NLRB appointments to indictments of labor officials for campaign abuses. Now, as in the past, there's no way to avoid asking what unions should do.

In this essay I scavenge through the history of labor politics in the United States to make a rather simple argument: unions have done best when they engaged both issues of concern to a majority of Americans and mainstream politicians who had some sympathy with labor's agenda. The grand, alternative vision of a classless society certainly had its uses; it motivated thousands of activists to sacrifice their time and, on occasion, their lives to the movement. Time after time, radicals proved to be among the most determined and effective organizers of unions. But independent parties of the labor left were seldom more than irritants to the political establishment.

Thus, I believe that, in political matters, the current leaders of the AFL-CIO have the right idea. While the top priority must be organizing new members, unionists and their intellectual allies also ought to continue fighting within, as well as outside, the Democratic Party for a creative agenda that can benefit all working people. It's not enough to follow the old dictum of Sam Gompers to "reward your friends and punish your enemies." Whenever possible, labor activists should choose their friends and imbue them with a pro-union sensibility. At the same time, in rhetoric and deed, they must be able to persuade ordinary people that unions are not merely a "special interest" but the hard-working champion of needs and values that unionists share with other Americans.

Behind this opinion lies a sober assumption: a radical transformation of American society led by working-class activists was never in the cards, even at those points when millions of workers were flooding into unions. Serious labor politics has always been about trying to improve the lives of workers within a liberal capitalist society, which shows no signs of creeping into obsolescence.

That judgment does not come easily. Like other left-wing historians who came of age during the 1960s, I dreamt about and argued for a society run according to strictly egalitarian and democratic principles. Those famous lines of the International–"We have been naught, We shall be all!"–are still, for me, the apotheosis of social redemption. They continue to evoke the rage and hope of millions of working people around the world damaged and discounted by private power. But, in the United States, a politics guided by such a dream flies in the face of the obvious realities of American life: race as a division with far more salience than class, a consumer culture that boasts an expanding (if unequally distributed) national income, a general mistrust of radicals and of sweeping political change, and structural impediments (from the balance of powers to the legally entrenched two-party, winner-take-all system) that would frustrate even a large and vital working-class left.

So, labor in the United States will never be all. But, over the past century, the workers’ movement has won significant political victories that helped to banish an order in which American wage earners had few rights and scant institutional power. It accomplished this by pursuing, notwithstanding detours, a strategy that combined independent mobilization with diligent pressure from within the political establishment.

The approach took decades to evolve. After the emergence of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century, working-class activists balked at accepting what Eric Hobsbawm dubbed "the rules of the game" of the capitalist workplace–labor as a commodity which had to trade its muscle and skill for wages.[1] During much of the nineteenth century, the workers' movement struggled with the concept and reality of wage labor itself, which seemed to impose a dependence no better than slavery. The white men who dominated the early unions made concrete demands on their bosses–but their overarching goal was the establishment of a cooperative, smallholders’ society that would escape the fate of the Old World, with its rigid, ancestral class hierarchies.

Ironically, a band of hardheaded Marxist craftsmen worked diligently to steer the labor movement away from that radical, if somewhat nostalgic, alternative. In the 1880s, young radicals like Peter J. McGuire and Samuel Gompers argued that unions would grow–in size and power–only if they stopped trying to escape a class-divided society and concentrated on bettering the lot of workers living within it. The American Federation of Labor and its affiliated unions were the main vehicle of this new departure. Only gradually did Gompers and his fellow leaders abandon their own socialist dreams; as late as the 1920s, the AFL constitution still began with a reference to "the struggle . . . between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer which grows in intensity from year to year." But the general direction was clear.

The organization that Gompers led has been roundly condemned as the exclusive preserve of male officials from northern European backgrounds who patronized or actively despised a long list of their fellow workers–blacks, Latinos, East Asians, women, the unskilled, and those who came from peasant backgrounds or voiced radical convictions.[2] In addition, AFL leaders have been accused of eschewing legislative solutions to the problems of wage earners, preferring to rely on the power they could amass on the job.

The real federation never resembled that baleful portrait. Among its two million affiliated members in 1910 were thousands of waitresses and immigrant seamstresses, black and Slavic coal miners, and card-carrying members of the Socialist Party. It is true that the AFL consistently advocated a bar on Asian immigration, giving noxious and crude rationales for its stand ("Meat vs. Rice: Which Shall Survive?"), and that its leaders viewed patriotic male producers as the backbone of the nation (repeating the conventional wisdom of their day).

But the charge that they abandoned politics is false. At the local and state levels, unions routinely drew up sweeping policy agendas, lobbied members of legislatures and city councils to adopt them, and proudly backed labor activists who ran for office themselves (on a variety of party tickets). On hundreds of occasions, they also demonstrated and planned electoral revenge against officeholders who ordered police to attack strikers.

Beginning in 1906, the national AFL moved aggressively, if with scant resources, to ensure that politicians would view union workers as, in historian Julie Greene's words, "major players in the brave new world of interest group liberalism."[3] In 1908, federation officials wrote the labor plank of the Democratic platform and worked diligently, if unsuccessfully, to elect William Jennings Bryan to the White House. Thereafter, national labor would consider the Democratic Party their normal partisan home–except for the 1920s, when the fortunes of both unions and party were at a low ebb.

Unsurprisingly, this alliance has never fulfilled the hopes of mainstream labor officials–and has routinely enraged those on their left. But it has hardly been the "barren marriage" that some radical critics describe. In a two-party system, indispensability to one of the players is a notable achievement. And by exerting its numbers and spending a portion of its members' dues, organized labor has ensured that at least one of the major parties cannot long evade responsibility for the problems of working Americans. On some issues, that has meant little more than a rhetorical commitment, and given the heterogeneous nature of the Democrats' base (particularly, the party’s reliance, up to the 1960s, on a union-weak, white-supremacist South), labor has seldom been able to feel secure about its status. But it is difficult to imagine how workers would have won the kinds of legislative safeguards and statutory rights they did if unions had remained scrupulously independent or struggled to convince workers to vote for a minor party on the left. As it was, prolabor Democrats worked with union officials to shape most of the landmark bills that Congress passed regarding workplace rights–from the eight-hour day for railroad workers in 1916, to the Wagner Act in 1935, to the law establishing OSHA in 1970.

At nearly every juncture, radicals railed against "class collaboration" on the part of union leaders. But they never could mount a strong, sustained challenge to policies they loathed. From about 1900 to the early 1920s, the working-class left was at its zenith of size and influence, and both Debsian Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) aimed polemical grapeshot at the AFL's political stand. Yet Socialists were able to win elections in only a scattering of midsize cities and factory towns (and were rarely competitive for long) , and the constitutional straitjacket prevented the Socialists from gaining a national foothold. In 1912, Eugene Debs won almost 6 percent of the presidential vote, but no seats in Congress. In 1910, the British Labour Party won forty two seats in the House of Commons with the same percentage of the popular vote.[4]

The IWW, strongest among male migrants who usually didn't stay in one place long enough to satisfy new state and local registration laws, had a contempt for elections and professional politicians has served it better in romantic legend than in the cold calculus of gaining and losing power. Without even a shred of electoral influence, the Wobblies (as IWW members were probably known) were crushed by the federal government relatively easily during World War I.

Of course, that fact is hardly cause for retrospective cheering. The darkest mark on the AFL’s political record is its acquiescence with the Wilson administration's repression of the labor left during and after the Great War. Gompers and his union allies did not support intervention until a month before Congress declared war in April 1917; they recognized and shared the antimilitarist sentiments of most American workers. Yet the risks of opposing the government during wartime and the leap in union membership that occurred caused a muting of old principles. As long as the war lasted, a more democratic workplace and long-sought reforms like government-run railroads and electric power seemed within reach.

The downside of political pragmatism is that it can obscure the difference between acts taken to survive and those performed merely to gain temporary advantage. In abetting the question of the left, AFL leaders crossed that line. Foolishly expecting the wartime compact with the state to persist after emergency conditions had passed they also sheathed the sword of independence. The corporate offensive that gathered speed after the Armistice (under the name of the “American Plan”) blasted their hopes for reform and crushed the industrial strike wave of 1919 that AFL officials only halfheartedly supported. By the time of Gompers’s death in 1924, labor's numbers had been pruned below the prewar level, and federal judges once more were busy levying injunctions against workers who dared to go on strike.

The next great upsurge of unionism did, however, confirm the old cigar-maker's essential political judgment. Without the assistance of New Deal Democrats, the stirring rise of labor's new millions during the 1930s would likely have been as short-lived as were the gains made during the strike wave of 1919. It is important to recall how vulnerable the new industrial unions were during the Great Depression to charges of Communism and fears of social chaos. The general strike of 1934 in Minneapolis and the Flint sit-down strike two years later are among the high points of labor's militant history. But, led by radical organizers (Trotskyists in Minnesota, Communists in Michigan), they scared most middle-class Americans and could have been squelched by less sympathetic authorities. Because President Franklin Roosevelt, Governor Floyd Olson in Minnesota (elected by a third party that would soon merge with the Democrats), and Governor Frank Murphy in Michigan needed labor support, they demurred and allowed the determined workers to prevail.

Alliance with liberal officeholders also helped win the new unions cultural legitimacy. Catholic wage-earners felt more secure joining an organization blessed both by their priest and by the party that already claimed their vote. And, while FDR never affirmed the truth of the famous slogan "The President Wants You to Join the Union," he said nothing to deny it. After Pearl Harbor, the War Labor Board continued in the same vein, through a "maintenance of membership clause" that made it difficult for workers in military industries not to sign up with a union.

Of course, the industrial unions gave as well as they got. From the formation of Labor’s NonPartisan League in 1936 through the mighty efforts of CIO-PAC in 1944, the new federation’s activists and money swelled FDR’s victory totals and helped elect liberals to high office in key northern states. As a result, the Democratic Party in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York became more beholden to organized labor than ever before–and more willing to back its legislative agenda.

A lively debate has raged among labor historians about whether cooperation with the New Deal helped or hindered the movement’s power and influence during the Roosevelt era. Critics argue that the alliance–and the structure of labor law it put into place–promoted bureaucratized, top-down unions and a stunted, tacitly racist vision of politics. On its own, they charge, labor never would have agreed to exempting agricultural and domestic workers from the Wagner Act–which helped keep black and Latino workers at the bottom of the labor force-- or allowed management to reign supreme in areas of business beyond the purview of hiring and firing. [5]

This view overestimates labor's ability to shape events to its liking and falsely assumes a commitment to racial equality on the part of white workers. In fact, most union officials, like anyone else with responsibilities to thousands of members, chose from among the alternatives available. They were well aware that, for most working-class people, politics remained a dirty game they would rather not play. As historian Richard Oestreicher asks, "Did the labor movement enthusiastically support New Deal labor policy because they suffered from paralyzing illusions or because those policies seemed so manifestly better than the labor politics of any previous regime?" In the end, workers–of all races–resolved the question themselves. In 1948, when the Democratic ticket was opposed not only by the GOP but by splits to its Dixiecrat right and Progressive left, as high a percentage of working-class voters cast ballots for Harry Truman as their British counterparts cast for the Labour Party or French workers for the Socialists and Communists combined.[6]

Where did that leave the American followers of Lenin and Stalin? The thousands of labor activists who belonged to or were close followers of the U.S. Communist Party (CP) bore little or no resemblance to the frightening portrait drawn by J. Edgar Hoover and other conservatives who rarely had a good word for unionists of any political stripe. By now, historians have amply documented the vital role that Communists played in organizing workers at a variety of such large firms as General Electric, Allis-Chalmers, and Ford and in the subways of New York City and on the docks of the Pacific Coast. Most Reds stuck to the hard business of building unions and, in the process, distinguished themselves as advocates of racial and gender equality in a movement that had historically known neither. Moreover, once the CP set aside its revolutionary hopes and embraced the Popular Front in 1935, its members and followers immersed themselves in the left wing of the Democratic Party and remained there until the Cold War.

At the same time, Communists did damage the reputation of American unionism. For all their fealty to labor's larger cause, they belonged to a party whose primary loyalty was to the USSR. They preached working-class democracy while revering a state that prohibited independent unions and murdered people of all classes for disagreeing, even slightly, with their self-appointed leaders. The influence of Communists in unions became a flagrant liability only with the onset of the cold war. But it weakened the CIO in competition with the AFL during the late 1930s. And it bred mistrust among rank-and-filers during World War II when CP labor officials became the most stalwart enforcers of the no-strike pledge.

That certainly doesn't mean that labor leaders ought to have endorsed and abetted nearly every pillar of U.S. foreign policy during the cold war–as the AFL-CIO did, often over the objections of progressive unions like the UAW and AFSCME. Promotion of democracy and workers' rights was one thing; aiding tyrannies of the right in order to prevent a potential tyranny of the left, quite another. In the name of combating totalitarianism, the labor hierarchy under George Meany and then Lane Kirkland helped to wage covert war on heroic, left-leaning unions in Latin America, East Asia, and South Africa and strenuously backed the U.S. assault on Indochina. Anti-Communist dogma became the mirror image of the ideology being fought. Labor officials ludicrously employed one rationale not only to justify opposing the African National Congress but also to promote subversion of the Poland’s government.

In judging these actions, one should draw distinctions–something AFL-CIO leaders failed to do at the time. Workers were far better off in the capitalist welfare states of Western Europe than in the socialist beggar regimes of the Soviet bloc, and U.S. labor officials played a small but useful part in ensuring that the former didn't succumb to the latter. But Meany and his disciples spent far too much time and prestige on even the more defensible aspects of their foreign policy while labor's strength at home slowly eroded. And their covert actions in the Third World all but destroyed the idealistic, democratic reputation American unionism had built up both abroad and at home during its glory days of the 1930s and 1940s. One result was that few liberal or radical activists in the swelling movements of the 1960s took seriously organized labor's claim that it was an agent of social change. For the first time in history, unions got tagged with the conservative label–notably by well-educated journalists from comfortable backgrounds who were influenced by the college New Left.

In doing so, they were making a mistake analogous to that committed by their left-wing ancestors who branded Sam Gompers and his ilk betrayers of the working class, pure and simple, because they endorsed U.S. intervention in World War I. In fact, the quarter century from the 1944 presidential election to the end of the Johnson administration in 1969 was the most ambitious period in the history of American labor politics. During these years, unions established and then undergirded the Democratic Party's status as the ruling party in Congress, the White House (with the exception of the Eisenhower years), and many northern and western states.[7] The irony is that this power was used most effectively to advance liberal causes that did not directly promote union growth–and, in some respects, may even have undermined it. As labor became essential to enacting larger social reforms, it all but abandoned its ability to mobilize independently to build its membership and to educate Americans about the changing problems of wage earners at their workplaces and beyond.

During the reign of the much maligned George Meany, lobbyists for the AFL-CIO and some of its largest internationals worked hard to finish the work of economic security and democratic inclusion the New Deal had begun. They were critical to passing the civil rights and voting rights acts, to enacting Medicare and Medicaid, to increasing the minimum wage and the duration of unemployment compensation, to abolishing the poll tax, and to defending the Warren Court's decision that state legislatures should be apportioned by population and not geography. Although Meany himself was lukewarm toward the civil rights insurgency (as opposed to the new laws it compelled politicians to enact), many local and state unions threw themselves into voter registration in urban areas and into the boycott of table grapes organized by the United Farm Workers, the movement that put "La Raza" into the political arena and the national consciousness to stay. And the participation of solidly liberal unions like the UAW ensured that the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom would be both mammoth and interracial.

Such efforts helped millions of people enjoy longer, more comfortable lives and helped dismantle the most visible structures of American apartheid. But the emergence of a more tolerant, more middle-class society made combative unions seem less important and much harder to sustain. In this environment, labor officials sometimes seemed too broad-minded for their own good. In 1965, AFL-CIO lobbyists lost a fight to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act;s right-to-work provision which crippled union drives in the South, because they were unwilling to compromise on reapportionment in the states.[8] In the quixotic effort to construct what Michael Harrington called, at the time, the nation's "invisible social democracy," labor lobbyists declined to fight for a victory that could have smacked of mere self-interest.

After the 1960s, labor's political clout did grow weaker. Only on rare occasions did unions demonstrate their ability to organize rank-and-filers and their allies to push an independent agenda or stop a hostile one.[9] In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter was noticeably cool to labor’s agenda and exerted little pressure on a Congress dominated by his own party to reform the Wagner Act sot that workers could more easily to win union recognition. But Carter’s centrist apathy toward organized labor was probably unavoidable. Private-sector unions were hemorrhaging members as manufacturing firms either shed workers or fled to nonunion climes, new multinational construction firms felt freer to stiff union workers than did their local competitors, and organizers struggled to make headway among clerical, service, and high-tech workers unfamiliar with or suspicious of unions. The Federal Reserve's tough measures to stem inflation also boosted unemployment and made it difficult to raise wages. Inside the national Democratic Party itself, the lion’s share of delegates were now chosen in primaries, and this reform made it harder for union activists, who represented just one constituency among many, to secure commitments from the men who would be president. In this new environment, unions no longer seemed an essential conduit to working-class voters.

Yet one should not overstate the erosion of labor’s political clout during the difficult years that followed. As political scientist Taylor Dark details, unions through the 1980s and 1990s remained able to put pressure on Congress to stop some of the more egregious measures put forth by the resurgent right.[10] The fervent desire of conservative Republicans for punchless unions was often frustrated by labor operatives who beat back attempts to curtail the eight-hour day, relax regulations on industrial health and safety, and punish violence by picketers more severely. During the height of Reaganism, Orrin Hatch, then chair of the Senate Labor Committee, griped, "It is next to impossible to do anything . . . without the approval of labor union leaders in Washington."[11] But those leaders were only playing defense, as their opponents on the right grew stronger. Lane Kirkland and most of his fellow hierarchs were both uninterested in and inept at mobilizing grassroots energy, and organizing–whether to boost membership or to persuade rank-and-filers to defend their interests at the polls–became sclerotic.

Labor’s holding action during the grim years of the 1980s did help it gain ground once Democrats regained the White House. While the Clinton administration has obviously not been the second coming of the New Deal, neither has it been the cynical foe of labor demands that some on the left describe. Since 1993, aside from the well-publicized conflicts over the NAFTA and GATT treaties, unionists have been more courted than shunned. A hands-off attitude during the 1997 UPS strike, a hike in the minimum wage, the earned income tax credit, family and medical leave, and pro-union appointments to the NLRB and the Labor Department were among the fruits of this relationship. Democrats in Congress grew more dependent and thus friendlier toward organized labor after the GOP gained a majority in 1994 by sweeping up races in the open-shop South and intermountain West. In a number of metropolitan areas, liberal officeholders are spearheading living-wage ordinances–against furious opposition from local employers and politicians afraid of antagonizing them.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney has devoted so much effort and money to bolstering the fortunes of Democrats. Reform-minded national leaders realize that their members are once more indispensable to Democratic success and that, as in the past, their numbers will not rebound without some aid from Washington. In the chronically imperfect world of politics, the party of Bill Clinton remains the only electoral option for unionists who want to protect their movement and advance its fortunes. Neither the tiny New Party nor the Labor Party (which has yet to run any candidates) has found an escape route from the legal, financial, and ideological dungeon that has entombed every would-be left alternative of the past.

And Sweeney and his associates are not rerunning the strategy of the hierarchy they dethroned. Fortunately–and, one hopes, just in time–an aggressive strategy with a local focus has replaced the insider hob-knobbing on which Kirkland and his minions relied. Around the country, unions are conducting voter registration campaigns in minority communities, training local activists to run for office, and promoting the living wage, national health insurance, and other initiatives that demonstrate that unions are not merely insurance societies for a dwindling number of white male members.

Knowing how cynical Americans are about electioneering, labor activists now emphasize issues and information over partisan rhetoric and the honeyed pledges of candidates. As SEIU president Andrew Stern put it in a recent speech, "Politics is not about taking back the House–politics is about owning a house and raising a family and sharing in the wealth of a booming economy."[12] Making such a distinction is critical to dispelling the still powerful belief that organized labor is only out for itself. In the past, unions and their allies only gained widespread public sympathy only when they put forth a moral vision. In the 1930s, unions marched under the cry of “industrial democracy” and tripled their numbers. A generation later, Martin Luther King Jr. brought the plight of black workers into the media’s glare, in part, by criticizing a system of “selfish ambition inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.”

That legacy needs to be recaptured. Millions of Americans may soon be ready for an anticorporate politics that acknowledges race and gender but transcends them–“a politics centered on the struggle to prevent the rich from ripping off the rest of the country,” as Richard Rorty bluntly put it at the 1996 Columbia University teach-in with labor. But most people will reject a labor politics that is just another exercise in spin-doctoring, a differently shaped projectile in the campaign consultant’s quiver. As in previous eras, the chance for reviving a workers’ movement hinges on the participation and votes of ordinary Americans who care little about government policy but a great deal about improving their own lives on and off the job. If one accepts that fact, then the real discussion of how unions can change an America they will never govern can proceed.

BIO: Michael Kazin teaches U.S. history at Georgetown. He is the coauthor of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, published this fall by Oxford University Press.

1. …A radical transformation of American society led by working class activists was never in the cards…Serious labor politics has always been about trying to improve the lives of workers within a liberal capitalist society… (p.2)

2. Only gradually did Gompers and his fellow leaders abandon their own socialist dreams: as late as the 1920s, the AFL constitution still began with a reference to “the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries… (p.3)

3 …It is difficult to imagine how workers could have won the kinds of legislative safeguards and statutory rights they did if unions had…struggled to convince workers to vote for a minor party on the left (p.5)

4 In the name of combating totalitarianism, the labor hierarchy under George Meany and the Lane Kirkland helped to wage covert war on the heroic ledft-leaning unions in Latin America, East Asia, and South Aftrica. (p. 9)

5 During the riegn of the much maligned George Meany, lobbyists for the AFL-CIO…worked hard to finish the work of economic security and democratic inclusion the New Deal had begun. (p.10)

6 While the Clinton administration has obviously not been the second coming of the New Deal, neither has it been the cynical foe of labor demands that some on the left desribe. (p.12)

7 Millions of Americans may soon be ready for an anticorporate politics that acknowledges race and gender but transcends them… (p.13)

[1] Eric Hobsbawm, "Custom, Wages and Work-load in Nineteenth-Century Industry," Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), 345.

[2] For a concise summary of a now quite venerable critique, see Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: 1999), 17–90.

[3] Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917 (New York: 1998).

[4] Richard Oestreicher, "The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth-Century America," in Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994: The Labor–Liberal Alliance, ed. Kevin Boyle (Albany: SUNY Press,) 31.

[5] For expressions of this point of view, see Staughton Lynd, “The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of Steel,” in Lynd, Living Inside Our Hope (Ithaca, 1997), 141-158 and Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: 1986), passim. For counterarguments, see, Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995) and Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule (New York, 1991).

[6] Oestreicher, "Rules of the Game," 27, 19.

[7] The best study remains J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (NY, 1969).

[8] David Brody, "The Course of American Labor Politics," In Labor's Cause (NY, 1993), 72.

[9] Thanks to Nelson Lichtenstein for recalling this episode. In the 1980s, unionists in Massachusetts also organized successfully to defeat an attack on the state’s prevailing wage act, and their counterparts in Missouri beat back a right-to-work initiative.

[10] Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY:. 1998).

[11] Ibid., 161–2.

[12] Stern speech to SEIU National Legislative Conference, Washington DC, May 24, 1999. For a pithy summary of the methodology now animating AFL-CIO politics, see Geoffrey Garin and Guy Molyneu, “Informing and Empowering American Workers: Ten Rules for Union Political Action,” in Not Your Father’s Union Movement, ed. Jo-Ann Mort (New York, 1998), 113–126.