By Nikhil Pal Singh

            Michael Kazin asks, “What should unions do?” In the context of renewed hopes for an insurgent U.S. labor movement, and in the pages of a journal designed as a forum for debating its potentials, this question is entirely apposite.  Yet to call Kazin’s prescriptions modest would be clear understatement.  At best, Kazin counsels us not to get our hopes up about the “new” AFL-CIO.  From a historical perspective, he argues, a labor agenda has been most “successful” when union leaders have operated within the constraints of the existing system, cooperated with the Democratic Party, and accepted labor’s role as one player among many within the liberal-pluralist distributive queue.  More ambitious political visions–from labor parties to vanguardist politics and class struggle–he suggests, have rarely been more than “irritants” to the enduring political mainstream. Such projects may have “had their uses,” providing activist spark and organizational energy at specific historical moments, but in general terms they have tended to be more the wish-fulfilling utopiansim of intellectuals than the stuff of an achievable agenda for working people in capitalist America.

            If the steady decline of organized labor in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century can be counted as success, then Kazin may have a point. That aside, a more immediate question arises: Why in a moment of the putative resurgence of the official U.S. labor movement would one of its partisans take it upon himself to so lower our expectations?  Many labor intellectuals and activists (with similar due caution) have regarded the triumph of the Sweeney leadership slate in 1996 as an opportunity to imagine a more expansive labor politics, one that might more fully engage with a post-1960’s politics of social movements–the manifold struggles for cultural as well as economic justice.  Many have further hoped that a new agenda for U.S. labor might also (for perhaps the first time) critically confront the visibly world-spanning movements of capital with something other than an unreflexive nationalism–or worse, xenophobia.

            By contrast, Kazin invites us to positively revisit all the old trade union compromises: the business as usual of business unionism.  With the odd caveat here and there against red-bating and racism, the hero of his essay is none other than Samuel Gompers.  The recovery of Gompers as a genuine sage of the American labor movement is couched within a language of weary inexorability reminiscent of Daniel Bell’s famous cold war defense of a moderately politicized “market unionism” as the only course for the U.S. labor movement.¹  Indeed, Kazin resuscitates an analytical method laid waste by much of the best labor history since the 1970s.  While it is impossible to summarize the diversity of intellectual efforts within this field, the new labor history actively scavenged the past for examples of anti- or counter systemic agency in the everyday struggles of working people.  This was never simply about reclaiming what Kazin cavalierly dismisses as “the grand alternative vision of a classless society.”  Rather, it was about a genuine commitment to alternatives, alternative social arrangements in which the political activation of laboring people on their own behalf would play a crucial part.

            At worst, then, what Kazin has offered is a kind of neotraditionalist labor history– something that may reflect upon a certain whiggishness of some pro-labor intellectuals than on the question of what unions should do in the current context.  As I have already suggested, this is not the first time that a sober “realism” has displaced genuine political vision in the name of  “the left-wing of the possible.” For me, Kazin most clearly reveals this lack of vision by basing his argument on the entirely false choice–itself an artifact of cold war logic–between revolutionary class struggle and piecemeal pragmatics.  The fact, as he writes, that “liberal capitalist society. . . shows no signs of creeping into obsolescence” does not mean our only option is to tinker around the edges of what already exists.  Thus, for example, Kazin concedes too easily that a new labor agenda should be based on organizing the unorganized, but he then has very little to say about what this might entail or how it might reshape the meaning and scope of contemporary labor politics.  Rather, he is much more concerned to defend a tradition by which union leaders have exchanged economic benefits for the diminishing ranks of the already organized for political quiescence and collaboration with existing institutional arrangements and powers.

            Kazin reinforces his defense of labor pragmatism with insistently normalizing appeals to “the majority of Americans,” “ordinary Americans,” and the “common people”–a rhetoric that effectively conceals chronic historical divisions within the house of labor.  His more politically correct Gompersism, reformed of its base opportunism, craven racism, and support for American imperialism, thus still bears the marks of a narrow nationalism that has buttressed a profoundly exclusionary record of official, U.S. labor organization in a working-class born of slavery and international migrations.  The well–known consequences of this position bear repeating and include the elevation of a part of that class (white, male native born) at the expense of its “others,” both within and beyond U.S. borders.  Such a position, now more than ever, is a sure loser for organized labor within the United States–or anywhere else in this global econominium.

            Closer to home, it’s hard to imagine that the better part of the many thousand home care workers organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) over the last decade in Los Angeles County, or the inspiring “Justice for Janitors” campaign were successful because (as Kazin puts it) “ordinary people” were finally convinced that “unions are not merely a ‘special interest’ but the hard working champion of needs and values that unionists share with other Americans.”  They were successful because activist unions working through community-based networks finally championed the interests of specific groups of workers (in these cases predominantly women, Latino/as, and African Americans): underpaid and exploited workers long outside union protection, the historic casualties of a segmented labor market divided by gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality.   

            These struggles illustrate what can happen when unions ally with existing social movements and when social movements become unions, a lesson obscured by Kazin’s account.  Here, we would do better to follow Kim Moody’s suggestion that today it is the manifest diversity of the U.S. working class that might be the greatest weapon of labor organization.  But this will only be true if unions learn from a range of contemporary movements for social justice and actively take on struggles for greater equality and recognition that address the particular needs and interests of working women, sexual minorities, immigrants, and communities of color.² 

            I have no doubt Kazin would applaud the victories of what Moody terms “social movement unionism.”  The problem is that there is little room to account for these struggles within the narrative and analytic he proposes.  “Yeah, yeah,” he seems to say almost impatiently, organizing “new members” should be a “top priority” for the AFL-CIO leaders (notice he does not say organizing new workers).  Indeed, what seems really important to him is the normalization of existing trade union politics and institutions within a national political arena.  The appropriate intellectual analogue to this programmatic vision is the much older version of labor history he reworks, the story of great (if now slightly flawed) leaders, the traditions they established, and the institutions they built. ³

            Thus, we have Gompers establishing the most durable and effective mold for an American labor politic.  Sure he was a racist, Kazin admits, but then everyone was back then.  Sure he collaborated miserably with police agents in the crushing of the labor left after World War I, but the “next upsurge of unionism” in the 1930s “confirmed the old cigar maker’s essential political judgment” by demonstrating that labor’s agenda would be advanced only by establishing strong ties to the political state.  Kazin then credits Gompers with elaborating an approach that took “decades to evolve,” combining “independent mobilization with diligent pressure from within the political establishment.” This meant that labor activists correctly stopped “trying to escape a class-divided society and concentrated on bettering the lot of workers living within it.”

            On closer inspection, Kazin’s characteristic descriptors of the Gompers approach, (independent mobilization, pressure from within, bettering the lot of workers, and so on) are generalities that obscure vast differences in the history of approaches to labor organization and struggle.  That the rise of an insurgent, industrial unionism with the CIO in the 1930s could be construed by him as primarily a confirmation, rather than at least a partial refutation, of Gompers’s “essential political judgment” is absurd, especially if the latter is understood with greater historical precision as the tradition of exclusionary craft unionism, racial nationalism, and antiradicalism.

            In other words, Kazin rehabilitates Gompers by flattening out the internal dynamic of labor history and substituting platitudes that brook little disagreement.  Take the following as an example: “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 of the left.”  Well, okay, but such counterfactual statements are deceptively easy to make.  One could just as easily frame the issue in the following way: “Without demonstrating a consistent capacity for independent mobilization and social disruption, labor’s cooperation with mainstream politicians would have yielded few enduring legislative safeguards or statutory gains.”  The point is that these kinds of arguments are too vague to yield genuine insight or programmatic orientation.

            Far more disturbing is the extent to which Kazin seems to be relatively untroubled by the deep divisions within the working class, the majority of which has always been outside of trade unions.  This is most clear in those passages where he tries at once to acknowledge the sorry record of racism within the official U.S. labor movement and to rewrite this same history as the only viable course.  Using an  analytical strategy based on partial disclosure (mitigated by the skillful use of parentheses), followed by a kind of “aw shucks” teleology in which all the nasty things work themselves out in the end, Kazin basically neutralizes racism as a factor that has substantially shaped the course of U.S. labor history.

            His principle line of defense of the old AFL and the post–World War II AFL-CIO against the charge that they “abandoned politics” at that time muddies the issue.  Of course they didn’t abandon politics, but the politics they embraced – racial exclusion and antiradicalism – was far more significant in setting the historic pattern of American labor than Kazin admits.  This was brought home at the beginning of the cold war and the inception of the modern AFL-CIO with two decisive events: the failure of the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” to actively confront racial segregation due to fears that it would divert from union-building efforts in the South, and the federation’s expulsion of left-wing unions in 1949 and 1950.  These culminated in the collapse of CIO-led progressive coalitions in parts of the country like Birmingham, Alabama, where the black-led Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers were expelled by Phillip Murray.  The great push for black civil rights and labor rights that began with the rise of what Michael Denning has called “the CIO social movement” of the 1930s was brought to a screeching halt within organized labor when the CIO merged with the AFL in 1955 and white leaders of both groups rejected A. Philip Randolph’s call to ban the exclusion of blacks from any union. ⁴

            In light of this history, the self-congratulatory tale of official labor’s “crucial” support for national civil rights legislation in the early 1960s rings hollow indeed.  This is especially true when we consider the extent to which George Meany, standing squarely in the Gompers tradition, was, opposed to the civil rights insurgency.  He compounds the mythmaking by annexing one of the greatest contemporary examples of social movement unionism, the United Farm Workers (UFW) to organized labor’s trophy case, writing that despite the lack of national support, “local and state unions” actively supported the broad-based struggles “that put ‘La Raza’ into the political arena and national consciousness to stay.”

            My point here is emphatically not that labor activists and progressive unions have not been central to the modern struggles for civil rights.  Kazin, however, carefully resists drawing clear conclusion from his own examples.  The exclusion of agricultural workers from the Wagner Act, the great New Deal statist compact with organized labor, alongside the post–World War II Bracero (guest-worker) program that negotiated and evaded exclusionary immigration laws heavily supported by organized labor since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, helped set the pattern for entirely different union traditions and forms of mobilization than those Kazin extols throughout his essay.  Labor’s activists and radicals were crucial to the success of these struggles, despite–and not as a consequence of–the programmatic vision of the better part of labor’s officials, and their “allies” in Washington.

            The undeniably superior political forces arrayed against organized labor notwithstanding, Kazin nonetheless buries much of the story of how the trade union movement purchased its greatest success during the early Cold War at the price of egregious political compromises, allowing a slow rot to set in that proceeded virtually unchecked into the Sweeney era.  Indeed, a similar pattern of argumentation to the one surrounding questions of racism can be discerned around the issues of antiradicalism within the labor movement.  Here, one example will have to suffice.  Kazin implies that just as the Wobblies were crushed because they lacked legislative allies (another counterfactual argument), the early CIO members would likely have suffered the same fate if they had not gained electoral influence in local, state, and federal government.  He then recalls the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, in which Governor Floyd Olsen refused to call out the militia, enabling “the workers to prevail.” In yet another aside, Kazin describes Olsen as “governor of a third party that later merged with Democrats.”  What he fails to mention is that Olsen was a farmer-labor governor and that the merger with the Democrats (supported by the communists) set the stage for the rise of Hubert M. Humphrey, whose prominent political career as a leading labor-Democrat was launched with the purge of many farmer-labor activists who in a previous era had been so crucial to labor’s “success.”

            The way we tell the story of the U.S. labor movement–the accumulated dynamic of struggle, gain, compromise and defeat–matters a great deal and makes a difference as to how we view the present.  In one sense, I can hardly disagree with Michael Kazin’s central point that organized labor must at once organize and remain politically active on the local, national, and legal fronts.  But this position cannot be purchased by soft-pedaling a history of racist opportunism and political compromise that has invariably occurred where the labor bureaucracy has met up with “mainstream” politics.

            Perhaps this is why Kazin’s essay is so disappointing in the end.  He argues that labor must play the old, sullied game of majoritarian politics. Fine.  But he asks very few of the hard questions about what an emphasis on organizing might actually mean in practice.  Organizing implicitly favors radicalism because it demands confronting questions about who is outside the house of labor.  This will not occur through the tepid plea Kazin makes at the end of his piece for “an anticorporate politics that acknowledges race and gender but transcends them” (especially if acknowledgment means that such historic divisions and differentials are believed to no longer really matter).  It will occur only if unions take strong progressive stances on seniority rules, the allocation of organizing resources, leadership, representation, and styles of activism, not to mention the typically divisive social issues of central concern to the majority of workingpeople, including so-called welfare reform, criminal justice, education policy, and affirmative action.

            As a final note, I want to touch briefly on the limits of writing about contemporary trade union politics as if they occur only in the United States, or as if what occurs in the United States is not now decisively shaped by global forces and events. In terms of labor strategy alone it is arguable that the most important contemporary examples of social movement unionism today have emerged in the global South–in places like Bangladesh, South Africa, and Brazil–where many of the (not so) dead traditions of Euro-American organized labor do not weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.  What can be learned from looking beyond Kazin’s “native” history of “American” labor?  Today, more than ever, in a US working-class that is one of the most nationally and ethnically varied classes in history, questions of internal diversity and internationalism are integrally linked. ⁵

            Undoubtedly, my task was easier than Kazin’s .  In sweeping, ambitious fashion he attempted to answer a big question.  I was asked only to critique and respond.  As to the question of what U.S. trade unions should do, I certainly think they can and should do more than what I think Michael Kazin thinks they should do.  At the same time, I might want to ask a different question:  What can labor’s intellectuals and activists do?  What I would suggest is that we work to deepen collective understanding of the value of insurgency in the creation of alternatives–not an alternative “system” but an alternative political culture in which the everyday fights for basic needs continue to evoke the inspiring vision of emancipating labor in all its manifest diversity.

Bio: Nikhil Pal Singh teaches history at the University of Washington, Seattle.  He is the author of Color and Democracy in the American Century, forthcoming from Harvard United Press.

Pull Quotes:

1                    “Why in a moment of the putative resurgence of the official US labor movement would one of its partisans take it upon himself to lower our expectations?” (p.1)

2                    “…Kazin most clearly reveals this lack of vision by basing his argument on the entirely false choice…between revolutionary class struggle and piecemeal pragmatics”. (p.2)

3                    “Kazin rehabilitates Gompers by flattening out the internal dynamic of labor history and substituting platitudes that brook little disagreements.” (p.5)

4                    “The undeniably superior political forces arrayed against organized labor notwithstanding, Kazin nonetheless buries much of the story of how the trade union movement purchased its greatest success…at the price of egregious political comprises…” (p.7)

5                    “Organizing implicitly favors radicalism because it demands confronting questions about who is outside the house of labor.” (p.8)

1. Daniel Bell, “The Capitalism of the Proletariat: A Theory American Trade Unionism,” in The End of  Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1960]), 211–227.

2. Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (New York: Verso, 1997).

3. For a recent, unsparingly critical and comprehensive account of this tradition, see Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (New York: Verso, 1996); Moody, Workers in a Lean World, 156.

5. See Moody, 201–226.