Checking the Union Labels (Page 3)

Current attempts at "rebuilding the labor movement...by hiring and training more staff" will, according to Eisenscher, provide only "a patina of activism" and lead ultimately to "staff dependent unions" not much different from the old "service-model" variety. Nevertheless, one hallmark of the new AFL's organizational style is "staffing up" rather than tapping the skills and abilities of rank-and-file volunteers. Not just any staff will do, either. When Amy Dean, a Mort contributor and Central Labor Council leader, was profiled recently in a San Jose newspaper, she boasted to the reporter: "I have the brightest staff in the county! We have a joke that the first week you come to work at the [100,000-member South Bay] Labor Council, you have a nervous breakdown, because you're used to being the youngest and smartest, and here are all these other people who are also used to being the youngest and smartest. You have to figure out who you are and what you're about."

When going to work for a workers' organization has become an experience akin to being a freshman at Harvard, there's definitely something wrong with the "new" organizational culture that's being created to replace the old one. Labor's old guard may have been eased out in some places and its new faces may be more energetic, racially diverse and gender mixed. But if the main movers and shakers are appointed hotshots instead of the people who punch a clock and pay dues, not enough has really changed.

That's why, to a degree greatly downplayed in Mort's book, it is their "fathers' union movement" that workers must still try to change. In fact, some sections of organized labor are in such bad shape under today's leaders that an earlier generation of leadership--whatever its shortcomings--looks good in comparison. One striking example of this is the recently trusteed AFSCME District Council 37, one of the union's largest local bodies. Its mounting corruption scandals have generated almost daily bad ink in the New York Times for months. How many millions of dollars in "repositioning" ads will it take to repair labor's image in New York City, thanks to the ratification-vote fraud and massive dues ripoffs perpetrated under executive director Stanley Hill's reign? In addition to damage control on the PR front, shouldn't some of labor's "best and brightest" be grappling with the question of how large union structures like DC 37 can be made more accountable to the workers they are supposed to serve?

Under former director Victor Gotbaum, DC 37 was once a beehive of activity, with progressive staffers and policy experts like those Dean has recruited, who belonged, as Mort does, to the Democratic Socialists of America. They went to work for the labor movement to do good, did some of that and did well for themselves in the process. But what did they and the elected officials who hired them bequeath to the members? Several decades later in DC 37, it's not a pretty sight. No matter how liberal-minded a union may be in its political endorsements, coalition partners or policy statements, if the members don't have any effective control over the functioning of the organization, particularly its finances, that's a formula for decay and decline--sooner or later.

The contributors to Transformation have, for the most part, been active participants in union cleanup efforts. So they understand this iron law of union organization (and how hard it is "organizing to change" or "changing to organize" within the DC 37s of the world). With a few notable exceptions--newspaper-union activist and columnist Juan Gonzalez among them--Mort's contributors have not had the same personal exposure to the underside of business unionism. Or perhaps their reform impulses have been directed elsewhere. That's why Not Your Father's Union Movement needs to be read together with The Transformation of U.S. Unions to get a more accurate picture of life "inside the AFL-CIO."

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