Early’s Provocative Assessment of the U.S. Labor Movement

by Randy Shaw‚ May. 28‚ 2009

Steve Early is known for his strong opinions on the United States labor movement, and his often biting critiques of Andy Stern’s leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But Early’s new book offers an amalgamation of essays and diversity of perspectives that include even strongly pro-SEIU assessments, and even those who disagree with Early’s core premises will benefit from reading his arguments. Embedded with Organized Labor surveys nearly every prominent book written about the U.S. labor movement over the past three decades. Early’s thoughtful, critical, and, yes, often controversial analysis of the labor movement is likely unmatched in any other single volume, and the best part is that he consistently uses labor’s past decisions and strategies as a guide for future action. Whether you share his conclusions or not, Early has given book groups and labor activists a wealth of material to discuss in every chapter, contributing to a much needed debate on the best strategies for building worker power.

During Steve Early’s thirty-year career with the Communication Workers of America, he found time to write over 300 articles on the labor movement. Those familiar with his writings know he has strongly held views, but the essays in this book show Early preferring intellectual and empirical arguments over emotional appeals, and eager to stimulate debate rather than insisting upon agreement.

Labor’s Unfulfilled Agenda

This is a book for those who seek to strengthen the labor movement, and are interested in past and current critiques of how unions have often failed to fulfill their promise. Early shows how critics have long questioned labor unions over internal democracy, ideology, and organizing prowess, and how this criticism increased as labor’s power has declined over the past four decades. Early discusses many of these trenchant critiques, showing a union movement so badly out of step with the times that pro-NAFTA Bill Clinton was elected as the first Democratic President in 16 years without much labor backing.

Early reminds us of how John Sweeney’s ascension to AFL-CIO President in 1995 raised hopes for an invigorated labor movement. He analyzes the basis for such optimism, and why it dissipated as the revitalized labor federation was unable to stop union membership loss, particularly in the private sector. By discussing books written when hopes for Sweeney were highest, Early reminds us of a time that seems far more distant than fourteen years. Early makes a convincing case that Sweeney was never capable of being an inspiring turnaround specialist, and that the dream of rising labor power associated with his presidency was never realistic for many reasons, particularly the AFL-CIO President’s lack of power to require unions to increase organizing.

Change to Win

The next phase of books reflecting rising hopes for labor surrounded the creation of the Change to Win labor federation in 2005. Early was clearly no advocate of Andy Stern’s decision to lead SEIU out of the AFL-CIO, and the recent SEIU-UNITE HERE split and the effective dissolution of Change to Win at least retroactively confirms opponents concerns over the move. I found this section of the book the most thought-provoking, as Early raises a number of questions about the route to building a powerful labor movement that deserve greater discussion.

For example, consider the Andy Stern-Change to Win strategy of bringing in progressive activists from outside the labor movement to run locals. Many saw this move as essential for unions to provide the activist and creative leadership they long lacked. We all knew stories of SEIU and UNITE HERE chapters whose local leadership defied international union policies toward diversity, organizing and progressive change, so the idea of replacing this dead wood with quality leadership appeared quite attractive.

But Early cites a number of SEIU leaders brought in outside the ranks of workers who seemed to have little understanding of how unions operate. He suggests that such outsiders often lack a real connection to the workers they represent, and owe their allegiance less to rank and file workers then to the international officials that appointed them. Early argues:

Too often in labor today, particularly in several high-profile ‘progressive’ unions led by onetime student activists, participatory democracy is missing. Membership mobilization has a top-down, carefully orchestrated character that subverts real rank and file initiative, decision-making, and dynamism.

Early’s criticisms of outside leadership deserve debate. But it is worth noting that until its recent demise, the Change to Win labor federation was far more progressive and activist oriented than the AFL-CIO. While Early claims that there is “little evidence” for Ruth Milkman’s argument in her L.A. Story (which I gave a glowing review) that “CTW unions, with the exception of SEIU and perhaps HERE, have responded more effectively” to the political and economic transformations of the past thirty years, Early undermines his critique by essentially eliminating the two unions that best prove Milkman’s case. And when one considers the always on the defensive and longtime anti-clean air UAW, and recall Tom Buffenbarger, president of the Machinists' union, ridiculing Obama supporters on the night of the Wisconsin primary in 2008 as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies,” its clear there are strong cultural differences between the two federations.

Early also questions the SEIU/Change to Win recruitment of idealistic young college grads as organizers, instead of primarily relying on longtime workers. While many recent college grads became great organizers – like SEIU Local 11’s Eric Brakken, whose role in the successful 2006 University of Miami janitors campaign is discussed in my book, Beyond the Fields, many unions have cutback on college recruitment due to high turnover. Again, one does not have to agree with Early to appreciate his raising the issue for debate.

Labor’s Future

Early ends his book with two previously unpublished chapters, one on the SEIU/NUHW battle in California and the other whose title reflects the author’s clarion call for “Reading, Writing and Union Building.” Early cites a publisher’s warning that authors seeking large audiences should “not write books about and for trade unionists,” as the movement does not “buy and read books that are written for us.” Savvy strategist that he is, Early then goes about trying to convince labor unions to recognize the importance of marketing union-oriented books. He provides detailed instructions on how unions can benefit from marketing labor books, and I wish him the greatest success in this campaign. The self-interest of labor authors aside, Early’s passion for a labor movement that prioritizes union democracy requires the encouragement of rank-and-file reading, and providing workers the skills and education they need to effectively run increasingly complex labor organizations.

If workers are educated in organizing and political strategies, fully understand their contracts, and know the past history of their bargaining unit’s relations with management, then strong and effective leadership will likely emerge from the rank and file. But if workers remain uninformed, uneducated and unskilled in labor strategies and the bargaining process, then outside leadership becomes essential for effective union management.

Although unions should heed Early’s call to invest in books promoting the labor movement – after all, the business community spends enough to ensure books touting corporations become bestsellers – this is unlikely to happen. But Early’s quest speaks to his continued idealism in the face of thirty-years of union decline that could have easily left him cynical about the prospect for the United States ever achieving a progressive labor movement. Early can be a strong critic, but he insists that those seeking union democracy and greater worker power keep hope alive.

Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron, and author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.

Embedded With Organized Labor

Monday 08 June 2009

by: Seth Sandronsky, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
A Detroit mural memorializes major events in the labor movement. (Photo: The Detroit News)

"Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home"

by Steve Early
288 pages
Monthly Review Press, (June 2009)

US labor unions have been and remain in trouble. Hardly a day goes by without new evidence of this. Steve Early was a "participatory" scribe in unions over the past three decades. In "Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home," he strives to help readers make sense of the roads (not) taken by American unions.

His book arrives at a fateful time for the nation's labor force. Workers in and out of unions are on their heels amid the most severe crisis of capitalism since the 1930's. Job losses and pay cuts rule the roost, a trend that began in the private sector. With the deepening recession and fiscal crises of the states and their local governments, wage cuts and layoffs are reaching the public sector. In such trying times for so many, what can a self-defined embedded labor journalist bring to the table? In brief, the answer is a historical context and a critical intellect. Early provides a readable mix of both in six sections, an introduction, epilogue and afterword.

The actions of working people from the previous century informed him and other activists of the 1960's and 1970's. Early begins with looks at some of those trailblazing s/heroes. Take the so-called "factory girls" of Lawrence, Massachusetts, fighting for "bread and roses too" in 1912. Their push for a better quality of life with livable wages resurfaced at a New York City hospital and service workers union in the late 1970's. An essay of Early's, in part on labor activist and author Moe Foner, at the center of this urban union's production of films, musicals and writing courses, is instructive.

Early's race, class and gender articles spotlight these linked oppressions for laboring Americans. He is not afraid of critiquing patriarchy and white supremacy. Silence may be golden sometimes, but it is not an option for Early on such matters. As he notes, citing historian Jacqueline Jones, "the idea that white workers have everything to lose if non-white workers are allowed to make any gains" has weakened the class interests of all who labor for a living.

Early also explores viewpoints of labor activists and historians concerning the "New Voice" AFL-CIO presidency of John Sweeny, who began his term in 1995. Early evaluates differing takes on the significance of this reform from above, a kind of "palace coup." When the rank-and-file are on the margins in reenergizing organized labor, unions' vitality as a social movement suffers. Unions' declining power has worsened the living conditions of the nation's working people, not to be confused with organized labor. Meanwhile, the fraction of the non-union US work force has grown, with the past two years being exceptions that prove this rule.

Private-sector employees' rights to organize have fared poorly since Early began his decades-long career with the Communications Workers of America. This on-the-job experience helps him to critically assess the history of federal labor law. That critique serves as a backdrop to millions of Americans' high hopes under President Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA, facing the fury of corporate America, would ease the big barriers for private-sector workers to join unions and negotiate first-year contracts. This is a must-read section for those seeking to understand present workplace conditions in light of past legal efforts to improve Americans' working lives.

Oh, and capitalism? It has been a global system from the start. Its built-in drive to grow-or-die is a process that means many things. One is that unions must organize locally, nationally and globally. The alternative is to perish. Early's essays challenge conventional thinking on related trends, from US deindustrialization to Mexican immigration. Along the way, he pulls back the veil on the AFL-CIO's coziness with the US government's policy to undermine independent unions abroad. The term AFL-CIA describes the labor organization leadership's choices to be on the side of oppression.

Early nears the book's end with thoughtful and thought-provoking reviews of books about the Service Employees International Union and its 2005 departure from the AFL-CIO with the Change To Win coalition of unions. He explains the whys and wherefores of the flaws in the SEIU/CTW bureaucracy. Briefly, it has been working at cross-purposes to the interests of the rank-and-file. However, this is contested terrain. For instance, Early writes on the SEIU takeover of a large California health care local this January. As political debate over the EFCA enters a crucial stage, this SEIU battle rages on. Tens of thousands of SEIU workers in the state are choosing to jump ship to the new National Union of Healthcare Workers.

In the final pages, Early turns to union-building, with a special focus on readers and writers. How to bring the two together more frequently? Digital media are part of the answer. But don't throw out what has worked before. "It's long past time for progressives in labor to find new methods of encouraging rank-and-file reading or to revive some of the old-fashioned ones." Exactly.

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home by Steve Early

Reviewed by Tom Gallagher

published Demockracy.com, July 10, 2009

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of "Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home," it sometimes seems that Steve Early's new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades. Not quite, but actually the volume's thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that. For instance, there's stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you've likely never heard. But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as "redeployed," is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn't seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn't out on that day Early recalls "In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers ... attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street." The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon. The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nomine e in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. (Some se e payback in McGovern's current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill's components is none other than Meany.)

Still some, like Early, persisted. A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer. (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn't see the labor movement as a collection of "real-life Archie Bu nkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled 'meathead' college kids,0 would even prevail, to a degree, and by "the fall of 1999," Early notes, "steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization."

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney's 1995 election as AFL-CIO president. Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, "Not Your Father's Union Movement," his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterwards the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War. Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early's book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would – reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book's first paragraph: "When I first got involve d the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country's workforce. Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry." Sweeney had assumed the Federation's leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation's largest union. And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney's successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO's membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not. About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared. The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor's decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for. He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar's findings that "union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses" – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain. The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of "Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court's seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement" are not part of political discourse today – "except in the speeches of Ralph Nader."

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early's book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism. "Since 1996," he writes, "when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU local s – or 14 percent of it s 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers." While he grants that "[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms," others just didn't want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the "air of arrogance and exclusivity" emanating from some SEIU staffers or an "attitudinal style ... closer ... to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement" that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU's now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early's book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally. There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do. At the one end are the "colonizers" like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd's "The New Rank and File," who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant. Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, "without the additional task of proselytizing." The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is "SEIU's 'best and brightest'" who come in for Early's criticism because "most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee." Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book's first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then "looked me in the eye and said knowingly, 'Ah, pencil hands.'"

<>And then there's the question of why the labor radicals do what they do. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place. They weren't motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end. For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early's next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement. But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment. And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95