The Problem with Labor

Labor leader Leo Gerard recently wrote an article, The Untold Story of Trump’s ‘Booming’ Economy, that circulated widely on the Internet. Gerard is the President of the United Steel Workers of America, an industrial union once a leading force in the pre-Cold War, center-left CIO, the last major expression of labor militancy in the US.

In many ways, Gerard’s article is a notable compendium of indicators that track the status of US working people over the last half century. His essay lists many telling facts and figures that document the economic decline of the millions who constitute the working majority of the population.

Gerard shows that workers labor longer and make less with fewer perks and greater insecurity. They are stressed, unhealthy, and commanding fewer rights. At the same time, the wealthy are growing more prosperous. In a word, one that Gerard cannot seem to find in his vocabulary, workers suffer growing “exploitation.”

Certainly, President Gerard’s “untold” story has been told many times before. But as a concise, authoritative chronicler of the dire straits of most working people, Gerard may be without peer. However, as a leader of the struggles of working people, Gerard is without answers.

Just as he cannot utter the word “exploitation,” the Steelworkers President cannot pronounce the word “capitalism.” The enemies of the people are, in his words, “...the system: the Supreme Court, the Congress, the president... [I]t is the system, the American system, that has conspired to crush them [workers].”

But Gerard does not mean to indict the system as an institution, as an institution corrupted, and chronically aligned against workers. He does not charge that corporations, capital, or capitalism own these institutions.

Rather, he means that a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, and a Republican President have conspired to keep the workers down.

Of course, this flies in the face of the history of the last five decades that has seen Democratic Congresses and Democratic Presidents join the cause of eviscerating the social gains and material conditions of US workers.

To acknowledge this fact would require Gerard to look beyond the Republican Party as arch villain and recognize that the Democratic Party also contributes to the anti-worker trend. He would need to challenge the facile, deceptive Democratic Party claim of partisanship for the cause of labor. This he cannot do.

Instead, it’s the fault of the right-wingers. If only we could return to a non-existent age when institutions were friendly to labor. “Just like the administration and the Supreme Court, right-wingers in Congress grovel before corporations and the rich,” Gerard exclaims.

It’s hard to square Gerard’s disdain for corporations with the fact that USW recently mobilized busloads to defend the US Steel Corporation against indignant citizens facing life-threatening pollution. When the corporation’s pollution-control equipment was damaged in a fire, allowing dangerous pollution to spew forth in the environs of the company’s Clairton works, Gerard’s union brought counter-demonstrators to confront the angry neighbors forced to choke on the pollutants. Indeed, the union has sought partnership over confrontation since it surrendered to Cold War imperatives.

The union also joined “right-wingers” in the Trump administration to defend corporate interests in last year’s tariff battles. They unhesitatingly joined steel corporations in their racist attacks on Chinese competition and, before that, competition with Japanese steel makers. So much for “grovel[ing] before corporations.”

Nowhere in his essay does Gerard mention the role of workers’ solidarity, union militancy, or activism in defending the gains of workers. Nowhere does he mention the workers’ greatest weapon against corporate power and for improving their conditions, the strike. Nowhere does he address the responsibility of union leaders to rally workers and their friends and neighbors to directly confront corporate power in the workplace and in communities, as well as in the courts and in the election booths.

After the Cold War purge of the left in the labor movement, labor leaders-- sanitized of the militancy and partisanship that Communists and Socialists brought to the movement-- made an unholy pact with capital. They traded class confrontation, international solidarity, and democratic demands for class collaboration, international betrayal, and a junior corporate partnership. As the Cold War drew to a close, capital discarded the partnership and mounted an unbridled offensive against workers. With a complacent union leadership, allergic to confronting their corporate “partners” and with no taste for a fight, the result was the rout that Gerard documents so well.

Of course it didn’t have to go this way. To imagine a different outcome one only has to study the history of the old left-led industrial unions of the CIO. When the USW, the ILWU, the UE, the UAW, the UMW, and the other CIO unions embraced class struggle unionism, they organized millions, energized their members, mounted relentless assaults on their employers, and won unprecedented gains. That history is ably recounted in the still eminently relevant, Labor’s Untold Story.

When Trump is gone, capital and rapacious corporations will remain. The promise of change will be hollow if unions fail to return to the fighting legacy of their forebears. That is the “untold” story that union leaders need to embrace.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Labor’s Betrayal

 THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN MARXISM-LENINISM TODAY (6-3-18)

“Nor can I understand how men who aspire to the leadership of labor are able to sacrifice labor’s interests in favor of the Democratic Party. I cannot understand men to whom a visit to the White House is more important than getting the workers out of the dog house.” Wyndham Mortimer
 
At a time when ex-FBI chief James Comey’s self-serving, self-righteous book becomes a bestseller, in a season when ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the enthusiastic apologist for genocide against Iraqi children, joins Comey on the bestseller list with a preposterous lecture on fascism, it may well be time to retreat to the library.

I found some solace and much enlightenment from a dusty, cobweb infested paperback in a corner of a basement book self. I had read Organize! some years ago, maybe forty or more years ago. Published posthumously by the author’s daughter and a colleague, the book is a memoir of one of the US working class’s most valuable leaders-- Wyndham Mortimer-- at one of labor’s most important junctures.

The first time that I read Organize! In the 1970s, I thought it another chapter in the rich legacy of US labor militancy, one of many engaging stories of the militant roots of the then powerful institutional US labor movement.

Reading the book today, I am struck by the foretelling of the labor movement’s decline, the causes of the decline, and its source in misleadership. Light is shown on the devastating effects of anti-Communism and opportunism in the US labor movement. The sad, pathetic state of the labor movement today brings the accomplishments of Mortimer and his comrades into even sharper relief than it did forty years ago.

Who was Wyndham Mortimer?

Wyndham Mortimer was the son of an expatriate English/Welsh family that settled in Central Pennsylvania coal country. Like many coal-patch youth, Mortimer went to work in the mines at age twelve. He later worked in a steel mill, on the railroad, as a street car conductor, and finally at the White Motor Company in Cleveland. Throughout his working years, he had both a deep understanding of the exploitation of working people and a burning desire to remove that burden. His experience and study took him from the United Mine Workers, to the Socialist Party, to the Industrial Workers of the World, and finally to the Communist Party, a logical journey that equipped him to lead the fight to win the organization of industrial workers.

He learned from his railroad experience that not all forms of unionism were the same. The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen (BRT), for example, preached the philosophy of “identity of interest” between workers and capital. He confronted the Grand President of the Brotherhood with the question: “You tell us the interests of the company and us workers are identical. What then is the reason for this union we call the BRT? Why don’t we join the same organization as the [railroad] carriers?”

The same question could be asked today of most AFL-CIO union presidents who advocate class collaboration or labor-management cooperation: Why do you need a union if the capitalists and the workers share common interests?

Mortimer garnered another valuable lesson from the encounter. Grand President Lee shouted back: “You are a socialist!”

“And I found out quite early that any time any organization or any individual spoke up in favor of the working people, they were immediately labeled [socialist or] Communist-- even though they might not have known the difference between Communism and rheumatism!”

And the old craft-union AFL was soon recognized to be no friend of the industrial worker, placing every obstacle in front of Mortimer’s organizing efforts in the auto industry. In the summer of 1932, Mortimer and his fellow workers approached the Cleveland Federation of Labor for help in organizing White Motors. CFL executive secretary, Harry McLaughlin dismissed the request: “Why, no one can organize that bunch of hunkies out there.” Unfortunately, this kind of craft-union insularity and elitism still infects too many of the trades.

At the famous 1935 AFL Convention, Mortimer stood by John L. Lewis when he raised the question of industrial-union organization. Apart from the celebrated punch-out of Carpenters’ union president, Bill Hutcheson, Lewis and his allies organized a challenge to the vice-presidency of the reactionary, vocal exponent of “identity of interest,” Matthew Wohl. Though they failed to defeat Wohl, they signaled that class-struggle unionism was on the industrial-union organizing agenda. The Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was born from these encounters.

                             Organizing the Unorganized

It should be an embarrassment to present-day trade union functionaries, who have overseen the decline of trade union membership, when Mortimer becomes almost apologetic that workers of his era were so accepting of their fate: “To those who marvel at the docility of a working force that could accept this kind of insanity, let me explain the conditions existing at the time. Unemployment was widespread… Men were kept in a state of fear, workers were fired on the slightest pretext, or for no reason at all… In the absence of a union, some workers became sycophants and stool pigeons… So great was the fear of losing the precious job that men would even work through their lunch periods.” And yet skillful and dedicated leaders were able to overcome these obstacles to build the most powerful, militant movement in the history of US labor.

Today, labor “theorists” and their Democratic Party colleagues decry the backwardness of the workforce, blaming the sorry state of labor on the workers themselves. They fail to correct the growing sentiment that workers are “deplorables”-- uneducated, bigoted, and uncultured.

It takes Wyndham Mortimer to remind us that workers, like everyone else, are subjected to the worse prejudices, baseless rumors, and crackpot thinking that popular culture can conjure. Prior to the great organizational drive, “Fisher #1 [General Motors plant] employed about eight thousand workers in 1936. The Black Legion boasted a membership of three thousand in the plant at that time. Its membership was composed exclusively of white, protestant, gentile, native-born individuals. This fascist outfit was another powerful obstacle put in the path of the union… This group did not stop at murder if it served their ends. A number of union organizers had, in past years, been found shot. A bullet would be left on their chests and applications for membership in the union were found scattered about.”

Nevertheless, by the end of the year, the workers at Fisher #1 were at the center of what was one of the most militant labor actions in US history, an action that firmly planted the foundation of the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW) and gave impetus to the explosive growth of the CIO-- the General Motors sit-down strike.

And Wyndham Mortimer, along with Robert Travis, were the lead organizers of that action. In the words of Mortimer’s colleague, Leo Fenster, “Nothing that the UAW had done before, nothing that it has done since, had that kind of impact on events. The UAW has since, to a considerable extent, taken care of many of the problems of its members. But it has done so within the routine of the status quo… But this was the one occasion when the status quo was wrenched loose from those who would cling to it, when the establishment was yanked from its moorings, when the sacred, inviolable, indispensable open shop was turned into its opposite-- the union shop.”

A former UAW leader and Communist, Fenster did not live long enough to see the UAW’s full retreat from even the “routine of the status quo,” but he correctly understood the dramatic achievements of 1936-37.

For the first time, US workers en masse refused to accept the sanctity of property rights by refusing to leave the plants “owned” by US corporations.

US Workers overcame the differences of race and national origin to empower their class, a victory that led to the CIO becoming the most integrated institution in US society (second only to the Communist Party).

The notion that the boss could fire workers at will was defeated in the first CIO contracts, along with many of the other privileges claimed by management.

Mortimer and other Communists’ success and popularity in building the UAW did not go unnoticed by the more conservative elements of the leadership. The year after the settling of the Flint sit-down strike, the reactionary UAW president (Mortimer was first vice president) attempted to expel the most militant leaders of the union on the ludicrous charge of delivering the union to the Communists. Of course the attempt failed and was repudiated at the next UAW Convention.

Nonetheless, anti-Communism, careerist intrigue, false “leftism,” and Democratic Party influence combined to marginalize Mortimer’s influence and leadership. Like most CIO Communists, his continuing commitment to strengthening the hand of the workers and weakening the power of capital stood in the way of the center-right forces who sought to consolidate personal power and distance themselves from the rank-and-file. Despite his retirement in 1945, Mortimer continued to reflect and write on the labor movement.

                            Reflections on Labor’s Direction

● The modern-day wedding of the Democratic Party and the labor movement began with the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal. Despite the cult-like admiration of workers toward Roosevelt, especially encouraged by the more conservative elements of the labor leadership, Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of labor were greatly exaggerated. Little was accomplished without a firm and insistent push (threat?) from the left. In Mortimer’s words: “I have dealt with President Roosevelt only because millions of American workers regard him as labor’s friend. Certainly destroying food and plowing little pigs underground was not the work of a friend when hunger was widespread in the land. We should understand that ‘friends’ of ours are not found among millionaires.” Were he alive today, Mortimer would thus find no “friends” of labor in Congress.

● “The time has come to convince the workers and common people of America that we must produce wealth to use and not to make people rich. I am well aware of the fact that we in America have been brainwashed and intimidated until such words as peace and socialism are never mentioned in polite society. But these two words must be heard loudly and constantly.”

● In January of 1950, Mortimer wrote an open letter to the CIO urging affirmative action to bring African American participation into the all-white leadership: “If the present leadership is sincere in its claims of opposition to Jim Crow, a most convincing way to demonstrate its conviction would be to do something about demolishing discrimination inside the unions. It is not an accident that the two largest unions in CIO, the UAW and USA [Steelworkers], with several hundred thousand Negro members in their ranks, do not have ONE Negro in any elective post. The Negro membership is not represented because, in my opinion, the present leadership does not want them represented.” The first Black elected to the UAW International Executive Board was Nelson Jack Edwards in 1964, a shameful delay abetted by the McCarthy-era purging of Communist and left-wing leaders from the CIO.

● Mortimer foresaw the abandonment of rank-and-file activism and its replacement with legal and financial maneuvers. He attacked the UAW’s $25 million strike fund when the union had a no-strike contract: “No ‘defense fund,’ however big, has ever won a battle between capital and labor, for the very good reason that the class struggle is not fought with money. If money were the deciding factor, then our fight would be hopeless… The UAW was built and won its right to live without any money. The great struggles of 1936, 1937, and 1938 were won because the American working class supported us, and any future struggles will be won in the same way… Trying to match monopoly capitalism’s bank balance is the greatest piece of hypocrisy, and the most dangerous delusion that any fast-talking phony labor statesman ever put over on the rank and file.” (1951)

● By 1950, Mortimer exposed the secretive, treacherous collaboration between US Cold Warriors and the leadership of the labor movement. He named the names of labor functionaries who enjoyed lucrative salaries to help undermine labor militancy in Europe and Asia. He traces this to the “...Foreign Service Act of 1946. This act provides, among other things, for two categories of ‘Labor Advisors’... The list of ‘Labor Advisors’ is too long for this letter, but they infest Europe and Asia like an army of locusts, spending their time and our money trying to weaken and destroy the organized labor movements…” This sordid activity morphed into the insidious AIFLD and exists with many bogus “solidarity” actions of the US labor movement today.

● While many leftists, even Communists, were seduced by the social democratic “road” to socialism in the 1950s, Mortimer stands out as a clear-headed, unmoved advocate of revolutionary socialism. In a 1949 response to an article lauding British “socialism,” Mortimer responded sharply:

You say, “British socialism is not abhorrent to UAW members.” Again, you say, “Most UAW members believe in a future non-Marxist world that includes privately owned corporations, paced by cooperatively owned activities and government-owned authorities-- the so-called mixed economy, like Sweden, like Britain, but with the UAW and Roosevelt and Senator Norris [a New Deal icon] added.

Now isn’t that a precious piece of nonsense?

I would remind you that surplus value would be perfectly safe with either Roosevelt or Norris. Their crime, in the eyes of monopoly, was that they saved capitalism from itself....

The British coal baron who formerly held a million pounds in coal securities [before nationalization], is now the holder of a million pounds in government bonds upon which he is guaranteed six per cent. Is this what you call a “middle” economy?

For my part, I am waiting to see what the [UK] social democratic government will do in the present economic crisis. Will it drop its policy of gradualism, and tackle the emergency on socialist lines? Or will it drop all thought of socialism in order to reassure Wall Street, thereby getting another billion dollars and a breathing spell? My guess is that it will forget the working class. It will seek to transmute the gold of working class militancy into the lead of passivity and subservience [Labour began a retreat and was pushed out of power in 1951].

Social democrats in general show a touching faith in the infallibility of capitalism-- a faith not shared by the more shrewd and clear-sighted capitalists themselves.

● Today’s trade union movement bears the deep scars of the purges of hundreds, of thousands of Communists like Wyndham Mortimer, Communist-sympathizers, and militants from the labor movement. By driving the most visionary, most uncompromising, and most dedicated fighters from the organizations that they were essential in building, the labor movement was destined for a decline that is today on the verge of restoring the open shop (80 years after labor’s victory over the open shop). With a Supreme Court decision looming, a decision that will likely make the open shop the fate of public workers in every state (It is already legislatively established for public workers in 28 states), how does the labor movement meet this attack?

With dollars spent on lawyers and lobbyists. And today, at the last minute, with text messages, phone calls, and letters begging members to commit to future dues payment!

On May 30, my local paper carried an advertisement sponsored by the AFL-CIO, between ads for a mattress sale and weight loss solutions, appealing for workers to visit the Internet and join a union. An impressive response to a life-or-death challenge!

Mortimer saw it coming in the midst of the 1950s purges. Writing in 1951:

[The treacherous, anti-Communist union leadership] plan to make the American labor movement the staunch ally of monopoly capitalism in its war against the exploited and poverty stricken peoples of the world. And here at home, their witchhunting, disrupting, and raiding of other unions, is treason to the working class…

They eagerly enlisted in monopoly’s army set out to cripple the unity and solidarity of the world’s working people… and their job is to disrupt, confuse, and, if possible, destroy the labor unions of those countries.

They have scuttled the once powerful CIO. They have assassinated the greatest hope American labor ever had, and have dealt the working men and women of America a cowardly blow from which they will not recover for many a long day.

A blow from which they have yet to recover.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Many thanks to Roger Keeran who encouraged me to write about Wyndham Mortimer. His book The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions  is a classic on the subject.

Labor at the Crossroads?

Does the labor movement in the US have a pulse? Given the unrelenting drop in union density (the percentage of workers organized into unions), many have concluded that labor is in decline both as an effective weapon for workers and as a social force in US politics.

It is easy to forget that some of the largest industrial unions arose from small, but determined organizing committees that faced brutal company resistance. Despite these obstacles, they grew into powerful forces shaping the political and social agenda both in industrial cities and on the national scene within little more than a decade. Unions birthed by the modest Committee for Industrial Organization in the mid-1930s sprung into powerful instruments for social change. It was a long standing tenet of labor advocacy that workers could not be organized and gains made during a period of high unemployment and diminished profits. And yet some of the US’s most militant unions came into being and won in the throes of the Great Depression. In the period immediately after World War II, labor was often the decisive factor in approving and electing officials, largely through its pervasive influence on the Democratic Party.

Today, the labor movement remains yet the most resource-laden, influential element in a progressive movement itself relatively powerless and adrift owing to the failing strength and near-dormant militancy of labor.

The United Autoworkers Union (UAW), one of the pillars of the industrial union movement of the 1930s, dramatically reflects this failing. Autoworkers today at one of Detroit's big-three auto companies can start at a wage as low as $14 an hour, an hourly rate conceded in 2007. At that time, the UAW agreed to a two-tier wage and benefit system that left new employees with roughly half of the package earned by existing workers. Today, over 30,000 UAW big-three employees are stuck in low wage hell (tier 2) out of a unionized work force of roughly 80,000 unionized employees (Bloomberg Businessweek). At Chrysler, a new hire makes a bit more ($15.78/hour), but more than half the workers are stuck at tier 2. At the same time, Bloomberg reports that Chrysler earned an adjusted net profit of $2.4 billion in 2014 and GM and Ford are expected to earn $7 billion and $6 billion this year, respectively. Profits are robust, but wages are dismal.

But matters are even worse with the UAW-represented auto parts companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, new hires at American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc make as little as $10/hour, reportedly comparable to what a local Wal-Mart pays in Three Rivers, Michigan. It is not uncommon for UAW workers at parts manufacturers to make in the $11-12/hour range.

In the last decade, the average hourly wage for parts-manufacture workers was down 23%; the average hourly wage for auto-manufacture workers was down 22%.

For the most part, UAW workers' compensation is on a par or little better than non-union auto workers in the US.

Given this bleak recounting of the UAW's failure to deliver for workers, two questions rush to mind:

1. How did a once militant, democratic, independent, and socially engaged union-- a model of class awareness and struggle-- reach a point where it can deliver a contract leaving workers with little more income than workers at the local Wal-Mart?

2. How will such a union maintain and grow in size and influence if it can promise to achieve no more than declining wages and benefits and parity with non-union shops?

For those of us who see a strong, fighting labor movement as necessary for developing any kind of vibrant and effective progressive movement, answering these questions is unpleasant, but essential.

The decline of militancy began with the purges, the legal restraint, and the raiding of the most powerful industrial unions, a blow inflicted in the early Cold War. And the UAW was at the cutting edge of class collaboration, redbaiting, and the expulsion and raiding of militant unions, beginning with the election of the social-democrat, Walter Reuther as president in 1946.

The vanguard of the trade union movement lost its most militant, class-conscious leaders to anti-Communist inquisitions, at the same time it was battered by the constraints of Taft-Hartley legislation, and met corporate power with a fragmented movement.

In its place, a careerist, bureaucratic leadership faced the future with an historic compromise: a Cold War compact that traded labor peace and support of imperialism for wage and benefit increases roughly commensurate with the rise in productivity. The US ruling class gladly conceded this policy in order to receive US labor's blessings in its brutal assault on class-oriented workers' organizations throughout the rest of the world. The crass, opportunistic labor leaders guiding much of organized labor enthusiastically retired the strike weapon and replaced it with a lame notion of “bargaining” that appropriately fit the naive embrace of labor-management collaboration. Accordingly, be-suited labor negotiators sat across tables from be-suited corporate negotiators in a friendly ritual of trading minor concessions and counter-concessions.

Into the last quarter of the twentieth century, US corporations faced dramatic challenges to profitability. Unsuccessful military adventures and rampant inflation from profligate military spending and competition from lower wage rivals employing cutting-edge technologies drove the ruling class to sever its unspoken deal with US labor leaders. The rulers unilaterally reneged on their commitment to “sharing” the fruits of labor. Instead, they launched an all-out war on labor while insisting that labor must surrender its previous gains to improve US competitiveness. Even today, few labor leaders will acknowledge that they have been betrayed by their former partners. With no imagination, no ideology, US labor leaders continue to plead with their “partners” for some accommodation, some willingness to return to benign bargaining.

The excellent labor historian, Roger Keeran, explains this development in the UAW as follows:

The peak of the red-baiting assault on labor occurred in 1947 with Taft-Hartley and the 1948-49 CIO expulsion of the so-called red unions.   So, what happened between then and the first significant concessions by the UAW at the bargaining table in the 1980s? Of course the losses of the Cold War expulsions and anticommunism was the main explanation, but there were a couple of other things.  For nearly 30 years, the Big Three did not face serious competition, and thus could raise wages and increase benefits by passing the cost to consumers.  This changed with the rise of competition from Japanese and European auto makers, who by the late 70s had rebuilt their factories devastated by World War II and were beginning to make inroads in the American market.  Secondly, for years the UAW and others were able to live on the reputation and the gains produced by the militant years. But the earlier militants, even the non-Communist ones, were eventually superseded by leaders with no experience and no stomach for struggle.  For awhile, these leaders were able to pull some rabbits out of hats by trading previous gains in some areas for small wage gains.  

Soon they ran out of hats.

Many commentators acknowledge this one-sided class war, but few place its cause in the sell-out of class struggle prompted by Cold War perfidy.

The Other Side of the Coin

The class collaboration spawned by the McCarthyite purges created another toxic byproduct: the unrequited fealty of the labor movement to the Democratic Party. Before the purges, the left core of industrial unionism had a close, but critical relationship with the Democratic Party. The new born industrial unions played a large role in revitalizing the Democratic Party in urban areas, providing the troops and organization for Democrats to return to power given an opportunity afforded under the banner of the New Deal. To some extent, New Deal Democrats recognized the debt owed to organized labor and very often responded with a generally pro-labor agenda.

But with the ruling class betrayal of the unspoken post-war pact came a similar betrayal of labor on the part of the Democratic Party. By the election of Barack Obama only a handful in the Democratic Party leadership carried forward the New Deal perspective. Nor does the Party pay more than lip service to labor and its agenda.

Yet top labor leaders continue the charade of a partnership with capital and the Democratic Party. They defend the imperative of corporate “competitiveness” by generously sacrificing the membership's wages and benefits; they donate millions of the membership's collective resources to re-elect Democrats who scorn labor's needs.

We desperately need a fighting union movement, larger and more militant than what we have inherited. Clearly the “partnerships” that have been fostered only result in a toothless, shrinking, and aimless movement. Without a new direction, there will be no need for a union like the UAW that can promise workers no more than what comparable workers make in the non-union sector, that forge no radical alliances, that provide no independent leadership, that offer no hope for real change.

But history shows that there are alternatives. The history of the UAW, the CIO and its predecessors show what a few dedicated organizers and leaders can accomplish. And history shows what a militant, class-conscious, class-partisan union movement can mean to the fight for change.

Many thanks to Roger Keeran for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com