Labor Suffers From Workers’ Loss of a Voice : Run by professionals, unions are out of touch with the working stiffs who need them.

It will make history if Lane Kirkland finally has to face a contested election to remain head of the AFL-CIO. Leaders of the American Federation of Labor have retired in office and chosen their successors since Samuel Gompers started this undemocratic tradition at the turn of the century. It has always been a practice designed to suffocate debate and keep the hands of union members away from the apparatus of decision-making.

But a contested election is only a tiny step in an era when the labor movement needs deep, profound change in order to survive and grow.

For the first half of this century, unions exerted a much more powerful hold over the thinking of working people than they do today. This is not because of their declining membership. The percentage of working people who are union members reached its peak at the end of the 40s. But during the 1920s, an anti-labor era remarkably similar to our own, that percentage was lower than it is today, and still the call of labor was stronger.

What gave unions their influence? During those five decades, many of them provided an alternative model of egalitarinism and democracy within their own ranks and proposed far-reaching visions of social justice.

The century was ushered in by the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, who provided an alternative to the narrow, craft-based unionism of Gompers and the AF of L. While many craft unions barred women and African Americans from joining, the Wobblies proposed “one big union” for all. They actively sought to organize immigrants and the workers on the bottom of the economic heap, regardless of race or sex. The IWW took internationalism seriously and extended a hand of support to the Flores Magon brothers, who began the Mexican Revolution with the miners’ strike in Cananea, Sonora, in 1907.

Republicans didn’t invent term limits; the wobblies did. They often refused to elect leaders at all, and when they did, kept them at the same level as rank-and-file workers. Unions like the West Coast longshoremen still preserve part of that tradition--locals only allow their full-time officers to run for re-election once before returning to work on the docks.

Unions today are strangled by a huge, expensive, top-heavy bureaucracy, in which members usually feel very distant from their officers and have little decision-making power. Too often, even today’s progressive unions are ones in which professionals run organizations for workers, rather than organizations which workers run themselves. Officials often live a lifestyle which makes it difficult for them to identify with the economic hardships of minimum-wage workers.

The wobblies were destroyed for their opposition to World War I, their best activists imprisoned for calling it a boss’ war in which workers died. The Congress of Industrial Organizations completed the organization of industrial workers. For its first decade, the CIO also involved ordinary workers in decision-making. That won CIO unions a deep loyalty, which people needed in order to endure strikes and sacrifices.

But the loyalty of working people to the wobblies and the CIO was not just based on democratic participation. Workers were inspired by the idea that capitalism itself could be changed. While some workers believed that change could be made within the system, and others argued for replacing it with socialism, they were united by the idea that working people could gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism and discrimination.

That vision of a new and better world made the labor movement stronger.

Since the 1950s, there has been no alternative to the AFL-CIO to provide a different vision of internal democracy and social transformation. Today, progressive union members are looking for it in their own unions. Will they find it in the leaders the AFL-CIO chooses at this fall’s convention?

The times when unions could afford to be led by conciliators and labor statesmen is long gone. That is the kind of leadership Kirkland has provided. There is no crisis of excessive expectations in our labor movement; there is a crisis of diminished expectations. Labor’s vision is not broad and radical enough.

Ordinary working people, be they African American, Latino, white or Asian, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, women or men, young or old--in other words, the tremendous variety of people who are the working stiffs of America--need to look at the leaders of the movement which speaks for them, and see themselves.