The ‘Labor Boss’ as the Ultimate Bogyman

Are the “labor bosses” back in power? Or at least a new threat to American democracy? Last week, a federal judge disqualified Ron Carey from running again for Teamsters’ president, accusing him of condoning the money-laundering schemes that tainted his narrow victory over James P. Hoffa in the 1996 union election.

Just the week before, “big labor” had played a key role in the defeat of the “fast track” trade bill, over the strenuous opposition of the White House and its newfound allies in the GOP. The latter are not too unhappy, because House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and others are betting that the label “controlled-by-the-labor-bosses” is one with which they can beat the Democrats over the head in the 1998 elections.

To most Americans, and especially those in the chattering classes, Carey’s downfall and the trade-bill uproar just confirm what they think they have known forever: U.S. “labor bosses” can’t be trusted with either the votes or the money of their members. They have too much clout and they’ll use it with ruthless abandon to stay in power and bend public officials to their will.

The irony here is twofold. In spirit and deed, Carey is the most democratic, genuinely reformist leader of the Teamsters in six decades. Backed by a vigorous rank-and-file movement, he has done for the Teamsters what the fall of the Berlin Wall did for Eastern Europe: transform the culture of an entire institution and break the back of an entrenched apparatus that once enjoyed the multiple salaries and feudal deference of a near-hereditary caste. Carey got into trouble not because he was on the take, but because, in last year’s desperate campaign against Hoffa, he put too much money and faith in the hands of the campaign consultants who have played such a corrupting role in other elections.

There’s also a cognitive disconnect in the conventional evaluation of labor’s presumptive clout on the trade bill, which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) calls a “watershed event,” evidence of the “incredible emerging power of labor bosses.” It would be interesting to know where this power comes from: not from PAC contributions, since business outspends labor by a 7-to-1 margin; nor from rising union membership, which is, proportional to the voting population, but one-third the size of 30 years ago, nor in terms of strike activity, which, despite the celebrated victory over United Parcel Service last summer, is at levels not seen since the years before the Great Depression.

But there is something profound driving this recent hysteria over the contemporary visibility of America’s trade-union leadership. The labor movement is finally showing signs of life, and its re-emergence has reopened a deep fissure in the nation’s political culture, a class divide reflected by the extent to which trade unionism and worker solidarity remains for so many politicians and businessmen a fundamentally subversive phenomenon.

Since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, leading men of letters have celebrated America as a society that is formally democratic and individualist, thus rendering the deep class divides that emerged late in the 19th century anomalous. Whatever their immediate self-interest, capitalists and their spokesmen thus have a big ideological problem: How to explain why working women and men need their own institutions of collective struggle. The best way to do so is to deny the legitimacy of their claims by asserting that any conflict between capital and labor, or between right and left, is a product of corruption, bossism or “outside agitation.”

It’s not a new story. Nearly a century ago, the railroad magnate George F. Baer offered a classic rendition of American capital’s enormous conceit when he told striking anthracite miners that they had no need of a union because, “The rights and interests of the laboring men will be protected and cared for--not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.”

American capitalists soon dropped the obnoxious theism and substituted an equally meta-historical faith in market capitalism. Its great enemy was “monopoly unionism,” the term they gave to the labor movement’s historic effort to build solidarity among workers and take wages out of competition.

In the managerial imagination, union leaders move instantly from the status of “outside agitator” to “corrupt labor boss.” There’s no respectful middle ground. Thus, the insurgent leaders of the new industrial unions who emerged during the 1930s and 1940s were transformed overnight into machine politicians. “Union heads meet in oak-paneled rooms,” a Cleveland auto-parts executive revealed to his colleagues. “In these offices are big maps, and through the cigar smoke, union leaders point to them and say, ‘This plant must be organized. That plant must be struck.’ . . . Then, wires crackle all over the United States and edicts go forth to local union officers.”

From the era of Baer onward, conservatives have claimed to be the champions of the rights of workers against autocratic and self-serving union bosses. In the 1950s, the GOP and its Southern allies fought hard to pass state “right-to-work” laws that would encourage individual workers to avoid paying union dues, even if they held a job in a unionized shop. In a verbal battle over this issue, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, who got his political start fighting for an Arizona right-to-work law, denounced United Auto Workers President Walter P. Reuther as “a more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do in America.” Today, the GOP continues this tradition, pushing forward a “Paycheck Protection Act” that would prevent unions from spending a member’s money on any campaign donation without his or her prior approval.

But the Republicans come to this defense of union rights with dirty hands. During the long reign of Teamster bossism and corruption that began with Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, the Republicans were hardly vigilant about the preservation of democratic rights within that union, mainly because the Teamsters shared so many GOP political goals. In the 1950s, Goldwater ignored the corruption charges leveled against Hoffa by the Kennedy brothers, telling the Teamster autocrat that he hoped “your philosophy prevails.” Later, Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush happily accepted Teamster money and endorsements.

But there’s a more significant way that the right’s talk of protecting union members’ “rights” is hypocritical. Trade unions are voluntary associations whose strength lies in their sense of solidarity, on both the picket line and at the ballot box. If one favors democracy within these institutions, that means the majority of union members must have the capacity to impose their will on the minority, to make sure strikes are solid, dues are paid and to agitate and educate unionists, as well as the public, to their political perspective. Anti-union businessmen and politicians hate this kind of democracy, so they ceaselessly push only those rights that will undermine it: the “right” to break a picket line, accept lower wages or avoid union dues.

But a vigorous, growing union movement is by far the most efficacious defender of our civil and political rights, because it promises to give working people a voice at the very seat of corporate power, where deference and pecuniary ambition dominate. As the Progressive-era reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd put it, the mission of the labor movement is to build an “industrial democracy . . . to extend into industry the brotherhood already recognized in politics and religion, and to teach men as workers the love and equality which they profess as citizens and worshipers.”

Lloyd and other turn-of-the-century reformers thought American democracy itself in peril unless corporate power faced a restraining hand from the unions. They were right, which is one reason why contemporary U.S. politics has assumed such a tawdry and sullen character.

Into this vacuum, the tough-guy authoritarianism of such faux reformers as Ross Perot, Patrick J. Buchanan and, in a union context, Hoffa, generates such wide support. Hoffa, although he may be disqualified for his own fund-raising illegalities, trades on his father’s name in an appeal to those looking not for a democratic mobilization of the union rank and file, but for a maximum leader who will do their thinking and fighting and for them.

This is why Carey’s expulsion is such a tragedy. Whatever his transgressions, the political penalty is being paid by those who have been the most steadfast democrats and the true advocates of union rights for working Teamsters. They need to find a new standard bearer around whom to rally, who can make clear to all Americans that union militancy, worker rights and democratic leadership are not mutually exclusive categories.*