Victories and new battles for democracy

Two hundred twenty-five registrants came to sessions of the AUD national conference in New York April 7-9. It was not the largest ever; but, in one respect, it was the most impressive. Most were unionists and supporters actively involved in union democracy-related campaigns. Interested sympathizers were there, but most were engaged. Those who were fighting hard battles against the odds told of their ordeals; but this time there were even more reports of encouraging victories.

The conference opened on Friday with seven union democracy success stories, experiences which summed up the whole three-day conference, rich in diversity, involving men, women, whites, African-Americans, rank and filers, seasoned oldtimers and local leaders new to the cause.

That evening, the conferees heard from Larry O’Toole, international president of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, and from Tim Brown, international president of the Masters, Mates and Pilots. They told similar stories of how

these licensed marine officers, after long and bitter reform battles, freed their unions from the control of crooked officials. Then, came a range of reports from professional seafarers to professional musicians.

Lucinda Lewis told how her International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM), beginning in the early 1960’s, won the battle for democracy inside the American Federation of Musicians.

Elinor Levine, young new president of the Coalition of

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In Dissent, spring issue, Katherine Sciacchitano, writing on “Unions, Organizing, and Democracy,” searches for a way to combine effective organizing with educating to “develop and nurture democratic leadership among the new workforce.” Convinced that the two must be linked, she cautions against those who, in the rush to organize with least delay, “don’t give workers a voice in how they are organized.” She is obviously one who knows her subject: former labor lawyer and organizer, now a teacher at the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies; she draws upon an intimate knowledge of two organizing campaigns and perhaps participation in them: the SEIU 1996 campaign against Beverly Enterprises in Philadelphia and a CWA campaign at US Ainvays, both of which she found instructive and encouraging.

“The revitalized AFL-CIO,” she notes, “has set its sight on

nothing short of movement building.” But there are serious contradictions. “Organizing is shaped by what a small group of insiders know and impart rather than by workers exercising power. We end up further from, not closer to, our goal of movement building.” in the haste to win NLRB elections, “certain tasks are postponed: developing rank and file leadership, member education, building the kind of enduring local union organization that can give workers power and change their lives....Where winning is impossible, the union walks away....Workers develop a healthy fear of abandonment.”

We need more than militancy; she says “...the crucial link between union campaigns and movement building is not just militancy.... Movement building requires understanding how learning and organization take place at the bottom....it means paying attention to workers’—not just organizers’—accounts of organizing.”

For insight in reforging the “essential link between an active membership and movement building,” she looks to the distant days of the thirties and the Great Depression: “the upsurge of organizing wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t simply the product of the CIO. Union successes of the 30’s and 40’s were

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No. 130

AUD’s 30th Anniversary conference

Published by the Association for Union Democracy

Participants discuss organizing in a Saturday panel

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