Staughton Lynd:
Yes, well, I don't think anyone listening to you will need to be
reminded that, in past decades, many of the most dedicated social activists in
the country have worked for and with trade unions. Of course, there's an enormous discussion as
well [regarding the question]: "How, then, did the Union Movement become, as
you say, so bureaucratic and top down, to the extent that the percentage of the
labor force now in unions is as low as it was at the time of the First World
War?"
My own answer was
one that was presented to me (quite in contradiction to what Historians and
Radicals and outsiders say about it) by a man who was the first President of
the CIO Union at a very large steel plant, Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana,
on the shore of Lake Michigan, maybe thirty miles from the city of
Chicago. And what John laid out to me,
and this is way back in the late 60s or early 70s, he said: "The problem was
that once the union became the exclusive representative of everyone in the
workforce, and the company took union dues out of the workers' paychecks and
then mailed them to the union hall, you lost the spontaneous, bottom up
character that the Labor Movement, that the CIO originally had."
Instead, you got a
pattern which I believe came from a very top down union officer, namely John L.
Lewis, whereby the Union cut a deal with the employer, gave up the right to
strike for the duration of the collective bargaining agreement, and agreed to a
so-called "Management Prerogatives Clause" that gave the company the right to
make big investment decisions like closing down a steel mill unilaterally. I remember the President of the largest
Steelworkers Local in Youngstown after the mill closed cleaning out his desk
and saying to me, "Here Staughton, you're a historian, you might be interested
in these," and they were typewritten drafts of the very first contract between
US Steel and the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee in the Spring of 1937. Lo and behold, there was a management
prerogatives clause in that very short contract that was almost identical to
the management prerogatives clause in the contract for the same union decades
later.
I believe that
once the company was handed this power - nothing in the law required it - once
the workers were required to surrender their only practical weapon to do
something about it, namely the right to strike, it was all over. Yes, there was McCarthy, yes there was etc.,
etc., etc., but I think the die was cast from the CIO's very beginnings.
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