The Kind of Union Leader I Can Get Behind
What is your vision of a 1970s union leader? Lane Kirkland and his lame leadership of the AFL-CIO? Jimmy Hoffa? A bunch of old men in suits?
One could hardly blame you if you had that in your mind. Every narrative tells us unions were moribund and bloated by the 70s. They all sold out or cared nothing but getting a little more in the pension plan for their members. They were ripe to be crushed by Republicans in the 80s, unwilling to put up a fight.
There is some truth to this to be sure, but it’s also a stereotype. There were some unions ready to throw major punches at the Republicans. And they provide some interesting lessons.
I’ve spent the last 3 weeks researching in the archives of the International Woodworkers of America for my book. It has been a very interesting time. I will be writing a series of posts over the next week or so on my impressions of this union, and unionism in general, based upon my time exploring this largely forgotten organization in depth.
I’ll start with this: whatever your idea of a 70s union leader is, it’s not IWA president Keith Johnson. Below is a small chunk from his address to the Thirty-First Constitutional Convention of the IWA in 1979. Keep in mind that this speech is not for the general public, but for the union leaders and the elected representatives of the locals attending the convention. So he didn’t necessarily have a strong reason to sugarcoat anything. Anyway, here is a bit from his talk:
“Let’s face it, profit is money and money is capital and people who control capital are capitalists.
Capitalists do not care if workers are crippled by unsafe plant environments.
Capitalists do not care if workers are thrown out of their jobs by log exports or antiquated equipment.
Capitalists do not care if the parents of workers must rot with untreated disease, or the children of workers die at birth.
Capitalists do not care if major groups of citizens are discriminated against at work or in the community.
Capitalists certainly do not care if union organizers are run out of town.
These are harsh words but they are conclusions compelled by the facts.”
Damn right.
Wait, didn’t the CIO kick all this crazy radical stuff out in the 50s? Well, yes, but some of the unions retained their radical tinge and in the 70s it resurfaced. The IWA is one of those unions. Talk about some honest words about the evil of capitalism. And it wasn’t just in 1979. Here’s a snippet from the 1982 convention:
“Who would have believed that the United States would again plunge into reckless adventurism in the Caribbean to protect the imperialist capitalists that have exploited those peoples for a century, a few short years after similar escapades in southeast Asia proved disastrous. Yet such an effort is escalating today, and is part and parcel of the world war by the capitalists against the people. I honestly do not know which is worse: the militarism of Reagan’s Secretary of State Haig or the gutlessness of Trudeau’s Secretary of State MacGuigan in this sorry spectacle.”
The IWA had Canadian locals, which explains the slam on Trudeau’s administration. But Johnson’s words would have hardly been out of place at a radical leftist convention. Now, the IWA did not necessarily work with hard-core leftist groups in these years, for reasons both cultural and structural. And it was getting absolutely destroyed by the timber industry collapsing around it. Which is why you’ve probably never heard of it. But here was a union leader ready to go 1930s-style at the conservatives. Keith Johnson should remind us both that our stereotypes of union leaders may in fact be caricatures and that unions, even as late as the 1980s, told truth to power in ways we can learn from today.
I don’t suppose Keith Johnson’s rhetoric would be very popular with the neoliberals and Democratic centrists of the world in 2012. But he stood up for working-class people, and not just white dudes either. He placed his union at the forefront of labor’s push for gender equality and affirmative action in the workplace. As one example, he ordered the use of gender specific language in union publications to end. And his words speak a lot of truth today. I’m actually not sure if Johnson is still alive today; I haven’t yet been able to find that out. He’d be pretty dang old if so. But he speaks through the 30 years to the Occupy generation. There’s so much we can learn from past union leaders, even the relatively recent past. Unions like the IWA may have had their issues, but they challenged capitalists to their faces. And we are less for not having them around today.
He was alive two years ago, because he did some oral history interviews re:
Interesting. All of this post-1935 stuff is entirely new to my work. My dissertation stopped then. It sounds like these are not the questions I would have asked, but I will have to go to Portland and listen to this. Not to mention figure out where he is living and try to contact him. Since you found this out so quickly, you want to find out where he lives too? I could always use free research assistance!
That would be a busman’s holiday, since I’ve been trying to make a living doing just that for 10 years now. ;)
I have looked a little further with no luck. Maybe the recordings have an introduction to him which tells where he was living at the time. He was born in 1930, if the WorldCat page is correct.
Yeah, I spent the last 15 minutes looking and didn’t find anything either. I won’t get to Portland until the summer, hopefully he is healthy.
Hello. Keith is still very much alive and could take on many of todays malfunctions. His health has deteriorated. I visited him last week at his home in Portland. Unfortunatly he’s bed ridden but his mind still works.
The Knight Library at the U of Oregon in Eugene has a lot of material about the IWA cataloged under something called The Labor Project. It includes “Correspondence, Reports, Internal Records, Photographs, Videotape, Legal Records.”
Have you read Jefferson Cowie’s new book? Because he lists a bunch of new kinds of labor leaders in the 1970s – Ed Sadlowski, Jock Yablonski, etc. Although Cesar Chavez is a problematic figure, he’s got to be there too.
Also, even though he died in 1970, I’ll still wave the flag for Walter Reuther.
It’s at the top of my reading list but since I almost never read anything not directly related to my book or a class, who knows when I will get to it.
I suspect that mainstream economic talk…you know, over the pickle barrel?…is headed back in this direction, altho I doubt we’ll see this kind of rhetoric.
He has a point: capitalism as practiced in America particularly is not about people, but about profits. Indeed, the really curious ideal of capitalism is a Marxist for-profit organization, where the workers own the means of production and run the business and everyone gets a say in what happens and a share of the results (good or bad).
That, I think, it was Smith had in mind: not that one entrepreneur would provide capital and then sit back and sweat his workers, but that the entrepreneur would be engaged in the business right alongside his workers, taking personal responsibility for the results, and taking the blame as well as the credit.
Woo yay for traditional leftist rhetoric! Woo yay for its consistent record over almost two centuries of achieving total domination over the forces of capitalism, as their battered standard-bearers slink away from the field of the social struggle to lurk as mere outdated dogmatists in the dusty halls of academic obscurity!
Oh, er, wait a minute, let me check…
*ahem* Keep trying folks! You never know…
You’re right, resistance is pointless.
Get back into your fields and mines and workshops, peasants. Those 18-hour days 6 days a week won’t work themselves.
I’m reading this while my newborn sleeps in the next room, because my wife and I are on family leave. Neither of us have unionized workplaces, but we know on whose shoulders we stand, regardless of the ignorance of others.
Back in the 1990s, I used to be in UE, and like IWA, they were booted from AFL-CIO for being too radical. As I recall, UE’s politics was pretty far left on the mainstream liberal spectrum. Not sure about now, but a cursory glance at their website shows at least somewhat of a left, international perspective.
Unfortunately, I think the right’s narrative about organized labor has become the internalized conventional view of unions, even among many on the left. Also, most people’s only interactions with union members (that they are aware of) is at the DMV or the post office, or now the TSA, and they see crappy customer service from disinterested petty bureaucrats and that reinforces all the negative shit they hear. Of course, then when they’re trashing the PO, and talkig about how awsome UPS is, they don’t realize UPS is Teamsters (and they don’t know shit about how the PO actually operates). Anyway, when there’s some shit like in Wisconsin or Indiana, people think “Unions are lazy and corrupt and I don’t get to have a union looking out for me so fuck those guys.” And there’s a racial thing to it, especially with regard to public unions.
And for people in unions, particularly educated people (I think), there’s some ambivalence. A couple of my friends who work in tv are in unions and they see it as necessary evil for getting health insurance and better paying gigs. My experience in UE was mixed too. The leadership, which had super-seniority, was close to management and I felt like they made concessions that hit people without seniority hard, because they were totally insulated from the immediate consequences. That said, I’m still pro-union. When people talk shit about unions I tell them two things: 1. Every workplace protection and benefit they enjoy, they have because union members fought and sometimes died to get them; and 2. Unions only exist because of shitty management; actually treat workers fairly, equitably, you wouldn’t see any unions.
The IWA was not kicked out of the CIO, though they did have to purge the communist organizers, which nearly destroyed the union in 1948.
So noted. Likewise, the UE withdrew from the CIO which set up IUE to draw workers away from UE. Not sure, but the withdrawal may have been under pressure.
My grandfather was a IWA man working for Weyerhaeuser in Springfield. Just this last Christmas my grandmother gave me his IWA 25 year pin.
Although he was exactly the kind of man who should have been a Reagan Democrat, he never voted for a Republican in his life, mostly because he believed deeply in the in philosophy embedded in that first block quote.
The Republican party was the party of the capitalists and a capitalist will never give two shits, as he would have said, about the working man.
The dream of the 30′s is alive… in Portland!
But what did that fiery rhetoric accomplish. IWA membership declined year after year until it had less than 20,000 workers by 1994 and merged into the IMA. You can praise his rhetoric all you want but its important to judge union leaders by results as well and, based on that criteria, he seems to have been very unsuccessful.
On a somewhat related matter, the Occupy movement seems to have disappeared. Today was supposed to be Occupy the Courts day, protesting the Citizens United decision. I was at the downtown federal court building today in L.A. The rally in support of Occupy the Courts was held on the steps adjacent to the court. Nice banners, good sound system for speakers, about 70 people. No attempt to occupy anything. Police and marshalls outnumbered attendees.
Once you account for the Canadian split from the union and the declining number of total timber jobs in the U.S., I see no reason to believe that the IWA membership decline from 1974 to 1994 was anything other than typical of all unions in that time frame and no reason to believe that fiery rhetoric or bad leadership of the IWA is at particular issue here.
Right. The fiery rhetoric did not cost a single job. Moreover the IWA was at the forefront of protecting worker health and forcing the timber industry to comply with OSHA and EPA regs. They were defeated by forces beyond their control
I’m not saying that the decline was due to him or his rhetoric. I’m just saying that his rhetoric didn’t lead to great results, surely one of the things you look to when evaluating a union leader.
Yes it did. It was part of a revitalized union that did much to protect worker bodies
Good turnout in SF.
mainstream media actually engaged Occupy’s issues, however briefly.
Sorry that you’re disappointed.
We’ll try to do better.
I think Citizens United is a great issue but a rally that draws 70 people doesn’t help the cause. Glad to know there was a better showing in SF
I was married to him