Attacks on Reformers Have Long History in Labor Movement
As history has repeatedly shown, the rulers of “one-party states” rarely concede power gracefully or quietly. When organized opposition emerges, such regimes often resort to a strategy of disinformation and intimidation to maintain their grip on power, whether the battleground is a nation or—closer to home—a national union.
Since the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed in 1959, union reform groups have had more legal protection for their electoral challenges and issue-oriented campaigning. Yet, in the last 40 years, entrenched leaders of major unions have displayed a pattern of undemocratic behavior and heavy-handed treatment of internal dissent.
In each instance, the incumbent administration focused its most intense attacks on an independent-minded official from its own ranks who “defected” to the cause of reform.
The latest case is United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) and its president, Sal Rosselli. Along with a new rank-and-file group called SMART (SEIU Member Activists For Reform Today), UHW has called for direct election of top officers of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other changes that would give members a greater voice in bargaining.
Rosselli’s break with SEIU President Andy Stern has elicited a coordinated counter-campaign, replete with personal vilification, legal harassment, and threats of trusteeship or dismemberment of the 140,000-member UHW, SEIU’s third-largest affiliate.
BREAKING RANKS
Past union reformers—like Jock Yablonski in the Mine Workers (UMW), Ed Sadlowski in the Steelworkers (USW), Jerry Tucker in the United Auto Workers (UAW), and Ron Carey in the Teamsters (IBT)—all attracted similar, or worse, attacks when they broke ranks. Well-funded and much better-staffed foes in the leaderships of their respective unions did their best to discredit them, but each played an important role in struggles for union democracy and reform.
According to Mine Workers historian Paul Nyden, Yablonski “had not been an active miner for twenty-five years when he challenged W.A. (Tony) Boyle” for the union’s presidency in 1969. He turned against Boyle after serving eight years as an international executive board member—the same position Rosselli holds today in SEIU.
Skeptics questioned how a bureaucratic insider— “a careerist” in a corrupt and violent union—could give effective voice to the complaints of long-suffering rank-and-filers. Yablonski proved his mettle on the campaign trail by reaching out to the union’s numerous wildcat strikers, black lung activists, and mine safety advocates.
Amidst massive vote fraud (that later led to the election being overturned), Yablonski lost to Boyle in December 1969. Three weeks later, union assassins killed him in his home, along with his wife and daughter.
In a federally-supervised re-run election held in 1972, the Miners for Democracy, a rank-and-file slate formed by Yablonski supporters after his death, finally ousted the murderous Tony Boyle. They succeeded in democratizing the structure of the UMW, while providing inspiration for reformers in many other unions.
FIGHTING BACK IN STEEL
Ed Sadlowski was a new USW international rep and former local union president when he first ran for a district director position covering 130,000 workers in the Chicago-Gary area. Sadlowski’s goal was to “return the union to the members,” who had, in secretive basic steel negotiations, been deprived of the right to strike when their contract expired.
Sadlowski had his first election stolen by what was called, in those days, the “official family”—an army of 600 appointed staffers answerable to USW headquarters in Pittsburgh.
“Oil Can Eddie” survived to win a Labor Department-supervised re-run by a 2-to-1 margin. This mid-1970s electoral upheaval threw USW officials into a panic. They continued to redbait Sadlowski, even after he joined the international executive board, and to starve his district of resources and staff in an effort to turn the rank and file against him.
Meanwhile, among restive members in mines, mills, and smaller manufacturing shops around the country, Sadlowski’s post-election formation of a multi-district reform group, Steelworkers Fight Back, helped legitimize organized dissent everywhere.
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As Phil Nyden writes in his 1984 book, Steelworkers Rank-and-File, Sadlowki’s defection from the USW’s “old guard” bolstered longtime critics and “transformed other latent rank-and-file activists—those who were sympathetic but never felt their involvement would make any difference—into active supporters of the broader reform movement.”
Sadlowski went on to lose a hotly contested bid for the USW presidency in 1977, but his backers retained control over the Chicago district and remained a force in the union elsewhere.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN AUTO
Before running afoul of the “Administration Caucus” that has dominated the UAW since the days of Walter Reuther, Jerry Tucker was a local officer in the Midwest. Tucker had pioneered efforts to win good contracts via militant in-plant campaigns in manufacturing units where the effectiveness of striking had been much diminished.
A one-time supporter of Walter Reuther himself, Tucker became deeply concerned about the union’s drift under Reuther’s successors. He decided that the UAW needed “New Directions” and, together with a network of rank-and-file supporters and local officers, he organized an opposition caucus under that name.
Tucker’s 1986 attempt to move up from assistant regional director to the top job in 90,000-member UAW Region 5 was thwarted illegally by UAW headquarters, which favored the incumbent. As soon as Tucker declared his district director candidacy, he was fired from staff, and lost his bid by 0.16 percent of the vote after a systematic national campaign to squelch New Directions.
A successful two-year legal fight ensued, leading to a Labor Department-supervised re-run. Tucker won, and served eight months of his three-year term, only to face constant undermining and interference from UAW headquarters.
While in office, Tucker continued to criticize the union for being too “top down” and cozy with management. He was barred from the largest GM plant in his district when he campaigned for re-election. UAW retirees were mobilized to protest his appearance at a Labor Notes conference and, later, formed the administration-backed voting bloc that deprived him of re-election in 1989.
Nevertheless, Tucker’s New Directions movement continued to contest UAW policies—including the lack of a referendum vote on top officers—well into the 1990s.
TEAMSTER REFORM
When longtime local president Ron Carey bravely agreed to run for president of the Teamsters in its first-ever “one-member, one-vote” election in 1991, he was dismissed by the press and union insiders.
Carey’s refusal to attend Teamster joint council meetings or the union’s last mob-dominated convention in 1986 was cited as further evidence of his parochialism. In campaign literature sent to 1.4 million Teamsters, Carey—a life-long union militant—was even called a “scab.”
In office from 1992-97, however, Carey ended IBT isolationism, getting involved in community-labor coalitions like Jobs with Justice and playing a key role in the 1995 internal rebellion that made “New Voice” candidate John Sweeney the AFL-CIO president.
Carey sponsored widespread membership education about the dangers of “company unionism” in the form of management-dominated “team concept” programs. And, with strong grassroots backing from Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Carey launched member-based organizing and bargaining initiatives that culminated in the IBT’s much-heralded 1997 strike victory over UPS.
Although Carey was forced out of office in an election fund raising scandal in 1997 (and later acquitted in court on related charges), TDU continues to promote reform activity in Teamster locals around the country and to challenge the current IBT leadership at the highest level.
Given SEIU’s size and much-applauded vanguard role in labor, the tough questions that Rosselli and his local have raised about the downside of some SEIU organizing and bargaining strategies are much too important to be dismissed as the product of an intra-union “turf battle” or personality clash.
Regardless of how SEIU reformers fare in the difficult arena of a leadership-controlled convention in Puerto Rico in early June, Rosselli and his allies have already had a positive impact. Inside SEIU, they have—like the reformers before them—created greater political space for other members around the country.
Friends of the union in academia are paying attention, and some have publicly taken Stern to task in recent weeks. A group of more than 100 labor-oriented intellectuals sent Stern a May Day letter opposing his threatened trusteeship of UHW. Student-labor activists involved in anti-sweatshop activity and campus-based labor solidarity at four colleges criticized SEIU for treating “students and campus workers as little more than pawns” in its “corporate campaigns.”
Key UHW and SMART demands, such as the right of workers to have a real voice in major decisions about local mergers and membership transfers, are now in the media spotlight. It will take a strong coalition of reformers inside the union to move from an upstart challenge to much-needed institutional change.