A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: Labor and the New Left

A History of Everything Leftist Unionism (full series)
The Old Left and the Reds | Labor and the New Left
The Rise of the SEIU | Labor’s New Coalition

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Labor and the New Left

The collapse of American Communism was not the end of American leftist radicalism, and the labor union movement would negotiate a complex dance with the “New Left” from its beginning through its height. Organized labor midwifed the activist faction that rose to prominence in the 1960s, but the two factions—and new and rising factions on the radical left—would come into conflict by the turn of the decade.

In the early 1960s, Big Labor was at its post–New Deal political zenith, with President John F. Kennedy in office and the United Auto Workers, led by ardent social democrat Walter Reuther, providing muscle and money for all sorts of left-liberal initiatives. Reuther was a social democrat but opponent of the 1940s Reds. His most prominent non-economic liberal campaign might have been support for Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil-rights struggle, but another lesser-known political decision would have major ramifications for the left-of-center coalition of the 1960s and 1970s.

The connections between Reuther’s UAW and the New Left were rooted in family. Sharon Jeffrey, a member of the National Executive Committee of Students for a Democratic Society, was the daughter of Democratic Party official and Reuther aide Millie Jeffrey. The UAW provided early funding to SDS, and when the radical student organization was looking for a place to hold its 1962 convention, there was an obvious choice: The United Auto Workers union retreat center at Port Huron, Michigan. From that meeting would emerge the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto that is credited with spurring the “student movement” of leftist activism.

The over 20,000-word document was in part a response to the Sharon Statement issued by the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (a much more readable manifesto at a mere 368 words), but would become the lodestar for a New Left more focused on social-democratic political economy, accession to Communist expansionism abroad, and identity-based politics than the mainstream left-liberalism of the early Cold War period. It even presaged “intersectionality” analysis, with longtime leftist journalist Kirkpatrick Sale writing in a 1973 history of SDS that “what gave [the Port Huron Statement] its particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected…and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another.”

The UAW and SDS remained aligned in the immediate period following the Port Huron Statement. In 1963, SDS was preparing the Economic Research and Action Project, a program to organize and educate the unemployed and urban poor along the lines of the Civil Rights Movement ongoing at the same time. UAW provided $5,000 (approximately $50,000 adjusted for inflation) toward these campaigns.

But the UAW and SDS would not be closely allied for much longer. SDS grew increasingly radical over the course of the 1960s, especially after the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965 and the use of involuntary draftees in combat roles. While the organization’s ancestor, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (LID), and its backers in the United Auto Workers had been opponents of international Communism even if they supported socialism, SDS became increasingly open to open Communists. Beginning in 1965, SDS permitted open Communists to join, leading the democratic-socialist LID to mutually terminate its association with SDS.

As SDS was taken over by Communist factions and then ultimately dissolved amid infighting among various Communist factions, the group’s formal links with mainstream organized labor also dissolved. But its legacy would affect organized labor for the next half-century, as (early) SDS alumni rose to prominence as professional union organizers, union officials, union-aligned politicians, and activist academics.

The most notable SDS alumnus to ascend the ranks of Big Labor would be Paul Booth, one of the drafters of the Port Huron Statement. He was elected vice president of SDS at its 1962 meeting at the UAW retreat center and later made the group’s national secretary until his ouster from SDS leadership with the radical takeover of SDS in 1966.

Knowing a good left-wing activist when it saw one, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (a predecessor union of the United Food and Commercial Workers) picked Booth up as its research director. Booth, who married fellow left-wing activist Heather Booth, helped create the Citizens Action Program, a Chicago-based and Illinois-focused left-of-center campaign group that helped unseat a Republican Illinois governor in 1972. Heather would found the activist and operative-training center Midwest Academy in 1973, and Paul moved to the Illinois state-level council of the AFSCME in 1974. In 1988, he was elevated to the union’s national office, rising to the role of chief aide to AFSCME national presidents Gerald McEntee and Lee Saunders.

In his role with AFSCME, Booth worked closely with the Democratic Party, most notably serving on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 party platform committee, and united organized labor with the institutional progressive movement. One liberal group’s remembrance of Booth specifically mentioned his work supporting a “host of other progressive institutions—from the Economic Policy Institute and Jobs with Justice to the National Employment Law Project, the Restaurant Opportunity [sic] Center, and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.”

Hesitation: The 1968 New York Teachers Strike and the 1972 Presidential Election

Following the rise of the Students for a Democratic Society and the New Left, dissension arose within the labor union movement over how closely Big Labor should align with the increasingly radical American left. These came to a head in two major fights between labor organizations and other left-wing factions: the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, which pitted the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) against the Ford Foundation and civil-rights activists, and the 1972 presidential election, which saw the AFL-CIO refuse to endorse Democratic Party candidate George McGovern, who enjoyed the backing of social-liberal and pacifist groups.

New York City in 1968 was led by liberal intellectual and nominal Republican (from a time when “Republican in Name Only” meant something) Mayor John Lindsay. Lindsay had commissioned McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy-Johnson administration official who had taken over the Ford Foundation in 1966, with leading an advisory panel on decentralizing the city’s school system in response to complaints from Black and Puerto Rican activists. The activists argued the city’s centralized school bureaucracy was shortchanging their kids and that the largely white-dominated school system denied them sovereignty over their children’s education.

Mayor Lindsay and UFT president Al Shanker were personal enemies. A Commentary retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the strike described Lindsay as calling Shanker an “evil man” and viewing the union boss as a “power broker” out for his union’s own, rather than the public’s, interest. Shanker (who was Jewish) reportedly viewed Lindsay as “the embodiment of every upper-crust Protestant, reeking of moral sanctimony and a whiff of genteel anti-Semitism.”

Backed by Ford Foundation funding, the New York City school system trialed decentralized neighborhood governance of schools in three sub-units. The most prominent in the disputes to come was Ocean Hill–Brownsville, at the time a nearly exclusively Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn. The fight scrambled the ideological lines with which a 21st century observer is familiar: Black nationalists aligned with Malcolm X asserted the power of parents to influence school curriculums while demanding the power to select new, Black teachers. Meanwhile, UFT trade unionists defended the race-blind selection system of the Board of Examiners and their own power as a (relatively new) government worker union, with powers above and beyond those of other ostensibly private associations lobbying the government.

Tension built throughout the 1967–1968 school year, coming to a head after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Tennessee in early April. Amid a climate of increasing militancy by Black activists and activist teachers, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville board terminated 19 teachers, who were all UFT members and included 18 white teachers, many of whom were Jewish. Shanker demanded the UFT members be reinstated and vowed to call a strike. A city examiner ruled the firings improper, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville board rejected his reinstatement order.

The stage was set for a citywide strike. All told the UFT would call three separate walkouts between September 9 and November 17, 1968. Mayor Lindsay proved ineffectual in resolving the impasse between the board and the union, and the strikes (especially the third and longest stoppage) were marred by anti-Semitic writings and slogans issued by Black nationalist activists who opposed the strike.

Ultimately, Shanker and the UFT won. The fired teachers were reinstated. The Ford Foundation–backed decentralization experiment was superseded by a UFT-backed state policy that subordinated “community districts” to the citywide Board of Education. Reflecting on the strike’s effects on New York City for Commentary, Vincent Cannato and Jerald Podair wrote, “Ocean Hill–Brownsville was a perfect example of the failures of Lindsay and modern liberalism: Promise a lot and deliver little to nothing, while exacerbating deep-seated tensions.”

The effect of the strike on union power relative to the aspirations of Great Society liberalism were even clearer. Cannato and Podair continued:

For John Lindsay and McGeorge Bundy were correct in many of their criticisms. The city’s education bureaucracy was sclerotic and self-serving … black parents were also correct that their children were not getting the quality education they deserved and that parents should demand more voice in their children’s education.

The UFT was also correct that the due-process rights of its members were being ignored under community control and that white, mostly Jewish, teachers were being scapegoated for the failures of urban schools—often in anti-Semitic and anti-white language. But Ocean Hill–Brownsville showed the ultimate power of Shanker and the UFT, a power that would only grow. Today, teachers’ unions around the country are the backbone of the Democratic Party and contemporary liberalism.

Private-sector unionism would suffer its own unpleasant collision with the New Left in 1972. George Meany, the longtime head of the AFL-CIO and a Cold Warrior by disposition, had backed what was effectively a shadow campaign supporting Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), a union-friendly Cold War hawk, for the Democratic presidential nomination. But Jackson’s candidacy stalled, and the ultimate victor in the presidential primaries and other nominating contests was Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), a favorite of the New Left, anti-Vietnam War activists, and the growing social-liberal movements.

In response to McGovern’s nomination and despite Meany’s (and his lieutenant and eventual successor Lane Kirkland’s) loathing of incumbent President Richard Nixon, the AFL-CIO denied McGovern its endorsement. But this act of independence from the rising Everything Leftism would not set a trend. It was, as Reagan administration official Max Green wrote in the Heritage Foundation’s now-defunct house journal Policy Review in 1984, “labor’s Last Hurrah, the last time it stood alone in defiance of liberal opinion.”

Alliance for Labor Action and Coalition Politics

Walter Reuther—the left-liberal head of the United Auto Workers and probably America’s second-most-prominent labor union official of the 1960s after the AFL-CIO’s George Meany—had longstanding gripes with his nominal superior. The two clashed over organizing strategies, political commitments, and personal ambitions. By 1968, the UAW and the AFL-CIO had broken up, with the autoworkers’ union joining a strange bedfellow, the mobbed-up and relatively Republican International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to form the Alliance for Labor Action.

Evidence of ALA’s positioning comes not only from Reuther’s participation but also from the praise the new alignment received in remarks by Sen. McGovern in July 1969. McGovern told the Senate:

I am pleased that the resources of the two largest unions in the Nation will be joined to help in the fight against hunger and malnutrition, to build houses for the very poor using modern techniques, to bring dignity to people living in our big city ghettos, and to halt the drift toward militarism and sacrocanct [sic] defense budgets.

Mr. President [of the Senate], perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the ALA so far has been to make clear to the entire country that significant leaders of the trade union movement today are not going to blindly swallow the views of the military establishment.

The ALA would not live up to Sen. McGovern’s left-wing dreams, in part because Reuther’s death in a 1970 plane crash took the impetus out of the new organization. But before Reuther’s passing, he would add another left-wing campaign to his expansive roster of supported causes: environmentalism, in the form of UAW contributions to the organization of the first Earth Day in April 1970. The environmentalist magazine Grist quoted Denis Hayes, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day, as saying:

Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped! … The UAW was by far the largest contributor to the first Earth Day, and its support went beyond the merely financial. It printed and mailed all our materials at its expense — even those critical of pollution-belching cars. Its organizers turned out workers in every city where it has a presence. And, of course, Walter then endorsed the Clear Air Act that the Big Four were doing their damnedest to kill or gut.

By 1971, the UAW had suspended its financial contributions to the ALA as part of a broader effort to downsize its social activist spending amid financial distress, and the alliance itself dissolved in 1972. The UAW would rejoin the AFL-CIO in 1981 after Lane Kirkland replaced Meany as the federation’s head.

Two structural shifts, more than any personal choice by union bosses, drove tighter alignment between union leaderships and the rest of the organized professional left. First, an increasing share of the labor movement was comprised of government workers, who in a post-1968 environment were much more comfortably aligned with the progressive coalition than Al Shanker was amid Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Second, foreign competition, inflation, and a rising southern United States were breaking down Big Business semi-monopolies that could collude with Big Labor to deliver ever-increasing benefits that made workers’ union dues more of a yield-generating investment than a simple tax.

Throughout the Long Decline, those returns shrank as national and international competition returned, the social consensus that underpinned the “Three Bigs” coordination model of the New Deal and Great Society eroded, and the statist regulatory regime that had midwifed Big Labor cracked under political pressure from the rising consumer class, while the power of the government worker unions rose. This made Big Labor more dependent on the Big Government that its coalition allies in the progressive movement demanded and more inclined to Everything Leftist politics in general.

Max Green argued that by the late 1970s there would be “no more going it alone, no more fights with potential allies, no more sitting out elections” for the largest labor organizations, with the result that “this new perspective has led to a partisan political strategy, with labor, as Walter Reuther wanted, becoming part of a larger, liberal-left movement for economic, political, and social change.” The AFL-CIO reversed policy to align with the left wing of the Civil Rights Movement in support of affirmative action and racial quotas. By 1979, the AFL-CIO had explicitly endorsed the controversial Equal Rights Amendment, a key demand of feminist activists, and agreed not to hold meetings in states that did not ratify the proposed constitutional change.

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In the next installment, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rises to prominence in Big Labor.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-history-of-everything-leftist-unionism-part-2/