Labor Spotlight
Throwing the book at labor
Sep 8, 2005 1:51 PM
Longtime watchdog chronicles movement’s transformation
Herman Benson, 90, and his new book.
As the mishegoss of a fracturing labor movement unfolds, New Yorkers have reason to celebrate: Herman Benson, who just turned 90, is still among us, and the organization he founded, the Association for Union Democracy, is quietly doing its work out of a cramped Brooklyn office, helping dissidents, reformers and gadflies fight for their rights within trade unions.
The good news is that Benson has put a lifetime of battles into a book called “Rebels, Reformers and Racketeers,” subtitled: “How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement.” If you think the decline of unionism has only to do with overseas jobs, Wal-Mart or cheap immigrant labor, you should pick up a copy of this book. Benson will set you straight.
Starting with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948, Benson covers union malfeasance and those who battled it at a time when the fortunes of labor were taking a turn for the worse.
There are many theories about what has happened to the labor movement. Some point to the Red-baiting of the post World War II 1940s, when unions ate their own — turning against former comrades, many of them left-wingers, who had helped organize the masses.
(Before the Joe McCarthy hysteria, for example, President Harry Truman had a loyalty oath and, at the height of the Red Scare, New York had the Feinberg law, by which teachers were fired for membership in “subversive” organizations.)
As I was reading Benson’s book, just at the time of the AFL-CIO’s July convention in Chicago, it reminded me of discussions I have had with my parents, teachers, journalists and labor activists over the years about what has happened to weaken labor.
My favorite theory is that the merger of the AFL and the CIO, once bitter rivals, in 1955 was the beginning of the end, for it made labor complacent, and the need to organize new workers wasn’t a priority. Mike Quill — the late president of the Transport Workers Union and an early UFT supporter — was the only CIO executive board member to vote against the merger. A few years later, Quill was asked by his lawyer one night how he was doing at an AFL-CIO convention. “Well,” Quill opined, describing the complacency, “we are having a grand time. The cigars are getting bigger and we are sitting farther away from the tables.”
The labor movement had gone from Mother Jones organizing a march of children on Teddy Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay estate to protest child labor to the head of the AFL-CIO agreeing to wage controls while golfing with Richard Nixon. It was a long way from being a Bronx plumber to being a Washington macher. In the 1972 presidential campaign, organized labor turned its back on Sen. George McGovern — who had a perfect labor voting record. Nine years later, Ronald Reagan fired every air controller on strike and organized labor did nothing. Unlike their European counterparts, union leaders in the United States hadn’t developed a general strike philosophy. The old AFL, in fact, believed more in arbitration than strikes.
Meanwhile, the nascent television industry — with its immense power to influence people’s behavior — was luring workers out of the union halls and social clubs and plopping them down in front of the tube. In addition, the growth of the paid professional staff in unions also made members feel like “the union” would take care of things, that there was little need to actually participate in the day-to-day union activities. The “union” became like Con Edison — just another bill to pay. (The minutes of an early UFT organizing meeting in 1960 contain a suggestion of “having our executive board members arrange home meetings and socials with refreshments.”)
Today, the media is about as anti-union as it has ever been, even worse than the 1930s, when the Left led a campaign whose slogan was “Don’t Read Hearst.”
Politically, the country has changed, from the FDR safety-net model of 1932 — “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All” — to the “Where’s mine?” mantra of 2005.
Added to the mix, in a conundrum that few union officials want to discuss publicly, is that union members want their discount airline tickets offered by non-union companies and $39 DVD players and they generally don’t care much where they are made or how the workers in those other countries are treated.
By 1968, the same union members who gave Lyndon Johnson a landslide victory four years before (he won 44 states) were voting racially, seeing themselves as part of Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” code words for “you white folks.” For my generation, the images of Al Shanker and Walter Reuther marching with A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King were replaced with the reality of pipe-wielding labor goons who attacked anti-war demonstrators at City Hall in 1970. We didn’t have to travel to Alabama to learn about Gestapo tactics. The instigator of that riot, a fake tough guy, was appointed secretary of labor by President Nixon.
But there was also something far more insidious happening: Some of the burgeoning union bureaucracies, sated with the Visa Gold Card for union leaders — the guaranteed income of the dues checkoff — stifled dissent by putting limits on democracy, wrote absurd new rules to make it tougher for “reformers” to challenge the leaders and — worse — went into business with the mob to build Las Vegas casinos, which financed the drug trade of organized crime. They perfected rackets whereby prevailing wages weren’t paid, union contracts were abrogated, no-show jobs were set up for gangsters and the public paid for it through a mob tax on everything from the price of fish to clothing. New Yorkers paid for it in mob-operated arson-for-hire schemes and the ravages of drugs, both of which obliterated entire neighborhoods.
Some, like Jock Yablonski of the United Mine Workers, paid with their lives. He was murdered by the hoodlums who ran that union in 1970.
Benson chronicles the darker side of labor in his 230 pages and recounts the sordid tales of frustrated workers coming to his group for help. Some had been thrown out of their unions, ostracized and denied the right to run for office; mob violence, whereby the baseball bat replaced the ballot box, kept gadflies in line.
One of those who credits Benson with saving his union career is Larry Hanley, who is now an international vice president of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Hanley was an idealistic young bus driver from Staten Island in the early 1980s with a lot to say about unionism, politicians and, more importantly, mob-run private companies that were scabbing MTA routes and collecting $30 million a year in cash-only fares.
Hanley was a pain in the neck at union meetings, always asking impertinent questions and accusing union leaders of not doing enough to fight the mob. He had his car tires slashed, his car windows were demolished at least 15 times, the brake lines on his car were cut and he was beaten by six union officials in the union office. When that didn’t stop him, his enemies came up with a plan to knock him out of running for office: He was accused of “verbally threatening” the president of the union by waving his finger in front of his face. Hanley faced a “trial board” appointed by the president (an old trick that Benson writes about extensively). If “convicted” of this heinous crime, Hanley would be thrown out of the union and barred from running for union office for three years.
Hanley was convicted by the hand-picked board and his fate was then left to the membership. He went to see Benson, who advised him to get his story out to the public and sent him to me. I was editor of a newspaper and I wrote a column defending Hanley, saying that if he were barred from running for office, the members should dissolve the union and give up their jobs to the mob. Hanley was acquitted by the members.
Benson is still at his pestering best because he says there is still a lot of work to be done in making unions more democratic and he still takes dozens of calls a week from people who suspect something isn’t kosher in their locals, a view shared by law enforcement officials who still prosecute unions for mob ties.
Benson hasn’t lost a step from the idealism of his youth. He still edits Union Democracy Review, which he publishes once a month. Lest you think his advocacy is based on some anti-union animus, this is Benson’s retort: “The organized labor movement is one of the great forces for democracy and social justice in America ... but the anomaly persists: this great pillar of democracy has been nibbled away by the mice of bureaucracy.”
He says the union reformer in corrupt unions “too often stands alone, with few allies, too often ostracized and marginalized by the leadership and shunned by the members, who are afraid of retaliation.” He adds that the debate in the national AFL-CIO, about which direction the labor movement should be taking, misses the major point: there is nothing to stop any union leader from organizing new members (as Randi Weingarten and the UFT and NYSUT are doing with the 52,000 day care providers). “They don’t need permission from John Sweeney or anyone else. Just do it,” he said.
