It's not often I link to the AFL-CIO website from here. The thuggishness that characterizes so much of the labor movement, both in union and partisan politics, makes them no heroes of mine. A movement that has been a victim both of its success and its arrogance has seen members stay away in droves. As a result, labor leaders have resorted to ever-greater government props and coercion to keep their movement from collapsing into rubble.
So I'd like to recall a personal hero of mine, Samuel Gompers:
First, he advocated craft or trades unionism, which restricted union membership to wage earners and grouped workers into locals based on their trade or craft identification. This approach contrasted with the effort of many in the Knights of Labor to organize general, community-based organizations open to wage earners as well as others, including employers. It also contrasted sharply with the "one big union" philosophy of the Industrial Workers of the World.Second, Gompers believed in a pure-and-simple unionism that focused primarily on economic rather than political reform as the best way of securing workers' rights and welfare. Gompers's faith in legislative reform was dashed in the 1880s after the New York Supreme Court overturned two laws regulating tenement production of cigars that he had helped pass. Gompers saw that what the state gave, it could also take away. But what workers secured through their own economic power in the marketplace, no one could take away.
Third, when political action was necessary, as Gompers increasingly came to believe in his later years, he urged labor to follow a course of "political nonpartisanship." He argued that the best way of enhancing the political leverage of labor was to articulate an independent political agenda, seek the endorsement of existing political parties for the agenda and mobilize members to vote for those supporting labor's agenda.
It's worth seeing how badly the current AFL-CIO, SEIU, and NEA have betrayed every part of this vision. Of course, it's almost impossible not to be political when over half your membership is on the government payroll.
Gompers's unwillingness to transform his unions into tools of the Wobblies and international socialism also earned the enduring hatred of Emma Goldman. Judge a man by his enemies.
Happy Labor Day!
