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From the September 2008 issue of The $100 Plus Club News #111
In The Cause of Union Democracy
by Michael Goldberg
AUD Director and attorney Michael Goldberg gave a speech at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law of the Association of American Law Schools, the major professional association for legal educators. The January 2008 program topic was "The Employment and Labor Law Professor as Public Intellectual: Sharing Our Work with the World." His essay is reprinted (in part) courtesy of the Suffolk University Law Review.(41 Suffolk U. L. Rev., 2008)
... II. My Path To Union Democracy
After a brief stint as a welfare-rights organizer following college, I went to law school intent on having a career as some kind of public interest lawyer. During law school, I wrote a piece on employment discrimination and spent a summer at the ACLU. After a judicial clerkship, I became a graduate fellow at Georgetown's Institute for Public Representation, practicing public interest administrative law. While at Georgetown, I worked with two important union democracy lawyers, Arthur Fox of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, who was working with Teamster reformers on truck safety as well as union democracy matters, and Joe Rauh, one of the leading civil rights and labor lawyers of his generation....
My next stop was a staff attorney position at the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office (LELO) in Seattle.... While at LELO, I represented a "shop committee" of United Parcel Service employees that later became the backbone of Seattle's chapter of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). That work led to a positon at TDU, where I served in its Washington, D.C. office as general counsel until I entered academia. Since then, in addition to my teaching and scholarly work--much of it focusing on the law regulating internal union affairs--I have remained active in the union democracy movement, serving on the board of the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), writing the occasional amicus brief, litigating the occasional case and otherwise trying to advance the cause of union democracy in the real world.
III. Why Union Democracy Matters
Most of my reasons for promoting union democracy are pragmatic. While I have no quarrel with those who value democracy as an end in itself, I am more inclined to see union democracy as an essential means toward achieving a particular end: a stronger labor movement that is not only more successful at the bread-and-butter functions of organizing and collective bargaining, but is also more effective representing working people in the broader political arena. A stronger and more democratic labor movement is an essential ingredient in a revitalized movement for progressive change and social justice, which I believe is so important to this country's future....
Most of labor's power, both on the shop floor and in society at large, depends on its ability to mobilize its members to, in the words of the newsletter Labor Notes, "put the movement back in the labor movement." Although a top-down organizational model may occasionally work, if the "organizing model of unionism" or "social movement unionism" is to succeed, members must have both the opportunity to participate in union decisions and a sense that it is, in fact, their union, not just an "insurance agency" that collects their dues....
Although the labor movement has not had many victories in recent decades, growing evidence suggests that more democratic unions are increasingly effective at their core collective bargaining functions.... An increasing number of studies suggest that democratic unions tend to fare better than autocratic ones in both organizing campaigns and at the bargaining table. If nothing else, democratized unions create enormous incentives for complacent or incompetent union leaders to improve their performance.
Another reason for promoting union democracy is that democratic unions are less susceptible to problems of corruption, labor racketeering, and infiltration by organized crime. The last twenty years have seen significant progress in the efforts to clean up historically corrupt unions like the Teamsters, the Hotel & Restaurant Employees, and the Laborers. Where corruption remains a problem or creeps back in, however, it not only has an immediate impact on the members of the affected unions, but it also tarnishes labor as a whole, as evidenced by the fact that anti-union employers can be expected to bring it up in response to almost every union-organizing campaign....
Given the important and unique role of unions in representing the interests of working people in the political process, it is critical that the positions they advocate be reached through a democratic process....
Beyond the realm of electoral politics and legislative lobbying, unions assume an additional political role ... unions are among the civic associations that play a crucial mediating role, protecting and insulating individuals from the overreaching efforts of the state and large corporations. In that capacity, unions--provided they are in fact democratic--can also be critically important "'schools for democracy' where the habits of self-governance and direct responsibility are instilled." [this quote is from Thomas C. Kohler, Civic Virtues at Work: Unions as Seedbeds of Civic Virtues, 36 B.C.L. Rev. 279,299 (1995) - eds.]
In too many voluntary organizations ... membership often means little more than sending in a dues payment in exchange for a newsletter subscription.
A prerequisite for union efficacy as schools for democracy is that the unions themselves operate democratically. After all, undemocratic or autocratic unions also educate their members, but teach very different lessons....
IV. The Importance of Support for Union Democracy From Public Intellectuals
Public intellectuals can play a particularly critical role in the union democracy movement. Reformers among the union rank and file often stand alone and thus are extremely vulnerable to retaliation. Both the incumbent union leadership and management typically perceive these reformers as thorns in their sides, if not outright threats. If management and labor want to get rid of a perceived troublemaker, a small obstacle like the duty of fair representation is rarely going to stop them, even in the absence of a permissible cause for termination under the collective bargaining agreement. Moreover, retaliation against reformers is not limited to threats to their jobs. Threats of physical violence or its actualization, including beatings and even murder, are not uncommon, particularly in unions infiltrated by organized crime.
Entrenched union officers also have tremendous advantages as incumbents in any electoral challenge to their control over union affairs, especially at the national level. Where that advantage is not enough, they sometimes resort to other tactics. These may include violations of members' free speech and due process rights under the Landrum-Griffin Act; improper exercise of union discipline including fines, disqualification from union office, and suspension or expulsion from the union; unlawful campaign tactics; and outright theft of union officer elections....
Many important causes cry out for the moral, material, and legal support of public intellectuals, but few of those causes find their natural constituencies as isolated and vulnerable as union reformers often are...Intellectuals have long played an important role in both the development of the labor movement as a whole and in the cause of union democracy ...The lawyers and law professors among them can help union members learn their rights, assist them in finding attorneys to help enforce those rights, and perhaps even take on a pro bono case or two....
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