2
The Fight Within
The explosion of social movement-based organizing during the late 1960s and early 1970s also penetrated into the heart of trade unionism. Some workers inside mainstream unions launched a movement of their own, challenging ingrained ideologies and practices that had long crippled their organizations. The top leadership of most trade unions was substantially out of step with their membership’s racial and gender composition as well as their concerns. Widespread sexism and racism within union institutions were everyday reminders that internal patterns of discrimination mirrored similar problems in the world outside. By the early ’70s, as capital launched a full-scale attack on unions, abruptly ending the “labor peace” of previous decades, most unions were headed by highly paid officials not directly elected by their members. Contract bargaining often took place in inaccessible boardrooms, and rank-and-file workers rarely took part.1
On the organizing front, the trade union record increasingly resembled a dusty ledger of long-past victories. Established, complacent, not yet facing capital’s more serious depredations of the later ’70s and ’80s, most AFL-CIO unions were largely uninterested in expanding into new groups of workers. George Meany’s nearly three decades at the helm of the AFL-CIO, from 1952 to 1979, had induced a paralysis of both vision and action, and even a barely contained hostility toward workers who were not yet within the bounds of official trade unionism. Paul Buhle’s critical study of AFL-CIO leadership, Taking Care of Business, recounts Meany’s answer to a reporter’s question in 1972 about why union membership was rapidly sinking as a percentage of the workforce: “‘I don’t know, I don’t care.’ When a reporter pressed the issue, ‘Would you prefer to have a larger proportion?’ Meany snapped, ‘Not necessarily. We’ve done quite well without it. Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized?’”2
The few internal attempts made to break the spell of Meanyism came from the left-wing progressive sector of the trade union movement as it explored new ways of organizing during the late ’60s and early ’70s. For instance, Hospital Workers Local 1199, which organized private-sector hospital workers in New York City, tried to expand union demands from bread-and-butter issues like wage increases and contract provisions to broader social movement goals of democracy and equality. Local 1199’s membership was diverse in race, gender, and skills, and the union’s leadership consciously incorporated those differences into its organizing, even dubbing itself the “soul power” union. Moreover, Local 1199’s organizers themselves often came from the ranks of social movement activists. In 1962 several Congress of Racial Equality chapters worked with Local 1199 to organize hospital workers. CORE organizer Sheila Michaels recalls that “the line between CORE/SNCC and 1199 organizing was porous. [1199] was sort of a halfway house for recovering community organizers,” who brought community-based strategies into the union.3
Similarly, some public-sector unions such as AFSCME linked their organizing among workers of color to civil rights, as in the landmark February 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. With pay as low as $1.80 per hour, some 40 percent of Memphis’s thirteen hundred trash collectors were eligible for welfare. Their strike was about better wages, the right to form a union, and, most of all, dignity on the job. During pickets, workers carried signs that said simply “I am a man.” When the city council and the mayor’s office refused to negotiate, African American ministers organized a community support network and called a boycott of businesses and news outlets associated with the mayor, and later launched large-scale civil disobedience activities, filling the city’s jails. Two months after it began, the strike was settled, with a raise for workers, a union contract, and an end to racial discrimination in the sanitation department.4
Along with efforts like these, during the late 1960s interest in community-based tactics began to reemerge within a few trade unions for the first time since the Depression, albeit often on a small, local scale. The United Auto Workers was one such union, both targeted for reform by union dissidents and actively initiating reform programs of its own. Two national and two local organizing projects were part of these efforts: Alliance for Labor Action, the Distributive Workers of America, the Detroit-based Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), and the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) in Los Angeles. WLCAC and Alliance for Labor Action—both heavily subsidized by the UAW—worked within accepted parameters of liberal trade unionism and corporate capitalism, while DRUM and the Distributive Workers presented more fundamental challenges to the way unions operated. Taken together, these cases illustrate the complex relationship that existed between institutionalized labor and mass-based social movements. Social justice activism emerged as a rebellious force within the house of labor, redefining what unionism could mean for poor workers.
Rebellions in the Ranks
“Some black militants have come into the unions, but as sworn enemies, bent on destruction,” wrote UAW education director Brendan Sexton in the February 1971 issue of Dissent. Like many union staffers, Sexton viewed with alarm the prospect that workers of color such as those who founded DRUM might create what he called “centers of black power” through either existing unions or organizations of “black and brown workers at the margins of the economy.”5 Whether Sexton feared such organizing because it might undermine what he saw as class solidarity or because it would compete on an institutional basis with trade unions, he was commenting on a visible phenomenon within trade unions all over the country: the trend toward independent rank-and-file caucuses based on race. Steelworkers in Gary, Indiana; transit workers in Chicago and New York City; construction workers in Boston; auto workers in Fremont, California—union members of color were increasingly turning to an “internal caucus” strategy to oppose racism within their unions. In some cases these caucuses were founded or influenced by Black Panthers or other Black nationalist groups, bringing the rhetoric and tactics of movement activism directly onto the plant floor and into the union hall.6 A few years later, radical women adopted a similar caucus strategy to combat sexism within trade unions.
DRUM was one of the best known of the caucuses, founded in 1967 by UAW rank-and-file activists impatient with decades of internal racism and bureaucratic control. It used critiques of racism and bureaucracy to mobilize a movement for change within the UAW. Charging both General Motors and the UAW with racism, it cited evidence that the best positions went to whites while African Americans had the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. DRUM’s leaders accused the nearly all-white union leadership of perpetuating this system by inadequately addressing African American workers’ grievances and neglecting organizing. The UAW’s membership was at least 30 percent Black, yet the union’s twenty-six-member executive board had only two African American members; likewise, women made up 14 percent of the membership, but there was only one female board member. “Once considered the cutting edge of militant industrial unionism,” write scholars Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, “the UAW showed little interest in organizing the numerous non-union feeder shops in the industry, in moving for unionizing in the South, or in fighting for substantial gains such as 40 hours’ pay for 30 hours’ work.”7
DRUM’s theory was that racism was intentionally cultivated, by both management and the union, to divide workers and maintain better control. It countered by linking community and workplace issues as well as by consciously defining its organizing in multiethnic, multicultural terms, particularly in its outreach to Detroit’s large Arab American population. DRUM was not without its faults, including a deep-seated sexism, a reliance on inflammatory rhetoric, and what writer Herb Boyd calls an “‘in-your-face’ bravado,” all too common in movement organizations of the time.8 Still, DRUM helped transform the way Detroit’s working class thought about itself, its culture, and its organizational power.
Auto workers at other plants formed sister “RUMs” (revolutionary union movements), including ELRUM at the Eldon Avenue plant, FRUM at the Ford plant, GRUM at the General Motors plant, all grouped by 1969 under the umbrella of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Later the group would launch a short-lived national organization called the Black Workers Congress. Relying on demonstrations and wildcat strikes, league members picketed the UAW International convention and ran against incumbents in union elections. The auto companies and the UAW alike were afraid of the RUMs, because they moved past rhetoric and organized actual shutdowns of plants. For instance, in July 1968, following a march to a UAW executive board meeting, DRUM members called for a wildcat strike the next morning at the Dodge main plant. Four thousand people walked out, surprising even the organizers themselves.9
UAW officials responded with red-baiting and called the league’s publications “extremist hate sheets” and its members “racial separatists.”10 The UAW’s secretary-treasurer Emil Mazey went so far as to imply, in a 1969 interview in the Detroit News, that this fearsome Black “peril” was more dangerous than the imagined red peril of 1950s anticommunism.11 This response, from a union that prided itself on a nonracialist, politically progressive, industrially based unionism, showed that liberal trade union officials were not as different from conservative Meany as they might have liked to believe.
The radical left hoped the rank-and-file caucus phenomenon was a move toward democratic and egalitarian trade unionism. “A specter haunts Detroit that tomorrow will haunt the nation,” wrote Robert Dudnick, the Guardian’s labor correspondentin 1969. For much of the left, rank-and-file rebellions signaled not only a rebellion against white male trade union leaders but also a long-overdue “internal revolution” against bureaucracy. Workers had begun questioning how unions “turned into their opposite,” from worker advocates into “an independent power that imposes its discipline” over workers, wrote Detroit activist-scholar Martin Glaberman in 1966. The stagnation of the union movement became a common theme in activist circles. Some workers began questioning how seniority, that most basic of union principles, had been put in the service of racial and gender discrimination; or how automatic dues checkoff made unions more distant from, and less dependent upon, the rank and file.12
There was criticism too about a generational privilege that benefited older, already organized industrial workers and left out younger, poorer workers in the unorganized sectors of the economy. “Unions are fat and lazy,” wrote Detroiter James Wilson to the editor of the Black magazine Sepia in 1969. “They’ve got it made and are more intent on enjoying what they have than preserving the rights for others coming along later. . . . Have men like [UAW president] Walter Reuther . . . forgotten how things were in the 1930s?” Indeed, for poor workers the 1960s looked like the 1930s. Unemployment among Black workers was more than twice what it was among white workers, and wages for both white women and people of color averaged around half what white men earned.13
For thousands of working-class activists who had experienced new modes of organization and political action in social movements during the ’60s, the need for radical change within their workplace unions was obvious, necessary, and inevitable. Coming from civil rights, Black power, and later the women’s and LGBTQ movements, they became the frontline troops who would push the limits of bureaucratic trade unionism from both the inside and the outside.
Trade union institutions, which owed their existence to prior social movement organizing, were clearly in a very odd and uncomfortable position. “Is a traditional instrument of protest action itself becoming a target of protest?” worried Peter Henle, chief economist of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1969. “Disruptive protest” for civil rights and equality had moved full force into trade unions, he warned, upsetting “normal collective bargaining procedures.”14 Rebellious workers angry at the failings of organized labor threatened its precious stability, the goal and byword of bureaucratic unionism.
Internal Dissent, External Funding
While some trade union leaders battled internal dissent, poor workers were pouring into the streets to call for social and economic justice via the civil rights movement. At times people’s protests against racism came through the destructive force of a riot, as in New York City’s Harlem in 1964 and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965, then escalating to twenty-one cities in 1966 and seventy-five in 1967.15 Meanwhile, liberal labor leaders searched for ways to quell poor Black workers’ anger through manageable “programs” for economic betterment, leading some unions to experiment with their own versions of community-based organizing.
One of the most ambitious efforts of this kind was the UAW’s Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty, founded in June 1964 by Walter Reuther as an attempt to institutionalize the coalition of civil rights, religious, and labor organizations that had successfully lobbied on behalf of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.16 One of its first programs was the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. In March 1965, borrowing the community union concept espoused by Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Research and Action Project, neighborhood residents founded WLCAC with the financial assistance of the UAW and fourteen other unions to address joblessness and poverty in Watts, an African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. The UAW sought to use collective bargaining techniques to resolve the community’s grievances, using what staffers in the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department called “prototypes of union forms to attack the problems of poverty.”17 UAW officials believed that union activists, many of whom had come from poor neighborhoods, could use their union-taught negotiating skills to improve neighborhood organization. Ted Watkins, a former auto worker turned UAW staff person, as well as an African American Watts resident, was appointed to lead WLCAC.18
In August 1965, only a few months after WLCAC’s founding, Watts erupted into rebellion. WLCAC sought to channel the community’s frustration into collective action around concrete needs. South Central Los Angeles’s unemployment rate had been near 30 percent in some census tracts during the first half of the ’60s, while the national rate hovered between 4.5 and 6.7 percent.19 The group decided that employment and medical services were the neighborhood’s greatest needs, and pushed for a hospital that would serve the community and offer jobs to residents.
Those South Central residents who did have jobs faced problems that more privileged workers seldom encountered. Watkins recounted in a 1968 interview that police frequently stopped Black workers as they drove to graveyard-shift jobs. Shortly after the Watts uprising, when a Los Angeles police officer fatally shot a Watts resident who had been driving his pregnant wife to a hospital twelve miles away, the incident became a rallying point for WLCAC in its demand for a hospital in the neighborhood as well as protections against police misconduct. The hospital became a reality a few years later, offering jobs to some two thousand residents.20
From the late ’60s to the early ’70s, WLCAC helped finance gas stations, supermarkets, a credit union, and a restaurant, as well as a training center designed to prepare youth and welfare recipients for jobs. In 1968 the organization started a 538-acre farm in Saugus, north of Los Angeles, raising thousands of chickens and five hundred cattle to provide poor residents with cheaper food than was available in chain supermarkets in the neighborhood. WLCAC built and rehabilitated hundreds of housing units, and it became a major property owner in Watts complete with its own management division to oversee rent collection, garbage, landscaping, and repairs.21
But WLCAC was far from a grassroots organization. It had a sizable staff, and its work was made possible by huge UAW donations and government grants. In 1971 the UAW loaned WLCAC $2 million to invest in vacant land to continue its neighborhood development projects. By the early ’70s, WLCAC was receiving substantial funding not only from the UAW but also from the Ford Foundation (an $800,000 grant) and the US Department of Labor ($1.6 million). WLCAC was one of the largest employers in Watts, with a thousand workers on the payroll and assets totaling $4 million.22
Many of these projects were a boon to Watts residents, creating much-needed employment and physical improvements in the neighborhood and therefore in poor workers’ lives. However, they came along with a conservative ideology, heavily colored by class hierarchies. WLCAC strongly emphasized Black business ownership and job training as the solution to urban underdevelopment. WLCAC’s staff saw its community and business ventures as “beautifying” Watts and keeping middle-class residents in the neighborhood. Poorer residents who couldn’t afford to start or own businesses were trained as workers. The Saugus Job Center’s Orientation Manual aimed to instill “punctuality” and “discipline,” along with good grooming, since “employers have little regard for that person whose dress brands him as different.” Creating an obedient working class was high on the agenda, as was linking success in employment to individual attributes rather than structural issues.23
Job-placement arrangements were set up with governmental agencies and public hospitals, as well as with corporations such as Safeway, most of them for low-paying entry-level positions. In 1969 Mervyn Dymally, a Democrat from Los Angeles and the first African American elected to the California Senate, criticized WLCAC’s programs as “a kind of ‘Booker T. Washington program’” and a “dead end,” resulting as they did in low-wage job growth.24
Building on the WLCAC model, in May 1968 UAW representative Schrade started another community organization in the largely Latino neighborhood of East Los Angeles. The East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU) also developed into a multimillion-dollar community-development corporation focusing on housing and jobs. The UAW appointed Esteban Torres, an International Affairs Department staffer from East Los Angeles, to head it. The organization strongly emphasized “area entrepreneurs,” and it boasted that it was “a force capable of serving . . . the interested investor, in terms of providing him with additional markets and manpower.”25 The UAW supported similar projects in Dayton, Ohio; Saint Louis, Missouri; and Newark, New Jersey.
That the UAW threw substantial resources behind these conservative models for job training and small business development, while opposing the more fundamental changes demanded by its own rank and file, indicates the limitations of vision within progressive union officialdom. Nationally, the civil rights movement had moved toward a focus on economic justice, as exemplified by the April 1968 national Poor People’s Campaign organized by a diverse coalition of activists. Whether they made low wages or none at all, poor workers were increasingly at the center of movement activities. Radical union reformers sought to build a strong economic justice movement that could challenge the unbridled power of postwar capitalism. But for WLCAC and similar organizations, structural economic change was not on the agenda. While social movement activists and trade union radicals were agitating for the destruction of racial and gender barriers to employment and for collective empowerment, groups like WLCAC sought to reinforce those barriers by individualizing the complex societal issue of work.
The activities of WLCAC did not directly affect the UAW’s membership, because few of the neighborhood’s residents ended up in UAW-represented jobs. And to some extent, heavily funded neighborhood groups like WLCAC mirrored the UAW’s own bureaucratic structure and organizational culture. It’s little wonder that UAW officials gave millions of dollars to these kinds of projects. They were a safe bet that allowed liberal union reformers to profess a rhetoric of social change, while still defending the union’s own fortressed internal politics.
Programming Change
By 1968 the UAW had turned its sights toward a new national effort to organize the unorganized, called the Alliance for Labor Action (ALA). UAW president Reuther was engaged in a long-running feud with AFL-CIO president George Meany, calling his administration undemocratic, complacent, and self-congratulatory, and long-simmering disagreements over the Vietnam War between progressive and conservative unions were coming to a head. In March 1968 Reuther challenged Meany to call a special convention so the UAW could present its program for “revitalizing” the labor movement. When the AFL-CIO refused, the UAW withheld its per capita payments, then disaffiliated in July 1968. Just three weeks later, the UAW and the Teamsters (which had left the AFL-CIO eleven years earlier following charges of corruption) announced the formation of the Alliance for Labor Action, inviting other unions to join them in organizing “millions” of unorganized workers and establishing community unions for the poor and unemployed.26
The UAW and Teamsters were the nation’s two biggest unions, representing more than 3.5 million workers. Initially they provided the ALA with a budget of $4.5 million, funds previously paid to the AFL-CIO as per capita dues. This made the ALA far larger and wealthier than the CIO had been when it was founded to support industrial unionism in 1935. Reuther already had his eye on several unions he wanted to recruit to the ALA, notes historian Nelson Lichtenstein, a list that read like a who’s who of the progressive labor movement: the United Farm Workers; the United Electrical Workers; Hospital Workers Local 1199; District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union; and a few others.27 While the ALA initially offered to not “raid” the memberships of AFL-CIO unions—ensuring, in other words, that the ALA wouldn’t organize in AFL-CIO jurisdictions—it later passed a resolution allowing raids when it judged that an AFL-CIO union was not doing enough to organize in a particular workplace or industry. In practice, the AFL-CIO treated the ALA as a competitor by threatening to suspend or expel any unions that joined it. In 1969 the International Chemical Workers Union joined the ALA and was promptly expelled from the AFL-CIO.28 Of Reuther’s wish list of joiners, only District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, which would later split from its AFL-CIO parent union, eventually came over to the ALA.
The alliance’s organizers were convinced that the new organization could not model itself on the AFL-CIO. The ALA “should be action-oriented and should never be allowed to become another labor bureaucracy,” according to the proposal its organizers penned.29 Its first and biggest campaign was launched in Atlanta, a largely nonunion city with strong connection to the civil rights movement. Success in Atlanta, organizers felt, would give them a springboard into other southern cities. In the fall of 1969, almost fifty ALA staffers converged on the city, home to a half-million nonunionized white- and blue-collar workers. All the organizers were male (though a staff of what the ALA called “girls” operated the phone lines at the union office), about half were African American and half were white, and some 40 percent were Atlanta residents.30 Under the direction of Teamsters organizing director William Genoese, flown in from Washington, DC, organizers spread out across the city’s business parks with an estimated two hundred rank-and-file volunteers. “Our jurisdiction is the yellow pages,” the ALA leadership told local reporters.31
But the traditional shop visits the organizers made paled in comparison to the barrage of pro-union propaganda the ALA launched throughout Atlanta. The ALA’s pricey public-relations campaign included wall-to-wall advertisements on television, radio, newspapers, and public transit. Billboards loomed over Atlanta with the messages “Earn more—join a union!” and “Let ALA help you.” Anyone not already in a union was urged to contact the ALA to start a union campaign where they worked, with the goals of improved wages, benefits, job security, holiday pay, and medical insurance. Buses all over Atlanta carried the same invitation, and radio ads written by a public relations company filled the airwaves. “Write down this telephone number . . . it can help you earn more, worry less, and live better! It’s 874-8675, the number of the Alliance for Labor Action. . . . ALA can improve your present job so it will pay you more money!” beseeched one radio ad. “There’s no obligation! . . . But the first move is yours . . . call 874-8675.”32
This kind of slick Madison Avenue–style campaign was novel: rarely had US unions cast such a wide net using public relations. But ultimately the strategy failed. Even though a survey commissioned by the ALA found that the ad blitz had made the ALA’s name recognizable to 43 percent of Atlanta’s citizens, few actually joined unions.33 When the campaign ended in December 1971, after twenty-eight months of organizing, only 4,590 workers had voted for unions in representation elections (and with Georgia’s “right to work” laws, even after a victory there was no guarantee the workers would join the union).The ALA balance sheet in Atlanta was negative: it had won 94 union elections but lost or withdrawn from 102.The first year’s campaign costs alone came to some $4 million—or $1,200 spent for each potential member. Head organizer William Genoese admitted in a July 30, 1970, organizing report that expenditures were “high if compared with results” and that the campaign hadn’t “really made the impact on Black workers,” who constituted over half of those targeted.34
The campaign showed that simply throwing resources into organizing would not turn around trade unions’ fortunes. While different from the AFL-CIO’s staid methods, the ALA’s campaign suffered from the worst in top-down organizing techniques. Most organizers didn’t actually work in potential organizing sites, so they had no organic connection to those who did. Workers considered the high-pressure advertising too slick, and people expressed fears about risking their jobs to join an organization that had not yet proved it could deliver.35
Ultimately, the ALA’s prime method, relying on people’s individual responses to ads, was itself highly alienating. Rather than fostering a collective sense of solidarity and power by organizing from the ground up at the workplace or community level, this strategy made joining a union an individual and isolating process. The pitch enumerated “consumer” benefits a member would receive, almost like a department store advertising goods on sale (and, incidentally, not unlike the AFL-CIO’s “union privilege” programs, which tout consumer items like special rates on credit cards and home loans as incentives to join). Workers considered the pitch but weren’t buying.
The ALA’s founders hoped to establish community unions to organize the poor, welfare recipients, and the under- and unemployed outside of traditional workplaces; they envisioned several pilot programs in communities of color and among poor whites. But these community unions never got off the ground; they were hampered by the ALA staff’s lack of community organizing experience. The ALA became something of a “philanthropic committee,” giving out large grants for job training and addressing community issues.36 Nonetheless, close ties remained between the ALA and existing UAW-supported community projects, including those in Watts (where the ALA gave WLCAC a combined loan and gift of $200,000)37 and in East Los Angeles.
The ALA’s strategy was the antithesis of the approach embraced by movement activists in the plants and on the streets: bottom-up, highly political organizing. Some of those same activists had been critical of the ALA’s formation, characterizing it as a “falling out among thieves,” according to one observer in the Guardian. UAW militants in DRUM saw the ALA as a cynical and expensive ploy by liberals to deflect attention from the struggle over racism within the UAW. “Everyone in the shop is laughing at the Alliance for Labor Action,” wrote Black rank-and-filer Charles Denby, “which they consider just some more of Reuther’s power politics against George Meany.” There would be no escape for Reuther and other union officials from the demands for change within their own unions, no matter how innovative their outside organizing efforts looked in the media. As historian Nelson Lichtenstein observes, “The radical cadre Reuther sought were already present in UAW-organized shops,” but Reuther rejected them as too far left.38
This dynamic of turning outward to build a new structure while ignoring needed change within was clearly at work with the ALA, as liberal Reuther—isolated from AFL-CIO unions—climbed into bed with the mobster-ridden Teamsters. These same “allies” would shortly attack the United Farm Workers by signing sweetheart deals with California growers and would endorse Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. By mid-1972, crushed by expenses from a protracted General Motors strike and without a push from Reuther (who died in a 1970 plane crash) to keep ALA alive, the UAW cut its per capita payments to the alliance.39 The ALA died shortly thereafter. But before the end, another union had joined the ALA fold. This newcomer brought an innovative agenda of its own that would carry it more successfully into the future.
The Workers’ War on Poverty
The independent Distributive Workers of America was born on May 24, 1969, when members of the New York–based District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store International Union (RWDSU) disaffiliated from their national union after a lengthy internal battle for reform, and formed a new organization. Charging racism among the highest echelons of the RWDSU leadership, the thirty thousand members of District 65 walked out of the RWDSU, declaring that the goal of the new union would be to organize poor workers. Ten smaller RWDSU locals, representing some ten thousand workers—from Los Angeles and Phoenix in the west and Philadelphia and Tallahassee in the east—defected from the national union. Together they formed the independent Distributive Workers.40
RWDSU officials reacted to the Distributive Workers dissidents in much the same way as the UAW leadership had responded to internal criticism from DRUM: by turning the accusations of racism back on the dissidents themselves. Max Greenberg, president of RWDSU, told his executive board in October 1969 that Distributive Workers’ organizing efforts consisted “in great measure of racist appeals to black workers.”41 The Distributive Workers received encouragement from ALA leaders, and, ironically, a $120,000 loan from the UAW, which would apparently extend a helping hand to change the racial topography of otherunions, if not its own.42
About half of the new union’s members were African American, and nearly all held low-wage service jobs. In sharp contrast to existing trade-union leadership, the Distributive Workers declared “as a fundamental American principle” the idea that a multiracial union could and should be led by people of color. At the founding convention in Suffolk, Virginia, delegates elected an eighteen-member executive board—nine of the members were Black, seven white, and two Latino; only three were women. Cleveland Robinson was elected head of the new organization unanimously, becoming the first Black president of a multiracial union in US history.43
Robinson had immigrated from Jamaica in 1944, at the age of thirty. Shocked at the existence of widespread discrimination in the US, of a kind he had not witnessed in the Caribbean, he became involved in the labor movement. A founder, and later president, of the Negro American Labor Council, he had long advocated a closer integration of civil rights and labor movements. “It is my belief that we ought to throw out a challenge to labor for the organization of workers,” Robinson wrote in July 1967 to Martin Luther King Jr., “particularly in the service and light manufacturing sectors, with the objective of raising the lowest wage level to $100 a week within a very short time. On the other hand, if the mainstream of labor continues to ignore the plight of these workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are Negro and Puerto Rican, then we ought to take steps to encourage the formation of independent unions to carry out these objectives.”44
Robinson and other Distributive Workers activists sought to link social movement energy with institutionalized labor-union strength. A few months before his letter to King, Robinson had rallied four hundred African American leaders to the cause of independent unions at a conference in Washington, DC, drafting detailed plans for a drive to organize nonunion low-wage workers and target unions that were not adequately representing their members of color.45
The union struck out on its own to organize poor workers outside what Robinson called the AFL-CIO’s “rotten and dilapidated” walls. “There are 57 million unorganized workers in the United States, and the AFL-CIO is not relevant to their problems,” Robinson told delegates at the Distributive Workers’ founding convention. Government programs to fight poverty were “ineffectual,” he said. “The only real war on poverty is the war of workers organizing for a living wage,” one in which poor people themselves build the structures of their own liberation.46
With pledges to organize “the Mexican-Americans, the Black Americans, the poor whites and the American Indians,” and with repeated criticism of the “lily-white” complexion of mainstream trade unions, the new union made plans to organize in fifty cities, opening its doors to any unorganized workers who asked for help.47 The new name—Distributive Workers of America—was meant to include as many kinds of workers as possible, whether working in trades, industries, or services, in large workplaces or small. This was a conscious effort to move past the exclusionary trade focus of the many AFL-CIO unions, and even past the old CIO’s focus of organizing along industry lines.
In its first year, the Distributive Workers brought more than two thousand previously unorganized low-wage workers into the union. Every new contract negotiated for those workers included what was at that time a unique clause: January 15 would be a paid holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., with 40 percent of the day’s pay going directly to a District 65 demonstration and rally fund. Moreover, the union insisted that rank-and-file workers be involved in organizing campaigns, because the “narrow objective of merely collecting dues would not . . . accomplish any useful purpose”; it would only replicate the mainstream trade-union movement’s failures.48 The Distributive Workers advocated “one-on-one” organizing instead, with connections made horizontally worker to worker, rather than vertically, paid union organizers or official to worker. With such practices, Distributive Workers activists successfully incorporated social movement–style organizing within an existing union institution, enabling them to organize across race, gender, and occupational lines in a way that was quite unusual at the time.
The Distributive Workers’ organizing also extended into the community. The union sent teams of community organizers to dozens of neighborhoods to organize responses to abusive landlords, dangerous streets, and cuts in city services such as sanitation, bus services, and health care. “Just as other . . . organizers protect our workers in their respective locals, the community organizers . . . are dedicated to the task of aiding members in the communities where they live,” wrote organizer Pete Gonzalez in a 1969 issue of the union’s paper, Distributive Worker. Union members who became unemployed were encouraged to remain active and use the union to advocate for changes in policy and benefits. Welfare recipients found support in the Distributive Workers’ opposition to the Nixon administration’s 1969 plan to push recipients into jobs in exchange for their benefits, which the union called an attempt to “provide sweat-shop employers with a cheap labor pool.”49
The Distributive Workers joined the ALA in May 1970. The same month, over six hundred people packed the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, center of ALA organizing at the time, to hear civil rights activist Coretta Scott King speak in support of the new union, which she called “the conscience of the labor movement.”50
Over the next decade, as it continued to organize low-wage workers of all types, the Distributive Workers took white-collar “women’s work” especially seriously. Margie Albert, a Distributive Workers steward, wrote of a “new spirit” of unionism among clerical workers in a 1973 New York Times op-ed piece, which was read into the Congressional Record by New York representative Bella Abzug the day it was published.51 Incorporating demands for equal pay, childcare, and flexible schedules into their organizing plan, activists racked up victories in heavily female workplaces in both the public and private sector, including office workers at Barnard, Columbia, and Fisk Universities; editorial staff at several large New York publishing houses; workers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and writers at the Village Voice. Even the workers at cruise line Club Med joined, along with sizable office staffs working in beauty salons.52
Affiliation talks with the UAW began in late 1978. The auto workers had announced their intention to organize workers outside their usual jurisdiction, particularly among white-collar women workers, and saw the Distributive Workers as key to those plans. Distributive Workers activists believed the UAW could lend greater resources to their organizing goals. In September 1979 the Distributive Workers affiliated with the UAW, becoming its “District 65,” with a membership of fifty thousand in forty separate locals—a 20 percent increase in membership from a decade earlier and a nearly fourfold growth in the number of locals—at a time when union membership was generally in decline.53 Its consciously multiracial, feminist, grassroots, social movement–style organizing strategy had paid off big time.
A Question of Change
Independent trade unions like the Distributive Workers, alternative federations like the ALA, and rank-and-file caucus movements like DRUM were critical developments within organized labor in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Virtually ignored by mainstream news sources, they were covered intensively in the African American press, women’s periodicals, and left publications, often with a sense of hope and excitement. Pressure inside trade unions combined with social justice activism on the outside to create a new opening for progressive unionism. Labor activists saw the possibility of a new stream of workers’ activism emerging from the stagnant waters of the AFL-CIO.
But these attempts to raise awareness and organize poor workers were a small part of the postwar era’s official labor movement—a mere blip on the radar screen of trade unionism. Successful independent initiatives were sometimes wooed back into mainstream trade unions and the AFL-CIO, as with the Distributive Workers’ affiliation with the UAW in 1979, and as we will see in the next two chapters, the affiliations of several independent labor organizing projects with the Service Employees International Union in the late ’70s and early ’80s. In exchange for their independence, these unions usually received attractive financial support, vastly enhancing their ability to organize and expand. They did insist on maintaining the elements of their original structures that allowed a high degree of local autonomy and decision making. That some AFL-CIO trade unions absorbed a few of the more successful organizing projects was to those unions’ credit and showed that they were beginning to acknowledge the need for alternative ways of organizing. These were not hostile takeovers but mutually agreeable collaborations between independent poor workers’ unions and progressive-minded AFL-CIO trade unions.
Other dissident workers put their energies into organizations for internal reform. In September 1972, twelve hundred Black workers gathered in Chicago to form the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Led by the Distributive Workers’ Cleveland Robinson and AFSCME’s Bill Lucy, the coalition pledged to work within the framework of organized labor and rejected Black separatism.54 Though its program included community-based organizing of poor workers, this work never materialized on a large scale. Such an investment in organizing would have taken substantial commitments from top trade union leaders, who not only determined organizing policy but also held the purse strings of major international unions. While those officials occasionally offered to affiliate successful independent unions, they were generally not yet convinced of the need for a broader expansion through large-scale organizing. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists became heavily involved in lobbying for change within the AFL-CIO and working on local electoral politics.
Two years later, in March 1974, female unionists formed the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which also stated that its goal was to “organize the unorganized” but then worked primarily on opening up union structures to female leadership. Indeed, CLUW activist and historian Ann Withorn argued in 1976 that political conflicts between activists employed as trade union staffers and rank-and-file activists led to CLUW’s eventual devolution into what she critically called “the official Women’s Auxiliary of the trade-union bureaucracy.”55 Still, while not engaged in active organizing campaigns, CLUW activists raised feminist consciousness within labor, advocating for issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s reproductive rights. Their more radical ideas slowly seeped into AFL-CIO trade unionism in the later ’70s and the ’80s, helping to sow the seeds for a broadening of the movement that would begin to emerge in the 1990s.
Like the movement-based organizing highlighted in chapter 1, these internal trade-union initiatives to steer the labor movement in a broader direction were experimental, and some were transient. The Distributive Workers, the ALA, and DRUM, like the civil rights–era jobs demonstrations, freedom unions, welfare rights groups, and women’s liberation unions, grew out of a specific historical context and its language of change. These efforts formed a continuum—from revoluntary-influenced efforts like DRUM and the internal caucuses, to the Distributive Workers’ radical but practical trade unionism, to community-development corporations funded by unions like the UAW.
Neither the ALA nor the UAW projects rocked the boat of existing trade unionism. The ALA’s support of organizing was refreshing, but its generally top-down methods did not translate into successful campaigns, as it sought to increase membership numbers without any significant increase in member involvement. UAW-funded neighborhood-based groups such as the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and the East Los Angeles Community Union provided social welfare–type improvements but often at the cost of reinforcing class and gender divisions within poor communities. They did little to challenge the root causes of poverty or empower working-class residents.
Activists in the Distributive Workers and the RUMs, on the other hand, saw the need for grassroots empowerment and challenged established notions about organizing poor workers by insisting that they needed a voice and a vote inside the unions—as members, organizers, and elected leaders. Unionism had to be about more than paying dues, voting for an old-boys’ network of leaders, and reaping a yearly pay increase. For them, union activism was a vehicle to pursue a deeper social transformation in which class, race, ethnicity, and gender oppressions were confronted by a membership that understood the value of participatory democracy and community-based activism. Continual organizing would lay the groundwork for an expanded membership base, and eventually a more diverse and capable movement. Collective power, not individual action, was the solution to movement decline. Over the next decades, both antipoverty activists and independent community-based workers’ centers would take this lesson and run with it.