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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Skewering personalities slights serious issues, May 17, 2002
"Taking Care of Business" is a scathing attack on the shortsighted, bureaucratic, business union approach of the leadership of the AFL and AFL-CIO over the last one hundred years. None of the presidents of these labor federations from Gompers through Meany and Kirkland escape the author's thoroughgoing criticism. Of course, those leaders can only reflect the nature of the overall trade union movement. Trade unions in the US have historically been both exclusionary and, since WWII, controlling in their relationship to the working class. Most trade unions, until only very recently, have focused on protecting the relatively privileged position of white, skilled craftsmen within the economy while either outright excluding or only rhetorically supporting the largest portion of the working class due to differences in race, ethnicity, gender, or skill level. The rise of industrial unions in the WWII era, despite being a small step in the direction of inclusion, ushered in a labor relations regime where labor unions' role became one of enforcing constraining collective bargaining agreements as much as the representation of workers. By the early 1950s union officials, as typified by Meany and Kirkland, came to see themselves as the counterpart to business leaders in a labor-management accord. They adopted the same lifestyles and moved in the same social circles. Labor officials, in their newfound role, had no problem with making the world safe for business interests. So-called radical unions and unionists with their demands for worker activism at the point of production were purged from the AFL and unions. The AFL and AFL-CIO under the regimes of Meany and Kirkland collaborated with the US intelligence community through a series of front committees and councils to defeat popular movements in favor of pro-US, right-wing thugs in foreign lands, especially Latin America. Even though the PATCO fiasco of 1981 clearly showed the shredding of the post-WWII domestic social compact, the focus of the AFL-CIO remained on expending tremendous amounts of federation resources on dubious foreign operations. Clearly, Meany and Kirkland did little to advance the interests of US workers, but the author does not really address the weakly federated structure of organized labor in the US. Given the independence of the AFL's constituent unions and the history of organized labor through WWII, were Meany and Kirkland types not almost predictable? Perhaps they do deserve the author's scorn as symbols of the ineffectualness of organized labor, but the problems run much deeper. The author more than hints that the Gompers-Meany-Kirkland threesome squashed the desires of the US working class to establish some sort of workers democratic regime - his admiration for the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) being a tip-off. But that view may be mostly wishful. He cites the Knights of Labor as indicative of working class interest in social unionism, but it is clear that only a small portion of the membership of that organization supported the KOL position of transforming the US into a cooperative society. In fact the KOL impaled itself on traditional, yet failed, strike actions. The author does not attempt to quantify, or place in a broader perspective, the impact of the 1890-1920 movements of populism, the IWW, and socialism on the wider society. Though Gompers, a socialist in his early working days, was clearly unsympathetic towards these movements, the attribution that he was a major factor in their demise seems very questionable. His power to influence events pales in comparison to power of various organs of the state, especially the judiciary, and corporations to adversely affect the working class. Though the author continually raises the issue of worker democracy as a rebuke to the policies of labor leadership, there is scant reflection on what worker democracy may entail. It would have been unthinkable that the author's much admired IWW would have tolerated third-party bureaucratic organizations like unions negotiating contracts for workers. The IWW wanted direct worker control at the point of production for all workers. But then the practical questions of social and economic coordination arise quickly with such radical decentralization. Nonetheless, the author does not attempt to resolve in any practical way the conflict between actual democracy and the current form of organized labor in the US. Nor is there any real assessment of the desire of the American working class to participate in some form of IWW-like democracy. The author does not limit himself to the personalities that have led the AFL-CIO. He is determined to identify countless former communists and socialists of labor organizations who renounced their radical pasts and joined neo-conservative political bodies or collaborated with the intelligence community. The fact that the author is a socialist undoubtedly is germane to his mission of identifying those who have abandoned the cause. A book that is so intent on skewering personalities usually suffers as a result and this one is no exception. The author hints at but does not pursue some worthy topics. What is worker democracy? Are trade unions compatible with such democracy? Aren't centralization and bureaucracy necessary in any complex society? Now those are topics worthy for a book on the labor movement and the working class.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very cogent critique, November 3, 1999
By A Customer
A scathing analysis of the flaws of Meany and Kirkland as leaders of the AFL-CIO. Well-written, well-informed, and passionate. Must reading for union activists and scholars, especially those who are sympathetic to Kirkland or Sweeney. But for rather different views, see Mort, Not Your Father's Labor Movement, and, especially, Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A convincing analysis, April 30, 2009
This review is from: Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (Hardcover)
This book, almost exclusively relying on secondary sources, is an analysis of the trajectory of the American labor movement from the late 19th' through the 20th century.
A big historical problem of the American labor movement, according to Buhle, has been the hostility of labor leaders to female and non-white workers. This tendency was illustrated even in circles of the labor movement which were the least racist. Buhle argues that the German immigrant circles controlling the American chapter of Marx's First International made a fatal mistake in expelling English speaking radical abolitionists and feminists from the International on the ground that the English speaking members were too bourgeois and reformist. Marx believed that racial and gendered oppression were far less important than the economic oppression of the workers.
Then the American Federation of Labor came along and, for the most part, refused to organize, on racist and sexist grounds, any worker who was not a white male craft worker of western European descent. A.F of L leader Samuel Gompers presented himself as an anti-socialist moderate. World War I was an opportunity for Gompers to try to work for his vision of a partnership between moderate labor leaders like himself, government and business leaders. The federal government's Committee on Public Information secretly funded a pro-war group established by Gompers within the A.F of L. Gompers supported the Wilson administration's repression of the American left but the A.F of L came out of World War I and its concomitant red scare in a very weakened state. Gompers established a labor organization for Latin America that attempted to build up unions in Latin American that would not be strike prone or raise questions about US corporate exploitation of Latin America.
Buhle covers the incorporation of the A.F of L's and then the AFL-CIO's international operations into American intelligence operations. Tens of millions of dollars were secretly funneled by the US government to A.F of L operatives, many of them based in David Dubinsky's International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), to attempt to undermine Communist trade union and elected officials in Europe. The ILGWU's Irving Brown was involved in attempts to undermine worker militancy on behalf of the US government for four decades. Buhle notes that Brown devoted himself to working with various folks, including mafia elements, to undermine anti-American union leaders in Europe in the late 40's. Then towards the end of his life, in the 1980's, Brown helped funnel money and coordinate support for the barbaric Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi as well as Chief Buthelezi in South Africa. Brown helped funnel AFL-CIO money to labor organizations linked to Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu Bantustan leader who was backed by the apartheid South African government and white business owners as an "alternative" to Nelson Mandela and the "communist tainted" ANC.
Buhle notes how eager AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland was to send his federation's money to Russia and the former Soviet block to create docile pro-business unions. Buhle points out how the AFL-CIO helped guide Solidarity in Poland into abandoning the libertarian socialist orientation that the organization rose to prominence with and encouraged its leaders by 1989 to embrace the extreme free market policies the US government wanted. Indeed by the late 80's, as domestic labor suffered dramatic losses of membership, faced substantial union busting and organizing defeats, Kirkland's regime was spending more money internationally than domestically. Buhle notes that in 1994 alone, while refusing to support any labor newspaper or radio station in the United States, the Kirkland regime found 660,000 dollars to fund four radio stations in Russia. While the Russian people sunk into misery, the AFL-CIO did its best to support the new corrupt "democratic" oligarchy around Boris Yeltsin.
Buhle is particularly harsh regarding AFL-CIO policies on race. During George Meany's regime, the AFL-CIO engaged in symbolic gestures against racism while doing little to fight racism within their affiliate unions. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers strike in Brooklyn in 1968 featured American Federation of Teacher (AFT) leader Albert Shanker's use of rhetoric that Jimmy Breslin found to be virtually indistinguishable from that of George Wallace.
In the 1980's and 1990's Buhle notes that, in the midst of American labor's decline, there were some notably powerful grassroots labor efforts such as among Hormel employees in Austin Minnesota and among agribusiness workers in Decatur Illinois. Such struggles were launched at the grassroots level and usually faced cold indifference from the fat cat labor bosses.
Buhle outlines the widespread problem of labor unions being controlled by bureaucracies unaccountable to the rank and file and by leaders who use their position to live very wealthy and luxurious lives and cooperate with management to keep the workers down. Buhle argues that the John Sweeny administration that took over the AFL-CIO in 1995 has somewhat ameliorated some of the deficiencies of the Meany-Kirkland regimes, particularly in a willingness to support immigrant workers. But AFL-CIO bureaucracies remain extremely undemocratic. AFL-CIO leaders, for the most part, continue to show complete fidelity to the Democratic Party and continue to insist on throwing massive amounts of money into the campaign chests of Democratic politicians, no matter how supportive these politicians are of "free trade" pacts and other anti-labor measures.
Buhle makes a convincing case that the business unionism pursued by American labor leaders in the 20th century has often brought poor results for American workers. The model, has, of course, at the same time brought a lot of prestige in the business and political world to the labor leaders who have followed it.
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