Against the Current, No. 23, November/December 1989
Peter Downs IMAGINE, IF you will, an office; not the cramped shabby office of clerk
or junior executive, but a large, richly furnished office on an upper
floor of a handsome office building. Thick, new carpet shields the
floor. Acceptably artistic drawings and photographs grace the walls.
Several overstuffed, leather easy chairs occupying the center and one
side of the room face the area’s dominant presence: a massive but
gleaming mahogany desk.
Now, imagine the people in this office. Men: middle-aged, white,
probably clean shaven with neatly trimmed graying hair. The kind of men
who wear conservative gray or blue business suits and see their barbers
once a week.
The number of men gathered in this office—three, four, maybe
five—denotes an exclusive club. Setting in motion events that will sweep
like a tornado through the lives of millions of people, these gray men,
fixed as they are on the “big picture,” give hardly a thought to such
people.
Who are these men? Are they captains of industry, of finance, or of labor?
For millions of Americans, the behavior of the three is interchangeable.
They see their union leaders in the above picture. For “the union,” to
them, has become another boss telling them how to live their lives. The
spread of that image among union members has given impetus to reform
movements, such as the New Directions Movement (NDM) in the United Auto
Workers, battling the union hierarchy about the very concept of what a
union is and how it functions.
Origins
NDM began in the autumn of 1985. Several local union officers in the
UAW’s Region 5 felt caught between an unresponsive international union
apparatus and an increasingly restless and dissatisfied membership.
Region 5 encompasses eight states: Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas,
Oklahoma, Nevada, Louisiana and Texas.
We felt abandoned by the International,” explains one of the founders of
NDM. “I had seen several good local officers defeated in their bids for
re-election because of what the International did. The members can’t
reach the International, but they can reach us.”
For five years companies had besieged local unions by demanding
concessions and moving work from union plants to nonunion shops and
companies. For five years the International had seemed to do nothing
about it except offer the companies’ concessions. Instead of
strengthening organizing efforts, the International Executive Board
actually cut staff and rebuffed local unions that sought subsidies to
add organizers of their own.
The locals most badly hurt were small locals and those with their own
wages and benefits which were not part of a national agreement—as is
usually the case in aerospace and auto parts. General Motors workers
suffered as well, however, once the union’s International Executive
Board agreed to let the company negotiate exceptions to the national
pattern with individual locals. One Ford activist says he joined NDM
because he saw what was happening at GM and understood the consequences
of “pattern bargaining and pattern concessions.”
On March 1, 1986, a meeting of local union leaders in Oklahoma City
approved statements on bargaining, organizing, the servicing of locals
and internal communication in a call for “New Directions.” The
statements, compiled in a report that was addressed and issued to “UAW
Region 5 Leadership” took the International leadership to task for
abandoning the local unions.
None of the statements adopted by NDM were particularly radical. What
was radical was the suggestion that the International leaders were not
fulfilling their responsibilities. As stated in the New Directions call
letter, they were “getting in bed” with the companies and making
“backdoor” deals, while union staffers were “jamming the company line
down our throats” or leaving local leaders “out there on our own.”
The Tucker Campaign
None of that mattered much to the Administrative Caucus—the caucus
ruling the UAW for the last forty years— until NDM nominated a candidate
for regional director. Then the administration reacted with a vengeance.
The candidate, assistant regional director Jerry Tucker, was fired.
Local officers backing him were threatened with reprisals against
themselves or their locals. Union dues money was funneled into incumbent
Ken Worley’s campaign. Worley also illegally appointed delegates to
attend the convention from small locals.
NDM was radical simply bemuse local leaders had the temerity to organize
independently of the Administrative Caucus and promote a candidate for a
national office that could be won. The administration reacted so
vehemently because the issue was not simply one of political program,
but of power.
Until the union’s constitutional convention in June 1986, NDM labored in
relative obscurity. Then, Jerry Tucker lost the election by 0.16 votes
(convention delegates cast weighted votes based on the number of members
in their locals).
The closeness of the vote and the overwhelming evidence of election
fraud made Tucker an instant celebrity. The decision to protest the
election to the U.S. Department of Labor and thus continue the fight
against abuses of power made him a hero.
The Issues
The decision to seek a rerun of the Region 5 elections set the stage for
some dramatic changes in NDM. Numerous hazards stood in the way of
success: the courts and the federal government are notoriously slow and
expensive. Delay and expense could cause the movement to dissipate or
consume its own activists. Tucker himself could be barred from running
again if he did not maintain his UAW membership or took a job somewhere
else.
Supporters of the NDM had a choice. They could accept the loss and
return to the administration fold, which some did. They could focus on
the legal strategy and concern themselves only with local issues until a
court ruling, which probably would have cost them any chance of winning
a rerun election. Some NDM supporters went that route.
The majority, however, decided to expose the Administrative Caucus and
broaden the movement’s base among the membership by distributing
leaflets in the plants, holding meetings, recruiting new activists and
collecting money.
Reaching out to the membership required that NDM clarify its vision of
unionism and sharpen its critique of the administration. That process
wasn’t easy, and in so doing, more of the early backers of NDM fell away
and rejoined the Administrative Caucus. As NDM enunciated its vision of
unionism by campaigning for the election of all union representatives,
for membership approval of bargaining policies as well as all contracts
or contract changes, and for in-plant mobilizations to fight corporate
offensives, new rank-and-file activists swelled its ranks and the
movement’s appeal broadened outside Region 5.
Democracy and job security remained uppermost in the concerns of the
rank-and-file. The administration argued that jobs could be secured by
making companies competitive. This was the argument that justified
concessions, speedup, lower benefits and deteriorating working
conditions. It was an argument for accepting a smaller unionized
workforce, in which the union bureaucracy would still have a place,
though many union members would not.
NDM activists argued that when workers compete to see who can do the
most work for the least money in the worst conditions, all workers lose.
We expect management to encourage that kind of competition, they said,
but not the union.
On a global level, however, the job-security argument benefitted the
administration. Management had created overcapacity in the automobile
assembly and auto-parts industries, through investment in new plants and
technology tore-place older facilities and through decisions to move
work to new low-wage, non-union or foreign factories.
With the overcapacity thus created, management pitted workforces against
each other to see which could work cheapest, a process autoworkers call
“whipsawing,” which nurtured feelings among workers that they must be
cooperative just to have a chance to their plant open.
Management used that same tactic during the delegate elections,
threatening to close plants if the workers voted for NDM candidates or
protested management’s actions. Conversely, management could, and did,
promise to ‘try to’ keep a plant open if the workers voted for
Administrative Caucus candidates in local or delegate elections.
On a more individual level, the job-security argument tended to benefit
NDM. Union officers who accept speedup and work-rule concessions in the
name of competitiveness are unwilling to fight for grievances around
those issues.
Such failures of representation had comprised the main factor souring
the membership on the administration and preparing the ground for NDM.
Even members who agree with the administration’s arguments get angry
when their own grievances get settled on management’s terms or, worse,
left to collect dust in a drawer somewhere.
As one GM activist explains, the lack of representation sabotages job
security “When management can go up to a worker on the line who has a
settled grievance over how much work he [sic] can do, and ignores that
settlement and adds work to the guy, and keeps adding work until he
can’t do it all and fires him, then management can do that to any worker
on the line. When the union refuses to fight for that guy, where’s your
job security?”
The issue of democracy also cut both ways. Members want to have a voice
in deciding what the union does. They want to decide whether to accept
contracts and grievance settlements. They want to elect their own
representatives. But they can’t They can’t elect International officers,
or even benefits and health and safety representatives in the plants And
the administration’s practice of changing contracts without even
informing members of the changes strikes at the membership’s right to
have a say over their working conditions.
The administration claims that it is creating real workplace democracy
through “jointness” with management Region 6 Director Bruce Lee, for
example, says that the team concept is the fulfillment of the UAW’s
decades-old demands for worker dignity and workplace democracy. That
claim, however, always played better with the public media than it did
with UAW members, who, when they had a vote, often voted against teams,
until repeated re-votes under threat of a plant closing finally brought
the approval the International sought.
In the three years since the 1986 convention, NDM has become a major
critic of jointness and the team concept Drawing on the analysis of Mike
Parker and Jane Slaughter in Choosing Sides, NDM was able to raise
debate among members, and to some extent in the public press, about team
concept Articles supporting criticisms of the team concept even began to
appear in business journals.
In the March-April 1989 issue of Harvard Business Review, Janice Klein
wrote that “our conventional Western notions of worker self-management
on the factory floor are often sadly incompatible with [team concept,
just-in-time inventory, and statistical process control].”
Echoing team concept critics, Klein writes that such programs “eliminate
all variations within production and therefore require strict adherence
to rigid methods and procedures” [emphasis in original]. She adds that
they cost workers their individual autonomy, their team autonomy and
autonomy over methods. That’s not exactly the way Bruce Lee bills it.
Victory and Defeat
In April 1988 a federal judge ordered a new election for Region 5
director. Delegate elections supervised by the U.S. Department of Labor
were held in May and June. A mini-convention, also supervised by the
Labor Department, was held in September.
Jerry Tucker won—but now only nine months remained in the term of
of-lice Tucker’s victory, however, so encouraged UAW oppositionists that
soon there was talk of organizing NDM tickets in local delegate
elections around the country.
A meeting in the Detroit suburb of Warren on January 8, 1989, drew over
800 people from at least five states. Activists around longtime
dissidents Don Douglas and Pete Kelly (presidents of Locals 909 and 160
respectively) began to organize a campaign for Douglas for director of
the combined Regions I and 1b under the NDM banner.
The Douglas campaign mushroomed into a rank-and-file crusade. Meanwhile
workers from Indiana began building a statewide movement. “New
Directions” slates sprouted in locals in Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York,
Ohio, Massachusetts, Delaware and California.
The administration, however, was campaigning in earnest. Every staff
member in the country was dunned for $500 for an anti-NDM campaign. Roy
Wyse, administration candidate in Region 5, took a leave of absence to
campaign full-time against Tucker. Staff members in Region 5 stopped
servicing local unions in order to campaign. International
secretary-treasurer Bill Casstevens made frequent trips into the region
to tour Wyse through the plants.
In Region 1, gangs of staff representatives swept into the plants to
campaign against Don Douglas. The administration, stunned by early
lopsided locals in GM plants, tried to pit workers against each other
along racial, gender, generational and employer lines. Corporate
management also appeared to intervene with material support to
administration delegates while threatening layoffs or plant closings if
NDM delegate candidates won.
The International called retiree meetings to accuse NDM of wanting to
take away retiree pensions and voting rights; and in at least six local
unions in Region 5 and two in Region 1/1B, unusually heavy retiree votes
provided administration-backed candidates with their margins of victory.
At Locals 110 in Fenton, Missouri, and 2175 in Brownsville, Texas, there
was evidence of ballot stuffing. NDM delegate candidates lodged protests
of election irregularities at over a dozen other locals. The
administration this time had stolen not one election, but two. It was as
if Owen Bieber and his Administrative Caucus were pursuing a scorched
earth policy—seemingly preferring to destroy the vestiges of unionism in
the UAW to losing their monopoly of power.
Estimating that NDM would have about 10 percent of delegates at the June
1989 convention, the administration orchestrated an image of
overwhelming rejection of NDM. Their delegates were instructed not to
talk to anyone in NDM, with hundreds of staffers watching to enforce the
orders. Individuals selected to speak from the floor were given speeches
to read condemning NDM as anti-union.
Groups of administration loyalists equipped with walkie-talkies received
instructions as to when to cheer or boo. Such a device was designed to
control the floor debate while putting on a show of democracy for the media.
Yet the convention was a success for NDM. It set the agenda for the
convention debate and emerged with more support than it had going in.
Three years ago dissidents accounted for a handful of voting delegates;
this year they were backed by nearly 20 percent of the delegates on
major issues.
The administration had intended to bury NDM instead it made NDM a second
political party in the union, creating for the first time in decades a
chance for the membership to take part in a debate.
NDM is poised to become a national movement in the UAW, with an October
conference in St Louis. The goal is to develop a national NDM program,
structure and recommendations for UAW bargaining objectives. NDM will
have to face squarely two central issues competitiveness and movement
building.
Competitiveness and the Future
NDM activists have responded to exhortations to compete either by
pointing out that if workers everywhere compete by speedup and wage
cutting, then they all get hurt; or by digging in and proclaiming,
“Dammit, that’s not the union’s job.”
Both responses have their place, but miss the point for many workers
Even the argument that the auto giants purposefully created overcapacity
in order to whipsaw workers is beside the point: Many workers are
convinced that their particular employer or plant is in trouble. Their
question is how to save their jobs, without wondering if their
concessions will put some other employer or plant in difficulty.
They lack, and New Directions has not provided, a clear view of the
crisis of the world economy. Corporate and UAW economists paint a
picture of a world economy booming, while individual firms and factories
face greater economic uncertainty from increased competition, making
concessions “unavoidable.”
This begs the question: why is competition more intense?
An alternative view sees the world economy itself in trouble, with
competition yielding to increased mechanization, overcapacity and
declining profit rates in every major capitalist country.
Concessions will not lift us out of the economic crisis, because the
crisis is worldwide. Concessions only aggravate the crisis. This points
to the need for a system-wide response focused on solidarity, not
competition. (An analysis along these lines is provided by Anwar Shaikh
in “The Current Economic Crisis: Causes And Implications,” published by
Against the Current, 1989.)
Movement building, meanwhile, has tended to take a backseat to election
cam-pains. NDM began as an electoral opposition in an arena largely
hidden from the UAW’s membership. The loss in Anaheim propelled NDM
toward the rank and file.
Since 1986 NDM leaders in Region 5 have struggled with practical
meanings of democracy and rank-and-file power. But movement-building
activities have been uneven throughout Region 5 and have also suffered
elsewhere.
In Region I the history of New Directions is only that of an election
campaign, emphasizing the candidate. New activists around the country
are only beginning to struggle with issues of expanding decision-making
circles, including new people, developing an alternative practice of
struggle on the shop floor to the legalistic and elitist functioning of
the existing union representation.
It is very difficult to break from the top-down flow of decisions and
the passing of responsibility from the bottom up, because that is all
everyone knows. It is how the company operates, how the union functions,
the method in which union activists have been schooled. They are drilled
constantly to take no action without first getting approval from higher
up and to do what they are told.
They fear independent activity because it leads to trouble People get
mad; opportunities for advancement disappear.
NDM is on the verge of becoming a national caucus. It can become more: a
national movement for a new, democratic unionism. To do that, it must
develop a support system to enable activists to accept rejection as well
as success, to develop thick skins and strong stomachs for harassment in
order to put the union—meaning the rank and file.—first. They cannot let
there be peace, until there is justice. © 2020 Against the Current November-December 1989, ATC 23