Abstract
As any union steward can tell you, the remedy for a grievance is often the most difficult piece of the procedure to frame. If a grievance involves millions of workers over decades, or even centuries, what remedy brings justice? If the grievance is race and sex discrimination by employers and unions, the remedy is complicated, controversial and “polarizing,” combining the often contradictory forces of civil rights and union seniority, both movements associated—supposedly—with the best practices of unionism.
Dennis Deslippe’s book, Protesting Affirmative Action, is both ambitious and timely. Deslippe covers the 15-year period when affirmative action was such a controversial topic. And now in 2013 the Supreme Court is scheduled to issue yet another major decision on affirmative action.
Deslippe describes how the grievances of race and sex discrimination brought the remedy of affirmative action, creating a turmoil of social movements and government action. He presents three opposition movements “who did not constitute a single social protest movement or represent one political stance” that arose after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the crucial Title VII, prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, and its enforcement agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The three opposition movements were an unlikely combination: “labor unionism, colorblind liberalism and colorblind conservativism. … And it was labor unionists and liberals—not conservatives—who led the opposition” (p. 3) and created the term “reverse discrimination” to challenge “hard quotas.” The “colorblind liberals” supported a “meritocracy,” with no weight given to race or gender while the “colorblind conservatives” insisted on the status quo, with minimal government regulation.
While academic labor educators might be interested in the chapters on quotas in higher education, the more compelling chapters for the majority of us are those focused on how unions dealt with government demands for equality, especially one entitled “Do Whites Have Rights?” a case study of the Detroit Police Officers Association. After years of racial and sex discrimination by employers and by unions, often formalized in separate seniority lists in union contracts, unions were challenged to resolve the apparent contradiction between equality and solidarity. For Deslippe, the bigger question for union members is: Who is the enemy—the boss? the government? the civil rights movements? our black and female co-workers? All of the above, some of the above, none of the above?
Every aspect of the union contract—from hiring to promotion to layoffs—was challenged by new laws and government policies as well as by a succession of court cases and popular demonstrations. For officers of industrial or public sector unions, the conflict was very complicated. Many were not incurable racists (although some clearly were), but they supported the hallowed principle of seniority in union contracts. Officers of building trades locals supported the long father-son tradition for admission to apprenticeship programs. Deslippe documents the internal struggles as these union officers and members first dealt with the social movements of the 60s, when the opposition to equal treatment was mixed up with contempt for the anti-war hippies, and then with the declining economy of the 1970s, when “last hired/first fired” displaced the issue of preferential hiring.
On a positive note, while many unions have been vilified as obstacles to the civil rights movement, there was strong support from some officers for drastic changes in union principles and practices. As an example, Deslippe notes that in 1965 only 28% of union contracts included a non-discrimination clause but by 1975 74% had such language. Today, the percentage is probably close to 100%.
Many conservative elements, led by Labor Secretary George Schultz, saw affirmative action “as a way to undercut the economic power of labor unions” (p. 27) and to attract many white union members to the Republican Party, changing the political configuration of the country, “as working-class whites came to think of themselves as victims” (p. 31).
While the building trades unions were confronted with the Philadelphia Plan that mandated minority hiring and admission to apprenticeship programs, the police union members in Detroit, as in many other cities, opposed affirmative action as a challenge to the seniority provisions of their union contract and any preferential hiring as an attack on the “professionalism” of their jobs. The detail Deslippe provides in the creation of a “reverse populism” that, in effect, made past discrimination into a union principle, is very powerful.