Abstract
The genesis of this book was a 1996 union activist conference where the author Dana Cloud, a professor of communications, met Keith Thomas, a Boeing worker and leader of the Wichita, Kansas–based dissident group Unionists for Democratic Change (UDC). Drawing largely on extensive interviews with Thomas, two other key dissident leaders from Washington State, and others, Cloud examines the dissident movement within the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) locals after 1989.
This was “a time of massive structural change in a rapidly shifting economic context … competition from Airbus, airline deregulation, investor pressure, and the neoliberal shift in the world economy toward practices of team-based, just-in-time production requiring increasingly fewer number of workers” (p. 34). Dissidents had two general criticisms of the IAM: an entrenched union leadership that cooperates with management in implementing team-based programs and quality initiatives and undemocratic practices that limit internal dissent.
Cloud contends that reform groups agitating for union democracy, accountability, and greater militancy are crucial to restoring the power of American unions. But their leaders, whom she refers to as the “loyal opposition,” have to “fight the union in order to use the union to their own ends” (p. xiii). They also contend with their employers, a dilemma that makes union opposition movements inherently fragile.
At Boeing, the crucial turning point came in 1995 when rank and file members twice rejected Boeing’s contract offers, including one endorsed by IAM negotiators that posed a serious threat to job security. In that same year, a highly profitable Boeing had eliminated 35,000 jobs (26,000 in the Puget Sound area), mainly through subcontracting and outsourcing overseas. The rejections sparked a victorious 69-day strike that produced significant pay increases, the preservation of health benefits without cost to workers, protections against job loss, and increased awareness and solidarity. A union reformer expressed the meaning of the victory: “The shining moment in that strike was the membership took over the union. The membership realized we’re the union. They have a say … people got the idea that this was theirs” (p. 109). And then it wasn’t.
Cloud elaborates on the paradox of dissent and the decline of the reform groups. She notes that they experienced undemocratic practices by entrenched union leadership, physical and other types of harassment from people affiliated with the IAM, and a determined corporation to take back what it lost in 1995. Leaders also became burnt out fighting both their union and Boeing.
The dissident groups also suffered from a lack of sustained organization and the failure to recruit and train new members that generate and sustains militant consciousness. The case of Wichita’s UDC is instructive. The group formally disbanded before the 1995 strike for a number of reasons, according to its leader, Keith Thomas. Unable to reform the established unions directly, Boeing dissidents turned to political and legal means. Both, according to Cloud, are problematic. She is especially critical of the dissidents who sued the IAM under the Landrum-Griffin Act because of the law’s antiunion history, because it exposes the union to government scrutiny, and because it takes the focus away from the employer. Instead, Cloud advocates 1930s-style shop-floor activism that pressures both the employer and the union: “the rise of the CIO provides an inspiring model of the birth of a fighting labor movement out of a period of fragmentation, exclusivity, and weakness in existing labor institutions. I mean to suggest that present conditions of economic crisis and the stirrings of a new militancy are ripe for a similar transformation” (p. 13).
She locates this new militancy in recent bottom-up working-class protests in both the private and public sectors and argues that the success of future organizing and labor action will “depend largely on the presence and strength of union activists who can apply pressure to both union and company at key moments of opportunity” (p. 195).
Although Cloud criticizes Keith Thomas and other leaders for not involving the rank and file in the reform movement, she doesn’t interview IAM members to understand their attitudes toward the reform groups and their alleged apathy. Moreover, she downplays the larger constraints operating against union renewal that have led to a continuing erosion of union density in the private sector.
These minor criticisms aside, We Are the Union offers an excellent cautionary tale to union educators, activists, and leaders for finding ways to reinvigorate the American labor movement in the face of union bureaucracy and hostile employers and their political supporters.