Abstract
Robert Bussel’s Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship is a joint biography of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway that reveals how they redefined what it meant to be a union member in St. Louis Teamsters Local 688. Working together, they ingeniously developed “a conception of unionism that in Calloway’s words ‘view[ed] the . . . member within the frame of his total environment—economic, social, cultural, and political’” (p. 55) against seemingly impossible odds: in a city “dominated by ward bosses, a parochial business elite, and a fragmented political structure resistant to reform” (p. 3); in a union culture that “held an unabashedly narrow conception of the appropriate mission of trade unionism” (p. 3); and in “the wake of Taft-Hartley’s passage” (p. 58). Gibbons and Calloway used inspired—if not always effective—offensive strategies that sought to expand the scope of worker power beyond the shop floor through the development of a “community bargaining table where empowered worker-citizens negotiated with St. Louis economic and political elites to ensure an equitable distribution of social resources” (p. 5).
Their common vision for “the uses of working class power” (p. 3) and their decades-long professional, political, and personal collaboration were likely due, in part, to the peculiar ways their lives paralleled one another. Both grew up in United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) coal-mining families. Both were exposed to labor education relatively early in their careers—Gibbons as a labor educator and Calloway as a student. Both were anti–communist democratic Socialists. And both demonstrated a life-long commitment to embracing “trade unionism as the most appropriate vehicle for advancing African American aspirations” (p. 21): For Gibbons, labor’s willingness to support the quest for racial justice remained the barometer of the movement’s moral standing. . . . As he explained . . . “The enemies of the Negro people today are the enemies of the labor movement.” (p. 123)
Gibbons’s observation remains chillingly prescient: does labor has the moral courage to use its resources—people, organizational, financial—and political power to advance the fight for racial justice?
I read Fighting for Total Person Unionism not from the perspective of a labor historian but from that of a labor educator who once served on the senior staff of a major national union and who is now the director of a college-affiliated labor center. I was deeply moved. Gibbons and Calloway are eloquent testimonies to the generative possibilities and crushing disappointments of lives lived at contradictory intersections definitive of the labor movement. Bussel gives us a granular view of how these intersections both shaped and were shaped by Gibbons and Calloway: the intersection of workers’ industrial citizenship with workers’ social citizenship; of “participatory democracy and working-class citizenship” (p. 123) with an ostensibly democratic union whose power base is highly centralized and corrupt; of working-class militancy and class warfare with mature labor-management relations; of member apathy, fear, and perceived impotency in the face of neoliberalism, globalization, and automation with the urgent need to identify new organizational forms that will build the labor movement; of the labor movement with the Civil Rights Movement and struggles for racial justice; of personal ethical commitments to worker solidarity with the difficult compromises one is asked to make in order to demonstrate loyalty in dysfunctional organizations. In Gibbons’s case, this last intersection gutted his credibility toward the end of his career and might serve as one critical reason why labor has failed to “in Calloway’s words . . . “inject the trade union apparatus into mainstream public life’” (p. 6).
Bussel’s careful and caring effort with Gibbons and Calloway deserves a much larger audience than labor historians alone; Fighting for Total Person Unionism is a must read for union leadership and staff and, especially, labor educators. In an era when collective bargaining is under attack, Bussel provides us with a plethora of object lessons for how we cannot maintain collective bargaining rights with sole recourse to industrial power. As union demographics shift to incorporate more workers in the service professions, in which caring for others and sustaining relationships is a built-in feature of the work, the qualitatively rich community bargaining table strategy deserves a thorough revisiting. Their approach for activating rank-and-file leaders—on issues like racial justice, affordable health care and housing, urban revitalization (without gentrification), inadequate social services, and job training for low-income and immigrant workers—may have been just slightly ahead of its time, as so many visionary ideas are.