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November 19, 1997
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Ron Carey's fall from power this week--a federal overseer barred him from seeking re-election asTeamsters union president--isn't just a victory against union corruption. It may also be an opportunity for organized labor to throw off its reflexively leftist politics and steer a more centrist course.
To understand the true significance of these developments, we must go back to the early 1970s. In December 1972, author James Ring Adams wrote on this page of a "Battle Royale Among the Socialists." Mr. Adams was referring to the ideological fault lines that were fracturing the intellectual-labor coalition in the wake of Sen. George McGovern's rise to power in the Democratic Party.
Mr. McGovern was a neoisolationist
with elitist, antilabor tendencies; and
the convention that nominated him had
refused to seat the president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany,
the anticommunist leader of the Democratic
trade union movement.
In the years that followed,the McGovernites held sway within the Democratic Party--but
were kept at bay within the labor movement under
the leadership of Meany's successor, Lane Kirkland,
and his secretary/treasurer, Thomas Donahue.
Mr. Kirkland made the AFL-CIO a major force in the battle
against international communism, playing a
crucial role in supporting Poland's Solidarity movement.
But labor veered left in 1995, when Mr. Sweeney defeated Mr. Donahue in the race to succeed Mr. Kirkland as AFL-CIO president. And behind all the talk about money laundering and corruption inside the House of Labor lurks the next stage in an ideological struggle that has been running for more than a generation.
Its trajectory was set when the writer
Michael Harrington created the Democratic
Socialists of America in 1972. In a lather over the Socialist
Party's lukewarm "statement of preference"
for Sen. McGovern, Harrington seceded from the party, opening a
rift that has never been mended.
On the other side of
the divide stand the more moderate Social Democrats-USA.
Many of its members participated in the Reagan revolution
and were partisans in the AFL-CIO's fight against communism
in Poland.
Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats: As anachronistic as these names sound to the American ear, the two groups' ideological differences explain a lot about the current situation inside the labor movement.
Mr. Sweeney's rise has given Harrington's
heirs a new prominence within the labor movement.
Four erstwhile members of Students for a Democratic
Society have emerged at the center of the Teamsters
scandal, including, most notably, the onetime
campus radical Michael Ansara, who has pleaded guilty
to raising campaign funds illegally for Mr. Carey.
Mr. Sweeney himself belongs to the Democratic
Socialists. (The group made headlines just last month when
it was reported that a member of its governing political
committee, Kurt Stand, had been spying for the East
German secret police for 20 years.)
The new AFL-CIO chief has taken an indiscriminate approach to coalition building. He held hands with the New Age Rabbi Michael Lerner at Mr. Lerner's touchy-feely "Summit on Ethics and Meaning" last year, and he has cozied up to left-wing MIT linguist Noam Chomsky. More broadly, Mr. Sweeney's AFL-CIO has emphasized partisan politics over organizing, dumping millions of dollars into electoral contests in which the Republican candidate was deemed vulnerable.
None of this sits well with the Social
Democrats, who fell out of power in 1995. "They've
got nothing to offer that wasn't done before--and done
better before," says Donald Slaiman, president of the Social
Democrats and an official at the AFL-CIO under Mr.
Kirkland.
Mr. Slaiman would like to see Big Labor become
once again a vibrant, independent force, the engine behind
gradual social change as opposed to a vehicle for
class warfare.
Internationally, of course, the Social
Democrats favor interventionism in support of democracy.
They may yet get their wish. The scandal
engulfing Mr. Carey just might pave the way for
the return to power of the labor movement's Cold War brain
trust. Mr. Sweeney's fate is closely linked to that of
Mr. Carey; not only did Mr. Carey swing his union behind
the AFL-CIO president, but investigators are looking
into charges that the AFL-CIO responded in kind
by helping to steer cash into Mr. Carey's campaign coffers.
Without Mr. Carey, there's no reason
to believe that the Teamsters will stick by Mr. Sweeney--especially
because Mr. Hoffa will have his own score
to settle with the AFL-CIO's president. Some even speculate
that the Teamsters will be kicked out of the
federation. In any case, it's likely that Mr. Sweeney's
base of power will be substantially eroded. "If
Carey doesn't survive, it is going to be a very tense few years
in the AFL-CIO," predicted one labor expert, sociologist
Stanley Aronowitz of the City University of
New York's Graduate Center.
Here's where the Social Democrats
come in. It's rumored in labor circles that if the Teamsters
are indeed expelled from the federation (or leave
voluntarily), the unions that were defeated in the 1995
election may unite behind the president of the American
Federation of Teachers, Sandra Feldman. Ms. Feldman,
the protege of the late Albert Shanker, says she
is 100% behind Mr. Sweeney; at a recent executive council
meeting, however, she pressed the AFL-CIO chief about
the Teamsters debacle. What's more, the AFT is currently
in the process of merging with the National
Education Association, a deal that could put
her at the helm of the largest trade union in the free
world.
In the event that the Teamsters stay
in the federation, there is also the possibility of an
alliance between traditional Social Democratic forces
like the AFT and the so-called bread-and-butter unions,
like the Teamsters, which are primarily concerned
with wages, pensions and benefits. There is a
precedent for such an alliance: George Meany, the plumber
who commanded the labor movement during the waning years
of the Cold War, was closely aligned with the intellectual
Albert Shanker.
Mr. Adams concluded his 1972 Journal
article by quoting a prominent Social Democrat, Penn
Kemble, as saying that the "New Politics" doesn't
just want a place in the liberal coalition of the Democratic
Party; it wants to take over the Democratic Party--even
if that meant throwing out the labor movement. A
generation later, a struggle is erupting over whether
the labor movement should forge an alliance with the
wing of the Democratic Party that turned its back on the
worker a quarter-century ago.
Mr. Mahler is managing editor of the
Forward newspaper.
Copyright 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.