WHAT LABOR CAN’T SAY

by Aldon Morris and Dan Clawson

What kind of labor writing gets suppressed in the U.S.
today? Apparently it doesn’t take much.

We wrote an article on "Lessons of the Civil Rights
Movement for Building a Worker Rights Movement" whose
last paragraph said:

Finally, a fundamental question faces workers today: do
they have the courage to get up off their knees and
confront powerful employers and corporations? A
movement requires moral authority and enormous
sacrifices by its participants if it is to succeed. In
mass movements people must be willing to go to jail, be
beaten, and even to lose their lives in a noble and
just collective effort designed to win their rights and
restore their dignity. Although we do not know whether
contemporary workers possess such courage, we do know
that Jim Crow was overthrown because southern Blacks
did.

The piece had been scheduled to appear in a collection
jointly edited by people from the AFL-CIO and Michigan
State, a volume intended to be a successor to
Organizing to Win. But the book’s publisher - the W.E.
Upjohn Institute Press - refused to include the piece
unless we changed the politics.

This paragraph was the final straw in a long-running
controversy, one of more than a dozen political changes
requested by the editors in order to get the piece
accepted by Upjohn. In some cases we had compromised
and in others we had persuaded the editors-publisher to
accept our wording. Consider three of the other
positions that the editors, in particular Rich Block,
tried to get us to change:

1. The term "racist" was deleted, and the wording
changed to make it appear that only those in power
defended segregation. In our response, we pointed out
that "it was NOT only those in power who defended
segregation - so did many poor whites, some of them
probably union members."

2. We referred to what took place in South Africa as a
"freedom struggle"; Rich Block changed this to
"resistance to apartheid." Our response noted that
"what took place in South Africa wasn’t just about
resistance, it was about changing the system and
winning freedom. The difference is fairly important.
If the labor movement thinks only of resisting one or
another employer assault, it can’t win a new system; if
it doesn’t have a larger vision (freedom or the
equivalent) it won’t motivate people. The proposed
editorial change totally misses the point of our
article in ways that we fear are too often
characteristic of today’s labor movement."

3. Our piece said that success for the labor movement
would depend on "disruption"; Rich Block wanted to
change this to say "nonviolent direct action." But a
symbolic event, a made for TV sit-in, is not the same
as carrying disruption to the point that elites have to
make concessions. As we noted in our response, "The
labor movement in recent years has sometimes used an
occasional carefully staged symbolic nonviolent direct
action, but has been much less likely to use sustained
massive disruption as part of a campaign for worker
rights."

In the end, after months of negotiation, it came down
to two issues: our insistence that "Black" be
capitalized, and that troubling (?!?) final paragraph.
Once it became clear that our problems were not with
the editors themselves - who wanted our piece accepted
without modification - we decided to call the
publisher, the Upjohn Institute, and managed to speak
with Kevin Hollenbeck, Director of Publications.

Mr. Hollenbeck reported that the final paragraph is
"too incendiary for this very conservative traditional
institute," and that the problem is that "a reasonably
objective intelligent reader, looking at that sentence,
would conclude that the only way this [workers rights]
is going to happen is if people go out and get beaten."
Dan (who was the one on the phone with him) agreed
that yes, that is the message of the essay as a whole,
and of that sentence in particular. Mr. Hollenbeck
said, "You are saying it will take civil disobedience
for workers to win. It’s the advocacy that is the
problem."

Dan responded, "Well, if the conclusion of our paper is
that workers won’t win their rights unless they are
willing to go to jail, to be beaten, and to risk their
lives, it seems reasonable that we would then say: We
think workers should win their rights, and to do so
they should be prepared to take these actions."

The only way we could have gotten the article published
in a W.E. Upjohn Institute press book was to compromise
our politics. Doing so would have contradicted our
basic message; it would have meant labor was not to
learn from, and be inspired by, the civil rights
movement, but rather was to stick with
compromise-as-usual.

We therefore pulled the article and sought another
publisher. You can read the article in its entirety,
along with a more detailed account of the struggle to
get it published, in WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor
and Society (December 2005, volume 8, number 6, pages
683-704). We encourage you to subscribe to WorkingUSA
and to support a journal that provides space for
alternative viewpoints. We think the article has
valuable lessons for the labor movement: lessons about
power, bureaucracy, media, court decisions, leadership,
culture, politics, failures, and sacrifice.

(For that matter, we encourage you to buy the soon to
be released AFL-CIO/Michigan State volume, Justice on
the Job, edited by Rich Block, Sheldon Friedman,
Michelle Kaminski, and Andy Levin; despite our problems
getting our article included, the volume contains many
valuable contributions.)

Two final notes. First, it’s always worth paying
attention to what most upsets our opponents; usually
the one thing that they aren’t willing to have said is
the one thing that might enable us to win. As Kevin
Hollenbeck of the Upjohn Institute told Dan on the
phone, "I knew that my neck was on the line if that
paragraph appeared and someone on my Board of Directors
said, ’The Upjohn Institute can’t be identified with
advocating that point of view.’"

Second, we want to emphasize that the problem is not
with the AFL-CIO’s preferences - the editors accepted
our piece and would have liked to see it published
without alteration. The problem is with labor’s
weakness, its lack of an independent press, its
continual willingness/need to make compromises.

Aldon Morris is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern
University and author of Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement. Dan Clawson (clawson@sadri.umass.edu) is
Professor of sociology at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Next Upsurge:
Labor and the New Social Movements.