Labor Unions and Democracy: A Long View

Abstract

This essay historicizes some of Stephen Ashby's findings, and elaborates on a thesis that union democracy is weak in the United States because capitalist opposition was so strong in a formative stage of union development. It introduces a brief survey of the first major U.S. industrial union, the United Mine Workers of America, to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. It introduces a brief survey of the first major industrial union, the United Mine Workers to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. Union leadership responded to that challenge with highly centralized control that blocked more democratic and struggle-based unionism. This had long term consequences through the next insurgency the Congress of Industrial Organizations. These historic influences are operative in the present, when workers seek power to build a counter to the growing inequality of wealth.