Can New AFL-CIO Leadership Build on Rank-and-File Spirit?
Under the influence of successively less articulate, less visionary, and less militant leaders at the top of the AFL-CIO (Phillip Green, George Meany, and Lane Kirkland), America’s organized labor movement increasingly lost its ability to inspire virtually anyone. Allies? We don’t need no stinking allies. Reaching the public through the media? We don’t negotiate through newspapers. Jobs going to the South, Mexico and China? Those people are too ignorant and unskilled, and the companies will bring those jobs back. Just you wait. For decades marked by this kind of complacency and arrogance, labor had no enobling rhetoric, no rallying cries, and no symbols of the courage of working people. (I recall a huge 1980 rally with tens of thousands of unionists present; I saw a single poster from the 1977 movie “Norma Rae” as the only visual expression of what labor stood for.) That’s why Milwaukee’s Labor Day march was such a remarkably uplifting event. There were thousands upon thousands of unio
