The Hard Road to Union Democracy

About the steel workers’ union only one thing can be said with assurance: no ready-made formula will take us far on the road to understanding.

Here is an important section of the classical “proletariat”; yet in consciousness, initiative and militancy it has lagged behind many other industrial unions. The role provided for it by the Marxist scheme remains unfilled; the expectations raised by liberal desires, unsatisfied. Its leader, David J. DcDonald, seems closer to images of mass advertising than to traditions of American unionism. Pipe in hand, jaw set, profile more or less firm, he looks like the ideal homeowner to whom the bank will be pleased to extend a solid loan. By comparison Walter Reuther is the height of intellectuality, George Meany the essence of plebeian authenticity.

For a good many years the steel union functioned as a conservative force within the CIO, often on the verge of breaking away from the more “socially-conscious” unions. For a good many years McDonald, acting the role of labor statesman, collaborated closely with the very industry that now—I write in mid-summer 1959 —has forced the union into a bitter strike in order, it would appear, to “teach it a lesson.” And inside the union, never noted for its democratic animation, there has arisen an opposition group, the Dues Protest Committee, which seriously threatened McDonald’s power in the last union election. In unions with a much richer democratic past, such as the UAW and the ILGWU, the usual opposition groups have almost completely faded away; this indeed has been a major tendency in American unionism; yet in the United Steel Workers of America there is now an opposition group that shows signs of becoming permanent.

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