Organized Labor in Chains

By Dr. David Shapiro

Seventy years of oppressive labor laws have reduced organized labor and American Workers to legal servitude. Organized Labor's strong traditions of apprenticeship, organizing, political independence and community has been torn asunder. Labor can regain its historic purpose through organizing and a return to its traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Shapiro, The Georgetown Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780975487419

Book preview

Organized Labor in Chains

ORGANIZED LABOR IN CHAINS

DR. DAVID SHAPIRO

Breaking Labor’s               Legal Serfdom

Selected Writings of a labor organizer and labor leader

1986-2003

The Georgetown Press Books         of Profound Significance

2004 The Georgetown Press

First Printing

P.O. Box 461

Georgetown, CA 95634

ISBN 0-8754874-1-8

1.Labor. 2. Labor Organizing 3. Labor Law. 4. Apprenticeship.

5. Occupational Health. 6. Labor and Health Insurance 7. Labor and

Politics.  8. Building Trades.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Labor’s Legal Serfdom, Organizing for Freedom and Power

Labor and Politics

Build Unions and Win Elections

The Recognized and Unrecognized Halves of the

Working Class: Social Worker’s Union Leads the

Way in Kaiser’s Union Management Partnership

Are Employers Winning and Why

Labor and the Constitution

Part Two: Health and Safety, Who Must We Rely

Upon?

Labor and Occupational Health

Labor and Insurance

Part Three: The Hopes and Dangers of the Struggle for

Freedom

Dr. King and American Labor

Meeting Dr. King

King, Randolf, Rustin…A Dream for Labor

Harry Bridges and American Labor – 1902 – 1990

Part Four: Labor’s Dying Traditions: Salvation From

Serfdom

Labor and Tradition

Labor and Community

The Apprentice and the Journeyman

Apprenticeship and Trade Education

Meeting Tomorrow’s Challenge Today: Building

Trades Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship and Union Power

Part Five: Cooperation or Conflict? Labor on the World   Stage and Its Partnership with Business

Labor and Business

The Kaiser Partnership – Which Way is Up? 

Labor and Progress

American Labor in a Changing World

Labor in the Wings

ORGANIZED LABOR IN CHAINS

By Dr. David Shapiro,

President Emeritus Local 535 and United Healthcare West, Medical Social Workers, Service Employees International Union.

PREFACE

Organized labor’s decline from 37 percent of the workforce in 1947 to 10 percent today is a result of labor laws that virtually outlaw labor organizing, by making illegal most tactics used to win union recognition, including sympathy strikes, mass pickets, secondary boycotts and hot cargo agreements.  Since 1933 to the present the labor laws have placed government as third party between labor and management and forced labor organizations to register and be administered by government agencies under government law and regulation. Unions, and their treasury’s can be seized, and their leadership deposed all without membership vote or agreement.  Unions have been removed by government from control of their apprenticeship programs and have been forced to give huge sums of money to politicians to remain influential within the political system.  However, no reforms of the repressive labor laws have been won with this money since 1947.  The United States maintains the most oppressive labor laws in the world when compared with what laws are on the books in nations worldwide.  This seemingly incomprehensible indictment is made more understandable when one studies the National Labor Relations Act, and its 1947 Taft-Hartley and 1959 Landrum-Griffin Amendments and has organized workers inside and outside the law.

Organized labor in our nation is at a crossroads.  If the most advanced nation in the world retains the weakest labor movement, under the most oppressive laws, what does this portent for the rest of the world workers in the future?  On the other hand that same position, with the renaissance of a new more powerful American labor movement can provide great hope for workers worldwide, and that re-establish the belief that organizing can provide permanent solutions to the problems workers face throughout the world.

This series of articles was written between 1985 and 2004, originally under the nom de plume David Rose for the Sacramento Valley Union Labor Bulletin, newspaper of the Sacramento Valley, California AFL-CIO Central Labor Council 1985-1991 and more recently in my role as President of Service Employees International Union Local 535 Medical Social Work Chapter of Northern California representing Kaiser Permanente Health Plan workers.

PART ONE

LABOR’S LEGAL SERFDOM

ORGANIZING FOR FREEDOM

AND POWER

LABOR AND POLITICS

The Labor Laws enslave, Politics gives hope, but  

Organizing is the Answer.

Labor unions and union members have given hundreds of millions in real dollars to thousands of candidates since the passage of the National Labor Relations act in 1935.  This year, reports AFL-CIO=s Rex Hardesty, labor Political Action Committees has raised some $50 million.  This represents about one-tenth of the half billion PACs have raised during the current election cycle.  It does not include the in-kind contribution of labor volunteers and the contributions of individual trade union members.

Year after year labor=s political contributions have increased.  Because of the falling national membership, the per capita amount has risen even faster.  Labor has been tremendously successful in helping elect the majority of candidates it supports.  However, throughout the whole course of this history, as the money from labor has increased, the laws governing labor relations have dramatically decreased labor rights in America.  Paraphrasing President Lane Kirkland's recent bitter attack on the labor laws, he essentially states, The erosion of labor law has become so complete that one wonders if it might be better to return to the law of the jungle - as it existed before the passage of the Wagner Act.   A legal and political struggle to gain labor=s civil and constitutional rights and an organizing campaign not dependent on the labor laws may emerge as the necessary precondition for labor=s survival into the next century.

Since the passage of the NLRA, labor has increased its dependency upon electoral politics as a vehicle of power.  The Taft-Hartley Amendment of 1947 and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 further restricted labor=s legal options for organizing and increased labor’s participation in the political arena.  Organized labor all but abandoned its traditional pre-Taft-Hartley organizing methods.  Time and money was poured into election campaigns and candidates.  Meanwhile, labor laws made it more difficult to build strength through organizing.  The premise was that if business interests numerically small could use money and have such great influence on the political process, labor with its many votes could compete successfully in the electoral arena.  Why has labor been able to influence social legislation with its money donations, but achieve only setbacks in labor legislation with the same elected officials?

PACs by 1988 had contributed $448.4 million to candidates.  The eight biggest PAC givers - namely Realtors, Teamsters, Letter Carriers, doctors, AT&T, state workers unions, auto workers, and the Carpenters Union - include five labor groups.  Labor=s portion amounted to about 10 percent of the total.  Employers contributed $140 million, trade associations another $140 million and ideological organizations the remainder.

On the nation level legislation provides for increased trust fund flexibility including educational scholarships for workers’ children. The NLRB decided to include non-profit medical facilities in NLRB recognition elections.  Locally in California, county supervisors and city councils endorsed prevailing wage rates in private and sometimes residential construction.  These victories, significant as they are, amount to a small portion of labor=s legislative program goals.  Labor has reached a survival threshold where the decreasing numbers of union members must be turned around or labor=s strategic position in the political area will be significantly diminished.  Labor’s use of its existing financial and volunteer power, and its investment in organizing and expansion is now becoming the main agenda for the coming decade.  Concurrently, the struggle to win labor=s civil and constitutional rights remains unfulfilled.

The most recent window of nation climate conducive to favorable changes in the labor laws occurred in 1978.  Major legislation was introduced during Jimmy Carter=s presidency to remove restrictions on construction site picketing and alter some of the more notoriously negative portions of the Taft-Hartley Amendment to the NLRA.  In 1978, the AFL-CIO supported candidates in 80 percent of their races.  With a Democratic president and labor=s tremendous showing in the elections, labor law revision and on-site picketing both lost.

FORGOTTEN STRUGGLE

The suppression of labor’s civil and constitutional rights in this country is the most forgotten freedom struggle of this century.  The history of labor legislation in America is a history of the subtle development of the servant status as the legal standing of organized labor and labor generally.

The law of the jungle before the Wagner Act was actually lawfully governed by the Constitution and bill of Rights.  The first Amendment right of association, speech and assembly, and the 14th Amendment due process provisions protected labor=s right to organize into associations for mutual protection and benefit.  In addition, English Common Law traditions supported the refusal of the court to issue injunctions to labor disputes.  The rights available to labor provided all the authorization needed to carry out organizing, using labor tactics to win recognition and bargain collectively to secure a contract.

The criminal conspiracy theory of union organizing arose out of the courts in 1806 in the famous journeymen shoemakers’= case in Philadelphia.  The Cordwainers’ Case of 1806 was followed by 20 years of court cases relying upon the criminal conspiracy precedent established in Philadelphia.  However, the court findings of criminal conspiracy gave rise to a storm of public protest and led to the gutting of the criminal conspiracy notion by the Supreme Court in 1842.

The courts tried to impose the notion of tort or damage as a vehicle to control union activity after the Civil War.  The thesis that the union was interfering with free traded could be litigated and damages imposed.  However, the principle that competition was a free trade requirement, and that the unions were part of the competitive groupings engaged in commerce, prevented the use of tort damages as a blanket prohibition of union activity. 

The greatest judicial departure from the constitutional tradition occurred toward the end of the 19th century.  The courts, using the vehicle of court receivership of railroads imposed the notion that they could enjoin labor through the court vehicle of receivership.  This limited instance wherein courts were overseeing companies was extended in principle to all union-management situations.  Were unions were faced with injunction they could still fight it legally based on the merits of the case.  The judiciary still remained the vehicle for the settlement of legal disputes arising from union activity.

The National Railway Act of 1926 was the first great leap into legislated collective bargaining and national mediation.  The act was not written by congress, by the railroad unions and management.  Unfortunately its progressive provisions for labor - management relations laid the groundwork for government intervention and a more coercive and chilling variety of labor laws.

The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1931, supported by the AFL, limited the federal court=s use of injunction in labor disputes.  Once again, the progressive natures of the legislation provided for future restriction on union activities; one such was the more limited applications of injunctions against employers in labor disputes.  These forays into legislation, as fetters on freer court action, although at the time aiding labor, because the ground work upon which further suppression of union rights could take place. 

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 provided the future language for labor legislation involving labor’s right to freely organize and bargain, but provided no government enforcement.  The symbolic upholding of constitutional union rights authenticated government=s intention to uphold the Constitution, but when the government appointed a National Labor Board in the same act, to receive complaints, hold elections and make investigations, the courts found the law to unconstitutional.  This was the last court challenge to government intervention in the labor-management relationship.

LEGISLATIVE CHAINS

The passage in 1935 of the NLRA finally coercively changed the legal shape of labor organization and essentially separated labor from the community and the citizenry as a whole.  The separation of the labor association from the community is understandable when compared to the historic connection between the trade association and the community.   The legal and social fabric of the trade association and the community were par of the same fabric of institutional life. The trade association was a free and voluntary association of workers.  Many associations provided for family members to participate in the association in equal measure, their voice or needs were equivalent in value to that of the breadwinner.  This subtle membership equity of family and breadwinner and their mutual participation with the trade association granted the organization a superior position among the organizations of family participation existing within the community.

The NLRA passed as the Wagner Act, made government a third party in between labor and management, responsible for holding recognition elections and judging unfair labor practices.  The government position and its new legal practice reduced the power of the union organization to an appendage of government regulation.  The union was responsible for getting authorizations cards signed and the government was responsible for certifying cards and holding elections.

The union, which heretofore had to force the employer to the bargaining table through a series of organization tactics which built both internal and external strength, now no longer was required to achieve this level of organizational power.  The passage of the Wagner Act occurred after unionization efforts in auto and other industrial sectors were successful in bringing the largest corporations in America to the bargaining table.

The preamble of the Wagner Act signals the need for labor peace and introduces the recognition election under government authority as the vehicle for establishing labor-management peace

The political wisdom after the NLRA was that a favorable government could help labor with the workers and offer a counterweight to management.  The Congress of Industrial Organizations, during the 1930s often referred to the idea that President Roosevelt wanted the workers to join unions.  This helped the organizing effort and greatly expanded union participation in the industrial sector.  On the surface, it seemed to be tactically correct to use such admonitions for organizing success.  However, the basic tried and true organizing methods and structures were denied usage and organizers were being trained in less traditional and more situationally opportunistic methods.  The declining use of traditional union organizing methods diminished potential union strength and weakened existing power.  Historically, the stronger the organization, the more successful

The negotiations, a keystone of organizing were weakened by this new vehicle - the recognition election.   The building of a committed union membership prior to the recognition struggle, the building of community support during the recognition struggle and the strengthening of member and organizer skills and discipline through the struggle traditionally built the industrial labor organization strength.  The Knights of Labor and the AFL individual craft unions additionally developed strength through the guild-like organization of the trade and relied upon secret and fraternal orders to develop commitment and discipline with the organization.

The passage of the Taft Hartley Act amendment to the NLRA in 1947 was an act of government, passed when union membership strength, almost 40 percent of the workforce, was at its historical peak. Taft-Hartley outlawed traditional union tactics, including mass pickets, secondary boycotts, hot cargo agreements and sympathy strikes, which if needed, could have been used accomplish recognition, even if the government sanctioned NLRA process proved unsuccessful.   These tactics when legal acted as a powerful backdrop for labor recognition and negotiations.  Management had difficulty withdrawing or denying the process of labor relations when faced with labor tactics which could weaken them and force them to table.  Even post- Taft-Hartley, the residue of strength from volatile labor organizing and the strike power exhibited by unions continued to provide a modicum of management respect for union power.

The 1959 passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act was the nail in the coffin which completely removed labor associations from sphere of community institutions.  The free and voluntary nature of labor associations, and their basis in association law for mutual protection and aid was eliminated when the act placed unions under government control, authorization and sanction.  The Landrum-Griffin Act gave government ultimate control over union leadership, membership and money.  Government regulators with out court adjudication could place unions in trusteeship, remove union leaders and seize union funds.  Although the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed as a protection for the union membership from criminal and corrupt leaders, it legally and practically removed union membership from the notion of union, and removed the notion of union from labor organization.  In recent years, the northern New Jersey Teamsters have fallen victim to Landrum-Griffin seizure and leadership in the face of membership disapproval of the seizure.  The free and voluntary mutual benefit nature of traditional unions has been completely sundered by the Landrum-Griffin Act.

Landrum-Griffin assured that union members no longer had sole discretion, power or authority in dealing with their leadership direction and purposes.  Unions had become government sanctioned and registered and could be taken over without due process of law by regulators asserting unproven allegations.  Innocent until proven guilty as a legal due process methodology was removed by the administrative court process.  Administrative judges preside over hearings when the government is challenged for exerting is power over unions.  During these administrative hearings, non-elected administrators supervised by the executive branch which wrote the regulations, also act as prosecutors, judge and jury.  The judicial branch, the true constitutional source of redress, has now a standard answer to those aggrieved by the actions of these executive branch courts, e.g.,@We cannot hear the case unless you have exhausted your administrative remedies.@  In many cases workers and unions are mentally and financially exhausted by the administrative remedies and hearings.  Most labor organizations worldwide do not face the kinds of government-imposed legal restraints, tactical and organizational, including government use of Taft-Hartley injunction exists nowhere in the industrial or industrially developing world.  They are only approximate in apartheid South Africa and South Korea.  It is no wonder that trade union membership has dropped to 16.8 percent of the workforce, the lowest in the industrial and industrially developing world.

The civil and constitutional rights of labor have virtually been eliminated by the current National Labor-Management Relations Act.  The denial of civil and constitutional rights to labor is emerging in the most profoundly overlooked oppression in the Western world.  In the midst of the just struggles or minorities, women, the aged and disabled to establish legal equality, the general removal of civil and constitutional rights from all of labor had gone almost unnoticed in the mass media and in academic circles.  Organizers and union members with knowledge of the negative effects of this legal oppression and union leaders and their attorneys who attempt to find safe legal ground upon which to organize remain the citizens with practical knowledge of this oppression.  It is this almost compete civil reduction of labor to legal serfdom that explains the better part of the reduction in living standards for the majority of Americans and the increase in the destruction of institutions supporting community and family.   Traditionally union apprenticeship programs, long the skilled trade bastion of real training and teaching of the young, gave workers continuity and real authority with many of our communities. Today, many apprenticeship programs have been removed from traditional union control by government regulations and hiring halls replaced by employer recruitment and hiring.

The sequential passage of the various labor laws provides an interesting look at how the political system has functioned in relation to labor.  The notion of exclusionary provisions contained in the original NLRA of 1935 followed a classical political process.  The House of Representatives based on population, with heavy representation from the industrial states, passed an NLRA out of committee which included farm workers.  The bill went to the Senate and came out of committee with farm workers excluded.  In addition, the law excluded domestic workers and independent contractors.  The Senate-House conference upheld the exclusion to get the bill passed.  The exclusionary provision provided a precedent for the reduction of portions of the workforce to non-employees of employers.  Thus, the legal definition of employee under the law, by excluding a portion of the workforce, created another legal status equivalent to servant without the rights of employees under the labor laws.

AServant@ workers could be hired and fired at the whim of the master and could not legally organize under NLRA unions to protect themselves.  The excluded worker classifications have been used to damage worker organization and worker standing.   Temporary workers and other groups were deployed at low wages and shaped to fit into the exclusionary section of the NLRA.  These excluded groups were used to undermine unions and organizational prospects.  The law not only reduced union power by removing union organizational necessities, it reduced union potential further by excluding a growing portion of the workers population.  Employers understanding the use of these provisions began a major effort to utilize these new worker groups to weaken union power and numbers.  Today approximately one-half of the working population is excluded from NLRA elections.

Throughout the late 1930s labor improved its position.  This was based upon past victories in which labor exhibited great strength and fortitude and had significant popular support.  However, once covered under the NLRA its continued success stood upon the quicksand of excluded worker groups.  Now not only the unemployed but excluded workers could be used to replace union or union eligible workers.  In the case of excluded workers, their legal status prevented them from participating in NLRA elections.  Temporary workers and independent contractor categories are the prevalent mode foe the defeat of union organizing potential.  The legacy of the excluded worker and the precedents derived from the existence of the NLRA allows double breasting in the building trades and provides a legal basis for the two-gate system on construction sites.

Labor generally supported a no strike pledge during World War II.  With the exception of John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers, this pledge held and workers wages were relatively stable during the war.

With the war=s end union leadership demanded a share in the post war fruits of newly strengthened business which profited during the war.  Business resisted and a wave of strikes broke out in 1946 demanding equity for workers who now were faced with higher prices as a result of war=s end and the removal of price controls on staples.

The strike wave brought a hue and cry from the business community to further control unions.  The power of business and its political impact had recovered from its Depression weakness because of its wartime prosperity.   Forgotten were the union struggles to improve the general standard of life and benefits for the aged, the infirm and the impoverished, such as the Social Security Act of 1935.  The business community, with the help of both Republican and Democratic votes, succeeded in passing the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.  At the time of labor=s greatest need, after its Great War time sacrifice, the political structure rewarded it with further legal chains.  All tactics previously used to insure labor victory were outlawed.  President Truman courageously vetoed the Act, sensing the severe injustice and the potentially unconstitutional provisions of the law.  The veto was overturned by Congress.  The overturning of a presidential veto, by two-thirds majority, showed the depth of antagonism to labor rights within congress.  John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, called the passage of the Taft-Hartley Amendment, AThe first faint whispering of fascism in America.@

Nine years had passed, from 1936-1945, during which labor had shed the blood of its best to defend our and other nations.  The Taft-Hartley Act was the ironic answer to this sacrifice.  Today, labor=s numbers have been reduced from almost 40 percent of the workforce to 16.6 percent of the workforce.

Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959.  The act spelled the government=s final destruction of labor’s legal freedom.  Under the guise of fighting criminal corruption in the unions and protecting workers from their union leadership, Congress passed the act.  Called the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, Landrum-Griffin enabled the government to seize union funds, put unions into trusteeship under government supervision, remove elected leadership and negate union membership elections.  This vast power existed without the necessity of adjudicating complaints or accusations before a court of law.

The definition of Alabor organization@ contained within the new Landrum-Griffin Act not only required registration by existing unions or workers covered by the NLRA, but even required it of those excluded worker organizations who dared to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining.  The excluded workers could not hold government recognition elections.  The fruits of Congress between 1933 and 1959, at first semi-sweet, turned bitter.  Covered workers lost organizational freedom, while uncovered workers could be punished under the very labor laws which did not permit them recognition elections.

Important issues to labor, including the workers excluded by the Wagner Act, the Taft-Hartley illegality of union tactics, and the restriction of the freedom of association by Landrum-Griffin have been lost as battle cries in the political arenas,.  Also, labor has relied upon law firms to help them through the maze of the increasingly complex chains of U.S. labor laws, rather than their use to remove these chains.

The hundreds of millions labor has spent within the electoral and legal arenas and the continuing decline of labor organization membership raises an essential question for current analysis.  The tremendous need for increased resources for more massive organizing is obvious.  Is what we buy with our political money nationally and locally worthwhile?  Can money spent in organizing and the money labor can call forth to support its candidates and positions in the political arena, increase the political clout?  Is it not time to hold our candidates to the issue of labor rights and not solely to social legislation objectives?

ORGANIZING AND POLITICAL POWER

Labor’s original basis for expansion and power was organization and organizing.  The withering of organization active organizing removed the pillars upon which labor was able to engage in active political campaigns.   Both people and money are directly associated with labor=s ability to organize.  We may have reached that critical threshold of membership affiliation which may require us to revitalize our organization and to take advantage of the political arena for offensive tactics and not simply for fewer and fewer defensive tactics.

Labor has not essentially influenced legislation having to do labor organization since the Wagner Act in 1935.  We have depended upon precedents to appoint sympathetic personnel to regulatory agencies and upon the National Labor Relations board to assuage the impact of a repressive law.  Over time, regardless of the political party in control of the executive branch, labor has been losing ground.

Labor=s 1978 experience with congress and the executive branch under Jimmy Carter=s presidency needs analysis and review.  The on-site picketing bill for the construction trades and other minor reforms aimed at the Taft-Hartley Act failed.  The AFL-CIO union membership money elected 80 percent of the candidates it supported, a remarkable feat, but this was preceded by these legislative failures.  The paradox has been that those who oppose labor have pointed to labor=s strength as the reason for denying labor legislative relief.  The opposition has culled a good portion of popular support in this belief.  They have effectively organized this opposition to tighten labor=s legal shackles and block reform.

Labor, with its grand history of helping all through organizing and through legislation, has not been able to organize the population coherently.  Ironically, today, during labor=s greatest weakness, its image with the population at large is mostly sympathetic.  Strategically, labor is in a position for advancement, if it only used our current and potential resources and organized our real and potential constituencies.  Money increases when people and their dues and numbers spill into union rolls.  It is now time for an assessment of the use of labor funds for its future.

The laws governing business provide a supportive environment for the use of money to build organization, both economic and political.  The laws governing labor place restraints on many of the same uses of money to build power.  Herein, lies some off the legal discrimination which forced labor to approach electoral politics with a lesser degree of potential real strength than other forces not prohibited by law to develop and use their organization as a base for political power.

NUMBERS AND ORGANIZATION

Business can exert its power through the use of money and the control of capital.  Labor uses its numerical strength, position in production and its organizational capability to build consistently growing bases of power.  Labor has to grow in numbers to improve its position viz a viz electoral politics or to increase its involvement in business through the use of its dues and investment funds.  Current ERISA guidelines place restraints upon the use union trust funds.  Trust fund administrators and their attorneys are reluctant to take the chance of supporting pro-union businesses with loans or building union-controlled businesses.  Even the avenue of business is restricted by government regulations, limiting labor=s ability to build material strength.  Herein lays the major dilemma facing organized labor.  The labor laws prohibit organizing tactics and traditional labor associations to act on behalf of membership.  We faced therefore with going back to the beginning of organized labor to revitalize ourselves, utilizing the traditional methods of labor organizing.  Only in this way can the real strength of numerical participation be applied to raise money and influence government.  Today unions, particularly in the retail trades and health care are attempting to bypass government elections.  Labor was able to organized power successfully before Wagner Act law and these small but useful steps are a preview of the tactics necessary for a large-scale increase in membership.

OPPORTUNITY NOW

Labor leadership has an opportunity to enter into the current vacuum in domestic political leadership.  It has already made some interesting forays.  With the lowest percentage of voters of any democracy, a percentage still declining, a majority of the population does not participate in electoral politics, even on the most minimal level.  Labor can lead, but only by developing a large scale and skillful organization.  Only then will changing the climate bear fruit.  The training and teaching of labor organizers on the job, an apprenticeship of historical nobility, must now be generalized to use the full range of the tactical arsenal of both labor and community organizing which is historically available to labor. Repressive labor law must not remain the sine qua non of our organizer apprenticeship program.  Political leadership must be held accountable not only to their positions on social legislation but the civil and constitutional rights of labor.  It is toward the regaining of these rights we must struggle and devote all our energy.

BUILD UNIONS AND WIN ELECTIONS (Original Presented to Andy Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union, Las Vegas Organizer’s Convention, 2003

By David Shapiro and Leo Shapiro

Would   our union funds be better spent on organizing than on election campaigns?  Would the increase in union membership produce more pro-union politicians?   There are those who believe that our union funds which are historically dedicated to fund candidates for political office would have been better spent on organizing.  Are election campaigns fruitful or can they better be used for organizing workers? We should return to our traditional methods of organizing.

The alternative to current organizing practices is to supply political funds to support candidates without giving them the funds and using the vehicles of campaigning such as canvass, house meetings and community meetings to organize workers into existing