We seem to be entering a new era of political posturing, in which words have more importance than content. This being the case, I feel the need to renounce a label that was pinned on me by Esquire magazine, which referred to me as a neoconservative. I am not a neoconservative because, to the extent that I want to reexamine critically the nature of the welfare state, I prefer to do so from the point of view of one who favored its construction in the first place, and not from the point of view of one who was against it. I thought, then, that I might use the label "neo-liberal" to convey that sympathetic, though critical, attitude toward the welfare state. But that also causes confusion, because you have to ask what kind of liberal I am "neo" to. An old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal? A New Deal liberal? What I really am, perhaps, is a neo-social democrat-that is, a social democrat who has learned something over the last fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years, who starts out with a basically egalitarian attitude toward society but has recognized that the nationalization of the economy is not the answer, and that between complete private control of the economy and complete nationalization of the economy there is a wide field for experimentation.
The Essential Role of Unions
One of the reasons I was interested in coming here to talk about trade unions as mediating structures was that for so long now we have been attacked by our critics-most recently, the occupants of the White House-as but another special interest group. I would like to suggest that the phrase "mediating structure" is a synonym for special interest group, and so I come to talk about the labor movement as a mediating structure in our society.
When I read the Berger-Neuhaus booklet, while preparing these remarks, I was struck by the reference several times to big labor. In fact, the term "big labor" was used more often than "big business" -- business being the other word "big" is supposed to go with. "Big" seems to be the first name of labor and business, just as crusty old George Meany's first two names are "crusty old."
The authors even went so far as to compare us to HEW. That reveals, I think, how little is understood about unions, even among people who approach unions somewhat sympathetically. HEW, as I understand it, is a very large, multi-billion-dollar, highly centralized bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO has a budget considerably smaller than HEW's, and it is a highly decentralized, not centralized, operation.
What the labor movement is really about is some 60,000 local unions in the United States. That is what the trade union movement is to the worker. He doesn't belong to the AFL-CIO; he doesn't send his dues in to Sixteenth Street in Washington. He belongs to a local union. That means there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who are union officials, union leaders, in the United States. A good portion of them are part time and unpaid, and they are rather average people, with roots in their communities.
Those 60,000 or so local unions negotiate some 150,000 collective bargaining agreements. That is a rather extraordinary thing. If we did not have collective bargaining agreements, then what alternative mechanisms would we have for setting wages? Basically, two: wages could be determined unilaterally by the employer, or wages could be determined by state decree. Yet, very few people seem to think of collective bargaining as part of the central function of a mediating institution in our society. We tend to look on it as either a dull affair or a nuisance. When collective bargaining breaks down, and the result is a strike, that is a problem for everybody. But, fundamentally, collective bargaining is the institutional arrangement by which we avoid having state control of wages or unilateral employer determination of wages.
Unions' Double Role
It is an immensely complicated business, the consummation of 150,000 agreements. Each one results from people's sitting down across the table. Here is where the trade union reveals itself as a kind of double mediating structure: that is, it mediates between the worker and the state, protecting the worker from state fiat, state-decreed wage levels; and it also mediates to protect him from the employer.
So long as these mediating trade union structures exist, there is no way the state can have complete control over our economy. That is a very important thing. There are many other mediating structures in society that could go out the window, and although we might miss them sorely, the economic structure of the country would remain pretty much the same. Not so if trade unions did not exist. Totalitarians understand that. That is why trade unions are the first institutions that are destroyed in a totalitarian seizure of power, whether it be fascist or communist, from the left or the right.
As I say, collective bargaining is a very messy process, and consequently, it has its critics. They just find it too messy; they would prefer that some neater formula be established for governing wages and for working out disagreements between the worker and his employer.
An incomes policy would be a lot neater than collective bargaining. We would just have a government decree saying all wages shall be restricted to 7 percent increases, no more. It would save a lot of time. People wouldn't have to sit down at the collective bargaining table and scream and yell at each other, as they do now. We wouldn't have to hire all the lawyers we now have to hire to go up against management's lawyers. We could simply sit back and collect the dues and run social affairs.
But that is a very dangerous business. This is why the AFL-CIO went to court against President Carter's threat to cut off government contracts to companies that exceeded the 7 percent voluntary wage guideline. We were not interested in protecting the companies, maintaining their access to government contracts, so much as in defending ourselves against the principle that under a voluntary program of wage guidelines, the state could employ coercive power. We won the case in the lower court, we lost it in the higher court, and the case will go on.
I can't think of a clearer and more direct illustration of the role of the labor movement as a mediating structure between the individual and the state than this case. Not because we take the view that we would never allow wages to be subjected to government controls -- we have said again and again we would accept controls, if all forms of income were subjected to the same controls-prices, profits, dividends, executive compensation, interest rates, and all the rest -- but because only in such a case, where some kind of equity is built in, would we be willing to allow the government to step into the collective bargaining process and say, This is what you must settle for. And I want to suggest to you that the position the AFL-CIO has taken ultimately redounds to the benefit of all citizens, whether they are workers or not, whether they are in the trade union movement or not, because democracy requires some clearly defined limits to state action.
Unions in Public and Private
Berger and Neuhaus talk about the double role of mediating structures in another sense-that mediating structures address themselves to the fact that we have public faces and private faces. Trade unions offer, I think, a uniquely rich example of that double mediating role.
The public face is clear enough. Our trade unions are engaged in collective bargaining which determines the division of about 70 percent of the national income of the American people. Not that that percentage of the work force is in unions, but 70 percent of the national income is in the form of wages, and trade union agreements set the pace for nonunion as well as union wages. The trade union movement also engages in intensive legislative lobbying through which we try to have an impact on national economic and social policies. And we have effective political action programs through which we try to elect to office the candidates we want. In all these ways, we affect national policy.
But the trade union is also a social institution. It cuts across, and at the same time reinforces, certain ethnic, racial, religious, and neighborhood lines. In some parts of the country, the local union hall is as important a social center as a fraternal organization, a neighborhood club, a political party, or an ethnic social group. In some cases, it is essentially synonymous with one of these other groups. In such a situation, the trade union reinforces existing homogeneous ethnic, racial, and religious units at the local level. We have had an Italian local of the ILGWU [International Ladies Garment Workers Union] for years. It conducts its meetings in Italian. Anyone who is not Italian has a hard time in that local union understanding what is going on.
Through his local union, the worker is also affiliated to a national union. That larger organization cuts across geographic lines, and it also cuts across these racial, religious, and ethnic lines, so that the total labor movement includes people of every conceivable size, shape, color, creed, and ideology. I cannot think of many institutions that function quite the same way. We share with the neighborhood, as a mediating structure, some element of territorial jurisdiction; that is, we are based on place -- not where your house is, but where you work. For that reason, too, the local trade union tends to be a socially cohesive force, at the same time that it brings members into contact with a much wider variety of people.
The Participatory Aspect
Berger and Neuhaus also speak of communities as running the gamut from communities of cohesion to communities of anonymity. They say the important thing is to defend freedom of choice, although I detect in their book a certain bias toward the communities of cohesion -- a subliminal bias, almost. In any case, they emphasize freedom of choice. That is true for unions also. This relates to a criticism one often hears of unions, one which especially was heard from the New Left around ten years ago: that is, that unions are empty shells, because they really do not have a great deal of worker participation. Someone going to a local union meeting sees a handful of people sitting there, and they elect the officers and make the decisions. That means that unions are not democratic, according to this view, because institutions are only democratic if they are participatory, that is, if they get everybody aroused and involved.
I have always felt that that contains the germ of a totalitarian idea. Participatory democracy as an idea has totalitarian tendencies, because it doesn't recognize the right of people to be left alone and not go to meetings. There are some people who love to go to meetings, who really would rather be out there at ten or eleven o'clock at night making motions, following parliamentary procedure, and so forth, than staying home with their families, watching television, going to sleep, going t,o the bar, or whatever. And that is fine for those people. But other people have the right not to go to meetings. Just as we say the individual has the freedom to choose whether to live in a community of cohesion, a community that imposes on him certain communal obligations, or to move to the big city and live in a community of anonymity, where he can do what he wants to do, so too does the union member have the right to go to a meeting or not go to a meeting. I don't blame union members who do not go to meetings, because often meetings are boring. All meetings do not take strike votes. When strike votes are coming up, when the contract is being debated, you will get full participation. There are very few unions I know of whose members do not turn out to fill up large halls when something important is happening. The point is that to be effective, unions and other mediating structures do not have to be participatorily democratic in an agitated way.
It may sound like a cliche, but for many people in society, unions really are schools of democracy. They are the place where workers, many of them with relatively little formal schooling, learn how to raise their hands, be recognized, get up, say something, and sit down. They learn how to organize and run a meeting; and they learn about parliamentary procedure, which is important as a formalization of the rules of where your rights stop and someone else's begin. That is, parliamentary procedure teaches us that the other person has rights, too: no one has the right to talk all night without giving others a chance to speak, and a speaker cannot be hooted off the platform or out of the hall by those who disagree. That is a pretty basic lesson of democracy. Our meetings are not always conducted according to Robert's Rules of Order. Trade union democracy is imperfect, like other forms of democracy, but it is the only place many people ever have a chance to learn about democracy at all.
Racial Integration in the Union
I want to say something else about the union as a mediating structure and as a social institution, something that, no matter how often it gets said, never seems to be understood, or accepted, or remembered. The trade union movement is the most racially integrated institution in American life, bar none. By that I mean that both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms, there are more blacks in the trade union movement than in any other comparable institution. By comparison, the churches still tend to be segregated. There are black churches and there are white churches in the United States. There are far, far fewer black local unions and white local unions.
Second, the percentage of blacks in the trade union movement exceeds their percentage in the population as a whole, and the proportion of blacks in leadership positions-on executive boards, as vice presidents, or whatever-in the trade union movement is far higher than in any comparable institution in American life. By "comparable," I mean large institutions: the universities, the churches, the corporations, the media.
I cannot believe that this can continue to be a fact for a long time without its having a beneficial effect on society. The television crews don't come running out to take film footage of black and white workers attending a union meeting together; that is not news. It is news if they go out on strike and close down one facility or another. But although the normal day-to-day intercourse among people in a union is not news, I think it has to be affecting our racial attitudes in this country, and affecting them, on the whole, for the better.
I want to make another point that is difficult to formulate without lapsing into the language of Karl Marx. Marx spoke about classes existing in two forms: classes in themselves and classes for themselves. A class can be a class and not be conscious of itself as such; that is a class in itself. But when a class becomes conscious of itself as a class with interests separate from those of other classes, it is a class for itself.
What a trade union does to the individual worker is elevate the quality of the demands he makes on his fellow citizens. Individual 130 workers may be racists; yet the trade union movement as a whole has been in the forefront of the civil rights movement. It pressed for civil rights legislation, and it even pushed to get the fair employment practices provision into the civil rights bill in 1964. That provision enforces equal opportunity not only on employers but on unions. Whether the individual white worker is a racist or not, it is not in the interests of white workers as a group to have blacks outside of the trade union movement earning lower wages and constituting a permanent threat to the whites' wage structure.
Unions and Centralization
Politically, the trade-union movement has a very decentralized structure, although you wouldn't think so from what you read in the papers. Cigar-chomping George Meany did not sit at his desk deciding who was going to be the next senator from South Dakota. That decision is made by our state labor federation in South Dakota. The endorsement of congressional candidates is done by our local federations, our local central bodies. (In addition to having a state federation in every state, we have central labor councils in every major city, some seven hundred of them.) The only decision that is made on the eighth floor of the AFL-CIO is the presidential-vice presidential decision.
This is important to bring up because it has a bearing on the role of the union as a mediating structure. In days gone by, if we had problems in Chicago, for example, George Meany would not call Mayor Daley, but the head of the central labor council in Chicago could pick up the phone and get right through to Mayor Daley. There are many cities in which local labor leaders have that kind of relationship with the politicians. Sometimes it is an embarrassment, frankly, but that is their role. In order to represent the workers, they must have an in to city hall, an in to the state house, to the local political parties, and so forth. If we were to try to direct that from Washington, from a centralized national source, not only would it not work, not only would it come apart, but the role of the labor movement as a mediating structure between the worker and the politician at the local level would be weakened.
In some parts of this country now, given the demise of the old political machines, the trade union movement is the closest thing there is to a structure through which workers can influence what happens at city hall. The fact that the labor movement in the United States is independent of the political parties -- unlike the Trade Union Congress of England, which is the owner of the British Labour party, and unlike other unions in Europe that are affiliated directly with political parties -- enhances our ability to perform a mediating function. We are able to speak for the workers' interests as they see them, without having them muffled by, or filtered through, a political party and its bureaucracy or its officials, its needs of the moment. Some filtering takes place in our own bureaucracy, of course; that is inevitable. But for the interests of the workers to have to go through a political party bureaucracy would, I think, make things a lot worse.
The Future for the Unions
Let me throw out some random and perhaps controversial thoughts about the future. I think the trade union movement is in great danger now. Its ability to serve as a mediating structure is in danger for several reasons.
The most immediate and obvious, although not necessarily the most important in the long run, is the current business and New Right campaign against the labor movement. This has cropped up in place after place, with some success. We have lost decertification elections in more places than we would have liked to. There is a lot of steam left in the right-to-work movement. And the fact that not a single prominent businessman in this country broke ranks with his colleagues and supported a piece of legislation as mild as labor law reform has convinced large numbers in our ranks that the trade union movement in this country still has not acquired the legitimacy, let alone the respectability, that it has in the European countries, for example. A large segment of management has not yet made its peace with the fact that unions are and should be here to stay. This has created a very bitter attitude through the leadership ranks in the labor movement. But that is a problem that can be turned around, and I think it will be turned around, even if it takes a decade.
There are other tendencies more deeply rooted in our political democracy that worry me more. Mediating structures are important for democracy. Democracy doesn't always know that, and sometimes it makes trouble for itself.
In order for structures to be mediating, they have to be structures. That is, they cannot be liquid; they cannot just float. They must have a shape, they must have a form, a leadership that is recognized in the society. There has to be somebody who can be talked to in that structure, if the structure is going to mediate anything. These days, there is a tendency among American politicians to go over the heads of the leaders of mediating structures, including the labor movement, directly 132 to the rank and file, directly to the mass. We have this problem with President Carter all the time, but we had it before him, with Nixon and Ford. I think it is not a matter of party so much as a new attitude-an attitude that all institutions are illegitimate, that they don't really have anything underneath them. They are just empty shells, hollow inside. The leadership doesn't represent the rank and file-look at the polls! The polls show the people don't have confidence in the leaders of any institution. So politicians go directly to the ranks-and sometimes that is effective.
This sounds like special pleading, and I suppose it is. After all, if all the politicians do that, and if everybody does that, we will have a hard time keeping the labor union together. But that will be a problem for you as well as for us, because if it can be done with the labor movement, it can be done with other institutions. The result of that kind of behavior is to atomize everybody. That is, if all of us can be appealed to directly by the president of the United States over the tube, never mind what our institutional leaders may think, then we are all rendered equal and impotent. At that point the force of organization goes out of our lives, and democracy gets into real trouble, because there is no greater threat to democracy than atomized individuals. That is why totalitarian states have to destroy institutions like the labor movement, the churches, and academic institutions, and create fakes in their places, to keep the population atomized.
We could perhaps deal with this problem by exercising our right to change political leadership from time to time. I am more worried about an even longer-term problem which I don't have any solution to, and that is the media. I think that of all the forces in American life, the communications media are the most corrosive of mediating structures. They have a vested self-interest in the erosion of all such structures. Why? Well, partly to disguise their real character. That is, they are part of the corporate world, with corporate interests, but they never portray themselves that way. They portray themselves as champions of the public interest. And to speak for the public interest, they have to convince themselves and everybody else that there is something out there called the public -- John Q. Public. Well, John Q. Public does not exist.
The editorial writers continue nonetheless to talk about strikes or about other activities they say are against the public interest. Unions don't know what the public interest is; corporations, churches, universities don't know. Only the press knows what is in the public interest. Some people think the maintenance of that fiction is essential to the maintenance of a free press. I doubt that, but, frankly, I don't know the answer to this problem, unless it is that we all have to figure out ways of fighting back, of saying to the media, "We understand your role. We don't accept your definition of your role-or your definition of ours. We know why you do what you do." But we need to arouse the citizenry to the problems that the media pose for mediating structures. This is not incompatible with protecting freedom of expression.