The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (105 page)

for both cross-union and union±community organization and solidarity (Ben-

singer, 1998; Fine, 1998; Waldinger et al., 1998). In order to meet the supply

demanded by such efforts, a new generation of labor organizers, drawn from

both worker and student ranks, are being systematically trained and placed by

the AFL-CIO funded Organizing Institute. Such efforts as these require the

establishment of ongoing links to university campuses, ethnic communities,

and religious organizations, and in contrast to the insularity and mistrust that too often characterized its predecessors, the current AFL-CIO leadership has

actively facilitated such ties (Fraser and Freeman, 1997).

The reason for such an intensive focus on organizing is that for several decades it was largely overlooked in favor of servicing the needs of the existing membership, who, after all, were the constituencies that union leaders depended upon for reelection. According to Richard Bensinger, the Director of Organizing in the first four years of the reforms, ``When John Sweeney was elected the new president of

the AFL-CIO, 97 percent of locals had no existing organizing programs and no

membership involvement in organizing. At best, less than 5 percent of our total

resources went to new-member organizing, and unions operated in almost com-

plete isolation of the community'' (Bensinger, 1998, p. 28). With union density

currently under 10 percent in the private sector, down from a high of 39 percent in 1954, according to Clawson and Clawson (1999, p. 97), a heavy stress on

organizing is now viewed as a matter of basic institutional survival, and union

locals are being urged to devote as much as one-third of their total resources to organizing activities. It is estimated that at a national level, unions must be able to organize a minimum of 350,000 new workers per year just to stay even with

current membership levels, and must organize 1.2 million new workers annually

to grow by a modest rate of 1 percent (Bensinger, 1998, p. 30).

The Mythic Is Real

These numbers help to explain the centrality of organizing in the work of the

new leadership of the federation, and also perhaps the emphasis in much of

the recent sociological and labor relations literature as well. Generally speaking, analytical attention to the labor movement by social scientists and others has

largely focused on various dimensions of the movement's corporeal forms,

probing its proportions, organizational structure, institutional leverage, political efficacy, membership characteristics, etc., while disregarding or minimizing its 452

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evocative dimensions, its place in the symbolic vocabulary of societies. However, I would suggest that it might be reasonably argued that the very strength and

efficacy of the labor movement's embodied forms depends, to a considerable

degree, on its capacity to evoke something larger than itself; that is, to spawn and to be able to sustain a sacred narrative, a transcendent myth. One might, in fact, nudge this point even further by suggesting that the most fundamental

reality of the labor movement is its mythic quality.

I do not mean myth that sustains the social order, as Roland Barthes has

demonstrated they may surely do (1972), nor do I mean myth as à`fabulous

narration,'' an untrustworthy or deliberately false construction that obscures the field of vision (Williams, 1977, pp. 176±8). Instead, I mean myth as an enabling and mobilizing force, `à means of acting on the present'' as Georges Sorel put it a century ago in his classic essay on the General Strike:

The General Strike groups all of the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that the proletariat possess in a coordinated picture, and by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their memories of particular conflicts, it colors with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. . . . [We] thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness ± and we obtain it as a whole,

perceived instantaneously. (Sorel, 1906, pp. 112, 128)

In Sorel's ``myth of the general strike,'' the truly potent social force was the myth itself, always appearing larger in the social imagination than any concrete

historical action, its symbolic presence looming large over every actual strike, every skirmish in the class war.

Mythical compositions or themes are generally created in the pursuit of some

certitude in an insecure world, and in his analysis of the symbolic life of the

Italian Communist Party, David Kertzer draws from the anthropologist Girardet

to identify the three central thematic elements of political mythology: (a) the

presence of an evil conspiracy; (b) the presence of a Savior; (c) the coming of a Golden Age (Kertzer 1996, p. 17). Of course, such mythic forms may be

effectively mobilized and invoked by social forces across political fields, by the right as well as the left (as Sorel's own flirtations with Fascism partly demonstrate), by capital or labor, by the socially powerful as well as the socially

stigmatized. However, in a period like our own when the market, the individual,

and the entrepreneur have taken on mythical proportions in the social imagina-

tion, through acts of construction that have rendered alternative ways of being

essentially unimaginable, the recitation of mythic solidarity can serve a crucial mobilizing function as counter-mythology.

For any myth to attain a social life it must be expressed in a practical,

embodied form. Antonio Gramsci's view of myth was as à`concrete phantasy''

embodied in The Prince (his jailhouse euphemism for the Italian Communist

Party), whose essential quality was as à `live' work, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of àmyth'' (quoted in

Kertzer, 1996, p. 17). Similarly, in their analysis of the mythic status of the law in The Myth of the Labor Movement

453

everyday life, Ewick and Silbey (1998) argue that for legality to be enacted, it must be believed to be, simultaneously, of this world and not of this world, both a temporal and practical product of human activity and a timeless product of

otherworldly forces. As they point out, the Church represents an institutional

reality that not only hosts the transcendent, but authorizes ``the sacred to break through to the profane'' (p. 232).

An important element of the foundational myth of labor movements every-

where has been solidarity, a potent sacred narrative with remarkably transcen-

dent qualities. Under certain conditions and at certain moments, demonstrations

of solidarity are capable of summoning powerful spiritual forces in the social

world (in groups, collective activities, organizational forms), forces that can

produce extraordinary degrees of selflessness and collective identification. This is not a tautology, for the dramatic display of solidarity can demonstrate that the impossible is possible, and thus beget a broader and bolder expression of solidarity. This may even be all the stronger in a society rife with social division and group mistrust, where there is a constant scramble to get ahead and to stay afloat, and where, amidst the inevitable disappointments and the relentless atomization, solidarity can represent an unusually potent mythic theme. Within the regime of

industrial relations, a system established to channel and domesticate social conflict, worker solidarity is capable of ``charming'' the social world by levitating that which was a mundane event in one moment (a meeting, a grievance, a

contract negotiation) and raising it to à`higher,'' ``sacred'' level the next (an individual voice becomes the collective chant, ``her'' grievance is transformed intòòur'' protest, the picket line becomes the site of a powerful moral crusade.) It is unfortunate that the term ``labor metaphysic'' has been employed so derisively,

for it expresses quite reasonably an important dimension of collective action.

I would agree that such terms can seem almost quaint in the American

context, where for the past half-century the leadership of the AFL-CIO actively

discouraged any collective recitation of mythic solidarity that might be con-

strued as a threat to the existing order. Emblematic of the impulse to inhibit the ritualization of its own history is the irony that labor's May Day is commemorated almost everywhere except in its birthplace, the United States (Foner, 1986).

But though institutionally quite peripheral through much of labor's history, the solidarity myth has, at certain times and in certain sectors, been symbolically

central in the United States. One example is the legend of thè`Wobblies,'' the

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), active from 1905 to 1917. As Rothen-

buhler (1988) has argued, the Wobblies crossed the threshold of meaningful

social categories, residing in à`liminal zone'' in which their actions had no

meaningful place within the terms of the governing myths of an industrial

society. Whereas labor organizations bargain and negotiate with employers,

file formal grievances, strike over wages, and otherwise operate within a struc-

ture designed to channel and accommodatè`labor relations,'' the Wobblies

refused to be à`labor organization'' at all. Celebrating their marginal status in their theme song, ``Halleluja, I'm a Bum,'' their members rode the rail lines from conflict to conflict, organizing the most marginal segments of the labor force

(immigrants, the unskilled, migratory laborers), whilè`filling the jails'' in their 454

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battles over free speech. As Rothenbuhler notes, their membership dues were too

low to have maintained a budget (with no system for collecting them), they had

no strike fund, they refused to sign labor±management contracts (the very basis

of the collective bargaining system), and they rotated their officials in order to prevent the hardening of loyalties and the creation of organizational hierarchy

(behind the slogan ``we are all leaders'').

Because the Wobblies refused to be a responsiblè`labor organization,'' their

actions and their demands were not resolvable by the mythic structure of

industrial society, Rothenbuhler argues, but because he views myth solely as a

symbolic expression of incorporation that ``preserves rather than changes struc-

ture'' (p. 73), he tends to see the Wobblies only as a force disrupting the

governing myths of the time (which they surely did), rather than as the myth-

making, legendary social embodiment of labor solidarity in its own right, one

that lives on symbolically, over eighty years after the Wobblies were destroyed as an organization. Clearly, their potential as a mythic force was strongly impeded by the dominance of bureaucratic forms of business unionism that prevailed for

most of the twentieth century, but it should also be recognized that the very

character of the Wobblies was, to a significant degree, a relational product of

this, its obverse, thè`pure and simple trade unionism'' of Samuel Gompers and

the American Federation of Labor. As Buhle has noted in his study of business

unionism, `Ìn its vision and practice, the IWW was everything that the AFL

refused to be and did not wish to be'' (Buhle, 1999, p. 66).

The post-Second World War versions of business unionism have not only

upheld the myths of capitalism (though some more firmly than others) but also

sought to erase the myth of the labor movement; not only in an ideological sense, but in a practical, organizational sense as well, where the relentless pragmatism of business unionism has been a powerful counterweight to the invocation of

mythic solidarity. Business unions are characterized by a highly centralized and unabashedly top-down hierarchical structure, with a heavy reliance on both the

formal procedural requirements of the labor relations system and closed chan-

nels of communication networks at the top that tend to facilitate secretive,

``backroom'' deal-making (thus requiring and encouraging an ill-informed and

passive membership). Business unionism is socially exclusive, rather than inclu-

sive, more undemocratic than democratic. Business unionism reacts to employer

initiatives, rather than taking a proactive stance, it engages in aggressive anti-radicalism (often the source of internal political opposition), and it eschews

union militancy except on rare occasions when it can be tightly controlled by

the union staff (Banks and Russo, 1996). It is because these organizational forms and practices are inimical to thè`sacred narrative'' of solidarity that they have been dominant within the American context.

A Social Drama in Two Acts

Acts

What I am underlining is the necessity of the labor movement to recover or

create a mythic status and the requirement for that recovery or creative process The Myth of the Labor Movement

455

to embody solidarism in actions, in organizational forms, and in the relation of the movement to social groups and institutions beyond it. Group formation and

collective action are social representations, which means that while they may

represent a certain social ``reality'' (like worker solidarity, or a labor movement), it is a reality that is uneven, never fully formed, in flux, a point of contention, and thus always partly allegorical. Where social groups are contenders for power and influence in a hostile social universe, like unions in American society, they must constantly ``demonstrate'' their efficacy and potential, not only to those

with no experience with unionism, but also to unionized workers whose experi-

ence of solidarity must be constantly reinforced.