by Jeff Crosby, Sep 30, 2008

The recent investigations into several local and state SEIU leaders by their national leadership, the U.S. Department of Labor and others into financial irregularities raise questions not only for the largest and most important union in the United States, but for all of us in the labor movement. A little more than a year ago, the head of the New York City Central Labor Council was removed for similar betrayal and financial misdeeds. A Communications Workers of America (CWA) local president in New Jersey is in receivership, in part, as a result of a financial investigation. We know these problems are not the norm, and they harm the huge majority of union members whose leaders’ work is done with little personal financial reward.

According to press reports and the union’s own internal investigation, the local leaders were collecting salaries in an annual range of $200,000 and also using union funds for questionable purposes, either paying family members for doing union business or spending union funds for unacceptable personal expenses. In some cases the local leaders represented workers who make little more than minimum wage. The union is assessing methods of addressing the problem. 

I have heard all the arguments over the years supporting large salaries for union officials.

1. “We need to pay top dollar to keep top people.” If we are competing with the companies to keep people, we are keeping the wrong people. Union leaders who want to be called “CEO” make me nervous. The same union leaders who defend large salaries uniformly argue that “We’re not in it for the money.” Take them at their word! Carly Fiorina got top dollar—she laid off thousands at Hewlett-Packard, was fired in 2005 for poor performance and received $45 million on the way out the door—and now co-chairs the McCain campaign. Why can’t we get talent like that? Because we don’t pay high enough salaries, of course.

2. “If you ran a company as big as our union, you’d make a lot more money.” See #1 above. The qualifications for leading a union are not the same as for running a company. Union leaders need first to be dedicated to the movement, capable of thinking strategically, inspiring people, etc. The qualifications for running a company? You have to be pretty good at taking care of yourself. See the $47 million slated for the top two officers who ran Merrill Lynch into the ground. In the capitalist world, they call this “pay for performance.”

3. “He works hard, we should take care of him.” I sure hope he works hard, so do the members. And it is true that union leadership demands long hours and personal sacrifice. Your evenings and weekends are often spent working for the union—with attendant strains on your family. I know all about this. This is part of what makes us leaders in the first place. And we should do everything we can to provide health care and a decent pension for union leaders. 

But there are perks and privileges to union leadership, too.   don’t get drenched in oil from the crush-grinder any more, my office is air-conditioned and politicians return my calls. (My daughter, on the other hand, occasionally reminds me that on the home front “You ain’t no President around here!”)

And isn’t it obvious that “taking care of him” shouldn’t mean putting the union leader in an entirely different social class than the unions’ members?

The recent investigations raise an additional problem—the democracy debate has surfaced again. Early in the split between the Change to Win unions and the AFL-CIO, when it looked momentarily like we might actually discuss some substantive issues, Change to Win chanted “union density” and several AFL-CIO unions, including my own, responded with “union democracy,” as they passed in the night. As I wrote at the time, SEIU, in particular, treated union democracy as a “frilly impediment to the real-man project of organizing.” (“Density, Democracy and Transformation: We Need Them All,” Working USA, Vol. 8, December 2005) 

On the other hand, to this day, AFL-CIO unions have made little or no direct response to the proposals by SEIU to focus on building union density in specific industries, although the AFL-CIO leaders themselves addressed the issue during the split. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts for example, SEIU is organizing more new members than the entire rest of the labor movement put together.

The issue here is self-governance. If a union local is deliberately set up so that it is virtually impossible for a member or group of members to challenge the appointed incumbent officers, what is gained and what is lost?

The argument in favor of appointed favorite sons (or daughters) proposes that we need the “Smart People” to make decisions at this critical time, and that the members cannot be expected to elect the “Smart People” and cannot hope to make the far-reaching decisions themselves that will allow their union to survive and grow.  Hence the Smart People must make their decisions for them.

If this seems a bit crude or overstated, let me concede that democracy has its drawbacks and is no panacea. My own local union votes on practically everything, even which grievances to take to arbitration and which ones to drop, yet building the kind of membership involvement we want has been a constant struggle since the local was founded in 1936. Change can come slowly, but when it comes, it is sure. At critical moments the members always respond, and some 80 percent of our members vote in local elections and on contract proposals.

If favorite sons or daughters are set up in locals or labor councils or national unions so that they can’t be challenged, and treated like part of an inner circle of Smart People, bad things tend to happen—in any organization. This may be a product of a corrupt culture, or by-laws, or both. Supervision and accountability need to come from below as well as from above. As I wrote in the article cited earlier:

The construction of highly centralized organizations impregnable from the bottom in any part of our movement seems to assume that those with the centralized power will remain forever uncorrupted and strategically infallible. I know of no period of labor history that supports this thesis. Appointed and elected leaders make mistakes. We even “go bad.” I would argue that absent membership supervision, some collective leadership and political mooring, we usually “go bad.”   

This passage still reads true to me, perhaps even prophetic. It’s like the Biblical admonishment I recall from church school as a kid, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” We all think we are going to take office and change the world, yet in a few short years many of us are on the special couch reserved for counseling overburdened union leaders, telling others who breathe the same rarified air, “My members don’t understand me.” It’s one rule of Crosby’s Law: “Given the proper pampering and impunity, Good People Will Do Bad Things.” 

It may sound old-fashioned to say it, in the labor movement, self-government has its place.

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