Strategy for Labor Revisited

(Editor’s Note) What follows is an unofficial transcript of an off-the-record conversation among three of the labor movement’s leading strategists. The meeting was convened by C, or “cooperationist,” who had been for over ten years the president of a local union, part of a major industrial union, representing 3,000 employees who had been hired to staff a new manufacturing plant in a Southern town (“Newplant”). Newplant had been widely touted as a breakthrough in U.S. labor-management relations because it was consciously designed to promote greater participation of production and maintenance workers in business decisions. In bitterly contested local elections last year, C was voted out of office and now serves in a staff capacity at the AFL-CI0.

A, or “adversarialist,” a longstanding friend of C, is the research director of another industrial union. A was very active in the Students for A Democratic Society in the 1960s, and after graduating from Antioch College, began his career as a labor organizer, working for a succession of unions that had been active in the McGovern-Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party. S, or “stay the course,” is the highly respected chief of staff for a national union representing government workers. Section headings and citations are supplied by the editor and do not appear in the original transcript.