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Reviewed by:
  • We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing
  • Michael Stauch
Dana Cloud with Keith Thomas, We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing (Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press 2011)

Dana Cloud’s new study of democratic unionism at Boeing is another valuable contribution to the growing literature on the conflict between union officials and the workers they purport to represent that has plagued organized labour since its inception and continues to this day. For this reason alone it comes highly recommended. But it is also a sensitive examination of an important recent attempt to overcome this issue through rank-and-file initiative, incorporating and in dialogue with the voices of the workers involved in this struggle.

We Are the Union centres on the 69-day strike Boeing workers in the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (iamaw) conducted in 1995. They won wage increases, preser ved health benefits, and gained a number of [End Page 321] guarantees against future subcontracting. Perhaps the most significant thing about the 1995 strike, though, was the way that a simmering conflict between the union and its membership going back a number of years burst to the surface when workers rejected a second, union-recommended contract from Boeing and stayed on strike another three-and-a-half weeks. This second contract was not substantially different from the first, and the union’s recommendation of it suggested a conciliatory attitude on its part that had increasingly bred mistrust among workers. Their gamble paid off, as the contract they finally ratified contained numerous important gains, and avoided the concessions the company sought and the union recommended. In We Are the Union Cloud dramatizes this conflict, and suggests that it holds important lessons for the labour movement today.

The seeds of democratic unionism at Boeing were sown in 1989. After a lengthy but successful strike, the union touted as a benefit of the new contract a series of joint initiatives between company and union meant to erode protections on health and safety as well as production standards. Givebacks on health and safety may have particularly rankled a Boeing worker in Wichita, Kansas, named Keith Thomas. Thomas had recently lost a close friend at a young age due to Boeing’s negligence on health issues. This willingness to compromise with management on these important issues alienated many workers from their union, and gave rise to caucuses around the country. Cloud uses the experience of Unionists for Democratic Change (udc) and Thomas, its presumptive leader, as a foil to discuss her ideas about democratic unionism.

These caucuses gave dissident workers an institutional home and, through elections, educational leaflets, and their many campaigns, a chance to participate in union politics in a way they never had before. Coming from a background in communication studies, Cloud stresses the important role constructing a coherent narrative played in shaping this rank-and-file alternative. A newsletter Thomas created called Floormikes did just that. This combination of ideas and action provided a viable alternative to the official union, and many workers gravitated to it.

But the 1995 victory, and the decisive role the caucuses played in securing it, was not enough to maintain their influence or sustain them as organizations. In the aftermath, the udc disbanded. The decision to disband comes in for sustained criticism from Cloud, representing, in her view, a tendency to view the rank-and-file as “unwilling or unable to fight in their own interests.” (128) As a result, she says, the udc focused on elections and, after the 1995 strike, on individual lawsuits against the iamaw using McCarthy-era labour laws.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Cloud’s work is that she provides space for a dialogue between herself and Thomas on these issues, allowing him to speak in his own words and defend his actions himself. This suggests a remarkable sensitivity to the sometimes fraught and always delicate relationship between a historian and her subjects. Thomas is his own best advocate on these matters, and this conversation is one of the book’s highlights. It raises important questions for the direction of the labour movement today...

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