Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement (review)

Recent years have seen a great deal of discussion about change and reform in the American labor movement. However, very little of that discussion has focused on union democracy or the democratic reform of unions. It may be that union leaders and members feel the labor movement is already sufficiently democratic. Or, with labor organizations under siege from external forces, they may believe that ruminating about internal democracy is a luxury they cannot afford. Whatever the reason, at least one long-time observer of the labor movement, Herman Benson, thinks they are very wrong

Benson is one of a handful of reformers (among them Jock Yablonski, Joe Rauh, and Ron Carey) closely associated with the movement for more democratic unions. Even among this group, Benson stands out for his dogged and determined efforts to make the labor movement more democratic. For over forty years, Benson has carried this torch, and the organization he founded in 1969, the Association for Union Democracy, continues his work today. So closely is Benson's career intertwined with this movement that his book, Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers, is simultaneously a personal memoir and a chronicle of the fight for more democratic unionism in this country.

Benson's book forces the reader to look at a side of the labor movement that most union advocates would rather ignore. He walks us through the reform efforts that ultimately took control of the United Mine Workers and the Teamsters, as well as those in which reformers captured significant positions at the regional and local union levels of the Painters, the Steelworkers, and the Auto Workers, among others. However, more of the book details the campaigns that failed due to some combination of resistance from old-guard union officials or the complicity or incompetence of the courts or the government.

In summarizing the occasionally exhilarating, often disheartening, history of democratic reform in the American labor movement, Benson points out the paradox of organizations whose purpose is to bring democracy to the workplace being run as autocracies and fiefdoms. He skillfully makes the case that democracy is not something to be feared or resisted by unions but rather a natural extension of the reasons labor organizations are formed in the first place. And he laments the fact that this contradiction has "divided the soul" of the labor movement and caused it to fail in unleashing what could be its most powerful tool for energizing its membership—the practice of union democracy.

This book might have been stronger if Benson had discussed in more detail the work of union government scholars such as Jack Barbash, William Leiserson, Lloyd Ulman, John Dunlop, and George Strauss. In addition, he could have more forthrightly addressed the arguments as to why greater democracy in the labor movement is seen as counterproductive, impractical, or even dangerous. And one might quibble with his assertion that insurgents "have transformed the labor movement." Still, Benson's book, and his entire career as a single-minded advocate of union democracy, makes any reader interested in labor's future pause and wonder: in the face of labor's inability to turn its declining fortunes around, could greater democracy and member involvement be the holy grail for which labor has been searching?