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chapter 21 Why American Unions Need Intellectuals Sixty-five years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of Cold War militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: “To have an American labor movement capable of carrying out the program of the left, making allies among the middle class, and moving upstream against the main drift, there must be a rank and file of vigorous workers, a brace of labor intellectuals, and a set of politically alert labor leaders. There must be the power and the intellect.”1 It did not happen. Labor leaders soon became entrapped within a stultifying bargaining regime, and the “working class” failed to fulfill its radical destiny. As for the intellectuals, they found careers and rewards aplenty in the midcentury academy. Indeed, Mills himself soon abandoned what he once called “the labor metaphysic” and launched a provocative quest for a new set of actors who might transform America and the world. But today union leaders and intellectuals are more entangled than at any time since the 1940s. If one has a generous definition of “intellectual,” it is easy to find lots of students, academics, researchers, journalists, and writers, many of radical pedigree, working in, around, and for the U.S. labor movement. Unions have long sought help from high-profile outsiders in support of their strikes, bargaining agendas, and political objectives, but today these connections have grown so dense that some of these figures, many pro-labor academics, now find themselves enlisted, at times even drafted, into the disputes that have recently wracked some of the nation’s key unions. Not since the early Cold War split the labor movement and divided American liberals have otherwise independent writers and academics played such a public role inside the labor movement. In 2008 top officials at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), perhaps the country’s most influential trade union, organized a conference call with more than two dozen academics to explain why a dissident California local, United Healthcare Workers West (UHW), posed an obstacle to the national Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 254 5/24/13 8:04 AM Why American Unions Need Intellectuals 255 union’s health-care organizing strategy. In response UHW reached out to its own group of professors, and when they signed on to a letter of support, UHW spent several thousand dollars to publish it as an advertisement in the New York Times. In this dispute both sides also posted advertisements and Web links on Talking Points Memo and at the Huffington Post, blogs that had plenty of liberal readers but that spent little energy covering union affairs. Meanwhile, in another dispute that divided UNITE HERE (the union for workers in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming industries) and also pitted that union against the SEIU, both sides have been assiduous in courting and in some instances winning support from scores of pro-labor academics and outside activists. In the summer of 2009, partisans of John Wilhelm , the UNITE HERE president, secured nearly 250 signatures, many from members of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, on a “letter of concern” to the SEIU executive board lamenting that the big union was “dividing the progressive movement at a critical moment in history.” In response the SEIU purchased the entire back page of the Nation to explain to that magazine’s well-educated readers why the UNITE HERE leadership was actually the most disruptive element in the internal union dispute. All summer long a barrage of emails and phone calls from both sides sought to win over the academics, or at least neutralize their voice.2 My point here is not to evaluate the pros and cons of these internal trade union fights, or even to note the role played by the academic partisans. (I tended to be on the side of the SEIU’s critics and competitors.) Rather, I want to explore how we got to this moment, where these academics and other such nonmembers seem to be playing a significant role in the life of the trade union movement. In the nineteenth century when trade unions in Europe and North America were young, insecure, and often socialist, autodidactic intellectuals were everywhere . Many had been radicals, veterans of 1848 or 1905 expelled from the old country after revolutionary defeat or stepped-up repression. Mills dedicated The New Men of Power to J.B...

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