The Trade Union as Community
A Philosophy of Labor.
by Frank Tannenbaum.
Knopf. 199 PP. $2.75.
We are fast becoming a “laboristic society,” Sumner Slichter tells us; he may exaggerate, but it is certainly true that trade unionism is one of the most important features of contemporary American life and is likely to become more so in the foreseeable future. A “philosophy of labor,” really getting to the heart of the labor movement as a social institution, would be of very considerable value in illumining the structure and functioning of modern democratic society. Such a philosophy Frank Tannenbaum attempts to establish in this brief but important work. He does not quite succeed, but he does develop some significant insights.
Professor Tannenbaum—who teaches history at Columbia and has concerned himself with labor for some three decades—finds unionism to be essentially a spontaneous effort on the part of the worker to reestablish a community for himself amidst the disorganization of our “asocial society.” (The last phrase is Alex Comfort’s but it well fits Tannenbaum’s diagnosis.) The Industrial Revolution disrupted all of the age-old continuities of life because it destroyed the community of work on which all other social coherences are based. The first three chapters of the book are devoted to a vivid retelling of this not unfamiliar tale. The fourth deals with the reflection of this disintegrative process in thought, i. e., with the philosophy of individualism. The fifth chapter is significantly headed “The Recreation of Community,” and the rest of the book is given over to working out this theme.
Community, for the new class of industrial workers, was recreated through the factory. “The factory converted them into a ‘society,’ with a sense of cohesive interdependence.” Out of the factory emerged the union. “The union is the spontaneous grouping of individual workers thrown together functionally. It reflects the moral identity and psychological unity men always discover when working together. . . .” Through his union, the worker “regains his dignity as a man and once again plays the part of a moral person.” Trade unionism, in short, restores his “society” and his status in society.
But in restoring to the worker his status in society, unionism is also, according to Mr. Tannenbaum, remaking society itself, restoring the pre-modern pattern though in a different context. “Without intent or plan, the trade union movement is integrating the workers into what in effect amounts to a series of separate social orders. It is recreating a society based upon status and destroying the one we have known in our time—a society based upon contract.” Tannenbaum indeed attributes almost unlimited creative potentialities to the labor movement. It can bring about the reunion of labor and industry by developing an expanding proprietary interest through using its “immense” financial resources to “buy into” the corporation. Indeed, unionism “may yet save the corporation . . . by incorporating it into its own natural ‘society.’” Unionism alone offers a real alternative to statism, whether in its Soviet-totalitarian or British-“democratic” form. (To Mr. Tannenbaum, there is little ultimate distinction between the two.) All this unionism has done, is doing, or will do without so much as taking thought, by the very spontaneity of its social dynamic, by its institutional logic rather than by deliberate planning.
Unionism not only comprehends all society in its scope; it also lays claim to the entire existence of the worker. “A society,” Mr. Tannenbaum holds, “tends to become all-embracing and a way of life.” As a “society,” unionism “conceives its members to be the entire community,” and therefore sees its own “moral role” as including the “economic, political, social and other interests of man”; in fact, “the trade union represents all the life-interests of its members.” As the “only true society” to which modern industrialism has given rise, it necessarily possesses total jurisdiction over the life of the worker.
_____________
There is much that is true in this book, and yet it all adds up to a grave misunderstanding of the labor movement in modern democratic society. It is true that the labor movement first arose, in part at least, to make up for the disintegration of community induced by early industrialism. It is true that through his union the worker today enjoys a corporate status in society, and perhaps even a sense of vocation, that he could never possess by virtue of his individual position. But it is surely farfetched to assert, as Mr. Tannenbaum does, that the trade union, in contemporary America, is the worker’s “society,” the single social group in which and through which he is able to “play the part of a moral person.” Is the American workingman of our time an alien to his local and national communities, does he possess no status in society except that which his union confers upon him? Quite obviously, the American worker achieves his status in society in a variety of social contexts, of which his union is but one. He comes to possess “social personality” not simply by virtue of his being a union member but also by virtue of his being a husband and father, a legionnaire, a Democrat, a Methodist, and fundamentally no doubt, in our society, by virtue of his being an American. To overlook this, as Mr. Tannenbaum tends to do, is seriously to misunderstand American life.
In reading this book, one sometimes gets the impression that Mr. Tannenbaum sees contemporary American reality in terms of his picture of early capitalism in Europe; his account of the impact of the Industrial Revolution is cast almost entirely in English terms or in terms of a transitory phase of immigrant life in this country. He thus misses not only much that is specific in our American experience but also a good deal of what is significant in the internal development of Western democratic society in the past hundred years. The touch of sentimentality that infects his writing—e. g., the early unionists were “simple men” who “wrote their own rules in the homely language of simple folk”—helps to aggravate this sense of unreality.
Even more serious is the fact that Mr. Tannenbaum tends to overlook what I should take to be the very basic fact about trade unionism: its emergence and functioning as a power institution limiting the arbitrary power of management and establishing a constitutional as opposed to a despotic regime in industry. From this viewpoint, trade unionism is seen to represent not simply a reaction against the liberal “idea,” as Mr. Tannenbaum stresses, but also and at the same time a continuation and extension of it to the field of industrial relations. This ambivalence is something that cannot be ignored if the full social implications of unionism are to be grasped.
Mr. Tannenbaum exaggerates fantastically the potentialities of organized labor’s financial resources. By tallying up the annual sum of dues payments, he gets what he feels to be an impressive total; he then points to this fund as the means by which labor can systematically buy out industry. But a little consideration is enough to destroy these illusions, which curiously recall the “labor banking” dreams of the 1920’s. All of the general and special funds of all unions in the nation put together—aside from insurance and pension reserves, which are earmarked and therefore not to be touched—do not amount to half the 1950 profit of the General Motors Corporation alone. Unions, moreover, can hardly use their income for industrial investment. But even if they could, how would that lead to the “reestablishment of a proprietary interest by the workers in the industries from which they draw their living” (my italics)? A union is an organization, an institution, and as such is not identical with its members.
It is this total identification of the union with its members that seems to me to constitute the most perilous aspect of Mr. Tannenbaum’s “philosophy.” Were the labor movement indeed to claim, as Mr. Tannenbaum claims for it, total jurisdiction over “all the life-interests of its members,” this claim would obviously constitute a totalitarian pretension as incompatible with a democratic labor movement as with democracy itself. “I am all for the ‘trade union society,’” writes J. B. S. Hardman (Labor and the Nation, Winter 1951). “In fact, the ‘trade union society’ has been a good deal for me, and I consider reciprocity as fair play. But I would not grant it exclusive control of life . . .” (my emphasis). It is because Mr. Tannenbaum cannot understand this kind of devoted, yet limited, loyalty, that, despite all his insights, he ultimately fails to understand the place or the future of trade unionism in democratic society.
_____________
