Labor’s Partisans
Essential Writings on the Union Movement From the 1950s to Today , Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti. A Dissent Anthology, The New Press, 2025, 352pp., $29.99
Reviewed by Samuel Borgos
“When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine.”-Irving Howe
In 1954, long before he spake those words, literary critic and activist Irving Howe formed a small political magazine named Dissent. The magazine would provide a unique perspective on politics and culture over the course of the next seventy plus years (Dissent is still in existence), unimpeachably Left wing but with a constant critical eye towards the Adversary Culture it inhabited, as well as the society at large. Integrity was essential to Howe and his allies at the magazine and the publication did not shy away from criticizing the fleeting fancies of the American Left. Howe famously came to proverbial blows with the New Left of the 1960s, criticizing what he perceived as its unseriousness when it came to class politics and its political sectarianism, even referring to Tom Hayden as a “commissar.” More recently, Howe’s intellectual descendants at the magazine have been unafraid to push a deeply humanistic form of progressivism contra even more violent and millenarian kinds to their left [1].
Another American institution Dissent is deeply bound up in, even while casting that famously critical eye, is the American Labor Movement. Indeed, Howe took a particular interest in organized labor even before he founded Dissent, writing about union democracy struggles in the Congress of Industrial Organizations [2] and the United Auto Workers as far back as the 1940s. Irving Howe and Association for Union Democracy founder Herman Benson had a similar pedigree, in this way. Both were natives of New York City and attended the City College of New York, although the latter was expelled from the institution for anti-war activism. Both were politically baptized in Max Shachtman’s Workers Party and wrote for Labor Action, the organization’s official organ. By the 1950s, both men had paved their own ways; Howe founded his magazine and Benson founded Union Democracy In Action, a precursor to the Union Democracy Review. Both maintained their contacts with one another and mutual interest in reformism in the labor movement. Dissent devoted pages to covering Labor over the years, with this volume, Labor’s Partisans, only containing a fraction of the ink spilled in that regard. Benson often wrote about the labor movement for Dissent, frequently covering its “divided soul”. Nary an issue of the magazine went by without an article covering some aspect of the struggle the trade unions are enduring, be it in the flush times of the 1950s (when union density was at its peak in) or the lean ones of today (when union density is at an all time low, nationally).
Happily, although unsurprisingly, the editors of this collection included a section on union democracy, specifically, with articles published between 1959 (incidentally, the year the Labor Management, Reporting, and Disclosure Act was signed into law) and 2024. Included were pieces written by Herman Benson and William Kornblum, another longtime friend of union democracy and ally of AUD (Kornblum would later return to the pages of Dissent to write Benson’s obituary). Benson’s contribution covered Arnold Miller’s victory in the United Mine Workers Of America’s 1972 presidential election, citing it’s importance within the union itself and, more broadly, for the cause of union democracy across the country. Benson discusses the specific context in which Miller was able to unseat a corrupt and autocratic incumbent after years of activism by the rank and file and investigation by the federal government. The story of Jock Yablonski’s murder (and the subsequent crusade both to bring his killers to justice and to continue his fight to make the UMWA more democratic and responsive to its membership) has been recounted many times in the pages of $100 Plus News and the Union Democracy Review, but Benson did so in his Dissent article with an eye towards larger implications. AUD’s founder was heavily involved with union democracy struggles within the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the National Maritime Union at the time of his writing, recounting in his article the uphill struggle of (in his immortal words) the “lonely union reformer”. Benson even briefly mentions the internal machinations of the United Steelworkers (USW) , an issue expanded upon by William Kornblum in his contribution to this anthology.
Kornblum’s article, published in 1975, covered the late Ed Sadlowski (later to be an ally of AUD, as well) and his campaign to reform the United Steelworkers. Sadlowski was a young and talented unionist with the Steelworkers, coming from Ohio and first elected to union office in the USWA in 1961 at the age of 23. Sadlowski was a man of his time; a staunch unionist but also not unaware of the changes in the culture (or counterculture) of the United States since the rise of industrial trade unionism. Unlike more parochial members of the USW and other unions, Sadlowski saw the central importance of democracy and participation (or lack thereof) to the challenges faced by trade unionism. Though Sadlowski would ride a wave of discontent in USWA District 31 to ascend to the directorship, the momentum of said wave could not get him the presidency of the international. In 1975, when Kornblum wrote his article, the upstart Ohioan union reformer was a district director and two years away from his historic (though unsuccessful) run for the presidency of the International union. At that time, Kornblum reports, Sadlowski was focusing on talking to the rank and file, in his own words;
“The real game was in pounding the pavement in front of the plants, getting to know the members, finding tough campaigners who wouldn’t fold under the pressure, and in knowing the issues in every part of this industry.”
Excellent advice for a union reformer (lonely or otherwise) and a fine epitaph for the cause of union democracy itself. Kudos to the late Irving Howe and his magazine for their work.