Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor

by Paul M. Buhle

Book Overview

In this original, colorful history of "business unionism," Paul Buhle explains how trade union leaders in the United States became remote from the workers they claimed to represent as they allied with the very corporate executives and government officials who persistently opposed labor's interests.
At the center of the tale are three of the most powerful labor leaders of the past century: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and Lane Kirkland, successive...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583670033
• ISBN13: 9781583670033
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A convincing analysis

This book, almost exclusively relying on secondary sources, is an analysis of the trajectory of the American labor movement from the late 19th' through the 20th century. A big historical problem of the American labor movement, according to Buhle, has been the hostility of labor leaders to female and non-white workers. This tendency was illustrated even in circles of the labor movement which were the least racist. Buhle argues that the German immigrant circles controlling the American chapter of Marx's First International made a fatal mistake in expelling English speaking radical abolitionists and feminists from the International on the ground that the English speaking members were too bourgeois and reformist. Marx believed that racial and gendered oppression were far less important than the economic oppression of the workers. Then the American Federation of Labor came along and, for the most part, refused to organize, on racist and sexist grounds, any worker who was not a white male craft worker of western European descent. A.F of L leader Samuel Gompers presented himself as an anti-socialist moderate. World War I was an opportunity for Gompers to try to work for his vision of a partnership between moderate labor leaders like himself, government and business leaders. The federal government's Committee on Public Information secretly funded a pro-war group established by Gompers within the A.F of L. Gompers supported the Wilson administration's repression of the American left but the A.F of L came out of World War I and its concomitant red scare in a very weakened state. Gompers established a labor organization for Latin America that attempted to build up unions in Latin American that would not be strike prone or raise questions about US corporate exploitation of Latin America. Buhle covers the incorporation of the A.F of L's and then the AFL-CIO's international operations into American intelligence operations. Tens of millions of dollars were secretly funneled by the US government to A.F of L operatives, many of them based in David Dubinsky's International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), to attempt to undermine Communist trade union and elected officials in Europe. The ILGWU's Irving Brown was involved in attempts to undermine worker militancy on behalf of the US government for four decades. Buhle notes that Brown devoted himself to working with various folks, including mafia elements, to undermine anti-American union leaders in Europe in the late 40's. Then towards the end of his life, in the 1980's, Brown helped funnel money and coordinate support for the barbaric Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi as well as Chief Buthelezi in South Africa. Brown helped funnel AFL-CIO money to labor organizations linked to Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu Bantustan leader who was backed by the apartheid South African government and white business owners as an "alternative" to Nelson Mandela and the "communist tainted" ANC. Buhle notes how eager AFL-CIO presi

Damn fools

A pugnacious, elegant and devastating critique of the Cold war liberal, business unionists who have corrupted American trade unionism and delivered the wimpy, pathetic federation we have now.

A very cogent critique

A scathing analysis of the flaws of Meany and Kirkland as leaders of the AFL-CIO. Well-written, well-informed, and passionate. Must reading for union activists and scholars, especially those who are sympathetic to Kirkland or Sweeney. But for rather different views, see Mort, Not Your Father's Labor Movement, and, especially, Taylor Dark, The Unions and the Democrats.