John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi seek to explain, using political science theories and methods, why some unions act in overtly political ways – beyond their members’ immediate economic interests – and why other unions do not. They also suggest the applicability of their research to other sorts of organizations (think churches), hence the book's abstract title. Specifically, they examine four unions in the transport sector in two Anglo-Saxon countries though, ultimately, most of their evidence and analysis concern the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which represents dockworkers along the US Pacific Coast and in Hawaii. While the terminology, arguments, and quantitative methods might make for a hard slog for many historians – present company included – the book is worth a close read for those wanting to understand why some unions engage in political activism and why other unions that have the potential to do so do not.
To explore this provocative topic, Ahlquist and Levi analyze two “social movement unions” with long histories of militancy on behalf of social justice causes and two “business unions” in the transportation industry that rarely, if ever, engage in such actions. To determine whether these issues are not simply a product of a single country, an Australian union also is investigated; indeed, Australia's Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) possesses politics and history surprisingly similar to the ILWU. The WWF amalgamated with the Seamen's Union of Australia, in 1993, to become the Maritime Union of Australia, but the book's focus predates this merger. The counterpoints to the ILWU and WWF, receiving far less coverage, are the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). Of course, Australia and the United States have a great deal in common; thus, the authors’ conclusions are only applicable, potentially, to other countries with similar cultures, histories, and legal structures. To generalize further, the authors would have had to examine at least two other countries with different historical trajectories with regard to labor unions and the state.
Ahlquist and Levi's main argument is that, “Sustained political mobilization requires an ideologically motivated founding leadership cohort who devises organizational rules that facilitate both industrial success and coordinated expectations about the leaders’ objectives” (p. 6). Once leaders deliver sufficient material benefits, they can charge members “rent”, which may be financial (high salaries and/or toleration of corruption as with the Teamsters and ILA) or political (member support for the leaders’ political agenda, as with the ILWU and WWF). In the latter, as the authors describe it, the “result is contingent consent: members will willingly, sometimes enthusiastically, go along with leadership demands as long as they are convinced that they are receiving the material benefits the organization promised them upon joining, that the leadership is accountable, and that enough other members are also going along” (p. 6). In this relationship, rank-and-filers come to believe that their interests are intertwined with not only their fellow unionists but also other people – even in other countries – that the authors label a “community of fate”.
The authors systematically explore – using in numerous chapters statistical methodologies – a series of actions and boycotts when longshore workers refused to do their jobs in order to express political views that had little connection with their own work conditions or wages. For instance, on numerous occasions over many decades, ILWU members refused to load or unload cargo from countries whose politics were diametrically opposed to the union's (leftist) ten Guiding Principles and the elected leaders’ (often communist) politics. Two examples: in the 1930s the ILWU refused to load scrap iron for fascist Japan in response to its invasion of Manchuria, and from 1989 to 1991 the union boycotted coffee cargo from El Salvador to protest “the killing of Jesuit priests by U.S.-supported right-wing death squads” (p. 13). Similarly, the WWF boycotted many Dutch ships in the 1940s in solidarity with the Indonesian independence movement and some US ships during its war in Vietnam. The ILWU and WWF engaged in many other examples of solidarity activism, too.
The authors examine how these unions came to embrace such ideals while other unions – in the same industry and with the same potential power – did not. They posit that the foundational leaders set the ILWU and WWF on a social-movement union path by institutionalizing democratic governance structures and establishing the leadership rents precedent that subsequent generations of leaders have followed. While mostly focusing upon the union's top echelon, the authors also examine if and how the ILWU inculcates its political values into new members, who come to be somewhat more politically progressive than, say, Teamsters, even though these unions draw from a similar pool of potential members. The most interesting section convincingly documents how ILWU members opposed “free trade” policy in solidarity with (American) workers hurt by offshoring production even though this policy, generally, benefits dock workers.
However, several examples repeatedly cited actually played out differently than suggested and potentially undermine the book's main thesis. In my work on the ILWU, based upon multiple interviews with key activists along with extensive archival research, solidarity actions – boycotting ships to express political views – often originated from “below”, i.e. ordinary members were not simply following their leaders. For instance, when the ILWU shut down the entire west coast on May Day 2008 to demonstrate its opposition to the US wars in Iraq (and, though unnamed, Afghanistan), the idea, energy, and follow-through came from the grassroots. Leftwing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area's Local 10 drafted the resolution, got it approved by the coastwide Longshore Caucus, and convinced wavering locals (particularly Local 13, the largest on the coast, in Los Angeles–Long Beach) to hold together and stop work for an entire shift.
Similarly, the ILWU's long participation in the anti-apartheid movement (AAM) was driven entirely and from its inception by rank-and-filers who pushed their local and international elected “leaders” to act. In fact, my article “No Justice, No Ships Get Loaded: Political Boycotts on the Durban and San Francisco Bay Waterfronts” – published in this journal last year – contradicts the authors’ contention that political activism in the ILWU happens top-down. In the aftermath of the Soweto student uprising, radical black and white members convinced the local to create the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee. For more than a decade, this committee educated Local 10, other ILWU members, and people in the Bay Area about apartheid. In 1984, days after President Reagan's landslide re-election, this committee, along with militants in another local caucus, led an eleven-day boycott of South African cargo – the largest and longest labor action against apartheid in America, ever. During the boycott, the Port Relations Committee held a private meeting in which the union's member of this joint employer–union group agreed that the boycott violated the master contract and the ILA studiously avoided commenting, with almost nothing reported in the union's monthly.
In these cases, it was not the elected ILWU leaders who initiated political actions, receiving members’ “rent” in exchange for a good job managing the union. Instead, these efforts were conceived of and led by class-conscious and internationalist rank-and-filers. Admittedly, in the ILWU (and WWF), elected leaders often emerged from such activists; for example, the legendary Harry Bridges arose out of the San Francisco waterfront's ordinary longshoremen to lead the ILWU for decades. Of course, since the authors repeatedly (and convincingly) assert that the ILWU (and WWF) are highly democratic, it should not be surprising that members drove political activism. Though knowing far less about the WWF, based upon what I do know, the authors’ portrayal of its political activism as top-down, leader-driven is convincing.
As the authors note, ILWU President Bridges heartily endorsed political activism. In a 1974 interview with Bill Moyers (curiously, not cited in the book), Bridges declared, “Interfere with the foreign policy of the country? Sure as hell! That's our job, that's our privilege, that's our right, that's our duty.” Or, at least he did in the first half of his career, as there exists a huge gap between the international activism of the union's early years and the wave that started erupting in the 1970s and has continued, occasionally, through recent times. If Bridges is to be credited with creating the conditions – for which the authors make a strong case – how come none happened for most of this thirty-plus-year reign as president? The authors reasonably note that he (and the union) were “redbaited” viciously in the 1940s and 1950s and that the introduction of containers occupied the 1960s. Nevertheless, my main critique is that rank-and-file activists in the ILWU often pushed elected leaders to engage in political activism though – now – the International leaders proudly and regularly champion this history, especially of anti-apartheid activism.
Allow me to be a cranky historian for a moment. This book is a stark reminder of how different academic disciplines collect and examine information to seek truth. The turn in political science towards game theory and the deployment of statistical methods to explore human motivations and actions will feel quite jarring to many historians. I am not qualified to assess this work's quantitative methods but let me cite just one example of the authors’ approach that left me perplexed: “We capture this process using a hurdle negative binomial model” (p. 253).
Critiques aside, the authors should be commended for examining important and topical issues. If others want to turn their organization into social-justice battering rams then, as the authors suggest, social-movement unions like the ILWU and WWF should be studied.
