More Thoughts on the Worker-Student Alliance: A Reply to Steve Early

Lance A. Compa, Cornell University ILR School

Abstract

[Extract] Early’s vignette about his Miners for Democracy experience sets the stage for an essay faulting some unions’ rush to hire new university graduates as organizers and researchers. He says that student recruitment “perpetuates the technocratic myth that deploying more professional staff is the key” to union success. “Any strategy for rebuilding union strength that relies so heavily on an infusion of paid help is deeply flawed,” he contends. Early contrasts this “staffing up” with the Communication Workers of America’s membership-based organizing network using up from- the-ranks union leaders and activists.

Most of Early’s essay is right on, if that sixties phrase is still apposite. He gives a correct caution about the dangers of too much reliance on university-trained staffers compared with indigenous staffers and volunteer-member organizers. He warns that fast-tracking recruits from the AFL-CIO’s organizing institute and union summer programs into leadership posts can turn unions into technocratic, top-down organizations disconnected from a membership base.

My comments here reflect ten degrees of difference. While I mostly agree with him, I think Early takes a valid critique a step too far with jibes about red carpet treatment, Mormon missionaries, the best and the brightest, mobile organizers, self-sacrificing souls, and the like, suggesting that any reliance on graduates is a mistake, and only indigenous staffers should build the labor movement. His only exception, it appears, is for graduates going into workplaces where Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU)–style dissident groups take on their national union leadership, replicating the “colonizing” of the late 1960s worker-student alliance. As Early says, students’ entry into trade union work then was mostly “in opposition to the labor establishment of that era.” I take him to argue that students now aspiring to trade union work should follow the same dissident path rather than seek union staff positions.