The Making of Union Democracy

Abstract

Lipset, Trow and Coleman argue that the possibilities for significant and widespread union democracy in labor unions are slight. They base their pessimism on their understanding of where democracy is likely to develop: in unions with highly skilled and highly paid workers, with moderately sized units, and with autonomous subunits.Autonomous subunits are likely to develop only in small-scale and not highly rationalized industries. Here I reexamine the bases for this pessimism by comparing the highly democratic International Typographical Union with United Automobile Workers Local 600, which displayed equally impressive levels of democracy, but entirely different structural and political characteristics. This historical and comparative analysis is followed by an in-depth empirical analysis of the political processes within Local 600. The latter finds that while union factions based on Communist-influenced ideology acted as a boost to union democracy(measured here by the level of electoral contention), factions based on the more conservative Association of Catholic Trade Unionists acted to suppress high levels of electoral contention. Hence, factionalism's impact on union democracy depends in part on the ideological orientation driving it.

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