Bureaucratic Unionism

Bureaucratic unionism has dominated labor unions in the United States for most of the time since 1900, if not before. The worker rebellion of the 1930s created considerable rank-and-file power in some of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions and some parts of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), but the government and companies were able to make unions bureaucratic again in the Second World War and after, disempowering the members and weakening unions. U.S. labor law is designed to tame and bureaucratize unions. The chapter then describes the dominant pattern of contractual unionism and bureaucratization; shows the ways in which the lives and interests of being a union official tend to make a person less militant, more top-down elitist, and in some cases corrupt; and presents “business unionism” as an ideology.