Examiner Editorial: Labor hero John L. Lewis must be spinning in his grave

August 17, 2013

This isn't the AFL-CIO labor hero John L. Lewis once knew. And what the heart of Big Labor is becoming won't be much better. At its quadrennial convention in Los Angeles next month, the Big Labor coalition will officially amend its bylaws to allow nonunion people to join. It will become a bigger tent — but not one focused on the most basic concerns its union members.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is doing this to cement its existing ties with liberal activist groups like Sierra Club and the National Council of La Raza. Those groups will in turn encourage their rank and file to become dues-paying AFL-CIO members. Why is Trumka doing this? Survival. Unionization has been in a long-term decline. It is now just 11.3 percent of the total workforce, down from 20.1 percent in 1983. The declines have weakened the movement so much it is now losing fights in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

"[H]ere's the way I look at it: What we've been doing the last 30 years hasn't worked real well. We need to do things differently," Trumka told USA Today Aug. 7. So, Trumka is finally conceding that Big Labor cannot just wish the 1950s back into existence, as it has been trying to do years now. That would be good news if it meant the AFL-CIO was fundamentally rethinking collective bargaining itself. Instead it is selling out existing members in a way that's only likely to speed their exit....To ReadMore.......

My Take – John L. Lewis wouldn’t be upset at all about such a strategy.  Who was his acolyte?  Saul Alinsky!  As Daniel Flynn pointed out in his December 16, 2011 article, Union Gangsters: Saul Alinsky;

"In a biography of Alinsky which was close to being a love letter, Nicholas von Hoffman writes of Alinsky’s “biography of Lewis which was close to being a love letter.” In that 1949 book, Alinsky coldly recounts the events of 1922’s Herrin Massacre, in which John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers (UMW) murdered twenty nonunion mine workers with impunity. A fawning Alinsky compares Lewis punching carpenters’ union leader William Hutcheson at a 1935 American Federation of Labor convention to colonists firing at the red coats at Lexington. Alinsky conceded of his mentor’s leadership of the UMW that there is “no question that Lewis runs the union with a strong dictatorial hand.” Rather than repulse the fledgling community organizer, the strong-arm tactics of the CIO and UMW strongman infatuated him. John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography foreshadows the more widely read Rules for Radicals published twenty-two years later. Dismissing critics of Lewis’s controversial tactics, his aide/biographer explained, “In the arena of power politics, the question of the ethics of means and ends can only be relegated to an academic arena.”

Ethics was no more important to John L. Lewis than it was to his protégé, Alinsky.  He was a true man of the left….whatever works to gain power.  It might be noted that he never became president of the AFL/CIO at the beginning of WWII when the USSR was a semi-ally of Germany due to the actions of British foreign intelligence agents who feared his collusion with communists. 

My grandfather was a coal miner and called John L. Lewis, "Brother John" because he did so much for the miners.  That doesn't change anything.  Even the "wicked give good gifts to their children".