We wrote an article on "Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement for Building a Worker Rights Movement" whose last paragraph said:

Finally, a fundamental question faces workers today: do they have the courage to get up off their knees and confront powerful employers and corporations? A movement requires moral authority and enormous sacrifices by its participants if it is to succeed. In mass movements people must be willing to go to jail, be beaten, and even to lose their lives in a noble and just collective effort designed to win their rights and restore their dignity. Although we do not know whether contemporary workers possess such courage, we do know that Jim Crow was overthrown because southern Blacks did.

The piece had been scheduled to appear in a collection jointly edited by people from the AFL-CIO and Michigan State, a volume intended to be a successor to Organizing to Win. But the book's publisher - the W.E. Upjohn Institute Press - refused to include the piece unless we changed the politics.

This paragraph was the final straw in a long-running controversy, one of more than a dozen political changes requested by the editors in order to get the piece accepted by Upjohn. In some cases we had compromised and in others we had persuaded the editors-publisher to accept our wording. Consider three of the other positions that the editors, in particular Rich Block, tried to get us to change:

1. The term "racist" was deleted, and the wording changed to make it appear that only those in power defended segregation. In our response, we pointed out that "it was NOT only those in power who defended segregation - so did many poor whites, some of them probably union members."

2. We referred to what took place in South Africa as a "freedom struggle"; Rich Block changed this to "resistance to apartheid." Our response noted that "what took place in South Africa wasn't just about resistance, it was about changing the system and winning freedom. The difference is fairly important. IIf the labor movement thinks only of resisting one or another employer assault, it can't win a new system; if it doesn't have a larger vision (freedom or the equivalent) it won't motivate people. The proposed editorial change totally misses the point of our article in ways that we fear are too often characteristic of today's labor movement."

3. Our piece said that success for the labor movement would depend on "disruption"; Rich Block wanted to change this to say "nonviolent direct action." But a symbolic event, a made for TV sit-in, is not the same as carrying disruption to the point that elites have to make concessions. As we noted in our response, "The labor movement in recent years has sometimes used an occasional carefully staged symbolic nonviolent direct action, but has been much less likely to use sustained massive disruption as part of a campaign for worker rights."

In the end, after months of negotiation, it came down to two issues: our insistence that "Black" be capitalized, and that troubling (?!?) final paragraph. Once it became clear that our problems were not with the editors themselves - who wanted our piece accepted without modification - we decided to call the publisher, the Upjohn Institute, and managed to speak with Kevin Hollenbeck, Director of Publications.

Mr. Hollenbeck reported that the final paragraph is "too incendiary for this very conservative traditional institute," and that the problem is that "a reasonably objective intelligent reader, looking at that sentence, would conclude that the only way this [workers rights] is going to happen is if people go out and get beaten." Dan (who was the one on the phone with him) agreed that yes, that is the message of the essay as a whole, and of that sentence in particular. Mr. Hollenbeck said, "You are saying it will take civil disobedience for workers to win. It's the advocacy that is the problem."

Dan responded, "Well, if the conclusion of our paper is that workers won't win their rights unless they are willing to go to jail, to be beaten, and to risk their lives, it seems reasonable that we would then say: We think workers should win their rights, and to do so they should be prepared to take these actions."

The only way we could have gotten the article published in a W.E. Upjohn Institute press book was to compromise our politics. Doing so would have contradicted our basic message; it would have meant labor was not to learn from, and be inspired by, the civil rights movement, but rather was to stick with compromise-as-usual.

We therefore pulled the article and sought another publisher. You can read the article in its entirety, along with a more detailed account of the struggle to get it published, in WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society (December 2005, volume 8, number 6, pages 683-704). encourage you to subscribe to WorkingUSA and to support a journal that provides space for alternative viewpoints. We think the article has valuable lessons for the labor movement: lessons about power, bureaucracy, media, court decisions, leadership, culture, politics, failures, and sacrifice.

(For that matter, we encourage you to buy the soon to be released AFL-CIO/Michigan State volume, Justice on the Job, edited by Rich Block, Sheldon Friedman, Michelle Kaminski, and Andy Levin; despite our problems getting our article included, the volume contains many valuable contributions.)

Two final notes. First, it's always worth paying attention to what most upsets our opponents; usually the one thing that they aren't willing to have said is the one thing that might enable us to win. As Kevin Hollenbeck of the Upjohn Institute told Dan on the phone, "I knew that my neck was on the line if that paragraph appeared and someone on my Board of Directors said, 'The Upjohn Institute can't be identified with advocating that point of view.'"

Second, we want to emphasize that the problem is not with the AFL-CIO's preferences - the editors accepted our piece and would have liked to see it published without alteration. The problem is with labor's weakness, its lack of an independent press, its continual willingness/need to make compromises.


Aldon Morris is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and author of Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Dan Clawson (clawson (at) sadri.umass.edu) is Professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Next Upsurge:
Labor and the New Social Movements.