Editor’s Note: this is the second of two articles regarding the approaching AFL-CIO Convention in early June. It is a look back 35 years to a different era in the AFL-CIO, but still very relevant to the situation today. The first installment may be found HERE
As was my routine, in early 1990 I attended an ordinary monthly meeting of the Albany, New York, city labor council, the umbrella coalition for AFL-CIO member unions in and around New York State’s capital city. I had been an elected delegate to the council from 1984 to 1988, representing the respective United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and Service Employees Union (SEIU) locals that I had belonged to.
By 1990 I was merely a guest; by then I belonged to the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), an independent and unaffiliated union. AFL-CIO rules barred UE from membership in the council, and many labor councils would have probably physically barred me from the monthly meetings. But in Albany, in 1990, the leadership of the labor council was friendly to UE and welcomed my attendance—and even occasional reports by me. Several other independent unions were also welcomed to sit in and stay connected to the broader labor movement. In that period of great attacks on labor, it just seemed like the smart thing for the council to do.
Both my wife and I had also been active members of the labor council “Solidarity Committee”, since 1984. She served as a delegate from her union, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union (HERE). This Solidarity Committee walked picket lines and generated massive material support for 50 different unions engaged in contract fights, strikes, organizing drives, layoffs, plant closing battles, political action tasks, whatever was needed. The Solidarity Committee was also open to anyone, regardless of what union they belonged to, even open to workers who did not belong to a union at all. Our Solidarity Committee even had a small but active working farmer section, probably the only labor council in the country at that time with such a distinction.
The prohibition on UE’s membership in the labor council was a rather mysterious aberration from the faded McCarthy period of several decades prior. UE was labeled by the top AFL-CIO as a “communist” union, but by 1990 this status actually added to UE’s standing among the progressive and left members of the council. The intended pariah status had not held up, evoking as much curiosity as scorn. And then, just like today, none of the AFL-CIO hardliners could explain when, why, or how UE had been given this treatment. Or why it continued. And of course what never, ever, came up either, was presumably what UE should do to gain admittance to the “House of Labor”. The anti-communist germ was pervasive.
A LITTLE PAMPHLET IS HANDED TO ME
At the conclusion of that 1990 meeting, I was approached by a delegate from one of the postal unions, a friend, a member of our Solidarity Committee, and an active member of the council for several decades. We had worked together several years before in a project to erect in the nearby City of Troy, New York, a monument to the memory of Irish trade union organizer, Marxist revolutionary, and leader of the 1916 Easter Rising -James Connolly. He handed me a small blue and white pamphlet with the cryptic instruction, “Don’t let anyone see you read that in here. This is what we need. I bought these myself. Read it, and I will call you.” As soon as I got into my car to go home, I read the title; “Why unions are in trouble… and what they can do about it.” At the bottom of the cover it listed the publisher as the “Trade Union Leadership Institute, Harry Kelber, Coordinator”. As soon as I got home, I read it cover to cover. And I was astounded.
A BOMBSHELL, A REAL BOMBSHELL
I had never heard of Harry Kelber or his organization. But as I read through the short pamphlet, I found myself ticking off a longer and longer list of things I was in complete agreement with. Something was fundamentally out of whack in too many of the unions and had been that way since I had joined the labor movement more than a decade before.
Kelber pulled no punches and pointed out the facts of the matter facing the labor movement in 1990:
- Organized labor no longer commanded the loyalty of the masses of working people, including many of the dues paying members.
- The labor leadership had failed to respond to the multiple attacks of the corporations and politicians.
- The leadership of the unions, and particularly the AFL-CIO, was invisible, literally hiding from the members in many unions.
- That there was no genuine democracy in many of the unions, and none in the AFL-CIO itself.
- Elections in too many unions, and in the AFL-CIO, were a sham.
- That the functioning of more and more unions and the AFL-CIO were remote from the lives of members and ordinary working people.
- Most unions and the AFL-CIO concealed or banned all internal debates, imposing a fraudulent “unity”.
- The publications of many of the unions and the AFL-CIO were little more than cheerleading and campaign literature for unremarkable incumbent leaders.
- That organized labor had thrown away its political clout by uncritically supporting the Democratic Party and relying increasingly on political donations, instead of political education and member mobilization.
- Many unions and the AFL-CIO were merely drifting downstream to disaster, the leadership not leading.
- That opposition elements in many unions and the AFL-CIO—if they even existed—were ruthlessly suppressed by many undemocratic and bureaucratic devices.
- That the AFL-CIO Convention had been reduced to an echo chamber for the incumbent clique, with no possibility of membership participation or input.
- That much of the labor leadership was fattened on sky-high salaries and lush benefits, living lives remote from most members and working people.
- Too many of the unions and AFL-CIO leaders were complacent or asleep in the face of organized labor’s possible extinction.
- And most of all, the solution for this disastrous and unnecessary state of affairs was openness, debate, a return to basic trade union principles, and a restoration of democracy within the unions and the AFL-CIO at all levels.
VOLUNTEERS SPREAD KELBER’S BOOKLET
Just days after receiving that booklet and reading its message, our small group in Albany went into action. We raised the funds to buy hundreds of copies. We distributed them in our travels and to other labor leaders and activists through the mail. Kelber, still a largely unknown figure to us, offered only that we should distribute the booklet far and wide, to rank and file members and leaders alike. Selling it to active members was easy. Most were hungry for some sort of new ideas after more than 15 years of the anti-labor Carter, Reagan, and Bush regimes. Things looked bleak for the working class in 1990. Organized labor took more blows and lost more in that era than in all of the previous postwar period combined. Retreat if not rout was underway on all fronts. But Kelber’s little booklet offered confirmation that we were not crazy after all—that the labor leadership had failed, given in, or given up, on so many levels. And that unless challenged, even greater disaster was just up the road.
COUNTERATTACK
None of us were naïve enough to expect that the top labor leadership strata, or that of the AFL-CIO, were going to see the errors of their ways and come to their senses. We expected a counterattack from them, and it steadily unfolded. Kelber had already been forcibly “retired” from his job at a union-sponsored school. Anyone seen with the booklet, caught talking about it, and especially anyone caught sharing or promoting it was at minimum warned of the consequences for such insubordination and disloyalty. The staff army—at that time—of AFL-CIO paid “organizers” and “representatives” were all mobilized to scour the labor councils for any evidence of Kelber’s dangerous and subversive thinking. Names were taken. People were warned. Some careers were shortened. Ironically, this repressive dragnet launched by AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland ended up manufacturing more interest in the Kelber booklet than anything the volunteers could do. While the atmosphere had changed from hopeful curiosity to very cautious curiosity, our circulation of the booklet actually increased as the name taking and red-baiting spread and deepened.
KIRKLAND’S FATE SEALED
Over the 1990 to 1995 period the preposterous campaign of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland against the elderly Kelber and his ideas actually backfired and began to erode his own credibility. Even those not in support of Kelber at all would often dismiss the panic of the officialdom, reminding everyone that “He’s just some old man—so what?” But overall, as the Federation continued to decline in size and vitality, suffering humiliating loss after loss, Kelber’s message sank in. The late 1993 loss of the fight against the job-killing NAFTA trade deal—led by the “friend of labor” Democrat Bill Clinton—sealed the fate of millions of U.S. manufacturing workers. And the singularly anti-communist regime of Kirkland was mortally wounded likewise. Many of Kelber’s popular points not just rang true, they made sense. The realization that something had to be done spread among significant layers of labor leaders and activists.
Kelber was less and less the issue; Kirkland’s inaction and misleadership, combined with one loss after the other, stimulated the discussion as wider and wider layers of union leaders and members looked for answers. By 1995, the thoroughly stagnant and rotten-to-the-core Kirkland regime disintegrated. Weakened by decades of failure, propped up only by the most conservative and ossified unions, and having embarrassed himself by incessantly raising the communist and Kelber twin bogeymen as the primary reasons to return him to the AFL-CIO top spot, Kirkland quietly bowed out and thankfully disappeared. Nonetheless, the incoming winning ticket of SEIU’s John Sweeney and Mineworkers (UMWA) Rich Trumka—even with furious effort—barely bested the discredited and exhausted Kirkland machine remnants. The significant role played by the elderly but energetic Kelber in weakening and ultimately bringing down the Kirkland regime has never received its due credit. But the facts will bear out that even in the pre-internet world his messages and publications achieved unparalleled circulation to the farthest outposts of the labor movement. Many tens of thousands of the Kelber booklet were circulated in most likely nearly every union in the country.
KELBER SANITIZED AND BURIED EVEN BY THE LEFT
Harry Kelber’s relentless one-man campaign to do something, anything, to revitalize the AFL-CIO and its constituent unions consumed most the last 40 years of his life. When Kelber died in April of 2013, at age 98, his passing was noted widely in the left press, but the obituaries were brief and incomplete. Kelber had been reared in the New York City political cauldron where the early Communist Party dominated much of the labor movement—and certainly dominated its most militant sections. Harry had joined the Communist Party like hundreds of thousands of other young workers in the 1930’s, and as he would later remind me over and over again during our 25-year friendship, “I drive the big union guys crazy not just because I am an old man, but because I am a red!”
In his autobiography, My 70 Years in the Labor Movement—sadly now out of print—Harry Kelber commented that although he had drifted in, and eventually out, of the Party—mostly for practical reasons—he expressed strong regret over the destruction of the Communist Party that he knew and had worked with so productively. Among the myriad of left labor leaders he had befriended during his long journalistic career, he had become close friends with the founding group of United Electrical Workers Union (UE) officers and headquarters staff. He even produced for several years the predecessor newspaper of the UE News, then known as the People’s Press, in the late 1930’s. He was on a first-name basis with dozens of the CIO leaders at the height of labor’s power and influence.
Regrettably, but not surprisingly, most of the left notices published to mark his passing omitted any mention of his Communist Party membership and relationships. So strong is the anti-communist germ among U.S. left writers and academics that readers of these truncated and sanitized notices would be left with no clue as to what motivated Harry Kelber, a man who worked feverishly to try to breathe life into our frequently unconscious labor “movement”. Left-wing anti-communist fanaticism in one way or the other always hearkens back to the high points and triumphs of the Communist Party and its movement—while denying it credit for even the most obvious accomplishments.
A BARREN AFL-CIO CONVENTION LOOMS
Harry Kelber would never deny that his work to challenge the labor establishment looked unlikely to succeed. He would argue however, with little opposition, that something had to be done, so he was doing “something.” The AFL-CIO Convention that approaches—the labor federation representing 65% of the organized workers in the United States—is virtually invisible at this point. There is no sign whatsoever that solutions to the multiple crises of the day facing the working class will be debated at all. It seems certain that the inertia displayed at previous Conventions will merely repeat, even as the Trumpian MAGA onslaught expands with only sporadic opposition. The indictment of the AFL-CIO and the labor officialdom spelled out by Harry Kelber in 1990 reads just as urgent and relevant today as it did 36 years ago.
We can be certain that the stage managers of the coming AFL-CIO Convention will allow no significant discussion of labor’s organizing, bargaining, or political action crises. No serious dissection of overdue solutions will be conducted. Trumpian crimes will be cited, but there will be no debate of his imperialist wars as they are largely supported by the Democratic Party establishment. Bad things will be condemned, good things will be hoped-for, but no concrete steps will be adopted that deploy the still-formidable trade union resources to our defense.
KELBER’S EXAMPLE
The Democratic Party insiders who dominate the Federation and many of its unions—the same forces who quickly condemned Kelber’s age as the primary reason to ignore and even attack him—will all compete energetically to prove their politically correct credentials and strict loyalty to identity politics. Barring some miracle, or a meteor strike, the coming 30 th Convention of the AFL-CIO is likely to come, and go, with little fanfare and nothing of significance left in its wake. The continued transition of the once effective trade unions into job trusts and toothless nonprofits is accelerating. Such is the balance sheet of reaction, inaction, and failure for the bulk of the U.S. labor movement in 2026. For the too-few who attend the AFL-CIO Convention and are willing to recognize its many disastrous defects, and who dream of something much more successful than the current setup, the proletarian spirit of Harry Kelber is certainly with them.