The bosses sell out.(Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise)(Book Review)

Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise, by Robert Fitch (PublicAffairs, 432 pp., $28.50)

ROBERT FITCH is a chastened leftie--as opposed to an ex-leftie. This is an important distinction: The former still believes in the Dream, the pursuit of progressive "social justice," even while admitting the result is often anything but progress; the latter thinks the whole effort is a product of (at best) naive and often perfidious motives. A union member and activist since age 15, bound for an academic career at Cornell and NYU, Fitch, now past 65, writes like a lover scorned. He's not going to forgive all those union chieftains and members who made deals with the mob or embezzled from the till. The cover of Solidarity for Sale, a mid- 1980s photo of His Royal Majesty Jackie Presser, a kept man of the Cleveland mob, carried by a galley of beefy faux-centurions onto the Teamsters convention floor, is a classic. But the temptations of power go back much further than that. "Corruption," the author notes, "had been built into the labor movement from its very inception."

Exposing links between organized labor and organized crime isn't a new art form. Robert F. Kennedy, counsel to Sen. John McClellan's late-1950s special committee on union corruption, published a book in 1960, The Enemy Within. Labor historian John Hutchinson's The Imperfect Union (1970) teems with vignettes of union alliances with the underworld. And--though more focused on political deals--Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray's Betrayal (2004) does likewise. But Fitch brings an insider's perspective to the table. He has seen up close why organized labor is silent about corruption. That proximity explains the noir feel of Solidarity for Sale; read it and you'll want to rent DVDs of Hoffa, GoodFellas, and Casino.

What explains the systemic rot? One reason, the author says, is a patronage system as territorial as any banana-republic fiefdom. In virtually every union, rainmakers receive protected status, the availability of jobs being tied to the fortunes of local bosses who dole them out. You don't ask questions. At New York City's Teamsters Local 282, during the late 1980s and early 1990s the turf of Gambino crime-family underboss (and confessed murderer of 19 people) Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, six-figure-income positions were readily available. Union officials denounce corruption only to excoriate rivals, not allies--and definitely not family. It's telling, Fitch notes, that current Teamster president James P. Hoffa cites The Lion King as his favorite movie.

Another reason for corruption is the "usable history" narrative, that epic tearjerking tale of American labor, bred to the bone in every union member, begun in the late 19th century and put on the fast track in the 1930s. In this script, honest workers, trying to feed their families, stand up and fight exploitative employers. These heroes risked everything, including their lives, at the Battle of the Overpass, Republic Steel Works, and other hallowed sites. Brothers and sisters in labor must honor their ancestors' legacy, even if it means refusing to acknowledge the bad apples in their movement.

Fitch, yet another New Yorker mugged by reality, spoils the party by announcing that this narrative was a disguise from the start. Moreover, it has become a self-defeating disguise, with only 8 percent of (non-farm) private-sector workers belonging to a union, down from a peak of around 35 percent a half-century ago. The usable-history narrative just doesn't have the horsepower to sustain a movement in decline. It can't hide the fact that union officials, far from being good folks forced into a Faustian pact, are feudal-style barons with few qualms about committing crimes or farming them out to mobsters. There never was any Golden Age of organized labor. Solidarity was always for sale.

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