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The United States Labor Council (USLC) is the upper house of the United States Congress. Originally created as one of several "constituency chambers" under the corporatist Constitution of 1925, alongside the Enterprise Council (representing business interests) and the National Senate (representing state governments), it was the only one retained after the toppling of Henry Justin Allen. The USLC performs an important role in reviewing legislation, although it lacks the special advice and consent powers of the old US Senate and can be bypassed by a two-thirds majority of the House of Representatives.
The USLC's 250 delegates are elected every four years by members of registered labor unions and typically sit under the label of their union federation. The chamber has historically been dominated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). While these federations once represented opposing craft and industrial wings of the American labor movement, this distinction has blurred over time, and they are now primarily known as the allies of the Democratic and Socialist Labor parties respectively.
Because the Constitution of 1940 protects collective bargaining as a right, the United States has one of the highest rates of union membership in the non-Communist world. Still, only about 50% of the adult population is eligible to vote in USLC elections. Liberals and conservatives have argued that the disproportionate political representation the USLC affords union members is unfair and contrary to the New Bill of Rights; the Republican Party has demanded the upper house’s abolition since the 1950s. The Democratic, Socialist Labor, and Communist parties officially support retaining the chamber, although some conservative Democrats have broken with the party line. The Industrial Workers of the World, who have been represented on the USLC on and off since 1939, have criticized the institution from the left as “exclusive” and a “palace of the labor aristocracy.”
Convenors of the US Labor Council
Under the Constitution of 1925:
1925-1938: Brig. Gen. Brice P. Disque (Loyal Legion of Labor)
1938-1939: William Hutcheson (American Federation of Labor) (acting)
1939-1940: Mike Quill (Congress of Industrial Organizations) (acting)
Under the Constitution of 1940:
1940-1954: John L. Lewis (CIO)
1954-1955: Daniel J. Tobin (AFL)
1955-1958: Jay Lovestone (AFL)
1958-1960: John L. Lewis (CIO)
1960: Thomas Kennedy (CIO) (acting)
1960-1974: Victor Reuther (CIO)
1974-1978: Peter Brennan (AFL)
1988-1982: Peter Brennan (AFL, with support from the United Farm Workers)
1982-1990: Tony Mazzocchi (CIO)
1990-1994: Peter Brennan (AFL)
1994-2000: Tony Mazzocchi (CIO)
2000-2010: Andy Stern (CIO)
2010-2018: Terry O’Sullivan (AFL)
2018-0000: Randi Weingarten (CIO)
Under the corporate regime, American labor was officially represented by the Loyal Legion of Labor (3L), a national company union closely tied to the military and helmed by the Vice President, General Hugh S. Johnson. Despite its overwhelming majority in the chamber, the 3L never actually dominated American workplaces; the AFL, with its record of loyal “Americanism,” was not disbanded and its national executive cooperated to a degree with Allen’s government. However, many of the federation’s larger and more radical industrial unions were purged, and men like John L. Lewis and the Reuther brothers were forced into the political underground. Ironically, these outlawed labor leaders provided the opposition with a coherent leadership structure for the first time; before the purge of the industrial unionists the underground had been fractured between partisans of the Communist Party and the IWW.
In the fall of 1938, as the revolutionaries began to seize control of entire states, President Allen received a tip-off that his vice-president was preparing a coup. Acting quickly, he had General Johnson arrested and launched a purge of the officer corps. The 3L was dissolved on December 1, and the conservative leader of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters, William Hutcheson, was appointed acting Convenor. Allen surrendered only a few months later, and Hutcheson was forced to resign along with the rest of the government. Mike Quill, the Irish Communist who had covertly organized New York’s subway workers into a revolutionary force during the depths of the Allen regime, was named
ad interim to lead the USLC. He remains technically the highest-ranking Communist in American history, although Congress had become inactive by this point as the Constitutional Convention took on most daily leadership.
The Constitution of 1940 represented a compromise between the “revolutionary opposition” (which included the nascent CIO and its political wing the SLP, the Communists, the Wobblies, and the Negro Army of Liberation) and the “loyal opposition” (which included the Democratic Party, the AFL, and significant elements of the regular army, who had mutinied against Allen after Johnson’s Purge in 1938). The revolutionaries wanted an explicitly socialist government, while many loyalists advocated the restoration of the old Constitution of 1789; the debate nearly led to a second round of war and was only averted by the Communists, who were under instructions from Joseph Stalin not to let the situation deteriorate again. The so-called Foster Compromise saw the old bourgeois-democratic federal structure restored but with a constitutional role for organized labor and a New Bill of Rights that included a statement of racial equality, the enshrining of collective bargaining, and positive rights to food, housing, and employment.
United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis was elected first Convenor under the new constitution. The miner would dominate the chamber for the next 20 years, leading the “All-American” faction of the SLP along with House Speaker Vito Marcantonio. The All-Americans opposed overseas intervention and promoted cooperation with the Soviet Union. They were opposed by the “Atlantics,” the Reuther brothers’ faction, who were more liberal and skeptical of the Soviets. These foreign policy divisions developed after the total Soviet victory in Europe in 1948 and cut across traditional factions within the SLP. Before his wartime radicalization, Lewis had expelled communists from the Mine Workers, but he now joined them in opposing American aid to Britain and Japan.
Unlike Lewis and the Reuthers, the AFL’s principal leaders stayed outside the USLC. The federation’s chief George Meany never took a seat in the chamber; instead, Meany became a backroom kingmaker in Democratic politics and officially affiliated with the party in 1950. Through close cooperation with the Democrats, the AFL edged the CIO out in the 1954 election, capturing the USLC for the first time. At the time, their caucus was being nominally led by the elderly Daniel J. Tobin, a former leader of the Teamsters who had been exiled to the chamber when his union was taken over by Dave Beck. Tobin was never more than a figurehead and died less than a year after taking over as Convenor. He was succeeded by the Russian-born Jay Lovestone, who had been a powerful factional leader in the Communist Party until his expulsion in the early 1920s, whereupon he’d wound up on the side of the Allen regime. He was now one of Meany’s chief advisers and the nation’s most prominent anti-Communist agitator. Through his personal friendship with President Dick Nixon, Lovestone gained influence even on issues outside the USLC’s remit. He was instrumental in the Treaty of Vancouver, which returned some American possessions in the Pacific seized by Japan during the revolutionary years in exchange for military alliance and financial support.
The AFL’s slim majority dissipated in 1958 and Lewis returned to power, although the miner was by this point in ill health and his faction was being eclipsed. Lewis died in 1960, months before Walter Reuther’s election to the Presidency; the Atlantics’ ascension was cemented when Victor Reuther was maneuvered into the convenorship. The brothers dominated American politics for the next twelve years, maintaining “watchful peace” with the Soviets, aggressively rooting out white supremacy at home, and promoting internal democracy in the CIO’s constituent unions. However, an eventual cultural backlash against the Reuthers’ social liberalism led to Walter losing his bid for a fourth term in 1972 and Democratic-AFL victory on all levels of government.
Inflation had been a chronic problem since the Allen years and had reached crippling levels by the late 1970s. The AFL almost lost control of the USLC in 1978. They survived only by relying on César Chávez of the United Farm Workers, who had once been a key supporter of the Reuthers but had recently withdrawn from the CIO in a fit of paranoia. The UFW supported AFL and Democratic policy in exchange for strict anti-immigration measures, but Chávez’s increasingly abusive, authoritarian leadership was an embarrassment for Meany and his lieutenant Peter Brennan. The mess in the upper house gave President Yorty the political capital to ram through supply-side economic reforms opposed by the AFL. Meany threatened to disaffiliate from the Democrats, Yorty called his bluff, and the boss folded. It was a hideous blow to the craft federation, which shed member unions for a decade afterwards and would consistently run behind Democratic candidates in future elections.
Tony Mazzocchi of the Chemical Workers returned the CIO to its natural majority in 1982. An avowed feminist and environmentalist, he was typical of the generation that had grown up under the Reuthers, although his anti-militarism frequently led him to clash with Atlantic SLP leaders in the White House. His combined fourteen years as Convenor saw the full integration of the American labor movement and extensive organizing in the emerging service sectors, as well as the growth of public employee unions to make up a near majority of the CIO’s locals. Mazzocchi was criticized by conservatives for making the USLC a venue of the “culture war,” but he consistently maintained that causes such as affirmative action and clean energy were good for all working people in the long run.
While the SLP and CIO’s preeminent places in American politics remain largely unchallenged today, there is cultural churn afoot. Leaders in both major parties have made tentative noises about reducing America’s towering trade barriers. Traditional voting patterns based on regional and industrial identity are in decline. Many longtime Democrats are embracing the Republican Party, which has reemerged from rural New England to claim that the CIO’s public employee unions now constitute a self-perpetuating ruling class. Convenor Weingarten – the first woman to hold the position, and the first public employee since Mike Quill’s brief tenure – is the bugbear of this “New Right,” and since her ascension last fall, Republican leader Paul LePage has made headlines with dark allegations about the teachers’ influence over the President…