Union democracy

Union democracy is a term referring to the governance of trade unions, in terms of the quality of election procedures at ensuring the executives of a union most accurately represent the interests of the members.

In 1911, a German sociologist, Robert Michels propounded a view that all democratic organisations were prone to become oligarchies because of the growth and size of modern organisations, the need for specialisation of officials, and the necessity that this division of labour would lead the rank and file to struggle to understand the activities of their leaders. Michels argued that this amounted to an iron law of oligarchy: all groups, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies with swollen bureaucracies. Michels himself, after falling out with the German Social Democrat Party, migrated to Italy and joined Mussolini's Fascist Party. Nevertheless, his ideas were popularized after the Second World War in particular by Seymour Martin Lipset, Trow, and James Samuel Coleman in a book entitled, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1957). This book argued that the ITU was an exception to Michels' general law, and that the conditions necessary to ensure democracy were that an opposition to the union's leadership could form. This depended on ensuring the leadership did not monopolize the channels of communication with members. Lipset and his coauthors confined their understanding of "democracy" to the existence of organised opposition. They were skeptical that the conditions in the ITU, which made it democratic, were likely to arise in many other unions spontaneously. Following this, in 1959, the US Federal government passed the Landrum-Griffin Act 1959 to mandate democratic principles be followed in union governance.

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