UNION DEMOCRACY, RADICAL LEADERSHIP, AND THE HEGEMONY OF CAPITAL

Are democratic or authoritarian unions more effective in defending and advancing workers' interests? Generally, the answers given are untheo retical, agnostic, or impressionistic-and unsupported by systematic em pirical studies. The theory guiding our analysis is that a union with a democratic constitution, institutionalized opposition, and an active membership would tend to constitute a worker's immediate political co mmunity and sustain both class solidarity and a sense of identity betw een members and their leaders. As a result, such democratic unions wou ld also defy the hegemony of capital in the sphere of production. Cons istent with this theory, a contingency analysis of a sample of contrac ts won by CIO unions from 1938 to 1955 shows that those contracts won by stable highly democratic unions were more likely to be pro-labor th an were those won by stable moderately democratic or stable oligarchic al unions. The contracts won by unions with organized factions also we re far more likely to be pro-labor than were those won by unions with sporadic factions or no factions. This pattern held both among the uni ons in the Communist camp and those in shifting or anti-Communist camp s. Further OLS analysis shows that constitutional democracy, organized factions, and Communist leadership (which approached statistical sign ificance) each had independent effects in limiting the power of capita l in the immediate production process.