THE MAKING OF UNION DEMOCRACY

Lipset, Trow and Coleman argue that the possibilities for significant and widespread union democracy in labor unions are slight. They base t heir pessimism on their understanding of where democracy is likely to develop: in unions with highly skilled and highly paid workers, with m oderately sized units, and with autonomous subunits. Autonomous subuni ts are likely to develop only in small-scale and not highly rationaliz ed industries. Here I reexamine the bases for this pessimism by compar ing the highly democratic International Typographical Union with Unite d Automobile Workers Local 600, which displayed equally impressive lev els of democracy, but entirely different structural and political char acteristics. This historical and comparative analysis is followed by a n in-depth empirical analysis of the political processes within Local 600. The latter finds that while union factions based on Communist-inf luenced ideology acted as a boost to union democracy(measured here by the level of electoral contention), factions based on the more conserv ative Association of Catholic Trade Unionists acted to suppress high l evels of electoral contention. Hence, factionalism's impact on union d emocracy depends in part on the ideological orientation driving it.