These events are of exceptional significance symbolic and practical to our labor movement. Union activists find it heartening when even so mild a turn effected by John Sweeney, accompanied by great promises, can win the sympathies of writers and thinkers who begin to view the labor movement as a fresh force in American life for social justice. It is a sign of how powerful an impact a truly democratized and refurbished labor movement could make on the nation.
Labor signifies potential power to intellectuals.
Intellectuals bring to labor the kind of approval that it needs so urgently as it seeks to lift itself out of the doldrums. The social power of labor linked to the moral power of intellectuals can become a force to change the nation. But nothing is perfect. From the very outset, this new intellectual movement appeared to be diffident on the subject of internal union democracy, not hostile to the abstract principle of union democracy but uncomfortable with the advocacy of union democracy. At the time, this lapse seemed like an accidental oversight of no significance.