Over the past three decades, scholars have written extensively about attempts by post-World War II unions to promote social change and greater member engagement at the community level. These efforts, variously described as “social justice unionism,” “social movement unionism,” “civic unionism,” and “civil rights unionism,” envisioned a larger social role for unions beyond the confines of negotiating wages, hours, and working conditions in a collective bargaining agreement.
One of the most ambitious and sophisticated of these attempts to advance a broader social vision for unions occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, where the interracial duo of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway developed the concept of “total person unionism” from their base in Teamsters Local 688. Viewing workers as “total persons” whose economic, social, and civic lives were deeply intertwined, they urged Local 688 members to “broaden their horizons beyond the shop and into the communities in which they lived.” Gibbons and Calloway believed that workers should act as engaged citizens and apply their expertise as unionists to support campaigns to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Through a “community stewards” program in the 1950s and a “trade union-oriented war on the slums” in the 1960s, they sought to create a “community bargaining table” where workers negotiated with St. Louis decisionmakers about policies affecting their well-being.
My book, Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and the Working-Class Citizenship, examines how these two visionary leaders led a pioneering effort to link the power of organized labor to the broader project of civic renewal and racial justice in mid-century America. These concepts are especially relevant as unions seek to build a broad social movement that addresses the serious problems faced by working people while defending democracy from those attempting to subvert it.
Teamsters in New York City protest sometime in the 1950s. (Library of Congress)
The Origins of Total-Person Unionism
Gibbons and Calloway forged a political partnership rooted in their common experiences. As coal miners’ sons raised in early 20th century company towns, they encountered what Calloway described as “corporate feudalism.” They observed the United Mine Workers of America play an important role in leading working-class resistance. They knew first-hand the sting of poverty and the profound insecurity caused by the Great Depression. Each gained positions of leadership in unions during the 1930s, Gibbons with the American Federation of Teachers and the distribution workers union and Calloway with the union representing railroad station redcaps. They also embraced socialist politics and saw labor’s fight for racial justice as both a moral and political necessity. These shared sensibilities guided their advocacy of total person unionism.
St. Louis became a laboratory for their ideas after Calloway joined Teamsters Local 688 in 1950. With over 10,000 members, Local 688 ranked as one of the largest and most influential unions in St. Louis in the decades following World War II.
Gibbons and Calloway used Local 688’s bargaining power within St. Louis’s distribution industry to erect what they called a “wall of security” for their members. Before they organized, Local 688’s members, many of whom were Black and female, had been low-wage workers who suffered greatly during the Depression. Teamsters’ contracts provided good wages, excellent health care, and strong pension benefits. Nonetheless, Gibbons and Calloway insisted that unions not forget the “other sixteen hours”-- the time that workers spent living in their communities. Noting that even the best workplace conditions could not offset substandard education, housing, transportation, and public health, Gibbons asserted that Local 688 members faced “a long, hard road before St. Louis is made a really livable place for working people.”
From the Shop Floor to the Neighborhood
In 1951, sensing the opportunity for a more powerful and confident union movement to play a broader social role, Gibbons and Calloway launched the community stewards program, as their first foray into total person unionism. This effort trained union members to organize around neighborhood issues and link workplace activism to community improvement,
The community stewards program had a test run soon after Calloway’s arrival when Local 688 members crafted a plan to support school desegregation in St. Louis. Later, the union recruited and trained community stewards in each of St. Louis’s 28 wards. Acting like union stewards on the shop floor, these community stewards actively solicited grievances regarding neighborhood issues and sought to resolve them with the city. Besides addressing concerns such as broken streetlights, cracked sidewalks, and abandoned homes, the community stewards more ambitiously took on larger deficiencies in the city’s infrastructure. They agitated for improved mass transit, expanded programs for youth, better public housing, and a free city college to make higher education more accessible. These initiatives aimed to benefit all St. Louisans while also addressing the city’s long history of systemic racial discrimination. After community stewards successfully pressured the city to enforce a rat control ordinance, Local 688 cemented its reputation as a union that “believed human rights and the basic protection of government belonged to all people, regardless of their economic position in the community.” The rat control campaign represented the union’s intent to establish a “community bargaining table” where the community stewards and allied groups would negotiate with city leaders to serve all of St. Louis’s neighborhoods equally.
The community stewards program culminated in 1957 when Local 688 and the St. Louis NAACP led by Ernest Calloway united to defeat a business-led attempt to revise the city’s charter and curtail growing Black and labor political influence. This resounding triumph prompted Business Week magazine to declare that city leaders would need to seek a “civil rapprochement” and deal with the “problem of Gibbons.” However, plans to expand the community stewards program into environmental protection and tax policy failed to materialize after Gibbons became Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa’s top assistant and spent less time in St. Louis. Also, Local 688 had to devote more resources to fighting corruption charges and other legal challenges that eventually forced it to discontinue the community stewards program.
Ernest Calloway (at right) with the rank-and-file organizing committee of the International Shoe Company outside the Cherokee Plant at 3400 Lemp Avenue in St. Louis. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Ernest Calloway Papers (S0011), S11.45]; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
After Gibbons left his role as Hoffa’s assistant and returned to St. Louis in the mid-1960s, he and Calloway established another iteration of total person unionism: an initiative Calloway called a “trade union-oriented war on the slums.” Reflecting his critique of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty for failing to address the structural causes of racial inequality, Calloway sought to improve conditions in a Black neighborhood whose deterioration he hoped to avert. His “war on the slums” melded the discipline and acumen of Black Local 688 activists with the energy and passion of local insurgents to help focus their protest and meet “the essential needs of the great mass of dispossessed, stakeless Negroes.”
Through an organization called the Tandy Area Council (TAC) located in a north St. Louis neighborhood, Local 688 organizers and members supported campaigns that sought increased social spending, expanded tenants’ rights, greater employment opportunities, and better treatment of the city’s Black citizens by the police. These efforts represented what TAC organizers described as “the kind of union activity which built the union’s reputation as the defender of all working people in the community as well as on the job.” When a local welfare rights group asked TAC to represent them in negotiating with city officials, the union’s renewed efforts to establish a community bargaining table achieved notable success.
In 1969, these efforts prompted Local 688 to support the first ever public housing rent strike in U. S. history. TAC organizers had developed strong connections to the tenants and rallied support for their cause. Fully supported by the striking tenants whose trust he had gained, Harold Gibbons mediated the final settlement rescinding proposed rent increases, providing for a strong tenant voice in managing public housing, and tapping Local 688 to administer public housing programs in St. Louis. Again, Local 688 leaders and members recreated the community bargaining table and demonstrated what could be accomplished when workers acted as total persons and successfully engaged with their communities. However, the union’s imaginative plan to scrap high-rise public housing and replace it with affordable low-rise housing faced political headwinds and had to be abandoned. Shortly thereafter, the Tandy Area Council reduced its activities, and Local 688 leaders who replaced Harold Gibbons showed little interest in reviving total person unionism.
The Legacy and Lessons of Total Person Unionism
Total person unionism requires several elements: a long-term commitment to build community relationships; a willingness to train and develop local leadership to function as effective citizens; and an expansive view of politics as a year-round activity. We see echoes of total person unionism in current “bargaining for the common good” strategies where unions demand enhanced investments and services that would make their communities better places to live and work. There are also many issues affecting workers such as climate change, unaffordable housing and childcare, and a lack of access to mental health services, healthcare, and high-quality mass transit, where engaged worker-citizens and their allies could press for policies that address their needs as total persons.
Fifty years ago, Ernest Calloway expressed concern that “new economic concentrations of power seriously undermine social and democratic institutions by establishing the supremacy of private decision-making.” This prediction aptly describes our current political circumstances and the nation’s rapid descent into authoritarian rule. In this context, Harold Gibbons’s assertion that “the union’s role is to encourage our working members to use their rights as citizens in a democracy” serves as a powerful rallying cry and affirms the relevance of total person unionism as a strategy for meeting the formidable challenges of our times.
Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship is available through the University of Illinois Press.
