Ironically, although I was unaware of District 65's history when I was one of its union members in the 1970s, this labor union had apparently been originally formed by leftist and/or Communist Party USA workers and organizers during the 1930s.
Apparently, its initial focus was to organize workplaces of less than 15 or 10 workers, which the existing CIO-affiliated union leaders felt had too few workers to be worth assigning their own organizers to recruit into their already existing industrial unions. And, as a result of merging for awhile with other unions during the 1940s and early 1950s, by the time I was working at New American Library in the mid-1970s, District 65's officials were also collecting union dues from some publishing firms and other corporations; based on the premise that certain individual clerical workers employed by these firms were occupying a clerical position that had previously been unionized by District 65 (or by a union District 65 had previously merged with), and were still now being represented by District 65.
Being a U.S. working-class person with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary New Left political beliefs, who was also interested in U.S. labor movement organizing and working to create a classless society in the USA in the 1970s, one would have thought that a District 65 union member like me would have tended to get involved more with District 65 activity; or to have tended to interact more with District 65's union office staff or officials at some point, when I was filling its unionized New American Library publicity clerk position.
But by the 1970s, the Old Left District 65 leaders--despite some of them still likely being "closet communists"--appeared to me to be not that much more democratic or less economist in the way they ran their labor unions or related to their rank-and-file District 65 members than were the U.S. labor union bureaucrats who undemocratically controlled the more anti-communist U.S. labor unions; despite the District 65 union bureaucrats likely being less corrupt and less politically reactionary than were the more anti-communist and more class-collaborationist U.S. labor union bureaucrats like George Meany and Lane Kirkland.
Aside from being invited, along with other new members who worked at other workplaces, to go to District 65's office further Downtown and attend a required orientation meeting for new members--where some elderly District 65 union staff members told us about the District 65-run union medical clinic that we were eligible to utilize for free if we needed to see a physician (which, being in my 20s and in good health at this time, except for occasionally getting a cold, I never needed to see, myself)--the District 65 staff members provided us new members no information about District 65's history and what its long-term economic and political goals were; and they showed no interest in learning what District 65's new members felt District 65's concerns and priorities should be.
And during the whole time I was purportedly being represented by District 65 at New American Library and District 65 was receiving dues on the basis of some historical bargaining with New American Library to get that firm to characterize the publicity clerk position as a unionized clerical job slot, I received no information about or any invitation to attend any District 65 membership meeting.
Despite some of its then-elderly leadership having been apparently involved in U.S. left movement politics prior to the 1950s McCarthy era that--in addition to seeking job security, health benefits and higher hourly wages for U.S. workers--also had envisioned creating a more democratic U.S. society in which the workweek was shortened, U.S. workers were more empowered at their workplace and politically, and the U.S. government would not be militaristic, District 65's union leadership in the 1970s now seemed unaware of the following historical reality:
By the mid-1970s, most anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist Movement supporters who were workers, who were born after WWII and who had grown-up during the more economically affluent 1950s wanted to create, in the 1970s, a classless, leisure-oriented society--in which U.S. workers were free of being trapped in 9-to-5 menial jobs and the division of labor that sentenced them to wage-enslavement.
And most post-WWII-born left Movement supporters who were workers in the 1970s wanted control of the corporate media workplace decision-making process (and/or book publishing firms like New American Library) to be in the hands of anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist left U.S. workers. In addition, post-WWII-born left Movement supporting workers in the mid-1970s wanted all the institutions in which District 65 members worked on a daily basis to be involved in rebuilding a 1970s Movement to oppose continued U.S. military intervention in Indochina and elsewhere abroad; and to be institutionally involved in working to create peace in the world by the 1980s, etc.
