September 14 marked the sixty-first anniversary of the Landrum–Griffin Act’s signing into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Erik Loomis detailed on Twitter, the act (also known as the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act [LMRDA]) was the immediate follow-up to the McClellan Committee, which was, in name, a body convened for hearings on corruption in labor and management, but unsurprisingly turned a much sharper focus on union corruption than its much, much deeper counterpart in business.

The LMRDA essentially mandated certain reporting and internal behavior from unions — things like filing annual reports of dues, finances, leadership, and payments; making union documents like constitutions and bylaws accessible to rank-and-file members by law; mandating certain minimums for union leadership elections on national and local levels; and giving recourse to rank-and-file members who feel their democratic rights as a union member were violated. It also said Communist Party members couldn’t run for office (though this was struck down by the Supreme Court). Obviously, it didn’t do anything to democratize management or the workplace.

But these provisions around union democracy, while intended to water down union power and widely protested by the unions themselves, opened important doors to rank-and-filers who really were trying to build more democratic unions. And these fights were extremely real — passionate working-class would-be leaders struggled against their union structures in almost every union. Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor, edited by Burton Hall, is a great volume on some of these fights, but there are plenty of others.