A relevant point to raise in the current debate over the future of the labor movement: listen up, sometimes old white guys can do the right thing (this being a bit of the bone of contention in the back and forth between Anonymous AFL-er and Union Maid over my post on seniority). Take Sol Stetin, former president of the Textile Workers Union, who died this past Saturday at the fine old age of 95.

As The New York Times obit today points out, Stetin voluntarily (I have to put this in RED and Bold because it’s so shocking) merged his union of 174,000 members into the then-Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (creating the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union—whose pronounced acronym would usually get you a “god bless you” in response—which begat UNITE when it merged with the International Ladies Garment Workers union, which, then, begat UNITE-HERE).

The reason? By drawing from the larger Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ treasury, Stetin thought that the merger would help organize textile workers in the South, particularly those who worked for J.P. Stevens. And it did—thousands of workers were organized (one of the few labor battles people might remember simply because of the movie “Norma Rae”).

And as the obit points out, “To ease the way, he agreed to take the No. 3 spot in the merged union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, not the No. 2 position traditionally reserved for the president of the smaller union.” Wait, I’m clutching for my heart here from shock.

And here’s the clincher:

The most significant thing about Sol Stetin was the decision he made in the throes of the J. P. Stevens campaign to merge,” said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, the successor union to Mr. Stetin’s union. “At the time, he headed a very viable union that had the resources and money to survive, but he supported the merger, not for himself – he got nothing out of it – but because the deal called for the new union to expend considerable resources on the Stevens campaign and finance a national boycott.

He got nothing out of this for himself? What, was he nuts?

Are there any giants like that on the AFL-CIO Executive Council? Men who would today give up their posts to merge with other unions to create stronger, more powerful unions to fight the massive corporate monsters today that make J.P. Stevens look like a Mom-and-Pop corner store? John Wilhelm did it (giving up his post as president of the hotel workers to merge with UNITE). Tom Buffenbarger wouldn’t do it, essentially killing a merger agreed to in 1995 (after he took over in 1997) which would have united his machinists union with the UAW and Steelworkers–a merger that could have been pretty damn useful today to all three unions that are trying to grapple with deep industry problems (a side note: I wanted to call that potential new union “Heavy Metal”…can you imagine how many young kids we could have gotten…on the other hand, you might end up with a very bad headache).

Anyone on the Council want to step up the plate, Stetin-like?