Month: October 2016

Response to Rosenblum, LaLuz and McAlevey

[New Labor Forum invited Jonathan Rosenblum, José La Luz and Jane McAlevey to respond to my article, “Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing”, and then gave me an opportunity to respond back. This is that published response.] The respondents have expanded the discussion far beyond the parameters of my initial article. I have written elsewhere about union structure, strategy, and legal reform, but my preceding article does not purport to offer an all-encompassing solution to labor’s organizing woes. Rather, I intended to highlight two institutional conflicts that I have seen little open discussion about, and which are clearly impediments to maintaining a commitment to an organizing strategy. Simply put, institutional priorities matter and I don’t just mean the budgetary commitment to do organizing. Jonathan Rosenblum, for instance, identifies mass organizing as the only choice for labor. Sure. I’d add reviving the strike weapon to our wish list, […]

The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained

The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation. But the way that the compensation is structured—with current teachers keeping their current 7 percent pension “pickup,” and new hires receiving a salary increase in lieu of a pension contribution—has some critics decrying the deal as a solidarity-killing, two-tier contract. A pickup is the percentage of a worker’s pay that an employer puts directly into a pension fund. The CTU’s House of Delegates meets Wednesday to deliberate over the tentative agreement and vote on whether to send it to […]

The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike

As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements. The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one of the 533 bargaining unit members participated in the strike vote, which delivered a 96 percent vote in favor of strike authorization. The teachers want to limit class size, reverse layoffs of student support personnel, and win more say over the school-year calendar. USCN executives want to shift more pension and health-care costs onto the workers, consolidate the pay schedule, and limit support staff to a 1 percent raise. “We sympathize with the CTU, we […]

Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing

In 2005, the labor movement split, ostensibly over a disagreement about the institutional priority of organizing for membership growth. A number of unions seceded from the AFL-CIO to form a rival federation, Change to Win, only to (mostly) quietly return to the fold. Other unions merged, only to attempt to divorce shortly thereafter. There have been trusteeships and membership raids, and some very good comprehensive campaigns for new members and new bargaining units. But as the dust settles from this period of union conflict, the decline in union density has not been arrested. Moreover, significantly fewer unions seem to be engaged in large-scale organizing, and the broad consensus within labor on the need to prioritize organizing has faded. The story of labor’s wars could be thought of as a tug of war between competing institutional interests within the existing union framework— actually, a twin set of tensions. The first is […]