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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 entire membership for ratification. If the deal is rejected, there is no guarantee that management will agree to more of the union’s demands—or even return to the table.

Two-tier contracts are an emotional subject in the labor movement. Beginning in the 1980s, employers used threats of off-shoring and sub-contracting, as well as their legal “right” to permanently replace striking union members, to force a wave of wage and benefit givebacks across many unionized industries. In order to make these cuts more palatable to the members who would have to vote on their ratification, unions negotiated agreements where current workers preserved most of their pay and benefits while future hires would bear the brunt of the cuts.

There are many epithets for this sort of thing, but the most common may be selling out the unborn. These ticking time bombs blow up years later, as the “new” hires become a larger portion of the bargaining unit and resent their veteran colleagues both for their more generous compensation packages and for the fact that the older workers signed away their younger colleagues’ right to enjoy the same. As the veterans become a minority in the workplace, there is an obvious financial incentive for supervisors to push them out through aggressive discipline. In such a situation, worker unity in future rounds of bargaining is hard to achieve.

To be clear, not all “two-tiers” are alike. The powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council accepted a two-tier wage structure after surviving a 27-day strike in 1985. But the tiers only impacted workers during their first year of employment. By year two, all workers were earning the same pay rate. And, decades later, ending the tiered pay scale remained a union bargaining priority.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) accepted a two-tier pay scale at Chrysler when the company went bankrupt in 2009. It was so severe that new hires earned only half the hourly wage of veteran employees. When members voted down a 2015 successor agreement that did not go far enough in reversing the double standard, the UAW was able to renegotiate a deal that brings newer workers closer to the traditional pay scale over the course of seven years.

The CTU’s proposed “two-tier” is a bit more of a shell game than those concessions. The fight over Chicago’s 7 percent pension pickup has more to do with symbolism than anyone’s actual paycheck. Pension systems are complicated things that only accountants and union researchers fully understand. But basically, a pension fund needs a certain amount of money coming in every year in order to guarantee a livable retirement income for actual and projected retirees. Currently, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund has set that target at 9 percent of every pension-eligible employee’s annual income.

Before the CTU won collective bargaining rights in the 1960s, teachers had most, if not all, of their pension contributions deducted directly from their paychecks. Over the years, the CTU was able to bargain for 7 of that 9 percent to be contributed directly into the pension fund, instead of paid as a salary increase and then immediately deducted as a personal pension contribution.

Obviously, the difference between putting 7 percent in pension contributions directly versus rolling it into salaries, and then immediately deducting it, makes no financial difference to the employer. But the 7 percent became a visible target for Gov. Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It was money they could portray to the public and the press as “extra” compensation that teachers get that other workers don’t and demand that teachers give it up. (It should be noted that Chicago teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, so their pensions are the only thing that stand between them and an old age spent subsisting on cat food.)

Under the tentative agreement the CTU is considering, the pay for new hires would increase by an additional 3.5 percent in two successive years. It’s not entirely clear how soon new hires would be responsible for paying the full pension contribution.

Teachers at charter schools also participate in the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. Members of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) at the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) are currently bargaining over the very same pension pickup, and have set a Wednesday strike deadline.

I was a part of the bargaining team that negotiated the first contract at UCSN in 2013. Because we had a significant amount of bargaining leverage in the wake of a very public insider dealing scandal, we realized that those negotiations were our best shot to get the charter network to pay more than the whole lot of nothing that it had been contributing to teachers’ pensions.

We were successful. That 7 percent was a part of an overall compensation package we were going to win anyway. But by directing the employer to put it towards the pension, we politicized a different figure: the network’s starting salaries. Because charters compete in the same labor market as the district to recruit new teachers, the salaries they can offer are key. If that 7 percent had simply been rolled into base pay, UCSN would be able to quote starting salaries that appear to be larger than what the district offers, but really aren’t, giving the union leverage to raise wages in future negotiations. Now that starting salaries at Chicago Public Schools will appear to be 7 percent larger—if CTU members ratify the deal—the salaries that UCSN offers will appear even less competitive.

As for ratification of their contract, CTU members have to decide how important the symbolism of that 7 percent is and what impact it will have on future rounds of negotiations. The shifting of that 7 percent from one column in a spreadsheet to another strikes me as a last minute ploy to give Rauner and Emanuel a face-saving narrative that allows them to say they didn’t suffer a humiliating defeat in this round of bargaining.

“This is not a perfect agreement,” said CTU president Karen Lewis. “But it is good for the kids. And good for the clinicians. And good for the teachers, and the paraprofessionals.”

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

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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 support the CTU,” says Erica Stewart, a spokesperson for the workers. “But this is our contract, and we’ve been bargaining on a separate track than the district.”

Yet UNO’s management’s giveback demands look a lot like what Chicago Public Schools is demanding of the CTU.

While there are many — particularly in corporate education reform circles — who see charter schools as non-union alternatives to school districts, the reality is that teachers at charter schools do not serve as a reserve pool of strikebreakers.

In Chicago, nearly a quarter of charter school teachers have voted their way into the union. The UCSN workers were the largest group of employees to organize when they joined the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) in 2013. Chicago ACTS is Local 4343 of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the CTU’s sister local.

Having directed the AFT’s charter school organizing program from 2010 until 2015, I may be a bit biased. But union organizing in charter schools is a story of union solidarity that too often goes overlooked. Teachers choose to work in charter schools for a variety of reasons, but union avoidance is rarely one of them. And, while union activists have a lot of problems with the role that the charter industry plays in the privatization of education, workers in charters who stand up for their rights deserve support from the Left.

Too Big to Fail

That the UCSN faces a possible strike at the same time CPS prepares for a walkout would have been unbelievable in 2012, the time of the last major CTU strike. Then, CEO Juan Rangel crowed about the fifty thousand students who would continue to report to charter schools while the public schools were shuttered.

Rangel’s pre-strike provocation inspired Chicago ACTS to organize UCSN teachers. The CTU joined the effort and contributed significant staff resources and leadership attention to the project.

This was a huge challenge. UCSN was the largest network of charter schools in Chicago at the time, with ambitions to expand to new markets. It was a driving force in the industry lobby, the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, and Rangel had served as transition chief for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first one hundred days. Up to that point, Chicago ACTS had organized mostly small networks and independent schools.

Given the high degree of teacher turnover and the rapid expansion of the network, we knew we needed to pressure management to sign an organizing rights deal — an agreement not to fight our organizing efforts — if we were going to win a union for the teachers and staff.

Campaign researchers soon discovered that the same rapid expansion that made the network hard to organize was UNO’s financial Achilles heel. Virtually every year, the network had to float a new bond to Wall Street investors, each time using the newest school property — purchased with the last bond — as collateral for the new one. This meant that any increase in the charter’s network’s revenue went to service debt. Any pause in new growth or revenue would put immediate pressure on their bottom line.

In essence, a charter school is just a five-year contract to provide government services. So when charters apply for fifteen- or thirty-year bonds, they are charged extremely high interest rates. Across the board, charter school bonds are only rated one grade above “junk.” But Wall Street investors love them, because they are also classified as municipal bonds, which produce triple-tax-free income for investors. Banks carefully bundle these with safer bonds from actual public entities to produce higher yield, but supposedly safe, bond funds.

If all of this is starting to sound like The Big Short, that’s because the bankers who inflated and then popped the sub-prime mortgage bubble are repeating the same scam in the charter school industry. This should be a national scandal.

But the actual UNO scandal was a result of the organization’s culture of insider dealing and no-bid contracts. Ordinarily, that’s business as usual in Chicago. But in the aftermath of Rahm Emanuel’s controversial closure of fifty public schools, the question of how public education dollars were spent became highly politicized.

When Chicago Sun-Times investigative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos launched a series of UNO exposés in early 2013, the public was outraged by the cavalier and venal misuse of public funds. As Mihalopoulos began to connect the scandal to specific politicians, UNO started losing friends fast.

The day the Sun-Times ran a story on UNO’s fundraising for House speaker Mike Madigan — complete with an embarrassing picture of Madigan at an UNO charity golf event — two things happened: first, the governor set in motion the suspension of a special $98 million grant that was supposed to seed the network’s expansion, and leadership called AFT president Randi Weingarten to propose a neutrality agreement.

Thanks to that deal, the worker-led organizing committee signed up over 90 percent of the teachers and staff for a May Day union certification.

Broke on Purpose

Negotiating multiple contracts with different corporations in the same labor market has not been an easy evolution for teachers’ unions. Traditionally, staff representatives from state umbrella organizations negotiate contracts for local bargaining units. These staffers tend to seek the most expeditious deal possible, with little consideration of how it might affect other units in the area.

CTU leaders, on the other hand, recognized that if the largest and most politically influential charter school bargaining unit agreed to concessions on merit pay or pensions, then they would see those demands pop up at their bargaining table, just as CPS’s concessionary demands are showing up in the current UCSN negotiations. The point of organizing staff in charters is to make them and their unions stronger, not race to the bottom in terms of employment standards.

These conflicting approaches to bargaining strategy have produced no shortage of internal tensions.

The UNO workers did manage to win just-cause job protections, maternity leave, an extended summer break, a salary schedule that brought newer teachers closer to — and occasionally above — the CTU pay scale, and the same 7 percent pension contribution that district teachers enjoy in their first contract.

Coming out of that experience, Chicago ACTS asked the CTU to provide negotiators and organizers to coordinate the current contract campaign. It also now has a full-time union officer released from teaching duties to keep teacher voice central to strategy.

Chicago ACTS is now aiming to have all charter-school contracts share the same expiration date, according to Chicago ACTS president and former charter school teacher Chris Baehrend. “We’re trying to be much more deliberate about how we exercise our bargaining power,” he says. Forming an employer association for the purposes of bargaining common contract language and benefits could make sense to charter employers, if they actually desire stability.

Whether it makes sense to have the charter school units bargain (and possibly strike) at the same time as the district teachers or to try to leapfrog the CTU’s contract gains (or losses) by bargaining in the following year is still being debated within ChiACTS. It’s also one that the bosses have no small say over.

Since that first contract, UNO has evolved as well: after the scandal, CEO Juan Rangel became a convenient scapegoat for the organization’s regulatory problems. He was fined by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to reveal his insider deals, and his Twitter account indicates that he’s now hustling for astroturf education reform campaigns.

In 2014, the UNO Charter School Network also split from its parent organization — the Saul Alinsky–inspired United Neighborhood Organization. Their background explains why they had the savvy to sign a union neutrality deal when they did. UNO had floated the bonds that paid for the network’s expansion. They owned the real estate, charging UCSN nominal rent but hefty management fees. The whole financial structure was designed to be intermingled. The messy disentangling of UNO’s complicated finances has resulted in a charter school network that is as “broke on purpose” as Chicago Public Schools.

The union announced the lopsided results of their strike vote in favor of a walkoff on Thursday night. Local reports stated that this was the first strike in American charter school history, but these Chicago teachers actually would not be the first group of charter employees to go on strike. Teachers at a Philadelphia’s Khepera charter school engaged in a wildcat sick-out in 2011 after management basically refused to bargain a contract in good faith.

Although the Khepera teachers could have been fired under the Pennsylvania labor law they were considered to be under at the time, management instead capitulated and accepted the union’s last contract offer. When Khepera’s administration attempted to gut that contract in 2014, the teachers conducted a strike authorization vote under private sector labor law, and management once again immediately capitulated.

Also in 2014, teachers and staff at Detroit’s Cesar Chavez Academy voted to authorize “walk and work” informational picketing after a year and a half of frustrating negotiations with the Leona Group, LLC. There, management settled the contract the night before the first planned action.

As Karen Lewis said of her members, so is true of teachers at charters: “Our ability to withhold our labor is our power.”

The Chicago ACTS members are working under a contract extension that expires on October 9, but they will not be walking out with the CTU on Tuesday. Even if their elementary schools weren’t on a one-week autumn break, both parties are carefully watching what happens in the CTU negotiations. “I think that UNO is probably waiting to see what happens with the pension contributions in the CPS negotiations,” says Andy Crooks, a leader of the charter school network’s support staff. Instead, the bargaining team has set an October 19 strike deadline — which could be during the potential public teachers strike, if the CTU has not settled by then.

Regardless, if no contract settlement can be reached, Chicago ACTS will be holding a rally outside of UCSN’s corporate headquarters some time this week. If the CTU is on strike, there will be forty thousand union members able to join their colleagues’ picket line.

That is a visual that managers at non-union charter schools are likely dreading. Expect to see some of them pipe up in the press with moralizing about how charter schools were designed to be free from the kinds of collective bargaining disputes that are currently roiling UCSN, and for them to denounce the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago ACTS.

The obvious truth is that they’re afraid. They’re afraid that the people who actually work in charter schools view unions as an important part of making these schools work. And they’re afraid that those workers have a powerful ally in the CTU when their bosses try to push them around.

[This post originally appeared in Jacobin.]

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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 between keeping decision-making and financial resources at the local union level versus pooling resources and concentrating power at the international union level. The other tension is between devoting resources and attention to organizing the unorganized and focusing on winning better pay, working conditions, and rights for existing union members. These twin tensions are closely related, but worth evaluating separately.

The Local versus the International
The concept of Change to Win was inspired by Stephen Lerner’s “Immodest Proposal: A New Architecture for the House of Labor” (New Labor Forum, Summer 2003) that unions should merge into ten to fifteen sectorally focused international unions. Lerner’s thesis was that diluting labor’s resources among sixty-six international unions (particularly when fifty-one of those unions accounted for less than a quarter of AFL-CIO membership) was untenable if unions were to grow. That dilution of resources gets even more hair-raising when one considers that international unions are divided into anywhere from a couple of dozen to a couple of thousand local unions, and that most union dues remain at the local level. Many locals barely have enough money to properly serve their existing members—let alone organize new members to join the union.

And so a lot of merger mania occurred at the local level. UNITE HERE engaged in a fairly thoughtful process of merging locals with overlapping geographical jurisdiction, in the hope of committing garment worker resources to new organizing in the hotel industry. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) utilized slightly more blunt force to forge mega-locals that cover entire multi-state regions. But this effort was not limited to Change to Win unions. One of the projects I worked on at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was convincing nine stand-alone locals of adjunct college faculty to merge into one statewide union in New Jersey for the purposes of pooling resources to hire a full-time coordinator of bargaining and contract campaigns.

More power and resources were concentrated at the international level. Constitutions were amended to give international leaders and staff more decision-making authority in organizing and even bargaining. Per capita dues were increased, giving the international unions (internationals) the power of the purse strings (and those international unions that left the AFL-CIO got even more money).

It is true that big campaigns against multinational companies can only be run with big resources and national coordination. But local unions with serious organizing programs (these do exist!) may have priorities that do not align with the international’s plans. Too often, the hard work of hammering out a plan that works for both sets of interests is undermined by secrecy and manipulation. In her memoir, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade of Fighting for the Labor Movement (Verso, 2014), Jane McAlevey provides a good, if somewhat biased, view of this tension from the perspective of an SEIU local that was not entirely “on the program,” as they say.

I saw some of these tensions firsthand while I was a young staffer at NYC’s hotel workers’ local, the New York Hotel Trades Council (NYHTC). The newly merged UNITE HERE’s first big campaign was coordinating the expiration dates of as many city-wide contracts as possible to end in the same year. This campaign was probably one of the biggest successes of the Change to Win era, as the threat of shutting down a significant percentage of hotel chains’ business resulted in both substantial pay and work-rule improvements in the existing locals’ contracts and neutrality deals that allowed the international union to grow in other parts of the country.

But I do not think anyone at UNITE HERE told the leadership of NYHTC that the plan was to line up everyone’s contracts with their 2006 expiration until after four or five cities’ expirations were already aligned. And the chain that UNITE HERE most wanted to single out did not make strategic sense for the NYC local. Finally, those neutrality deals also involved signing away some locals’ rights to organize other properties that the chains considered offlimits—and no one sought the locals’ consent. I am not sure that any of these disagreements were properly aired until the day that NYHTC President Peter Ward and Las Vegas local President D. Taylor stood in the office of UNITE HERE General President Bruce Raynor and told him he would not be re-elected (thus precipitating the disastrous “divorce”).

The pressure to gain more members is one that international unions feel acutely, while many locals do not seem to feel that burden if they are able to continue to bring in decent contracts and get their officers re-elected as long as the membership decline happens slowly enough. This is particularly true for locals who only represent one employer, or who have the lion’s share of their membership in a handful of politically important shops. In fact, new members upset the apple cart. This is doubly true for new members who come in having learned the organizing model, and, therefore, have radically different expectations of their involvement in contract enforcement and future rounds of bargaining.

Plus, comprehensive campaigns often feature confrontational tactics that may discomfort or embarrass local union leaders who are not used to them. What results is often a lack of local support, if not outright sabotage, and organizers are caught in the middle of a bureaucratic pissing contest.

Internal Organizing versus New Organizing
Positing internal organizing against external organizing is a false choice, borne out of prioritization forced by labor’s declining resources. Both kinds of organizing are vital to labor renewal. But in the rush to find new money for new organizing, many unions targeted the vast sums that are spent on grievances, arbitration, business agent salaries, and shop steward training—expenses that do not tend to build union power, absent a meaningful member mobilization plan.

At the risk of caricaturizing, the “organize or die!” logic essentially meant the following: We cannot grow if all we do is “service” our existing members and we cannot substantially improve pay and working conditions without meaningfully increasing union density in a given industry; therefore, we should devote as much of our resources as possible to organizing for growth. Taken to its extreme, this resulted in quick and under-staffed organizing campaigns under neutrality agreements, quicker still negotiations that prioritized union recognition and agency fee over detailed language on work rules and new union members receiving a business card with an 800 number for a call center to handle grievances.

In such a framework, international unions jealously guarded resources meant for new organizing from being sneakily expended on contract campaigns. But here’s the thing. Many organizers—including those on international staff—found it was very difficult to organize new members into locals with poor reputations and weak contracts, and so often prioritized reinvigorating legacy bargaining units with contract campaigns.

Because of vicious employer retaliation in union organizing campaigns, workers must have a sense that running the gauntlet of employer opposition will be worth it. Any organizer can vouch for how detrimental a worker with a “bad union experience” can be to a campaign. Conversely, if a worker had experience, or intimate familiarity with some other member’s experience, in an organizing campaign with an informed and democratic organizing committee, a plan to win, and meaningful “asks” of worker activism, such a worker comes away a bit more radicalized and vastly more likely to take action in a new campaign.

The choice between internal organizing or new member organizing may be a false choice, but to the extent that unions have been making it so, there is a strong argument to be made that we have been choosing poorly. It is the visible resistance of organized workers that inspires people to join the labor movement. As a recruiter and trainer of new union organizers, I can recall very few new recruits in the last few years who did not cite as their “reason I want to do this work” either the Chicago teachers strike or the Wisconsin protests. And the Wisconsin protests were a failure! But the example of union members standing and fighting the right-wing agenda was still an inspiration. Of course, I am citing examples of workers who decided they wanted to work on the staff of unions, not stand and fight for a union where they currently work. Clearly, we have a long way to go toward inspiring an upsurge in spontaneous organizing.

In this regard, I agree with much of Richard Yeselson’s “Fortress Unionism,” which proposes for labor to focus on preserving and strengthening existing unions “and then . . . wait” (his words). Except we must all take exception with his prescription for merely waiting for a spontaneous worker uprising. Our job is to inspire it! And so unions should engage more in well-planned contract campaigns and job actions with the vast audience of non-union workers in mind.

Comprehensive new organizing campaigns are important for the same reason. Most workers in this country do not even know how a union gets formed. The assumption that workplaces either do or do not have a union by some kind of bureaucratic fiat is surprisingly pervasive. Nonunion workers need to see big campaigns of workers standing up to their employer and demanding improvements and a voice at work to get inspired to do the same. We must talk more about this symbolic and inspirational value that comprehensive campaigns have since institutional support for them seems to be at a historic low. They are too often the victims of impatience, the changing priorities of new leadership, and the institutional conflicts outlined herein. But they are essential and must be revived.

Some Thoughts about Moving Forward
There should be more training for union leaders and staff in the kind of facilitation and consensus-building that actually gets areas of disagreement and hesitation on the table and develops campaign plans with true “buy in.” This is some of our most difficult work, and yet we devote very little attention to building these skills.

International unions, in partnership with their affiliates, should develop, or revisit, their own organizing models. Transparency, honesty, and a commitment to organizing must be the bedrock principles of any model.

There should be a greater openness to chartering new locals where an existing local, for whatever reason, is an impediment to new organizing. The kind of union-building that results in a leadership and a membership base that can stand on its own is very time-consuming and resource-heavy, which is one reason why unions are loathe to do it. But unions should only be engaging in organizing projects with long-term commitments to building power anyway.

Unions must continue to raise their dues and implement special assessments for organizing and strike funds. Members will vote to raise their dues if it is presented as a real plan for increased power. Union dues should cost at least $1,000 a year. Many unions have already raised their dues to this level. Those unions who keep their dues “cheap” do the labor movement no favors.

And unions should continue to find ways to devote a larger percentage of their resources to organizing. We could certainly be more judicious about how and what we spend on politics. Doubling down on political spending in 2014 when, historically speaking, the President’s party was inevitably going to lose the last midterm of the last presidential term, converted the Democrats’ loss into “labor’s loss.” That money could have been spent more wisely on organizing.

Finally, the AFL-CIO does have a role to play here. The smaller international unions that have not yet engaged in comprehensive campaigns need the federation’s leadership. The AFL-CIO should take the lead in facilitating their development of organizing models and plans. A special focus should be placed on unions with similar jurisdictions that could be coaxed into combining resources in joint campaigns resulting in new merged locals.

The great push to organize and grow that began twenty years ago with the start of the Sweeney administration, and which intensified ten years ago in the Change to Win split, has frankly and obviously stalled. Perhaps this discussion merely nibbles at the edge of the problem, but we need a thorough analysis of the institutional barriers that have kept unions from truly committing to organizing for growth and power.

[This piece originally appeared in Volume 25, Issue 3 of New Labor Forum.]