How Union-Busting Bosses Propel the Right Wing to Power
U.S. bosses fight unions with a ferocity that is unmatched in the so-called free world. In the early days of the republic, master craftsmen prosecuted fledgling unions as criminal conspiracies that aimed to block their consolidation of wealth and property. During modern times, corporations threaten the jobs of pro-union workers in over half of all union elections—and follow through on the threat one-third of the time. In between, bosses have resorted to spies and frame-ups, physical violence, court injunctions, private armies of strikebreakers, racist appeals and immigrant exploitation.
The labor question has never been a genteel debate about power and fairness in America.
A new book from the University of Illinois Press’ “The Working Class History in American History” series offers a broad survey of how bosses have historically engaged in union-busting. Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson.
The essays that comprise Against Labor cover a period that stretches from the late 1880s to the Clinton era. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger explore the racist assumptions that were built into so-called “scientific management.” The men with the stopwatches who broke production down into ever smaller tasks had ethnic preferences for each: Lithuanians for grinding steel, “American Poles” for forging, never Mexicans for the night shift and so on. A happy (for management) side effect of this speed up was the simmering resentment between different nationalities that hindered workplace solidarity.
Chad Pearson shines a light on Progressive-era worker organizations that were created and propped up by employers to help workers resist “union monopolies.” In other words, they created unions for scabs to break strikes and open up closed union shops.
Robert H. Woodrum looks at the use of the Ku Klux Klan and employer-sponsored vigilantism to run union organizers out of the Alabama docks and reverse the modest gains southern workers made during World War I. Michael Dennis updates the southern picture by documenting the UFCW’s sustained, large-scale organizing drive in non-union Virginia supermarkets in the early 1990s. Already facing enormous competitive pressure from Walmart, the supermarkets dug in for a years-long fight with little concern for the law. The story is a perfectly concise example of just how broken the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was as a venue for protecting workers by the time Bill Clinton took office.
None of these stories are particularly earth-shattering revelations to people who study unions and union-busting. What’s most notable is how employer tactics get recycled and adapted from era to era, and that no era was free from union-busting. That’s a key point of Against Labor. Editors Feurer and Pearson place their collection squarely within the new body of scholarship on the “rise of the right.”
Contrary to a popular narrative that has an activist right wing resurging in the years between Nixon’s 1968 election and Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981, the modern right wing began rising in reaction to the New Deal. Many employers simply never accepted the legitimacy of state intervention on behalf of union rights that was enshrined in the original National Labor Relations Act. These employers—mostly small and mid-sized firms—acted as an advance guard against union rights.
They pressed against the edges of the law, testing their ability to fire union activists for cause, replace strikers, lockout recalcitrant unions and restrict organizers’ access to the job site. They learned to love making the NLRB go to court to enforce orders against bosses’ union busting, for in the courts they found far more sympathetic arbiters of management’s rights. The biggest holes in labor law’s protections of workers rights, exploited in the anti-union drives of the 1980s, mostly come from bad court decisions in the postwar years that some people like to kid themselves were a golden age of labor-management cooperation.
Sure, there were employers who talked a good game about their (junior) “partners” in labor, kept their pensions and healthcare plans funded and mostly avoided knock-down, drag-out contract fights. But, clearly in retrospect, they were ready to beat down and bust their own unions just as soon as the advance guard of reactionaries created a political environment where it was possible.
The most fascinating story in the collection, “The Strange Career of A.A. Ahner: Reconsidering Blackjacks and Briefcases,” comes from Feurer. It tells of a hired gun whose career bridged two very different eras of labor-management relations in the Kansas City area. Scholars have referred to the advent of the NLRB as a kind of transition from blackjacks to briefcases for anti-union employers. It’s commonly assumed that the Pinkertons, thugs and company “unions,” employers’ first line of defense against unions in the 1920s, were muscled out of the way by a new generation of lawyers who promised to “work the system” to represent their clients’ interests at the NLRB. But in Ahner we find a direct, lineal connection between the two approaches.
Ahner ran his own detective agency beginning during World War I. For the right price, he would spy on workers, plant bombs and frame union activists (he had lots of friends in law enforcement at a time when there weren’t terribly rigid boundaries between local business and police). This work continued into the 1930s, when he was investigated by a Senate committee probing how employers were violating the new labor act.
Recognizing that times had changed, Ahner improved his image, if not his underlying philosophy. Working with a local priest, he became co-chair of the St. Louis Labor-Management Committee, which counseled conciliation and arbitration. Through this “volunteer” work, he lined up consulting gigs with unionized employers. Mostly this was for bargaining and grievances, where union representatives who knew his history would be aghast to find him sitting across the table with an air of respectability. But occasionally—even in the 1950’s—he was called on for union avoidance work, where he pressed the limits of employers’ rights to their own free speech and to squelch their workers’.
Ahner’s story enriches our understanding of the real roots of today’s anti-unionism. One wishes Rosemary Feurer had expanded her research on Ahner and others like him and made that the subject of her book.
It also serves as a warning that today’s union-buster will claim to have “always” had a “productive working relationship” with unions when we begin to win again. But the only “always” that applies to American capitalists is that they are always against labor.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
When Labor Fought Rock-and-Roll
Facing the world ain’t easy when there isn’t anything going
Standing at the corner waiting watching time go by
Will I go to work today or shall I bide my time
So begins the Kinks’ song, “Get Back in Line,” one of the most hauntingly beautiful paeans to the forced idleness and stress of unemployment ever committed to tape.
I’ve turned to this song for solace, a little too often for comfort, but I’ve always been discomfited by the refrain that follows.
‘Cos when I see that union man walking down the street
He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat
Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine
Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line
Is this just Ray Davies being a contradictory crank? He has, after all, written songs snarking about health prescriptions from government doctors (“National Health”) and complained “I was born in a welfare state / Ruled by bureaucracy” about his childhood experience of getting moved from an inner-city still pockmarked with unexploded Nazi bombs to a planned satellite garden community.
According to Davies, the song was inspired by a period in the late 1960s when the Kinks were prevented from performing in the United States, which he vaguely blamed on the musicians’ unions. The Kinks missed the summers of love and Woodstock, remaining behind in the United Kingdom. Due in part to that isolation, the Kinks are celebrated as perhaps the most quintessentially British of the British Invasion bands, one that put out songs about Queen Victoria and “little shops, china cups, and virginity” while everyone else was doing the whole “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” thing.
But did the musicians’ union really “ban” the Kinks from America? If so, how were they ever so powerful? And what, if anything can modern labor advocates learn from this curious history?
The answer can be found in Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock and the Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968, a recent book by Michael James Roberts about how the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) fought rock-and-roll as an emerging art form — and in the process, lost much of its power.
Roll Over, Beethoven
It’s almost impossible to imagine that a union of musicians could ever exercise monopoly power in an industry as complex as entertainment, but the AFM did so from the 1930s into the 1950s. One reason is that the industry was significantly less complicated; there were only a handful of major record labels, a few radio networks, and a finite number of concert halls. As a traditional craft union, the AFM trained and certified “qualified” musicians and forced the employers to get their musicians from the union’s hiring hall. Part of the strategy of a craft union is to try to restrict the number of workers to roughly the amount of available work.
So rock-and-roll was legitimately a threat to the union’s power, as it flooded the market with non-traditional musicians, and the cottage industry of independent labels and unconventional concert spaces that sprung up around the devil’s music undercut the union’s bargaining power.
The union’s own hostile reaction to rock-and-roll exasperated the problem.
Start with the AFM’s structural problem of not making room for rock musicians in the membership. As a craft union, the AFM needed to vouch for the professionalism of its members, who could, theoretically, get hired out to any union shop. One baseline standard of musical professionalism is the ability to read sheet music. Rock musicians, by and large, don’t. They learn by ear, playing along to records or just mucking about with tunings and electrical feedback in the garage.
To induct a rock musician who couldn’t pass the reading test would open the union’s hiring hall up to the risk of sending, say, Jerry Lee Lewis to sub in a Broadway orchestra and having the conductor send him back with the complaint, “This bum can’t play!” That might sound ridiculous now, but it was a significant structural barrier to the AFM keeping up with the times.
The format of high-fidelity records was itself a threat to the union’s power. In the context of radio stations filling their airwaves with pre-recorded classical music and big band swing rather than hiring multiple live bands every day, they are a job-killing technology.
In 1943, the union waged an impressive industry-wide strike to force the record companies to pay mechanical royalties to musicians who appear on records. But the union still wanted to limit the use of records on the air, and waged various campaigns to keep live music on the air.
But rock-and-roll is essentially a recorded art form. The records
that get put out into the world, whether on vinyl or MP3, become the definitive versions of the songs for fans, their happy accidents of studio noise, feedback, and weird pronunciation to be noted and obsessed over. The rapidly growing audience for popular music would accept no substitute for their favorite songs on the air.
Because the record industry was also slow to recognize the market for rock music, a lot of the early singles were produced by new upstart record labels like Chess, Philles, Stax, and Motown. Since the AFM refused to grant membership to many of the artists on those labels, the union missed the opportunity to organize them (despite the fact that those artists were, and still are, getting screwed out of their fair share of royalties). Today, most records are produced by non-union record labels that may nevertheless be distributed by the majors.
When rock music was recorded at unionized labels, the union’s collective bargaining framework treated rock bands more like employers than actual workers. The hiring-hall model assumed a producer or a big band leader assembling a full band of professional musicians. But a rock band can combine bandleader, songwriter, singer, producer, and the core musicians into one collective unit. Their need for the hiring hall was for extra musicians — a horn section or some strings — whom they are responsible for paying the union scale.
Rock music’s impact on the hiring hall is documented in the excellent 2008 film The Wrecking Crew, about the loose group of in-demand studio musicians who helped create a lot of famous songs in the 1960s. They were union members who stood out from the hiring hall crowd for their ability to transcend and collaboratively transform the music written on the page.
In order to specially request a musician, a band would have to also pay for the one whose number came up on the day’s roll. The film treats the idled musicians as objects of derision, sitting in the lobby in their navy blazers reading the newspaper while Carol Kaye is in the studio punching up the bass line to Sonny & Cher’s “The Beat Goes On.”
Union deals that call for workers to get paid for not working are notoriously hard to defend. Meanwhile, to this day, more rock stars turn up in the AFM’s database of employers than on their membership rolls.
Still, the story of the union isn’t solely about its role in preventing the emergence of new, innovative music. As many obituaries of the late great Chuck Berry noted, sometime in the 1970s he stopped touring with his own band. What’s less commented upon is that his contract rider spelled out that concert promoters had to hire a bassist, drummer, and piano player from the local AFM hiring hall. After all, how else could he be sure that they could really play (and that he wouldn’t have to bother negotiating a wage scale)?
We Love You Beatles, Oh Yes We Do
During the first wave of rock-and-roll, the musicians’ union mostly focused on professionally ostracizing the new breed of performing artists, and promoting cultural education for teenagers about the merits of classical and jazz music and the virtues of live performance. They also encouraged congressional investigations into the “payola scandal,” the elaborate web of schemes the upstart labels improvised to bribe radio deejays into giving their discs extra spins on the air (as if there was anything new or unique about corporations trying to buy their way to cultural dominance).
Payola and the variously coincidental airplane crashes, arrests, and military conscriptions of its biggest stars seemed to have put an end to the “fad” by the dawn of the 1960s. When rock music roared back to life with a British echo in the mid-1960s, the AFM gained a new more powerful tool with which to fight it: our nation’s immigration laws.
In order to work in the United States, British Invasion bands had to apply for H visas that required affidavits — subject to challenge — that there were no qualified American workers available to do the job.
“We can go to Yonkers or Tennessee and pick up four kids who can do this kind of stuff,” the AFM unsuccessfully argued to block the Beatles from reentry.
It’s true that to this day Paul McCartney can’t read sheet music, but the AFM’s legal argument was obviously a willful misreading of what “kind of stuff” the Beatles actually did.
While the union doubled down of their definition of professionalism and cultural merit, they sparked one hell of a backlash from teenage Beatlemaniacs. One emblematic letter from a San Diego teenager to the Secretary of Labor goes:
Please sir, what is the exact story on this? How will you determine whether there are qualified Americans when the Beatles request readmission? If you ask me or any other teen-age girl (and there’s a lot of us) there is no one who comes close to their talent, and we mean it!
Roberts includes a number of archival letters like these in Tell Tchaikovsky the News. As delightful as they are to read with 20/20 hindsight, they also point, Roberts argues, to the drift of labor from the Left.
The teenage girls and boys (of which there were many) who could not fathom a social movement that would try to restrict the free cultural exchange of the music they loved had a similarly difficult time understanding why the AFL-CIO was one of the staunchest organizational supporters of the war in Vietnam. By the time union building-trades workers were beating the shit out of hippie antiwar protesters in the “hard hat riot” of 1970, the cleavage was doomed to last for at least another generation.
In the end, the Beatles were a widely beloved cultural and capitalist force that the AFM was simply no match for. John Lennon may have sang, “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me,” but ultimately it was the Kinks that had to climb on that cross.
The key difference seems to be the Davies brothers’ penchant for onstage fisticuffs and their general surliness. The AFM managed to block the band from entering the United States from 1965 until 1969, essentially by arguing that they were dangerous aliens and that there were thousands of American workers who could do exactly what Ray and Dave Davies could do.
Only a schlocky Hollywood villain would try to prevent kids from listening to rock-and-roll, but in retrospect, that’s exactly the position that the American Federation of Musicians found themselves in.
In the labor movement, many organizers tend to assume that the way unions are organized and bargain makes sense because someone smarter than us evaluated all the options and decided on our present course as the best possible one. “It is what it is,” we shrug and tell ourselves. But maybe we should be asking something more along the lines of, “Are we trying to kill rock-and-roll?”
Also a Worker
On Super Bowl Sunday, Jacobin posted a simple tweet, “Lady Gaga: also a worker” (in response to a previous tweet noting that Tom Brady was a worker, though one badly in need of some basic political education). The account was promptly showered with dozens of negative and hostile responses from joyless and doctrinally confused leftists.
Granted, Gaga is rich and famous — a peculiar digital-age version of what Vladimir Lenin called the “labor aristocracy” — but she is a worker. Her art is the product of labor — hers and others’ — and I guarantee you that nobody involved in making her music and videos is receiving a fair share of the revenue that they generate for giant corporations.
As a result of the musicians’ union’s inability to adapt to the changes in the record industry, songwriters, bandleaders, rock stars, and pop icons like Gaga are not able to bargain collectively — a loss of power that reverberates down the chain of production.
The most notable collective action taken by recording stars in recent memory was an effort to create a streaming service to rival the bottom-feeding Spotify and Pandora, essentially asking fans to pay more for their music — not for the corporations to take less of a profit. And the most notable sustained effort by recording artists to gain more control over their working conditions, the Future of Music Coalition, is a 501(c)3, not a union.
One fantasizes about Beyoncé, Jay Z, and Daft Punk announcing instead that they were becoming charter members of a new AFM local dedicated to figuring out how pop stars could strike and boycott media conglomerates to wrest more control over what they’re paid, what they pay for, and who has final approval of their art.
Absent that, the American Federation of Musicians’ clearest pathway back to power might — irony of ironies — be through live music. Their defense of live music on Broadway, where they have members and contracts under attack, is one that generates a good amount of public sympathy. Who wants to pay a hundred dollars or more for a ticket to a “live” show and listen to canned music?
Meanwhile, recording artists who aren’t stratospherically famous make most of their money on tour. Notably, the number of concert venues in major cities is again becoming rather finite and increasingly owned and managed by chain employers like Bowery Presents. That’s the kind of concentration of ownership that can give a well-organized union real power under our current labor relations framework.
Rebuilding that power won’t look like the union’s 1943 strike, and it certainly shouldn’t look anything like the union’s approach to the dawn of rock-and-roll. But it also won’t happen by surrendering to forgone conclusions about how unions should be structured, conduct their bargaining strategy, or conduct their protests.
[Originally published at Jacobin.]
From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win
Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press.
A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years ago. After “thirty-two Boston-area winters,” the placid weather was more of a draw than the city’s vibrant urban reform movement, Early writes. But, naturally, he soon got involved and began taking notes, eventually producing a lively read—an intimate, warts-and-all look at how a small band of activists fought for and won a slightly better world at home. His book is a ray of hope for anyone wondering how to survive, and possibly even thrive, under Donald Trump and a hostile, Republican Congress.
Taking on Chevron
Richmond was once home to factories that built warships and automobiles. Today, what’s left of local industry is a giant oil refinery owned by the global superpower, Chevron. The deindustrialization of Richmond produced the usual urban problems: white flight, declining tax revenue, a corrupt government and a police force that behaved like an occupying army.
In 2004, an “unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), and began to organize around environmental and good government causes. It grew into a political machine.
Party labels don’t appear on Richmond city ballots and all city council seats are elected on a citywide basis—a structure that’s advantageous for insurgent minority efforts to gain representation and build a reputation in government.
In its first election, the RPA managed to win a city council seat for Gayle McLaughlin, a Green. As councilwoman, McLaughlin championed city parks and pushed for more environmental regulation of the refinery. Two years later, she was elected mayor.
McLaughlin hired a good government city manager, who straightened out the city’s books, as well as a new police chief who retrained the city’s force to emphasize community relations and de-escalation.
The alliance also fought to make Chevron pay its fair share in taxes, eventually extracting an additional $114 million from the company. It helped negotiate a separate $90 million payout, along with new safety regulations and investments for the plant. In turn, that money was invested in parks, in youth jobs programs and in expanding the city’s workforce and services.
In spite of such successes, the RPA found itself under regular attack. Its members skewed older and whiter than Richmond’s diverse population. Machine Democrats exploited this fact by running African-American opponents against RPA-supported candidates. These hacks were routinely endorsed by state Democratic leaders like Dianne Feinstein, out of party loyalty. In a dynamic familiar to anyone who labors in urban union politics, the building trades and police and fire unions also opposed the progressive alliance.
Finally, and least surprisingly, Chevron spent $3.1 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat the RPA slate in 2014. To put that in perspective, that’s more money than the company spent on every congressional race in the country for two cycles—combined!
From protest to policy-making
Richmond progressives also faced intense opposition from powerful real estate interests. The city made national headlines with its “Richmond Cares” plan to use its powers of eminent domain to help homeowners whose loans exceeded the values of their homes in the wake of the mortgage crisis and Great Recession that followed. “The banking and real estate industries,” writes Early, “wanted to strangle Richmond Cares in the cradle before it could become a model and precedent for other cities.”
Corporate interests sued to block implementation, and inundated the local airwaves with broadsides against the mayor and progressive councilmembers. In essence, the banks threatened a capital strike, warning that “lending for new home buyers will dry up, home values will decline, and neighborhoods will be hurt,” Early writes. Ultimately, the mortgage industry successfully lobbied Congress to prevent the use of eminent domain to renegotiate private mortgages. Such a bill was signed into law by President Barack Obama in late 2014.
Efforts to provide relief for Richmond renters were more successful, although no less contested. Located just 17 miles from San Francisco and connected by a train line, Richmond has seen an influx of new residents priced out of more expensive cities to its south. Newcomers were soon pricing out longtime Richmond residents, as rents were raised by hundreds of dollars a month, with no warning. Evictions spiked.
In July 2015, the city passed a package of rent control measures. They established a rent control board, capped annual rent increases to the federal inflation rate and established a just cause standard for evictions. The California landlord lobby responded by paying canvassers to mislead several thousand Richmond voters into forcing a referendum on the law. Although Early’s book went to press before the November election, the happy postscript is that Richmond’s rent control law was one of the many progressive ballot questions that won.
The rent control battle exposed a deepening rift between the RPA and the new mayor, Tom Butt. Butt, who the alliance backed at the end of McLaughlin’s two terms, favored a “supply side” solution to the city’s housing crunch and bitterly walked out on the council’s rent vote.
This kind of political growing pains is being experienced in almost every city where progressive coalitions have won more power in city hall. In the transition from protest to policy-making, alliances contend with the rising expectations of Left voters, on the one hand, and the dawning reality, on the other hand, that liberal allies may only be along for part of the ride.
“Showed what a little group of people could accomplish”
Appropriately, Refinery Town includes a foreword by Bernie Sanders. Before he became the de facto opposition leader against Trump, Sanders gave hope to a beleaguered and much tinier Left during the Ronald Reagan years, as mayor of the small Vermont city of Burlington. He’s now working with Our Revolution, the new national organization that spun off from Sanders’ recent run for the presidency, and is focused on the recruitment and training of local activists for down-ballot races.
Community activists who are just starting out could find examples like Richmond a bit daunting, which makes intimate, contemporary histories like Refinery Town so valuable. The first step, of course, is to find each other. The activists who would go on to form the Richmond Progressive Alliance first coalesced around a successful effort to block construction of an oil-fueled municipal power plant next to the Chevron refinery.
The next project they worked on was a year-long campaign to stop the police from harassing Latino day laborers at their morning meetup spot outside a local Home Depot. This campaign was also a success, and led to the creation of a day laborer association to improve safety and workers’ wages.
Organizing around these discrete winnable issues “showed what a little group of people could accomplish,” Early writes one founder recalled, and inspired the shift into electoral work.
[Originally appeared at In These Times.]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before.
There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday.
Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light in the new generation of labor and social justice reporters. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a campaign you wanted to get in the press you had exactly two full-time labor reporters to lobby to convince them that your campaign was interesting enough to warrant fighting with their editors to get it in print.
Now our movement has a slew of journalists who dig deep and follow campaigns and movements over the long haul. The result is not just that good campaigns get press attention, but that movements grow and expand as people read about them and get inspired to join or do something similar.
Jaffe has a good eye for characters and a great ear for what they have to say, making Necessary Trouble a very engaging read. She weaves a narrative that connects the 2008 economic collapse to the outrage that gave rise to the Tea Party, the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda and Occupy Wall Street. The movement for black lives, the Occupy Homes protests against bank foreclosures, the occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, student debt protests, the Chicago teachers strike(s) and the rolling strikes led by OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15, Jaffe argues, are all connected to a growing sense among Americans that the rules of the system are rigged against the working class—and doubly or triply so against workers who are black, queer, young, old, immigrants or women.
These movements are often “analyzed as if they had each happened in a vacuum,” she writes. “But in fact, as I followed them through the years, I would find similar patterns and even direct connections between them.”
The connections come, in part, to activists’ increasing understanding of “intersectionality.” That is, according to Jaffe, a term used by protestors to describe the way that people experience different forms of oppression (say, racism and sexism) as “intertwined, overlapping experiences.”
Intersectionality has become a mainstream enough concept that even Hillary Clinton felt the need to pay lip service to it on the campaign trail. “This generation,” notes City University of New York professor Ruth Milkman, “uses the word intersectionality as if it were a household label.” Jaffe makes a good case that this is a strength of the emerging movement.
Another concept that Jaffe emphasizes in her book is “horizontalism” in social movement structures. She defines the term as broad-based democratic decision-making without formalized leadership—where any member is free to speak out, propose and carry out a movement action.
“The ideal of horizontalism,” Jaffe writes “is connected to the sense that democracy, in this country, is failing, or perhaps, as some are coming to believe, that it never really worked.”
She points to Occupy Wall Street as the most obvious example of the movement’s horizontalism and experimentation with democracy. Occupy, I must say, never struck me as particularly new. It’s more like a welcome return of the Direct Action Network (DAN). Never a formal organization, the activist network was responsible for the 1999 Seattle protests that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization and went on to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Republican and Democratic conventions.
The lack of elected leaders, the consensus decision-making with “blocking concerns” and “stand asides”—even the “spirit fingers” to silently mark agreement—all of it first appeared in the DNA of DAN. The fact that a decade and a half later we are still reinventing the same wheel suggests the need for some more permanent organizations.
Jaffe agrees. “The next challenge for the movements,” she writes, “will be creating organizations that last, that suit the needs of twenty-first-century troublemakers, that can be flexible and still enduring, that can overlap and connect up with one another and create more long-term plans for the future they want to see.”
There is a deep-seated aversion to formal organization on the Left. Part of it is, as Jaffe notes, the fear of a movement becoming dominated by “charismatic leaders.” But part of it too, I think, is charismatic leaders not wanting to deal with the indignities of democratic accountability.
I worry that Jaffe’s readers will take the word “horizontalism” and use it to justify and fetishize a lack of formal organization. A better word, I think, is one she quotes to describe the movement for black lives: “leaderfull.” That is a concept that doesn’t preclude dues-paying membership, elected committees and formalized leadership. It’s more about maintaining a culture where good ideas, speakers and writers that come “from the floor” are not merely tolerated but actively solicited.
Two good examples of leaderfull organizing that Jaffe highlights come from labor. In 2008, the workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory engaged in a sit-down strike. Their leaders at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE) had proposed a small, symbolic civil disobedience action. The workers took that idea and ran with it—locking the bosses out and eventually winning their owed severance. They even got a shot at running the business themselves as a cooperative.
The second example was in 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck against Rahm Emanuel’s giveback demands. Rank-and-file activists engaged in some pretty deep coalition building and picket captains were given wide latitude with how to conduct their protests. The result was a traditional union strike that got converted into a community protest against austerity and corporate “ed reform.”
There’s no shortage of formal structure and elected leaders in labor. And while the UE and CTU are obviously exceptional unions, leaderfull organizing is more prevalent (and certainly has more potential) than is commonly recognized.
To her credit, union activists and campaigns are described throughout Jaffe’s narrative as essential to a movement fighting for an end to injustice and inequality. But I’m slightly disappointed that she didn’t delve into the recent rise in strike activity. Many of these strikes—like at Kohler and Verizon—were big, visible wins for workers.
There’s been so much written about worker centers and “alt labor” that it’s beginning to skew the market for labor writing. Yes, there’s a lot of action in alternative models of worker organizing, but old (not so) Big Labor is also showing encouraging signs of renewed militancy. Activists will learn from each other by example, and books like this must connect the dots.
To that point, Jaffe tells a delightful and inspiring story about the first night that then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to clear an Occupy encampment at the newly rechristened Liberty Park, near Wall Street, because it had to be cleaned. Occupy activists spent the night scrubbing the park down and, at dawn, were joined by hundreds of union activists, in their respective union colors, to stare down riot police. Bloomberg blinked and ordered law enforcement to withdraw. Jaffe reports that a burly orange-shirted member of the Laborers’ union turned to her to say, “This is power.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]