Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis
In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own.
An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life.
As such, it’s really more of a history of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the short-lived federation of independent labor unions sponsored by the Communist Party in the years before the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The TUUL has been maligned by many historians as a sectarian boondoggle that isolated the Communists from the early development of the CIO. Foner portrays the formation of the TUUL as a “necessary and unavoidable” response to the wholesale expulsion of Communist activists from the AFL’s mineworkers and garment workers unions as well as a sincere effort to organize new unions in industries that the AFL had no serious plans to take on.
Foner documents a revived Auto Workers Union, as well as a Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, that organized shop committees and published consciousness-raising shop papers during the long years that the AFL was still thinking of assembly line work as dozens of discrete crafts. Also chronicled are lesser-known unions like the Food Workers Industrial Union, which staged a strike in 1933 that successfully raised wages for 1,400 mostly black women who worked as nut pickers in St. Louis, and an Alabama Sharecroppers Union that defied violent racist repression.
Other heroic campaigns are highlighted, like the National Miners Union’s 1931 strike in “Bloody” Harlan County, Kentucky, which kicked off a decade-long struggle for union recognition, and Ben Gold and Fur Workers organizers facing down violent racketeers, gaining the loyalty of much of the rank and file, and leading eventually to collective bargaining and a CIO charter.
Foner was not particularly critical of the TUUL. He was a Communist, and in the last three volumes of his series, which coincide with the existence of the Communist Party, his analysis became much more partisan. That’s a shame, because it will cause some scholars and activists to continue to dismiss or ignore the lessons of this brief project of forming new, “pure,” left-wing unions outside the established labor movement. More recent scholarship has shown that the TUUL was more complicated, and more influential, than its critics have claimed.
Edward P. Johanningsmeier has shown that the shift from the 1920s strategy of “boring from within” the established unions (basically, the “rank-and-file strategy” of its day) to forming new unions was driven by organizers’ frustrations with the dirty tactics of trade union bureaucrats as much if not more than by “orders from Moscow.” Victor G. Devinatz has argued that the better measure of the TUUL’s legacy was not its membership numbers (which were pathetically low, perhaps never more than fifty thousand) but in the hundreds of thousands of workers who followed its leaders out on strike during these years, serving as a proving ground for organizers and giving workers some experience for the actual strike wave that would follow in 1934.
And Ahmed White has shown that former TUUL members, many of whom took jobs in the steel mills in order to organize a union, were the most dedicated activists during the long and sometimes violent SWOC organizing campaign at the “Little Steel” firms.
Foner’s is still, somehow, the first book-length treatment of the TUUL, and it’s well worth a read by activists who are currently, or thinking about, forming new independent unions. The surprise NLRB election victories of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island and the Trader Joe’s Union in Hadley, Massachusetts, have provoked serious debate over the efficacy of organizing without the resources and expertise (and baggage and bureaucracy) of traditional labor unions.
My takeaway: it’s hard to blame workers for organizing independently of unions that won’t seriously commit resources to unionizing the industries they claim jurisdiction over. But most independent unions (historically speaking) have not amounted to much on their own. Where the TUUL unions were able to inspire workers to protest their working conditions, though, they left a road map of workplaces for the CIO to concentrate on a few years later. And where TUUL leaders inspired rank-and-file confidence in their strategies, they were sometimes able to negotiate their way into AFL and CIO unions to score the resources necessary to win when collective bargaining became legally protected.
A History of the History
It’s a strange delight to hold a “new” volume of Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in one’s hands, its cover the same red and blue gear, with the same typeface and International Publishers logo on the spine, three decades since the series was presumed to have ended with Foner’s life. (Amalgamated Transit Union organizing director Chris Townsend learned of its existence and fought for its publication, and SUNY Empire State College professor emeritus Roger Keeran got the manuscript into publishable form.)
A massive work across over four thousand pages, Foner published the first volume in 1947. He conceived the series as a Marxist rebuttal to the then-dominant Wisconsin school of labor history, which treated the broad sweep of labor’s story as an evolutionary process that resulted in the ideal policies and practices for unions: those of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s (which, in retrospect, was a historical nadir of union membership, organizing activity, and political power for labor).
Foner’s approach was institutionalist (making heavy use of minutes and official journals to document organizations), but his focus was more on strikes and organizing campaigns, making the theme of his series the conflicts that are the whole point of having a labor movement.
The books are arranged thematically (earlier volumes include The Industrial Workers of the World 1905–1917 and The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor 1900–1909) and chronologically, which I’ve found makes them a go-to reference when researching any particular event in order to get a sense of what else was going on in the labor movement at the time.
Foner’s choice to focus just on the first four years of the Great Depression is instructive. The historical memory of the New Deal tends to get smushed together, causing a lot of fuzzy thinking on the Left of the interplay between labor militancy and legal reform. In fact, radical changes were occurring on a year-to-year basis before Franklin D. Roosevelt even took office. (Rutgers labor studies professor Eric Blanc has been working through this in the series of working papers he put out this summer, “Labor Struggle from Below and Above: Lessons from the 1930s.”)
Aside from the TUUL, Foner highlights the unemployment demonstrations of the first years of the crisis and the AFL’s long, tortured internal disagreements about pushing for a system of unemployment insurance (which the federation had derided since the days of Samuel Gompers) as a “dole” that would make workers subservient to the government. As we have seen during our own COVID-19 crisis, workers are more likely to risk protesting on the job when they have some kind of safety net to fall back on.
The most important reform during these years was the anti-injunction Norris-LaGuardia Act, still the most important labor law in this country. Prior to the legislation, employers routinely made workers sign “yellow dog” contracts promising not to join a union. When unions went on strike, employers would go to federal court — yellow dog contracts in hand — and argue that the picket lines were interfering with their contract rights (as well as their property right to expect their employees to come to work every day). The courts would just as routinely issue injunctions, and the National Guard would violently shut the strikes down.
The Norris-LaGuardia Act made it the federal government’s stated policy to encourage the “full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives . . . free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers.” More practically, it outlawed yellow dog contracts and basically forbade federal courts from issuing injunctions that restrained workers’ strike and picket line activity.
That this great law was written by two Republicans (albeit liberal ones, when that was still a thing) and signed by a Republican president is illuminating. By the early 1930s, enough senators were so frustrated by the court’s pretzel logic on property rights, its conservative legislating from the bench, and its dithered views on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce that they actually voted down one of Herbert Hoover’s Supreme Court nominees and passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act by a veto-proof majority.
Would that we had enough senators of either party today who would vote to strengthen labor law as a “fuck you” to the Roberts Court.
Had Foner lived long enough to complete the History of the Labor Movement in the United States (a sisyphean task for any one scholar), the twelfth volume would probably have dealt with Roosevelt’s “first” New Deal, the industrial code-setting National Recovery Administration with its Section 7a “right” to organize — a gift lobbed toward a feeble labor movement to buy just a little opposition to a controversial bill — that, in turn, triggered the 1934 strike wave. And the thirteenth volume would likely have covered the advent of the National Labor Relations Board, the sit-down strikes, and the period that we tend to think of as “labor’s great upsurge” (and, again, tend to romantically misremember as occurring earlier in the New Deal timeline).
Perhaps now, a quarter of a century since Foner’s passing, the time is right for a new generation of scholars to pick up his mantle.
[This article originally appeared in Jacobin.]
15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas
The prestige drama Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons, beginning fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it, which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from socialist thought. Series creator Matthew Weiner tipped his hand that Mad Men would at least play with Marxist critiques of capitalism in the very first episode with two simple words: “It’s toasted.”
That advertising slogan is prominently featured in a classic mid-century Marxist text, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. In an age when supermarket shelves were newly and fully stocked with competing technicolor boxes of breakfast cereal and the constant introduction of “new” and “improved” products, the two writers, associated with the Marxist magazine and book publisher Monthly Review, argued that “competition, which was the predominant form of market relations,” had been replaced by “large-scale enterprise producing a significant share of the output of an industry, or even several industries, and able to control its prices, the volume of production, and the types and amounts of its investments.”
Monopoly, in other words, wasn’t an occasional mistake of the capitalist system — now it was the system.
One of Baran and Sweezy’s central arguments is that the massive surplus value (or, more crudely, the profits) generated by monopoly capital could be democratically and equitably distributed to provide for the material needs of all members of society. Instead, it’s wasted.
One particularly egregious form of waste they target is the commercial advertising business, which was rapidly expanding in the 1960s. Instead of reinvesting surplus in innovation or using the lowered costs of production to make more products available to more people, advertising wastes vast fortunes on convincing consumers that one identical product is somehow superior to another.
In the process of advancing this argument, Baran and Sweezy cite a bit of Madison Avenue braggadocio from ad exec and author Rosser Reeves: the George Washington Hill tobacco company’s “It’s toasted” advertising campaign — “So, indeed, is every other cigarette, but no manufacturer has been shrewd enough to see the enormous possibility of such a simple story.”
The plot of Mad Men’s first episode centers on an impending Surgeon General report that will link smoking tobacco to lung cancer. This is a crisis for the series’ protagonist, Don Draper.
Not a health crisis, of course. In fact, Draper, the head of the creative department at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency, is first introduced smoking a cigarette and sketching out tobacco ad campaigns on the back of a cocktail napkin in preparation for a high-stakes meeting with his largest client, a tobacco company. Cigarette advertising had long emphasized the supposed therapeutic benefits of smoking, and the client wants a plan for how to continue selling a product when the public inevitably finds out it’s deadly.
To prove his point, Draper asks the men to describe how their cigarettes are made. His client, the patriarch of Lucky Strike, blathers on about insect-repellent seeds, the North Carolina sunshine, and the harvesting, curing, and toasting of the tobacco leaves.
“There you go!” Draper declares about the fact that tobacco leaves are toasted before they’re rolled into cancer sticks. When the owner’s son objects that all cigarette tobacco is toasted as part of the manufacturing process, the advertising agency’s head of creative counters, “No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s is toasted.”
This was not a famous advertising campaign. It’s hardly “Where’s the Beef?” and was for a completely different cigarette maker. It seems clear that Matthew Weiner read Monopoly Capital and drew some inspiration from it. But what, if anything, was he trying to say about the advanced stage of capitalism and artistic creativity in an industry built on lies and deception?
A Beautiful Sentiment
Early reviewers noticed that Mad Men was slyly feminist, with secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson’s slow climb toward professional respect and artistic ambition marking her as the show’s parallel (if not primary) protagonist. From early on, interviewers drew out Weiner on the influence that Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl had on his pilot script.
Those were bestselling books. But Cold War–era Marxist economic texts are deeper cuts, so Monthly Review’s contribution to Mad Men has gone unremarked upon.
Baran and Sweezy are not the last or even the most obvious example of Mad Men cribbing from leftist texts. A third-season episode has a pair of copywriters, recently hired to help court the emerging baby boomer market, making a “kids these days” presentation about developing a youth market for a client, a coffee brand, to Draper.
The smarmier of the two, Smitty, launches into an already passé staccato faux-beatnik rap about “this letter from a friend back in Michigan . . . he’s still in school, man, and it’s got this — I dunno — sixty-page rant in it.” He reads from it: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”
Though unnamed in the episode, that “rant” is the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society and a seminal text of the New Left.
“That’s a beautiful sentiment,” Draper replies sardonically. “Does your friend know what you do for a living?”
Smitty replies with a slightly deflated, “Yeah . . . there was a shitty note with it.”
How quickly and eagerly young men would seek to commodify youth rebellion to sell instant coffee is treated as a bitter joke. There is some creativity required to repackage anti-capitalist sentiment as a new and improved lifestyle that can be purchased at the supermarket. But that creative spark is wasted on cynical exploitation.
A major theme across Mad Men’s seven seasons is the tension between the creative talent at an advertising firm and the accounts executives who keep the corporate clients happy (and the revenue flowing). At one point in the series, Draper bellyaches that the creative department is the “most important, least important thing there is.” The most important element in advertising, of course, is actually the buying and selling of radio and television airtime and column inches in newspapers and magazines (in its 1960’s business model, at least). That’s where the money is made. But the creatives are essential for selling the lie that one cigarette is superior to another (and that they will all kill you should not be a primary concern).
In its first three seasons, the idea of advertising as “selling out” creative ambition is most fully represented in the character Paul Kinsey, a senior copywriter who fashions himself as a bohemian and wears his admiration for Rod Serling and Orson Welles on his sleeve (and his bearded face). He lets anyone who will listen know that he’s always writing something that could turn into the Great American Novel, or at least an episode of The Twilight Zone. We also see him try to blow up a pitch meeting with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to protest the demolition of its classic train station in 1963, as well as participate in — and chicken out during — the Mississippi Freedom Rides that summer.
Advertising as Art
Draper, in the early seasons, is similarly drawn toward the bohemian Greenwich Village, and stays on top of the latest novels and movies. One imagines he could create greater art than hokey tag lines for Life cereal. Peggy similarly winds up in the orbit of artists who can at least score an invite to Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Even the accounts men have a creative drive. Senior partner Roger Sterling spends the fourth-season year of 1965 writing his (poorly received) memoir, Sterling’s Gold, and an early episode in season one has the announcement that junior accounts executive Ken Cosgrove published a short story in the Atlantic, stirring jealousy among the other young men in the office.
With Cosgrove out of earshot, Kinsey and Peter Campbell and Harry Crane confess their artistic pretensions and cook up plans to get their own abandoned (and seemingly sophomoric) stories published; Campbell going so far as pressuring his wife, Trudy, to reconnect with an ex-boyfriend in the publishing business. Cosgrove, we find out, continues to pseudonymously publish genre short stories even as his accounts responsibilities increase — causing “fellow frustrated writer” Sterling (perhaps in a fit of jealousy) to forbid him from continuing to do so as a senior executive.
Whatever Matthew Weiner had to say about the employment of creative talent in a wasteful and unnecessary industry, it seems he intended to give the audience two potential interpretations in the series’ ambiguous final scene. Having walked out of the stultifying environment of the enormous McCann Erickson advertising agency after it absorbed and dissolved the small firm that Draper dedicated years of his life to building up, Draper dries out and meditates at a California hilltop yoga camp with an ambiguous smile on his face. Before the scene cuts to black, it fades in a soundtrack and visuals from a vastly more famous advertisement than “It’s toasted.”
The real-world McCann Erickson managed to turn a jingle for Coca-Cola, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” into a chart-topping single in 1971 on the strength of a stunningly cynical ad that featured vaguely multicultural hippies embracing on a hilltop. Sure, the ad sought to reassure its audience, you just saw cops beat the shit out of those idealistic Students for a Democratic Society kids in Chicago and now a bunch of them are blowing up federal buildings to protest the whole system, and your new president was elected through a strategy of racist “law and order” dog-whistling. But at least Coke brings us all together.
If you rewind and slow-mo the moments before Draper’s Mona Lisa smile, you’ll notice hairstyles and outfits from the Coke ad surround him as workers and guests at his newfound hilltop hippie camp. Is he smiling because this scene that he’s stumbled upon has inspired him to innovate a new decade of exploiting baby boomer culture to sell a national culture back to them in the form of diabetes in a bottle? Or is the dark joke of Mad Men that, even when an advertising creative walks away from a lucrative career of emotional manipulation and lies, the machine keeps on humming without him?
The problem is that as much as Matthew Weiner leaned on the famous cut-to-black ending of The Sopranos (his artistic home when he was writing Mad Men’s pilot) as a sort of “choose your own mythology,” his recent interviews have placed a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of the interpretation where Draper returns to New York to pitch the hippie Coke ad. Why does the internet tempt creators to ruin their endings by commenting on them? Weiner had ample opportunity to put a more definitive version on the screen and didn’t. What now privileges his head canon over my own, where Draper remains retired and returns to New York to be a present father for his kids and a reliable friend to the handful of female colleagues he managed to avoid sleeping with?
The ending in Weiner’s head is one of the most disappointingly cynical statements that a TV show that began with a nod to how advertising contributes nothing of productive value to society could have landed upon. It suggests a triumph of capitalism so complete that not only is making emotionally manipulative advertising an art that artists should settle for because the system makes room for it, but that it is the kind of creatively fulfilling work that an artist should aspire to. I’d rather stay at yoga camp.
[This article originally appeared in Jacobin.]
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.]
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.]