The Case for “A Right to Your Job” Campaign
[This article was co-authored by Moshe Z. Marvit.]
It is time for the labor movement to campaign for a “Right to Your Job” law.
With anti-union Republicans in control of Washington, this might not seem like the best time to think and plan about workers’ rights. But to surrender to a mere survival mentality would be a mistake. We are on the verge of a major opportunity for labor renewal.
Among congressional Democrats, there is a growing recognition that a strong labor movement is vital to building a constituency for progressive change, and that delivering tangible wins for workers is vital to gaining and maintaining office. As one small example, the official labor bill that the Senate Democrats are currently offering is essentially a repeal of Taft-Hartley.[note]Moshe Marvit, “‘A Better Deal’ Ensures Long- Overdue Worker Protections,” The Century Foundation, November 3, 2017, available at https://tcf.org/content/commentary/better-deal- ensures-long-overdue-worker-protections/.[/note]
This could be opposition theatrics, of course, but we believe something deeper is at play.
A better example is a draft bill by Rep. Keith Ellison—as of this writing not yet introduced— which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to make “just cause” the legal standard of employment and is at once a deeply radical and eminently sensible proposal. That it is a dead letter in a Republican-dominated Congress should not discourage us. Rather, we should press to keep it on the agenda and make it a battleground.
Thus, legitimized by actual federal legislation, a campaign to win just cause as a “Right to Your Job” law in blue states and rebel cities would strongly contrast with and make the false term right to work ring hollow. There would also be a neat symmetry, as “Right to Your Job” is most winnable in non–“right to work” states.
Explained simply, “just cause” is the principle that an employee can be fired only for a legitimate, serious, work-performance reason.
“Just cause” empowers workers to have a voice. It gives them the power to say, “No.” “No” to requests that fall outside of a job description, to unwanted sexual advances or jokes, to an employer’s demand that the worker lobby the government on its behalf.[note] Josh Eidelson and Hassan Kanu, “The Newest Weapons against Unions Are Employees,” Bloomberg Politics, April 2, 2018, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/the-newest-weapons-against-unio ns-are-employees.[/note] It gives workers the right to engage in free speech out- side the workplace, to flip off the president, to attend a protest, and to engage in all manner of non-work-related speech, without risking their jobs. Just cause puts the onus on the employer to prove that a termination was for a valid work-performance-related reason and not—as a worker would have to prove today—that it was based on one of the few improper reasons contained in the law, such as racial discrimination, retaliation for blowing the whistle on inappropriate or unfair working conditions, or some public policy exception.
That makes the campaign for just cause a natural complement to the #MeToo movement. Women are overrepresented in the service sector, where they may be subject to more demands that fall well outside their job description (if there even is a clear job description). Much of this comes in forms of emotional labor—where supervisors, customers, and clients alike expect female workers to fill roles analogous to surrogate moms, daughters, and wives. Furthermore, in every one of the most common occupations for women, they are paid less on average than their male counterparts.[note]“Most Common Occupations for Women,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, available at https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/most_common_occupat ions_for_women.htm.[/note] Women who request equitable pay increases know they are inviting undue scrutiny or new “duties as assigned” in retaliation. Women also experience sexual harassment in the workplace at alarming rates. A major 2016 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report found that 25 to 85 percent of women experience sexual harassment in the workplace.[note]“Report of the Co-Chairs of the EEOC Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace,” June, 2016, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_force/harassment/upload/report.pdf.[/note]
This range is so broad because workers are not empowered to say anything. Just cause laws would permit workers to speak up, without having to make the impossible choice of demanding fairness and dignity or risking their livelihoods. (See “Beyond #MeToo” in this issue.)
The “Right to Your Job” law also makes sense as a defensive strategy for Black Lives Matter and Antifa (anti-Facist) organizers, who are currently vulnerable to targeted far-right attacks aimed at getting those organizers fired for their activism from the day jobs that are unrelated to their non-workplace endeavors. Because arbitrary termination is the boss’ greatest weapon, “just cause” can serve as the rule that protects all other rights at work.
The labor movement must make common cause with these newly enlivened movements in the workplace. “Just cause” for all makes sense as a progressive coalition demand.
This could be a winning issue in blue states with a political culture of ballot initiatives. We saw in 2016 that when paycheck issues and workers’ rights are put on the ballot, voters support those initiatives and often come out to vote for down-ballot Democrats in greater numbers.
The At-Will Doctrine and Faulty Judge-Made Law
The alternative to “just cause” is the current mess of affairs euphemistically referred to as the “at-will” employment doctrine. “At will” is based on the false concept that because employees have the freedom to quit their job at any time, the employer should have the right to fire them at any time, for good cause, bad cause, or no cause. This formulation does not recognize that a worker’s right to quit stems from the Constitutional protections against involuntary servitude, while the employer’s right to fire does not stem from any fundamental right. Furthermore, “at-will” does not recognize the huge imbalance inherent in the employment relationship, where a worker who leaves his or her job rarely puts the entire enterprise at risk of failure, but an employer who fires a worker can cause that worker to lose his or her health insurance, home, and livelihood. Most workers who do not have an individual or collective contract find themselves as “at will” employees.
Some may question whether workers will rally to win employment rights that many mistakenly believe they already have. To the extent that that is true, naming and blaming the “at will” doctrine must be taken up by the newly invigorated socialist left as a popular education project.[note]Bill Fletcher Jr., and Shaun Richman, “What the Revival of Socialism in America Means for the Labor Movement,” In These Times, October 9, 2017, available at http://inthesetimes.com/[/note] In some ways, that would be a return to our roots.
“At will” is entirely a judge-made law, and it has been unpopular with workers’ movements from the start. Early on in our nation’s history, judges imported the doctrine from English common law. This coincided with the Industrial Revolution breaking up the traditional relation- ship between master craftsmen and their journeymen and apprentices. It ensured that the new class of capitalists had no obligations to displaced workers.
Earlier generations of the labor movement resisted the “at-will” doctrine and fought for employment rights for all workers. That changed with the advent of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
Basing employment rights—along with retirement, health insurance, and pay standards—on the enterprise-level of contract bar- gaining was an accident of history, and one that places U.S. workers well outside the norms of employment standards around the globe. It worked—on its own terms—for a few decades. But it is increasingly clear that the system is breaking down under a sustained corporate assault and unions’ continued fidelity to the model of a bygone era that is part of the trap we find ourselves in.
With “just cause” routinely negotiated into collective bargaining agreements, unions evolved to accept that job security is something a worker only gets for being in a union. Even today, many union leaders and organizers might have a slight preference for retaining “at-will” to drive more unrepresented workers to organize for a union contract at their place of work. Although that might have made sense in the 1950s, it is a completely counterproductive strategy in an era where union rights are under attack and employers routinely fire union activists to chill new organizing campaigns as well as subcontract and offshore jobs to avoid the reach of union contracts. The logic of this approach is also dangerous, as it could easily be used to argue against an increased minimum wage, universal health care, or a slew of other issues that would make all workers’ lives better.
“Just Cause” as a New Tool for New Organizing
As a practical matter, “Right to Your Job” laws would open up new pathways to organizing.
In a “just cause” legal environment, employers would have a self-interest in professionalizing their human resources department to avoid lawsuits and maintain discipline. Many companies would wisely institute forms of progressive discipline to document that underperforming employees were informed and counseled on areas of needed improvement before a “just” termination. Some might even institute an internal appeals process.
A worker who receives a warning that his or her job is in peril might reasonably want to contest a write-up and seek help and representation. This provides unions with an opportunity for a new model of representation and membership growth. Unions could offer unrepresented workers an at- large membership for a reasonable fee. Unions could offer telephone or in-person counseling.
If the “grievant” works at a company that the union is interested in organizing, providing onsite representation could be a good way to make inroads with other workers. More generally, providing such services would provide workers who have no experience with unions a positive view of them.
The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) re-established collective bargaining through such a strategy in 2014. Infamously, of course, the city fired all of its teachers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and methodically replaced most of the district with charter schools.[note]Technically, it was more like a reduction in force. Teachers at the five and a half schools that remained in the Orleans Parish Schools district kept their jobs and their tenure. Everyone else had to “apply” for a “new” job in the Recovery School District or one of the private charter school companies it subcontracted to in the rest of the city’s schools.[/note] But some schools retained forms of tenure in the rule books. The employers tended to evade it through a strategy of churning both the workforce and the “portfolio” of charter management organizations.
However, at the historically elite high schools that were converted to charters, many of the former teachers were rehired and retained long enough to re-achieve tenure. When Benjamin Franklin High School moved to terminate a popular Latin teacher, UTNO represented him at a school board hearing and successfully saved his job. Before the school year was over, a rank- and-file organizing committee had signed up 90 percent of their colleagues for the union and successfully pressed the school board for voluntary union recognition.
Contrast that with what happens these days when an unrepresented worker whose job is in peril calls most local unions for help. The worker is most often told “They’re allowed to do that” and “We can’t help you,” and the union usually writes off the shop as an organizing prospect, because how can you start a campaign with a worker who is about to get fired?
The ability to contest a termination through mediation, arbitration, or lawsuits would also create a proliferation of worker/union-side labor lawyers. This is important because despite the common disdain for attorneys, especially those who advertise their services, the avail- ability and outreach by attorneys can serve an important educational function for workers who may not know their rights at work. Think of it as Better Call Saul, with more of a social justice focus. The increase of lawyers who rep- resent workers can also create a virtuous cycle, where there becomes an increase in judges who understand worker issues and thereby change the law to make it more worker-friendly.
Why Now?
For decades, unions have watched in frustration as badly needed labor law reforms have died under Democratic administrations and Democratic congressional majorities. As a result, we have understandably tended to lower our legislative ambitions. To take advantage of this moment, unions, workers centers, alt-labor organizations, and workers’ rights advocates of various stripes need to take the opposite approach from what we did for the doomed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Rather than try to cobble together a consensus around a small tweak of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), we need to vastly expand our list of reform proposals and think way beyond the bounds of the NLRA. We need to promote legislative change that protects and empowers all workers to vindicate their rights on the job, to have a voice, and to form a union and collectively bargain.
We have a rare opportunity to move big, bold ideas at the federal level. These can serve as trial balloons for what issues should be at stake in 2020 and beyond. They can also help spur and encourage state- and local-level campaigns to win them sooner. “Just cause” employment legislation[note] Moshe Marvit and Shaun Richman, “American Workers Need Better Job Protections,” The New York Times, December 28, 2017, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/opinion/ american-workers-job-protections.html.[/note] should be high on the progressive community’s short- list of demands.
We are in a unique moment. After decades of unions losing members and power, that regrettable trend is now widely recognized as a political crisis. Simultaneously, there is a resurgent left and a broad-based grassroots movement, and a Democratic Party hungry to reclaim it. It would be a mistake to tiptoe around the edges of labor law, only hoping that if we advocate modest reform, it might survive business opposition and Senate filibuster. The more minor and esoteric the reform, the more difficult it is to build broad- based coalitions to fight for it.
A “just cause” employment campaign would not only serve the disparate goals of various workers’ rights groups, but it also carries the possibility of changing perceptions about employment and the employer. The more workers begin to experience and feel a right to their jobs, the more they can imagine what’s possible in the workplace. And, with the protections of “just cause,” the more workers can act on it without danger of losing their jobs.
We do not propose this as a silver bullet to reverse labor’s sagging fortunes. Rather, we advocate the development of a bold and broad list of demands for workers’ rights. We would also suggest sectoral wage boards (see On the Contrary: “The Time Has Come for Sectoral Bargaining” in this issue), outlawing noncompete clauses (see Organized Money: “A Not-So Free Market in Bad Jobs” in this issue), and forced arbitration clauses, the criminalization of wage theft as some of the other items to be considered—along with a comprehensive repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and modernization of the NLRA.
But the demand for “Right to Your Job” is both overdue and timely. It is compelling and easily understandable, and contains within it the potential for widespread appeal. It is a demand that is worthy of unions who still consider labor to be a “movement.”
[This article originally appeared in Volume 27 Issue 3 (Fall 2018) of New Labor Forum.]
Response to Rosenblum, LaLuz and McAlevey
[New Labor Forum invited Jonathan Rosenblum, José La Luz and Jane McAlevey to respond to my article, “Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing”, and then gave me an opportunity to respond back. This is that published response.]
The respondents have expanded the discussion far beyond the parameters of my initial article. I have written elsewhere about union structure, strategy, and legal reform, but my preceding article does not purport to offer an all-encompassing solution to labor’s organizing woes. Rather, I intended to highlight two institutional conflicts that I have seen little open discussion about, and which are clearly impediments to maintaining a commitment to an organizing strategy.
Simply put, institutional priorities matter and I don’t just mean the budgetary commitment to do organizing. Jonathan Rosenblum, for instance, identifies mass organizing as the only choice for labor. Sure. I’d add reviving the strike weapon to our wish list, but both strategies are more easily said than done. The historical reality is that the U.S. labor movement has mostly grown through brief periods of worker-led, seemingly spontaneous mass strike activity. The efforts of the last 20 years to increase union density by gaining new members as quickly and easily as possible was doomed to never live up to expectations.
It would be better to find a balance — and a connection—between smart contract campaigns aimed at increasing the power and membership engagement of existing unions and strategic and potentially iconic new organizing fights that might inspire more non-union workers to think about their power and how best to organize.
The best example of that kind of external campaign is, as Jose La Luz points out, the Fight for $15. The campaign offers a model of unions thinking outside their institutional boundaries, it also enables supposedly powerless workers to experience the power that comes from withholding their labor. Along these lines, an “internal” organizing campaign that gives me hope is Bargaining for the Common Good[4], an effort by public sector unions to line up contract expirations and bargaining demands with community demands like progressive taxation, affordable housing, and government transparency, taking dead aim at the largest banks and power brokers while organizing a very real strike threat.
La Luz is correct that the failure by unions to engage in a “serious ongoing conversation” with members about the organizing imperative contributes to institutional roadblocks. Too many unions limited the conversation about the need to engage in organizing to convention delegates, and then just to get dues increases passed. Among admirers, there’s a fear that SEIU might stop funding Fight for $15 if it doesn’t start producing new members. I think Fight for $15 organizers have been thoughtful about getting existing union members to join the rallies and picket lines in solidarity. Such actions can be the most serious education in why we need to organize.
I must admit that I found Jane McAlevey’s response to be unsporting . She twists a few of my points in order to knock them down as strawmen and only seems to offer do more good organizing as an alternative. Don’t get me wrong; if McAlevey and I were tasked with working together to organize a single bargaining unit, I doubt we would substantively disagree on strategy. But reviving our movement will take more than just running more good single unit campaigns, especially if those campaigns want nothing more of their umbrella organizations than to “stay out of the way of good local leadership.”
Affiliation and federation are proven methods for pooling resources to take on larger employers and industries and connecting local fights to national struggles. They’re a pain in the ass, but retreating to provincialism is the worst possible response to the institutional tensions described in my article.
[This piece originally appeared in Volume 25, Issue 3 of New Labor Forum.]
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.]