Unions Are at Their Lowest Levels in Decades—To Gain Power We Must Stop Following the Rules
If Donald Trump’s first week as president wasn’t depressing enough, Thursday brought a report that showed union membership fell in 2016. Union members are now just 10.7% of the overall workforce and only 6.7% of the private sector. Those are the lowest levels since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began tracking them in the early 1980s—and possibly the lowest since the 1920s.
Bosses and union haters will crow that unions are dying institutions and even our friends may write eulogies. But this funeral is for the wrong corpse.
What may be dying is the system of collective bargaining that developed in the years after World War II. That system is one where unions exclusively bargain on behalf of workers on a company-by-company basis, not just for wages but also for an ever-expanding portfolio of employer-paid benefits. These collective bargaining agreements emphasize peaceful resolution of disagreements through grievance procedures, mediation and arbitration and can cover many years at a time with guarantees of no strikes and lockouts.
When it worked, it really worked. The postwar period is marked by an historic rise in compensation and living standards for American workers and a sustained reduction in inequality. United Auto Workers (UAW) negotiations used to receive the same breathless news coverage that the stock market receives today. Wage increases won by the union affected the wages of even non-union workers in totally unrelated industries.
But there were problems with the system that made its downfall inevitable. The emphasis on employer-sponsored benefits meant that new companies could waltz in and instantly be competitive by offering their employees a stingier benefits package (and by fiercely resisting union organizing). This, in turn, drove unionized companies to outsource and subcontract jobs, or ship them overseas, to replace humans with robots and to overwork their existing employees to avoid hiring more workers. Arguably, such “labor-saving” measures account for much of the decline in union density in the last 30 years.
This collective bargaining framework also systematically sapped unions of their militancy. Congress made solidarity strikes and sympathy boycotts illegal. The courts stripped striking workers of legal protections. And, as labor scholar and activist Stanley Aronowitz convincingly argues in his book, The Death and Life of American Labor, the “no-strike” and “management rights” clauses of most collective bargaining agreements box unions into a position where they are restricted in what they can fight for and when. Most have a legal obligation to tamp down spontaneous worker protest while contracts are in effect.
We saw a dispiriting example of this when the union that represents the Rockettes rushed to issue a statement to emphasize the dancers’ contractual obligation to not refuse to work at Trump’s inauguration. Ironically, if the workers weren’t covered by a collective bargaining agreement, they would have had a far stronger legal right to refuse to dance.
Contrast that with the inspiring example of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), which quickly organized a strike Saturday night at the John F. Kennedy International Airport to protest Trump’s anti-Muslim ban. The taxi workers don’t have collective bargaining rights so they don’t have a no-strike clause. (They also have few benefits or job protections and work long hours for very low pay; collective bargaining does have its benefits.) But even though the NYTWA is not legally certified, it still managed to build an organization that is nimble enough to strike for better pay and for human rights.
Toward a more perfect union
Because activists tend to conflate our legal rights with our actual human rights, we doggedly pursue age-old strategies because “it is what it is.” We must stop this, and pursue an internal debate that is crystal clear about what we can’t control at the moment—Congress, capital mobility and our psychotic president’s attention span—and what we can—our strategy, structure and demands.
Take for instance the fight for universal healthcare. One of the flaws of Obamacare was that it preserved the employer-based health insurance system, which was developed as an accident of collective bargaining. During World War II, the government froze wages to fight inflation, but did allow unions to negotiate for “fringe” benefits. Many workers emerged from the war with health insurance through their job, but union leaders at the time viewed this as a stopgap until Social Security could be expanded to provide universal healthcare.
All these decades later, unions can and should lead the fight for “Medicare for All.” Getting health insurance premiums off employers’ payrolls and replacing them with a payroll tax that all employers pay equally would take benefits out of competition (and get bosses out of the business of determining care and policing their workers’ vaginas).
I know a lot of leaders and activists who view the benefits negotiated into contracts as the “union advantage,” which makes membership attractive and is an essential part of what unions do. But offering a compelling vision of universal rights and leading fights to win and preserve them could also be what unions do, and is what unions do in most other industrialized nations in the West.
The ghost of labor peace
The threats that labor faces from a Republican government cannot be downplayed, and could tempt one into a depressive funk. A bill to make “right-to-work” laws the law of the land was introduced in Congress on Wednesday. But if we lose that fight, there are some strategic choices that are still within our control.
The first is whether to abandon exclusive representation and kick out the scabs.
The combination of exclusive representation and agency fee is a uniquely American framework, and it, too, arose out of World War II. That wage freeze described earlier followed unions’ no-strike pledge to aid wartime production. Workers who were frustrated with the lack of raises and with union leadership obliged with preventing job actions stopped paying dues in protest. The government granted those wartime contracts a “maintenance of membership” clause that prevented workers from quitting the union that represented them, which evolved into today’s “agency fee.”
It is that combination—of exclusive representation, agency fee and no-strike and management rights clauses—that make it possible (and arguably necessary) for unions to agree to “shared sacrifice” when necessary (and sometimes lopsided sacrifice when unnecessary).
This is a crucial point: Mandatory union fees are not the compensation that unions get for the costs they bear for bargaining and representing all the workers in the unit (although, those costs are significant). They are the compensation for the political costs of representing all the workers in a shop and maintaining labor peace.
If unions refused to be exclusive representatives, it would open the door to multiple competing unions at each workplace. It would make no-strike clauses impossible to enforce. It would mean that in every major issue that gets settled with the boss, there could be a stubborn group of workers who go its own way to keep up the fight or raise larger demands. It would also mean a plethora of less confrontational, employer-friendly associations could compete with unions on their own turf.
In essence, it would mean the end of labor peace. Since corporations long ago decided they weren’t interested in labor peace, while we maintained the illusion that we could convince them to give it a try, it might be time to give up the ghost.
A union of leaders?
Another key decision that would be entirely within unions’ power should membership become voluntary is which workers to target for recruitment. Currently, most open shop unions try to sign up all the workers they represent. Often, they fall far short of that goal.
When a workplace has few members, it makes the first union members de facto representatives, if not the actual shop stewards. But what if that early joiner is not respected by his coworkers? What if he’s a sexist? What if he’s bad at his job and his coworkers frequently have to pick up the slack? In its rush to pick up dues-paying members, a union could alienate 10 times as many potential people.
This is not how we structure new union organizing campaigns. In those, we target natural leaders. We look for workers who are brave, who ask smart questions, who are good at their jobs and respected by their coworkers. Often, the first worker to inquire about organizing a union, and from whom we learn as much as we can about the workplace and its leaders, is kept off the organizing committee because he doesn’t fit the bill.
This is a radically different way of viewing a unionized workplace for most Americans. It is essentially the way that French unions organize. Union density in France is even smaller than in the United States, yet unions there are capable of organizing massive general strikes. There are many reasons for that, including the legal framework for bargaining, but the fact that French unions are “leaderfull” organizations is also a factor.
We don’t control the legal framework for collective bargaining, but we can control who we count as members. And that kind of distinction between what we can’t change and what we can must be analyzed and sharpened.
Collective bargaining, with exclusive union representation and agency fee, but limited to within the four walls of a specific employer, is “what a union is” to most people. But it is not how unions look and function in other places, nor, indeed, in our own history.
Unions have been around since the earliest days of our republic, and the concept of workers banding together will outlive all governments. We get to decide what that looks like.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
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.]
Fighting Trump Isn’t Enough—We Must Also Wage War Within the Democratic Party
What reasonable American does not feel some amount of bitterness about the stunning election win of the short-fingered vulgarian scion of an outer borough slumlord, who squandered a billion-dollar casino fortune, and reinvented himself as a reality TV star and racist demagogue?
There’s plenty of acrimony to go around. The cadre of technocratic campaigners, pollsters and pundits trained to campaign on promises of “we’re not as awful as the other guys” is already pointing fingers at millennials, working-class whites, old people and Jill Stein voters.
Then there are those of us who understand that we have a world to win and that we need to actually energize and motivate people to vote for something. We’re pissed that the Democratic establishment—including union leadership—manipulated the primary process to guarantee the human embodiment of “The Establishment” would win the nomination because it was her “turn.” And we’re pissed that she didn’t turn her campaign into a full-throated denunciation of the last half-century of Republican demagoguery against minorities, immigrants, women and the working class because her “get things done” fantasy involved doing shots with John McCain to craft bi-partisan solutions to intractably partisan controversies.
We need to fight Trump’s agenda, but we arguably have a more urgent need to fight a civil war within the Democratic Party. This party needs to campaign on paycheck and civil rights issues, and needs to deliver real wins that put more money in people’s pockets and win them more dignity at work and in their communities.
Left, center or a third way?
I wrote in March about the ongoing realignment of our two major parties. As the Republican Party circles the drain of a toilet bowl of ethno-nationalism and borderline fascism, it becomes a marginal extremist party that can obviously do real damage when it wins. Fortunately, their voters are rapidly dying of old age. And let’s remember, too: The majority of voters have rejected them in six out of the last seven presidential elections.
But—absent our activism—the changing face of the GOP will continue to drag the Democrats further to the right. There are simply too many stockbrokers and single-digit millionaires who enjoy rigging the capitalist system to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but also support immigration, gay marriage and gun control. The GOP is no longer a comfortable home for them.
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party welcomed these exiles with open arms. Her “Republicans for Hillary” efforts resulted in a flag-waving, military-saluting George W. Bush-style convention, complete with a prominent role for billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Clinton brought (more of) the moneyed elite into the party. The left has to organize to kick them out.
Anybody whose 2016 campaign strategy involved lowering voters’ expectations must be tossed onto history’s compost pile like the moldy vegetables they are.
Look, I’m not above casting a protest vote, or organizing in earnest for a durable third party alternative. In fact, I managed the Socialist Party’s 2000 presidential campaign. I recruited the candidate, David McReynolds, and I got him on the ballot in—among other places—Florida, where his more than 600 votes eclipsed the official margin between Bush and Al Gore. A framed Palm Beach County sample ballot still holds a place of pride on the wall of my home office.
But our job now is to organize the greatest possible progressive coalition, and third party efforts tend to attract the least serious and least skilled campaigners, resulting in a muddle like the Stein campaign. I did not cast a vote for the Greens last Tuesday. Between dopey statements about vaccinations and Clinton’s e-mails, and the party’s perennial lack of a clear anti-capitalist message, it just wasn’t a coherent protest statement. So, after 16 years of resistance, I finally voted for Hillary Clinton … on the Working Families ballot line.
The Working Families Party is currently the best-organized left opposition caucus within the Democratic Party. Happily, it is also structured to take advantage of opportunities to break with corporate Democrats and run serious third party campaigns down-ballot now, and to build towards becoming a real third party threat after the GOP has been vanquished. It is well worth paying ten bucks a month to join, take a serious role and push the party to raise its ambitions.
Yes, comrades, it is our burden to “fix” the Democratic Party. Like it or lump it, the project of capturing the Democratic Party to organize the largest possible progressive coalition to beat the fascists falls to us.
Tell-tale signs
While we’re sifting through this mound of horseshit, frantically searching for a pony, I offer this: We were likely to face a recession—possibly a global one—in the first two years of whomever’s administration. If that recession happened on Clinton’s watch, the 2018 midterms would have been a bloodbath for the Democrats, and her 2020 re-election campaign would have faced an uphill battle of historical proportions.
Now Trump gets to own the recession (which might be more severe, thanks to his bigly business savvy), and lose the House on his path to one-term ignominy. That’s as long as Democrats reject neoliberalism and run full-throated Robin Hood-style campaigns to take from the 1% and give the rest of us universal health care, free public college, affordable housing and wages we can live on.
Let’s be clear: The majority of voters rejected Trump. Like Bush 16 years ago, he lost the popular vote. Unlike then, we should insist that Democrats reject the legitimacy of his LOSER administration and agenda and punish those corporate Democrats who don’t. Democrats should filibuster Trump’s judicial picks and appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Any rollback of rights must be vigorously challenged.
Let’s also take heart from the fact that where progressive issues were on the ballot, voters supported them. The minimum wage was raised through ballot initiatives in Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Maine. Voters in Massachusetts rejected a billionaire-backed effort to raise the cap on charter schools. San Jose, California, voted for a fair scheduling law for retail workers. Wake County, North Carolina voted to increase funding for public transportation.
The lesson here is that we on the left should remain on the offensive and press to put progressive issues—not debatably “liberal” personalities—on the ballot. Here in New York, I’m in favor of the CUNY Rising Alliance campaign to make the City University of New York tuition-free and of voting next November to authorize a statewide constitutional convention. Minimum wage hikes, fair scheduling laws, rent control and free public college all seem like winnable issues in our biggest, most progressive cities.
Sadly, union leaders are not likely to lead on this agenda, as Micah Uetrecht has bitterly noted. Most of the big NYC unions are lining up against a constitutional convention out of fear, just as they lined up against the most pro-worker Democratic presidential candidate in decades: Bernie Sanders.
As we prepare to challenge the next president of the United States, we must gird ourselves for those moments when we might have to act in contradiction to official union leadership, and ask ourselves how we rebuild a movement that cannot be so easily derailed by the personal ambitions—or fears—of union leaders, but instead encourage grassroots protests that expand on the wants, needs and frustrations of the coalition that Barack Obama built.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
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.]