The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained
The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation.
But the way that the compensation is structured—with current teachers keeping their current 7 percent pension “pickup,” and new hires receiving a salary increase in lieu of a pension contribution—has some critics decrying the deal as a solidarity-killing, two-tier contract. A pickup is the percentage of a worker’s pay that an employer puts directly into a pension fund.
The CTU’s House of Delegates meets Wednesday to deliberate over the tentative agreement and vote on whether to send it to the entire membership for ratification. If the deal is rejected, there is no guarantee that management will agree to more of the union’s demands—or even return to the table.
Two-tier contracts are an emotional subject in the labor movement. Beginning in the 1980s, employers used threats of off-shoring and sub-contracting, as well as their legal “right” to permanently replace striking union members, to force a wave of wage and benefit givebacks across many unionized industries. In order to make these cuts more palatable to the members who would have to vote on their ratification, unions negotiated agreements where current workers preserved most of their pay and benefits while future hires would bear the brunt of the cuts.
There are many epithets for this sort of thing, but the most common may be selling out the unborn. These ticking time bombs blow up years later, as the “new” hires become a larger portion of the bargaining unit and resent their veteran colleagues both for their more generous compensation packages and for the fact that the older workers signed away their younger colleagues’ right to enjoy the same. As the veterans become a minority in the workplace, there is an obvious financial incentive for supervisors to push them out through aggressive discipline. In such a situation, worker unity in future rounds of bargaining is hard to achieve.
To be clear, not all “two-tiers” are alike. The powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council accepted a two-tier wage structure after surviving a 27-day strike in 1985. But the tiers only impacted workers during their first year of employment. By year two, all workers were earning the same pay rate. And, decades later, ending the tiered pay scale remained a union bargaining priority.
The United Automobile Workers (UAW) accepted a two-tier pay scale at Chrysler when the company went bankrupt in 2009. It was so severe that new hires earned only half the hourly wage of veteran employees. When members voted down a 2015 successor agreement that did not go far enough in reversing the double standard, the UAW was able to renegotiate a deal that brings newer workers closer to the traditional pay scale over the course of seven years.
The CTU’s proposed “two-tier” is a bit more of a shell game than those concessions. The fight over Chicago’s 7 percent pension pickup has more to do with symbolism than anyone’s actual paycheck. Pension systems are complicated things that only accountants and union researchers fully understand. But basically, a pension fund needs a certain amount of money coming in every year in order to guarantee a livable retirement income for actual and projected retirees. Currently, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund has set that target at 9 percent of every pension-eligible employee’s annual income.
Before the CTU won collective bargaining rights in the 1960s, teachers had most, if not all, of their pension contributions deducted directly from their paychecks. Over the years, the CTU was able to bargain for 7 of that 9 percent to be contributed directly into the pension fund, instead of paid as a salary increase and then immediately deducted as a personal pension contribution.
Obviously, the difference between putting 7 percent in pension contributions directly versus rolling it into salaries, and then immediately deducting it, makes no financial difference to the employer. But the 7 percent became a visible target for Gov. Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It was money they could portray to the public and the press as “extra” compensation that teachers get that other workers don’t and demand that teachers give it up. (It should be noted that Chicago teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, so their pensions are the only thing that stand between them and an old age spent subsisting on cat food.)
Under the tentative agreement the CTU is considering, the pay for new hires would increase by an additional 3.5 percent in two successive years. It’s not entirely clear how soon new hires would be responsible for paying the full pension contribution.
Teachers at charter schools also participate in the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. Members of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) at the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) are currently bargaining over the very same pension pickup, and have set a Wednesday strike deadline.
I was a part of the bargaining team that negotiated the first contract at UCSN in 2013. Because we had a significant amount of bargaining leverage in the wake of a very public insider dealing scandal, we realized that those negotiations were our best shot to get the charter network to pay more than the whole lot of nothing that it had been contributing to teachers’ pensions.
We were successful. That 7 percent was a part of an overall compensation package we were going to win anyway. But by directing the employer to put it towards the pension, we politicized a different figure: the network’s starting salaries. Because charters compete in the same labor market as the district to recruit new teachers, the salaries they can offer are key. If that 7 percent had simply been rolled into base pay, UCSN would be able to quote starting salaries that appear to be larger than what the district offers, but really aren’t, giving the union leverage to raise wages in future negotiations. Now that starting salaries at Chicago Public Schools will appear to be 7 percent larger—if CTU members ratify the deal—the salaries that UCSN offers will appear even less competitive.
As for ratification of their contract, CTU members have to decide how important the symbolism of that 7 percent is and what impact it will have on future rounds of negotiations. The shifting of that 7 percent from one column in a spreadsheet to another strikes me as a last minute ploy to give Rauner and Emanuel a face-saving narrative that allows them to say they didn’t suffer a humiliating defeat in this round of bargaining.
“This is not a perfect agreement,” said CTU president Karen Lewis. “But it is good for the kids. And good for the clinicians. And good for the teachers, and the paraprofessionals.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
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.
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.]
The Fight to Save UMass Labor Center Is a Fight for Worker Power
The Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst is in turmoil. Its director, Eve Weinbaum, says she was abruptly pushed out of the position. In an alarming e-mail to alumni, students and allies, she protested funding cuts to teaching assistants and part-time instructors and, more troublingly, threats to the “Labor Studies faculty’s autonomy to make programmatic decisions and to designate a Director.”
Founded in 1964, the Labor Center is one of about 30 labor centers around the country. Most are rooted in the extension programs of land grant public universities. In addition to its extension work—providing trainings for unions and worker centers—the Labor Center runs undergraduate and graduate degree programs in labor studies.
These days it is most renowned for its limited residency Union Leadership and Administration (ULA) program, in which union leaders, staff and rank-and-file activists meet for intense 10-day periods of instruction every summer and winter and can earn a graduate degree in three years if they keep up with readings and assignments from home (or in the field). As you might have guessed, I’m a proud alum of the program.
The response to Weinbaum’s letter produced nearly 500 letters of protest in a few days, according to organizers for a Save the Labor Center campaign. Local union leaders, heads of other labor centers, alumni and current students also expressed alarm about the situation in a prominent article in The Boston Globe. According to Jeff Schuhrke, another UMass alum and writer for In These Times, an organizing committee of at least 30 alumni is holding regular conference calls to plan the next steps of the campaign. The upheaval there has many worried about the future of labor education at public universities nationwide. Changes in the way education programs are funded are setting off a kind of labor center “Hunger Games,” where some programs grow while others die.
Austerity and the corporatization of higher education
The plight of the Labor Center is rooted in a very common problem: state divestment in public higher education. Public university systems that were once so adequately funded that they charged little-to-no in-state tuition to students have seen their state funding decline over a period of decades.
For a state as wealthy and as liberal as its reputation, Massachusetts’ divestment in its university system is particularly egregious. The state allocates some $508 million to UMass. That’s only 17 percent of the school’s $3 billion budget. And the legislature only increased state funding by 1 percent this June, which will lead to more increases in tuition and student fees.
The skyrocketing tuition and crippling student debt caused by this divestment have been well documented. What is a bit murkier is how it impacts the function of a university, as every academic discipline is forced to generate revenue. This is what critics refer to as the corporatization of higher education.
Science and engineering faculty must secure federal grants, philanthropic funding, corporate contracts and Congressional earmarks in order to gain tenure and get promoted. Those revenue sources fund an army of non-tenured research assistants, postdocs and research professors.
Law and business schools can turn to corporations and wealthy alumni for donations and endowed chairs to fund additional faculty lines. But the humanities and social sciences don’t have the same rich resources to draw upon. Their charge from administration is to drum up student enrollment, particularly for profitable master’s degree programs—hence, the pressure on the Labor Center to recruit more out-of-state students for its residential master’s program.
Labor centers are changing with the times
But not every labor center is struggling. Some, like the ones at Rutgers University and Cornell University, have deftly pursued program grants from unions and philanthropic organizations, allowing them to expand and create new institutes. Cornell’s Worker Institute is partnered with the AFL-CIO on a next generation leadership development program and convenes a workers research network, among other projects. Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization does leadership development work for alt-labor groups and is a key partner in Bargaining for the Common Good, among its other programs.
Bucking the state-funding trend, the City University of New York’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies has, according to its director, Gregory Mantsios, “received a commitment from the University to elevate the status of the Institute to a CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.” With this come more state funding and control over that money. It is the result, according to Murphy professor Stephanie Luce, of a sustained lobbying campaign by local labor leaders that labor should have a school with the same status as CUNY’s business school.
“It reflects that New York City, and the state, and CUNY have decided to invest in the labor school,” she said.
Luce, a former UMass labor professor, recently issued a report that showed that New York City has defied national trends and seen its union density increase to 25.5 percent. The NYC labor movement has both the power and the willingness to exercise it on behalf of labor education.
Another labor center that’s bucking the trend is the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. A private Jesuit university, Georgetown didn’t even have a labor center until a few years ago. They had just two labor history professors, Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin.
Georgetown president John DeGioia sought to create a labor center at the university in 2006. He was eventually connected to the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation (which, ironically, was carved out of the estate whose caretakers left a deep scar in the city of Milwaukee by shuttering the unionized Pabst brewery in the mid-1990s). An influential board member, who was steeped in the Catholic social justice tradition and whose children had attended Georgetown, wanted to steer a significant grant to a labor education program in the Washington, D.C. area.
McCartin agreed to head up the new labor center, bringing the influential labor strategist Stephen Lerner along as a fellow. The modestly-funded initiative (its annual budget rarely tops $700,000) served as the incubator for Bargaining for the Common Good—a union coalition effort that aligns bargaining demands with those of other members and with community demands around progressive taxation, affordable housing, youth incarceration and government transparency.
But, if you’re wondering why Kalmanovitz is an “initiative” and not an “institute,” the charitable organization provides rolling grants—not a bequest or an annuity—which leaves the Kalmanovitz Initiative as vulnerable to the fickle priorities of a charity as the public labor centers are to the indifference of state legislators.
The future of labor education at UMass and beyond
John A. Hird, dean of social and behavioral sciences at UMass, assures In These Times, “We have no intention of allowing the ULA program to stand on its own.”
He says the university is working with the Labor Center to increase residential enrollment in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, which have declined in recent years. He sees some promise in the planned “4+1” bachelor’s/master’s program for increasing labor studies enrollment. The program would allow undergraduate students to earn graduate credit in their junior and senior years and walk away with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just five years.
“Rest assured we are doing everything we can to further develop this jewel of a program,” Hird said about ULA.
While UMass is earnestly conducting a search for a new director of the Labor Center, Hird concedes that it is likely the position will go to an internal candidate, and not a new hire, due to the financial picture. Sources at the Labor Center say they hope their campaign might result in a commitment to hire a new tenure-track labor professor to direct the center, or, at a minimum, to win more input for Labor Center faculty and staff in the selection of its next director.
“This crisis is going to bring more attention to UMass and more of a commitment to fund it,” said Paul Mark, a Democratic state representative.
Mark was a shop steward and executive board member of his IBEW local when he was a classmate of mine at ULA. He notes that Massachusetts’ senate president is also an alum of UMass, and that the Democratic legislature is moving a plan to institute a graduated income tax in order to better fund education and transportation. You read that right, the state that Republicans love to malign as “Taxachusetts” has a constitutional flat tax. It will take two successive legislative sessions to vote on a progressive tax amendment before the matter can be put before the voters in 2018.
Mark also reports that he has sat in on strategy meetings this past weekend with Tom Juravich, who is serving as interim director of the Labor Center, and state AFL-CIO president Steven Tolman, among others, to brainstorm ways to direct more union funding and programming to the center. If the current crisis gets Massachusetts’ unions to realize that they cannot take for granted that the Labor Center will always be there, well, that is certainly a silver lining. Although, even this may not be enough. As the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s McCartin laments, “Even if you’re taking care of your labor constituents well, they don’t have the resources they once did to keep you funded.”
Many people I talked to note that the Boston area is thick with private colleges, including elite institutions like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their many graduates have moved on to careers in politics. As a result, UMass doesn’t command quite the same alumni loyalty among legislators that many other state universities do. The other intrinsic challenge for UMass that supporters will note is its physical remoteness. Most of Massachusetts’ labor movement is based in Boston, in the eastern end of the state. The beautiful flagship UMass campus is located “in the sleepy west of the woody east” of Amherst.
I happen to think that remoteness is an asset.
Most of the surviving labor centers sprang up after World War II. They were founded in the spirit of labor-management partnership, a post-war consensus that emphasized mediation, arbitration and respectable political statesmanship. This is a framework that most employers abandoned long ago. But, to this day, most unions approach the labor centers as places for shop stewards and staff representatives to learn how to handle grievances or the finer points of collective bargaining.
What our movement needs from our labor centers is to be a place where leaders, staff and rank-and-file activists, from all kinds of different unions, can get the hell away from their offices and daily grievances and meet together in a retreat-like setting and study, read, discuss and debate—and maybe come up with some potential breakthrough strategies.
A model worth revisiting is the labor colleges of the 1920s. Brookwood Labor College in upstate New York was a bucolic retreat where thoughtful activists studied and debated the big strategic questions of the day. These included how to adapt craft union structure to mass industrial production and organize key sectors of the economy.
Brookwood made a substantial, if underappreciated, contribution to the strike wave that revived labor’s fortunes in the late 1930s. Our current economic order is marked by massive inequality that some call the New Gilded Age, and our current union structures are as ill matched as those were in the 1920s to the ways industry restructured to avoid our reach. Looking backwards to that time makes sense.
We need more spaces like the UMass Labor Center to regroup and reconsider our strategic choices, not fewer. Labor centers are worth fighting for.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]