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.]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before.
There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday.
Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light in the new generation of labor and social justice reporters. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a campaign you wanted to get in the press you had exactly two full-time labor reporters to lobby to convince them that your campaign was interesting enough to warrant fighting with their editors to get it in print.
Now our movement has a slew of journalists who dig deep and follow campaigns and movements over the long haul. The result is not just that good campaigns get press attention, but that movements grow and expand as people read about them and get inspired to join or do something similar.
Jaffe has a good eye for characters and a great ear for what they have to say, making Necessary Trouble a very engaging read. She weaves a narrative that connects the 2008 economic collapse to the outrage that gave rise to the Tea Party, the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda and Occupy Wall Street. The movement for black lives, the Occupy Homes protests against bank foreclosures, the occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, student debt protests, the Chicago teachers strike(s) and the rolling strikes led by OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15, Jaffe argues, are all connected to a growing sense among Americans that the rules of the system are rigged against the working class—and doubly or triply so against workers who are black, queer, young, old, immigrants or women.
These movements are often “analyzed as if they had each happened in a vacuum,” she writes. “But in fact, as I followed them through the years, I would find similar patterns and even direct connections between them.”
The connections come, in part, to activists’ increasing understanding of “intersectionality.” That is, according to Jaffe, a term used by protestors to describe the way that people experience different forms of oppression (say, racism and sexism) as “intertwined, overlapping experiences.”
Intersectionality has become a mainstream enough concept that even Hillary Clinton felt the need to pay lip service to it on the campaign trail. “This generation,” notes City University of New York professor Ruth Milkman, “uses the word intersectionality as if it were a household label.” Jaffe makes a good case that this is a strength of the emerging movement.
Another concept that Jaffe emphasizes in her book is “horizontalism” in social movement structures. She defines the term as broad-based democratic decision-making without formalized leadership—where any member is free to speak out, propose and carry out a movement action.
“The ideal of horizontalism,” Jaffe writes “is connected to the sense that democracy, in this country, is failing, or perhaps, as some are coming to believe, that it never really worked.”
She points to Occupy Wall Street as the most obvious example of the movement’s horizontalism and experimentation with democracy. Occupy, I must say, never struck me as particularly new. It’s more like a welcome return of the Direct Action Network (DAN). Never a formal organization, the activist network was responsible for the 1999 Seattle protests that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization and went on to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Republican and Democratic conventions.
The lack of elected leaders, the consensus decision-making with “blocking concerns” and “stand asides”—even the “spirit fingers” to silently mark agreement—all of it first appeared in the DNA of DAN. The fact that a decade and a half later we are still reinventing the same wheel suggests the need for some more permanent organizations.
Jaffe agrees. “The next challenge for the movements,” she writes, “will be creating organizations that last, that suit the needs of twenty-first-century troublemakers, that can be flexible and still enduring, that can overlap and connect up with one another and create more long-term plans for the future they want to see.”
There is a deep-seated aversion to formal organization on the Left. Part of it is, as Jaffe notes, the fear of a movement becoming dominated by “charismatic leaders.” But part of it too, I think, is charismatic leaders not wanting to deal with the indignities of democratic accountability.
I worry that Jaffe’s readers will take the word “horizontalism” and use it to justify and fetishize a lack of formal organization. A better word, I think, is one she quotes to describe the movement for black lives: “leaderfull.” That is a concept that doesn’t preclude dues-paying membership, elected committees and formalized leadership. It’s more about maintaining a culture where good ideas, speakers and writers that come “from the floor” are not merely tolerated but actively solicited.
Two good examples of leaderfull organizing that Jaffe highlights come from labor. In 2008, the workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory engaged in a sit-down strike. Their leaders at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE) had proposed a small, symbolic civil disobedience action. The workers took that idea and ran with it—locking the bosses out and eventually winning their owed severance. They even got a shot at running the business themselves as a cooperative.
The second example was in 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck against Rahm Emanuel’s giveback demands. Rank-and-file activists engaged in some pretty deep coalition building and picket captains were given wide latitude with how to conduct their protests. The result was a traditional union strike that got converted into a community protest against austerity and corporate “ed reform.”
There’s no shortage of formal structure and elected leaders in labor. And while the UE and CTU are obviously exceptional unions, leaderfull organizing is more prevalent (and certainly has more potential) than is commonly recognized.
To her credit, union activists and campaigns are described throughout Jaffe’s narrative as essential to a movement fighting for an end to injustice and inequality. But I’m slightly disappointed that she didn’t delve into the recent rise in strike activity. Many of these strikes—like at Kohler and Verizon—were big, visible wins for workers.
There’s been so much written about worker centers and “alt labor” that it’s beginning to skew the market for labor writing. Yes, there’s a lot of action in alternative models of worker organizing, but old (not so) Big Labor is also showing encouraging signs of renewed militancy. Activists will learn from each other by example, and books like this must connect the dots.
To that point, Jaffe tells a delightful and inspiring story about the first night that then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to clear an Occupy encampment at the newly rechristened Liberty Park, near Wall Street, because it had to be cleaned. Occupy activists spent the night scrubbing the park down and, at dawn, were joined by hundreds of union activists, in their respective union colors, to stare down riot police. Bloomberg blinked and ordered law enforcement to withdraw. Jaffe reports that a burly orange-shirted member of the Laborers’ union turned to her to say, “This is power.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
When the Hell Did the NLRB Become More Activist Than Labor?
When the hell did the federal government get bolder than most labor unions about asserting the legal rights of workers?
On Monday, in a 3-1 ruling, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reversed a Bush the Younger-era precedent that gave employers a say over whether temporary and subcontracted workers can be included in the same bargaining unit as the regular, full-time employees with whom they work beside. Go figure, most employers said “no” to the proposition that people who work shoulder to shoulder, but are paid from separate checkbooks, could bargain together in the same union. But the new Miller & Anderson, Inc. decision could force subcontractors to bargain with a certified union over the wages and working conditions determined by the controlling employer.
The ruling comes hot on the heels of the Board’s American Baptist Homes decision. That case re-established a balancing test for whether a boss’ employment of permanent replacement strikers is actually motivated by a desire to bust a union —which goes a long way towards restoring a legal right to strike.
And, of course, the Board’s attempt to expedite representation elections by holding frivolous management objections in abeyance until after the workers vote nearly broke the Congress. (Seriously, if you want to drink some delicious boss’ tears Google “quickie NLRB election.”)
As veteran union organizer Stephen Lerner succinctly puts it, “Unions have been significantly hobbled by the legal regime, and a lack of imagination to challenge it.” I have advocated that unions should pursue an agenda of judicial activism. These recent NLRB actions prove that the time is ripe to challenge the rules of the system that keep unions shackled. I’ve spent most of my career complaining about how slow and ineffective the NLRB is, as have most union organizers. That bias should not blind us to the opportunity of the moment.
Grandma’s pot roast
After eight years of a Democratic administration, and—with the implosion of Trump’s GOP—the reasonable expectation of at least another eight years, we finally have a labor board that will no longer shrug and sigh that it “is what it is” when it comes to the unfair rules of the system.
But are union leaders and staff bold enough to reject the “is what it is” mentality? There’s an analogy that makes the rounds in Cornell University’s labor extension programs. It involves a man sharing his grandma’s pot roast recipe with a friend. The first step of the recipe calls for cutting the ends off the raw rump, which prompts the friend to ask, “Really? Does that, like, make the roast more tender … or what?”
The man sharing the recipe, who had never questioned why it called for the ends to be cut off, calls around to his parents, siblings and aunts and uncles to find out why grandma’s recipe does so. Finally, he gets his grandma on the phone and she says, “Oh, that’s because the grocer only sold rump roasts that were too big for our roast pan.”
This is the most devastatingly on-the-nose analogy for how unions engage in long-term strategy. We hope and assume that sometime in the past, someone smarter than us considered all the possible options and settled on what we are currently doing as the best possible choice.
What if I told you … that isn’t what it is?
A good case in point is employers’ “right” to force employees to attend mandatory anti-union “captive audience” meetings during a union organizing drive. Most organizers accept that it “is what it is”—another fucked up way that NLRB election rules are rigged so that unions lose a ton of representation elections. (Although, it should be noted that unions used to lose half of all representation elections during the Clinton I-era and now tend to win about two-thirds of elections, thanks partly to more strategic organizing choices and partly to the NLRB’s recent return to its historic mission of encouraging unions and collective bargaining.)
Meanwhile, apparently, the NLRB has been on the record for half a century as inviting unions to make a case that there should be some kind of equal access standard for unions if an employer forces workers to attend mandatory meetings on the subject of union representation. A group of 106 leading labor scholars, led by Charles Morris and Paul Secunda, have filed a petition at the NLRB to re-establish just such a rule.
The speculation is that the NLRB is unlikely to act on Morris’ and Secunda’s petition, as it prefers to act on union (or employer) initiated procedural cases. The Miller & Anderson decision came in response to a union representation petition; the American Baptist Homes decision in response to an unfair labor practice charge. To win equal time, a union will have to file exceptions to a losing representation election in which the employer made use of mandatory captive audience meetings. Surely, and sadly, someone reading this article has recently lost an election under such circumstances, and can take the initiative.
Similarly, most unionists just accept that an employer has a “right” to permanently replace striking workers. For example, Jane McAlevey, in her organizing memoir Raising Hell (and Raising Expectations), incorrectly chalks it up to a law signed by Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t. It was a poorly decided 1938 Supreme Court case that was dusted off in the 1980s. Like referees in a schlocky Hulk Hogan wrestling match, Reagan’s NLRB appointees looked the other way as employers engaged in a coordinated union-busting drive that weaponized the unfrozen caveman Supreme Court precedent.
After an unsuccessful attempt to legislatively ban permanent replacements during the first Clinton era, most unions seem to have shrugged and accepted that workers can legally lose their jobs for striking—that is until the NLRB reverted to the pre-Reagan rules. But the Board can go further. The crucial phrase in that 1938 Court decision, NLRB vs. Mackay Radio, is that an employer can hire permanent replacements if it is necessary “to protect and continue his business.”
In other words, to meet the Supreme Court standard, the NLRB could force Verizon or any other Fortune 500 company to prove that they would otherwise go out of business unless they can hire scabs to steal the jobs of their striking workers. Good luck with that. Unions should get in the habit of filing unfair labor practice charges any time a boss advertises for scabs.
The NLRB even potentially has the power to reverse “Right to Work.” The statutes, passed on a state-by-state basis, aim to prevent unions from collecting fees from all of the workers they are legally obligated to represent. But the federal law that allows “Right to Work” statutes has, until recently, faced very few judicial challenges. One open question is whether the legislative intent of the Taft-Hartley act was merely to ban union membership as a condition of employment—not whether unions could negotiate mandatory fees for grievance representation services. Seattle University Associate Professor of Law Charlotte Garden notes that the NLRB could approve such a formula, and has indicated openness to cases arguing for it.
Only 3,114 days to go
Tom Perez, the current Secretary of Labor, is apparently a bit notorious for noting exactly how many days the Obama administration has left (190, as of today) to make any gains for working Americans. Perez, who has milked every ounce of executive authority that his department has in the pursuit of that goal, is most well known (on Wall Street, at least) for getting Obama to sign an executive order that extended overtime protections to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 per year (up from the mid-1970’s standard of $23,660). In so doing, he won a pay raise, or reduction in hours, for millions of working Americans. And for that mitzvah he is reportedly on the shortlist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vice-presidential pick. And, honestly, choosing Perez is Clinton’s last chance to disprove Erik Loomis’ contention that she’s “a Martha Coakley-level campaigner with a once-brilliant campaigner for a husband.”
If labor leaders allowed themselves enough optimism to last not just until the end of Obama’s term but to anticipate at least another eight years of a Democrat in the White House, while maintaining the urgency with which Secretary Perez conducts himself, imagine what we could win for working families. If I didn’t mess up my math, that means we have at least 3,114 days left of an activist, majority-Democratic NLRB with which to press our case for a restoration of workers rights.
Because here’s the thing: challenging bad labor law involves breaking the law. When unions violate the law in pursuit of a voice at work for unorganized workers (by, say, engaging in solidarity boycotts, waging partial strikes or making “permissive” community goals their essential bargaining demands), the NLRB is the sheriff that is tasked with taking them to court. Is it crazy to think that this NLRB might treat bad labor law the way that Obama’s Justice Department treated the Defense of Marriage Act? In the court because they have to be, but conceding that the law is unjust?
Grandma’s pot roast recipe should be revised for our newly remodeled kitchen.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]