“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.
I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.
Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.
In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis. Continue reading “Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters”
AUDIO: On Work Force Radio Talking Starbucks and Sectoral Bargaining Bill in CA
Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis
In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own.
An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life. Continue reading “Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis”