On Labor, a Tale of Two Cities’ Mayors (with Presidential Ambitions)
It was a tale of two cities’ mayors (with presidential ambitions) this week. South Bend, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg and New York’s Bill de Blasio—the two active-duty mayors among the 20 Democratic presidential candidates still on the debate stage—released their labor and workers’ rights platforms.
Both mayors include fairly robust proposals to overhaul and modernize our nation’s main labor law, the National Labor Relations Act.
But that should no longer be considered good enough. Given that Congressional Democrats’ official proposal right now, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, essentially overturns the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, adds card check under some circumstances and imposes meaningful financial penalties for employers who violate their employees’ rights, woe to the candidate who doesn’t propose to outdo it. Only one mayor, de Blasio, breaks new ground with his proposal; the other, Buttigieg, offers a survey course of think tank white papers and moderate reforms.
I’m actually uncharacteristically optimistic that we may get the PRO Act—or something close to it—if the Democrats win big in 2020. However, we won’t end our country’s crisis of economic inequality and creeping fascism without a legal framework that puts workers’ rights and union power into every workplace on day one.
This may be hard for union leaders and activists who have been in the political wilderness for four decades to understand. Most of us have experienced begging for scraps like card check and banning permanent replacement scabs as the best we could expect Democrats to meekly fight for (and then fail to deliver). Now the stakes are higher, the essentiality of unions to working-class political education and voter turnout is obvious, and overturning Taft-Hartley is the consensus position of Democratic leadership across the political spectrum. Which means that putting the labor movement’s foremost political demand of the last 70 years in your platform is suddenly Not. Good. Enough.
Fine. This is Fine.
Buttigieg’s platform attempts soaring rhetoric with a preamble about “the verge of a new American era” calling for “a fundamentally new and different approach to fix our broken political and economic system.”
Good, fine so far. The solution, Buttigieg says, requires going “above and beyond existing legislative proposals like the ‘Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.’” But instead of doing that, Buttigieg’s labor platform goes sideways with extra footnotes.
He wants to plug holes in the law that allow employers to mischaracterize workers as independent contractors and fix the weak “joint employer” standard that allows large corporations like McDonalds to avoid bargaining with hundreds of thousands of their employees. He proposes to correct one of the original sins of the National Labor Relations Act by finally expanding its protections to farm and domestic workers (whose exclusion was a racist concession to Dixiecrats), and to improve upon the Act by imposing multi-million dollar penalties “that scale with company size” for violating workers’ organizing rights, giving unions a right to “equal time” on during election campaigns and creating a certification process for industry-wide bargaining.
He endorses the Paycheck Fairness Act and a host of other anti-harassment and gender discrimination bills that were already on the shelf, waiting for a government that will finally pass them.
He also has a pretty detailed proposal for paid sick and family leave. Actually, it’s virtually identical to Bill de Blasio’s proposal (which I’ll get to below), except that he must feel some supernatural neoliberal impulse to refer to it as “access” to those things. That’s a red flag for me. And if those of us who wave the red flag were to engage in a drinking game that called for doing shots every time a politician proposed “access” to a vitally important thing that should be a “right,” we’ll all be hammered for the duration of the primaries if we don’t die of alcohol poisoning first.
But, in general, Pete Buttigieg’s “New Rising Tide” labor platform is … fine. It’s clear that he got a lot of really good advice from a lot of the smartest people trying to tackle the problem of the legal restrictions on workers’ rights and the economic inequality that results from it. But it’s equally clear that he glommed on to the narrowest, most technical tweaks to a broken system and studiously avoided a more radical rethink of our labor relations system.
Buttigieg’s presence in the race as a media darling is slightly annoying. It’s as if the D.C. establishment convinced themselves of their own nonsense that the reason so many voters supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries was because he’s a white guy, and if only they could find a younger, charismatic white guy (with just a twist of diversity) that they can garner enough votes for the status quo ante.
It’s nice that he reads books (in self-taught Norwegian, no less!) and speaks “in lucid paragraphs.” But most of his actual contributions to the discourse–like every candidate who’s in the race to thwart popular demands to expand government services–wind up questioning the value of living in a society at all. Take his opposition to free college. “As a progressive,” he explained to an audience of undergraduates in Massachusetts, “I have a hard time getting my head around the idea of a majority who earn less because they didn’t go to college subsidizing a minority who earn more because they did.” There’s nothing remotely progressive about a “hOw d0 Y0u PaY fOR iT?” argument that could just as easily conclude, “Why have any public education at all?”
Bill de Blasio’s presence in the race is also annoying. He has no shortage of critics at home who point to our crises of mass transit, affordable housing and police accountability as campaigns the mayor should be running to the state capitol to fix. But he also has an impressive track record of delivering wins for New York’s working families and, we learned this week, an impressively bold workers’ rights agenda for the nation.
The right to have workplace rights
De Blasio begins his 21st Century Workers Bill of Rights with an issue that’s near and dear to a lot of us here at In These Times: The Right to Due Process at Work. Simply defined, due process at work, or “just cause,” is the principle that an employee can be fired only for a legitimate, serious, work-performance reason.
In last August’s special issue, “Rebuilding Labor After Janus,” Bill Fletcher proposed a labor movement for just cause laws as a way to “end the tyranny of the non-union workplace,” one that “actively disrupts the strategy of corporate America and its right-wing populist allies.”
And in a recent piece marking ten years of the magazine’s Working blog, Jessica Stites noted that I’ve been using this platform to wage a lonely crusade on this issue for four years now.
Fellow ITT contributor Moshe Marvit and I carried that crusade into an op-ed in the New York Times in December of 2017. We were building support for an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that then-Rep. Keith Ellison was drafting. (If any presidential candidates who are currently serving in Congress want to see a copy of that bill, slide into my DM’s…)
Although Ellison’s move to the Minnesota Attorney General’s office has momentarily orphaned a federal bill for a “right to your job,” the crusade was revived by a New York City Council push for fast food workers that progressive city council member Brad Lander is doggedly shepherding to Mayor de Blasio’s desk. (The bill’s true champion was SEIU local 32BJ’s recently departed and dearly missed president, Hector Figueroa.)
To be sure, de Blasio happened to propose my hobbyhorse. But the reason I’ve been arguing for Right to Your Job law is that it is a reform on another scale. It would increase the bargaining power and legal rights of every worker in America. It has the potential to put union representation in every workplace and gives unions new and creative ways to organize.
The rest of de Blasio’s platform is similar to Buttigieg’s except for one key distinction: A number of proposals highlight concrete improvements that the city of New York has made in the lives of low wage workers during de Blasio’s two terms as mayor.
Like Buttigieg’s, De Blasio’s labor platform includes a right to paid time off, including paid sick days, paid family and medical leave and the right to at least two weeks of paid vacation per year. Buttigieg proposes something similar, but de Blasio actually implemented a paid sick leave law that entitles workers to up to 40 hours a year of sick time, paid through an insurance fund.
De Blasio also proposes a fair scheduling law—modeled on one that fast food and retail workers won in New York—and a $15 minimum wage and new protections for gig workers.
Labor wants more!
Unlike many on the left who are in the “Bernie or Bust” crowd, I don’t have a horse in this race—yet. We’re months away from the Iowa caucuses and I won’t even have a vote in New York’s April 2020 primary (I’m registered in the Working Families Party).
But I’m enjoying the race to the left on policy, and watching candidates like Buttigieg reveal the emptiness at the heart of business-friendly centrism.
No one can doubt Bernie Sanders’ labor bona fides. He has been on the front lines of workers’ struggles for half a century, and the way that he has used his 2020 campaign infrastructure to lift up specific organizing campaigns and strikes and to use his bully pulpit to pressure massive corporations like Amazon and Walmart to raise their workers’ pay should be a model for all the candidates. But he is a blunt force instrument, and his indifference to policy details is frustrating on issues as complicated as how to restore the legal rights and collective power of workers.
Elizabeth Warren’s whole stock in trade is that “she has a plan for that.” As a Senator, she bucked the “think tank industrial complex” by developing a team of experts on her staff who reached out far and wide to progressive thinkers for policy ideas. Her staff have been picking the brains of In These Times writers on policies to tip the scales in favor of workers for years. She would enter office with a slew of policies to empower unions and worker centers to carry out the Robin Hood role the economy needs.
Any other candidate who wants to appeal to voters on labor issues has to propose bold solutions to even be noticed, standing next to Bernie and Warren. Pete Buttigieg has fallen short of that mark. Bill de Blasio has introduced a bold new workers’ right that no candidate was talking about. He’s earned your $3 donation to keep him on the debate stage, if only to ask the question: Why should your boss be able to fire you for no reason at all?
[This piece originally appeared at In These Times.]
Rats have speech rights, too: Unions, protests and balloons
Outside a strip mall on Staten Island, a giant balloon rat lies deflated. I can’t imagine a less auspicious scene for the free-speech fight of the century. But it’s here the Trump administration has chosen to argue that free speech is for corporations — and not for workers. And it’s here that unions have an opportunity to reverse decades of anti-union legal dogma.
Last month, the National Labor Relations Board sought an unprecedented injunction against Laborers Local 79 in Staten Island to stop them from inflating a rat balloon. Previously, agency staffers leaked word that Peter Robb, Trump’s NLRB general counsel, “hates” the rat and was determined to exterminate it.
The NLRB is a federal agency tasked by statute to protect the rights of workers. But under Republican administrations, it does the opposite.
Now, by taking aim at the inflatable rodent, the NLRB invites a First Amendment challenge. Conservative jurists have spent centuries trying to keep unions as far from free speech rights as possible — unless it can be used as a weapon against unions. In last year’s Janus vs. AFSCME case, the conservative majority upended a 40-year-old precedent by inventing a free-speech right for public sector workers to refuse to pay union fees.
If Scabby the Rat winds up before the Supreme Court because unions claim that popping their balloon is a violation of their First Amendment rights (which it clearly is), the justices will be faced with squaring Janus with free speech in favor of forming a union.
Some history. Unions have long been subject to speech restrictions that would never be applied to a corporation. One reason is that our nation’s main labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, is constitutionally rooted in Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce and not in workers’ constitutional rights. Another reason is the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed solidarity.
Today, we think of the act’s “right to work” provisions as its biggest attack on labor. But the ban on strikes and boycotts against companies that do business with an employer in a labor dispute — on pain of multi-million dollar fines — has actually been the greater sap on union power and organizing prowess.
Essentially, Trump’s NLRB is using the act to argue in federal court that cartoonish vermin are a “signal” to engage in “illegal” boycotts, and inherently coercive. They’re leaning hard on outdated stereotypes about union thugs and broken kneecaps.
Even on Staten Island, which has one of the highest unionization rates in the country, no one is going on strike or refusing to shop at ShopRite because of a balloon. The rat doesn’t coerce; it merely makes a mockery out of a union-busting boss.
Before he joined the NLRB, Robb was a construction-industry lawyer. He’s probably spent countless billable hours listening to thin-skinned real estate developers like Donald Trump complain about rat balloons outside their windows.
The Southern District court, often a problem for Trump, rejected the NLRB’s request for a preliminary injunction on Monday. But the case will move forward. A government agency is making a value judgment about the form and content of unions’ speech that has nothing to do with coercion or its impact on commerce. The AFL-CIO must wage this free speech fight.
It’s an opportunity to challenge the entire premise of a legal regime that is directly responsible for the decimation of the labor movement.
Corporations have every legal tool at their disposal to resist workers’ unionization efforts and the economic power to subcontract and reclassify the last remaining union jobs. Taft-Hartley denies workers the right to even ask fellow workers across corporate lines to leverage their own economic power to help them gain or maintain their labor rights. When it passed in 1947, one in three workers belonged to a union. Today it’s less than one in 10, even though polls show that at least half of all workers want to join a union.
Workers either have free speech rights and equal protection under the law, or the courts are where democracy goes to die.
[This op-ed originally appeared in the New York Daily News.]
Fighting Against Racism—And For a Better Paycheck—On the Docks
“Dockworkers have power.” With that simple statement, Western Illinois University professor and In These Times contributor Peter Cole kicks off his compelling new history, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press).
The story of the west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), its legendary founder Harry Bridges, and the 1934 San Francisco general strike he led is broadly familiar to Americans who enjoy romantic stories of derring do from the labor movement’s past. Less familiar may be the union’s struggle for anti-racist hiring and layoff policies on the docks, and its crucial allyship in various civil rights struggles.
Cole pairs their history with that of black South African docker organizing that presaged the struggle against apartheid by decades, and created an early and durable institutional stronghold of black power in South Africa.
The similarities between the two unions don’t end with the struggle for their black members’ civil rights. Half a world away, the unions also struggled to maintain job control in a system of casual employment, grappled with job-killing containerization and flexed their power at the choke points of the global economy to extend solidarity to workers’ freedom struggles around the world.
Although rarely in direct communication with each other, especially during the Apartheid era, the unions had remarkably similar approaches to the issues that vexed them. Cole’s book is a valuable contribution to the relatively thin field of global union comparisons.
Workers of the world (trade)
By the nature of their work, dockworkers of all countries have long been more cosmopolitan than many comrades in their respective national labor movements. They are exposed to new ideas and far-away struggles. Cole’s book stresses how these two regional workers’ movements melded their organizing for a better paycheck with the struggle against racism in their broader societies and how—keenly aware of their leverage in the fast-moving global economy—they went on to exercise transnational solidarity at these ports of trade.
One of the substantial victories of the 1934 Bay Area strike was the replacement of the shape-up system—the informal hustle for day labor work—with a union-operated hiring hall that worked to racially integrate the workforce. African-Americans from southern states joined the ranks en masse during World War II and were welcomed into union membership.
But the end of the war brought a serious reduction in work on the docks. Union leadership recognized that if membership ranks within the hiring hall were reduced on a “last in, first out” basis, the newer black longshoremen would disproportionately feel the effects of the layoffs—an action that would leave scars within the port workforce for generations. In an act of racial solidarity that stands out in the pre-civil-rights era, the Bay Area locals of the ILWU decided instead to share the lack of work. All existing members stayed in the union, and worked fewer shifts until business picked back up.
As a racially integrated union with a large black membership, the ILWU naturally played a leading role in connecting the labor and civil rights movements. The Bay Area locals were key organizers of a local 1963 civil rights demonstration, in addition to organizing one of the farthest-traveling contingents to that year’s famous March on Washington. They formed the membership backbone of the local chapters of the NAACP and Urban League. They pressed successfully for fair employment and housing laws in Oakland, and the union used its pension fund to build racially-integrated cooperative housing in the rapidly gentrifying Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco.
As Cole notes, the exceptional role of the ILWU in many left-wing struggles is often glancingly mentioned in historical accounts of the postwar labor movement. This book is the first time all of these examples and more have been brought together in a comprehensive narrative.
Durban dockers have enjoyed far less attention from American scholars. Their history of labor militancy dates back to the 1950s, although the apartheid state did not extend formal union recognition to industries that employed black workers until the 1980s. The union they formed—today called the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU)—made substantial gains in pensions, health and safety—and won for workers a guaranteed minimum wage regardless of the availability of work. It also affiliated with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a junior partner with the African National Congress (ANC) in both the successful final drive to end white minority rule and in the post-Apartheid government since 1994.
Interestingly, the ILWU’s commitment to civil rights extended to international solidarity. As early as 1962, Bay Area longshoremen occasionally refused to unload South African cargo in protest of Apartheid. In 1984, union members refused to unload South African cargo off of an older non-containerized ship, the Nedlloyd Kimberly, which sat docked at San Francisco’s Pier 80 for 11 days. The protest attracted the attention of community activists who joined daily rallies outside the port and eventually brought the ongoing work anti-apartheid boycotts to Bay Area colleges and community groups.
In more recent years, Bay Area longshoremen have refused to unload ships carrying Israeli cargo in 2010 and again in 2014, during periods of active military attacks against Palestinians.
Durban dockers, too, have notably refused to unload ships under contract with Israeli corporations in protest of what they call—and they have some license to say this—“an apartheid regime.” And their solidarity activism doesn’t end there. In 2008, they prevented a bloodbath by turning away a Chinese shipment of armaments that the embattled president of neighboring Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had ordered in a last-ditch effort to prop up his regime.
Maintaining worker power in the face of economic change
Both dock workforces began their nonunion eras essentially as on-call temps. In addition to racially integrating the docks, the ILWU-operated hiring hall also freed workers from bribery and the blacklist and allowed them to keep the best part of casual employment—only showing up for work when they felt like it and needed the paycheck.
The non-employee status of Durban dockers, on the other hand, was a source of union power and legal protection, and made de-casualization the employers’ strategy to reign in the power of the unions. The Apartheid system of labor relations basically exempted industries that employed black workers from statutory collective bargaining, while making strikes illegal. But if workers finish their shift with no promise or guarantee of more work the next day and—collectively and entirely coincidentally—don’t bother showing up in the morning to see if there’s more work available until the wages get better, is that legally-speaking an “illegal” strike?
By defying white boss power in work stoppages, the Durban dockers became pioneers in the African freedom struggle. A 1954 Durban docker strike resulted in wage concessions, but also the termination and blacklisting of strike leaders. Other strikes followed, but the workers were careful to not elect any formal leadership. Cole argues that the dockers sparked a strike wave in other industries in the port city in 1973. Those Durban strikes are widely acknowledged as a turning point in the struggle against Apartheid.
White authorities retaliated by making the dockers regular hourly employees, which stabilized the workers’ incomes but legally restricted their ability to strike. (The Apartheid state did move to formally recognize unions of black workers by the end of the decade, and the post-Apartheid constitution protects the right to strike.)
Another economic change that all the world’s dock workers had to contend with was containerization. The standardized containers—40 or 20 feet long—that transition neatly from train to truck to boat (and back again) have revolutionized world trade. Filled with anything from diapers to televisions to just about any cheap plastic thing slapped with a “Made in (fill in the blank)” label, they rocket products around the world in the global logistics supply chain.
Amazon’s two-day shipping program would be largely impossible without them. Entire fleets of boats have been replaced to accommodate the containers. Harbors have been dredged, ports relocated and shorelines reshaped.
Of course, they’re job killers. Machines do much of the heavy lifting that used to require full crews of workers.
Containerization was imposed on Durban dockers in 1977, years before they gained formal collective bargaining rights. In the decade before container ships first appeared at the Durban docks, the workforce peaked at 3,500 workers. By the time automation was fully implemented in the mid-1980s only 1,200 workers remained.
In the Bay Area, Harry Bridges had the unique combination of street cred, shop-floor power and battle fatigue to make an accommodation with the shipping magnates. Rather than engage in dubious battle to preserve back-breaking jobs that were rapidly becoming unnecessary, Bridges struck deals in 1960 and 1966 that guaranteed all existing longshoremen wages even if there was no work. The slimmer crews who would work with the machines to remote control the giant steel boxes on and off the boats were promised a greater share of the profits.
When rank-and-filers felt that those financial gains did not make up for the loss of job control they had previously enjoyed, they went on strike over Bridges’ objections during the winter of 1971 to 1972. Stung, the old Communist militant lent no personal support to the strike.
Still, the organized workers who remained employed in the Bay Area and at the world’s ports enjoy a position of tremendous leverage within globalized capitalism.
Strangling the chokepoints of global capital
There is an understandable tendency among those of us who care deeply about restoring the power of unions to grasp for breakthrough strategies and inspiring flare-ups of worker militancy like the recent teachers strikes and digital newsroom organizing wins. In contrast, trade unionists who instead focus on port workers and truck drivers can seem hopelessly quaint and backwards-looking. Meanwhile, global capitalism is still at its root about making and selling products in the global marketplace. Workers who have a hand in how quickly those products move—if they move at all—retain the capacity for tremendous power.
Another book that takes stock of the potential power of workers at strategic locations in the global supply chain is Choke Points (Pluto), a new collection of essays edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness. Peter Cole is here as well documenting the Durban dock workers’ solidarity actions on behalf of other African struggles for freedom from colonialism.
Elsewhere, Peter Olney, former organizing director of the ILWU, makes a characteristically masterful contribution on the evolving nature of the global economy and the west coast longshoremen’s role in it. He writes, “the future for powerful dockworkers lies in conceptualizing themselves as logistics workers.” By this he means extending longshore organizing and solidarity further inland to the warehouses and trucking companies that combine to form the central nervous system of so-called free trade. The threat of waging strikes that can roll from boat to truck to warehouse would be an obvious point of leverage.
Sheheryar Kaoosji contributes a vital and educational post-mortem assessment of one such effort, the comprehensive campaign to organize the warehouse workers and truck drivers a decade ago in the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Despite being “resourced with strategic researchers and experienced organizers, and supported by motivated community partners,” this signature effort of Change-to-Win faltered with the changing political winds in Washington and the rival labor federations and the inability to get workers in different parts of the logistics chain to see their own common cause.
Although the strategic location and potential power of the people who work at these choke points is obvious to outside agitators, the tendency of workers to focus on the boss who gets in their face and the name that signs their paycheck instead is a perennial obstacle to the untapped power of solidarity. Looking at labor battles in Turkey, contributors Çağatay Edgücan Şahin and Pekin Bengisu Tepe describe the problem as a “nineteenth-century working class” going up against the “Age of Industry 4.0’s capital.”
Some of the other essays in the volume are thick with academic jargon that make them less accessible to the layman. It’s regrettable, because if you can parse the language Choke Points is a blueprint for revolution.
The best contribution both of these books could make is to help focus the new generation of young socialists who are eager to help rebuild the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers on where our power really lies. I mean no disrespect to the crucial work of journalists and teachers, but global capitalism can grind to a halt when the ships don’t sail on time.
[This article was originally posted at In These Times.]
“The Class Idea” (And How to Get It)
Many progressives in the United States are prone to making gloomy jokes about moving North whenever conservative forces grip our national institutions. After all: Canadians have unions! They have health care! They don’t pretend that everyone’s middle class!
Why, people wonder, are the politics and labor movements of the two countries so different?
In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, sociology professor Barry Eidlin grapples with this question. His explanation not only illuminates the history but suggests some ideas about a course correction for the U.S. labor movement.
Canada, by contrast, strengthened its labor laws. The Canadian labor party—the New Democratic Party—is frequently in power in certain provinces, acting like a left pressure bloc on Canada’s not-quite two party system.
Eidlin locates the source of this reversal of fortune, in part, in how much harder the Canadian unions had to fight to establish themselves. In contrast, an American labor law regime was handed to union organizers by the New Deal. The fight in Canada took a decade longer for the government to recognize a protected right to engage in union activity, and it solidified a class consciousness among Canadian workers that in the United States is a bit more, well, flippy-floppy.
And this raises the perennial question: How can we get the American working class to recognize its own existence and fight like hell for what it deserves?
The United States and Canada are remarkably similar countries in terms of labor politics. We were colonized by the same European nations—England and France—which shaped our political cultures. And U.S. unions colonized Canadian workplaces by chartering locals north of the border. (The “I” in most unions’ acronyms stands not for “Industrial” but for “International,” which basically means, “Oh, and we have some members in Canada.”) For that reason, Canada’s labor law regime was modeled on the U.S. emphasis on government-certified bargaining units with firm-level contract bargaining, exclusive representation, and the union shop.
The passage of key pro-union legislation, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, preceded and in some ways made possible U.S. labor’s great upsurge in organizing and strike activity, Eidlin argues. Union rights were in effect “granted” by the Roosevelt Administration, which was rewarded, in turn, with the entrance of unions into the Democratic Party coalition as a special interest.
The Canadian government responded to increasing worker militancy during the Great Depression with equal parts repression and indifference. By way of example, Vancouver dockworkers went on strike in 1935 for union recognition. The struggle faced armed resistance from employers and the police, briefly spreading to a general strike punctuated by a bloody street fight—the Battle of Ballantyne Pier. In the United States, the West Coast longshoremen who had gone on strike the year prior, won union recognition through federal pressure and a nascent system of New Deal tripartite arbitration. The Vancouver dockworkers’ fight dragged on another decade until the Canadian government created more labor-friendly laws.
As a result, Canadian workers were far more likely to see themselves as a working class with distinctly different interests than the bosses, government, and two major parties. They made common cause with farmers in a third party—the forerunner of today’s New Democratic Party—that continued to gain votes and threaten the power of the established party. Crucially, they continued to strike during World War II for their rights and in protest of rising inflation.
That electoral threat, combined with the impact of the strikes on wartime production, finally compelled Canada’s government to enact a labor law that protected workers’ rights in 1944.
American unions’ post-war rise in militancy, by contrast, was greeted with legislative repression. The Taft-Hartley Act—which outlawed many forms of strikes and legalized anti-union “right to work” legislation—codified the legal status of unions as a mere special interest, one to be “balanced” against management.
Eidlin explores the key tests of strength faced by unions in the postwar years, and how that shaped the divergence in fortunes. Both countries faced a Red Scare, but unions in the U.S. contended with a 1960s New Left not centered on questions of class.
Canada’s labor movement, in contrast, made room for New Left politics within its New Democratic Party. They were able to tap into the hard-fought recognition of class interests to convince the government to strengthen labor laws as a way to mediate industrial disputes.
Eidlin, I think, underestimates the explanation given by many previous scholars for the lack of an American labor party: that property-based restrictions on voting were abolished before American workers had a chance to fully conceive of themselves as a separate class. The American labor movement entered the Great Depression already an atomized collection of special interests to be courted by the two major parties.
Regardless, a more urgent question for American activists is how to to wake the working-class giant. I suggest two trends—legal reform and political realignment—that contain promise.
One idea for creating a new labor relations system is an old idea that’s gaining traction: wage boards. These are public, tripartite industrial standards boards that can raise wages and working standards across entire industries. They were a cornerstone of the early New Deal framework, and still exist in some states, waiting for a demand to be revived.
The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, FDR’s first legislative effort to woo unions into the Democratic fold, is perhaps best remembered for its Section 7 guarantee of workers’ rights to organize unions. Though lacking an enforcement mechanism, the guarantee did inspire workers to sign up for unions in droves and helped get labor’s great uprising going.
The act also created tripartite industrial boards, like the National Longshore Board that arbitrated end of the 1934 strike. These consisted of a representative each from companies, unions, and “the public” for each major industry—with the power to establish minimum wages, work rules and union recognition. Strong unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and United Mine Workers were able to press the boards to raise wages and spread union standards across non-union firms in their industries. In non-union industries where workers didn’t rise up in paralyzing strikes, the boards gave little thought to working conditions.
The National Labor Relations Act was meant to be an enforcement mechanism for the National Industrial Recovery Act’s “right to organize.” The 1935 act outlawed pervasive union-busting techniques like retaliation and surveillance of union activity of employees. It threatened the power of the state to restrain “unfair labor practices,” and it demanded that employers bargain in good faith when workers declared themselves to be a union.
But the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by an arch-conservative Supreme Court that detested the idea of any kind of federal intervention in the private market. Roosevelt signed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act into law a few weeks after the court struck down the earlier law. His expectation had been that the two laws would exist side by side. The NLRA-created National Labor Relations Board would protect workers’ rights to organize and strike, while the NIRA-created industrial wage boards (and their state-level counterparts) would arbitrate union demands and impose the terms on employers.
University of Michigan law professor Kate Andrias proposes that wage boards, still on the books in states like California and New Jersey, could be used to pioneer a new form of social bargaining in the here and now. This is not pie in the sky. New York’s wage board system was dusted off by Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the Fight for $15 movement.
American unionists might hear “tripartite” as “two votes to one against the workers.” But what do you call a group of decision-makers who could vote to give you and your peers a wage increase or fairer scheduling practices or the right to several weeks of paid family leave but resists doing so? I call that a boss – a big one that we can run campaigns against.
Let’s imagine a hospitality industry labor board. The board could enact a whole range of changes, from raising the minimum wage to abolishing the practice of tipping. It could ban “clopens,” the practice of assigning an employee to work the first shift of the day after she just finished the last shift of the night before. It could take on issues of harassment in the workplace, like granting cocktail waitresses the right to refuse to wear “uniforms” that are too sexually exploitative.
The workers’ representative on the board could force a vote on any issue. Once that vote is scheduled, every union and workers center with an organizing stake in the industry would agitate for a yes vote. Join us. Sign this petition. Wear this button. Pay your dues. The unions could anticipate which major employers would have the most influence on the other two board members, and target them for disruption with actions like slowdowns, consumer boycotts, and rolling strikes.
Unlike in our current system, where workers are siloed in their bargaining relationships with individual employers, unions could take on entire industries as a class.
Our political system is in the midst of a rare political realignment, suggesting that a class-based party of the people is possible, even in America. As the Republican Party degenerates into authoritarianism and white nationalism, it becomes unelectable in many large city and big urban states. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, remains a big blob of incoherence, grappling with an energized left flank while trying to absorb “former” Republicans who would drag it to the right.
The solution may be regional. We are seeing the ideological fight, appropriately, in primaries, as witnessed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upsetwin over Congressman Joseph Crowley, and Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to Andrew Cuomo’s reelection.
But states like New York have essentially a one-party system—there is no threat of a Republican eking out a win in a three-way race. This makes a formation like the Working Families Party a viable second party.
With affiliates in more than a dozen states, the Working Families Party tends to act as a left pressure group in Democratic primaries, but doesn’t shy away from challenging corporate Democrats in general elections. It represents our best chance at an independent labor party in the United States and, like Canada’s New Democratic Party, could work on a regional basis.
More crucially, if the GOP continues its death rattle of naked racism and authoritarian hero-worship, while billionaire vampires like Howard Schutz and Michael Bloomberg abandon its corpse to suck what life remains from the Democratic Party, the rest of us are going to need a party to continue to fight for the survival and uplift of the 99 percent.
That is not to say permanent union opposition to both boss and state is a long-term winning strategy. Eidlin’s book—along with two centuries of union organizing in practice—make clear that workers need state power to restrict the worst impulses of corporations. But a degree of explicitly declared political autonomy within the current Democratic coalition, combined with a labor relations framework that treats workers as a distinct and protected class interest, could revive the class idea in the United States.
[This article originally appeared in The Progressive.]