Nonunion Workers Can Save Unions. We Just Need to Reimagine How We Collect Dues.
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH. The writers at DNAinfo and the Gothamist network had voted to form a union. But a few days later, on Nov. 2, 2017, their sullen jerk of a CEO decided to fold operations in perfectly legal retaliation.
Our peculiar labor relations system bases whether or not you are protected by a union contract on whether you can survive a campaign of threats, harassment and outright lies to prevail in a winner-take-all vote. Even then, a union contract can still be voided by a crybaby boss picking up his marbles and offshoring, subcontracting or “shutting down” operations entirely. A workers’ rights system that can be so baldly circumvented by billionaires and soulless corporations is clearly and inalterably broken.
Many of the best ideas currently on the table for labor law reform transcend workplace-based contract unionism. We could revive the New Deal model of wage boards, which dictate minimum standards for all companies in an industry. Even, or perhaps especially, if they are dominated by corporate interests, they would provide unions with a campaign target and all kinds of organizing opportunities to gain new associate or “at-large” members.
As I have advocated and Bill Fletcher proposes, “just cause” measures like the one Keith Ellison is considering create an opportunity for unions and worker centers to offer tangible benefits to employees in nearly every workplace in America. Having expert advice and representation while contesting a boss’s write-up or termination is worth paying dues. Even the fair scheduling, paid sick days and assorted anti-discrimination laws that have proliferated in blue states and rebel cities in the Trump era represent opportunities to expand the ranks of union membership. The laws are a dead letter without an enforcement mechanism; enforcement should be the role of unions. These strategies are not meant to replace union contracts but to support, expand and enhance union standards across all workplaces.
The federal policy that would tie all of these reforms together and make them work as a union membership organizing strategy is a dues check-off law, voluntary for workers but mandatory for employers. Workers would be able to make voluntary paycheck contributions to any nonprofit of their choice—including unions. If they were getting enforcement help from a union, this would be a way of paying for the service. Other times, as when unions are waging battles for labor law reform, it would be more like throwing a few bucks at an advocacy group. Either way, for workers, it should be as simple as filling out a confidential form, or logging in to a website, to join or quit any time.
Voluntary contributions are very hard to maintain without access to payroll deductions. While I appreciate the romantic turn-of-the-20th-century history of Wobbly dues stamps and “walking delegates” hand-collecting voluntary union dues, modern experiences with alternative forms of dues collection have proven to be wheel-spinning exercises that can’t properly fund unions.
I spent years organizing with the United Teachers of New Orleans after all the teachers were fired in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. With no collective bargaining and little access to payroll deductions, we were asking union supporters to rejoin and pay their dues through credit cards or bank account debits. In our new age of inequality, even supposedly “middle class” teachers bounce checks and miss monthly credit card payments with distressing regularity. In a typical year, we would sign up 500 new members for a net gain of 100 new dues payers.
Any right-wing opposition to this bill would be laughable. Imagine the “right-to-work” and “forced unionism” dittoheads straining to argue that they should be allowed to make it more difficult for their employees to voluntarily pay dues to a union of their choosing. Oh, what an administrative burden for some back-office staffer at Paychex or ADP or one of the other small handful of companies to which basically every employer in America has subcontracted their payroll processing to tick a donation box! What a threat to democracy! Damn you, Nanny State!
Janus is an opportunity to break our understanding of “what a union is” into its component parts and decide what we want to keep and what requires change. Payroll deduction does not have to be limited to union shop contracts. Employees in every workplace in America deserve the immediate choice to join a union.
[This is the fourth of a four-part series on rebuilding labor after the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling. You can read the first part here, the second here and the third here. All four pieces, as well as an exclusive interview with Bernie Sanders on the future of the labor movement, are featured in the August 2018 issue of In These Times magazine.]
Take This Bullshit Job and Pretend to Love It
The British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” What kind of misery is it, then, if your particular form of exploitation is being asked to do nothing particularly useful?
David Greaber explores this question in his thought-provoking and hilarious new book, Bullshit Jobs. Five years ago, he wrote an essay for the radical magazine Strike!, asking why people in the United States and England are not working the 15-hour weeks that John Maynard Keynes had predicted would be the result of technological advancement? In our post-scarcity society, he argued, only a tiny fraction of the population actually has to labor in order to provide for the material needs of all. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” he wrote.
The essay went viral. Millions of people read it and thousands wrote him to vent about their own pointless jobs. Those first-person accounts enliven and flesh out Graeber’s book.
He breaks down these jobs into five major categories: Box-tickers, Duct tapers, Taskmasters, Flunkies, and Goons. While humorous, it’s also a well thought-out system of categorizing pointless work by the dynamics that create them. A Duct-taper, for instance, is hired because an existing employee (very likely a full-of-it supervisor) either skips or botches one essential part of his assignment and so an entire extra employee is hired to make sure that that one small task gets carried out. That task may be essential, but it hardly amounts to a full-time assignment.
A Box-ticker, on the other hand, exists mainly so an organization can claim it is doing something that it doesn’t actually take seriously. Much of this involves researching and compiling reports no one will read to comply with a regulation or to document progress on a mission or goal.
Flunkies, meanwhile, are employees hired purely to make their supervisor appear more important. A receptionist whose main function is to place phone calls for a middle manager just to say to the party on the other line, “Please hold for Mr. ____,” is a perfect example.
These bullshit jobs make up an astonishingly large portion of the global economy. Inspired by his initial essay, one U.K. poll found that 37 percent of respondents did not believe their job made “a meaningful contribution to the world.” A similar poll of Dutch workers found that 40 percent of workers didn’t think their jobs served a useful purpose.
Barraged by right-wing talking points, much of the public has come to believe that pointless, self-created bureaucracy is uniquely a public-sector malady. But Graeber found many times more private- than public-sector workers reaching out to him to complain—in detail—about their salaried jobs, which they said would make no discernable difference in the world if they quit and the posting was left vacant for several months (or years). Many of these were in financial and legal firms, where the bloat was by design. The purpose (for a law firm) might be to whittle away a chunk of a large class-action settlement on administrative expenses, or to make a manager seem more important by virtue of the number of employees reporting to him. Usually, it was some combination of the two.
The real difference between the public and private sectors isn’t—to borrow a line from Ghostbusters—that “in the private sector; they expect results.” Instead, Graeber finds, it’s that corporate firms expect every employee to actually show up each week for his or her 40-plus hours of “work” and to “look busy” while doing it.
Picture here the Seinfeld character George Constanza, who, after years of temp jobs and unemployment lands a cushy job in the New York Yankees’ back office. Well-paid and in delightful proximity to the heroes of his youth, he nevertheless suffers anxiety from the fact that he doesn’t understand what his job is supposed to be and nobody at work seems to be sweating him about assignments or deadlines. His stroke of brilliance is to furrow his brow and squint his eyes in a way that makes him “look busy” to his colleagues.
It’s funny in a sitcom but borderline tragic in real life. Why a bullshit job would be regarded as daily torture instead of a paid vacation might be confounding to anyone who hasn’t spent the lions’ share of her waking life pushing a boulder of Outlook calendar invites up a mountain of pointless conference calls on mute. As explanation, Graeber points to the early 20th century work of psychologist Karl Groos. Studying early childhood behavior, he noted infants’ delight at being the cause of an effect that they were able to repeat through their own actions—as well as their rage at being denied the continued ability to alter the world through their own actions. He called this “the pleasure at being the cause,” and time and research have shown that is elemental to human happiness.
Much of the “bullshitization” of white-collar work is purely accidental, but Graeber argues that capitalists couldn’t have designed a more effective pecking order of oppression if they’d tried. At the bottom, you have millions of workers striving to work longer hours and fighting for a couple more dollars an hour that might lift them out of literal poverty. In between the desperate lumpen and the de facto rulers of the world is a massive segment of the workforce who secretly suspect that maintaining a decent standard of living doesn’t correlate with useful or productive work (or, indeed, any work at all!). But challenging the system could imperil their relative comfort.
They are more likely to resent people whose jobs are easily explainable to their family and neighbors—but who nevertheless demand better wages and working conditions—than to make common cause with them.
Graeber points to autoworkers and teachers as workers who achieve a tangible degree of satisfaction from their work and who are frequent targets of the public’s ire for expecting that and decent wages. I think more of all those amateur chefs on Chopped, hoping to win a $10,000 purse in order to buy a food truck. How many thousands of people are living an essentially monastic lifestyle because they want to make a living feeding people? In a world filled with well-paying but meaningless work, or poorly-paid drudgery that a robot could (and may soon) do, is it any wonder that so many people yearn for a meaningful life spent cooking for people and watching them enjoy the literal fruits of their labor?
What I particularly love about Graeber’s book is how it contributes to the revival of the kind of labor lit that flourished in the 1970s. The last 40 years of globalization, automation, and the gutting of our labor laws has narrowed the focus of too many labor writers to questions of how workers can get enough hours at a high-enough minimum wage and with decent enough benefits to reverse an inexorable slide into poverty.
In the ‘70s, books like False Promises by Stanley Aronowitz or Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day, and especially Studs Terkel’s Working shined a light on the meaning that people struggle to find in their lives through their labor.
Interestingly, each of these books devoted some discussion to Lordstown, Ohio. That’s where General Motors had recently built a factory staffed with a bunch of hippies and Vietnam vets. These workers managed to turn the company’s pioneering “small car”—the Chevy Vega—into a notorious lemon through their protest campaign of wildcat strikes and sabotage. Despite generous and rapidly rising wages, the workers rejected not just the inhumane pace of the assembly line but also their alienation from any pleasure at being the cause of an actual car driving off at the end of production.
They wanted not just to slow down the pace of the assembly line, but to spend more time with each car as it was assembled. They wanted to experience more of the pleasure at being the cause.
Contrast all that with this juicy quote that Graeber digs up for what I don’t doubt was a sincere objection by President Obama to the push to expand Medicare for all:
Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, “Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.” That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?
Absent a vivid socialist imagination, how can we justify all of these millions of office drones affording food, shelter, and clothing if we couldn’t make them spend 40-to-60 hours a week making every doctor and patient they deal with miserable and furious?
The closest contemporary cousin to Graeber’s book is Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government, which questions why we surrender most of our constitutional rights at the boss’ doorstep and don’t even notice that we are doing it.
Like Graeber, she looks back at the value systems of the pre-industrial era and how they got twisted and confused during the revolutionary rise of capitalism and the nation-state. Anderson is a philosopher by training, and Graeber is an anthropologist—which highlights how important it is for labor studies to embrace its interdisciplinary nature.
Being an anarchist, Graeber is loath to suggest specific policy solutions. Still, he can’t help but talk about the policy that is most frequently advocated by the nerds who talk about the post-scarcity society: the universal basic income. Obviously, he sees value in decoupling the deservedness of food, shelter, and clothing from how one spends the majority of her waking hours. There simply isn’t enough useful work to go around for each of us to trade an hour for a loaf of bread.
The alternative progressive policy proposal—a federal commitment to full employment—is touted as more pragmatic and winnable. It’s a reasonable appeal to the god, mom, and apple-pie Calvinist work ethic. And, after all, there are a lot of roads and bridges that need to be rebuilt, a lot of child and elder care that should be compensated as the very real work it is, and well, who wouldn’t love to see a lot of WPA-style public artwork going up around the world? But, Bullshit Jobs should serve as a warning that a continued fidelity to the notion that one must work for one’s supper would likely condemn many of us to box-checking and duct-taping, as the machines take over and make most of us redundant.
[This article originally appeared at the American Prospect.]
Elon Musk’s Very Dumb Tweet
The United Auto Workers union (UAW) slapped billionaire gadfly Elon Musk with charges of violating federal labor law in a stupid tweet last week. Musk owns the unprofitable luxury electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors, which the UAW has been unsuccessfully trying to organize.
Tesla has previously been scrutinized over allegations of “excessive mandatory overtime,” a lack of workplace safety and union busting. Musk’s tweet suggesting that Tesla workers would lose their stock options in the company if they voted for union representation raised eyebrows and prompted the UAW to file an Unfair Labor Practice Charge over the retaliatory threat. Speaking to Bloomberg news, former NLRB chair Wilma Liebman said, “If you threaten to take away benefits because people unionize, that’s an out-and-out violation of the labor law.”
The dumb tweet was fired off in the middle of a surreal “It’s 2018 and, yes, this is actually happening” social media meltdown that was sparked the revelation that the 46-year-old capitalist mogul who looks like his name sounds has been secretly dating the pop star Grimes.
Somehow this led to Grimes tweeting a defense of Tesla’s union busting. (As writer Brandy Jensen quipped in a tweet of her own: on a scale of “said you liked his band” to “publicly defended his union busting” what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done for a boyfriend) In the resulting Twitter conversation from Hell, Musk – who, again, is a billionaire and has on a scale of “said you liked his band” to “publicly defended his union busting” what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done for a boyfriendnearly 30 million followers on the platform – responded to the gentle chiding of someone with .00004% of his social media reach with this gratuitous gem:
Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2018
Musk’s online meltdown has also included attacks on the credibility of the press, along with a threat to create some sort of Rotten Tomatoes-style website to rate the truthiness of various media outlets. Hilariously, he wanted to name it Pravda – Russian for “truth” – after the infamous Soviet newspaper. After his “grand” announcement Musk found out that the domain name was taken because Pravda still publishes and they’d like to keep their name, thank you very much.
As of this writing, Musk’s latest train wreck is a tweet suggesting that the real problem with the media is, and I quote, “Who do you think owns the press? Hello.” (The belief that the media is owned and controlled by a Jewish conspiracy is an anti-Semitic trope that won’t die, and Musk’s tweet was celebrated by hundreds – if not thousands – of literal Nazis who joined the thread from Hell because it’s 2018 and this sort of thing happens now.)
Not only was Musk’s anti-union tweet arrogant and gratuitous, it was the dumbest, clumsiest technical violation of labor law that every dipshit front-line supervisor makes before the professional union-busters get in there and teach them proper Newspeak.
For Elon Musk’s benefit – and everyone’s– here’s how union negotiations actually work.
The moment that workers form a bargaining unit and successfully vote for union representation, a status quo of pay, benefits and working conditions sets in. This is regardless of whether the union was formed through an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) or through voluntary card check recognition by the employer.
That’s because the only thing that unionizing workers win on Day One is a seat at the bargaining table. The employer is legally compelled to negotiate “in good faith” over the union’s (that is, the workers’) demands for the changes they’d like to see at work. Likewise, the employer must negotiate with the union over any changes it wants to make. In fact, there’s some case law at the NLRB that the status quo sets in as soon as a union organizing drive goes public and a union demands recognition as the representative of the workers.
So, nothing “goes away” when workers form a union. There’s nothing automatic about the changes to the benefits package or work rules. Both sides must negotiate them all.
Now ask yourself, if there was a benefit that employees enjoy – like, say, stock options – how would they even wind up on the table, much less surrendered or bargained away? What group of democratically elected representatives is going to suggest getting rid of a popular benefit?
Popular items wind up on the chopping block because vindictive employers put them there. It is very common for employers to carry over their union busting campaign into negotiations for a first contract. So the boss comes into bargaining with a laundry list of benefits to be pruned, new surveillance and drug tests that need to be instituted and all kinds of “flexibility” around pay and scheduling that he needs to stave off those suddenly-pending layoffs.
And that’s why Elon Musk’s tweet is illegal. He’s not predicting the future, or explaining the UAW’s “Big 3” contracts. He’s telling his workers, “Hey, you can form a union but I’ll be damned if I keep giving you ungrateful S.O.B.s an ownership stake in the company.”
It was an unmistakable threat.
Now, do popular benefits and work rules get traded away in bargaining? Sure, it happens. But here’s the thing: in order for a contract to get signed and be in effect it must be ratified by the workers who are subject to its terms. When a union member is voting on whether to accept a deal or not, she is weighing the entire package. Do the wage increases and new health insurance with lower co-pays outweigh the fact that, for example, the nurses now have to pay the same parking fee as the cafeteria workers, or that the kitchen staff can no longer haul off with a case of beer each week, no questions asked? And, is the entire package worth the cost of the union dues members will soon be paying?
If the answer is no, it’s hard to imagine how a majority of workers would vote to approve such a deal. This is not abstract hair-splitting. Half of all bargaining units that vote in favor of unionization wind up with no contract and ultimately no union rights.
Forming a union is a process of bringing some much-needed democracy into the workplace. Workers have real and meaningful control over what they’re demanding and how they go about trying to win it. Without a union a workplace is a literal dictatorship; the boss dictates all of the work rules, pay and benefits. With Tesla’s stock options for its employees, Elon Musk can try to convince himself that he is a benevolent dictator. But let’s all be as clear as Musk himself is about his power over his workers. Musk fights the UAW in ways both sophisticated and clumsy because he wants to retain his dictatorial powers over his company and its workers.
[This post first appeared on the Unionist.com blog.]
What Is Janus and Why Does It Matter?
Half of the labor movement could go “right-to-work” depending on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court decision. In Janus v. AFSCME, the justices are weighing whether union shop contract clauses that compel represented workers to join or pay a representation fee should be illegal in the public sector. With 7.2 million union members’ participation at stake, the case represents the latest in the unrelenting corporate assault on union power and financial resources.
Part of what the right wing is exploiting in this case is that for public sector workers, their employer is, in some sense, “the government.” That makes their union contracts more vulnerable to challenges from outsiders. Indeed, public sector workers won the right to negotiate for the same union shop clause that private sector unions have enjoyed for over a century in a 1978 Supreme Court case called Abood v. Detroit.
That long-settled precedent has been under sustained attack in recent years, with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leading the charge. He inserted the argument—that every interaction that a union has with the government
is inherently political—into the Court’s 2014 decision in Harris v. Quinn. That decision maligned unions representing state-funded, but home-based, child and elder care work- ers and took away their right to bargain for the union shop.
In Harris, Alito strongly signaled that he and the rest of the conservative Court majority would support a court challenge to mandatory union fees as “compelled” political activity that violates the First Amendment. Lo and behold, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association rock- eted through the courts the following year. It deadlocked in a 4-4 tie only because Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2015.
Two short years, and one stolen Supreme Court seat later, Janus is in front of the Court with the same stale arguments backed by the same deep pockets.
The anti-union argument is ironic because judges have spent most of U.S. history denying workers any kind of free speech right to form a union. Before Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, courts were more likely to treat unions as criminal con- spiracies that interfered with employers’ property and contract rights. But even the NLRA, which provides legal protections for union organizing and collective bargaining, does not recognize a First Amendment right to engage in union activity. Instead, it bases those rights on Congress, and its power to regulate interstate commerce—not in the civil and constitutional rights of workers.
As a result, corporations enjoy more free speech protections to beat up on work- ers than workers and their unions have to organize. An employer can force workers to attend mandatory anti-union presentations or be fired, and unions have no comple- mentary right to respond. Workers can be fired for making “disloyal” statements about their company in the course of a protest. And the scope of issues that unions can meaningfully demand to bargain over has been significantly narrowed.
A ruling against AFSCME in Janus could provide unions with a solid First Amendment basis to challenge these and other inequities in labor law. But con- servative judges could also shamelessly wave away any argument about why free speech shouldn’t make collective bargain- ing fairer for workers, while beefing up corporate power. Already, some are concerned that anti-union lawyers will next argue that col- lective bargaining regulated by the NLRA is another “inherently political” interaction between unions and the government, making any union shop—even in the private sector—unconstitutional. That this argument might even see the light of day shows how far the right wing has pushed the American political conversation.
U.S. unions are bracing for impact. Unions with substantial public sector memberships have beefed up their mem- ber-to-member organizing programs. Their immediate goal is convincing current fee-payers to join and pay dues.
This is not a drill or a false alarm, and stewards play a key role in keeping workplaces, bargaining units and unions together as all working people—union and not—come under assault. Here are three things to do:
- Talk about Janus and its effect on our communities, unions, and workplaces. Unionist.com has resources from across the labor movement and around the media.
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Expect a well-funded direct mail blitz from union busters encouraging mem- bers to quit their union to “give themselvesa raise.” Member-to-member organizing is critical for counteracting right-wing propaganda portraying unions as “ineffective” third parties Here, shop stewards must be the first line of defense.
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Express solidarity with all workers. Show up at another union’s picket line or rally, sure. Is there a demonstration against workplace raids by ICE in your community? Those are workers, too. Be there for them, in your union colors.
[This article originally Volume 29, Issue 2 of Steward Update.]