1.

Jane Slaughter and Mark Brenner, "The Lay of the Land for Labor"
[2008]

2. Lee Sustar, “U.S. Labor in the Crisis: Resistance or Retreat?”

[2009]

3. Erin Small, “Feminism At Work” [2007]

4. Steve Downs, “Review of Solidarity Divided” [2009]

Jane Slaughter and Mark Brenner, "The Lay of the

Land for Labor" [2008]
Despite Weakened State, Labor Still a Key Force for Social
Change
• The labor movement is the largest mass of independent, working
class organizations in the country, with over 10,000 local unions
nationally counting 16 million union members
• As the west coast dockworkers recent May Day work stoppage to
protest the Iraq war indicated, some unions continue to wield
serious economic leverage, capable of striking a blow to profits.
• Unions also have tremendous financial resources, taking in close
to $10 billion in dues each year (and holding another 19 billion in
assets).
• Labor represents a key player in national elections, spending
upwards of $250 million in 2008, and mobilizing tens of
thousands of people to walk precincts, phone-bank, and do other
voter education and turnout. In the 2004 election 25 percent of
voters came from union households.
• Despite some unions’ history of racism and exclusion, unions
have had an important positive impact on white working class
consciousness. Although it’s admittedly an imperfect measure,
white working class voters who are union members (and not
evangelical Christians) support Democratic candidates 60/40 in
elections. Non-union white working class voters are the reverse,
supporting Republican candidates by roughly the same margins.
• Unions are also, of course, the workers’ organizations that are by
definition and by law created to fight the boss, either a capitalist
employer or a government one. They remain organizations
where workers are forced to come together across racial and
gender lines and where hundreds of thousands of workers have
the experience of getting to know and working together with
people of other races that they do not have in their communities.
The union (and the workplace) is where the reality of “an injury
 to one is an injury to all” is there for all to see (even if it’s not
always seen).

Economic Landscape for Labor: Global Integration, Rise of

Finance and Logistics
• With the entry of the former Soviet Union and China into the
world capitalist market, together with the opening of India’s
economy, we have experienced an effective doubling of the
world labor market.
• The rules of the global economy have been written by global
corporations, though trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA,
and are now being enforced by the WTO
• These two factors, together with the “logistics revolution” of the
last 30 years, have allowed corporations to truly globalize
production, stretching supply chains across countries and
regions. One stark measure of this trend is shipping container
traffic in and out of the U.S:
 8.4 million in 1980
 15.6 million in 1990
 30.4 million in 2000
 45.0 million in 2007
• While these trends have had a major negative impact on some
sectors of the U.S. economy like manufacturing,they have also
tremendously increased the leverage of workers positioned at
the chokepoints of today’s cargo chain. Together, and in some
cases individually, the clusters of ship hands, longshoremen,
truck drivers, railroad operators, and warehouse workers have
the power to cripple today’s “just-in-time” delivery networks,
idling the ships, terminal yards and trucks now used as mobile
warehouses.
• The evolution of financial markets in the last three decades, both
globally and inside the U.S., has changed the dynamic of profit-
making, shifting resources and attention out of the sphere of
production into what is often speculative activity. In the U.S., for
example, in 2007:
 5% of all workers were in the financial sector
 15% of gross value added came from the financial sector
 40% of total profits came from the financial sector
• This has made capitalism, especially in the U.S., even more
unstable and “irrational.” It has also removed some of the
traditional leverage that workers have on the job (e.g., if GM
makes most of its profits through its financial arm rather than
making cars, this weakens the power of on-the-job activity by
auto workers). It also has put workers involved in ‘production’ in
competition not just with workers in other regions or countries,
 but with the choice of no production at all (that is, capital could
choose to invest in speculative activity instead).

U.S. Economy Continues Long Trend of Getting Leaner and

Meaner
• The recession that marked the beginning of this decade never
ended in some sectors, and the situation will only get worse
given the current economic turmoil.
o We have lost over three million manufacturing jobs this
decade
 2000: 17.2 million
 2007: 13.7 million
o These losses have been especially concentrated in core
union industries like automotive and heavy equipment.
o Part has been due to trade, given the enormous increase in
the flow of goods in and out of the country (see container
traffic statistics above).
o Also due to technology, owing to the heavy investment in
capital equipment in the 1990s.
• Recent trends are a continuation of ‘Lean Production’ – a
corporate squeeze play that dates back at least 30 years. The
results are now depressingly familiar. Lean production not only
reduces the number of jobs through straightforward methods like
speed-up, it also fundamentally changes the way the workplace
is structured (both physically and in terms of the balance of
power on the shop floor). Workplaces are redesigned to isolate
workers and minimize opportunities for solidarity and collective
action. Work processes are re-engineered to strip workers of
discretion and reduce their power on the job,
• Corporations have also found new ways to attack workers:
o Gutting union contracts through the bankruptcy courts
(e.g. Delphi and Northwest)
o Shifting the social risks associated with pensions and
retiree healthcare onto unions (e.g. VEBA at Goodyear, GM,
Ford, looming proposal at Verizon) or eliminating pensions
and retiree healthcare altogether for newer, second- tier
workers.
o Using large pools of capital (i.e. private equity), Wall Street
investors are now capable of taking over major
corporations (even giants like Chrysler), often pulling a
quick “strip and flip,” chopping the company into pieces,
and/or piling on debt to goose up stock prices and line their
own pockets.
• The place where unions have had success organizing in the past
40 years, namely in the public sector, is increasingly becoming
 an island of decent jobs, in terms of pay and pensions, in a sea of
low-wage, no-benefit, non-union private sector options.
Conservatives are gunning for public sector workers:
o Exploiting the gaps between higher public sector standards
and the private sector (for comparable work) to push for
privatization, contracting out, and the creation of charter
schools.
o Using the poor pay, pensions, and benefits of most private
sector workers to pit them against “overpaid” public sector
workers, bolstering general opposition to taxes and public
spending, and deepening the general cynicism and
mistrust of many voters towards government.
• Conservatives’ concrete strategy is to exploit this
distain for taxes and mistrust of government to
“starve the beast,” i.e., fight tax hikes or other
means of increasing public sector revenue.
• Choking off new revenue creates a material crisis for
the state, forcing it to cut spending and services.
These dynamics are only exacerbated by other
conservative policies like balanced-budget mandates
and new changes to pension accounting rules (which
force governments to count all future pension
obligations as current liabilities).
o After decades of rightward political drift many public sector
unions are too willing to accept the stereotype of voters as
conservative and anti-tax. This has led many to shy away
from high-profile “us-versus-them” campaigns—where the
risks are high—relying instead onincrementalism and their
status as “insiders” in the political process to protect
members’ standards. Not only has this reinforced many
voters’ picture of unions as a special interest, it has also
ensured that most public sector unions won’t touch the
“third rail” of U.S. politics—the tax system—since
“insiders” all agree that this is political suicide.
o We can only expect these trends to intensify as the current
recession deepens.
Private Sector Remains Hostile Territory for Unions, Low-
Hanging Fruit in the Public Sector Has Mostly Been Picked
• Private sector union density is at its lowest point in 100 years.
o 12 % overall, 7.4% in the private sector
• Large scale organizing in the private sector remains an elusive
goal.
o Where unions have succeeded it has often been by getting
employers to agree to card check or neutrality agreements
(see more below).
 o Another successful strategy has been to use the leverage
that comes from ties to the public sector, such as forcing
new publicly-funded construction to use union labor, or
requiring vendors and contractors at public airports to
remain neutral in union organizing drives, or even using
zoning and permitting processes to extract “community
benefits agreements” (which typically include neutrality
provisions) from big developers.
• Today most newly organized workers come into the labor
movement outside of a typical NLRB election procedure, usually
through a card check or neutrality agreement with the employer.
There is wide variation in how unions secure neutrality deals and
organize within them.
o It is possible to win a card check/neutrality agreement
through beating up on the employer.
• The 1999 card check agreement that eventually
helped CWA organize more than 17,000 retail
workers at Cingular Wireless was the product of five
years of struggle with Southwestern Bell, Cingular’s
predecessor company.
• The 2006 neutrality agreement giving San Francisco-
based UNITE HERE Local 2 the right to organize in
the suburban markets and outlying counties was the
product of two years of “bargaining to organize” that
included strikes, lock-outs, and civil disobedience the
targeted hotels.
o But in many of these agreements, the union explicitly or
implicitly agrees to mute struggle against the employer,
before or after the contract is signed, and to keep
improvements in workers’ conditions minimal. Such
agreements result in more members and more dues for the
union involved, and may even beef up the union’s political
muscle in elections, but the “union advantage” for new
members is sub-par.
• For example, in 2002 the UAW secured a neutrality
agreement with parts-maker Metaldyne and agreed
to wages $10 lower than Big Three standards. This
included forcing UAW members at
DaimlerChrysler’sNew Castle, Indiana plant to take
pay cuts when their portion of the operation was sold
to Metaldyne (or to transfer out of town).
• SEIU secured a quiet quid-pro-quo agreement with
California’s Nursing Home Alliance that gave the
union organizing rights at facilities the companies
chose, provided the union help get more money into
the nursing home industry through the state
 legislature. The union spread “template agreements”
to newly organized homes that gave up the right to
strike, limited workers’ ability to talk about patient
conditions publicly, and contained wages and
benefits below those in other SEIU-organized nursing
homes. Ironically, SEIU organized more non-Alliance
nursing homes during the time period of the
agreement, usually with better contracts and
standards.
o While there is lots of variation with neutrality agreements,
a few points are clear:
• Sweetheart contracts, or playing junior partner with
management, is not the way to rebuild the labor
movement.
• The recent experience of the Steelworkers at
Dafasco in Ontario also illustrates that employer
neutrality is not enough. You still have to organize
the workers and convince them that there are good
reasons to join the union.
• You also still have to build a union. And how you
organize in the first place has a tremendous impact
on what you are able to build down the road. If the
union is a product of struggle, of grassroots rank-
and-file involvement, then it will be a different
organization than if it’s the product of backroom
deals or sweetheart contracts.
• Given the prodigious difficulties of organizing today,
because of employers’ ability to break the law at will,
it would not be tenable to dismiss neutrality
agreements out of hand. The question is what kindof
neutrality agreement is negotiated and, as always,
the involvement of workers in fighting for their own
union.
• Given the hostile terrain, raiding between different unions will
continue, and may intensify (e.g., the war between the SEIU and
the CNA as seen in Ohio, California, Illinois, and Nevada and the
recent raid on AMFA at United Airlines by the Teamsters). Raiding
or unions fighting over the same members is very often
unproductive and wasteful, a substitute for organizing the
unorganized. But sometimes it makes sense for members to
switch unions—to one that is more likely to fight concessions, for
example (as when United Airlines mechanics left the Machinists
for AMFA), or when the incumbent union is hopelessly corrupt or
undemocratic. Union officials don’t “own” their members, and
while the burden of proof may be on the raiders, raiding should
be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
 • After decades of growth, new public sector organizing has also
slowed down.
o New, large-scale organizing requires moving into largely
non-union, right-to-work states in the South and
Southwest. It also requires actually establishing the right to
collective bargaining for public employees (just over half of
all states permit public employees to bargain collectively,
with the rest either denying bargaining rights explicitly or
offering limited “meet and confer” options).
o Unions have also branched out in the public sector to
organize new kinds of workers. In fact, it is important that
the largest single chunk of new organizing in the last
decade has moved unions pretty far away from their
traditional model, namely, the organizing of more than half
a million homecare and childcare workers. These workers
have become new union members through ballot initiatives
and/or gubernatorial decree. By creating public entities to
serve as the employer of record for such workers—who
ultimately receive their pay from the public purse—unions
(usually SEIU or AFSCME) were able to sign them up as
members.

Top Union Leaders Recognize Crisis, Abandon the Fight

• For the first time in its modern history, the bureaucracy
recognizes the crisis it’s in.
• The first outward response was the contested election for AFL-
CIO president in 1995, which brought John Sweeney and the
“New Voices” slate into office.
• But 10 years of trying to rebuild the labor movement “from
above” brought few results, leading to the 2005 split in the AFL-
CIO and formation of the Change to Win federation. In many
ways, Change to Win is a paradox.
o The public rationale for breaking with the AFL-CIO was the
need for a stronger federation, one that could force
affiliates into line and “on program”.
o But in practice CtW has even less infrastructure and
resources as a federation than the AFL-CIO.
o Despite their weak center, CtW projects an even more
intense program of revitalization “from above” through its
driving force the SEIU. Since the split in the AFL-CIO, for
example, SEIU has created a wave of mega-locals—
administrative units of tens, sometimes hundreds of
thousands of members that often span multiple states—
and the union has centralized more resources and control
over bargaining in the hands of SEIU’s national leaders.
• Now, top leaders of unions in both the AFL-CIO and the CtW are
managing the decline of union standards (and sometimes the
decline of unions themselves) as we’ve known them for the past
60 years.
o Some unions are trying to manage the decline
straightforwardly.
• The UAW and the Steelworkers, for example, have
argued that global competition is too tough,
thatU.S. workers can’t compete with workers
in Chinawho are paid so little.
• The UAW has openly said that a large portion of its
members in auto—parts supplier workers, “non-core”
workers in the Big Three, and new hires in the Big
Three—should not be paid the decent wages/benefits
of the past, and has enshrined this point of view in
every major contract negotiation in the last five
years.
• The spring 2008 strike at American Axle, was, on the
level of International leaders’ wishful thinking, a last-
gasp resistance to the pauperization of parts-sector
workers, but in reality it had no strategy to win, with
predictable results.
o Some are trying to manage the decline via spin, accepting
lower standards (which will ultimately serve as a drag on
better union standards everywhere) and claiming they are
immense victories. Unions in the “spin zone” are primarily
associated with Change to Win.
• At UPS Freight, a formerly non-union division of UPS,
Teamsters refused to use their leverage inside the
rest of the company to bring UPS Freight workers
into the union and up to the standards of the
National Master Freight Agreement. Instead, they
won a neutrality agreement which forced them to
organize each UPS Freight terminal one-by-one, with
contract standards that will undercut Teamsters in
other parts of the freight industry.
• In 2002 SEIU launched a janitors strike in Boston.
Rather than organize an effective work stoppage
(there was never more than 15 percent participation
in the strike), the union waged a series of highly
visible and even militant public actions in the streets,
counting on political pressure from city leaders and
state officials to coerce the contractors association
into a decent settlement. While the strike was
tremendously important in terms of making the work
of Boston’s immigrant community visible, the
 contractors held out and the union took a weak
settlement, which it trumpeted as a major victory.
• Where unions do exist they have continued to cede the
workplace, not even showing up for the continuous bargaining
that should be happening daily between workers and
management, both over the ordinary give-and-take on the shop
floor and over the changes that management is continually
introducing (technological, workplace organization).
• The most ominous trend is for outright acceptance of the
corporate agenda, in hopes that corporations will let their
“partners” survive. More on this below under “Survival Era.”
• Meanwhile, many local leaders who have not given up the fight
continue to try to represent their members, including through
militant and sometimes innovative struggles. Unfortunately, their
hands are often tied by their national unions’ policies or lack
thereof.

Union Strategy in the ‘Survival Era’

• The shift in union policy we are seeing today can be described as
a shift from retreat to organized surrender. This shift is not a
thorough one; there are still many areas where retreat—or even
resistance—are still the order of the day. But the growing trend
among top union officials is to surrender.
• The “retreat” line that top leaders have enforced for over two
decades says to the members “We have to take givebacks now
because we’re not strong enough [though they usually don’t
organize any fight to in fact test the balance of power between
employer and union]. In order to level the playing field between
employers and unions, we need to get the politicians to carry our
water.” So unions have focused all their hopes (and their
considerable financial and staff resources) on the political arena.
The message is that “Organizing in the private sector is too hard.
Corporations are too powerful. The deck is stacked against us.
Congress needs to do something.”
o That something is the Employee Free Choice Act, which is
made to sound like a cross between the passage of the
civil rights legislation in the 1960s and the second coming
of Jesus Christ.
o The drumbeat has gotten even stronger with the
Democrats in (bare) control of Congress and with a chance
to win the White House. But there are a few holes in the
logic:
o First, these are the same politicians who gave us NAFTA,
refused to ban permanent replacements for striking
workers, and worked so hard on behalf of Wall Street
 during the Clinton years that we’re now left with the
biggest gap between rich and poor since the Great
Depression.
o Yes, organizing is hard, but unions could do a lot of it with
the quarter of a billion dollars labor will spend in the 2008
election.
o This logic reverses the history of our labor movement, the
civil rights movement, and every significant advance ever
made in the U.S. We didn’t take those steps forward
because a light bulb went off in somebody’s head
inWashington.
o They were the product of struggle: the hard-won fruits of
millions of ordinary people, convinced of the righteousness
of their cause, acting together, willing to face fire hoses,
attack dogs, employer goon squads, Pinkertons, and even
the National Guard. Politicians aren’t the motor force of
history, people are.
• While labor’s current knee-jerk spending on Democrats—usually
with little or no accountability required—won’t get workers
anywhere, it is certainly true that labor needs a political program
backed up by mass action in the streets. Many of the battles
workers are now in cannot be won workplace by workplace.
Pensions and health care are essentially political problems.
• There are also positive signs on the political horizon. Although
DC insiders in both the AFL-CIO and CtW are maneuvering to
sideline their efforts, more and more unions are endorsing single-
payer legislation. In the same vein, the center of gravity within
the labor movement is solidly against the Iraq war and
occupation. In both cases, what is missing is any vision for how
to spark a movement that can take these struggles into the
streets and communities.
• In the big picture, however, we still face an uphill battle, trying to
foster consciousness for which there is no concrete political
expression. The U.S. working class has no political party of its
own, and when shifts do occur in working class consciousness
they usually cross squarely through the Democratic Party. The
Democrats remain stumbling block on the road to a socialist
alternative, and labor’s allegiance is not just at the level of the
officialdom but among most rank-and-file activists as well. Our
task remains finding a working class solution to the current
economic and political turbulence and achieving that task will
force us to moves past the tremendous barrier of not having our
own political organization.
• The surrender mode of operation goes further than retreat. In
this mode, unions volunteer to carry the corporations’ water. Go
straight to the source, and try and prove your worth to the
corporate bosses. “If we help you, you will let us live, right?”
Everyone knows that CEOs are reasonable people, just looking
for ways to “add value” to their bottom line—and unions are just
the people to help them. This is the ideology of partnership that
has infected nearly every corner of the bureaucracy. It comes in
different flavors.
o Old School: Union leaders surrender in two ways
here:
• At American Axle the union was so timid that it
didn’t take the minimum steps necessary to
win a strike. The Canadian Auto Workers’ early
contract negotiations, before expiration, in
order to make preemptive concessions, is
another example.
• At Chrysler during the last Big Three
negotiations, union leaders put down rank-and-
file efforts to fight back.
o New School: Implicit and explicit promises are made
to employers that if the union is allowed to sign
workers up, it will help corporate profits. Not only will
the union promise not to strike and not to disparage
the company, and to keep wages down, it may also
put its political apparatus at the company’s service.
• For example, in California SEIU initially backed
legislation to make it harder for nursing home
residents to sue the homes, until their quid pro
quo with nursing home operators was
discovered and they had to disavow the deal.
• SEIU represents the vanguard of this trend,
with a well worked out and even public
rationale that sometimes dismays (and
shafts)even its Change to Win partners. SEIU
puts itself forward as fighting for all workers,
not just union members (“Justice for All”). But
the more in bed the union is with the
corporations, the less tenable that posture is.
• It is important to note that the new-school
surrender mode requires more discipline in the
union, to carry the line and to keep resistance
from breaking out. Megalocals, appointment of
local officers from above, armies of appointed
staffers, bullying, and a general corporate
modeling of union functioning are almost a
prerequisite for this survival strategy.
Can The Ranks Save Labor?
• We can’t ignore the facts. Private sector union density is as low
as it’s been in the last 100 years.
• Worse still is action where it counts – strikes and work stoppages
– face to face confrontation with the boss, wielding our
economic muscle.
o In this decade there were about 200,000 workers in any
given year idled by strikes and work stoppages.
o To put that in perspective
• 1910s 581,000
• 1930s 889,000
• 1940s to 1970s roughly 2 million
• 1980s 718,000
• 1990s 384,000
• What do ‘survival era’ politics at the top mean for rank and file
activists and our interventions in the labor movement?
• This moment coincides with the end of an arc for many of the
interventions we’ve made in the labor movement:
o New Directions in transit and various reform movements in
auto.
o Consolidation of Hoffa’s power inside the Teamsters
o We’ve also seen the disappearance of some newer reform
movements in other unions, and the immigrant rights
movement that pulled off massive marches in 2006 has
pulled back in the face of repression and political backlash.
• What does all this mean for class consciousness?
o Most workers have not had the experience of fighting back
on the job, or any experience they had was quite a long
time ago.
o The 1970s upsurge is gone, and the generation who
thought open combat with their bosses—or civil war within
their own unions—was a sensible idea are now retiring or
already gone.
• Organizing and fight-back, however, continue, whether at labor’s
grassroots or in new formations like pre-majority unions, or
workers centers.
o Rank-and-file union members and local leaders continue to
prove that the fight—on the shop floor or in the streets—is
not over and that winning is even possible.
• On May Day dock workers up and down the West
Coast shut down the ports to protest the Iraq war, a
move initiated by rank-and-file longshore workers.
• Union reformers inside the 40,000-member Los
Angeles teachers union put more than a quarter of
their membership in the street demonstrating during
 their last contract fight, winning reduced class sizes
and more control of school curriculums in some
schools. Just last month LA teachers delayed the
start of school to protest looming budget cuts, with
close to 15,000 community members joining them on
the picket lines.
• Healthcare workers from Massachusetts to California
have struck to protest mandatory overtime and
unsafe staffing levels. They have also been at the
forefront of political fights to save public hospitals in
cities like Los Angeles and Buffalo.
• A two-hour wildcat strike by 100 train dispatchers in
Fort Worth, Texas in 2005 snarled train traffic from
Seattle to Chicago, as union workers walked off the
job to protest unilateral changes to the company’s
vacation policy.
• Even after losing two organizing drives, workers
atSmithfield’s largest hog processing plant, in North
Carolina, continue to fight for a union. The primarily
African American and Latino workforce has staged
wildcat strikes and walked off the job to win the
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and workers are
waging in-plant protests in support of the union.
o Faced with intense employer opposition, some unions
forego representation elections and contracts, organizing
“non-majority” unions using Section 7 of the National Labor
Relations Act to “fight like a union” before they are
recognized or have a contract.
• Organized through Black Workers for Justice and UE
Local 150, workers at the Consolidated Diesel engine
plant in Whitakers, North Carolina, have gotten fired
workers reinstated, forced the state government and
the company to pay unemployment benefits during
slow periods, won a paid holiday for MLK Day, and
forced the company to deliver on its broken promise
to pay out more than a million dollars in bonuses.
• Philadelphia security guards, working with Jobs with
Justice, formed a non-majority union for guards at
the University of Pennsylvania and TempleUniversity,
winning paid sick days, significant raises and at U-
Penn a new building for the guards’ office. They are
now moving their organizing campaign city-wide.
• In Texas nurses are organizing non-majority unions
together with the National Nurses Organizing
Committee (the national arm of the California Nurses
Association), forming patient care committees inside
 the hospitals to fight for patients’ rights, and pushing
for a safe-staffing bill in the state legislature.
o And many entirely new workers organizations—mainly in
the form of workers centers—are sprouting up across the
country, primarily organizing immigrant workers or those in
the freewheeling segments of the service sector
(restaurant workers, domestic workers
• Some worker centers have been able to win
impressive victories against corporate behemoths,
like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who have
forced Taco Bell, then McDonalds, and now Burger
King to pay more for the tomatoes CIW members
pick.
• Others have won millions in back wages and
overtime (e.g. the New
York RestaurantOpportunities Center’s recent victory
against the Fireman Hospitality Group).
• These are organizations with strong internal political
education, typically organizing workers of color
(especially immigrant workers), and tackling the
challenge of organizing where there are large
numbers of workers in the economy overall (e.g.
restaurants and retail). They are also more
organically rooted in communities than most unions,
despite their overall small size and limited leverage
at any one workplace and their heavy reliance on
staff direction and foundation funding.
• At the same time that resistance continues so too does the
development of working class consciousness. The reality of “us”
versus “them” is still present, and if anything spreading. But
collective solutions to what are indeed collective problems don’t
seem viable, so people resort to individual solutions.
o Looking up the corporate (and social) ladder, rather than to
the people standing right beside them (going back to
college, starting own business, going into management,
making deals with supervisors).
o Taking no action on the things that outrage and disgust
them (war, healthcare, rich getting richer) because action
doesn’t seem viable.

A Bridge to Socialism?
• Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to transforming organized
labor into a true social movement. This is an essential task if
the U.S. working class has any hope of achieving its
revolutionary potential. A militant, class-conscious labor
 movement is needed if we want to reconnect the U.S. working
class to socialist politics in any large-scale fashion. (“Labor
movement” is broadly defined to include not just unions but
other kinds of workers’ organizations as well.)
• The building blocks of union transformation are no mystery:
o Struggling to defend workers’ gains against the employer
offensive.
o Expanding labor’s ranks through large-scale member-
driven organizing.
o Re-connecting labor to its community roots and linking it to
other social struggles.
o Enabling women and people of color to take the lead.
o Re-creating unions as consciously pro-immigrant, LGBTQ-
friendly, anti-racist and anti-sexist organizations.
• All of this requires breathing life into limp local unions, rebuilding
them as ‘instruments of struggle’ and equally importantly as
‘schools of democracy’ where workers become, in Marx’s words,
‘fit to rule.’
• In the here and now this requires taking unions in a different
direction. That is why we’re involved in building—or leading—
reform movements within unions. Victories, even small ones,
change consciousness, offer lessons and serve as building blocks
for further organizing and organization.
o Particularly important are winning shop floor victories—
everyday skirmishes with the boss to try to make the work
day bearable—because the workplace is typically where
class conflict is most apparent, where workers are thrown
together across racial, ethnic, and gender lines, and where
all workers have a chance to participate in struggle,
whether they are active at the union hall or not.
o The fight for union democracy has a similar long-run
impact, building the possibility for workers to look upon
unions as truly their own organizations. This sense of
ownership is a precondition for renewed engagement with
the life of the union, and a necessary condition for workers
to take the kinds of risks needed to win against today’s
aggressive employers.
• It also requires a different vision for the labor movement, which
is why we’re involved in building cross-union formations and
networks, like Jobs with Justice, Labor Notes, and the many local
variants, together with projects that expand the political and
social vision for labor— embodied in initiatives like the Labor
Party, U.S. Labor Against the War, and the myriad labor-
community and international solidarity campaigns that have
sprung up in the past two decades.
• These efforts at sparking a grassroots labor revival stand in
 sharp contrast to other alternatives. For example, Steven Lerner,
architect of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, has recently
argued that their current “Justice for All” program is much bigger
than their union, that in fact it represents a comprehensive vision
for advancing the interests of the entire working class. While
most of their goals (expanding healthcare, raising the minimum
wage, making it easier for workers to form unions) are
unobjectionable, their method for achieving these ends leaves
members largely on the sidelines, and minimizes the role of
struggle. Gains are secured from above, within the system, and
the role of the rank-and-file as the agents of their own
emancipation is short-circuited. This approach misses the critical
point that how we get where we want to go matters. It also
ignores the fact that struggle is the best school for socialism, not
just because of its transforms consciousness, but also because it
forces us to grapple with profound questions, like how to build a
democratic movement, or what change do we actually want to
see in the world.
• Our job, as always, is to engage in struggle, whether it’s fighting
over discrimination in daily job assignments, circulating a
petition, spearheading a contract fight, organizing drive, or a
strike, contesting in a union election, picketing a boss’s house, or
arguing politics. Struggle changes consciousness on a scale and
to a depth that we cannot match through any other means. It’s
also important to recognize that even in better times we lose
more fights than we win. As such, our challenge is to build
struggles which offer a greater sense of power and a deepening
sense of history and social purpose, even when we lose. Thus the
way we build fights and organizations is not predicated only on
winning a victory—though we want to win—but also on fighting in
way that means we come out the other end with more
committed fighters, a clearer sense of which side we’re on,
stronger organization, and a sense of the bigger picture
historically and socially, so that even if we lose today we are
increasing our capacity to win tomorrow.
• A socialist labor activist first and foremost is a reliable ally. We
have our co-workers’ backs in a way that inspires them to have
ours. We get to know what moves our co-workers and what gets
in their way. We experience camaraderie not as a tactic but as
part of our own survival. We know our co-workers quirks, their
warts, and their sometimes astonishing moments of bravery,
solidarity, and kindness.
• We cannot necessarily foresee the clash of forces that will spur
masses of workers into motion. What we do know is that we want
to be there when they move.
Lee Sustar, “U.S. Labor in the Crisis: Resistance
or Retreat?” [2009]
The election of Barack Obama last November seemed to promise a
new era for organized labor. With Obama in the White House and a
solid Democratic majority in Congress, it appeared that unions would
finally be able to get action on their main legislative agenda—passage
of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a measure that would make it
easier for workers to join a union. And with the world’s press gathered
outside Obama’s Chicago home during the transition period, a
victorious factory occupation at the Republic Windows and Doors plant
in that city captured the imagination of the country, and even got
some encouraging words from Obama himself. Soon afterwards,
workers at the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina
voted to unionize after more than a decade of vicious anti-union
actions by the company. Hopes were high that unions were set to go
on the offensive.

A few months later, the picture is quite different. The chances for the
passage of EFCA appear bleak. The biggest union in the country, the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was embroiled in the
undemocratic takeover of its 150,000-member West Coast health care
local.1 At the same time, the SEIU intervened in the internal conflict of
another union, UNITE HERE, once its closest ally, to annex 150,000
members of a breakaway faction. The old UNITE leader, Bruce Raynor
sought refuge in the SEIU because, he claimed, the HERE side was
spending organizing money wastefully; the top HERE official, John
Wilhelm, accused Raynor of bargaining for low wages and poor working
standards, Stern style, in order to convince employers to allow
unfettered organizing. At stake is not only union jurisdiction over hotels
and casinos, but control of the only union-owned bank, the
Amalgamated Bank, which had $4.47 billion in assets in 2008.2

As a result of this internecine battle, the SEIU-dominated Change to

Win group of unions was in tatters. A 2005 split from the AFL-CIO, the
Change to Win unions had failed to deliver a promised breakthrough
for labor. Instead, it was edging toward some sort of reunification with
the labor federation—but only under pressure from the Obama
administration, which insists on the convenience of one-stop shopping
when it deals with the unions.3

1
Dan Clawson, “A battle for labor’s future,” Z Magazine, June 2009.
2
Ruby Wolf, “Civil war in UNITE HERE,” SocialistWorker.org, March 31, 2009,
socialistworker.org/2009/03/31/civil-war-in-unite-here.
3
Harold Meyerson, “Unifying unions,” Washington Post, April 7, 2009.
Certainly the Republic Windows and Doors occupation to win workers’
severance pay—and the solidarity and excitement that this action
garnered—remains an inspiration. But what followed wasn’t similar
victories, but one of the most catastrophic setbacks in the history of
the U.S. labor movement. Private employers were demanding, and
obtaining, concessions from unions in industries ranging from
newspapers to trucking companies. Even as expectations of Obama
mounted in advance of Inauguration Day, Chrysler and General Motors
were slashing jobs and gutting union contracts as they drifted toward
bankruptcy amid the worst economic slump since the Great
Depression.

It was during that 1930s crisis that the United Auto Workers (UAW)
stormed onto the scene with dramatic factory occupations led by
communists, socialists, and other radicals. Today’s UAW, though, is a
vastly different organization. It has followed its long-established
strategy of partnership with employers to an extreme conclusion by
becoming, through health-care trust funds, a major shareholder in GM
alongside the U.S. government and the majority (55 percent)
shareholder in Chrysler. To achieve this bizarre form of employee
ownership—the union trust fund will get just one seat on the company
board—the union agreed to ban strikes for six years, eliminate work
rules negotiated over decades, cut overtime pay, and further
concessions.4 The result of all this is the virtual elimination of the
difference between UAW-organized plants and nonunion ones. The
UAW, which once steadily raised the bar for wages and benefits for the
entire U.S. working class, is now leading the way down.

The driving force in obtaining these concessions is the Obama

administration, which publicly claimed that it had been tougher on the
UAW than the Bush White House.5 Rather than use the $50 billion
nationalization of GM to launch a green industrialization program, the
Obama administration wants to create a slimmed-down “new GM”
while selling off unwanted assets at fire-sale prices. This will intensify
the crisis in the auto parts industry.

Even mainstream liberal commentators were aghast at the terms of

Obama’s GM bailout. “Wouldn’t it be better to use the money to
convert GM and other declining manufacturing companies into
producing what America needs, such as light rail systems and new
energy efficient materials, and training laid-off autoworkers for the
technician jobs of the future?” said former labor secretary Robert
4
John D. Stoll and Sharon Terlep, “UAW discloses terms of GM deal,” WSJ.com, May 26, 2009.
5
“Obama administration auto restructuring initiative—General Motors restructuring,” the White House,
June 2009,www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Fact-Sheet-on-Obama-Administration-Auto-
Restructuring-Initiative-for-General-Motors/.
Reich.6 Rather than use GM to create good paying jobs, the Obama
plan will further downsize GM’s UAW. “At the end of the 1970s, when
the first round of concession bargaining began in the U.S., the UAW
had 450,000 members at GM,” wrote Sam Gindin, a former economist
for the Canadian Auto Workers:

Today, after repeated contracts that allegedly “won” job security in

exchange for workplace, wage, or benefit concessions—sold by the
union as well as the companies—the UAW’s GM membership is down to
64,000. If GM is “successful” in its current restructuring, that will be
further reduced to 40,000. Thirty years of concessions and a 90
percent loss in jobs. If ever there was a failing strategy for workers,
this was it.7

The capitulation by UAW leaders has boosted the confidence of

employers everywhere in their effort to make workers pay for the
economic crisis. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger met no
union resistance when he imposed unpaid leave on state workers,
which amounted to a 9.2 percent cut in pay. He planned to seek
another 5 percent cut as this article was being written.8 Fifteen other
state governors have made similar moves.9 And when United Teachers
Los Angeles (UTLA) dared to show resistance by organizing for a one-
day strike to protest layoffs, they were hit with a judge’s temporary
restraining order that banned the action by threatening to levy fines
that would bankrupt the union and strip the credentials of any teacher
who walked out. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the most
active of the big-city labor councils, failed to mobilize in response.10

If union leaders can see a bit of a silver lining in one of these many
ominous clouds, it’s the appointment of a pro-union member of
Congress, Hilda Solis as labor secretary.11 But that’s little
compensation for Obama’s leave-no-banker-behind economic policy.
So far, Obama’s funneled trillions in U.S. taxpayer money into
enormous bailouts for Wall Street, compared with only modest tax cuts
for workers and an economic stimulus plan that will create far fewer
jobs than the six million jobs that the recession has already

6
Robert Reich, “No reason for public involvement in GM,” Marketplace, June 1, 2009.
marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/01/pm_gm_bailout_comm/.
7
Sam Gindin, “The auto crisis: putting our own alternative on the table,” The Bullet/Socialist Project E-
Bulletin No. 200, April 9, 2009.
8
Jon Ortiz, “State pay cut likely; how it’s done is the question,” Sacramento Bee, May 31, 2009.
9
Herbert Sample, “California provides example for Hawaii plan,” Associated Press, June 3, 2009.
10
Gillian Russom and David Rapkin, “Battle intensifies in LA schools,” SocialistWorker.org, May 19,
2009, socialistworker.org/2009/05/19/battle-intensifies-in-la-schools.
11
“The labor agenda,” New York Times, December 28, 2009.
destroyed.12

Besides this immediate onslaught, the U.S. working class faces an

epochal shift as the result of three intertwined crises: a protracted
economic crisis that will lead to plant closures and layoffs
(“restructuring” in the employers’ parlance); a generational transition
in which younger workers find that decently paid union jobs held by
their parents are no longer available; and a great demographic shift in
which immigrants account for an increasing share of the working class.
Before we can assess the prospects for labor’s revival, we need to take
account of these developments and understand their economic, social,
and political implications.

Kim Moody, the veteran socialist, labor activist, and author, has made
an invaluable contribution to this task in his recent book, U.S. Labor in
Trouble and Transition. Moody argues that organized labor, already
weakened by decades of decline, has become further disoriented and
thrown onto the defensive by several trends, including an aggressive
attack on unions by Corporate America, demographic change, and a
restructuring of manufacturing around “lean production” that involved
steady job loss—not simply as a result of globalization, but through
new labor-saving technology and a shift to nonunion operations in the
U.S. South. The analysis that follows will take Moody’s work as a point
of departure.

Impact of the economic crisis

The recession—or perhaps, depression—is greatly exacerbating the

problems of the U.S. labor movement. Even as the economic downturn
began in December 2007, one labor economist pointed out that, “17.5
percent of all unemployed workers were long-term unemployed,
compared with just 11.1 percent in March 2001,” the start of the last
recession.13 And if job growth had simply kept pace with the population
increase, there would have been an additional 3.2 million more jobs in
the U.S. economy by 2008.14 Today, workers are facing what the
Economic Policy Institute calls a “jobs desert,” with joblessness at 9.4
percent in May 2009, the highest level since 1983. One in four of the
unemployed—some 3.9 million people—had been jobless for at least
six months.15
12
Shobhana Chandra, “Slower U.S. job losses signal recession is starting to ease,” Bloomberg News, June
6, 2009.
13
“Statement by Chad Stone, chief economist, on the December unemployment report,” Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, January 4, 2009.
14
Josh Bivens and John Irons, “A feeble recovery: The fundamental economic weaknesses of the 2001–07
expansion,” Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2008.
15
Heidi Shierholz, “Jobs picture,” Economic Policy Institute, June 5, 2009.
The leadership of organized labor has been unable—and in many case
unwilling—to resist job losses among unionized workers. Rather, they
have concentrated on organizing the unorganized. This led to an
increase in the numbers of workers in unions by 311,000 in 2007 and
by another 428,000 in 2008, bringing the so-called union density rate
to 12.4 percent, up from 12.0 percent in 2006.16 These gains—
especially in the context of a recession—highlight the fact that tens of
millions of workers are prepared to organize, a conclusion supported
by recent opinion polls.17

While these increases in unionization are important, the pace is far too
slow to change the balance of power between labor and capital—and
the recession and the anticipated “jobless recovery” will likely wipe out
these advances. Further, unionization is down from about 35 percent in
the mid 1950s. In the private sector, union density is just 7.5 percent,
a figure comparable to that of a century ago. Yet even these stark
numbers fail to convey the extent of labor’s crisis. Half the country’s
union members (about eight million people) live in just six states—New
York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and California. The South
remains a bastion of anti-unionism, where six states had unionization
rates below 5 percent.18

The union bureaucracy has sought to overcome its crisis through

political solutions via the Democratic Party. And unions did play a
major role in Barack Obama’s presidential victory, spending $300
million on the elections and mobilizing enormous numbers of union
staff and members.19 This led labor to look forward to the political
spoils—chiefly, the passage of EFCA. But, as usual, organized labor
badly overestimated the support of its supposed Democratic friends in
Congress and the White House. Instead of using its election field
operation to launch a campaign for EFCA, the unions pulled back just
as big business geared up.20 Nevertheless, union leaders continue to
look with hope toward the Obama administration for a political solution
to their problems—if only because they have no other strategy to deal
with the employers’ escalating demands for givebacks.

Indeed, the auto crisis is only the most egregious example of

concessions bargaining that has taken place since the onset of the

16
“Union members in 2008,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 28, 2009, 1.
17
Costas Panagopoulos and Peter L. Francia, “Labor unions in the United States,” Public Opinion
Quarterly (New York), Volume 72, Number 1, Spring 2008.
18
“Union members in 2008,” 3.
19
David Moberg, “Wooing unions for Obama,” Nation, October 13, 2008.
20
Tom Hamburger, “Labor unions find themselves card-checkmated,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2009.
recession in December 2007. For example, Teamster officials reopened
a contract at YRC, the parent company of the Yellow and Roadway
freight haulers. Union officials agreed to, and workers ratified, a 10
percent cut in pay and mileage compensation. In return, the workers
will get part ownership in the company.21 YRC’s main unionized
competitor, ABF, is expected to demand similar givebacks.

Many other companies are pressing similar demands, reported the

Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), a private research company. Other
large contracts set to expire this year include regional grocery store
agreements covering 110,000 workers. Overall, contracts covering 2.2
million private-sector workers will come up for negotiation throughout
2009.22 It should be added that most unions that took major
concessions in the last recession of 2001—such as the airlines—have
still not overcome the job losses and pay cuts that they took then.

One big showdown could come at AT&T, which demanded concessions

this spring in contracts that cover 100,000 workers. Despite $2.6 billion
in profits last year, the company recently laid off 12,000 workers. Now
management wants health-care concessions that amount to a 7 to 10
percent pay cut.23 After mobilizing for a possible strike, the CWA
allowed an April 4 contract deadline to pass without an agreement,
apparently to allow its other contracts with the company to expire to
better coordinate bargaining.

A notable exception to this concessions bargaining trend is Boeing Co.,

where a long strike by machinists last fall forced management to back
down on demands for virtually unlimited outsourcing and minor gains
on pensions.24 Boeing’s backlog of orders gave the union leverage
despite the slump. Nevertheless, the strike victory did not roll back
previous concessions on outsourcing and lower-tier pay for new
workers. Moreover, despite a huge backlog of orders for new airplanes,
the economic slump has led Boeing to announce 10,000 layoffs.25

21
“YRC Teamsters to vote on 10 percent cuts,” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, December 3,
2008, www.tdu.org/node/2571. See also John Schulz, “A YRCW-Teamsters deal reached,” Gerson
Lehrman Group, December 3, 2008,www.glgroup.com/News/
22
“Bargaining calendar is fairly light, but some early reopeners expected,” Labor Outlook 2009, Bureau of
National Affairs, January 29, 2009.
23
Randy Christensen, “CWA gets ready for a fight,” SocialistWorker.org, March 25, 2009,
socialistworker.org/2009/03/25/cwa-ready-for-a-fight.
24
Darrin Hoop, “Boeing strike ends in union win,” SocialistWorker.org, November 4, 2008,
socialistworker.org/2008/11/04/boeing-strike-ends-in-win.
25
Christopher Hinton, “Boeing plans to slash 10,000 jobs as the economy weakens,” MarketWatch,
January 28, 2009,www.marketwatch.com/story/boeing-plans-to-slash-10000-jobs-as-the-economy-
weakens.
Meanwhile, in the public-sector, recession-driven budget cuts are
leading to layoffs and aggressive management demands at the
bargaining table. In New York City, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg
has extracted $400 million in health-care concessions from public-
sector unions as he pushes to eliminate 2,000 jobs.26 New York
governor David Paterson, a Democrat, backed off a plan to lay off
9,000 state workers, will eliminate 7,000 union jobs through buyouts
and attrition, and reduce workers’ retirement benefits.27 Across the
Hudson River, yet another Democrat, New Jersey governor Jon Corzine,
also used the threat of layoffs to get state workers’ unions to agree to
an eighteen-month wage freeze and ten unpaid furlough days, a
giveback worth $304 million.28 Across the country, in Washington
State, Governor Christine Gregoire, another Democrat, submitted a
budget that eliminates funds for pay raises that the state had
previously negotiated with unions.29 There are similar examples from
other states.

Organized labor’s failure to resist concessions has lowered the living

standard of all workers. According to the BNA’s Wage Trend Index,
annual wage growth in 2009 will be about 2 percent, as the economy
will “eliminate any ability for the vast majority of workers to negotiate
higher wages,” said Kathryn Kobe, the economist who worked on the
report.30

The recession will accelerate the transformation of the U.S. into a low-
wage economy—a trend that is already far advanced. As the New York
Times’ Louis Uchitelle wrote last year:

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle

of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more
than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a
marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction…. The decline
is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly
workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since
1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.31

What’s more, household income was propped up only because of the

26
Paul von Zielbauer, “City labor unions agree to reductions in health benefits,” New York Times, June 3,
2009.
27
“Unions, Paterson reach agreement to avoid mass layoffs,” Albany Business Review, June 5, 2009.
28
“Corzine, union deal avoids layoffs,” Associated Press, June 4, 2009.
29
Adam Wilson, “State wins union lawsuit: Gregoire can shelve contracts, judge says,” Seattle Times,
February 12, 2009.
30
“Slowdown in rate of wage growth to continue, BNA index shows,” Bureau of National Affairs, January
15, 2009,www.bna.com/press/2009/specialreports/wtijan09.htm.
31
Louis Uchitelle, “The wage that meant middle class,” New York Times, April 20, 2008.
increasing role of women in the workforce—that is, it took two (or
more) incomes to achieve the living standards that one wage earner
could have supported previously.

As the Economic Policy Institute noted with the release of the State of
Working America 2008/2009,

although the economy has expanded by 18 percent since 2000,

most Americans’ household income does not reflect that growth.
Quite the opposite: real income for the median family fell by 1.1
percent from 2000–2006. A small increase in the median family’s
hourly wages (1 percent) was more than wiped out by the 2.2
percent drop in annual work hours. Moreover, whatever wage
growth occurred since 2000 was based on the momentum from
the 1990s recovery—wages did not improve at all over the 2002–
07 recovery.32

As measured in today’s dollars, the State of Working America authors

note, “from 1979 to 2007, wages are up only slightly, from $16.88 in
1979 to $17.42 in 2007, a growth of just 0.1 percent per year over
nearly 30 years—virtually stagnant, despite some rapid growth in the
late 1990s.”33

In the recovery of the 2000s, the share of national income going to

profits reached a forty-year high. This change in the distribution of
national income, the authors’ estimate, is “the equivalent of
transferring $206 billion annually from labor compensation to capital
income.”34

For African Americans, as always in U.S. capitalism, the system is

qualitatively worse, owing to the legacy of slavery and the persistence
of racial discrimination. The Black jobless rate in May 2009 hit 14.9
percent.35 If there is still a controversy among economists whether to
call this downturn a recession or depression, in Black America there’s
no debate.

In short, U.S. workers are experiencing a rapid and sharp drop in

income, employment, and living standards, with slim opportunities for
improvement in the foreseeable future. This will have far-reaching
social and political consequences. The aim here is to try and frame

32
“For most, economy yields more of less,” Economic Policy Institute press release, August 28,
2008,www.stateofworkingamerica.org/news/swa08_pr_final.pdf.
33
Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009
(Washington: Economic Policy Institute 2008, advance PDF edition), Chapter 3, 12.
34
Mishel, et al, State of Working America, Chapter 3, 42.
35
Shierholz, “Jobs picture.”
some of the questions facing the labor movement that will arise from
this crisis.

The one-sided class war

The 1960s and 1970s are remembered as the heyday of the civil rights
and antiwar movements. But it was also a time of worker rebellions in
the “basic industries” of auto, steel, and coal mining as well trucking.
Much of a revived revolutionary left threw itself into union organizing.
Then came the PATCO strike of 1981. President Ronald Reagan used
the full power of the state not only to replace 11,000 striking air traffic
controllers, but also to obliterate their union. The signal to employers
was clear: It was open season on unions, and “concessions
bargaining”—negotiations in which unions surrendered pay and
benefits—became the norm.36

The obliteration of PATCO also encouraged further government

intervention in strikes, from routine injunctions limiting picket lines to
violence by police deployed to protect strikebreakers. The National
Guard was used to violently break strikes by Arizona copper miners in
1983 and Minnesota meatpackers in UFCW Local P-9 in their heroic
1985–86 strike against wage cuts.37 A decade later, striking newspaper
unions in Detroit abided by court injunctions and violent police tactics
that shut down effective, militant mass pickets during the opening
weeks of the long Detroit newspaper strikes.38 In January 2000, South
Carolina state troopers attacked a picket line in Charleston, S.C., which
led to five longshore workers being placed under house arrest for more
than a year until a solidarity campaign forced charges to be dropped.39

The heavy hand of the state ensured that most picket lines would
remain symbolic rather than active attempts to stop production, as

36
Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition (London and New York:
Verso, 2007), 108–10.
37
For excellent accounts of these struggles, see Jonathan D. Rosenblum, How
the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in
America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Peter Rachleff,
Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor
Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
38
James Bennet, “After 7 weeks, Detroit newspaper strike takes a violent turn,”
New York Times, September 6, 1995.
39
The story is told by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger, On the Global
Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2008).
they had been in the militant struggles of the 1930s. Striking unions
adopted the slogan, “one day longer” to show their willingness to
outlast employers. Workers sacrificed enormously in what were often
valiant, but losing, battles, such as the Illinois “War Zone” struggles at
food processor A.E. Staley, heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, and
tire maker Bridgestone/Firestone.40

The big exception to this pattern is the victorious 1997 Teamsters

strike at UPS—a big employer was caught flat-footed by workers’
solidarity and widespread pro-union sentiment. UPS could make no
serious attempt at strikebreaking. But UPS was able to use its political
connections to mount a campaign against then-Teamster president
Ron Carey, who was elected on a reform slate. In the months after the
strike government overseers of the union removed Carey from office
for campaign violations by his staff, even though Carey, who passed
away recently, was later cleared of all wrongdoing in federal court.41

In the post–PATCO labor movement, the heaviest judicial hammer has

come down on Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, which
represents 38,000 bus and subway workers in New York City. In 1999,
a judge put in place an injunction in which fines of $25,000 for strikers
and $1 million against the union would double each day of the strike.
After the union did walk out for sixty hours in 2005, a judge imposed a
fine of $2.5 million on the local, banned the automatic deduction of
union dues from workers’ paychecks, and ordered the brief jailing of
union president Roger Toussaint.42 Local 100—already weakened by
ex-reformer Toussaint’s high-handed administration—has yet to
recover.43 The New York injunctions were apparently the template for
the judge who banned the planned one-day strike by L.A. teachers.
This hard line recalls the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when unions routinely faced “injunction judges,” violent attacks on
picket lines by police and armed forces, and naked class justice.

In this environment, unions have all but abandoned the strike as a

weapon. In 2008, there were just fifteen work stoppages involving
1,000 or more workers, compared to 424 in 1974. In the last two

40
See Steven K. Ashby and C.J. Hawking, Staley: The Fight for a New
American Labor Movement (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2009).
41
Joe Allen, “Remembering Ron Carey,” SocialistWorker.org, December 16, 2008,
socialistworker.org/2008/12/16/remembering-ron-carey.
42
Steve Downs, Hell on Wheels: The Success and Failure of Reform in Transport Workers Union Local
100 (Detroit: Solidarity, 2008), 20, 45.
43
Amy Muldoon, “Taking back the TWU,” (Interview with Marvin Holland), SocialistWorker.org, May
15, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/05/15/taking-back-the-twu.
decades, there have never been more than fifty-one such work
stoppages in a given year.44 Less union militancy led directly to
organizational decline, Moody writes:

[Unions] grew when they fought for something and in particular, as in

the 1960s and early 1970s, when they fought to sustain or increase
power in the workplace. These days, the notion that growth and
militancy have any connection, except possibly a negative one, is
angrily dismissed by precisely those who lay the greatest claim to
strategies for growth…above all…the SEIU.45

A bureaucratic solution to union decline?

Labor’s long crisis led to the victory of John Sweeney’s New Voices
team, which took over the AFL-CIO in 1995. Sweeney’s team gave a
liberal makeover to the stodgy Cold War federation apparatus, and
promised a labor renewal. (Under Sweeney there was also a
repackaging of, but not a fundamental change in, the AFL-CIO’s largely
government-funded foreign policy operation, notorious for its
collaboration with the CIA.46 That, however, is beyond the scope of this
article.)

To survive, Sweeney’s AFL-CIO developed a strategy with four basic

elements: (1) encourage mergers with other unions to compensate for
shrinking membership; (2) organize in industries that cannot be
shipped overseas, such as in health care, hotels, and construction; (3)
collaborate with management to try and gain employers’ neutrality in
union elections; and (4) pour big money and member activism into
electing a Democratic president and Congress in the hope of prolabor
legislation.

This approach is pursued by both the AFL-CIO, the historic national

labor federation, and the Change to Win (CTW) coalition, which broke
away in 2005. It’s a perspective that fits the needs of the top levels of
the union bureaucracy. The top union officialdom functions as a buffer
between capital and labor, and, in the U.S., most embrace that role
enthusiastically. Far removed from the shop floor (if they ever worked
there at all—many are lifetime staffers), leading U.S. union officials
have a lifestyle and social connections that tie them more closely to
management and politicians than to the rank and file. While crises and
splits in the union hierarchy can open the door to reform candidates
44
“Major work stoppages in 2008,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 11, 2009.
45
Moody, 101.
46
Kim Scipes, “An unholy alliance,” Znet, July 10,
2005,www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/5864.
and pressure from the membership, the union bureaucracy will at best
vacillate unless pressed forward by rank-and-file action.

And that’s exactly what today’s union leaders are keen to prevent.
While their methods differ, both the UAW’s Ron Gettelfinger in the AFL-
CIO and SEIU president Andrew Stern in Change to Win have
essentially the same goal: create a union machine that is
unaccountable to, and impregnable against, the rank and file. Stern’s
method is to create gigantic “locals,” often more than 100,000 workers
that span one or more states, run by people who were appointed or
installed through electoral maneuvers orchestrated by union
headquarters.47 In this way, Stern, argues, SEIU can have the clout to
force employers into neutrality agreements. Yet this has most often
involved top-down organizing in which the workers are passive, even
unknowing, recipients of union membership.48

Stern’s scorched-earth effort to destroy the opposition-controlled

United Health Care Workers-West with dismemberment and
trusteeship is only the biggest and crudest expression of the
authoritarian rule that has become the norm in SEIU. Stern’s
authoritarianism was on display in April when hundreds of SEIU
members were sent to physically attack the Labor Notes union activist
conference outside Detroit as part of a dispute with the California
Nurses Association (CNA).49 Stern called off the dogs a year later and
made peace with the CNA and its affiliate, the National Nurses
Organizing Committee, which led to trades of members in Nevada
hospitals, a move that, as union democracy organizer Herman Benson
put it, left “nurses on both sides feeling like bartered chips.” This, in
turn, was part of a complex regroupment of the CNA and registered
nurses into a new 185,000-member union affiliated with the AFL-CIO.50

The SEIU’s deal with the CNA wasn’t a case of Stern turning
softhearted, however. The deal preempted an emerging alliance
between the nurses’ union and the new National Union of Healthcare
Workers (NUHW), which was founded by leaders and members of the
SEIU’s United Health Care Workers-West after the local was put into
trusteeship by the SEIU International.51 In any case, the seamy side of
Stern’s regime came to light, as corruption scandals took down two
important union leaders in Southern California and another in
47Steve Early, Embedded with Organized Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 218–24.
48
Brian Cruz and Larry Bradshaw, “Roots of the crisis in the SEIU,” SocialistWorker.org, April 25, 2008,
socialistworker.org/2008/04/25/roots-crisis-seiu.
49
Ibid.
50
Herman Benson, “Nurses now for sale, barter and trade,” Union Democracy Review, March–April
2009.
51
Randy Shaw, “The shocking SEIU-CNA alliance,” BeyondChron, March 21, 2009.
Michigan.52

In defense of these organizing methods, Stern and his supporters claim

that workers are more interested in power than democracy.53 It’s true
that SEIU has had major success in organizing mostly immigrant
janitors after achieving a breakthrough in Los Angeles in the early
1990s. But as Moody points out, the L.A. janitors’ real wages fell by
around 10 percent over the course of two consecutive five-year
contracts.54 More recently, the SEIU policy of “bargaining to organize”
has led to strict limits on traditional union workers’ rights, including the
right to speak out on bad conditions in nursing homes. The agreements
also included a low wage increase and bans on strikes.55 In Stern’s
eyes, the crime of Sal Roselli, who was then president of the SEIU’s
United Heathcare Workers-West, was to resist such deals and
challenge the SEIU’s approach to partnership.56 Now head of the new
National Union of Healthcare Workers, Roselli has the support of tens
of thousands of SEIU members, most of whom, for the moment, are
legally prevented from joining the new union, which calls for a fighting,
democratic labor movement.57

For his part, the UAW’s Gettelfinger is also seeking ways to preserve
the bureaucracy by making it as independent from the rank and file as
possible. The means to do so was to be the retiree health-care trust
fund handed over to the union by GM, Chrysler, and Ford under the
terms of the last contract. Now that those funds give the union
ownership stakes in GM and Chrysler, the union itself will be the
enforcer of harsh working conditions, lower-tier pay, and a ban on
strikes.

Of course, unaccountability and hostility to rank-and-file militancy have

long been the norm in the U.S. labor bureaucracy. But Stern and
Gettelfinger have pushed bureaucratic control to new extremes. Their
argument to the rest of the labor movement is that the union
machinery must do whatever it takes to survive. In this view, unions
must help make employers profitable and minimize, if not eliminate,
union democracy in order to permit leaders to make difficult,
unpopular decisions. This will allow the unions to survive and rebuild a
new base among different sections of workers in nonunion industries.

52
Paul Pringle, “SEIU spending scandal spreads to Michigan,” Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2008.
53
Sustar, “Behind the UNITE HERE merger,” Socialist Worker, July 23, 2004.
54
Moody, 195.
55
Brian Cruz, “Will SEIU obliterate a California local?” SocialistWorker.org, January 9, 2009,
socialistworker.org/2009/01/09/will-seiu-obliterate-a-local.
56
Mark Brenner, “Trusteeship looms for dissident SEIU local,” Labor Notes, February 2009.
57
Clawson, “A battle for labor’s future.”
Moody calls Stern’s program “corporate bureaucratic unionism,” a leap
beyond even the class collaboration of traditional American business
unionism.58

The rest of the union bureaucracy hasn’t gone as far in this direction as
Stern and Gettelfinger. But many union leaders would do so if they
could. Indeed, the issue in the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO had more to do
with control over money and resources than any clear-cut differences
over labor or political issues. Essentially, Stern and the leaders of the
other CTW unions—including unions of workers in health care, food,
farms, trucking-driving, and construction sectors—no longer wanted to
be dragged down by the declining manufacturing unions that remained
in the AFL-CIO. Splitting the federation didn’t resolve those issues;
neither will the proposed reunification ahead of the AFL-CIO convention
set for later this year.

Another failure for labor law reform?

Whether or not they reunite, the AFL-CIO and CTW are both focused on
trying to pass EFCA. The employers have made it clear that they will do
whatever it takes to prevent this “armageddon,” as the head of the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce called it.59 But the shift of momentum to
the employers recalls labor’s last two failed attempts to pass labor law
reform under Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill
Clinton in 1994, which went nowhere despite Democratic control of
Congress.60

Some in the labor movement have criticized EFCA as an effort to

substitute a legal mechanism for the hard work of organizing the
unorganized.61 Certainly, EFCA in itself wouldn’t overcome all the
problems that have hindered union organizing for decades:
bureaucratic, top-down methods that use arbitrary checklists and
timelines rather than cultivating and encouraging rank-and-file
militants over the long term; jurisdictional disputes that pit rival unions
against one another as they compete for “hot” shops; and a reluctance
to use job actions and other militant tactics to pressure employers.

Jerry Tucker, a former UAW regional director from the New Directions
reform caucus and a leading labor activist, argues that EFCA won’t
automatically make it easier to organize unions. “I would take it back

58
Moody, 196–97.
59
Steven Greenhouse, “After push for Obama, unions seek new rules,” New York Times, November 9,
2008.
60
Sustar, “A new labor movement?” International Socialist Review, Issue 1, Summer 1997.
61
Mishel, et al, The State of Working America.
to labor’s culture,” he says, “its actual activity and what it represents
to workers. Organized labor doesn’t represent a movement at this
point that workers can attach themselves to—where they feel a certain
sense of upsurge or upward momentum.”62 Moreover, EFCA wouldn’t
necessarily lead to the kind of strategic focus needed to rebuild the
U.S. labor movement. Crucially, no union has been willing to commit
the resources necessary to organize (or reorganize) the critical supply
chains of trucks, trains, and warehouses that are integral to today’s
just-in-time production methods. (The failure of the Teamsters’ poorly
planned and ineptly run 1999-2002 strike for unionization at the
Overnite trucking company—now UPS Freight—highlighted this
failure.)63

The most import thing about EFCA or similar legislation is that it could
reinforce the idea that there’s a federally protected right for workers to
organize. As in the 1930s, when organizers used New Deal legislation
to claim “your president wants you to join a union,” today’s union
officials and rank-and-file activists could use EFCA to encourage
workers to be confident to organize. They can use Barack Obama’s
own words as justification.64 The United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW) took an important step in this direction when it used the EFCA
debate to relaunch its effort to organize Wal-Mart.

But even the best labor law reforms won’t overcome the crisis of
organized labor. As U.S. labor history demonstrates, unionization has
increased not in small increments, but in great upsurges of struggle, as
in the 1930s.

Immigration and the unions

Amid the latest escalation of the employers’ relentless war on labor

there are also signs of the possibility of renewal. On May 1, 2006,
millions of immigrants and their supporters marched in cities across
the U.S. against proposed federal legislation that would have
criminalized the estimated 12 to 14 million undocumented people in
the United States. In response, immigrant labor took to the streets. As
Moody points out, companies in industries heavily dependent on

62
Sustar, “What can turn labor in a new direction?”, (Interview with Jerry Tucker), SocialistWorker.org,
April 11, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/04/11/turn-labor-new-direction.
63
Tom Leedham, “The road ahead runs through UPS Freight,” TDU.org,
March 16, 2006, www.tdu.org/node/153.
64
Sustar, “A new battle over the right to organize,” SocialistWorker.org,
November 21, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/11/21/battle-over-right-to-
organize.
immigrant labor—from the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach truck
drivers to meatpackers to textiles and landscaping services—were shut
down for the day, demonstrating the power of immigrant labor in those
sectors.65 These actions revived May Day, International Labor Day, in
the country where it began during the struggle for the eight-hour day
in 1886. The marches were won of the biggest displays of workers’
power seen in the U.S. in many years.

The impact of the immigrant rights demonstrations underscored big

demographic changes in the U.S. population—especially in the working
class. Moody sees the new prominence of immigrant labor as evidence
of a third great demographic transformation in the U.S. working class,
following the earlier wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth
century and the changes wrought in the mid-twentieth century by the
mass African American migration into the cities, the North, and
industry, and the large-scale entry of women into the workforce. Each
of these changes posed challenges to organized labor, which
sometimes rose to the occasion (uniting white and African American
workers in the old CIO mass production industries, for example) but
often did not. Today, he notes, “immigrants are already attempting to
organize in a variety of ways. The question is, are the strategies and
structures of today’s unions fit for the job?”66

To be sure, many unions, especially the SEIU and UNITE HERE, have for
many years sought to organize immigrant workers. Those efforts
resulted in a historic policy shift in the AFL-CIO in 2000, when the
union’s executive council voted to call for amnesty for undocumented
workers. This is a big break with the past, when most unions saw
immigrant labor as a threat and supported restrictions on immigration.
In 2003, the HERE union of hotel workers helped organize “Immigrant
Freedom Rides” across the U.S., linking the historic struggle of African
Americans for civil rights to immigrants’ willingness to struggle.67

But even as the immigrant rights movement erupted in 2006, labor

became consumed in a debate over whether to support employer
programs for a guest-worker program. The SEIU and UNITE HERE
favored this approach, collaborating with employer organizations to
advance the agenda; the AFL-CIO opposed it.68 It wasn’t until President
Obama began pushing for immigration reform legislation that the AFL-
CIO and the Change to Win federations agreed on an approach that
opposes guest-worker programs and proposes a national commission

65
Moody, 211–12.
66
Ibid., 78.
67
Alan Maass, “Freedom ride for immigrant rights,” Socialist Worker, October 3, 2003.
68 Sustar, “Labor and immigration,” Socialist Worker, May 5, 2006.
to decide on future levels of immigration of permanent and temporary
workers.69

This is a step forward from supporting guest workers, even if it fails to

live up the AFL-CIO amnesty position of 2000. But the unions are still
far from coming to grips with the changes that immigration has
brought to the U.S. working class—and the potential to organize in a
radically different way. In the big May Day marches of 2006 and 2007
in Chicago, for example, unions easily could have passed out flyers
announcing informational meetings in immigrant neighborhoods in and
around the city to explain how the marchers could unionize their
workplaces. The self-organization that enabled uncounted numbers of
workers to negotiate with bosses for time off—or together plan not to
show up—could have been the starting point for workplace
organization.

However, most union officials, locked into the narrowest cost-benefit

analysis of organizing, simply couldn’t grasp the fact that immigrant
workers were willing and able to organize themselves. Other union
officials may have understood that potential—but were unwilling or
unable to give their full backing to a movement that was beyond their
control.

Organize the South—or die

A key focus of Moody’s U.S. Labor in Trouble is the shift in production

to the South. While there certainly has been a shift in jobs overseas,
the numbers are questionable, Moody points out, because much of the
job loss is the result of technological change that makes a smaller
number of workers vastly more productive. As a result, even though
the number of manufacturing workers in the U.S. now stands at 12.3
million—a drop of 5 million over the past decade70—the U.S. remains a
fundamentally industrial economy: “the ratio of service output to
goods and structures, as the government measures these, has not
changed much in almost half a century…. The industrial core remains
the sector on which the majority of economic activity is dependent.
Hence it is the power center of the system.”71

The continued centrality of production could allow U.S. manufacturing

unions to retain their clout, despite job losses. But the unions have not
only failed to maintain wages and conditions in their historic bastions,

69
Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse, “Immigration accord by labor boosts Obama effort,” New York
Times, April 14, 2009.
70
“Unemployed exceed manufacturing jobs,” Manufacturing & Technology News, April 17 2009.
71
Moody, 39.
they’ve been unable to follow work into nonunion facilities, particularly
the South. Here labor is paying a steep price for its historic failure to
confront racism directly during the era of Jim Crow segregation. In the
late 1940s, the old CIO’s Operation Dixie organizing drive was stillborn
as Southern employers used both racism and anticommunism to attack
any and all efforts to organize Black and white workers. “Only a
confrontation,” writes labor historian Sharon Smith, “with Southern
white supremacy could have paved the way for organizing success.”
But the CIO at that time was busy purging and raiding the left-led
unions that were willing to take on that challenge, and its support for
the Democratic Party made it incapable of challenging the party’s
segregationist Southern wing.72

As a result, in the postwar era the South became an attractive locale

for both U.S. and foreign capital. The region has become home to most
of the auto “transplants” owned by German and Japanese companies,
all of which are nonunion despite repeated efforts by the UAW to
organize workers. The picture is similar in other industries: by 2000, 30
percent of manufacturing jobs were in the South.73

Even where labor has made inroads in the South, the unions’ pursuit of
corporate partnership and aversion to rank-and-file activism has been
ill-suited to the fierce resistance they’ve encountered. A particularly
telling example of this is the struggle of the Freightliner Five, leaders of
a UAW local at truck plant in North Carolina. When the workers led a
brief strike in April 2007, they were fired. Four of the workers had been
leaders of the organizing committee that helped compel the company
to recognize the UAW a few years earlier. Yet rather than defend these
militant, diverse leaders—three of the workers are Black, one is a
woman—the UAW excluded them from membership by the union local
president. Two got their jobs and union memberships restored in
arbitration.74

An important exception to labor’s losing streak in the South was the

UFCW’s organizing campaign at the huge Smithfield pork processing
plant in Tar Heel, N.C. Despite years of setbacks through company
violations of union election laws, firings of union militants, and general
repression—including an in-plant jail—the union prevailed. Key to this
was outreach through workers’ centers to both immigrant and African-
American employees, and on-the-job organizing that made the union’s
presence felt. Long before the union officially won the right to
represent employees, the union became a resource for immigrant
72Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2006) 189–92; 197–98.
73
Moody, 45.
74
Sustar, “Split ruling for Freightliner Five,” Socialist Worker, November 7, 2008.
workers coping with the threat—or reality—of job loss and deportation
by supporting a walkout against a raid. For Black workers, the union
was key to the successful fight to win Martin Luther King Day as a paid
holiday.75

Reviving social movement and class-struggle unionism

The Smithfield victory provides a glimpse of how labor can win even
against a hostile employer. But labor’s unwillingness to embrace social
movement unionism—among immigrant workers and in general—
highlights the larger reasons behind the unions’ repeated failure to
organize the unorganized. As Kim Moody explained:

While the blame for so many not getting a chance to choose a

union lies heavily with the employers and a broken [National
Labor Relations Board], the labor leadership must take a good
deal of collective responsibility. This isn’t just the lack of
organizing effort by many unions, but the long-standing, top-
down business union practices (or worse) of most of those who
are organizing in the private sector. You can’t be a union
member unless you are, or are about to be, part of a recognized
bargaining unit. You can’t even be part of an organizing drive
these days unless your employer was targeted by the strategists
at union HQ. If you are part of an organizing effort that fails (by
card check or election) you’re out. If the union wins recognition
but fails to get a first contract and gets decertified, you’re out
even if you voted to keep the union. All of these practices are
self-imposed, none are required by law. There are a handful of
unions that are now practicing non-majority unionism, such as
the UE and CWA. And the AFL-CIO and some unions have given a
measure of recognition to worker centers and immigrant
workers. But most top union leaders don’t want members or
allies who aren’t under their control. This needs to change.76

The example of UE should be emphasized. Once the largest union in

the old Congress of Industrial Organizations founded in the 1930, it
was decimated in the late 1940s and 1950s by a series of splits and
raids orchestrated by rival unions because of its left-wing leadership
that included members of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, UE has
survived as a small but vigorous independent national union of about
35,000 members, one that has in recent decades focused heavily on
immigrant workers.77
75
David Bacon, “Unions come to Smithfield,” American Prospect, December 17, 2008.
76
Kim Moody, “A few additional thoughts on the new situation,” contribution to the Center for Labor
Renewal listserve, November 23, 2008.
77
Jim Wrenn, “UE ‘non-majority’ union organizes the old-fashioned way,” Labor Notes, August 2002;
UE’s militant and democratic approach to trade unionism was
vindicated in December 2008 during the successful six-day occupation
at the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago. The
occupation was organized by workers to demand severance pay after
the company announced that the business was closing its doors.
Overnight, a factory occupation—something usually reserved for labor
history books on the 1930s and nostalgic speeches at union
conventions—became a focal point for working-class resistance amid a
profound economic crisis. The widespread attention to the fight even
inspired a California “green” window manufacturer to buy the plant,
with plans to hire most, if not all, Republic workers.78

That militancy didn’t develop overnight. Republic workers had

decertified two conservative and corrupt unions before joining UE in
order to build a fighting, democratic union. Those years of struggle laid
the basis for the battle of December 2008. By day three of the
occupation, the importance of this fight was clear to millions of working
people across the United States. “This is the end of an era in which
corporate greed is the rule,” said James Thindwa, executive director of
Chicago Jobs with Justice. “This is the start of something new.”79

Crucially, the Republic workers—most of them Latino immigrants, a

minority African Americans—became the faces and voices of the U.S.
working class as it faced the worst economic slump in seventy years.
At a spirited December 9 rally of several hundred outside the occupied
plant, UE Local 110 President Armando Robles got an especially loud
cheer when he declared, “We are America,” a popular slogan from the
immigrant marches of 2006. This time, it was a reference to the entire
working-class majority in the United States.80

Rebuilding the labor movement in a changing working class

Does the Republic Windows workers’ victory represent, to borrow the

overused cliché from the business press, the first “green shoots” of a
recovery for labor? Or will the UAW’s epic collapse foreshadow yet
another series of retreats and defeats for the unions? Can the
independent National Union of Healthcare Workers establish a model of
Steve Bader, “Pre-majority” public workers union makes gains in North Carolina,” Labor Notes,
September 2002.
78
“Chicago window factory reopens with occupying workers back on the job,” Democracy Now! May 15,
2009,www.democracynow.org/2009/5/15/chicago_window_factory_re_opens_with.
79
Sustar, “A rallying point for labor,” SocialistWorker.org, December 8, 200,
socialistworker.org/2008/12/08/rallying-point-for-labor.
80
Sustar, “Republic workers target Bank of America,” SocialistWorker.org, December 10, 2008,
socialistworker.org/2008/12/10/workers-target-bank-of-america.
democratic, member-driven, militant unionism? Or will the SEIU’s
corporate-style gigantism predominate, as shrinking unions seek
mergers for survival in a perverse realization of the old Industrial
Workers of the World dream of creating “one big union?”

These questions can only be answered in the struggles of the months

and years ahead. But what is already clear is that the depth and length
of the economic crisis means that organized labor will have to fight like
hell to just to keep its ground, let alone advance. But reviving class-
struggle unionism—to use another term from labor’s past—will be a
painstaking task. Complicating the process is the fact that the
generation that led the last wave of labor resistance in the 1970s is
nearing retirement or is out of the workforce already due to job loss.
And given the low level of union struggle since PATCO, a younger
generation has little or no experience of unions as fighting
organizations. As some academic labor relations experts noted, “the
reduction of strike activity has created an environment in which the
general public, and perhaps some union members have little
conception of what a strike is or does.”81

Resistance, nevertheless, continues. Crisis-driven government budget

cuts in the months and years ahead makes public-sector strikes in
particular more likely. Teachers are in the crosshairs, as the crisis
combines with the “school reform” agenda to give school boards
additional leverage to attack seniority, impose merit pay, and create
nonunion charter schools. Private employers too are using the crisis to
push for givebacks that finally forces a showdown, as several long,
recent strikes, such as the one at the Stella D’oro bakery in New York
City.82

The potential for a labor victory that could change the dynamics is
there. Certainly the Los Angeles political establishment was relieved at
the judge’s order that banned a teachers’ strike, lest it become a
popular rallying point for working people fed up with attacks on the
education of working-class kids.

Other elements of labor revival may well come outside the established
unions altogether. Moody calls attention to the network of workers’
centers that meet the needs of nonunion workers, often immigrants, to
help pursue wage-and-hours claims and assert their legal rights. He
also points to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the organization of
81
Paul F. Clark, John T. Delany and Ann C. Frost, “Private sector collective bargaining: Is this the end or
the beginning” in Clark et al (eds.), Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press,
2003), 4.
82
Jessica Carmona-Baez, “Stakes get higher at Stella D’oro,” SocialistWorker.org, June 4, 2009,
socialistworker.org/2009/06/04/stakes-get-higher-stella-doro.
nonunion immigrant tomato-pickers who waged a successful campaign
to force Taco Bell, the corporate customer for their tomatoes, to pay a
higher price to finance higher workers’ wages. McDonald’s surrendered
next.83 To this list could be added the Starbucks Workers Union (SWU),
a project of the IWW. Although it lacks formal collective bargaining
rights and represents workers in a relative handful of stores, the SWU
has, through tenacious organizing, made gains on the job, reversed
firings of union activists, and won precedent-setting cases before the
National Labor Relations Board.84

These creative efforts highlight the possibility for new organizing. Yet
there also needs to be a strategic focus to rebuilding the unions in the
heart of production and distribution. For it is there that workers have
the greatest leverage to reverse the decline of their class and begin to
make gains.

This point is rightly emphasized by Moody. He points out that the lean
production system—minimizing inventories, for example—has created
several choke points for U.S. industry. To rebuild their muscle, unions
must reconquer, or conquer anew, lost ground in the ports, on trucks,
in the warehouses and on the railways. At the same time, unions have
to finally make the commitment to organize Southern industry, a task
that will require an explicit commitment to fighting racism, long-term
preparation, and, ultimately, courageous actions that draw upon the
traditions of the civil rights movement. Opposition to racism will be
essential in efforts to both organize immigrant workers and serve as
their advocates amid xenophobic attacks from the right as it seeks
scapegoats for the current crisis.

Entering such battles will require a kind of politics very different from
that put forward by union officials, who typically follow the dominant
trends inside the Democratic Party. What’s needed is independent
working-class politics. This doesn’t mean prematurely declaring the
existence of a workers’ party, but rather building on the basis of
political independence of the working class. This will necessarily be a
long-term project, one that applies the lessons of labor’s largely buried
radical history to new conditions.

For that reason, the new debate on socialism in U.S. politics should be
taken up inside the labor movement. While socialism re-entered
political discussion as a right-wing epithet for Barack Obama’s policies,
83
Moody, 219–20; Helen Redmond, “McDonald’s caves to farmworkers,” Socialist Worker, April 20,
2007.
84 Adam Turl, “Standing up to Starbucks,” SocialistWorker.org, April 17, 2009,

socialistworker.org/2009/04/17/standing-up-to-starbucks.
there is a genuine interest in socialism as an alternative to today’s
crisis-ridden system. Left-wing labor activists should seize the moment
to bring socialist politics into the workplace—not only as a vision of a
more egalitarian and democratic society in the future, but as a way to
inform how workers organize and fight today.

To be effective militants today, union activists need to assimilate the

lessons of previous generations of socialists who rejected labor-
management partnership and promoted class-struggle, social-
movement unionism. It was those socialists, communists, and other
militants, not the established union leaders, who led the battles that
transformed the U.S. labor movement. The 1934 general strikes in
Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco and the sit-down strikes in auto
and other industries a few years later couldn’t have happened without
that rank-and-file upsurge. The expansion of public-sector unionism in
the 1960s couldn’t have been achieved without the civil rights and
Black Power struggles that involved and inspired millions of African-
American workers.

In today’s crisis, as Sam Gindin argues, the survival of organized labor

—let alone its revival—will require bold new approaches:

This is an historic moment that challenges us to think big or

suffer even worse defeats. Faced with immediate needs, workers
and their union have too often shied away from taking on larger
issues of social change that seemed too abstract, too distant, too
intimidating. The lesson however is that if we only focus on the
immediate, the options we have are always limited. We are all
now paying the price of that failure to think bigger…. In this
context, what is truly unrealistic is not new options, but the
notion that stumbling through the present crisis will preserve
past gains or bring new security.85

Where and when the next upsurge will come is impossible to predict.
But with capitalism in a protracted crisis—and the system more
discredited than in any time in decades—the conditions for a fightback
are developing. And despite the catastrophe in the auto industry and
the seemingly endless stream of bad news for workers, the Republic
Windows and Doors victory points the way towards a renewed, fighting
labor movement. Melvin “Ricky” Maclin, vice president of UE Local
1110, spoke for millions of workers the night that the Republic workers
won:

I feel wonderful. I feel validated as a human being. Everybody is

so overjoyed. This is significant because it shows workers

85
Gindin, “Auto crisis.”
 everywhere that we do have a voice in this economy. Because
we’re the backbone of this country. It’s not the CEOs. It’s the
working people.86

86
Sustar, “Victory at Republic.”
Erin Small, “Feminism At Work”
As feminists we often focus our attention on the effects gender
inequality has on women. And while this inequality still exists and
requires our unwavering attention, as socialist feminists we also focus
on the effect this inequality has on our ability to organize a class
conscious movement, where our differences do not impede our ability
to act collectively against capital.

I have been a committed feminist since early in life, but these politics
were reinvigorated when I began working as a technician in a
predominantly male workplace. Being a feminist in theory is much
different than being a feminist when some guy is shaking the 18-foot
extension ladder you are working on; it requires a different relationship
to your goals.

In my early years, though I did face real material struggles, my

feminism was largely ideological, for me it took place in arguments and
was often about being right. In my work as a rank-and-file activist, my
socialist feminism has become more defined and concrete. It is about
building solidarity among my coworkers which is not only “right” but
also actively builds the kind of solidarity it takes to enforce and
reproduce socialist-feminist politics.

It means, for example, confronting the ladder shaker but also building
a network of fellow activists who simultaneously confront the ladder
shaker and make it impossible for other ladder shakers to do their
thing without answering to the collective.

Approaching organizing in the workplace this way is an essentially

socialist-feminist strategy: 1) understanding that gender does not only
happen when sexism or heterosexism happens but in every moment
that adherence to gender roles trumps class solidarity; 2)
understanding gender and the ways it is used to organize society and
the work we do; 3) understanding that gender is not only about liberal
demands for individual equality but also about radically redefining the
potential for individuals to be fully liberated; 4) understanding the
centrality of our gender roles to developing radical class
consciousness, leadership and movement; 5) finally, it is about
including the tradition of socialist feminists’ insights and politics into
our strategies as organizers.

1. Gender does not only happen when sexism or

heterosexism happens.
Gender is not only an issue at work for queers and women. We need to
be explicit about this in order to keep every discussion from being only
about individual people’s struggles (which are real and deserve
attention) to also include the politics and culture of the workplace as a
whole.

One way that gender affects all workers explicitly at my job is around
workplace safety issues. In an almost entirely male workplace,
organizing around workplace safety involves having a complicated
understanding of gender politics and a specific set of skills for
navigating them.

Specifically, the guys I work with will often not work safe unless there
is another issue at stake. We will do job actions which rely on enforcing
safety regulations only if somebody is suspended for something else,
being off the job for example. Safety issues on their own, and not as a
strategy for slowing productivity, are ignored. Working safe is
essentially for “wimps.”

This “macho” attitude persists while safety issues at work are huge. I
work in manholes, where the safety issues range from risk of
immediate injury to longterm health risks from exposure to dusts and
gases. My co-workers essentially police each others’ masculinity and
effectively enforce management’s approach to on the job injuries,
claiming they are always the employees’ fault.

Management actively denies what union activists know, that the

hazards exist at work because of how work is organized, that workers
themselves do not create these hazards. Nonetheless management
successfully claims that we’re not careful enough while climbing rusty
ladders, lifting 300-pound manhole covers, or driving trucks without
working turn signals. Hyper- masculine workplace culture affirms
management’s claims.

My co-workers say injured workers aren’t strong enough or smart

enough to navigate these hazards. Consequently the union
membership has no active demands or positions around safety. All of
the union’s gains regarding safety equipment and procedures have
basically become a nuisance or seen as compromising masculinity.

Management makes safety equipment available for liability reasons

and uses safety violations as a way to discipline workers. In my
workplace safety, previously a union victory, has become a tool of
management.

Because of this dominant workplace culture, organizing for more

effective and widespread safety measures at work is also organizing
against some of this staunchly hetero-normative masculine behavior.
Convincing people that “unsafe for one is unsafe for all” does not
compromise their individual worth, only management’s increasing
productivity demands.

Organizing with the goal of redefining what is valued on the shop floor,
not hypermasculinity but collective engagement in class struggle, is
essentially a socialist-feminist project: a project that strengthens the
collective power of all workers, regardless of gender identity, by
undoing the centrality of those individual gender identities to how we
work, how we relate to the union, how we define the union, and
ultimately to what we think is possible in the world.

What we as socialist feminists believe is that it is possible, necessary,

to live a life in which you are not constantly struggling to meet the
standards of oppressive gender roles, and that individual struggle must
not interfere with our collective project of building working class
power.

2. Gender is used to organize society.

Understanding gender roles plays such a central role to organizing in
my workplace because hypermasculinity is such a big part of the
dominant culture there. In reality, there is actually extreme variety in
gender and sexuality, and every worker’s relationship to those
identities gets lost in this dominant culture.

Though I want to recognize and understand this workplace culture, I do

not want to essentialize any aspect of gender or sexuality. Some of the
people I work with are not as macho; there are some women, there are
macho women, there are serious union activists who derive their
macho pride from yelling at the boss and not from working unsafely,
and there are much more passive characters, etc.

I am trying to say that the diversity of the working class, which is truly
infinite, is not made apparent by the dominant cultures in our
workplaces and our unions. These cultures are often a response to how
work is organized, which is not by the class, or to how union life is
organized, which is not often enough by the class. Therefore, gradually
chipping away at the homogenous and destructive force of patriarchy
and homophobia in these places makes the way for real and lasting
change.

The more and more we organize together and have each others’ backs
at work around safety issues, the more the very terms of how to be a
successful “guy” at work change. This strategy also makes more space
for people who are not “guys.” The more successes we have as a shop,
the more solidarity there is.

After months of organizing with this socialist-feminist understanding at

the core, my whole shop is getting closer to working safely for our own
sake. Increasingly, there is not as much to prove as before, and what
was perceived as a defense of gender is not as necessary.

What we are now defending is our collective rights to a safe workplace,

reclaiming that tool from management. We have had only some
success with this at my shop, but the amount of convincing it takes to
get people on board has decreased drastically, which is a sign that
solidarity has increased.

3. Gender is about radically redefining the potential for

liberation.
Some of the success of the feminist movement has been the creation
of rules for behavior and legal recourse for people who encounter
discrimination and hostility on the job. These rules are valuable and
are the consequence of a very real and brave fight by people of color,
queers and women on the job.

Without a politicized union membership, however, these rules do not

get integrated into the core of what solidarity looks like. And without
anti-racist, feminist and queer organizing in the workplace, there is not
the collective commitment to confront these violations of union
solidarity. Management, afraid of lawsuits, essentially enforces these
rules around sexism, homophobia and racism.

It is our job as activists, especially in the workplace, not to allow these

victories of the movement to be turned into the very things that undo
our movement. We need to redefine the terms of what it means to be
union, what it means to be human. It is our job to intervene effectively
in all of these manifestations of racism, sexism and homophobia on the
job. It is also our job to do this in a way that builds solidarity and
doesn’t simply scold offending union members, which is precisely how
management undoes our solidarity.

This is the difference between a socialist- feminist approach to building

a collective that can demand and enforce the rights of all union
members, and a liberal approach to simply safeguarding individual
rights.

A socialist-feminist approach is not only more effective in terms of

building lasting structures and relationships to preserve the essence of
feminist, queer and anti-racist demands, but it makes more sense. It
creates situations where we are asking people to step up and have
each others’ backs, not to step down and get out of the way because
they just don’t get it. It demands that people be their best for the sake
of their coworkers, for the sake of the union. It builds relationships and
responsibility to the collective.
When building one-on-one relationships, which are the building blocks
of bigger organizing, socialist-feminist politics is decidedly different
from liberal politics and it makes a difference when you’re talking with
people on the job.

People hate “liberals” — partly due to racism and sexism and

homophobia and seeing liberals as representing minorities only — but I
think all of that masks the fact that people really hate liberalism
because it has failed to change the world in ways that make a
difference for the class.

Liberal politics depend on the class for support but work in opposition
to the class, privileging individual mobility and individual citizenship.
Radicalism places all of these individual struggles in the context of how
capitalism alienates us from each other and ourselves. People “get”
radicalism because radicalism accounts for all of people’s struggles
under capitalism. They want to support each other and be supported —
“an injury to one is an injury to all” — and if we don’t support each
other we’re all more vulnerable.

Placing workplace struggles in this context is a radical project.

Understanding how gender plays a role in alienating people from each
other and themselves is a socialist-feminist project. Socialist feminism
is also an approach to organizing because it understands the role
gender plays in developing the class conscious of workers as well as
understanding the personal as political. And this is radical.

There’s a personal and emotional connection that people have to feel

to trust each other, to take risks on the job, to undo the privileges of
whiteness, maleness, heteronormativity, being a productive worker —
organizing is fundamentally building trust, about caring for and about
each other, about creating a place where the class takes care of each
other for common struggles against all of the effects of capitalism.

These personal politics play out while organizing around workplace

issues and in informal social interactions away from work. Occasionally
people go out, drink, open up to each other, and we as human beings
who struggle with the ways capitalism organizes our lives on and off
the job share our stories with each other about our needs for respect
and care, our needs to respect and care.

We don’t necessarily build on these conversations upon returning to

work the next day. But we share an understanding that we are in this
together because of our struggles, not in spite of them, and
challenging each other to be fuller people is part of our project as a
class.

In all of this formal and informal conversation, issues of gender,

sexuality, race, the war, how we organize our personal lives,
relationships and work are constant. Being a socialist feminist helps to
understand what people say, and why they say it.

When people talk about stuff they want to assert the value of the
choices they have made in life, the sacrifices that they’ve made. And
people are brilliant, insightful, creative and sincerely trying to
understand this mess capitalism has made of our lives. They are
interested in engaging with and arguing about all of these issues and
desire for these struggles to be taken seriously.

As radicals, as socialist feminists, we do take all of these personal

struggles seriously. It is at the core of what we believe. The effects of
capitalism on our identities and how we organize our lives are
sometimes traumatic.
We do not reduce our politics to only these personal struggles, but we
incorporate them into our understanding of the world and our
approach to organizing. This is appealing to people. This is socialist
feminism.

4. Our gender roles are central to developing radical class

consciousness.
If this can be seen as one of our goals in the workplace, and in the
world, we need to approach it as activists. We need to earn the respect
and trust of our coworkers, our community. This is no small task. Our
approach to being good organizers is also derived from our socialist
feminist tradition. We integrate our understanding of the centrality of
our gender roles in developing political consciousness with our
methods for building democratic movements. Individual identities are
fragmented under capitalism, there are unrealistic standards for living
under this gendered order, and the wholeness of our humanity takes a
backseat to surviving under capitalism.

I experienced this myself when I started at my job. I kept looking for

opportunities to talk to other workers as a worker about the contract,
the wages, working conditions, union, and management, but instead
found people most interested in personal life — theirs and mine.

I mistakenly thought this focus on being workplace activists, focusing

on what material demands we had in common, had to happen at the
expense of my other identities, which were not heteronormative and
therefore, I mistakenly thought, were distracting from our commonality
as workers. I was struggling with how to integrate my sexuality and
gender identity with my identity as a workplace activist. I was worried
about making my sexuality an issue, but people seemed to be more
fixated on obsessing about their own sexuality and gender than about
mine.

The people I worked with were, in a funny way, more socialist feminist
than I was, integrating their work and after work lives, being moved
completely by both experiences. They challenged me to do the same,
to be myself comfortably. Coming out ended up making me closer to
people, not more alienated as I wrongly suspected. I was challenged by
my coworkers and my broader politics to understand the workplace as
being about more than work, as being about our whole experience in
life.

One of the ways my socialist-feminist politics played a role in how I

handled coming out at work is that I started out understanding that
everyone has experience as a gendered and sexual person — and
everyone in some way or another struggles with these identities, and
with insecurities. So I didn’t see myself as unique or different from the
straight men I worked with in that way. It also forced me into the
unfamiliar place of knowing myself to be the “one” in “an injury to one
is an injury to all” and the less familiar place of allowing the “all” to be
my coworkers.

When I realized that being more of who I am on the job was the key to
being able to establish trust and solidarity, it brought me back to my
socialist-feminist politics in a way. As an activist, I took what I
perceived as a risk to let people know more about myself. Coworkers
respected this honesty and saw it as respectful, and together we
effectively established a deep trust. This interpersonal politics is part of
our socialist- feminist understanding of what is political, but also a
socialist-feminist strategy for organizing.

Understanding that we are all in all of our struggles together, a

socialist-feminist organizing approach, led me to be a more effective
organizer around those workplace issues I had initially focused on and
continue to work on, now with the benefit the trust and support of my
coworkers. This support goes both ways and contributes to the
developing of leaders and activists on the shop floor. When I intervene
on somebody’s behalf, they intervene on mine. We tap each other for
support, and stand together on the shop floor.

Integrating a broader understanding of what moves people, a socialist-

feminist strategy for organizing, leads to developing a culture where
individuals are more willing to take risks as activists around shop floor
issues, ranging from the way work is organized, safety issues,
discrimination, the humiliation of being constantly managed, denied
bathroom breaks, and the unbelievably long list of things that workers
struggle around every minute of the day at work.
Building trust and developing relationships is necessary for organizing
around workplace issues. But this process does not only happen
because of “typical” issues. Our broader struggles under capitalism
contribute to our ability and interest in fighting, to developing a
consciousness that sees all of our personal struggles as connected, to
see how these struggles affect all of our fights. Socialist feminism
provides us with the political framework for organizing towards this
goal.

5. The tradition of socialist feminism is included in our

strategies as organizers.
There has been a lot of focus on socialist-feminist process in building
socialist organization. And I do think it is important to be explicit about
this as a political process and decision. But I also do not want to
overlook the fact that socialist feminist process is good organizing:
listening more than talking, caring as a task and a goal, seeing
consciousness as a kind of process in which everyone is equally
responsible and engaged.

Socialism has a tradition; socialist feminism is part of that tradition. In

my time as a rank-and-file activist I have learned so much about what
moves me and my coworkers, how to effectively organize collective
action, how deep and broad the range of things we struggle with under
capitalism, as workers in our lives and at work. And I have also learned
how enormously lucky I am to be aware of this larger tradition of
struggle and thought.

Sometimes we assume that people’s lack of interest or commitment to

these traditions is deliberate. I have learned that people are unaware
of these traditions. The left has not been widely present in the
workplace for a long time. Some labor leaders see the middle class as
our goal, and while demanding more of the share of wealth we produce
is not a horrible goal, we know as radicals it doesn’t touch the sheer
inhumanity of capitalism.

Sharing this tradition and the lessons of these politics is an important

part of organizing, sharing the potential for a different world, a
different world that is informed by all of our insights into the failure of
capitalism as a way of organizing life. And going about it in a way that
understands people’s alienation from the processes of struggle itself is
more effective organizing. At least it has been for me in modest shop
floor activities. Building bigger more lasting organization with this
foundation is a longer-term project.

There are many more opportunities to learn from this socialist-feminist

approach to organizing because capital is constantly reorganizing our
lives and work in ways that further alienate us from ourselves, each
other and the very process of political change. For all the above
reasons, I think a socialist-feminist process is the most effective way to
build the power and collectivity needed by the class. And for the
reasons above, I think the workplace is an important place to
implement this strategy.

Only conscience resistance will effectively undo the institutionalization

of gender roles and the obstacles they create for building-class
conscious movements. Gender roles are institutionalized and interfere
with building collective struggles, interfere with collective goals and
identities. Socialist feminist process and goals are aimed at developing
this conscious resistance.
Steve Downs, “Review of Solidarity Divided”
Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path
toward Social Justice
by Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin

In the preface to Solidarity Divided Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin

tell of an encounter between Service Employees (SEIU) leaders and
South African unionists. A South African reminds the SEIUers that a
union’s role is to represent the interests of all workers. “There are
times,” he says, “when the interests of the working class conflict with
the interests of the members of our respective unions.”

Fletcher and Gapasin use this moment to illustrate one of their

underlying themes--that the U.S. labor movement does not see itself,
or act, as if it is rooted in “class struggle.” It has failed to be a vehicle
for creating a broader social movement. It represents a rather narrow
subset of interests--of its members--and is not doing that particularly
well either.

The authors argue convincingly that the union framework is broken

and a complete overhaul is needed. They come to this position from
long and respected careers in different unions, as rank-and-file
members, staff, and officers; they participated in John Sweeney’s New
Voice leadership in the AFL-CIO and had an inside view of the
federation. Fletcher was the education director and then assistant to
President Sweeney. Before becoming principal researcher for the AFL-
CIO’s Union Cities project, Gapasin was a rank-and-file activist and
then an officer in his local union and central labor council. They also
bring their unique perspective as activists of color and as leftists with a
belief that the labor movement should be the engine of a movement
for broader social change.

Behind the Scenes

Last month the AFL-CIO met in Pittsburgh. One Change to Win union—
UNITE HERE—rejoined the federation it left in 2005. Were the
differences that caused the split resolved? Did they ever actually exist?
Not really, according to Fletcher and Gapasin.

The authors take us behind the scenes of the debates that led to the
split. Their insider knowledge makes clear that the way the media
portrayed the split--old versus new, political activity (AFL-CIO) versus
organizing (CtW)--was misleading. They argue that no fundamental
differences existed on “consolidation, core jurisdiction, pragmatic
international solidarity, and political flexibility.”
Fletcher and Gapasin present a damning picture of SEIU President
Andy Stern’s organizing and management methods. Their critique of
Stern’s brand of unionism, with its emphasis on consolidating locals,
creating mega-locals of 200,000 members in half a dozen states,
making deals with employers to organize workers, and crushing
internal democratic initiatives -- all in the name of growing the union --
has been validated by recent events. Stern, long the darling of some in
the labor movement and the press, is now intensely criticized for
putting United Health Care Workers-West in trusteeship and fostering
the split in UNITE HERE.

Labor would do well to listen to Fletcher and Gapasin’s critique of the

prevailing approach to organizing. They point out that simply
organizing new workers into a union is not in and of itself a solution.
What kind of union are they being organized into? Are they going to be
active participants, members with voice and representation? Will they
be able to negotiate good contracts, or will they be union members in
name but not in practice?

Never a True Movement

The authors say that the U.S. labor movement has always been defined
by an inclusion/exclusion dichotomy. Racial exclusion, they say,
“crippled the movement from its birth. One can argue that the United
States has never had a true labor movement, only a segmented
struggle of workers.” They lay out the ways employers have used, and
workers have accepted, race to divide workers, from the exclusion of
African-Americans in the building trades to the hostility shown
immigrants. They argue that unions’ inability to overcome
managements’ use of race is a fundamental failure, leading to labor’s
continued fragmentation and weakness.

And as unions surrender their past gains, divisions among workers

deepen. Two-tier contracts, for instance cause conflicts between
workers with more seniority, who are often white, and workers who
were hired later, disproportionately people of color and women. When
jobs are cut to “restore profitability,” people of color and young people
have the hardest time finding work.

Fletcher and Gapasin describe how difficult it is to change entrenched

union culture: bureaucrats are akin to “crabgrass, with deep and
durable roots.” Describing the failures of the AFL-CIO and Change to
Win (CtW) is almost too easy, though, and Fletcher and Gapasin do not
stop there. They assert that all union leaders adopt one of three
“ideologies”: they are traditionalists, pragmatists, or leftists. They
argue that the function of unions is to represent the interests of all
workers, not just their members—but that only leftist leaders are
committed to this. Fletcher and Gapasin advocate a fundamentally
different kind of unionism from the current consensus: they want social
justice unionism, which sees unions as part of a broad working-class
political and social movement.

Fletcher and Gapasin’s description of what’s wrong with U.S. unions is

excellent, as is their vision of the changes needed. But they put too
much emphasis on the need for leftists, especially leftist officers, to
shape a new vision for labor. Instead, the emphasis should be on rank-
and-file members—through reform movements and other struggles—
transforming their unions and building the foundation for a militant,
participatory labor movement.

For Fletcher and Gapasin the failure of Sweeney’s New Voice to bring
about fundamental change in the AFL-CIO (as well as the increasingly
evident failure of CtW) rests on the fact that its leaders—traditionalists
and pragmatists all—could not transcend the limits of their ideologies
and therefore did not challenge capitalism. And leaders who won’t
challenge capitalism are bound to capitulate to it. Central to Fletcher
and Gapasin’s strategy for addressing the crisis of organized labor is
getting more leftists into the leadership of unions.

But their analysis begs a few questions: Where do those ideologies

come from? How do they change? Can they? Put another way, why
have so many leftists in unions become pragmatists and so few
pragmatists become leftists?

Daily Experience
Many factors help form a person’s ideology. One key factor, for
workers, is their experience of class struggle— especially their conflicts
with their employers. Fletcher and Gapasin do an especially good job of
showing the inevitability of class struggle and the ways it intersects
with other social struggles

But the day-to-day experiences of union officials are different from

those of the workers they represent. No matter how “left” their
ideology, union officials are generally not subject to the daily battle
with the boss over how they’ll spend their time on the job. This
struggle over how hard we will work and for how many hours, how
workers will be treated and how much we’ll be paid, is what class
struggle looks like day to day at the workplace.

Officers are freed from that daily tug-of-war on the job; instead, their
role is to negotiate daily cease-fires and to enforce the big truce
reached every few years when a new contract is bargained.

This need to reach truces in the struggle doesn’t rule out strikes,
slowdowns, or other mobilizations of the members. But their role
requires union officers to enforce “management’s right” to run the
business and organize the work.

Over the last 30 years, as employers have stepped up their efforts to

roll back union gains, more and more officers have moved from simply
enforcing management’s rights to embracing management’s goals.
Their inability to envision an alternative to capitalism leads most to
accept the need for wage cuts and taxpayer subsidies to preserve jobs.
They defend socially harmful production, such as SUVs.

It is the role of mediator between boss and workers (and the higher
salary and better working conditions that usually go with it), and
enforcer of the contract, that is union leaders’ daily reality. That’s what
shapes their ideology, and goes a long way toward explaining why a
leftist is more likely to become a pragmatist than the other way
around. This is why a strategy for change driven by leftist officers and
staff is a non-starter.

Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
Despite their useful insights about the failures of New Voice and CtW,
Fletcher and Gapasin implicitly accept that change will come down
from the top and dismiss the possibility of its coming from the ranks of
the union movement. They give short shrift to the so-called “caucus
movement” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While they give due
credit to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and a shout-out to
Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the thrust of their argument is that
the time for rank-and-file-based caucuses has passed.

But caucuses (such as New Directions in the UAW and the Longshore
Workers Coalition) keep forming, because they are necessary. They are
organizations of rank-and-file members and sometimes low-level
officers who are not removed from the day-to-day class struggle. The
best of them organize their co-workers to engage in that struggle and
in the process, they provide training, skills, and, yes, ideology, for a
new set of union leaders.

Like every other effort to bring about a new kind of labor movement,
rank-and-file reform has been slower and more uneven than any of us
would like. Many of the caucuses that formed in the 1970s or 1980s
were defeated by union officials or withered away. There are
examples, however, which point to the potential of this strategy.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union helped transform that notoriously
corrupt union. TDU was essential to the election of reformer Ron Carey
to the Teamster presidency. That election, in turn, made the New Voice
challenge within the AFL-CIO possible. More important, TDU’s rank-and-
file network helped make the 1997 strike against UPS one of the most
successful in recent history.

In my own local, New Directions in TWU Local 100 in New York City led
a 15-year struggle against giveback contracts, unsafe work practices,
abusive supervisors, and ineffective union leadership. In 2001 it took
control of the 38,000-member union of bus and subway workers. Power
and authority in the local shifted to persons of color. New union leaders
mobilized members through demonstrations and the enrollment of
hundreds of new stewards.

Unfortunately, the caucus succeeded in ousting pragmatic local

officers only to have the new leadership turn away from the kind of
rank-and-file organization and mobilization that had enabled it to win.
The transformation of TWU Local 100 was derailed not because the
new officers lacked “an ideological framework to place reform in a
broader context of social transformation”—many of them had that—
but because they lacked a sufficient commitment to internal union
democracy and building a member-run union. The new president
actively resisted the idea of an ongoing caucus that might have held
him accountable, and members and leaders of New Directions were
unable, or unwilling, to maintain the organization.

TWU 100 is not the first union local where reformers succeeded in
getting elected but the new leaders soon began to emulate the very
politics they had run against. Frankly, this has happened too often and
reflects a serious problem for the reform-from-below strategy.

One example where the rank-and-file movement did not fold up after
the election victory is TDU. TDU kept going strong—and recruited more
members—after Ron Carey and his team took power at the top. The
caucus continued to push Carey—supportively—and was a big factor in
the UPS strike. While Carey was eventually ousted for other reasons,
while in office he didn’t back away from his platform. This experience
suggests that when members become union officers, a strong caucus,
or a local union with a culture and practice of rank-and-file
organization, can provide a critical counter-weight, keeping officers
from succumbing to the conservatizing influences of contract
enforcement and union administration. It could help to keep the
“leftists” from becoming “pragmatists.”

Union democracy is hardly mentioned in Solidarity Divided. When

Fletcher and Gapasin do address democracy within unions, they
maintain their focus on what is happening at the top. They call for
unions to “embrace consistent democracy.” Consistent democracy
essentially comes down to practices that promote inclusion. But when
they give examples, they either list demands the union should make
on the employer or the government, or they narrow their focus to
whether women and people of color hold staff positions high in the
union hierarchy and whether those positions are invested with real
power and authority.

These aspects are important, but what about consistent democracy for
members? What about investing members with real power and
authority? How about building structures and practices that place the
initiative for the union’s transformation in the hands of the members,
rather than urging leftists to become officers and then educate
members? Fletcher and Gapasin do acknowledge the importance of
internal democracy and point out how the move toward mega-locals
undermines members’ ability to hold their officers accountable. But it
is hardly integrated into their larger critique of unions and seems to be
something union officers should promote, not something fought for and
defended by the rank and file.

Globalization
Like most other authors on the state of U.S. labor, Fletcher and
Gapasin take a hard look at the causes and effects of globalization.
They make a strong case that it is neither a natural nor an inevitable
process. It is driven by political and economic decisions intended to
“eliminate obstacles to the achievement of profit.” Without a better
understanding of globalization and the decisions that facilitate it, they
argue, unions will not be able to build an effective response.

Here, unlike most authors on the state of U.S. labor, Fletcher and
Gapasin link their understanding of global capitalism to changes in
domestic politics, especially the character of the U.S. government.
These changes have resulted in what they call the “neoliberal
authoritarian state.”

They argue that the government reacted harshly to the social

movements of the 1960s and 1970s, intensified its authoritarianism
during the “war” on drugs, and escalated further in the aftermath of
9/11. They point to a connection between that increasing
authoritarianism and the drive to reorganize the international economy
to eliminate obstacles to the achievement of profits. They argue that
the U.S. ruling elite is committed to this project but is divided between
a “unilateralist” wing (who think the U.S. should act on its own to
achieve its international goals, saying “take it or leave it” to its allies)
and a “multilateralist” wing (who believe the U.S. “cannot succeed
alone” and must act in cooperation with its international allies). These
two wings compete over who can best achieve the goals of the
neoliberal authoritarian state. This is a thought-provoking argument
but, unfortunately, Fletcher and Gapasin do not draw out its political
implications.

Organize, But Where?

Central to their vision for achieving a union movement committed to
social justice unionism is the idea that “…if class struggle is not
restricted to the workplace, then neither should unions be [emphasis in
original]. The strategic conclusion is that unions must think in terms of
organizing cities rather than simply organizing workplaces (or
industries).”

Doing this will require the formation of “social/political blocs” of the

working class. They don’t define this term, but I take it to mean long-
term, strategic alliances of unions and other working-class
organizations that will define common goals and carry out common
campaigns to achieve them.

The mechanism for building the “bloc” is the central labor council
(CLC). Fletcher and Gapasin argue that CLCs, rooted in the working
class of particular communities, can take the lead in reorganizing the
labor movement and promoting social justice unionism. They argue
that CLCs should open themselves to a broader set of working-class
organizations than just unions and should see themselves as the
centers of a labor movement, not just the union movement.

But how does this call for social/political blocs organized through the
CLCs fit with the authors’ notion of the neoliberal authoritarian state?
Any local working-class “political bloc” is going to feel the gravitational
pull of the Democratic Party quite early in its life. But a resurgent labor
movement, especially one committed to social justice unionism, is
bound to find itself at odds with a pro-globalization, authoritarian
government. Does it make sense for workers to back the
multilateralists, found principally in the Democratic Party, over the
unilateralists, found principally in the GOP?

In an important step, some CLCs are already opening up to workers

centers and organizations such as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance,
but the CLC strategy by itself is not convincing. Having ruled out
reform from below, and having been disappointed by heads of the AFL-
CIO and its affiliates, Fletcher and Gapasin have turned to local and
regional union officers to lead the transformation. Without dramatic
changes in local unions and a more active and aggressive rank and file,
it’s not going to happen.

Of course some CLCs can and will play the role Fletcher and Gapasin
call on them to perform. But if we focus on the CLCs and the local
officers who fill them, we miss the struggles within unions and at the
workplace that make it possible for unions to become cornerstones of
local working-class movements. Encouraging and supporting caucuses
and rank-and-file-oriented unions is a better use of our time and
resources.

Fletcher and Gapasin have done an important service in challenging

union activists to think about how their work fits into a bigger strategy
that challenges capitalism. Solidarity Divided poses big and important
questions about transforming the labor movement. We need more
thoughtful contributions like it.