This is the final installment in a three-part series by Nick Unger on union structures, labor consciousness and the possibilities of organized labor moving forward. Read Part I: Thoughts on Union Structures, Labor History And Union Member Consciousness and Part II: Hello & Goodbye with Far Too Little In Between for the full picture.
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“Once the Voting Rights Act was passed and people got the right to vote, they stopped sitting in and started voting and that turned out to be much more effective.” -Former Rep. Barney Frank on the CNN series “The 60s”
Much more effective? The millions facing new barriers to the right to vote might question that. Replacing sit-ins with legally protected (a little) voting was a bad idea strategically, tactically and ideologically — and not just in retrospect. We were making progress so we stopped using the tools that worked. When has that ever worked?
But this is a blog about labor, not the civil rights movement. Same point. Replacing sit-down strikes with legally protected (a little) collective bargaining turned out to be effective for a little while. I know capital promptly moved to outlaw sit-down strikes to make a point, but they had never exactly been “legal” to begin with.
The big change was unions now had something to lose: their formal recognition and political acceptance, their institutional structures and treasuries. Before then, they just risked jail. Dylan was right: “When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose.” Modern unions thought they had something to lose.
I have stressed, perhaps over-stressed, the structural, legal, political and ideological strictures limiting the modern US union, which channel it to engage unionized employers public and private over the terms and conditions of labor and at the same time hobble it in that challenge.
For a few decades unions lifted much, not all, of the working class, organized or unorganized. Unions were the mass anti-poverty program that actually worked. That is for the relatively brief period it worked. Unions no longer pull up the wages of non-union workers. Unions are surrounded and under constant attack, with no buffer zone that gets a raise when the unions get one. There is no secure labor/capital border anywhere, only contested terrain.
The Wagner Act promise of “labor peace through collective bargaining” rings hollow. The social compact of the New Deal proved way too compact, leaving labor with a sub-compact union vehicle when a full class sized one is needed.
Roosevelt’s goal of saving capitalism from short sighted capitalists required shifting the focus of a rebellious working class talking about how society is organized to bread and butter issues, neatly labeled “terms and conditions of labor.” Not how we all should live but just “how much do we get.” The Wagner Act did its job, and even built a wall separating the unions from working class political ferment.
Morand is right. The connection of Canadian and European unions to social democratic political parties changes their culture and ideology, and impacts how they engage employers. The framework is larger than one group of workers against one employer. Giving money to Democrats and cranking up a GOTV operation is no substitute for a political structure that places collective bargaining in a broader social context.
How could this not be the case? Don’t US companies behave differently in different states, let alone different countries? They pay what they must, pollute where they can, offer family leave only if the law forces them to. Same companies, different context. Context matters.
Glimpses That Make Me Less Forlorn
Can unions today lift the class by their struggles with their employers, the task they are essentially designed for? It is not clear to me they can. Yes, it is better for union members and everyone else that unions try to fight their employers as best they can. And that militant, democratic leadership is better than capitulation-ist autocratic leadership. But slowing the decline of unions and the attacks on the standards of the organized is a defensive task which cannot do enough to advance the class.
Something more is needed. The miner’s anthem “Hold The Fort” sings of “reinforcements fast approaching, victory is nigh.” Union radicals need to help nurture these reinforcements, not wait for them or expect the unions to win without them. It is some glimpses of new labor, not just union, energy that make me a bit less forlorn.
I see more promise in the many struggles that refuse to accept the definitions and limitations of 1930s industrial struggles than in those trying their best within them. I see more promise in those trying to find ways to respond to the ways capital has reorganized the nature of work than in those trying to wish it might be a passing fad.
Labor is traditionally a day late and a dollar short. The AFL came a generation or two after the post-Civil War reorganization of American capital; the CIO that much after the next one. One union strength can become a weakness. Like a tree that’s planted by the waters, we shall not be moved. Thats a problem when capital is so mobile.
Some glimpses of possibilities. The dynamic areas within labor today are not necessarily within unions, though some are supported by unions:
- Workers in the growing sectors excluded by the Wagner Act collective bargaining framework are developing new forms of collective action. This is worth intensive investigation, as capital increasingly finds way to function outside even the weakened parameters of labor law. Should union support for these efforts be viewed less charitably than John L. Lewis’s support for the CIO when the C was just a Committee?
- The worker center movement among immigrants resembles the early stages of CIO organizing committees, with more organic ties to broader working class communities and more attention to political education. How they make the leap from smaller groups of conscious fighters to larger mass organizations will help define the next attempt at generating broad culture and consciousness. There are many lessons from the less-than-successful efforts of unions and labor education groups over the years.
- These efforts are not traditional industrial organizing. They include more societal demands, more calls for social regulation of wages and conditions than enterprise-by-enterprise industrial regulation, more calls for living wages and paid sick days, $15 in 15, domestic worker rights, broader minimum standards for more kinds of work, bringing underground work into the dim light of Fair Labor Standards. They all address the creation of an insurgent culture by focussing on something that has been lost over the last few decades, a militant sense of what working people are entitled to aspire to in a rich society.
- The attacks on public sector unionism as part of the broader assault on the public sphere, civil society, the social wage and popular democracy has forced a rethinking of the relationship of public sector unions to the public they serve after some half century of an almost exclusive focus on the relationship with the governments they work for. This goes well beyond private sector unions’ recognition of the need for allies.
- Public sector unions copied the dominant union forms more than they created new ones to fit the significant differences between working for government and working for private capital. Ownership and management are not the same thing. Administering the post-war welfare state is not the same as making cars. Capital understands this, constantly clamoring for government “to run more like business.”
- Teachers can’t win and teacher unions can’t survive without championing public education and democracy. The Chicago teachers’ union spent a year talking to the public and their members about class size and classroom supplies, not teacher wages and pensions. They changed the public discussion, which changed the political climate within which they negotiate.
- They’re not the only ones. Nurses can’t win or their unions survive without championing patient care. Bus drivers can’t win or their unions survive without championing increased affordable mass transit as a basic component of democratic life.
- In all of these examples, the unions needed to develop new forms to engage all their members, not just a cadre of militants, since every public sector worker is the face of the union to the public.
- This turn from the narrowly-defined employment relationship to the broader societal function will, of necessity, force a rethinking of organizational forms. Public sector unionism in the next generation might well have formal structural ties to communities as part of more democratic local budgeting.
- There are also experiments with new forms of worker organizations to respond to new forms of work as well as growing scholarship on the precariat and other formulations to describe what is happening.
What about the unions? No, they can’t lift the class by themselves or by being better unions in battle with their employers. The unions can’t lead the struggle. History indicates they will try, and perhaps worse try to control it, with unfortunate results. But the inability to lead does not mean unions and union leaders have no role.
The United Mine Workers did not change in the 30s. They helped change occur. The ACWA did not change but rather funded the change. The AFL did not see the light and mend its ways. The CIO did not replace it. Both continued, the latter encouraged by and the former transformed by the Wagner Act.
To the extent that the Wagner Act framework and American unions, be they AFL-CIO or Change to Win, are at least as out of phase with the current dynamics of the economy as the AFL was in the 1930s, is expecting fundamental change in these unions any more reasonable than expecting the AFL to change in 1935? Or will today’s unions continue alongside something(s) new, as the AFL did alongside the CIO?
The “progressives” in the old AFL showed it much more by supporting the new industrial union organizing committees than by any action within their own unions. Is this a useful yardstick today?
The inability of today’s unions to lift working people through the on-the-job fight of union workers is not a dead end for unions and unionists. The broader struggles of the rest of the working class have to create the conditions, culture, visions and organizations needed to lift us all. A good lesson from labor history: in times of crisis, like today, the attitude of unions, union leaders and activists toward the rest of the working class is decisive.
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Nick Unger is a veteran trade unionist and labor educator who has worked with and for every kind of union. Many of these questions come from examining the efforts to save the giant Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans for a book he is working on.
