Winning Strategies for Workers
We begin by paying tribute to the extraordinary Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote brilliantly about poverty, work, collective joy, and the downsides of “positive thinking,” among many other topics. In The Nation, Katha Pollitt wrote this moving tribute. And on Twitter, Rebecca Solnit quoted one of Ehrenreich’s most famous passages about low-wage work:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
One of the great questions of our time is whether and how the labor movement can find new life. Not only economic justice, but also the future of democracy and racial justice turn on this question. Recent victories in union elections at Amazon and Starbucks captured the public imagination, but there are organizing efforts breaking out in many vibrant and unheralded campaigns around the country. The paradox is that public approval of unions is higher than any time since 1965 (71% according to Gallup), but only 6% of workers are in private sector unions — the lowest share in a century. The gap is explained mainly by rigged labor laws that favor employers and by the brutal anti-union tactics of corporations but also, in part, by the failure of some unions to invest in organizing.
What’s the path to labor’s renewal when the deck is so stacked against workers?
Some propose a return to fundamentals of good worker-led organizing to overcome rigged rules — and are organizing for recognition shop by shop, as Starbucks workers are doing. But can such efforts force intransigent corporate behemoths to the table to negotiate contracts, given the vast scale of such corporations and the relatively small share of stores that are unionized?
Others insist on the need for a strategic, industry-based approach to confront today’s big employers, a model that has resulted in growth for some unions even in hard times, for example in hotels, building services, and airports. But can such an intensive approach fuel explosive growth to reach the tens of millions of workers who want to be part of unions?
Still others propose policy change as a path forward. The passage of landmark legislation in California providing for sectoral bargaining for fast food workers is a historic breakthrough with enormous promise. And the Biden administration’s aggressive pro-union stance and policies have undoubtedly helped fuel union wins. But Congress remains inhospitable terrain for labor law reform. And what about states and regions, like the South, in which the political environment doesn’t allow for progressive labor policy?
Many point to historic and contemporary examples of movement-style organizing campaigns in which militant workers act like a union and win real gains at the workplace long before they achieve recognition from employers. Militant worker movements that ignore the artificial restraints of broken labor laws depend on mass participation by workers and real, sustained disruption. Sustained worker insurgencies can’t be scripted — but this tight labor market and broad awareness of victories at iconic employers may create favorable conditions.
It seems likely that a revival of labor’s fortunes at scale will depend on some combination of all these strategies. There’s also plenty of evidence that the fate of the labor movement is tied to other social movements, and that deeper alliances, including through strategies such as “Bargaining for the Common Good,” will be critical to the success of labor, community, and racial justice efforts. This issue of The Platypus features writing that explores some of these campaigns and approaches.
In their new report The State of the Unions 2022: A Profile of Organized Labor in New The State of the Unions 2022: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, Milkman and Joseph van der Naald report that
Some of the most dramatic union wins occurred in New York: the first Starbucks stores where unionization votes succeeded in 2021 were in Buffalo, and the warehouse where the independent Amazon Labor Union famously won an election in April 2022 is in the New York City borough of Staten Island. More generally, as pages 4-9 below document, New York City leads the nation in the recent wave of union organizing.
And yet, these developments have failed to reverse the long-term decline in organized labor’s share of the U.S. labor force, a decline that has continued steadily over recent decades — especially in the private sector where the dramatic events of the past year took place. As Figure 1 shows, unionization rates have relentlessly fallen, even in the past year and a half. In the private sector, union density is at a record low, despite the spate of recent union organizing successes that have captured so much attention.
Ruth Milkman’s Dissent article “The Amazon Labor Union’s Historic Breakthrough,” offers an excellent overview of the ALU’s victory and the challenges ahead.
In The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson explains the significance of the enactment of legislation in California to establish sectoral bargaining. (The fast food companies have predictably announced their intent to try to repeal the law in a ballot initiative in 2024, so the battle will continue.)
Some credit where credit is due: I can’t think of any institution or person in recent decades that’s so profoundly changed social and economic policy for the better—while settling for Plan B—than SEIU and its president, Mary Kay Henry. . .
Today, ten years after Henry committed SEIU to the $15 and a union campaign, the union still can’t claim any fast-food workers as dues-paying members. (More than a thousand Starbucks baristas have voted to join, but they’re not members until they have a contract.) But a Plan B fallback has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. By highlighting the low wages and difficult working conditions of millions of American workers, the campaign compelled some big cities, and then bigger states, including California and New York, to raise their minimum wage to $15 and even higher. And this week in California, the campaign won a stunning victory when the state Senate followed the Assembly by passing a bill that establishes sectoral bargaining for all of the state’s roughly 550,000 fast-food workers.
Under the terms of the legislation, the state will establish a ten-member council, consisting of two representatives of franchise owners, two from the corporate chains, two fast-food workers, two fast-food “advocates” (likely SEIU), and two who are the governor’s appointees to head labor-related state agencies. The council is charged with regulating pay and conditions in the sector. The legislation also sets a minimum hourly wage for the half-million workers in the sector at $22, and stipulates that the wage will be adjusted annually in accord with the consumer price index, so long as the increase doesn’t exceed 3.5 percent. The council is also empowered to set industry-wide standards for a host of working conditions and nondiscriminatory practices (California fast-food workers being heavily Black or Latino). In theory, the state agency heads in a Republican gubernatorial administration could side with the employer representatives to retard or repeal worker protections; in practice, for the foreseeable future, Republicans are about as likely to elect a governor in California as the Trotskyists are.
Sectoral bargaining is a common feature of labor-management relations in a number of European countries, all of them with proportionately larger union movements than ours. . . . But creating a board that will include both labor and management and state representatives to set industry-wide standards—that is, sectoral bargaining—is something new under the American sun. It may, in time, help SEIU actually organize fast-food workers and win contracts with McDonald’s and its ilk, by limiting the kinds of harm that employers routinely inflict on workers attempting to go union (see, e.g., Starbucks’s Howard Schultz). Conversely, it could also lead workers to conclude that they don’t need a union. Whatever the outcome, actual unionization, which is regulated by a long-dysfunctional federal law, remains dauntingly difficult, though the bill the California legislature just passed may effectively limit some of employers’ union-busting ploys.
Keith Kelleher, a longtime union leader and organizer, has a great piece in The Forge, “Amazon, Starbucks and What It Means to Act Like A Union.” Kelleher contends that a worker upsurge can translate into worker power, writing about his experience with homecare workers in the Midwest and how direct, militant action inside and outside the workplace — “acting like a union” — eventually produced huge gains and union growth, overwhelmingly among women of color.
Organizing today is hard, expensive, and time-intensive. Most unions and many organizer training programs rely on the deadeningly slow mechanisms available through federal or state labor laws — all of which have been neutered over the decades by right-wing Democrats as well as Republicans. Unions spend weeks training new organizers to make house calls and assess individual workers. This isn’t wrong. It is critical to know the numbers, to be clear on the level of support and challenges in the workplace and to understand where workers across a facility are as they head into a union election. But this methodological organizing is not the sole avenue to building organization and power at work. Conversely, other unions center their strategy on leverage with capital-intensive “corporate campaigns.” For some workers and industries, these strategies are necessary and do end in huge victories, but many of these campaigns take years and millions of dollars in resources. Even when they succeed, they are often won without much active worker participation. When the campaigns fail, this does double damage to efforts to build worker power.
What the labor movement needs will not be found in the hundreds of power points across union board rooms but in workers organizing together to win at the grassroots level. To beat the country’s biggest employers, we need to organize with workers who want to build power and are ready to act like a union for the long haul. Today’s new wave of worker-driven organizing is a reminder that workers are willing to go to extraordinary levels to build their union. We have to be prepared to follow and support workers along the way, and ensure that we’re not missing the opportunity to teach them what it means to be a union. . . .
We didn’t organize this many workers by waiting for the correct historical moment or for the right politician to be elected or for labor law to change. We did it by taking strategic action in all those spheres. You don’t go from zero workers to 100,000 workers overnight. You build those numbers incrementally by signing up members, running direct action campaigns, and acting like a union.
The labor movement needs to do what workers are doing at this moment: take action and look to make deep change. We need to relearn that there is power in a union — and that workers themselves moving in collective direct action have power. In the case of McMaid, seven workers who met in a church basement in 1983 were bold enough to make a commitment to organize a union of homecare workers, regardless of whether it was legal. Irma Sherman, Doris Gould, Mary Williamson, Helen Miller, Essie Stinson, Lula Bronson, and many, many others set off a movement of homecare and childcare workers that are now the foundation for one of the largest increases in new members — primarily women and women of color — into the labor movement in the past 40 years, changing not only the industry but the face of the labor movement.
This important piece in Convergence Magazine, “Moments of Rupture: The 1930s and the Great Depression,” by Cody R. Melcher and Michael Goldfield, offers important lessons for today’s upsurge.
Union growth tends to take place in huge waves. As the most astute analysts have noted, during normal times very little seems to happen. Then, often unexpectedly, enormous gains are made. To be sure, there is plenty that organizers can do during the quieter times, not only to make important, if seemingly small gains, but also to prepare for the massive gains that will come with the next upsurge. . .
So, one can conclude that today, as in the 1930s and 1940s, mass organizing, rallies, disruptive tactics, and strikes, along with the cultivation and mobilization of important allies, are key components of successful organizing. Especially important in the successes of that era are the championing of the rights and issues of all workers, especially those who are most oppressed, be they racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or other groups. Those organizations that did this often had the strongest bonds of solidarity. Some of the greatest victories took place where such solidarity was developed. The decline of such stances is one of the major reasons why the labor movement is weak today.
In his Jacobin interview, “You’ve Been Lied to About the 1963 March on Washington,” Will P. Jones talks about the hidden but crucial role of labor in the fight for racial justice. As Shawn Gude, who interviewed Jones, writes
Despite his towering contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) has somehow faded from popular memory. A black trade unionist and socialist, Randolph’s long political career started in the 1910s (when his Harlem-based magazine the Messenger staked out a pro-labor, pro-socialist position), ran through the 1930s and ’40s (when he gained renown for leading the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the first March on Washington), and stretched well into the ’60s (when he founded the Negro American Labor Council and served as the official head of the 1963 March on Washington).
Randolph’s life alone rebuts the whitewashed versions of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1963 march. Here was a man who saw the struggle against racial oppression and economic exploitation as intimately linked; who located the locus of change in the organized masses rather than the upper crust; who regarded unions as a grand instrument to bludgeon racial injustice.
As historian William P. Jones lays out in the following interview, it was fitting that Randolph headed the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For that march was a union march, a mass working-class march, a march that sought not only to end Jim Crow tyranny and racial segregation but to win a massive federal jobs program, well-funded education and housing, and a living wage for all workers.
Randolph had plenty of pro-labor company at the march: Cleveland Robinson, a key organizer, was head of the New York City local of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Addie Wyatt, a leader of the Packinghouse Workers union in Chicago, organized a large group to come to the march. The Garment and Auto Workers unions footed the bill for the event’s $20,000 sound system. Martin Luther King even originally tried out his “I Have a Dream” rhetoric at a 1961 AFL-CIO convention.
For years leading up to the March on Washington, black labor leaders and rank-and-file workers had used their unions, as Jones puts it, “both as vehicles of economic empowerment of black people and as tools for fighting racism.” When they gathered on that late August day, it was likely the largest-ever march of US union members up to that point. The following spring, with civil rights legislation languishing in Congress, Randolph pulled out another classic labor trick: he threatened to call a general strike. The Civil Rights Act passed that summer.
Jones tells this story to great effect in his 2013 book The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights. He spoke with Jacobin‘s Shawn Gude about the first March on Washington, the central role that black trade unionists played in the Civil Rights Movement, and the unfulfilled promise of the 1963 March on Washington’s radical, mass working-class vision.
Speaking of A. Philip Randolph, everyone should watch the amazing documentary Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.
In her Boston Review piece “Labor’s Militant Minority,” Mie Inouye describes the role of “salting” in some successful union drives and profiles some of the college-educated workers joining workplaces to help unionize them.
The organizers at the party included long-term Amazon workers as well as “salts.” Salts are workers who take jobs at a workplace with the goal of unionizing it—a strategy that left-wing organizations have used in the past, but that hasn’t garnered results in recent decades. Salts played an important but underreported role in the ALU’s widely celebrated union election at JFK8. Six of two dozen or so members of the core organizing committee were salts. ALU organizers wound up at the Communist Party headquarters on May 1 because Justine Medina, an organizing committee member who was recruited to JFK8 by the Young Communist League, helped plan the party.
Today’s salts are one component of a new militant minority, a layer of combative, politically conscious rank-and-file leaders within the labor movement. Their presence at Amazon and Starbucks suggests that we are witnessing an organic convergence of the college-educated middle class with the existing working class. This new militant minority, comprised of working-class labor leaders and left-wing college graduates, has the potential to unite the rejuvenated labor movement and other post-Occupy, post-Bernie arms of the U.S. left. If this occurs, then the victory at JFK8 portends many more to come. . .
Why are so many young, college-educated people independently deciding to take jobs at Amazon? Gene Bruskin, former Campaign Director of the UFCW’s Justice@Smithfield campaign and informal advisor to the ALU, credits structural conditions for the labor movement’s renewed “coolness.” “It’s a particular moment. The younger generation went through the financial crisis, Trump, Bernie, the pandemic, and all of those objective conditions.” This process, combined with the growing imminence of climate change, has given young people both a sense of urgency and a willingness to take conventionally working-class jobs.
In his profile of Jennifer Abruzzo for the Guardian, “Too Radical or Not Radical Enough? US’s top labor lawyer in the spotlight,” Stephen Greenhouse highlights how important an aggressively pro-labor administration can be for workers and describes Abruzzo’s critical role, including in the Amazon Staten Island victory.
Abruzzo’s bona fides are clear. She has repeatedly urged the NLRB’s five-person board to adopt new policies that would make it easier to unionize. She wants the board to prohibit so-called captive audience meetings in which Amazon and many other companies require employees to listen to anti-union speeches from managers and consultants. She wants the board to require employers to grant union recognition once a majority of workers sign cards saying they want a union. . . .
In another move that upset business, Abruzzo has proposed returning to a 1949 NLRB policy, known as Joy Silk, that would require employers to recognize a union once a majority of workers sign pro-union cards, unless the employer has good-faith doubts about the legitimacy of the majority. “When a union demonstrates that it enjoys majority support of workers in a workplace and an employer refuses to recognize their workers’ chosen representative … solely to undermine union support, which typically happens through unlawful coercion and other unlawful acts, that to me is problematic,” Abruzzo said. “We should not be allowing those employers to delay recognition so that they can coerce these workers to think differently or choose differently.”
A multi-media team at the New York Times recently produced a chilling investigation of workplace surveillance: “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score.”
Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.
Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. . .
The metrics are even applied to spiritual care for the dying. The Rev. Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients wrestle with deep, searching questions. “This is the big test for everyone: How am I going to face my own death?” she said.
But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.
But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.
As these practices have spread, so has resistance to what labor advocates call one of the most significant expansions of employer power in generations. TikTok videos offer tips on outsmarting the systems, including with a “mouse jiggler,” a device that creates the appearance of activity. (One popular model is called Liberty.) Some of the most closely monitored employees in the country have become some of the most restive — warehouse workers attempting to unionize, truckers forming protest convoys.
In “The Boss Will See You Now,” a review of recent books on corporate surveillance in The New York Review of Books, Zephyr Teachout addresses many chilling instances of what she called “the second big turning point in electronic performance-monitoring.” Based on a reading of Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), she offers two takeaways:
First, that to address the constant spying, we should focus on power, not just the technology. Labor rights and antitrust enforcement must be first-level responses to the current—and worsening—structures of power. Second, we should treat employer surveillance as we do any governmental surveillance—in other words, with deep suspicion. It is a truism that governmental surveillance chills speech and debate and erodes the public sphere; once we can perceive the workplace as a site of government, we can perhaps build a political movement for greater freedom in the places where working Americans spend most of their waking hours.
To make sense of the reality we are in, we need to be able to talk to one another without fear of our conversations being used against us. The private conversations among workers—and friendships, debates, questions—are part of the cohesion and connection that enables not just labor organizing but public life. When everything we say is being listened to—especially by a smaller and more powerful cadre of employers—it can become easier not to speak. This is not unlike the political totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt warned against, where the state aims to disintegrate both the private and the public by submerging the private into the public and then controlling the public. The logical conclusion of workplace surveillance is that the private sphere ceases to exist at home because it ceases to exist at work, where visibility into the worker’s life is unrestrained.
Delights & Provocations
If you haven’t watched the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You!, consider this issue of The Platypus as your preparation. Emily Yoshida of New York Magazine sums it up in her review:
A pro-union, anti-corporate, race-conscious, Silicon Valley side-eyeing tale of one man’s journey through the late-capitalist nightmare of an “alternate present” version of Oakland, Sorry to Bother You’s greatest asset is the strength of its conviction, and how far it’s willing to go to make sure it stays burned in your brain.
Books we recommend
In The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, Sarita Gupta and Erica Smiley, two veteran labor activists provides compelling answers to urgent questions: What do organizing and collective bargaining reimagined for our times look like? How should fights for worker justice intersect with community struggles for racial and gender justice?
Ellen Cassedy’s new book Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie takes readers to Boston in 1973, where Cassedy and a small group of office workers sparked what became a national movement and inspired one of the greatest pro-labor films of all time.
Three Great Jobs
The Colin Powell School at City College of New York is hiring two Distinguished Lecturers who will be associated with Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, which Deepak co-chairs with Gara LaMarche. We hope to recruit outstanding practitioners and movement leaders (advanced degrees not required) who have an interest in teaching at CUNY and building programs focused on training social justice leaders. Here is the application link. The jobs are open until filled, but applications will be reviewed beginnig on September 15th. You can go here for more information about Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice.
The Department of Labor Studies at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) seeks a junior scholar for a tenure-track Assistant Professor appointment. Applicants must hold a PhD at the time of appointment in History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Geography, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, or a related interdisciplinary field in the social sciences or humanities. The successful candidate will possess a demonstrated scholarly record and research agenda that focuses on workers, the labor movement and diverse working-class communities, past and/or present. Candidates should also have demonstrated excellence in teaching. Preference may be given to candidates with experience teaching nontraditional and adult students. Review of applications will begin October 15, 2022; the position is open until filled. You can apply here. For more information about SLU visit https://slu.cuny.edu.