[div class="excerpt"]ISR Issue 66, July–August 2009

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ECONOMIC CRISIS SPECIAL COVERAGE

By LEE SUSTAR

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

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.

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http://www.isreview.org/issues/66/feat-USLabor.shtml

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This article is very long, but pretty interesting.

Emphasis mine...

"Tens of millions of workers are prepared to organize"

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.


...


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. 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. 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.


...

"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."

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 pro-labor 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 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. 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.


...

"What’s needed is independent working-class politics."

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, 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.

"Activists need to assimilate the lessons of previous generations of socialists who rejected labor-management partnership and promoted class-struggle, social-movement unionism."

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.

Why is this not of interest to people here?

TA,
The Labor Movement has been a neglected topic for a long time. I think one reason is that it's impossible for either activists or unorganized workers to engage most Internationals. About the only support Locals want is donations to their PACs or help phone banking at election time. If your not a member (and mostly even if you are) there's no space for a conversation with Union organizers.

I've mentioned before that I'm active in a Workers Center. We have frequent interactions with Staff of both AFL-CIO and CTW locals. We've been involved in a SEIU janitors campaign, a couple of UFCW grocery and food processing campaigns and numerous partnerships with the Building Trades on wage theft campaigns. Much of this work has been what Sustar & Moody call "social movement unionism". We've been able to engage the community to pressure employers to bargain, but once a contract is signed, the campaign is over. And to be fair many of these same Staffers have helped us enthusiastically (just don't ask them to turn out the rank and file).

"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."

Sustar mentions the Immokalee Workers as a successful Workers Center, and they are in large part, because once they have organized a successful social movement campaign, they move to the next target, the next issue. Many of the victories have been "agricultural shop floor" ones. They use their members expanding (almost said growing lol) power to influence the way they work, as well as how much they get paid.

"Left-wing labor activists should seize the moment to bring socialist politics into the workplace"

This was the impulse of many radicals who left the student or civil rights movements in the 1970s. I agreed then and agree now, but the way forward may not pass through the mega-locals. The other day I looked at the new In These Times Labor Blog and 2 of the top 4 stories were about Workers Centers. If social movement unionism exists anywhere outside of UE or CWA, it's in these Centers.

For some the article isn't new, nothing they don't already know.

Sometimes there's (ahem) resistance to talking about class, race and elitism in labor movements.

There's also the heavy conditioning most of us have had to FLAME WAR contentious fighting on the forums. Not that that's necessarily bad, you can learn a lot, assuming you're not wasting yourself on deliberate attempts to avoid something more important.

Maybe somebody needs to start an incendiary labor union thread in GD.

:)

The way forward may well be to start over from scratch. Millions of workers are ready to organize now. It is rare to find anyone who isn't. They are not ready to "join a union" whatever that means now. They are ready to band together to fight back, from the bottom up. But everywhere we turn, we find gentrified bullshit, shills for the owners in one guise or another - cooperators, collaborators, compromisers.

Hey Runs,
I'm not sure what your point is. There was a time when US Trade Unionism was a radical movement. This is not that time. But, unions are not the reason that working people are exploited. Unions may not fight for their members in the way we would like, but the bosses and their political tools are the problem. It's one thing to argue that business unionism does little for the working class. It's another to argue that it's equally responsible for the state of things.

What you say is correct, "but the bosses and their political tools are the problem," inasmuch as someone might say of the US political system, "but the politicians and the mainstream media are the problem."

I don't think unions are the reason workers are exploited. I'm sure cops and firefighters etc are doing pretty well.

Yes, there was a time when trade unionism was more synonymous with social movement. And I only see that now in the organizing of the service sector. But I don't see good Limo Liberals anxious to talk about those movements.