WHAT’S WRONG WITH LABOR’S NEW ORGANIZING?
Posted by Chris Townsend | Mar 3, 2024
February 29, 2024
Despite frequent claims that organized labor – the trade unions – are more popular than ever as measured by all manner of public opinion polls, union membership continues to decline. Many sections of the labor “leadership” repeat this claim of popularity as if by pronouncing it, the labor movement will magically begin to grow again. Well intended leftist writers also author obligatory articles about this phenomenon. When reality returns, however, these feelgood bromides are nice to hear but otherwise are misleading and even destructive. They divert attention from the actual facts of the current crisis of new union organizing. Many a union “leader” or supporter gets ample applause when this sound bite is dropped, all acting to drown out the sounds of a sinking ship.
We have in the U.S. today a battered, shrinking, yet well-liked labor movement that is still undergoing a deep and systematic destruction. The current situation begs an obvious question: What good are positive public opinion polls if the union membership is declining, and union power is falling dramatically? What good is it if the unions themselves by and large have no significant work underway to organize new members and reverse the decline?
DISASTER CAN NO LONGER BE CONCEALED
Current NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) elections only cover private sector workplaces, but it is the leading indicator of union organizing activity and health. The number of union elections run by the NLRB has declined by more than 70% in the past 50 years, with the number of workers participating falling likewise. Only 980 total NLRB elections were conducted in the entire U.S. in 2021, the worst year of the pandemic; 1,400 were conducted in 2022; and 1482 in 2023. The number of workers involved continues to diminish as well, with elections of more than 100 hundred workers in a voting unit a rare commodity. In recent years — at best – barely 150,000 workers will vote in all NLRB elections combined. And all elections are not won, as some are decertification elections to abolish a union.
SICKENING FACTS
It is required to mention that the number of union organizing elections only represents the small slice of all the worker groups who initially set out to join a union. Many thousands of these incipient organizing efforts are destroyed by employer lawbreaking and repression, are bribed into deactivation, dissipated as extreme fear runs riot in the workforce, or are somehow legally delayed by the employer into a bureaucratic abyss.
For those not already astonished by these statistics, it is imperative to mention the ultimate bad news; of those groups who manage to run the employer gauntlet and force an NLRB election – and win it – only half of these units will ever win a first union contract. And for those who manage to somehow win twice, once an election and once a contract, of those, only half will reach a second union contract and actually begin to contribute to the strength of the labor movement.
This is therefore the bottom-line of trade union repression in the U.S. workplace today. For an Empire that wastes no time claiming to be the citadel of “human rights” worldwide, the U.S. workplace remains a repressive and often nightmarish dictatorship. In every union organizing school or class for workers that I conduct I declare with no hesitation that the workplace today is a dictatorship. No one disagrees.
OTHER UNION ELECTIONS?
Railroad, airline, and public sector union elections are not tracked by the NLRB. But the news is not much better for unions in those sectors today. Elections in railroad and airline sectors have slowed to a trickle for many of the same reasons as the NLRB. Union organizing elections in the public sector – which for 50 years have backfilled lost private sector members and provided an “optical illusion” of trade union growth and vitality – are now declining sharply.
The effects of the pandemic, combined with massive anti-union political assaults in several states has led to a situation where even public sector unionism has now begun to decline. Florida being the latest state where public sector labor unions are being liquidated with virtually no new organizing underway to replace the losses. See: Tens of Thousands of Workers in Florida Have Just Lost Their Labor Unions. More Is Coming (portside.org) and Florida Public Sector Unions Facing Destruction (MLToday).
Some unions manage to win voluntary recognition from employers without the NLRB processes, but the numbers and sectoral reach of these “card check’ agreements is tiny. Some unions also manage to orchestrate “top-down” recognition for their union from employers, most often in the building and construction trades. But the numbers are likewise small. Overall, these facts paint a stark and alarming picture; without a sharp course correction the prognosis for the unions is continued decline and decay. And as the workforce continues to grow, the shrinking and stagnant unionized garrisons are further isolated, marginalized, and sapped of their strength.
AN EVEN DEEPER CRISIS
Of all the multiple “crises” besetting the unions today, only a few observers would identify the lack of new union organizing among them. And the unwillingness of the labor “leadership” to seriously confront this disastrous situation also means that the many contributing factors to it go unexamined. As new organizing has receded or even ceased, thousands of experienced trade union organizers have retired, quit, and disappeared, taking with them the precious tactical knowledge of union organizing under today’s conditions. Fewer and fewer rank and file are exposed to new organizing and consequently are un-engaged in its support. In this situation they have almost no opportunities to learn the many new organizing skills. Union organizers are often left to stagger from campaign to campaign, and since organizing institutional memory is often lost – or never collected – this also leaves the employers with a decided advantage on many fronts. Employer institutional memory, combined with a renewed and expanded union-busting industry means that potent bomb-dropping power is deployed oftentimes against hapless unions in their heroic yet feeble organizing uprisings.
UNION STAFF MULTIPLY
Unions increasingly resort to off-the-street hires for all manner of organizing positions, which can sometimes bring valuable recruits, but just as often invites into the union elements unsuited for trade union organizing for a litany of reasons. Critical training for the new generation is also lacking, superficial, or even non-existent, which leaves organizers to essentially “train themselves.” Some land on their feet and make real contributions; some burn out quickly and abandon the task; others dutifully apply social justice models of organizing with mixed results at best; and many work diligently and apply a muddle of old and new methods, and consequently organize few if any new members.
New organizer raw material and immense amounts of money are wasted in this merry-go-round which repeats over and over in today’s labor world. Some unions actually rely on this staffing “model”, strangely trying to justify it. Few programs exist to teach and transition rank-and-file into the new organizing work, reinforcing their exclusion from this critical recruitment process. This decision to essentially twist new organizing into some sort of distinct and outside “profession” has had disastrous impact on the labor movement. Organizing staff are frequently not incorporated into the life of the union by wary or cynical union “leaders”, with real damage being done to the morale and motivation of the staff members.
DE FACTO BUSINESS UNION SABOTAGE
Business union “leadership” – resistant to serious new organizing in the first place and always seeking justification not to do it – point to union organizing election debacles, their alleged high costs, and the generally “low return” on the organizing “investment”. They point to these things as additional reasons why new organizing is “impossible”, “too expensive”, or must be postponed since “now is not the time”. The highest councils of the unions are frequently uninterrupted – to any serious degree – by serious deliberations regarding of the troublesome new organizing, as the “leaders” dutifully handle internal and administrative matters as their primary preoccupations.
The business union custodians of many of the unions see new organizing as little more than costly and confusing adventures, distractions from the main task of enabling their unchallenged hold on power in the union. Even worse, some consider new organizing as just more interference in their otherwise mindless internal bureaucratic meanderings. In this dense business union fog any development of a serious organizing strategy and program to implement it are nearly impossible. The periodic intoxication with the fantasy of labor law reform – notions such as mobilizing to pass the dead-on-arrival “Pro Act” to legalize union organizing again – act as further roadblocks to real organizing. Valuable resources are diverted into these pie-in-the-sky chases, with outside consultants and much ballyhooed labor “experts” sometimes moving in to sell the slumbering union bigs some miracle potion for their crisis.
WHERE IS THE NEW UNION ORGANIZING TODAY?
In those unions who are actively organizing today, the efforts are relatively small and isolated, found mostly, if not exclusively in “hot” shops where the workers are in brief uproar for some reason or another. And on any given day, fewer than half of all national or international unions are on the battlefield even on a small scale working to win new members. Several industrial sectors are, however, also momentarily and relatively speaking more active owing to different factors. Sectors that employ a higher-than-average number of young college-educated workers, some professional occupations, or African-American workers, are all more active in union organizing campaigns today.
By industry sector, a glance at the past 2 years of NLRB union elections – the first post-pandemic numbers on hand – will show that union elections are most likely to be held and won in the following types of workplaces: coffee shops, non-profit organizations, brewpubs and niche cafes, security guards, all levels of healthcare occupations, entertainment, cannabis retail shops, ground transportation, federal contract employees, all levels of college employment, energy-related construction, retail food and processing, museums and attractions, building services, and some professional scientific occupations. Manufacturing units – once the mainstay of new union organizing – do appear in the statistics but union success is rare, and the size of the units is usually tiny. See: Recent Election Results | National Labor Relations Board (nlrb.gov).
WHICH WAY OUT?
In this desolate landscape there are bright spots, little known as some of them may be. The launch and remarkable continued expansion of the Starbucks organizing movement would be one. Launched in 2019 by leaders of the Inside Organizing School (IOS) Inside Organizer School (squarespace.com) in collaboration with the Rochester Joint Board of Workers United/SEIU, this amazing organizing contagion continues to defy the massive union busting machinery of the employer and now approaches 400 NLRB elections won against all odds. Starbucks Workers United (sbworkersunited.org)
The equally remarkable successful organization of more than 25,000 graduate and teaching assistants by the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) would rank as one of the hard-fought examples of 2023 on this front. Top Five UE NEWS Stories of 2023 (ueunion.org). The recent and massive launch of a campaign by the newly-invigorated United Auto Workers (UAW) to renew and dramatically expand serious efforts to organize the open-shop auto manufacturers – primarily in the south – is an early and commendable undertaking. The drive is only in its infancy and has little to build on owing to the previous UAW “leaderships” only token attention to organizing. The advances won in the recent auto strike have however been heard by unorganized auto workers and early results of the drive are promising. The South, Where Automakers Go for a Discount (Labor Notes). On the health care front, The National Nurses United (NNU) organizing program continues to roll-up wins among registered nurses coast-to-coast. 0722_NNOC_101_Final.pdf (nationalnursesunited.org).
There are also small scale but key examples of unions or sections of unions now engaged in fierce and sometimes successful battles to organize the unorganized, although confined mostly to the sectors reviewed here. As I made clear in my recent article on the bankruptcy of much of the “Organize the South!” sloganeering, Organize the South! Empty Slogan or Real Goal? (MLToday) honest efforts by trade union militants can be effective in pushing into action the otherwise docile trade union “leaders”.
SHOVING THE UNION LEADERSHIP INTO ACTION?
This crisis of new union organizing is a life-and-death situation for the unions. Oblivion and extinction await if the current lame and lazy approaches continue. The responsibility for generating internal pressures on the unions tops will fall primarily to the small and isolated groups of leftists within the unions. No other section of the union possesses the political understanding or the stamina to confront this situation. Legendary labor leader and organizer William Z. Foster spent large sections of his career grappling with this exact situation. See his collected works; American Trade Unionism (intpubnyc.com).
While daunting in its steep climb, huge sections of the membership will instinctively support the needed and expanded new campaigns of organization – but only if they are brought into the work and allowed to participate. Large sections of the existing union leadership will also respond favorably, as they recognize the magnitude of the crisis and are at least supportive of the need to help move the union forward. The disastrous and often corrupt union merger waves of the past several decades have now also evaporated, largely eliminating this excuse to delay new organizing. The existing leadership is now open to wide and new challenge as membership levels fall and the existing problems faced by the unions worsen and multiply. Unrest among the membership is significant in many unions, and the demand to organize is a major part of the solution to their on-the-job problems.
The labor “left” however, will need to re-acquaint itself with new union organizing and its powerful influences in order to generate this political wave. The small left is frequently found to be active, or at least vocal, within every union on every union issue there may be – with the exception of new organizing. Calls to “Organize the Unorganized! Save the Unions!” must be injected into the national and local union leadership councils at every junction. While the left forces are not today sufficient to prevail by themselves, valuable links will be made with the wide strata of members and low and mid-level leaders who are likewise alarmed at the downhill direction and deepening ruination of the unions.
https://mltoday.com/whats-wrong-with-la ... rganizing/
UAW ARAB CAUCUS DEMANDS STRONGER UAW ACTION ON PALESTINE
Posted by MLToday | Mar 4, 2024
Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent by the UAW Arab Caucus to United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain on February 12, 2024.
Shawn Fain
President, United Auto Workers
Dear Shawn,
We write to you as an Arab caucus in the UAW on day 129 of the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians to ask you meet with us this week.
Yesterday, Americans watched the Superbowl, including vicious Israeli propaganda ads that lawyers have said violate FCC regulations. Thinking that people who have been steadfastly resisting our complicity as taxpayers in this genocide would be distracted by the Superbowl (as they did during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas), Israel aerial bombed Palestinian homes, mosques, and hospitals in the “Safe Zone” region of Rafah– the last place that Palestinian civilians can go.
As you know, the weapons Israel is using are paid for by U.S. taxpayer money – 14.5 billion dollars was sent since October 2023 in addition to the 3.8 billion dollars the U.S. sends every year. On this same Super Bowl Sunday massacre, the U.S. Senate met in a secret session and advanced another 14.1 billion dollar package to Israel. On top of it all, many of the weapons being supplied are made in UAW unionized shops. It is abundantly clear how central our role as U.S. residents, laborers, and American voters is to Israel’s U.S.-supported ethnic cleansing campaign – and it’s never been more clear to us the role that the UAW can play in putting an end to it.
As Arab members of the UAW, we have been asking for a meeting with you since late October. In addition to emailing you ourselves, our fellow UAW members sent hundreds of emails on our behalf, and people who see you regularly have asked directly for this meeting. We’ve been given a wide range of excuses as to why this meeting hasn’t yet happened. All the while we are grieving the loss of dozens of family members, livelihoods, witnessing direct violence and incitement to violence against Arabs in the US – including those of us who are members of Local 600 in Dearborn which a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed just called the “jihad capital of America”. We are terrified that this war is intended to expand to the entire Middle East region, and harm more and more of us here in the U.S. (Americans have already been killed in Gaza and the West Bank, and Palestinians targeted in the U.S.).
We need you to meet with us now – you must take action to translate the UAW’s ceasefire declaration to practical interruption of the weapons which our UAW siblings are making, sending to Israel, and which are being used to kill our families. We have lots of ideas of what that can look like, but we need the support of our reform leadership. You must show your accountability to your rank-and-file workers by sitting down with us, coming up with a plan of action for Palestine, and then following through on it.
We aim to realize the dream of the original UAW Arab caucus, which undertook a wildcat strike in November 1973 in Dearborn, demanding the UAW divest from Israeli bonds. Fifty years later, nearly to the date this November, we celebrated as you and our elected leadership passed a ceasefire resolution and created a committee to look into Divestment and a Just Transition– fulfilling the Arab caucus’s demands. We are grateful for your leadership on calling for an end to the genocide and as our Arab caucus before us, we urge you to do much more.
The question of Palestine has moved U.S. residents in sustained resistance for months in ways unprecedented in decades. If UAWD and the reform leadership is going to stay in power and continue to push the labor agenda in this country, we will need to move beyond the supposed priorities of the traditional and often white male labor activists. We will need to work on campaigns and in ways that touch a wider range of diverse younger workers – Palestinian liberation is one such campaign, and we, as Arab unionists, know also that our liberation is interconnected. That is, we are already and will continue to work to connect with our more marginalized union siblings to bring all of our pressing issues to the forefront of the union.
This kind of work will bring more active members into the reform caucus and actually ensure the expansion of the UAW reform program. In fact, issues like the genocide in Palestine have already proven to be one of the most powerful activating and mobilizing forces for the labor movement. Fear, on the other hand, that taking an active stance on Palestine will alienate rank and file or leadership members of the Admin Caucus, will get us nowhere. Instead, it will just reproduce the same dynamic that UAWD is supposedly trying to shift. If our union’s power is to continue into the future in a diverse America, we must grow and become more committed to the cause of workers everywhere.
We need you to take action on Palestine, starting by meeting with us now. We, as Arab unionists, in turn, commit to helping to transform the UAW into a truly democratic and more powerful union that can fight the fascist turn in this country, and improve the conditions of all workers in the U.S. and everywhere.
In solidarity,
Mary Jirmanus Saba, UAW Local 2865
Alia ElKattan, UAW Local 2110
Shahinaz Geneid, GENU-UAW & HAW-UAW
Ignacia Lolas, UAW Local 2325
Mafaz Al-Suwaidan, HGSU-UAW Local 5118
On behalf of the UAW Arab Caucus
https://mltoday.com/uaw-arab-caucus-dem ... palestine/
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America’s Richest Men Ask the Courts to Make Unions Illegal
Today on TAP: Lawyers for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon say the Court erred in 1937 by letting workers have rights on the job.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON FEBRUARY 22, 2024
EDUARDO MUNOZ AVAREZ/AP PHOTO
Amazon JFK8 distribution center union organizer Jason Anthony speaks to the media, April 1, 2022, in Brooklyn, New York.
Fourscore and seven years ago—1937, to be exact—our fathers on the Supreme Court (well, five of them, which was just enough) brought forth a new nation: New Deal America. In that year, the justices ruled that the most fundamental legislative works of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency—Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)—were constitutional. So said the Court; so said, in the NLRA case, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the decision’s author, who had been the Republican candidate for president in 1916. From these decisions, which saved seniors from destitution and enabled workers to form unions, a broadly shared prosperity emerged that gave the nation a middle-class majority for the three decades after World War II.
Now we are engaged in a war with the rulers of the new economy, who, having already downsized that middle class by appropriating an ever larger share of the proceeds from its work for themselves, actually want to strike down the NLRA. In the past few weeks, three pillars of that economy—Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, and the Albrecht family’s Trader Joe’s—have all asked federal courts to declare the core functions of the NLRA unconstitutional, on the grounds that the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) administrative courts, like those of other regulatory agencies, mix judicial functions with executive branch functions. In actual practice, what those bodies do is hear and rule on cases such as those brought by workers on organizing campaigns who’ve been illegally fired. What Elon and Jeff would prefer is that federal courts hear such cases directly, which guarantees that by the time they reach the bench, those organizing campaigns will have become a dim memory. Or maybe, they want no one to hear such cases. Or perhaps, given the deep hatred that Sam Alito holds toward unions, they hope that Alito can persuade enough of his colleagues to toss the NLRA altogether, as he did with Roe v. Wade.
Their arguments are the same that came before the Court in 1937, when the most reactionary corporate overlords of that era sought to destroy the threat of some modestly countervailing worker power, which then had been rising for several years. That same dynamic clearly threatens the Musks and Bezoses today, with unions’ approval rating at its highest levels in 60 years, with young workers particularly bent on winning a say in their work lives, and with Joe Biden’s NLRB working to restore some teeth to the NLRA, which had been largely defanged by decades of decisions from pro-corporate courts.
This isn’t an academic exercise for the Elons and Jeffs; it’s personal. Musk’s Tesla is the target of organizing efforts from the UAW and a number of European unions, while Bezos’s Amazon, having suffered the indignity of having one of its warehouses vote to unionize, is avidly surveilling all of its workers for any sign of undue collective ambition. Like the CEOs of yesteryear, the current crop of corporate autocrats knows they can’t win the public to their cause: The optics of the world’s richest person (Musk) and the third-richest (Bezos) destroying American workers’ right to go union and win living wages could be, well, problematic. If rebuffed in the court of public opinion, though, they might just prevail in the courts of the United States.
But really—in a time of stratospheric economic inequality and overwhelming public support for unions, they want the courts to strike down workers’ right to collective bargaining? One of the fundamental landmarks of the New Deal? Shall we negate all of America’s mid-20th-century social progress? All of Roosevelt’s legacy? How about we revisit World War II and surrender to the Nazis and Japan?
As with the company formerly known as Twitter, Musk is the sole owner of SpaceX, as the Albrecht family is of Trader Joe’s. But Amazon, at least, is publicly traded, and its board of directors includes a few members who may not wish to be so closely associated with the evisceration of the New Deal’s good works. Lawyer Jamie Gorelick has, to be sure, lobbied for drug companies and done work for Jared Kushner, but she’s also on the board of the Urban Institute and once was Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general. Patty Stonesifer, whom Bezos installed as the interim CEO of The Washington Post, has worked for a number of giant tech companies, but has also played key roles establishing and running a number of foundations and nonprofits, once even serving as CEO of Martha’s Table, an organization that makes fresh and healthy food more available to the poor of Washington, D.C. While Martha’s Table’s clientele would surely grow if unions were wiped off the map, we shouldn’t assume that Stonesifer would therefore support the Court’s revocation of the right to collective bargaining. For Jamie and Patty and their fellow Amazon directors, dancing on FDR’s grave, and the mass grave of the American working class, may be viewed by future historians as really unseemly.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newslett ... s-illegal/
