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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 24, 2018)
PAGE 20 | August 24, 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS How to restore union power Unions are withered from decades of attack, but several labor figures have ideas about how to spark the comeback workers need. Revive the strike Joe Burns, today chief negotiator for Association of Flight Attendants, CWA, was a hospital orderly in Min- neapolis who became president of AFSCME Local 1164. He decided to make organized labor his life’s work, and went to school to study labor law, but was troubled to learn how weak American labor law is. The law says employers must “negotiate” with unions, but don’t have to agree to any union proposals. How are unions supposed to get employers to agree to anything? Burns found the answer in decades old labor rela- tions textbooks: Labor law could be weak because unions, using the strike, were strong. All the textbooks assumed that the strike was how unions won gains. Burns came to believe that workers can not make real gains in collective bargaining without the threat of a strike that succeeds in halting production. Without that threat, employers have little incentive to meet and bar- gain, and even less incentive to make concessions. He makes that case in a pair of very readable books: Reviving the Strike and Strike Back: Using the Militant Get organized For working people, there’s just no substitute for the power that comes from being organized. To be organized, in this context, doesn’t mean keeping a orderly toolbox. It means all or substantially all the workers in a workplace are a meaningful part of an organization that’s capable of taking unified and collective action. In her book No Shortcuts, lifelong organizer Jane McAlevey says historically, organizing resulted in mass participation by ordinary people in movements that im- proved their lives and changed society for the better. But the power of the labor movement waned as unions shifted from a model based on deep organizing to a model based on shallow “mobilization,” in which professional staff turn out the same group of dedicated activists while most union members stay uninvolved. McAlevey, who was formerly deputy national director of SEIU’s health care division, traces the shift to the 1970s when unions, particularly SEIU, started hiring more and more college-educated professionals from outside their ranks, rather than developing and training their own rank- and-file members. Outside hires like organizers, re- searchers, lawyers, communicators can add value, Bury the dead and move on The 20th century U.S. approach to labor relations is dead, says David Rolf, and it’s well past time that unions bury it and move on to something else. Rolf is president of Seattle-headquartered SEIU Local 775, which represents 45,000 home-healthcare and nursing home workers in Washington and Montana. Rolf says America’s system of enterprise-based collective bar- gaining is broken because it gives employers every in- centive to fight unionization and resist making eco- nomic concessions. If a union firm gives a raise, it becomes less competitive with non-union firms. Rolf made that case to union officers and stewards at the Oregon Labor Law Conference in January. Now he’s presenting it in a 116-page online white paper for JOE BURNS Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America Tactics of Labor's Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today. America once had the world’s https://amzn.to/2nTbRlI most active strike move- ment. In the 1950s there were 350 strikes a year involving more than 1,000 workers. But strikes fell off dramatically in the 1980s, and by the 2000s, they had almost ceased to exist. Last year there were 7 strikes of over 1,000. And today, on the rare occasions when workers do strike, they tend to be symbolic “publicity” strikes of a day or so. Burns studied strikes of the 1930s to 1960s and found a classic pattern of escalating solidarity. A strike would begin at one location and spread quickly to oth- ers (“sympathy strike”), even an entire industry. These were no symbolic protests. Their livelihoods on the line, strikers meant business — they meant to stop McAlevey writes, but they can’t re- No Shortcuts: place the power of Organizing for organized work- Power in the New ers themselves. Guilded Age https://bit.ly/2nUOkkn And when the outsiders come to lead unions, workers can come to be little more than props to be deployed in employer-centered pressure campaigns that are aimed at getting media attention, em- barrassing the boss, or persuading politicians to intervene. No Shortcuts, aimed at union leaders and organizers, lays out a method of organizing that starts with identifying and recruiting the most respected workers in a workplace, developing them as leaders, and ramping up the level of risk and engagement the entire work force until they’re prepared to take the ultimate step — striking — if their employer refuses to be fair with them. McAlevey says every tactic must be aligned to bring about that maximum involvement. She says union bar- gaining teams shouldn’t (and don’t have to) agree to ground rules or gag rules, for example, and can invite every worker to observe contract negotiations. [It’s their JANE McALEVEY DAVID ROLF A Roadmap to Building Worker Power the Century Foundation, a non-profit think tank. The paper, https://bit.ly/2ByJVNS aimed at “orga- nizers and archi- tects of the next labor move- ment,” argues that unions must adopt new ways of providing value to workers. Rolf puts forward nine value propositions — things unions could do to provide value to workers. Benefits provision and administration are one exam- ple. Unions, through so-called Taft-Hartley trusts, pro- vide high-quality affordable health and pension benefits to members; could they provide benefits to gig economy workers too? Or take certification and labeling: Third-party labels like LEED and Fair Trade are proliferating. Why not production. The word picket came from military us- age, meaning a line of troops (with sharp sticks) set up to stop an enemy advance. Picket lines were phys- ical blockades meant to prevent strikebreakers from entering and goods from entering or leaving. In the 1930s, mass pickets blocked plant gates and discour- aged would-be scabs from taking their place. Sit-down strikes (in which workers occupied and refused to leave their workplace) prevented anyone at all from entering. If a company did succeed in producing goods with scabs, other workers would refuse to ship or re- ceive them, or handle the “hot cargo.” Unions also took the struggle to the wider public, boycotting not just the struck employer’s goods, but also businesses that bought or sold the scab-made goods. But bit by bit, laws and judicial rulings prohibited each of those tactics. Real solidarity became illegal. In the 1930s, and in earlier epochs, unionists consid- ered restrictions on the right to strike to be illegitimate, and refused to follow them. Burns thinks unionists are going to have to break the law again to win back the right to strike effectively. own interests that are on the line, and nothing may turn them into union stalwarts faster than seeing the contempt with which the bosses’ $300-an-hour corporate lawyers treat workers’ own elected representatives.] Most of the book consists of case studies where she looks at tactics used and results achieved. She profiles the Chicago Teachers Union strike, Seattle’s Fight for 15 cam- paign, and her own SEIU Local 1199NE in Connecticut, which attained the nation’s highest wage and workplace standards by engaging in routine all-out strikes every few years. Some of the profiles make for dramatic reading, like how, overcoming fanatically hostile management, UFCW organized 5,000 workers at Smithfield Foods pork factory in Tar Heel, North Carolina and won $15 an hour, paid sick leave and vacation, health and retirement bene- fits, and more. McAlevey argues that powerful production stopping strikes (as opposed to symbolic protest strikes) are still the most effective method to winning gains, and that mass or- ganization is necessary to pull those off. The most suc- cessful unions, McAlevey writes, are still the ones that follow that classic model of the old CIO, where organizing never stops, and where members are the union, electing their own representatives, and attending and making de- cisions at their meetings. reinvent the union bug as way to certify to consumers that workers providing their product or service were treated decently? To illustrate each value proposition, Rolf briefly profiles groups that employ them. Rolf looks at Indi- visible and the NRA as models of member engage- ment, AARP as a model of benefits, and the Kaiser Permanente labor-management partnership as a model of codetermination. In fact, some of the “value propositions” he proposes for the future are already modeled fairly effectively by America’s building trades unions, like worker training (apprenticeship programs), and job placement (hiring halls). Others, like codetermination (where workers have seats on corporate boards or have input in company de- cisions via “works councils”) are borrowed from Euro- pean examples and would need legal changes. If unions want to rebuild worker power, Rolf argues, innovation needs to be the new religion.
