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.