Abstract
In 1995, striking aerospace workers at Boeing plants in Wichita and Seattle won a small victory after 69 days on the picket line. Boeing was then the world’s largest defense contractor and the strike was led by dissident workers who had rejected a contract endorsed by Boeing’s main union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (known as the IAM).
Dana Cloud tells the story of this strike, which she sees as evidence of the continuing viability of traditional models of rank-and-file union militancy. Since this view clashes with the opinions of the rank-and-file unionists whose strike she chronicles, Cloud devotes a chapter to a dialogue with Wichita’s Keith Thomas, who had been a leader of the 1995 strike. This is a fascinating exchange, particularly in the light of recent history.
The year 1995 was pivotal for organized labor. Forty years earlier, when the AFL and CIO confederated, unions had been at the summit of their power. Over a third of the labor force (17 million of 50 million workers) belonged to AFL-CIO unions in that year. But since then union strength had waned. In the 1970s and 1980s, capital flight became so common (unionized factory workers were often replaced by low-wage workers in remote locations) that manufacturing unions were weakened and corporations emboldened.
By 1979, a top unionist could already lament that business was waging a “one-sided class war” against labor. That war intensified soon after, most notably when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union in 1982. But in the early 1990s, labor scored a rare breakthrough: the mass unionization of hotel workers (first in Los Angeles, later in many places) by Justice for Janitors, a project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
On the strength of this success, a reform slate headed by SEIU leader John Sweeney came to power in the AFL-CIO, displacing the entrenched bureaucracy that had ruled organized labor since 1955. That occurred, significantly, in 1995.
This history is crucial to understanding the situation of Boeing workers in 1995. Yet surprisingly little of this appears in Cloud’s book. Nor does she explore the structural problems that rendered labor vulnerable after 1995. The key fact is that industrial capital is mobile. Factory jobs can be dispatched to the far corners of the world at virtually the snap of a finger. In contrast, service capital is rooted—in hotels, shops, roadways, and other fixed sites. It was largely for this reason that, after organizing hotels, Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles turned to airports. Service workers are more readily organized than factory workers because few of their jobs can be sent abroad. Airports are too gigantic and site-specific to move. Hence, airport jobs cannot be readily sent abroad.
But aerospace jobs are easily moved. That is why the IAM tried hard to impose “clawbacks” (penalties for exiting after accepting tax breaks) on aerospace firms in Wichita in the past decade. This effort came up short. Boeing opened a non-union plant to the south and announced recently that it will leave Wichita altogether by 2014. Yet the attempt to bind Boeing with clawbacks was entirely understandable, since factory workers today have decreasing leverage as they become increasingly expendable. To have a hope of success, manufacturing workers (and their unions) must explore new options.
That, in short, is what Thomas concluded after seeing militancy dissipate after 1995. Like other strike leaders, Thomas was disheartened by the defeats that followed. He had good reason to be dismayed. Even the 1995 strike (which Cloud calls “a moment of profound class consciousness,” “by most accounts…a tremendous victory,” [pp. 108–9, 115]) yielded modest results. “We still took concessions, we still got beat back on our insurance,” said unionist Denise Harris (p. 113). Later events were even more sobering.
After 1995, Boeing went “lean,” installing a high-pressure workplace regime that left workers “bruised and battered,” “detached and resentful” (in the words of a major study by Edward Greenberg et al., cited on p. 34). In June 1996 (when Cloud met Thomas at a conference), the IAM urged workers to protest to remind Boeing “you didn’t go on strike for 69 days to have your job eliminated” (p. 95). But Boeing did not listen. From 1999 to 2004, 35,000 workers were laid off. In 1999, Thomas said that Boeing “is sending work…overseas every day” (pp. 70–71). In 2005, another 10,500 workers lost their jobs when an investment company bought the Wichita plant. In 2006, Boeing cut a quarter of its remaining Wichita workforce, while reporting in May that share prices had tripled since April 2003.
Cloud wants to assign blame for labor’s fall at Boeing. She quotes a key rank-and-file organizer in Seattle: “We blame everybody… The members aren’t demanding all that much.” She quotes Thomas: “The rank and file has to accept a portion of the blame…” (pp. 139, 124). For Cloud, however, this conclusion is elitist, and defeatist. Citing strikes in 2005 and 2008 as examples of “how concessions can be beat,” she says Boeing’s dissident unionists need to try harder. “Boeing workers are inherently powerful,” Cloud holds, “because they consitute a highly skilled and difficult-to-replace workforce” (p. 101). And she is convinced that, if rank-and-file workers are properly educated, they will unite, because that is where their interest lies. The ultimate secret to success, she says, is to keep trying.
Keith Thomas agrees that workers should not give up, but he also contends that something new is needed, and that activists should grapple with rank-and-file apathy and conservatism, rather than denying or dismissing them. Here are key lines from his dialogue with Dana Cloud:
Thomas: “…Some people are loath to assign any responsibility to the rank-and-file…but is that…even remotely accurate? … . As a body, they chose not to get involved. It really wasn’t for lack of education.” Cloud: “I think maybe it was for lack of education… . I think people can be inspired, as I have been, by the history of struggle.” Thomas: “We did reach out and train other people. They burned out. It isn’t as if there are a lot of people…willing to put in another forty-plus hours a week…with little chance of success and no reward… .” Cloud: “Over the long term there is a reward. I don’t think people need direct, immediate, or personal rewards to be motivated to organize” (pp. 156–7).
Thomas: “I’m not disillusioned. [But it’s like seeking] a cure for cancer [and] this pill doesn’t work. Or for another disease, you find that this antibiotic doesn’t work.” Cloud: “But you don’t give up on the idea of antibiotics.” Thomas: “Well, no. But you look for a different antibiotic” (p. 173).
Cloud is not looking for another antibiotic. Her brief “history of struggle” which she characterizes as the history of “the stagnant, recalcitrant sludge of the traditional union bureaucracy and the energetic movement that has risen out of the muck over and over again…” is inspirational, not analytic (p. 12). She gives short shrift to the defining event in recent labor history, the split of the AFL-CIO in 2005 which gave rise to a breakaway confederation, Change to Win. That this rival group consists largely of service unions, which enjoy a relative immunity to outsourcing, is beyond Cloud’s purview. Yet this is perhaps the essential clue to understanding what happened at Boeing. Manufacturing firms are increasingly abandoning unionized workers—and many service unions are following suit. Hence the continuing fall, and fall, of industrial unions.
Labor remains formidable, even today. There were 14.8 millon workers who paid union dues in 2011, including a high percentage of public sector workers. But as long as corporations send jobs abroad, as long as public sector workers are assailed, and as long as organized labor is fatefully divided, Cloud’s vision of a revived grassroots movement is likely to remain an anachronism. Fresh analysis is urgently needed as a prerequisite for any such revival.