Abstract
During the 50-year decline of U.S. labor unions, labor-affiliated researchers, officials, and activists have offered a series of proposals to revitalize unions. An early proposal focused on increased rank-and-file union democracy and has shaken up dozens of previously unresponsive, bureaucratized union locals. Another led to huge organizing drives among contracted security and janitorial workers. A push for a less oppositional, more collaborative stance from unions undergirded innovative labor-management partnerships. These ideas have all brought notable successes, but none have reversed the secular decline in union influence.
In Tell the Bosses We're Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century, Shaun Richman objects to this prior generation of union revitalization proposals. He argues that they all presuppose a broken labor-relations system, in which short-term benefits trap unions in self-defeating patterns. Exclusive representation, in which only one union represents all workers at a work site, prevents productive competition among rival unions. Formal collective bargaining agreements that codify union gains also carve out broad swaths of workplace decisions as the exclusive domain of managers. No-strike clauses, which ensured industrial peace during the post-World War II golden era of union influence, also neuter union bargaining power. Richman argues that when unions engage these basic elements of the U.S. industrial relations system, they remain stuck in an unequal exchange with employers.
Versions of these points have been made by commentators ranging from Robert Fitch's Solidarity for Sale on exclusive representation and Joe Burns on reviving militant strikes to my colleague Thomas Kochan's decades of work on alternative channels of worker voice. But Richman argues from his experience as a union staffer organizing hotel workers and teachers. He supplements this experience with historical and contemporary examples of labor struggles, contextualized in the shifting legal context shaping union activism. The result is an incisive synthesis of prior arguments. The U.S. labor relations regime imposes difficult constraints on unions. As union power has weakened and anti-union legal decisions have piled up, the constraints of the traditional system increasingly outweigh its benefits for unions.
The main thrust of the book, however, is not analysis and criticism, but a discussion of a series of possibilities open to workers and unions if they abandon the traditional system. Some of these proposals—like committing to ongoing union member mobilization, activism, and strike action—will be familiar to observers of debates on union strategy. More novel are Richman's arguments about how unions should address shortcomings of labor law. He also puts forward a series of interesting—but, to this non-lawyer, implausible—legal arguments that unions could pursue without new legislation (illegality of employer captive-audience meetings; illegality of permanent strike replacements; multiple collective bargaining agreements for competing minority unions).
Beyond these options for unions to unilaterally challenge the traditional system, Richman advises policy changes, like eliminating at-will employment and introducing single-payer health care and tripartite wage boards. Versions of this latter proposal, which would establish boards to set industry- or occupation-specific minimum wages, have recently been a focus of the Clean Slate for Worker Power project. Richman adds to this active debate by speculating about the implications of wage boards for framing organizing and activism, rather than just discussing the institutional and legal mechanics of the boards. This sensitivity to the mobilization and messaging implications of sometimes wonky legal and policy issues is a distinctive element of Richman's writing. His perspective as an organizer and labor educator keeps these considerations in sharp focus.
Taken as a bundle, Richman's proposals may be unlikely to be implemented. But they serve to illustrate his opening argument: U.S. labor unions typically operate in a narrow ambit, hedged in by past political compromise and unfavorable legal decisions. Richman's proposals also offer a warning to employers and to managers, who may bristle at conventional union representation and bargaining: the U.S. labor relations system exists in part to contain worker activism and win industrial peace. As employers make that system increasingly unworkable, they risk a return to unruly and disruptive expressions of labor activism. Tell the bosses we're coming, indeed.
More than many books reviewed in Contemporary Sociology, this book is not written for an academic audience. Richman's readers are union staffers, activists, and the growing ranks of young socialist activists. So instead of assessing evidence and inference as if this book wanted to be academic sociology, I will instead, in the remainder of this review, explain why sociologists may find this book of interest.
Richman provides a peek into the mechanics of union organizing (p. 16 and elsewhere) that is difficult to find outside of organizing manuals and union training programs. He also raises questions about the contagion of activism and the spillover effects of labor strikes. Some work on social movements (and on labor strikes specifically, recent research by the Columbia Labor Lab) speaks to these questions. But these are deep sociological issues about the conditions and nature of emulation that deserve further study.
Richman’s analysis of minority unionism should be of interest to sociologists of stratification. As Richman notes, several European countries, such as France and Italy, have long traditions of competing union federations, based on ideological differences, that often seek to recruit the same types of workers and even at the same workplaces. The downsides of this approach, viewed from the one-union-per-bargaining unit American system, are obvious. There is a loss of solidarity, an increase in the cost of coordination, and costly infighting. But minority unionism allows an outlet for workers dissatisfied with the bargaining preferences of the median bargaining unit voter (or entrenched union leaders). Historically, women and minorities have often seen their concerns dismissed by the leaders of their union locals. In rare instances, like the black autoworkers’ Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, dissatisfied union members organized caucuses to contest and even circumvent unresponsive union leaders. Perhaps allowing minority unions would help give voice to these concerns and ultimately make the labor movement more responsive to their diverse members.
Finally, Richman's overview of work-to-rule and workplace sabotage offers lessons for sociologists trying to understand wage stagnation and rising inequality. It is one thing to grasp, in the abstract, that employers might offer high wages to ensure high worker productivity, as in canonical efficiency wage theory. This is a reasonable interpretation of wage premiums offered to workers in the classic high-paying blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, transportation, and mining. But the challenge, unmet so far by sociologists, is to track in detail the arms race between employer surveillance and worker disobedience. When surveillance improves and disobedience ebbs, the incentive to pay high efficiency wages erodes. A useful starting point for sociological research on this issue may be Richman's vivid continuum of workplace action (Chapter 6), ranging from partial strikes to Amazon workers mislabeling packages.
For sociologists without a specific interest in labor union strategy, these insights make Richman's thought-provoking book worth the read.