Abstract
New York City fast food workers strike for improved wages and dignity in the workplace, April 2013.
For much of the traditional labor movement, the last year included major defeats. A so-called right-to-work law, which makes it illegal for union contracts to oblige workers to pay dues, went into effect in Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers. In New York City, where government workers in relative terms hold significant political power, nearly all public sector unions are operating on expired wage agreements while they organize to pick the next mayor with whom they will bargain the specifics of such a colossal economic mess. A long anticipated East Coast longshore workers’ strike, expected to invigorate the idea of using the power of cutting off the supply chain, was averted when the union and coalition of ports extended bargaining at the end of 2012, and on the West Coast, the more radical International Longshore and Warehouse Union is dealing with lockouts and scab labor.
Clouds have darkened at the national level as well. The U.S. Postal Service’s proposal to switch to five-day mail delivery has been seen as the first critical step toward undoing the power of the postal unions. Its big unionized corporate competitor, the United Parcel Service (UPS), happens to be on the employer end of the nation’s largest private sector collective bargaining agreement. In its recent nationwide agreement with the Teamsters, UPS got away with modest pay raises, which raise deductibles on health care, a move that has angered much of the membership. Leaders James Hoffa and Ken Hall responded that disgruntled members should find comfort in the inferior medical plans of their nonunion counterparts. Ken Paff, national organizer of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, said, “Members have low expectations, and Hoffa and Hall have met them.”
In a time of economic stagnation, failure to offer bosses major concessions at the bargaining table has opened unions up to the accusation that they are impeding recovery for the rest of the nation. Last fall, Hostess, which owned Wonder Bread and Drake’s brands, shuttered its operations when members from the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union went on strike after rejecting concessionary contract terms. The blogosphere accused the workers’ lack of belt tightening of destroying the great American Twinkie. (Mark Hendrickson wrote in Forbes, “I can’t respect a union that would kill off the Twinkie and their own jobs due to a false sense of pride.”) Likewise, any public sector union advocating for wage increases since 2008 is condemned as trying to turn the United States into another Greece.
Since 2008, there has been hope that with a Democratic administration, there may be more opportunities in the political arena, paving the way forward for unions to make progress at job sites. But at the federal policy level, things are not much prettier. In late May, a Senate committee approved President Barack Obama’s nominees for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a step forward since those appointments had been invalidated by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. It was progress for labor, but beyond that, the first year of the second Obama administration has delivered hard news. For example, the president appointed Patricia Millett—who worked as an attorney for Starbucks, which fought baristas who tried to unionize—to the same bench that denied his NLRB appointments. That fact did not bother AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who said after hearing about Obama’s court appointments that Congress should “move expeditiously to confirm these nominees.”
That court also invalidated an NLRB decision requiring employers to post notices that workers had a right to join a union, arguing that it violated the bosses’ free speech rights (the Fourth Circuit ruled similarly). “That’s pretty remarkable, because employers are required to post all kinds of things, yet somehow this court found a way to get them out of posting about the right to form and join a union,” said James Pope, a law professor at Rutgers University at Newark. “It underscores how we’re in a period where the basic value of freedom of association is at issue in the United States.”
Reality has also crushed the left’s hope—and right’s fear—that a second Obama administration would let loose the Democrat’s hidden radical agenda. Obama appointed Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary, even though hotel worker unions have fought against her in Obama’s hometown of Chicago in her role as a part of the Hyatt Hotel fortune. In such a climate, it is no wonder the Employee Free Choice Act, labor’s biggest legislative priority at the end of the Bush administration, has not been mentioned in policy circles.
While these setbacks have inspired labor leaders to talk about increased unity in the face of adversity, the evidence points to the contrary. The AFL-CIO’s indirect endorsement of the Keystone pipeline, which angered environmentalists, was emblematic of the power of construction unions that desire jobs at all costs, a blow to any imagined labor coalition with environmentalists. Iterations of this theme percolate nationwide. For example, New York public sector unions are in battle with Governor Andrew Cuomo over tough contract terms and privatization. Meanwhile, his administration is propped up by the Coalition to Save New York, which mostly comprises wealthy business interests, and also the Building and Construction Trades Council, which has affiliate unions that benefit from large-scale real-estate development and the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to extract natural gas.
With such a bleak record, it might sound naïve to think that the Chicago teachers’ strike and the wave of strikes by nonunion fast food workers are glimmers of hope. But those victories, along with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s success in organizing car wash workers in New York City, provide encouragement not simply because they are industrial actions that have grabbed headlines but also because they change the dynamic of labor action, putting forth broad economic demands on the government, rather than simply striking for a set of workers at a particular company.
Chicago Manual of Style
The teachers’ strike in Chicago was an exhilarating event for radical unionists for several reasons, not least of which was that it bolstered the leadership of Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis and her reformist Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), securing a sector of radical thinking in the otherwise moderate American Federation of Teachers. Around the country, more militant organizers believe this could be a model elsewhere in the country.
For starters, the strike was not about teachers’ pay, but about resources for schools, such as on-site nurses and social workers, as well as limits on class sizes, a direct benefit not simply for teachers but for parents and students as well. Brian Jones, who this year ran unsuccessfully as secretary-treasurer of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers on CORE’s sister slate—the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE)—said that the strike broke the taboo of confronting the Democratic Party, which along with the Obama administration had been vigorous in pushing for charter schools, standardized testing, and privatization. “They were facing Obama’s right-hand man in his hometown in an election year, and instead they decided to stand up to the Democratic Party,” said Jones, speaking of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who previously served as the president’s chief of staff. He added,
You can pull the public along with you when you’re standing for what’s right. Unfortunately, too often, our union leaders feel boxed in or feel that they are constrained by their belief that there is not much that can be said or done outside of that Democratic box, it’s like stepping over a cliff.
That is a particularly sobering message for the public sector as a whole. To expose the Obama administration as part of the plot against public sector workers would undermine the consoling delusion that it is all attributable to the Koch brothers and Fox News. It is easy for union leaders to vilify Republican antiunion governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Chris Christie of New Jersey, but unpalatable to publicize how often unions are also defending their rights and jobs from the likes of Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo of New York or Jerry Brown of California.
Already, Jones can see the roots of this new movement taking place. In Seattle, a group of teachers refused to administer new standardized testing, with the support of parents who saw the testing as degrading to education. Although this was a rank-and-file action, these teachers eventually got the support of union officials. “The [National Education Association] backed them up, and that’s great,” Jones said.
Breaking the Mold
In the past year, a wave of fast food worker strikes (organized by the Service Employees International Union and community groups like New York Communities for Change), demanding a higher minimum wage, has been seen as an impressive new development. Furthermore, walkouts by Walmart warehouse and retail workers (organized by the Change to Win coalition) were heralded as rank-and-file achievements that traditional labor organizers had not been able to reach. The lesson from these outbursts of rage by nonunion workers is not only that there is an alternative method of industrial action but also that workers must no longer place demands on an individual employer, but on the state, which can create mandates to broadly improve workers’ compensation, whether or not they have the advantage of being in a certified bargaining unit. In particular, the fast food workers are demanding a raise to fifteen dollars per hour.
Professor Pope said,
The Walmart and fast food strikes represent a major shift in the movement’s thinking, because the way the law is set up, you’re supposed to organize a union, you’re supposed to seek an election for a bargaining unit and then have an election and then you get certified. . . . They’re going to skip the recognition phase and go straight to terms and conditions of employment. That’s the way historically unions have organized. They’re breaking out of the model they’ve been dependent on for so many years.
Reflecting on the tenor of the labor movement and the assault on unions, Janice Fine of Rutgers University continued,
For so long we’ve been hearing, “You can’t go on strike. It’s too dangerous. You have to have a plan to win representation.” But there’s a sense that capitalism is in such a vital, vicious phase, tearing up the social contract, there’s a willingness to let it rip for a while.
Jonathan Westin of Fast Food Forward, a coalition of community groups in New York City demanding higher pay for fast food workers, told Doug Henwood on his radio program Behind the News in March that strikes and support from the community leaders have emboldened workers elsewhere to take militant action. “The strikes have been a driver for worker interest in the organizing,” he said. “We’ve been able to use that energy within stores so there will be more actions taken, bigger actions that engage more workers, but really building the worker involvement to change the whole industry.” Westin added,
Workers believe a fair demand from some of the richest corporations in the country that are making billions in profit would be that they could pay their workers a wage of fifteen dollars an hour and allow for them to pay their rent, put food on their table, and maybe take a vacation once in their life.
Workers of the World Uniting
In light of the fact that more than a thousand people were killed in the incident, it is emotionally difficult to say the collapse of Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza in April, which housed thousands of garment workers, had a silver lining. The incident, which was the most deadly industrial accident in the history of the garment world, has intensified the movement against sweatshop labor.
In fact, human rights groups and organizations like the UNI Global Union were able to pressure many companies, although most of them not American, to sign a new accord on standards, which, as the Christian Science Monitor described, is “a five-year, legally binding commitment from retailers, whose suppliers will be subject to independent inspections and public reports.” It also “requires each firm to contribute to safety upgrades, at a maximum of $2.5 million each over the five-year commitment.”
Some observers immediately made comparisons to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 that killed 146 garment workers in Manhattan, spurring new factory safety laws, and emboldened union organizing. Solidarity groups have used the tragedy to stage protests at places like the Gap trying to educate consumers about the supply chain. Eric Dirnbach, who serves on the board of directors of the International Labor Rights Forum, noted that the sensational details about the building—how workers saw cracks in the building but were forced to work anyway and the political shadiness of the operation’s ownership—all added to the pressure activists have been able to use to make the issue a watershed moment. (Disclosure: This writer and Dirnbach were coworkers at Unite Here prior to its highly publicized schism in 2010.)
While noting that there was a healthy degree of skepticism about the accord among labor activists, Dirnbach argued that this deal was advantageous because it put the onus on the brands directly, not just on the contractors. “We’re entering a new phase in international corporate responsibility in terms of garment workers,” he said.
Regardless of these bright spots, it is all but certain that traditional labor is in store for more pain, whether it comes in the form of new antiunion legislation at the state level or simply a widening of the gap between what corporations and unions can spend to influence electoral politics.
But the lessons from the fast food strikers or the Chicago teachers is not so much how a union can campaign against an employer, but how it can promote broad political demands for this economic landscape, demands that may include universal basic income or real health care reform, as well as demands to restrain the financial sector, like reviving the Glass–Steagall Act, which would separate commercial and investment banking. It should not be that only marginal institutions like the Industrial Workers of the World are campaigning for a shortened workday, something that has not happened in more than a century.
Standing in the way of this is an unwillingness to change and the provincialism of specialized unions. At a meeting of labor journalists in New York this spring, in response to the question of why unions have been unable to fund new think tanks or media organizations to counter antiunion institutions, several people responded that labor leaders “don’t speak the same language”; they are constrained by serving their members directly and thus unable to settle on any kind of grander agenda. The building trades, retail, and public sectors are just too different from each other, the logic went, so they are unable to put aside differences and collaborate on long-term projects.
To put it bluntly, this is nothing more than the narcissism of small differences. The reluctance of older labor leaders, lulled into complacency by their hefty salaries and access to Democratic Party officials, to break from tradition will only make next year’s report card for labor more dismal than this year’s. Or, hopefully, the energy and imagination on display in Chicago and elsewhere spreads.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.