“We’re Locking Up Demographics:” AFL-CIO Live Blog, Day Two

Lane Windham


The convention media buzz is mostly about the federation's decision to solidify partnerships with new groups. A resolution to that effect did pass, though it basically punted on the question of how official those partnerships would be. That’s a story we’ll have to watch develop over the next year.

But the bigger story at this convention may actually be what the AFL-CIO is doing to lay the groundwork for those partnerships. Resolution #17, the “Big Business Behind Mass Incarceration” resolution, is important. The AFL-CIO came out sharply against the growing prison pipeline, and embraced this issue fully as its own. President Trumka made the link clear between race, class and incarceration: “We’re not locking up individuals as much as we are locking up demographics…. We punish people for being brown and black.”

A young woman then rose to quote Gompers, calling again for “more school houses and less jails.” She pointed out the US spends six times more money on prisons that education, and that Americas is number one in the developed world for incarceration rates. A teacher then rose to talk about how much education has been de-funded over the last 25 years, and how he has seen too many students who ended up behind bars.

And here’s a little inside scoop. Tefere Gebre, the soon-to-be Exec. V.P., happened to sit down next to me in the hall. As we chatted, this resolution came up, and he confided that he thinks it’s one of the most important ones of the week. In fact, he helped develop it. That bodes well for future leadership and direction for the Fed! Tefere Gebre is pictured here:



A few other fun tidbits:

Terry O’Neill, the President of Now, spoke in support of the resolution on community partnerships, saying “we’re not leaning in as individuals, but together.”

North Carolina’s Moral Mondays and the NAACP’s Reverend Barber were among the groups featured in a film on community partnership.

President Obama was supposed to address the convention live, but took a pass because of Syria. In a taped message, he said he’d join a union if he was someone looking for economic security. Sign that man up! He also called for a “true right to organize, free from intimidation” and said that’s why he got the NLRB functioning again. But, really, isn’t that sort of a low bar after ignoring EFCA?

Good news: an Indiana judge struck down that state’s proposed Right to Work law.

Not so good news: Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said that this decade will be the “lost decade” for the US and Europe, and that unless we change course, we’ll lose more than a decade. The economic crisis was, “not a result of inevitable forces, not a natural disaster or earthquake, but the result of what we have done or not done.”

And finally, there was a tear-filled good-by to the current Exec, V-P, Arlene Holt-Baker. She pointed out that after growing up in a segregated Texas, amidst poverty as the daughter of a domestic worker, “you decide that you want to make your community and your world a better place.” Well done.

Class Talk is Back: Live Blog from AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles

Lane Windham

I’m blogging live for a few days from the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles.

President Trumka gave his keynote this morning. I swear I didn’t write this speech –I don’t do that anymore - but I feel like I could have. It showcased a class-based rhetoric - -

Highlights here: “This is a rich country, so where’s all the money going? …We can shout about the Koch brothers and nasty little conspiracies, and it’s true – there are powerful forces in America today who want our country to be run by and for the rich. But greed and hate have always been with us. The question is what are we going to do about it? …We can’t win economic justice only for ourselves or the union movement…it’s just not possible…all working people rise together or we will fall together.”

And catch this. Trumka asserted “We must ignite our movement not so we can have bigger unions, but so we can make all working people’s lives better.” Wow, so the President of the AFL-CIO is saying the goal is NOT just bigger unions. That’s one for the record.

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren wow’d the nearly 5000 people who are here. There’s much buzz about whether she’ll throw her hat in the ring for president. Her message: “Our agenda is America’s agenda!” She skewered the Supreme Court for its corporate focus. Pointing out that five of the Supreme Court justices are among the top 10 most pro-biz justices in history, she warned, “If keep on this track, the court will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business.” Amen. (She also talked about trade deals that don’t work for workers. That’s something we could use from a Dem.)

The highlight of yesterday was when domestic workers from across the globe marched singing to the dais to receive the Meany / Kirkland human rights award. George and Lane would have had quite a shock were they still alive to see it. The women are part of the International Domestic Workers Network.

Overall, the AFL-CIO has put much effort into making this convention about diversity. That’s not new, exactly. One of the sleeper stories from the 2005 split convention was that the delegates passed a resolution requiring that the 2009 convention delegates accurately reflect the membership in turns of race and gender. At this convention, 46% of the delegates are women or people of color (though a number of the trades and uniformed services’ delegations are STILL all white guys.)

But what is new is that the AFL-CIO is doing more things that will naturally bring diversity. For example, the new Executive V.P. is going to be Tefere Gebre, an Ethiopian immigrant. That’s huge. It was only in 1999 that the AFL-CIO even reversed its historic policy opposing open immigration. Now, one of the top three officers will be an immigrant.

Also, seated among the union delegations were members of the Taxi Workers Alliance - - as real delegates, not as guests. That’s a big deal, and begs the question of whether other “alt-labor” groups - - like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Restaurant Opportunity Center - - or even groups like the Sierra Club or NAACP, might one day come to the convention as delegates.

Finally, as a former union spin meister, I hear a difference in the rhetoric in many of the speakers. It’s more class-focused. Maria Elena Durazo, LA County Fed President, welcomed the crowd saying that we are in a “real class war.” In his opening remarks, Trumka nodded to class: “This is where we confront the truth of what we have to do, to build shared prosperity and to build a new working class movement.” He echoed that again this morning “It’s time to turn America right side up. It’s time to build a working class movement that can do it.”

Then Trumka ended the key note today by pulling up dozens of workers - - taxi drivers, teachers, construction workers, immigrant workers - - in a rousing, shouting, energy-infused speech. I hope it sets a tone for the whole movement.

Detroit, Labor Day, and a Hard Day's Night

Lane Windham

As part of my dissertation, I've been trying to answer "Why did employers target unions so much, starting in the early 1970s?" I've concluded that one big reason is that the government had charged unions with wrestling broad economic security in our employer-provided welfare state model. Employers wanted out, and they attacked unions in order to get out of their role as a broad provider of benefits and economic security. This helped set up 21st century economic insecurity, and the kind of crisis that is now hitting Detroit.

I developed that line of thinking into a Labor Day opinion piece. Check it out on the The Hill's Congress Blog.


Here's the full text:

Detroit, Labor Day and a Hard Day’s Night

The Beatles first visited Detroit just before Labor Day in 1964, and they gushed with admiration for the Motown sound. Detroit hummed with industry then, like the Beatle’s own Liverpool, England with its bustling ports and pop music scene. Both industrial cities would soon flounder, losing 40 percent of their populations over the next 30 years.

As we approach Labor Day 2013, Detroit still endures its “Hard Day’s Night,” filing for bankruptcy last month. Yet Liverpool thrives once more, a showroom for urban renaissance. Why did Detroit and Liverpool follow such different paths? It turns out that workforces thrive best in a challenging world economy when they have a solid, government social safety net, not one woven from the vanishing threads of employer-provided job security and benefits.

People fled both Detroit and Liverpool after WWII, taking their tax base with them. America scattered its military industries outside the cities and the people followed the jobs. Eisenhower’s interstate highways paved a path to the suburbs, at least for many white families. After the German air force flattened Liverpool, residents found replacement housing outside the city center. Tough towns, they hung strong, only to find themselves on the wrong side of a newly-globalized economy. By the late 1970s, imports outran Detroit’s capacity to innovate, while Liverpool floundered when containerization made its ports obsolete.

Liverpool dock workers faced these structural shifts with far more security than did Detroit auto workers. England’s strong postwar social safety net guaranteed citizens health care, livable wages and unemployment insurance. In the U.S., a coalition of unions and civil rights organizations lost their post-war fight for national health care, job security and a federal unemployment system.

Instead, the U.S. wove a unique social safety net that relied on employers to provide citizens with economic security, such as health care and pensions. It was a compromise with a built-in dilemma. If the government ceded the role of security provider to business, how was it going to make sure business kept stepping up? For that, the nation’s leaders turned to unions. In the Inland Steel case of 1948, the federal government first decided that employers must bargain with unions over pensions and health care. The nation then came to depend on unions to wrangle good benefits and paychecks through collective bargaining. The U.S. thus built two social safety nets - - a robust one for those workers who could effectively organize a union and enter the collective bargaining system, and a much more meager one for others through public benefits like Social Security and the minimum wage.

For twenty-five years, this two-tier system worked out pretty well, not only for Detroit auto workers but even for many people who didn’t have a union. Most big businesses matched the pay and benefits of the unionized industrial giants, in part to keep their employees from forming unions. Once corporations faced growing international competition and began to pull good jobs out of Detroit, workers found they needed the kind of national safety net that preserved workers in Liverpool, where the spiral into poverty never got as destructive as in Detroit.

Other differences matter. While both towns received federal aid, Liverpool benefits from the European Commission’s Structural Funds which recognize that regional poverty hurts Europe’s global economic position. There are no comparable funds for Detroit to smooth out the wreckage left by globally-mobile corporations. Instead, Detroit turned to bankruptcy courts.

As the U.S. struggles to define its role in a globalized economy, it would do well to study the challenges facing Detroit. A competitive nation needs a strong safety net for its citizens, one that neither depends on fickle global employers nor burdens workers’ democratic institutions with a redistributive role best played by the government. In addition, the U.S. should take a cue from the European Union and allocate more funds to help hard hit areas transition their economies.

Working people in other American cities may soon face their own hard day’s night, but it does not have to be this way. This Labor Day, we can choose to support our nation’s workers and their cities in the shifting global economy.

New Worker Power Structures, Not a Fortress...

Thanks, Jeff, for the apt reminder that as we build a new source of worker power, we must build it as a global one. Your point goes to this larger question of how we define success.

I applaud Rich for putting forth a specific idea for getting us out of the mess that we’re in. Yet in his essay on fortress unionism, Rich defines success as, “to organize enough workers so that union density increases significantly, or at least keeps pace with workforce growth.” But organize workers into what? Traditional unions in which workers’ source of power is through a one-on-one collective bargaining relationship with one employer? Is that the best we can do? We must build new worker power structures that are better suited to today’s challenges than is the current collective bargaining sytem.


I organized in the clothing and textile union in the South throughout the 1990s, and we won a lot of campaigns - - Tultex (5000 workers in Martinsville, VA), Healthtex, Springs Fashions. We won contracts, too. Every shop I helped organize is gone today because of the global turn in the industry, and when the employer went, the local union dissolved because there was no longer a collective bargaining agreement. What if we had spent the 1990s building an organization that could continue to mobilize those workers, perhaps in an industry or regionally-based organization? Impossible the leaders said. But now there is nothing…


There’s no point building a fortress, hoping one day to increase union density, if all we have to offer is today’s weakened system of collective bargaining. When workers do begin to militantly mobilize, they will remain ill equipped for today’s economy, and will be crushed.


Worker militancy does not solve the kinds of structural problems which Rich points out - - today we have smaller work places, a mobile workforce and global capital. History can serve as a guide here. Rich spotlights the worker militancy in 1937 and the Republic Steel strike in which 18 workers were murdered for standing up for a union. But militancy alone does not cut it. Workers also need the appropriate structure and strategy. Steel workers tried for decades to organize and were crushed – aka Homestead in 1892 and the Great Steel Strike in 1919. It was only in the post-Wagner Act period that hundreds of thousands of steelworkers were able to form unions - - and they were able to do so because of the new-fangled industrial unionism and state-backed collective bargaining. I agree that FDR signed Wagner because he was pushed by striking workers to do so. Nevertheless, those workers needed that particular new structure in order for their militancy to stick.


I just attended the Labor Research Action Network (LRAN) conference in Washington, DC - - and I was struck that many of the young people who attended that conference are way beyond us on this - - especially the ones in what Rich calls “alt labor.” They have taken many of these ideas and are running hard, building a worker power movement and trying out a host of new ways for workers to leverage power. (And, Jeff, be cheered by the fact that they're leagues ahead of us on the global power issue.)

Yes, yes… they struggle with sustainability. And, yes, many of the organizations that work best are the ones that combine collective bargaining with new tactics. But maybe we can take a break from brick-and-mortaring our fortress to really … REALLY… help them wrestle with how to build sustainability. Someone asked Saru Jayaraman (co-director and founder of ROC – the Restaurant Opportunity Center) what labor could do to help and her answer… she wants help making a 25-year plan. She wants labor leaders to sit down and help this new movement build a plan. Seems like we can do that, right, everyone?


We need to stop defining success according the Bureau of Labor Statistics union density figures. Success is about worker power. Maybe that means fixing collective bargaining somehow. Maybe it means finding another source of leverage. But whatever path we choose, now is the time to expand our vision of success, not narrow it.

Should We Adopt "Fortress Unionism" - An Answer to Yeselson's Thoughtful Essay

In a recent essay on "fortress unionism" Richard Yeselson argues that given the realities of today's political economy, unions should hunker down and defend our strongholds and wait for another worker-led union surge. While the essay is provocative, I have some different ideas.

Here's Yeselson's essay: http://www.democracyjournal.org/29/fortress-unionism.php

Here's my response:

Yeselson may be correct that a solid defense is the labor movement’s best move in 2013; nevertheless, there are two major considerations that we should take into account as we have this discussion.
First, we should consider a broader definition of success than expanding union density. Who cares if unions are big, as long as the movement makes this world a better place to live for workers and their families? Our goal is economic and social justice, not necessarily big unions. For example, the dominant narrative on the women’s association 9to5 seems to be – “great idea, but they didn’t succeed.” Really? Yes, they did not make unions get bigger. But they helped put sexual harassment on the map as a workplace issue and helped transform the working experience for entire future generations of women workers. Seems like success to me.

Second, Yeselson highlights the big moments of union growth, and asserts that we should hang tight and “wait.” Do we really think that workers just built those moments of union growth out of the blue? They built those growth moments on decades of slow and persistent organizing. The seeds of the 1930s uprising were planted throughout the entire Progressive Era, starting in the late 19th century. Workers learned to form organizations, work in broad coalition, and that “success” would have to come through changes in federal law ( a fairly new concept then.)

Now is not the time to wait. Now is the time to understand that the unions in which all of us have been working for 20, 30, 40 years are specific creatures born of the New Deal and the Wagner Act, and that we need new creatures that are more fitting for the Wal-Mart economy that Yeselson describes so well. Yes, real change can’t happen without worker activism and passion. But workers need structures and tools. And the tools - - the unions - - we are offering them today are the wrong shape and size. So what should today’s worker power organizations look like? That’s the conversation I’d really like to see us engaged in.

The Roots of a Union City: The Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

Here's a little history of an important joint organizing committee that I am sharing with the AFL-CIO for their upcoming convention in Los Angeles:

The Roots of a Union City: The AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee

by Lane Windham

Jimmy Hoffa didn’t believe it. He charged that the new AFL-CIO Los Angeles / Orange County Organizing Committee (LAOOC), launched in 1963, would “not organize 50 people…it’s all propaganda and hot air.” In fact, this joint organizing campaign organized nearly half a million workers over its more than 20 years in operation, making it the largest such joint effort in the labor movement’s history and helping to forge Los Angeles as a 21st century pro-union city. The LAOOC offers several lessons to today’s union movement, including the importance of broad solidarity over narrow organizational interests, the need for big vision coupled with long-term investment, and the missed opportunity of community engagement.

In the early 1960s, Southern California’s workforce was booming as companies moved to the Sunbelt, but those jobs were increasingly non-union. Since 1950, union density in the LA metropolitan area had dropped from 37 to 30 percent, with no end to the slide in sight. The leaders fretted about the challenges ahead of them - - challenges that ring familiar to unionists today. They blamed the laws, the anti-union companies and the young people in the “space age” who seemed to see no need for unions. Inter-union rivalry was a big problem - - too often unions fought one another in big organizing campaigns rather than branching out into new territory.

The AFL-CIO itself was still a freshly-minted organization in 1962 and it was carving out its relationship on organizing with its affiliate unions. UAW President Walter Reuther had only agreed to the 1955 merger if the new AFL-CIO established the Industrial Union Department (IUD), a free-standing, autonomous department for industrial unions that would be a seat for much of the work of the former CIO. Reuther headed it and pushed the new federation to take a lead role in organizing. When Reuther started to put together an IUD organizing effort in Southern California, the non-industrial unions wanted in, too.

Thus the Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO Executive Council established the new LAOOC in 1963, with Reuther’s support, and it originally included 57 unions. The level of coordination was impressive. Each union submitted to the AFL-CIO a list of its current locals in the two county area, and a list of potential organizing targets. The unions then divided themselves into five divisions: hard goods (lumber, steel, glass, etc.); soft goods (textiles, oil, chemicals, etc.); retail; government; and hotel and restaurant. Each union agreed to contribute money and organizers, according to their size. The original budget was for $230,000 a year, half of which the AFL-CIO paid, including for a director. The unions in each division then sat down and hashed out the acceptable organizing targets. Unless the group agreed to the target, the unions would not organize there. Unions would sometimes agree to petition jointly, or to confer with one another, but they would not oppose one another.

It worked. After five years, by 1967, the joint effort had helped hold union membership in Los Angeles at 30% density, even as national density slid from 30% to about 28%. There were over 1100 union elections in that same period, a whopping 98% of which only had one union on the ballot (compared to 89% nationwide.) They also counted 800 voluntary recognitions, many of which were card check agreements, and a number of new government units. By 1967, they’d organized about 110,000 new members in the two counties. Many of the elections were in traditional manufacturing, like UAW at Cadillac Gauge and USWA at Harvey Aluminum. Others were in newer industries, like the Machinists’ win at Scientific Data Systems or the Chemical Workers’ wins at Shell Chemical Division and Bio-Sciences laboratory, the largest privately-owned clinical lab in the world.

But it wasn’t perfect. Many of the unions backed out - - by 1965, the group had shrunk from 57 to 39 unions - - and the project was constantly having to harass unions to pay their share of the costs. One of the great tragedies of the project was that it dropped retail entirely as one of the original five divisions when the Retail Clerks and Amalgamated Clothing Workers union could not settle their differences over who should organize in retail. This was a very bad choice. Retail would end up driving the 21st century economy, and it would largely be non-union. In this case, the union movement would have done better to have a big vision for retail that pushed the bounds of what was acceptable by the jurisdictional unions, and insist on a plan that worked - - even if feathers were forever ruffled.

The project also did not have a seat for community groups, despite the fact that there were
contemporaneous models it could have emulated. For example, by the late 1960s Walter Reuther was driving through the UAW and IUD what he labeled a “socially-conscious” unionism which sunk resources into organizing the poor, such as through backing tenants’ unions. The LAOOC did not have this level of engagement. It stuck to traditional organizing, sometimes supported by ministers and community groups, but which was designed to lift wages and working conditions through traditional collective bargaining only. Such a narrow view later helped divide unions from the larger community, an issue that late 20th century Los Angeles labor leaders would be forced to tackle.

However, what the project did have was longevity. A core of about 35 unions stuck with the project for over twenty years. They’d meet each quarter, banging out those approved targets. The project served to not only coordinate organizing, but to spur it, for organizers routinely had to go sit next to their peers from other unions and talk about the state of their campaigns. By 1978, they’d organized 358,000 workers, 217,000 of whom came through board elections, and about 114,000 of whom came through new organizing in governmental sectors. By 1984, they’d organized nearly half a million.

The leaders who formed the LAOOC in 1963 had no idea that they were enriching the soil in which the LA County Federation of Labor - - under the leadership of Miguel Contreras and Maria Elena Durazo - - would grow a new kind of union movement after 1996, rooted in immigrants and deeply intertwined with the community. The 21st century Union City that is Los Angeles rests on the willingness of these early union leaders to think beyond their narrow institutions, to challenge their organizations’ cultures, and to invest in a geographically-targeted, long-term, joint organizing effort.



Sources:
Based on various memos, statistics, newspaper articles and meeting minutes surrounding the LAOOC, found at the George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD, RG28-002, Organizing Department, Boxes 1, 52, 53 and RG95-009, Alan Kistler papers, Box 6, Box 12.
Bernstein, Harry. “AFL-CIO Drive Here Will Fail Hoffa Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1963.
Murphy, Michael J. “Developing Communities: The UAW and Community Unions in Los Angeles, 1965-1974.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. 6, Issue 4, 19.
National Labor Relations Board Annual Report, 1965.

Ok, this could be interesting...

Did anyone else catch the buzz around the speech that AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka made in Chicago about new models for the union movement?

I don't know if it's rhetoric or real... no one does, yet. But the fact that the AFL-CIO seems to be soliciting widely for ideas for new models of worker power...that's very interesting, no?

Here's the link to the speech:

Basically, the ideas is that with union membership at SUCH a low rate - - we saw a 400,000 membership drop last year - - we have got to really think about new ways of affecting change.

Trumka acknowledges that NO amount of union organizing, within or without the NLRB, will get us up to the level of membership that we need in order to leverage power the old way.

So what are new possible models? Maybe the Taxi workers alliance or the Domestic Workers union which organize outside the parameters of a contract with one employer. Maybe a bigger or bolder Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate for workers who don't have a union at work. Or maybe it's a new form entirely.

At any rate, Trumka says that the AFL-CIO will convene a wide conversation within the labor movement and with community groups in order to get ideas.

But, I'm still a bit skeptical.

I'm a historian, and I spent many days in the AFL-CIO archives. There was another attempt like this in 1983-85 when the labor movement realized that membership was first really sliding. The had a "Committee on the Future" (no joke). While the Committee on the Future considered a wide range of alternative forms of membership and organization, in the end they punted. The leadership couldn't wrap its head around a form that didn't lead directly to a dues-sustaining model. So, instead, they came up with a consumer-focused model that got us the Union Plus credit card, etc. Needless to say, it didn't save the movement.

Nevertheless, the union movement must do something.

The ultimate question will be whether it will be too weighed down by the old forms of unionization that it is carrying on its back (like the single-employer based contract model), or whether it will be able to have the vision and flexibility to create entirely new forms of organizations.

Training Won't Cut It... Make New Jobs Good Jobs

For years I worked in media outreach for the labor movement, and banged my head against a wall talking to reporters about income inequality. They just yawned. During this last recession the Inside the Beltway types started to finally get it - - the growing income divide is now hot. And what's the wonks' solution.... drumroll,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., Training! We'll train all the people and send them to college! After all, college grads make more money.

Ok, I'm all for college. I teach college. But the problem is that our nation isn't creating more jobs for college grads. We're creating many, many more low-wage jobs. In fact, even the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently pointed out that the vast majority of job losses during the recent recession -- 60 % - - were "middle-income" jobs (paying between $14 and $21 an hour.) But then once we started gaining jobs back, only 27% were such middle-income jobs. Most of the new jobs were low-wage jobs. See today's Washington Post article on this here.

Below is a chart that I completely stole from the National Employment Law Project website. You can see that 8 of the 12 jobs with the most openings are low-paying jobs.



So, what's the solution? Training won't cut it. We have to make these low-wage jobs good ones. We can do that through wage policies - - like raising the minimum wage. We can demand that any employers who get tax incentives in our communities meet certain basic standards. And we can support workers' freedom to collective bargaining -- perhaps in creative ways not now supported by law, like giving a minority of union-minded workers at a workplace the power to bargain over some issues.

What do you think we should do to make the new jobs good ones?

Obama front-paged Newport News - Now check out this shipyard's little-known union history

Eddie Coppedge and Oscar Pretlow, two of the men who helped lead the USWA unionization effort, talking union on the company gate in 1978.


Today President Obama traveled to Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia to make the point that the sequester will hurt real people, and cost real jobs.

Yet nowhere in the media coverage did I see mention of the workers' union, USWA Local 8888 - - or it's storied history.


The 19,000 welders, painters, inspectors, mechanics and other who formed a union with the Steelworkers in 1978 at the Newport News shipyard overthrew a company-controlled union that had been in place for nearly forty years. They achieved this as part of a workforce that was half white, half black, and increasingly female. Through a union, they sought economic security in deeply insecure times. The Civil Rights movement greased the wheels of their victory. Their insurgency had been started up by four African-American men who were dissatisfied with the pace of ending discrimination at the shipyard under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It was driven home by increasing numbers of African-American and female workers who believed they should have an equal access to the best jobs in the shipyard and who turned to the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to help them secure that right.

Tenneco, Inc - - the conglomerate that had owned the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock company for ten years - - refused to honor the workers election victory. But the workers did not wait for the law to slowly churn out justice. They struck their Navy contractor employer for 82 days in order to force the company to recognize their union, even as the governor’s guardsmen met them with dogs on the picket lines and the city police stormed the union hall, beating strikers with abandon.

The photo at the top of this blog shows one of the workers being beaten up by the local police in 1979 during the strike- - the officer in the middle is the chief of police.

USWA Local 8888 went on to build a mixed-race, mixed-gender local union that mobilized its members to shake up local and state politics, and which remains an active progressive presence today.

And in the event that there is a sequester, the Newport News workers will have a union to help them make sure that any layoffs or cuts are done fairly. Cold comfort, perhaps, but they are in a lot better situation than the millions of workers who will be hit who do not have a union.

Today I heard from David, a union member for 25 years. He told me that he appreciated my article "If Not Unions, Then What?" (posted below), and he asked:

However, what would your argument be in regards to our companies (allowing for higher wages, benefits, etc.) competing in a global economy? Nay sayers will contend that unions can and have rendered US companies less competitive, particularly when competing with emerging economies.


Below is my answer to David's question. Does anyone else have answers to David's important question?

You raise an important question, which has to do with profitability in a globalized economy.
I believe that history has much to teach us here.

Before the 1930s, workers and their unions were never able to achieve much lasting power. This was a period when the economy was becomeing nationalized, but much of the economic power and regulation was still at the state level.

Beginning in the 1930s and with FDR's New Deal, our nation got the first widespread national regulations of the economy. As part of that, workers won federal government backing for their unions through the Wagner Act.

From 1945 to 1973, the US economy expanded greatly - - everyone did well, employers and workers, because there was so much to go around. Unions made sure that employers shared that wealth.

After 1973 the US began to enter a globalizing economy, and global competition increased - - so there was less to go around. US employers were increasingly free to source their labor anywhere in the world. This, of course, pitted US workers against lower-wage workers around the world. Just as the economy shifted from a state-level to a national one at the turn of the 20th century, now the economy is shifting from a national to a global one at the turn of the 21st century. We are still in the middle of this shift. But, yet again, we do not have the legal structure we need to guarantee workers' rights. In this case, we now need a global legal structure.

What I have described above is not a union issue - - it's a larger economic issue. When the media and elites blame unions for driving companies overseas, in fact they are using unions as a scapegoat for much deeper economic structural issues. ALL U.S. workers have faced decreased wages and benefits in a globalized economy, even as their productivity has continued to rise. And as the US economy has globalized, workers' interests have been absent from the larger global legal framework. This is a key factor to today's shocking levels of economic inequality.

Allow me to reframe your question a bit. Perhaps the question for us as union members isn't - "how can our unionized companies compete in a globalized economy?" The question is "how can workers re-shape the global economy to meet workers' needs instead of those of corporations?" Our globe is in the early stages of building a framework for new rules to govern corporations on a world-wide scale. Right now, corporations clearly have the upper hand. We can demand a global economy which lifts all boats. However, like everything else, it won't happen unless we make it happen.

We must call on the WTO to honor workers' rights, we must insist that the US sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights (which defends' workers' freedom of association) and we must insist that all nations follow it. Meanwhile, we need to build global alliances with other workers.

I realize that these are not short-term answers. But I don't see any way for union members to win in the global marketplace under the current rules. We have to re-build power, ultimately, in new ways.

.... Then What?

In order to imagine a world in which working men and women have more power over global corporations, we have to step out of NOW and envision the NEW. An article in the New York Times that ran yesterday gave me one little tool to help me do that.

It's an article about young people and politics in Montana called, In Montana, Young, Liberal and Open to Big Government.
Basically, even in this very RED state, young people are reading between the tea party lines, and rejecting a future in which they have no security. They know they don't have good jobs right now. They know they've been essentially screwed over by a new economic structure that values corporate profit over the richness of people's own lives.

The article is narrowly focused on whether these young people will be a new caucus for the Dems. That's good, I guess, and important.

But that's not the little tool that I found in this article.

The tool is simply this: the stuff of which movements are built - - the people - - are changing in this nation. The article reports that "young voters believe that it is more important to create jobs, have affordable access to health care and develop 'a world-class education system,' according to the Institute of Politics at Harvard" than to lower the deficit.

Young people get it that we need a solid safety net. That's pretty hopeful!

So this leaves us with the question of how can we nurture and develop these instincts, and set the stage for building institutional power. What do you think are ways to build on young people's beliefs?

If not unions, then what?

If not unions, then what?

Opinion Editorial in Baltimore Sun:


Membership in organized labor, a tremendous force for ensuring broad prosperity, is at a 93-year low

January 28, 2013| By Lane Windham

You wouldn't know it from our nation's debate over Obamacare, but the U.S. has had government-supported health care for nearly 80 years. Not only that, but our nation bolsters a retirement level well beyond the thin safety net provided by Social Security, and it even ensures Americans a path to a family-supporting wage. And, no, I have not mistaken the U.S. for a socialist European nation.

Our government assures us these broad economic benefits by guaranteeing our right to form a labor union. Those among us who join a union — or who get a job with a company that matches the higher wages and benefits offered by its unionized competitors — effectively win a more robust social safety net through government-sanctioned collective bargaining. Thus, the U.S. has long relied on unions to do the kind of economic redistribution work which is shouldered by governments in other nations.

However, our nation is about to lose this leveling tool. We learned this month that the nation's rate of unionization is at a 93-year low. Only 11.3 percent of America's workers belong to a union, including a mere 6.6 percent of private-sector workers. In Maryland, union membership used to be above the national average, but in 2012 it fell below average to 10.6 percent. Much of the media coverage around this drop in union membership asks what this means for labor's future. The larger question, however, is what it means for America's future — how will our nation temper the inequities of today's new, global economy if we can no longer rely on unions to do that work for us?

Unions have long served as economic equalizers. From 1947 to 1972, the U.S. economy was the undisputed economic world leader, and our nation used unions to ensure that we spread that wealth around. Once union membership started falling, the income divide grew. Since 1973 the drop in union membership accounts for a full third of the growth of wage inequality among men, according to a recent study by scholars at Harvard and the University of Washington. Today, the income gap is larger than anything we've seen since before the Great Depression.

In fact, it was during the Great Depression that our nation struck a grand compromise to finally soften for its citizens the harshness of industrial capitalism. It was a bargain that had been in the works since the late 19th century, and we hammered out the details throughout the post-World War II period. America's citizens never got the kinds of universal health care programs, job insurance or wage guarantees that benefited European workers. Instead, we won very basic economic security through Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Plus we won the government's assurance that if we voted in a union election, the government would give legal backing to our efforts to win greater economic security from our employers.

However, too few of us were ever able to grab onto this economic life boat. It turns out that it is difficult to form a union, and employers have shrewdly upped their resistance over the decades. Employers routinely fire, harass and threaten workers who want to form unions, and U.S. labor law is too weak to stop them, according to Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University. In fact, in 2000 Human Rights Watch declared that U.S. workers have effectively lost the freedom to form a union. However, labor law reform does not seem to be in the Obama administration forecast for the second term.

So, if not unions, then what's the new plan? What's the new institutional framework we will use to balance people's needs with those of corporations? If we're going to effectively scrap our nation's method of broad economic redistribution, what will we replace it with? A near 100-year low in unionization rates isn't just labor's problem. It's a problem for anyone who does not want to see U.S. economic inequality shred our nation's social fabric.

Lane Windham is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her email is lanewindham@gmail.com.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-28/news/bs-ed-unions-20130128_1_union-membership-labor-union-income-gap

Welcome to Working Class Progress, a blog space which is dedicated to conversations and ideas about the direction of our movement for economic and social justice.

We all know that we are at a critical moment. Inequality is rising, union membership is shrinking, and the corporations are writing the rules for the new global economy. It seems like we've been hunkered down in defense for years. We worry about our children's future.

Remember that we've been fighting this battle for over 150 years. When working men and women faced a new industrial capitalism in the 19th cnentury, we began the fight to shape the economy and our society and our lives. Did we win safe workplaces because the sweatshops naturally evolved? No, we won them because we marched and demanded laws to ensure health and safety. Were manufacturing jobs just naturally good jobs? No, working people made them good jobs by causing enough trouble that the government guaranteed our right to bargain collectively with employers.

We're at a new stage in the battle. Yet again, we face a new kind of capitalism - - one that is global in reach and driven by retail and finance. Yet there is nothing inherent in the new capitalism which precludes working-class power. No natural law says retail and service jobs cannot be good jobs, that global interconnectedness means class disparity, nor that broad economic security is unattainable today.

The tools that we used to win power in the old capitalism will not serve us well today. Industrial unions, 20th century labor law, even the current form of collective bargaining - - these are all institutions which must evolve. We shouldn't just toss them out the window, but we must question our assumptions, and ask what kinds of tools and directions we need in order to shape corporate power today.

I don't have the answer. Neither do you. And we may never know the answer in our life time. But it's time we had the conversation.

I look forward to hearing from you through Working Class Progress as we build ideas and analysis together for the future.