Monday, June 17, 2013

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.

1 comment:

  1. Now is not the time for unions to adopt a defensive stance and "wait for a worker upsurge." That's a recipe for disaster, as unions are not strong enough to survive in a defensive posture, and worker upsurges don't occur spontaneously. As Lane Windham says, workers need structures and tools. So what are the proper structures and tools for today's labor movement?

    It is hard to understand how an otherwise insightful article on the decline of US labor could relegate one the most important factors in the decline to a one-time mention of "globalization," with no discussion of the ways in which the outsourcing of production has weakened labor and no discussion of any possible counter-measures.

    In today's global economy, national unions are not adequate to take on the corporations alone. Most corporations have adopted the "supply chain" or "outsourcing" model, and have become complex international systems of production that cannot easily be challenged by workers in a single location or even a single country.

    This means that unions must shed the blinders of narrow nationalism and become truly international structures, using the tools of cross-border solidarity to build power throughout the corporations' systems of production. The "global union federations" that have existed for many decades have not yet proven adequate to the task, although there are signs that they have recognized the need to transform themselves into more action-oriented organizations, and to provide direct support to union campaign coalitions. American unions have been very slow to come to the realization that their fate is bound up with the struggles of workers in the developing world, and most have devoted very little energy or resources to building the relationships that would make coordinated cross-border industrial action a reality. Some positive examples do exist, however, in the Steelworkers' alliance with the Mexican Mineros, the CWA alliance with the Mexican Telefonistas, Teamsters support for UPS workers in Turkey, and CTW's support of workers in Walmart's supply chain. Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of the kinds of international trade union structures that can take on the global corporations and reverse the global decline of labor.

    Of course it is important to recognize that as unions join in solidarity with their counterparts in other countries, they must also become more effective at encouraging the participation of their own members in the governance and activities of their unions.

    Overcoming narrow nationalism and bureaucratic stagnation are tall orders for a movement that has often been purged of radicals and is for the most part led by adherents of American exceptionalism and pragmatism, who until very recently have been characterized by their uncritical support of US foreign policy and domestic capitalism, and by their acceptance of a top-down presidential model of union organization.

    The bottom line is that, rather than retreat into "fortress unionism" the American labor movement should undertake a serious effort to build "international unionism" and at the same time revitalize its internal structures to engage its members in global campaigns against the global corporations that now control our destiny.

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