Labor Wrestles With Its Future

Harold Meyerson

Labor wrestles with its future
By Harold Meyerson,

Since the emergence of capitalism, workers seeking higher pay and safer workplaces have banded together in guilds and unions to pressure their employers for a better deal. That has been the approach of the American labor movement for the past 200 years.

That approach, however, has begun to change. It’s not because unions think collective bargaining is a bad idea but because workers can’t form unions any more — not in the private sector, not at this time. There are some exceptions: Organizing continues at airlines, for instance, which are governed by different organizing rules than most industries. But employer opposition to organizing has become pervasive in the larger economy, and the penalties for employers that violate workers’ rights as they attempt to unionize are so meager that such violations have become routine. For this and a multitude of other reasons, the share of unionized workers in the private sector dropped from roughly one-third in the mid-20th century to a scant 6.6 percent last year. In consequence, the share of the nation’s economy constituted by wages has sunk to its lowest level since World War II, and U.S. median household income continues to decline.

Unions face an existential problem: If they can’t represent more than a sliver of American workers on the job, what is their mission? Are there other ways they can advance workers’ interests even if those workers aren’t their members?

Organizing Migrant Workers Key to Union Renewal in China and USA

by Paul Garver

On March 17th Talking Union, the Jacobin Magazine and Labor Notes sponsored a roundtable discussion at the CUNY Murphy Institute on China in Revolt. Over a hundred labor scholars and community and labor activists, including many from both Overseas and Mainland China, met to discuss the latest developments in the Chinese workers’ movement.

Eli Friedman, now teaching at Cornell University, summarized his hypothesis that China’s new working class of internal migrant workers might be developing a more politicized class consciousness as global manufacturers increasingly located their factories closer to their villages of origin deep in the interior provinces of China. Three highly regarded scholar/activists from the Chinese diaspora (Anita Chan, now teaching in Sydney, Chris King-Chi Chan of the City University of Hong Kong, and Elaine Sio-ieng Hui, a doctoral fellow in Kassel, Germany) commented on Eli’s hypothesis, and outlined some of their own extensive recent research findings and analyses of the current Chinese workers’ movement.

As a person with experience in the socialist and international labor movement, I was impressed and thrilled by the high level both of critical thinking and of passionate commitment to workers’ struggles present on the panel and in the room. Marxist critical theory is not only alive, but is actively at work in supporting one of the most important developments of workers’ struggles in global history. I was proud to have played a small role in facilitating this roundtable.

But as a rank amateur on Chinese worker issues who knows little more than what I learn at second hand from folks like Eli, Anita, Chris and Elaine, I want to reflect here on what implications we might draw from China for the American workers’ movement.

This is of course a stretch. Not only are China and the USA opposite poles of capitalist globalization – our political and union institutions are moving in different trajectories. Our industrial working class is shrinking – theirs is still growing. Our union membership is declining – theirs is nominally huge, but their trade union federations are essentially government/party bureaucracies with no input from or control by workers. We have a political party system of which one party is openly hostile to organized labor and the other at best an untrustworthy ally – China has one hegemonial political party nominally committed to working class interests and trade union organization but beholden to capitalist globalization and highly suspicious of and resistant to any autonomous workers’ movement.

Yet there is an analogous source of hope for these divergent labor institutions in the organization of migrant/immigrant workers.

Chinese “migrant” workers for over a generation have migrated from rural villages in China’s interior to work in factories and construction sites in coastal cities, where they make up a large percentage of the relatively unskilled manufacturing and construction workers. In recent years they have increasingly asserted their collective power through unsanctioned strikes and riots. The formal trade union structures had heretofore made little effort to represent their interests, but under pressure from the Party to deal with the growing social unrest and industrial actions of migrant workers, some local and provincial trade union federations are experimenting with reforms designed to open up channels for collective bargaining.

The American labor unions have long had checkered relations with immigrant workers, that at various times in U.S. history have also made up a significant portion of the working class. In recent years recent immigrants, even some without documents, are becoming leaders in local unions. For instance many SEIU locals particularly in the property services sector are being led by recent immigrants recruited through the Justice for Janitors campaign, and a top SEIU officer, Eliseo Medina, is a leader of immigration reform efforts. Even as the AFL-CIO unions are weakened by losses in membership, most of its national union organizations have become much more progressive in including immigrants, including ones without documentation, and the AFL-CIO is solidly backing comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship.

Of equal importance, many of the most creative new union organizing efforts in the USA, from port truck drivers through fast food workers, warehouse workers, healthcare domestic and personal care service workers heavily draw upon recent immigrants both as the organizers and as the organized.

It is no accident that the reform agenda of unions both in China and in the USA have to be based on their ability to integrate newer entrants into the working class movement, whether these be internal migrants (China) or documented/undocumented immigrants (USA).

Those of us who advocate and support workers’ struggles and union reforms in both countries have much to learn from each other. Exchanges of experience like the roundtable on China in Revolt are extremely important.

Labor’s Turnaround: The AFL-CIO has a plan to save the movement

by  David Moberg

(March 3 2013)The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued “business as usual.”

As I waited outside the AFL-CIO’s closed-door executive council meeting on Tuesday at a hotel near Disney World, I recalled a conversation at another AFL-CIO meeting some 35 years ago. The Democratic Socialist leader of the machinists union, William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, had called for retirement of the AFL-CIO’s aging, conservative president, George Meany, saying that labor was in crisis and needed to head in a new direction. I approached the teachers union president, Albert Shanker, known as a feisty Cold War liberal, to get his reaction. Wimpy was too impatient, Shanker said. The labor movement was like a battleship. It takes time to turn it around.

Who knew how long?

Jerome Brown Reviews Two Reviews of Jane McAlevey’s Rising Expectations

by Jerome Brown

                                                                                         

Talking Union previously featured Sarah Jaffe’s interview with Jane McAlevey. Joe Burns’ review of McAlevey’s book can be found here. Steve Early’s review of McAlevey’s book can be found here. McAlevey’s response to Early can be found here. We encourage further discussion.–TU

I am submitting this as a review of Joe Burns’ review of Rising Expectations and of Steve Early’s critique of McAlevey which in many ways is parroted by Burns.

I am writing as someone who was directly involved in the unusually effective changes led by Jane McAlevey in Local 1107, SEIU Las Vegas and as someone who watched with real sadness the subsequent undermining and failure of that Local. I am the retired president of 1199 New England, a union with a proud history of militant rank and file activity and high standards in the public and private sector. The growth of Local 1199 in Connecticut from 900 members when I assumed staff leadership in 1973 to 23,000 members when I retired required the dedicated efforts of many leaders and members. McAlevey identifies me as one of her mentors in the labor movement and I am happy to wear that description.

I disagree with some of the examples of SEIU skullduggery recited by McAlevey–most particularly her description and demonization of Sal Roselli and UHW under Sal’s leadership. But on most of the facts supporting her narrative, McAlevey is right on target. Yes, SEIU made private deals with national hospital chains, deals that gave away worker rights to strike and even rally. And these deals were never explained to or ratified by the members. Yes SEIU undermined and then disrupted member activism,threatening Jane and the Local with trusteeship if it dared engage in job actions against these employers. And yes, the SEIU and the AFL-CIO failed in Florida during the 2000 presidential election and failed in any number of other crises because they did not motivate, support or really believe in militant membership activity.

But Joe Burns-and Steve Early-think that somehow it is important to engage in ad hominem (I do not know the Latin for attacks on women) attacks on McAlevey rather than understanding and appreciating the unusual value added by her style of leadership.McAlevey went to Vegas to try to invigorate a moribund union in a very important growing market. She, and her staff and rank and file leaders were immensely successful in doing that. In an open shop state they took the dues paying membership from 25% to over 75% in hospitals with thousands of employees. They organized numerous new units and reorganized all of the existing units. They led successful strikes and job actions,demonstrations and political campaigns. They elected hundreds of new stewards and began an intensive training program. They won a rank and file vote to increase the dues by a substantial amount to finance these programs and they were well on their way to consolidating and improving on these victories when they were undermined and derailed by SEIU collusion with bosses and an internal election campaign pitting holdover old guard leadership from the public sector against new,mainly Registered nurse leadership from the private sector. The final chapter of the McAlevey’s work in Vegas brings no credit to her or to her opponents and the decline of the Local since then is a tragedy. But I challenge anyone to show another model of such growth and resuscitation in such a challenging open shop environment. To my knowledge such an example does not exist.

Burns and Early continually paint McAlevey as an elite stranger acting as a missionary to the working class with no real trust or belief in workers intelligence, initiative or courage. I observed her in Stamford, Connecticut where she led a program that organized more than a thousand workers and developed deep and lasting ties with community leaders. Then I saw her lead a truth squad that chased Governor John Rowland all over Connecticut when we had 5000 nursing home workers on strike and Rowland spent $30 million dollars of public money to finance scabs to try to bust our union. Then I traveled to Vegas on numerous occasions to consult with McAlevey and coach her in bargaining. I met those rank and file members. I saw their enthusiasm and drive. I saw how McAlevey and her staff treated them with profound respect. This was not top down. It was bottom up at its best. Maybe Early and Burns can’t get past the fact that McAlevey was sent to Vegas during the term of Andy Stern and therefore, in keeping with Early’s mostly correct narrative of the Stern presidency, this has to be a top down deal. The facts in this case just do not fit that narrative and if Burns and Early had approached it with an open mind they would have figured that out for themselves.

McAlevey’s book has its flaws,as most memoirs do. I have heard some critics say that the book is “all about Jane” as if a memoir should be all about someone else. I think the book is a provocative window on the labor movement and is worth a good read and a good discussion. What it does not deserve is small minded personal attacks that are not in any way grounded in reality.

Jerome Brown served as President of 1199 New England from 1979 to November 2005. He also served as Secretary Treasurer of the National Union and then as a Vice President and Executive Board member of SEIU. He was deeply involved in reform movements within SEIU and lost his Vice Presidency as a result.  As a leader in the National Union of Healthcare Workers 1199 and in SEIU Brown helped build strong healthcare unions in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Seattle, Ohio and other places around the country.

A Man Who Tried to Change Labor

Jerry Tucker

A fine essay by  Alec MacGillis   in the New Republic traces the history of  long time labor activist and leader in the UAW  Jerry Tucker.

An outspoken dissident, Tucker urged an alternate course for American unions for more than three decades, one with a broader progressive message and greater empowerment of rank and file workers. Despite his repeated successes in the field of action, Tucker was largely sidelined by the union establishment. Labor could desperately use Tucker’s guidance today, but it’s too late:

He died in his hometown of St. Louis on October 19 of pancreatic cancer, at age 73.

Still, with the movement he loved in such dire straits, it’s worth reckoning with him and his legacy to ask: Could it have been different? And might it yet be? …

How Organizing for Change Is Very Different Than Winning Elections

by Sarah Jaffe

“Raising Hell” is what the title of Jane McAlevey’s new book says she spent her time in the labor movement doing, and she isn’t joking.

In the book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, out now from Verso, McAlevey names names and shares secrets about organizing within the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union. The book ranges from the mess that was the 2000 election in Florida, to winning battles for public housing with workers in Connecticut, to her years in Las Vegas fighting for healthcare workers, to battling her own higher-ups and union members in the power struggle that eventually drove her out of SEIU. But what she really wants to talk about is organizing: how to do it right, how the Democratic Party gets it wrong, and why there’s no substitute for face-to-face conversations with workers.

McAlevey sat down with AlterNet to talk about organizing in so-called “right-to-work” states, the too-close relationship between unions and Democrats who leave them high and dry, the brutality of fighting the boss, and why the worst thing to happen to labor in the U.S. might just have been purging the Communists from the movement.

Apple Launches iPhone5 with Forced Student Labor

by Paul Garver

Photo by Steve Jurvetson/Wikimedia/Creative Common

Rural American schools used to empty out for a few weeks in the fall to allow farm children to help harvest potato or fruit crops for family farmers.

The world has changed. In 2012 students are required to leave classrooms in interior Chinese cities to help with the Apple harvest – specifically to produce the Apple iPhone5, just as their predecessors did in 2011 to assemble the Apple iPhone 4S.

According to Chinese media sources, several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an in eastern China required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to manufacture cables for the iPhone5. Their teachers told them they would not graduate unless they worked for Foxconn, since “Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

An assembly worker in Zhengzhou, where the iPhone5 is assembled, reported to China Labor Watch last month:
We are now producing the iPhone5. We 87 workers have to assemble 3,000 phones per day, and as our team leader told us, after the new iPhone goes public, we will need t assemble 6,500 phones per day. We are now working more than 10 hours a day. There are many student workers in our production line, all of whom are around 18 years old. They’ve been complaining and demanding to go back to school but are never allowed.

The recent promises Apple and Foxconn made through the audits of the Fair Labor Association to reform its brutal regime for Chinese assembly workers and student “interns” evaporated like smoke under the pressures to launch the iPhone5 as quickly as possible.

After Labor Day: Time to Think Big

by Street Heat

So much of our future hangs in the balance it is difficult not to offer up a set of opinions of what I think we should be doing to reverse the decline of unions and thus reverse the decline in wages, benefits and working conditions for millions of American workers. Literally dozens of Newspapers, Blogs, and more than a few TV shows today highlighted the fact that unions are singularly responsible for the creation of the American middle-class and with the weakening of unions that same middle-class living standard is disappearing.

It is always good to hear our leaders state in so many different ways that we are going to fight like hell to win this years election. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of President Obama’s record on delivering on his commitments to labor, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the cabal of reactionary operatives like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist represent an existential threat to unions. They are committed to waging war on our ability to fight for a fair economy that works for all of us.

A key question in this years election will be whether labor’s increased emphasis on diverting resources away from Democratic Party structures toward membership mobilization and messaging as well as direct contact with non-union voters will be sufficiently robust to counter the tsunami of corporate money that will bombard voters with billions of dollars in negative advertising.

Chinese Students and Workers Confront Global Capitalism at Foxconn

by Paul Garver

Photo by Steve Jurvetson/Wikimedia/Creative Common

If the cotton mills of Manchester exemplied 19th century capitalism and the River Rouge Ford plant symbolized capital’s 20th century stage, its early 21st century embodiment is Foxconn. In its thirty giant  factory complexes  1.2 million young Chinese workers assemble over 50% of all the electronics products consumed over the globe. Armies of young men and women perform monotonous repetitive assembly work under quasi-military discipline for at least 60 hours a week for minimal pay and virtually no social benefits.

Foxconn, controlled by Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, is China’s largest exporter and 60th largest global corporation with annual revenues of $79 billion (2010). Its largest corporate customer is Apple, but every other major global electronics company also contracts Foxconn for most of their final assembly tasks. Sophisticated components and parts are manufactured in Korea, Japan, Europe and the USA, shipped to China for final assembly, and then re-exported for sale mainly to more affluent consumers in the Triad (North America, Europe and Japan). About 1% of the cost of your iPhone, iPad or other advanced electronic device goes to pay the wages of the Chinese workers who assemble them, while another 1% goes to Foxconn executives and shareholders.

Foxconn is a linchpin of the most leading edge and most profitable sectors of global capital. Although its own operating profit margins are razor thin, shaved by the constant cost-squeezing of Apple and other corporate customers, Foxconn has made itself indispensable to global capital by fully utilizing its strategic position in China.

But Goliath has feet of clay. Students and scholars from Mainland China and Hong Kong have been struggling to assist Foxconn workers improve their conditions. And they are beginning to win some astonishing victories.  We can help them extend and consolidate those victories.

Will Wisconsin Wake-Up Call Lead to AFSCME Shake-Up?

By Steve Early

Steve Early

Tuesday, June 5, was a bad day for public workers from the west coast to the mid-west. Voters in San Diego and San Jose approved retirement benefit cuts for their city employees, which led major newspapers to proclaim (accurately) that more “pension reform” of this type is on the way, despite worker and retiree resistance to it. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, labor and its allies failed to oust Republican Governor Scott Walker who stripped the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other workers of their fifty-year old right to bargain union contracts.

Within ASFSCME, the rollback of past collective bargaining gains and, in Wisconsin, the virtual elimination of bargaining itself, has given some activists a new sense of urgency about shaking up the leadership of their own 1.4 million member union. Since the labor-community uprising in Madison sixteen months ago, members of Wisconsin Council 40 of AFSCME have been in the forefront of rank-and-file struggle against public sector union busting. On June 5, they mobilized pro-labor voters in their own state in the failed attempt to recall Walker. And now some are headed for a June 18-22 showdown in Los Angeles, where they hope to do better in an uphill fight within AFSCME itself.

This week’s vote by 3,500 elected delegates at AFSCME’s national convention will decide who takes over from 77-year old Gerry McEntee as president of the third-largest U.S. labor organization. McEntee is retiring this month after 30 years in office. Internal critics of his heir apparent–AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Lee Saunders–view this hotly contested election as a rare opportunity to revitalize the union at a time of great peril for all public workers, including thousands of AFSCME members in California.