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?

The Future of Work, Unions? Tune into the AFL-CIO Tweet Chat with President Trumka

by Jackie Tortora

We need to talk—about the future of workers and the union movement.

We’ve all seen the numbers: People are working harder (and have longer hours) and still can’t get ahead. Staggering inequality is on the rise and fewer workers have a voice on the job.

So we’re asking the tough questions:

• What’s the future going to be for working people?
• How can we build a real movement for broadly shared prosperity?
• What should unions look like tomorrow?

That’s where you come in.

How Unions Are Getting Their Groove Back

by Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson

Yesterday—April 24th—was a red-letter day in the annals of worker mobilization in post-collective-bargaining America. In Chicago, hundreds of fast-food and retail employees who work in the Loop and along the Magnificent Mile called a one-day strike and demonstrated for a raise to $15-an-hour and the right to form a union. At more than 150 Wal-Mart stores across the nation, workers and community activists called on the chain to regularize employees’ work schedules. And under pressure from an AFL-CIO-backed campaign of working-class voters who primarily aren’t union members, the county supervisors of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County voted to raise the local minimum wage.

The Chicago demonstration, which began in the dawn’s early light of 5:30 a.m., included workers at McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Subway, as well as Macy’s, Sears, and Victoria’s Secret, all of whom make the state minimum wage ($8.25) or just slightly more. Roughly one-third of the jobs in Chicago are low-wage, and more than half of the city’s low-wage workers are older than 30. The demonstration was organized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, which formed to demand a living wage for the city’s retail and fast-food workers.

Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on FY 2014 Budget Proposal

(April 10, 2013) A president’s budget is more than just numbers.  It is a profoundly moral document.  We believe cutting Social Security benefits and shifting costs to Medicare beneficiaries – while exempting corporate America from shared sacrifice – is wrong and indefensible.

The administration’s budget cuts cost-of-living increases for current and future Social Security beneficiaries by $130 billion over 10 years, and much more in future years.  It shifts $64 billion in health care costs to Medicare beneficiaries over 10 years.  Yet despite closing some loopholes, it calls for corporate income tax reform that is “revenue neutral” – meaning it fails to ask big, profitable corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.

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.

Trumka’s Turn Around Proposal

by Kas Schwerdtfeger

Kas Schwerdtfeger

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.  Finding the way to beat it is next.

Taking an honest look at the labor movement, it doesn’t take a genius to find it at a low that hasn’t been seen since the early thirties.  Unions are taking a beating from politicians, who rather than taxing the ultra wealthy, take the “easier” road of demanding cuts on government workers.  At the same time, private sector employers scrape more and more from the workers in order to maintain massive profits.  No-strike agreements and open shop clauses in the private sector, and right-to-work legislation and restrictions on collective bargaining in the public sector, strike right at the heart of what’s left of organized labor’s gains.  In that sense, I applaud the public statements of President Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO in their recent meetings that recognize the fact that labor needs to change course in the US.

Changing course is not only the right thing to do; it has become necessary.   According to the March 3rd In These Times article, the new AFL-CIO plan is searching for “new forms of worker representation,” including Working America, Workers Centers, and a general low-wage worker campaign at Wal-Mart and in the general service industry.  It is a mixing bowl of good and bad ingredients. The approach labor takes with the ingredients will determine if what comes out is any good.

Now What? Labor Unions and the Inevitability of Class Struggle

bysBill Fletcher, Jr.

There is a story that I often use to make a point regarding one of the central problems in organized labor in the USA.  It goes like this:

A man jumped off of the Empire State Building in New York.  As he was dropping past the 30th floor he was overheard saying “…so far, so good…”

For more than five decades organized labor in the USA has been in decline.  At first the decline was not particularly noticeable since, through the early 1970s, organized labor still represented more than 25% of the non-agricultural workforce (down from 35% in 1955).  Nevertheless the decline rapidly increased in the aftermath of the recessions of the 1970s and the advent of President Ronald Reagan and Reaganism (the homegrown variety of neo-liberal economics).

​Having purged its left-wing in the late 1940s and abandoned any coherent sense of being a social movement on behalf of a class of people, organized labor drifted, slowly at first and then with increasing speed as gravity took hold.  Despite evidence of decline, most of the leadership continued to insist that the situation was not ‘that bad’ and that either (1) their particular labor union would survive intact, and perhaps grow, or (2)the pendulum of U.S. politics would inevitably shift and unions would rise again.

​Yet the rate of decline increased. In 1947 a Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which amended the National Labor Relations Act. There were many regressive components to this statute but one in particular has performed like a slow-acting poison in the political system:  so-called ‘right to work’.

So Why don’t we have better unions?

by Michael Hirsch

Union busting is nothing new; the atavistic trait was never bred out or beaten out of capital. While the business class fights among itself like stray cats— witness Dirty Digger Rupert Murdoch’s feral relations with communications rivals real and imaginary— that class also maintains a good deal of commonality on shaping the state and treating unions even in boom times as irritants. And when it comes to making workers pay for an economic crisis or on denuding funds for public needs, it reads from the same hymnal. Even the 1950 Treaty of Detroit, where the Big Three automakers and the United Auto Workers traded social welfare for labor peace, was more a one-front  Christmas truce than an industry-wide peace accord, let alone the preferred model for industrial-labor relations in many other industries.

By the late 1970s, even the treaty was shredded, with the UAW’s Douglas Fraser denouncing a “one-sided class war.” It’s been one-sided since.

Only now, with its numbers among the working population so downsized that the obscenity of “right to work” can pass for sober public policy in northern states, too, are our unions getting on the same verso page, or at least the same chapter, and beginning to act with the kind of minimal unity that typified corporate behavior throughout the postwar period.

The Will to Change

by Street Heat

Nissan workers organizing in Mississippi

The depth of labor’s crisis has now been officially acknowledged by Richard Trumka.

That is a good thing.

All of us , inside and outside the AFL-CIO, should welcome the coming discussions leading up to the AFL-CIO convention later this year.

The space to discuss and debate strategy on how to best revitalize, invigorate, and most of important of all save the labor movement has now been expanded. Hopefully this will open the door to those who decline to comment, discuss, or even acknowledge labor’s fight for survival out of a perceived need to “circle the wagons” so as not to feed into anti-union rhetoric.

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?