TELL THE BOSSES WE’RE COMING
TELL THE BOSSES WE’RE COMING
A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-first Century
SHAUN RICHMAN
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2020 by Shaun Richman
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
available from the publisher.
ISBN 978-158367-8565 cloth
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
3. The Routine of Collective Bargaining
4. Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing
5. The Changes That We Have the Power to Make
7. An All-In System of Labor Relations
9. Get the Boss Out of the Doctor’s Office
10. And We Have to Fix the Labor Board …
Appendix: Labor’s Bill of Rights
For my wife, Kate,and my daughters, Audrey and Bernadette
Preface
YOU’RE READING THIS BOOK. I’m going to assume that, like me, you take it as an article of faith that we need to restore the power of unions, protect workers’ rights. I’m not here to convince you that unions are good for our democracy and our economic well-being.
There are plenty of good books on why we need more—and more powerful—unions. If you haven’t read them, I would recommend Jake Rosenfeld’s What Unions No Longer Do, Michael D. Yates’s Why Unions Matter, or Thomas Geoghegan’s Only One Thing Can Save Us.
This book aims to get past abstraction. “What a union is” is a combination of legal and political structures that are not consistent across history, across industries, and across the globe. The details matter. Bringing unions back from the edge of institutional annihilation where they currently find themselves is no simple proposition. It is complicated by the law, but also by union structure and strategy, along with comfort with what is known and familiar. It is complicated by a sort of historical amnesia about how our country’s system of labor relations developed. It is complicated by a whole zoo’s worth of elephants in the room, sacred cows roaming free, and chickens coming home to roost.
Specifically, we will first break down “what a union is” into its constituent parts. Exclusive representation, for instance, was not written into our nation’s main labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), when it was passed in 1935. It was simply not the explicit intent of the Act at a time when many unions did actually compete for members and workplace leadership on the shop floor. Unions competing in the workplace is a perfectly normal part of many other countries’ labor relations systems.
We need to have a much more informed conversation about what parts of the system are worth preserving—and possibly reforming—and which we should seek to get rid of. This book represents my attempt to aid that conversation.
Happily, there are some changes that are completely within union activists’ power to change that don’t require legislative reform. I’ve sketched out some thoughts about the changes we can and should make in how we organize, how we protest, and how we engage with the National Labor Relations Board and the courts.
Finally, fixing the system so that workers can get the representation they want and deserve and restoring our power will require new laws. I will explore some thoughts about the principles we should be applying when we think about labor law reform.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do hope that I’m asking the right questions, and that this facilitates more dialogue and a deeper searching for breakthrough strategies and reform.
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE to thank for this book.
I’d like to thank Sarah Jaffe for giving me early advice on how to start and finish writing a whole damn book while we sat on Jesse Sharkey’s lawn and ate his delicious barbecue. I’d like to thank Sharkey for being one of the first people to really push me to write this book, and I’d like to thank both of them for giving me the opening to write such an insufferably name-droppy paragraph.
On more than one occasion, Nick Unger read a new draft of this manuscript and got me on the phone for an hour or two to pick the whole thing apart and force me to sharpen my arguments. Over many years of teaching and conversation, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Joshua Freeman, and Ed Ott have helped me analyze the labor movement with clarity, specificity, and nuance. (If you disagree that my writing has any of those qualities, the blame falls squarely on me.)
Whether by phone, DM’s, or over whisky or wine, I’d like to thank Chris Aikin, Brett Banditelli, Sharon Block, Valerie Braman, Chris Brooks, Leo Casey, Peter Cole, Bryan Conlon, Daniel Gross, Steve Lawton, Elana Levin, Erik Loomis, Stephen Lerner, Moshe Marvit, Jim Pope, Micah Uetricht, and Douglas Williams for spit-balling and shit-talking with me while I drafted this manuscript. Moshe probably deserves a co-author credit for a chunk of this book.
Equally influential were the many good organizers and campaign strategists that I’ve worked with over the years. This is hardly an exhaustive list (and some names don’t appear here because they show up in other parts of this Venn Diagram of thanks), but I thought about each of these comrades at least once while writing this book: Alisha Ashley, Mark Bostic, Alan Cage, Yonna Carroll, Liz Chimienti, Jim Donovan, Carlos Fernandez, Otoniel Figueroa Duran, Richelle Fiore, Jessica Foster, Audra George, Carrie Gleason, Glenn Goldstein, Jacob Lieberman, Sam Luebke, Evan Lundeen, Matthew Luskin, Rich Maroko, Victoria Miller, Jackson Potter, Leah Raffanti, Leigh Shapiro, Casey Sweeney, and Nate Walker.
Thank you also to Jeremy Brecher, Edmund Bruno, Joe Burns, Lynne Dodson, Michael B. Fabricant, Bill Fletcher Jr., Harris Freeman, Charlotte Garden, Julius Getman, William A. Herbert, Phil Kugler, Sam Lieberman, Mariah Montgomery, Bradford Murray, Ed Ott, Paul Secunda, Shayna Strom, and Andrew Stettner for reviewing drafts and providing helpful feedback on sections of this book.
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