Writing is often a lonely process (at least until one starts working with an editor). I’d like to thank my fellow writers for encouragement and community, particularly Chris Brooks, Rachel Cohen, Rebecca Givan, Hamilton Nolan, Dania Rajendra, and Jessica Stites.
I’m greatly appreciative of my editors, Michael Yates and Erin Clermont, as well as Martin Paddio, Susie Day, and all the comrades at Monthly Review who helped get this over the finish line.
Finally, I want to thank my family. I began writing this book at my in-laws Jim and Kathy’s kitchen table, and my own parents, Bob and Margaret, helped watch the kids while I continued to work on it in the home office. This book simply would not exist if it weren’t for the support and patience of my wife, Kate.
ONE
The System Is a Trap
WHY CAN’T UNIONS GROW?
In an age of rampant inequality, at a time of increasing social protest, including a notable uptick in workers’ strikes, and when a majority of workers say they want to be union members, why does union density continue to decline?
The reason is that we have structural problems, lots of them, one piled on top of another. The system of labor relations that came out of the New Deal and matured in the post–Second World War era has evolved into a complex and insidious trap. This trap prevents workers who want to join unions from doing so. It legally restricts workers’ rights to protest our routine use and abuse by rich and powerful corporations. It confines unions to sectors of the economy that are not growing. It gives bosses veto power over whether a new union can even be formed in a workplace. It sharply narrows the scope of issues that unions can even put on the bargaining table.
The combination of exclusive union representation, mandatory agency fees, no-strike clauses, and “management rights” are the foundation of our peculiar “union shop.” No other country structures its labor relations system quite like this. Our labor system didn’t always look like this. It developed through a series of historical accidents. It has been made unworkable by a dogged anti-union legal campaign run by the vast right-wing conspiracy of think tanks, industry lobbyists, and bloodthirsty billionaires.
The system has become a trap.
Part of the trap, however, is in our own heads. Too many union activists and allies take for granted what a union is—how it should be organized, what collective bargaining looks like.
There’s an analogy that makes the rounds in Cornell University’s labor extension programs. It involves a man sharing his grandma’s pot roast recipe with a friend. The first step of the recipe calls for cutting the ends off the raw rump, which prompts the friend to ask, “Really? Does that, like, make the roast more tender—or what?”
The man sharing the recipe, who had never questioned why it called for the ends to be cut off, calls his mom to ask why the recipe calls for the ends of the rump roast to be cut off. She confesses that she never thought about it either and suggests that her older sister might know. So the man proceeds to call his aunt who is similarly thrown off by the simple question. She had never questioned why the recipe called for this bit of home butchery. All she knew is that the dish she made when following the recipe tasted good; it tasted familiar.
And so on and so forth as this man called through the family historians and home cooks until he finally visits his grandma at the nursing home. And she dismissively explains, “Oh, it’s because the grocer only sold rump roasts that were too big for our roast pan.”
This is the most devastatingly on-the-nose analogy for how unions engage in long-term strategy. We hope and assume that sometime in the past, someone smarter than we are considered all the possible options and settled on what we are currently doing as the best possible choice.
We want there to be more unions and assume that means more unions that are just like our current unions. And so we get excited for silver bullet solutions like forgoing NLRB elections in favor of majority sign-up (or “card check”) certifications or overturning right-to-work that seem like they would help unions grow.
Even when we argue among ourselves about how unions need to change to win more, we nibble around the edges of what the problem is. More robust union organizing departments running comprehensive organizing campaigns would be good and valuable, just as more face-to-face organizing conversations in existing union shops and networks of trained workplace leaders would revitalize many unions. But these won’t grow the labor movement in any appreciable way, because we’re still trapped in a rotten anti-union system.
Organizing Won’t Save Us
How can I so casually and confidently assert that more organizing won’t significantly add to the ranks of union membership? Because it hasn’t.
We are nearly a quarter-century into what I call the “organize or die” push by unions to significantly increase the amount of money and energy they spend on new union organizing. Of course, when it comes to organizing many unions talk the talk but fail to walk the walk. I’ll discuss some of the reasons why in chapter 4.
However, there are unions that have developed and actually maintained fidelity to organizing model strategies, putting hundreds of organizers in the field and successfully organizing thousands of bargaining units and new union members. These unions have survived, but they have not thrived. They have not greatly increased their density or their power. And the millions of workers who want to be union members remain outside the labor movement’s ranks.
When most of us speak of the “organizing model,” we are talking about methods of organizing within our broken system that may vary from each other slightly but are all informed by the research of Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell. Dr. Bronfenbrenner identified ten “comprehensive organizing tactics” from her own previous organizing experience. These include:
1. Adequate and appropriate staff and financial resources. This means not just putting enough staff organizers on the ground—Bronfenbrenner recommends a ratio of one staffer for every one hundred workers—but also research and communications support and enough money to take out ads, hold rallies, get buttons and T-shirts for the activists.
2. Strategic targeting. Organizing employees in the same or related industries so that both the workers you are seeking to organize and the members you are asking to help see this as a reasonable plan to gain power.
3. Active representative rank-and-file committee. That is, an organizing committee made up of leaders in the workplace, reflective of the racial and gender makeup of the workforce and the diversity of jobs and shifts.
4. Effectively utilized member volunteer organizers. Getting existing members at other shops to take part in the organizing campaign.
5. Person-to-person contact inside and outside the workplace. Rank-and-file committee members talking to potential supporters on the job and staff, member volunteers, and organizing committee members doing house visits. 6 Benchmarks and assessments. Testing and measuring your support through public actions in which workers are called upon to participate.
7. Issues that resonate in the workplace and community. Respect, dignity, voice in decision-making. Not just problems that the boss can throw money at or “fix” without a union.
8. Escalating pressure tactics in the workplace. Start with buttons. Build toward a march on the boss.
9. Escalating pressure outside the workplace. Start with handbills. Build toward rallies.
10. Building for the first contract before the election. Surveying all the workers—not just supporters—on issues of importance. Working on contract language. This way, collective bargaining isn’t