We won most of the campaigns we took on. But we walked away from many times more schools because we couldn’t get the workers to the high level of support necessary to win in a union recognition process that is rigged in favor of recalcitrant employers.
And overall, the AFT did not grow. In fact, we lost density. State takeovers of urban districts like New Orleans and Detroit resulted in the legal fiction of “new” school districts that were carved out of the union contracts. The proliferation of charter schools is little more than the educational equivalent of “offshoring” to avoid the reach of the union. In higher education, colleges and universities used their “managements rights” to shift most of the workforce to part-time instructors, who have little or no job security or benefits, to erode union power. The AFT’s strong commitment to an organizing model did help the union preserve much of its membership and relative power, particularly in the face of a coordinated corporate attack under the guise of “education reform.”
Finally, let’s look at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Probably more than any other union, SEIU devoted substantial resources to organizing. It’s fashionable on the left to take swipes at their more staff-driven model, and perhaps a tendency to cut corners on the organizing model in some campaigns. However, unlike many other unions, they organize on a much larger scale, chasing units of thousands of workers at a time. And they actually grew! SEIU gained at least one million members in the twenty year period leading up to 2010.3 But then the Supreme Court aimed directly at knocking out their public sector bargaining unions. The Harris v. Quinn and Janus v. AFSCME decisions cost the union a lot of the membership gains they had managed to eke out in a decade of organizing.
Rethinking the System
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to make some kind of “why bother?” argument. The unions that are using the organizing model should continue to do so and certainly be willing to make room for improvement. And the unions that have not embraced an organizing model like Bronfenbrenner has laid out should do so and commit serious resources to running strategic comprehensive campaigns.
But if every union was spending down their treasuries on organizing model comprehensive campaigns, we wouldn’t grow on the scale or at the speed that we need. Because the system makes us organize shop by shop, company by company, and industry by industry and gives employers every opportunity to delay, to impede, and to refuse, we just wouldn’t get to the kind of union density levels that are needed for the system to actually work the way it was once intended by its New Deal architects as a federally enforced check on rampant inequality and an impediment to periodic economic depressions. When unions represented one in every three jobs in the economy, collective bargaining was the rising tide that lifted all boats.4 And because unions organize from positions of strength—that is, within industries in which we already have a toe-hold or in ancillary or related industries—the long decline in union density means that we would be hard-pressed to expand into the essential areas of the economy in which unions are all but locked out, such as information technology and financial services.
The breathless focus that many on the left have on the organizing model often carries with it an implied oppositionalism. Sometimes it comes with an explicit challenge against union leadership. Maybe here and there a union’s leadership is an impediment to change, and fresh blood and a new approach to the work would be helpful. But, in general, I don’t think pushing out one set of leaders for another is much of a solution.
I’m of a similar mind as the character President Roslin in the television series Battlestar Galactica who kept a running tally on her whiteboard of surviving humans following a robot holocaust. There are so few of us left doing this very hard work of trying to keep the labor movement going that it takes a lot for me to conclude that someone needs to get pushed out the airlock. All leaders would be trapped by the same system. I’m much more interested in education with a line of critical inquiry that has little patience for easy answers or sacred cows.
One of the shibboleths among leftists in the labor movement is to bemoan the Cold War purge of Communist activists as a singular tragedy and a key turning point for the labor movement. With the bravest leaders and organizers gone, the thinking goes, unions slid into business unionism and stopped organizing.
That’s just a bunch of romantic hooey. It’s a close cousin to the idea that some sort of wholesale leadership change is the magic solution to our problems. What the purging of the Communists did that actually was and continues to be detrimental to union strategy is that it purged the last bulwark of disagreement from the labor movement. I don’t even necessarily mean good, wise, or principled disagreement. Just simple disagreement: looking at a challenge or opportunity and proposing an alternative plan. With the Communists dispatched, the AFL and the CIO merged, and a broad consensus developed that our peculiar union shop is simply what unions are, and what they should be.
For example, as states went “Right to Work,” unions all basically accepted the rottenness of the free rider problem. There was no serious debate, at least not until recently, about whether to continue to accept the burdens of exclusive representation. As the courts proved to be incredibly hostile to workers’ rights and NLRB decision-making, unions mostly accepted that the courts suck and should be avoided. There’s been remarkably little debate about developing our own proactive legal strategies for winning a stronger constitutional basis for workers’ rights.
There’s been a remarkably broad acceptance of the rigged rules of the system. And organizers are actually some of the worst about this. There’s this macho culture of telling workers, “Well, the boss is allowed to do that; he’s allowed to fire you. That’s why you need a union.” As if the idea that the default status of workers (at least, of non-union workers) is at-will and the ever-present threat of termination shouldn’t at least be debated and possibly challenged.
There actually are socialists in the labor movement today. Tons of them. The Cold War ended, of course, and the AFL-CIO elected new leadership in 1995 that embraced the hiring of more movement-based staff, many of them veterans of the 1960s New Left. As Joe Burns notes in his book Reviving the Strike, “Despite their background as part of the political and ideological left, the views pushed by many ex-1960s activists today demonstrate a remarkable pragmatism.”5
That pragmatism consists of largely accepting the rigged rules of the system as a given and pushing against the boundaries of the law rather than challenging or outright breaking the law. There is a pervasive tendency in our movement to accept that when it comes to labor structure, strategy, and law, “It is what it is.” The horrible structures of American collective bargaining rules are a given, and we don’t have much opportunity to change them.
My generation was trained by that generation, and we largely respected the experience and expertise of those who came before us and mostly accepted this structural trap. Because we hammered out strategy in airless rooms where leaving with a consensus plan was a valued goal. Because Grandma’s pot roast tasted like home.
I had to get out of the room. Toward the end of my tenure at the AFT, I read Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Life of American Labor,6 in which he names the trap that unions find themselves in “contract unionism.” He argues that the scope of bargaining and the drudgery of contract bargaining and grievance handling, combined with no-strike clauses, structurally limits the vision of what unions are or can be and saps us of our potential for militancy. His experience in union leadership, as part of a successful opposition movement in his faculty union after a career spent criticizing bad leadership, drew him to the conclusion that the system is a trap no matter how well-intentioned the leadership is.
I couldn’t unread it. His arguments gnawed at my sureness in what we were doing as organizers and as a left within labor. As soon as I found myself not working for a union for the first time in my adult life, I started playing with some of his ideas as I began to write for In These Times. Frankly, I think my writing made me unemployable for a while. I know that it’s pissed off some of my friends. Stanley Aronowitz pisses people