Some comments on the state of the labor movement and other current affairs

Consider them notes toward a manifesto.


Fighting concessions, universal healthcare, and organizing the unorganized

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/11/05]

Before the split, the New Unity Partnership and the Change to Win Coalition consistently advocated for the AFL-CIO to take the lead on a campaign for universal healthcare. Here's an excerpt from the "Restoring the American Dream" proposal:

"Labor must take the lead in a campaign to unify the broadest number of working people, capture the imagination of the nation, and build a broad coalition to win affordable, quality health care and retirement security for all. National health care is the central jobs and economic security issue of our era. Social Security and defined benefit pension plans are under assault. The ideas of health and retirement security are at the heart of the American Dream. The labor movement needs to build a mass campaign to win affordable health care and retirement security for all."

As a former SEIU staffer, I know that there have been conversations in the international and some of the locals for years about leading a movement (possibly culminating with a general strike) for universal health care. (As the largest health care workers' union, SEIU is in a uniquely good position to lead this fight.)

To their credit, the AFL-CIO and many member unions have adopted more or less the same policy position as the CTW, but there's one thing missing: a serious committment to, as the above proposal reads, "unify the broadest number of working people" in pursuit of this policy. As long as the wage-and-benefit packages of airline workers, auto workers, steelworkers, supermarket workers, etc, remain isolated exceptions to the general rule of low wages and meager benefits for working people all over the country and around the world, they will continue to disappear. These tiny islands of privilege will continue to be overwhelmed by the category-5 hurricane that is contemporary capitalism. As long as the UAW doesn't organize Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and the rest in the South, as long as the UFCW doesn't organize Wal-Mart, as long as nobody builds a truly international organizing and collective bargaining program to raise standards worldwide, all of our benefits will be vulnerable.

Don't get me wrong, I think the UAW and other unions facing massive concessions should lead militant actions in defense of their hard-won standards. After all, those standards were achieved through militant action decades ago, and SEIU and UNITE-HERE have shown recently that militant action can preserve, and even win for the first time, fully employer-paid family health insurance for traditionally low-wage service-sector workers. Maybe sit-down strikes at Delphi would help kick-start a large scale movement for universal healthcare.

But it's worth noting that SEIU and UNITE-HERE's recent victories have come in the context of an overall organizing strategy designed to put them on the offensive, while other recent fights (the Southern California supermarket strike, all the airlines, the UAW at GM and Delphi) have been purely defensive. In order to fulfill the vision "affordable health care and retirement security for all" the strategies demonstrated by SEIU and UNITE-HERE in limited segments of their industries must be put into action all across our global economy. That's what Change to Win is all about.


Democracy, trusteeship, and building a movement

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/4/05]

Many have criticised the CTW unions, especially SEIU, for a lack of internal democracy. The evidence often has to do with SEIU's increasing tendency to have large statewide locals (the idea being that members can't control their local if they live in San Diego and the "local" headquarters is in Sacramento), and with SEIU and UNITE-HERE's history of imposing trusteeships on locals that don't get with the program.

But it doesn't make sense to have a one-shop, one-local setup (as in the UAW and some other unions) when your shop is a restaurant with 30 employees, or a home-healthcare situation with 1 employee and 1 client. It's not the ratio of shops to locals that matters, it's the level of member involvement, and if a large local with a lot of resources is the structure that best facilitates member involvement and rank-and-file leadership development (and a commitment to organizing the unorganized), I'd rather have that than a supposedly "rank-and-file" local that operates as a dues-collecting, concession-granting machine. (The UAW's concession-granting tendencies, their narrow-minded zeal to line up with their employers against environmental rules that would benefit the entire working class, and their half-assed approach to organizing the foreign-owned plants in the south make them, in my mind, the perfect example of a biz union.)

And, for that matter, if a trustee is the most capable of mobilizing the rank-and-file around a progressive organizing program, it's very appropriate that the trustee should be elected president. For example, until a few years ago HERE Local 1 in Chicago had one of the worst contracts in the industry, despite relatively high density (around 60%), because the leadership was a little corrupt and very lazy. It was the epitome of business unionism. There was a local rank-and-file reform movement, but it was tiny and had exactly zero chance of ever taking power. So the international sent in Henry Tamarin as a trustee, with a mandate to recruit rank-and-file leaders (for the first time in decades) and get ready for the city-wide contract negotiations. They built a huge committee and took an overwhelming strike vote, and the hotels buckled, resulting in the best contract the members had ever seen. Now the local is doing large-scale external organizing for the first time in who-knows-how-long, and they're getting ready to take part in a national fight against the major hotel chains next year (along with Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Sacramento, Toronto, and Hawaii). Oh, and they've been on strike at the Congress Hotel (the one hotel that didn't except the master contract last time) for over a year. Somewhere along the line Tamarin was elected president, and thank goodness.


"Staff-driven social movement unionism" vs. "business unionism"

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/4/05]

In the course of the discussion over the current crisis in the labor movement, the term "business unionism" has been thrown around a lot, sometimes applied (surprisingly, to me) to SEIU and UNITE-HERE. Marc Brazeau posted an articulate and thoughtful comment at Working Life, addressing this issue, and making a distinction between "business unionism" and "staff-driven social movement unionism."

Piggybacking on Marc's terminology, and in response to a poster calling himself "Joe Hill" who opined that "staff-driven social movement unionism" is an oxymoron, I'd like to argue that, in fact, the distinction between "staff-driven" and "worker-driven" or "worker-centered" social movement unionism breaks down as long as the staff is doing its job right. In other words, as long as the staff's job is to recruit and train worker leaders, and as long as this is reflected in the fact that the staff is composed largely of people who cut their teeth as rank-and-file leaders themselves, then what exactly is the difference? And what is this blanket aversion to union "staff" all about? Whether they come from the militant rank-and-file or from radical student-organizing or community-organizing backgrounds, let's respect hard-working, honest union staffers (and almost everybody I've met in various CTW locals fits that description) for what they are: dedicated, full-time union leaders.

(Full disclosure: I am currently NOT a union staffer, though I dedicate a significant amount of my time to volunteer organizing work with a CTW union. A few years ago I was fired as an organizer by a different CTW union, so I suppose I could be bitter, but I'd rather focus my ire on the real enemy.)


Hurricane Katrina and organizing the South

[Originally posted on Marc Cooper's blog, in response to his post on the future reconstruction of Mississippi's casinos, 9/28/05]

Marc, thanks for throwing in that little bit about "living wage guarantees for casino workers," but how 'bout a little in-depth reporting. We all know you like to go to Vegas, and we all know you like to report on the the struggles of our country's most down-and-out workers (such as grape pickers in the Central Valley), so why not hop on down to Mississippi to see what's up with all the casino workers who've been left with neither job nor home?

Believe it or not, the workers in Tunica, MS, up in the delta near Memphis, unaffected by Katrina, have organized a union and are in negotiations for their first contract. (They got a significant assist from their sisters and brothers in Atlantic City, who pulled off a very successful strike last year against the very same companies that operate the casinos in Mississippi.) The workers down in Biloxi were in the process of doing the same before their workplaces got blown out of the water.

But your question--"Under what conditions should the thirteen Mississippi casinos wiped out by the storm be allowed to rebuild?"--is not idle speculation. The fight for economic justice in the casinos was already going on before the hurricane, and it should only ramp up now that the inequality and outright failure of the current system have been laid bare.

For that matter, why stop at the gaming industry. Now that the entire Gulf Coast economy needs to be rebuilt, let's rebuild it right, and let the Deep South be an example of justice for the rest of the country (imagine that!). I'm stuck here in LA, doing my own organizing. Why don't you go give us the play-by-play on the battle of Biloxi.


Internal and external organizing and rank-and-file leadership

[Originally posted at Working Life, 9/28/05]
[Reposted here]

As an activist who has been involved in various ways (staff, volunteer organizer, student organizer, etc) with three different locals of CTW unions, I'm having trouble understanding why many commentators assume there's a conflict between rank-and-file democracy and Change to Win's approach to large-scale new organizing. I can't speak for every CTW local, but I can speak for UNITE-HERE Local 34 (Connecticut), UNITE-HERE Local 11 (Los Angeles), and SEIU 1199 New England when I say that large-scale efforts to organize the unorganized are not mutually exclusive with energizing, mobilizing, and training rank-and-file leaders. In fact, they ought to go hand in hand.

In the unions I have worked with, most of the staff organizers who are supposedly "parachuted in" are actually members of the union. They are housekeepers, bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, bellmen, front desk agents, etc, who have learned how to organize in their roles as chief shop stewards and are now spending twelve or more hours a day recruiting and teaching other workers to do the same.

Whether they are doing "internal" or "external" organizing, every organizer on our staff spends all of his or his time doing what we call "building committee." In internal organizing, this means we have recruited and trained a group of shop stewards who are trained to handle grievences and lead shop-floor actions to resolve day-to-day issues. It also means we are constantly recruiting and training a large organizing committee covering every department, shift, nationalaty, clique, etc., capable of mobilizing large numbers of members for demonstrations, local political campaigns, and strikes. And it means more of the full-time organizers' time is freed up to work on external organizing.

External organizing is much more difficult because the fear levels are much higher, but it essentially works the same way. Without a strong committee, we don't win campaigns. Do we also use various kinds of corporate campaigns to pressure companies to recognize the union? Of course we do, because without winning campaigns, we aren't doing right by our strong committee, and it doesn't get bigger, and it doesn't have the power to affect the power relationships of our economy.

To all of you complain that in CTW campaigns "only a small portion of the workforce is involved," by all means go out there and work on getting more folks involved. We'll all be better off for your efforts.


An idea about Wal-Mart organizing and solidarity with Chinese workers:

[I hope to expand this into a full proposal in the near future, but comments are welcome in the meantime.]

1. Make connections with independent labor organizations in China, and pick out some key workplaces in China based on (a) their significance in the Chinese labor market and (b) their relationship to WalMart.

2. Start noisy, public militant-minority mini-campaigns at WalMarts around the country, along with the types of community alliances that the UFCW has already built in communities where they've tried to keep WalMart out (such as Inglewood, CA).

3. Do slow, careful, underground organizing at Wal-Mart's distribution centers. Don't let the boss know we're there, or who the rank-and-file leaders are, until we've already got a strong organization.

4. The mini-campaigns at Wal-Mart stores around all over won't build a majority, and they won't bring the company to its knees, but they will be a big headache. Once this headache has gotten bad enough, and if all goes according to plan, we may can really call the question by (a) shutting down distribution centers and (b) shutting down major suppliers.