Thursday, October 27, 2005

"Dying of hunger in a supermarket and not daring to open a tin of sardines"

Last week I posted an article about self-management at a factory in Uruguay. Here's another article, which focuses on Venezuela but also mentions factory occupations in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Panama. The upshot is that these occupations are no longer isolated incidents, they're part of a movement across Latin America. [Update: here's another and another about Venezuela's effort to create an international organization of worker-occupied factories.]

For as long as I've kept this blog (three whole weeks!), I've maintained that the most urgent task at the moment for the American labor movement is to organize, organize, organize. That is, to bring into our movement the 90% of American workers who don't even have a union yet. Not that we shouldn't have a vision for the future (that's what this blog is supposed to be about, after all), but that there's no point in pretending we can take a shortcut to socialism.

Of course, "organize, organize, organize" is what CTW is all about. But CTW has been faulted for planning to organize only the 50 million American workers whose jobs can't be shipped overseas. I think this is a reflection of respect for the jurisdictions of AFL-CIO unions, and a recognition of CTW's current limitations, rather than an expression of disdain for manufacturing workers. Still, the question remains, what are we gonna do with what remains of the American manufacturing sector? (Given that concessions, concessions, and more concessions are not an acceptable answer.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say that part of the answer to that question is, "organize, organize, organize." For example, the UAW could get serious about organizing the foreign-owned plants in the South and about building international solidarity in the auto industry.

But for workers in factories that are closing, organizing a union (or strengthening the union they already have) isn't really an option. Is there no way for these workers to be part of the movement? The wave of factory occupations across Latin America provides a tantalizing answer to this question. This is easier suggested than organized, but these workers have nothing to lose but their pinkslips.

Here's a quote from the article I linked to above:
"[A Venezuelan union leader] also explained the destruction of Venezuela’s manufacturing industry. According to figures he gave, in 1999 there were nearly 12,000 manufacturing companies in the country, but now the figure was less than 7,000, which meant a loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. At the same time 90% of Venezuela’s companies were in the service sector. This extreme situation was due to the fact that 'capitalists are no longer interested in production' when they can get much quicker returns through speculation."
Sound familiar?

In South America, workers are increasingly responding to this situation by occupying and operating factories that otherwise would be abandoned. Wouldn't that be a better option than passing by the shuttered textile mill every day on the way to your new job at Wal-Mart?

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

The birth of a new labor federation

(In Venezuela.)

The AFL Should Stop Attacking and Learn Something: Venezuela's National Workers' Union

Monday, October 24, 2005

Hope in Southern Louisiana

The Nation has a good article this week about Cajun country's grassroots response to Hurricane Katrina. The whole article is worth reading, but here's a choice bit:
"So what does it all mean?

Mark Krasnoff thinks Ville Platte is the shape of things to come: southern Louisiana getting its interracial act together to take on its colonizers and rulers. A small, wiry man with the build of a dancer or gymnast, he is an actor (most recently in a prophetic FX network TV drama, Oil Storm, about a category 6 hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast) and a stunning bilingual raconteur. He is also the Che Guevara-cum-Huey Long of Evangeline Parish. His beat-up pickup wears the bumper sticker LOUISIANA: THIRD WORLD AND PROUD OF IT."

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Democracy and leadership in the labor movement

Heated debates about union democracy often center on a false dichotomy between strong union leadership and meaningful member-centered democracy.

A recent thread on the Working Life blog is trying to get past this dichotomy, but I fear we're not all the way there. I commend Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes (which publishes some of the most strident voices on the "pro-democracy" side of this confused debate) for emphasizing that democracy is not about "what looks democratic on paper" but rather "what will make the union more powerful against the boss." But from there she slips back into the same old dichotomy, by claiming that the Change to Win union leaders believe "that what makes a union powerful is very smart officers and staffers carrying out a well-thought-out plan" as opposed to the engagement of the members, as though the two were mutually exclusive.

The way I interpet the message pushed by Andy Stern of SEIU, John Wilhelm of UNITE-HERE, and Bruce Raynor of UNITE-HERE (I don't know much about the personal philosophies of the other CTW leaders, or the organizational cultures of their unions) is that we need to involve and engage more workers in our movement (especially, but not only, the 90% of workers who don't even have a union), and that the only way to do this is to have smart, committed leaders carrying out a good plan.

I can't repeat this too many times: a good plan carried out by good leaders is by no means mutually exclusive with membership involvement. To involve the membership effectively takes a lot of money and time. That's not a reason not to do it, it just points to the fact that it requires (you guessed it) good leaders with a good plan. Does this mean all those "smart officers and staffers" have to be college grads? Of course not. In my experience, many of the best organizers and strategists are straight from the rank and file. But should we exclude energetic, idealistic Ivy Leaguers who want to make a difference? Why on earth would we? It's damn hard to find a good, committed union organizer, and it doesn't make sense to close any doors. (Some of us, by the way, are both college grads and rank-and-filers.)

My experiences with UNITE-HERE and SEIU have taught me that strong leadership and membership involvement are not in conflict with one another--neither can exist without the other. In the locals I've worked with, the job of every organizer (some of whom are from the rank-and-file, some of whom are progressive college grads, some of whom are both) is to recruit and train rank-and-file leaders--as organizing committee members, chief shop stewards, etc. Mobilization is important, of course, but it's secondary, and good mobilization is simply a reflection of good leadership development.

Nor, as I've said before, is membership involvement mutually exclusive with the large-scale external organizing that CTW has in mind. In fact, in order to organize a lot of workers into our unions, we're gonna need thousands of rank-and-file leaders out in the field, teaching their non-union brothers and sisters how to stand up. Keep in mind that it takes very strong leadership to convince union members to spend their time and their dues money organizing non-union workers. That's the type of leadership Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor have distinguished themselves by providing.

Finally, I'd like to nominate Maria Elena Durazo as the leader whose story perhaps most neatly embodies the way democracy, leadership, and power go hand-in-hand. In the late 80s she led a Labor Notes-style reform candidacy in HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles. The president of the local at the time was a white guy in a majority latina union who was more interested in protecting his own little domain and providing services to some of the more privileged members (banquet waiters) than in involving the membership or organizing anyone. He went so far as refusing to translate membership meetings into Spanish.

The race was close and, because there were allegations of fraud, the votes were never counted and a trusteeship was imposed by the international. Of course, the first instinct of Durazo and her supporters was to oppose the trusteeship as vehemently as they had opposed the old regime. But once they got to know the trustee and his staff, they realized that they were part of a small but growing progressive faction of the HERE international. They were, in fact, close associates of John Wilhelm. This was several years before Wilhelm was elected president of the union.

Durazo worked with some of the experienced organizers from the international to continue the internal organizing work she had begun during her campaign. They started recruiting an organizing committee and actively recruiting and training stewards for the first time in the local's history. After the trusteeship ended, Durazo was elected president. The cooperation with the international continued, and so did the hard work. The local started waging militant contract fights, and they started organizing non-union hotels and food-service contractors in the LA area. Meanwhile, they helped transform not only that one local, but the entire LA labor movement (the trustee, the late Miguel Contreras, moved on to become the leader of the LA County Federation of Labor, and Local 11 was always one of the strongest affiliates) and the entire international union (many organizers who have helped turn around other HERE locals were originally trained in LA). Most recently, Durazo and the Local 11 staff led the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and a successful city-wide contract fight, the main objectives of which were to maintain free family health insurance and to line up the next contract expiration date with other HERE locals around the country. In these times, to accomplish those goals was a major victory. Stay tuned this year and next year for a lot more external organizing and a nationwide contract fight against the major hotel chains. Local 11 enters these fights as a model for the entire labor movement both in terms of rank-and-file leadership development and in terms of its committment to organizing the unorganized.

My main point is this: it took strong leadership to turn around a local that had a history of discouraging membership involvement; it took a special kind of farsighted, mature leadership to work with Wilhelm rather than trying to compete over the contested turf; and it will take even stronger leadership, not only from Durazo but also from hundreds of worker leaders, to win the huge fights that the local (and the international) have coming up in the near future.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Worker self-management in Uruguay

This is a good story:

Without a Boss: A Worker-Run Textile Factory

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

What's the ideology of the CTW leadership?

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather talk about organizing strategy than ideology. It's not that I don't think our vision for the future is important, it's just that, given the current state of affairs, the question that's really looming in my mind is "how on earth are we going to build a movement?" That's the type of vision that matters most to me right now.

But there are a lot of young radicals out there in the labor movement (myself included), and it's understandable if some of us stop in between housevisits to wonder, "what's next?" And I don't mean the next housevisit, I mean, after we organize the millions of workers that CTW is supposed to organize, what are we going to do with our power?

The syndicalist in me would say "just keep organizing." That is, if we reach 30% union density (a la the CIO in the 30s and 40s), let's go for 50%. If American workers are organized, let's do whatever we can to support labor movements in other countries. I think the capitalists will always have the edge on us as long as the majority of the world's workers are unorganized.

But let's just say that in our lifetimes we have the chance to replace capitalism with something else--can we trust the leaders of our unions to do the right thing? More to the point, if Stern et al have a choice, ten or twenty years from now, between keeping up the fight and adopting the "collaborationism" of the Cold War AFL-CIO, what will they do?

First of all, given the direction in which Stern has taken SEIU, and in which he has been rather forcefully pushing the entire labor movement lately, it's hard for me to imagine him becoming another George Meany. And his declaration that SEIU will never merge back into the AFL-CIO seem to indicate he doesn't want to repeat the mistake Walter Reuther made (and later regretted) when he merged the CIO with Meany's AFL.

But what does Stern believe in? Is he a comrade in the fight against capitalism? I'd like to suggest that we'll never really find the answer to these questions in his public statements. As the leader of a relatively large union in a pathetically small movement, he's not in the position to call the question, "capitalism or socialism." None of us are. The position he (and the rest of us) can and should be asking right now is, "are we gonna organize on a massive scale?" Stern and the rest of the CTW leadership have made that the question of the hour in the American labor movement. In any case, we should all be judged more on what we do than on what we say, and Stern's success in building a vibrant, growing union ought to speak for themselves. (No, SEIU's not perfect, but it's successes are pretty damn inspiring.)

But let's say we're still worried about the decisions he might make in the future. How can we get inside his head, besides being one of his close personal confidants? For what it's worth, the only time I saw Stern speak in person (at my old local union hall in Connecticut), he was fantasizing about calling a general strike for universal healthcare. But I suppose that doesn't prove he's not a "bourgeois reformist." So let's parse a few choice bits of his speech at the CTW founding convention, and see where they lead us:

1. "We pledge today that ALL of our Federation’s actions, ALL of our efforts, will be for ONE fundamental purpose: to ensure every that American, and every American's hard work, will be valued and rewarded – not just the shareholders and executives."

This is good old-fashioned class agitation, although not explicitly anti-capitalist.

2. "We pledge today that no one -- that no one who works full time -- will be poor anymore."

I hate to break it to ya, folks, but under socialism we're all gonna have to work full time.

3. "We pledge to create a new political movement. Not about Democrats and Republicans or left and right, but what’s right and wrong for American families."

Ok, I wish he would just go ahead and say the "new political movement" is a movement of the left, but let's face it, to most Americans "left and right" refer to the two sides of partisan politics in Washington, neither of which gives a damn about the average worker. This quote is really about declaring political independence, thereby reversing one of the mistakes of the Cold War AFL-CIO. And it should be noted that he's not talking just about endorsing vaguely "pro-labor" Republicans every once in a while. He's talking about "creating a new political movement." That suggests a long-term political strategy, the details of which, we must assume, have yet to be worked out.

4. "We pledge today to revolutionize our failing health care system that is sapping America’s competitiveness, and stealing worker’s pay raises with it. . . if not now -- at the dawn of a new century -- if not now after witnessing the shame of Katrina -- if not now at a time when America’s economic leadership is being tested, then when?"

Some people get uncomfortable when labor leaders use words like "competitiveness" and "America's economic leadership," and understandably so. But let's look at the context. Rhetoric about the healthcare system "sapping America's competitiveness" refers to the impending bankruptcy of GM and many other American firms that have high healthcare costs due to the goverment's failure to provide universal health insurance. It's part of an attempt to build a national consensus in favor of single-payer healthcare. Stern isn't explicit, but the logical conclusion of his comments is that capitalism isn't working. Which brings us to the last line of his speech, "if not now, at a time when America's economic leadership is being tested, then when." Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but read this as an observation that conditions are ripe for organizing, because American capitalism is in crisis.

5. "We pledge to ensure that in this new global economy, 'workers of the world unite' is not a slogan, but the basis to build global unions."

Theory and praxis, people, theory and praxis.

In the end, it sounds to me like Stern is "tacking betwixt and between" the two dangers of reformism and sectarianism, just like Rosa Luxemburg recommended. And, most importantly, he's doing everything he can to advance the "day-to-day struggle." Let's learn from him, and follow his example.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Some headlines I noticed today

1. The consequences of not organizing:

General Motors and Union Reach Agreement on Health Care Costs

The failure to stand against concessions represents an abdication of leadership on the part of the UAW's top officers, but the concessions themselves are symptomatic of a much deeper abdication of leadership that goes back decades: the union's failure to organize the non-union plants in the south, failure to participate in a large-scale effort to organize the unorganized in other industries, and failure to develop meaningful international solidarity in the auto industry.

Walter Reuther (who wanted to retain the strategic organizing center of the CIO when the AFL and CIO merged, but was overruled by George Meany) must be turning in his grave.
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2. Immigration, the Minutemen, and working in the fields:

MODEST PROPOSAL: Minutemen, grab your hoes and march north

This one speaks for itself.
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3. Basing Iraqi democracy on Floridian and Ohioan democracy:

Vote Totals Under Inquiry in 12 Iraqi Provinces, Panel Says

Come to think of it, don't all of these headlines represent the consequences of not organizing? Let's get out there and hit the doors.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Let's make the Deep South an example for the rest of the country

It has become a mantra among progressives that Hurricane Katrina did not create, but merely laid bare, the gross injustices long suffered by residents of the Gulf Coast. It is, after all, the Deep South we're talking about. But what are we going to do about it, now that the cities and towns of that region have been reduced either to rubble or to a soggy, moldy, rotting mess?

Let's review, first of all, the situation that Katrina found when she arrived:

1. A service economy dominated by low-wage, non-union, tourism jobs, either in New Orleans hotels or Gulfport/Biloxi casinos.

2. Massive environmental injustice due to an abundance of oil drilling and refining, a bad habit of wetlands destruction, and a failure to invest responsibly in infrastructure.

3. Racial injustice left over from slavery and Jim Crow.

Sounds like a microcosm of contemporary American society, no? And our political and economic elite have responded with a cute little demonstration of what they'd like to do to the rest of the country: Bush has already suspended prevailing-wage, affirmative-action, and environmental regulations and handed out no-bid contracts like candy to his best corporate friends. What's more, the New Orleans business community wants to rebuild the city without all the poor people.

The good news is that there's already some organizing going on. Even before the hurricane, UNITE-HERE was organizing casino workers in Mississippi, having won organizing rights via last year's strike in Atlantic City. And a few years ago there was a mostly unsuccessful project called HOTROC to organize the hotels in New Orleans.

In the immediate aftermath, community organizations have been sprouting like mushrooms after a good rain. Community Labor United, a seven-year-old local community organization, has put together the People's Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition. ACORN, a national organization based in New Orleans, has been organizing refugees in Houston, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere, and is launching a Hurricane Survivors Association to fight for the right of return and a fair reconstruction process, along the lines of their "Proposal for Hurricane Katrina Recovery and Rebuilding" and Naomi Klein's article "Let the People Rebuild New Orleans." A broad group of civil rights and labor organizations have formed NOAH (New Opportunities for Action and Hope) to fight for fair employment practices during the rebuilding, and the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Federation have both set up worker-assistance centers and training programs to reach out to workers in the region.

Can these groups can get strong enough fast enough to defeat the right-wing reconstruction agenda in the short term? That remains to be seen. But what is certain is that Katrina has provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to mount a long-term campaign to organize the South. Yes, the problems were there long before the hurricane hit, but there's never been as much national attention on them as there is now. Not since the Great Depression has the failure of American capitalism to serve the needs of the people been so obvious to so many.

Nor has there ever been so much opportunity for unions to make connections with the workers of this region. All those Ninth Ward residents fighting, via ACORN and other organizations, for the right of return? Those are the same folks who work for minimum wage in the hotels.

The mainstream media's attention span is notoriously short, but there will be a lot of public money rebuilding the Gulf Coast for a long time, and with public money comes an opportunity for public attention (and campaign leverage). The casinos in Mississippi will all have to be rebuilt, and, as Marc Cooper has pointed out, they're gonna be asking for a lot of favors from the state government. We need to make sure those favors come with conditions.

In short, we've got the raw materials for worker organizing, community organizing, and public pressure, on a scale we haven't seen in a long, long time.

With all this in mind, the community organizations and unions operating in the wake of the hurricane ought to work closely with one another and set high goals: the right of return, local hiring and living wages in the reconstruction industry, affordable housing, community oversight over the oil and chemical industries, investment in renewable energy and other infrastructure, protection of wetlands and public oversight over real-estate development, good public transportation, and, above all, the right to organize in the hotels and casinos that dominate the region's economy. This last demand will enable us not only to improve the conditions of low-wage workers in the region, but also to build permanent organizations that can carry the fight forward, and then carry the Gulf Coast's example to other parts of the South and the rest of the country.

There is some recent precedent for this kind of organizing. UNITE-HERE and SEIU have built labor/community alliances that have led to both organizing rights and "community benefits agreements" in Los Angeles, Connecticut, and elsewhere. This strategy could be replicated at a whole new level in New Orleans and Mississippi, but only if somebody makes it happen. Any ideas?

Friday, October 14, 2005

Having it all figured out: organizing, vision, and the anxiety of the perfectionist

An anonymous commenter (the first comment on my blog! thanks!) wrote: "we must continue organizing, no doubt. But what kind of world are we going for, and how are our every day efforts linked to that vision?"

Well, to quote a famously indecisive, and infamously unsuccessful, crusader for justice, "that is the question." Rosa Luxemburg phrased the question this way a century ago:
"The international movement of the proletariat toward its complete emancipation is a process peculiar in the following respect. For the first time in the history of civilization, the people are expressing their will consciously and in opposition to all ruling classes. But this will can only be satisfied beyond the limits of the existing system.

Now the mass can only acquire and strengthen this will in the course of day-to-day struggle against the existing social order -- that is, within the limits of capitalist society.

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one had, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectic contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform."
I believe the labor movement and allied grassroots community organizations are the best day-to-day tools available to us. And I'm attracted to Michael Albert's vision of Participatory Economics. But I'm turned off by anyone who claims to have this problem all figured out. If anyone had the path to a better society all mapped out, we'd be there already.

My favorite thing about Luxemburg's phrasing of the question is that she acknowledges, in a very deep way, the difficulty of answering it. She also acknowledges the impossibility of maintaining perfect control over the direction(s) the movement(s) take(s):
"That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix, once and for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labor movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression."
Here's the moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned: let's not get our undies all in a knot over assumed or actual imperfections in the leadership of our unions or other organizations. Let's not let our anxiety about the future course of these organizations hold us back from putting our all into building the union today.

Of course, we can learn from past failures: the Soviet Union, "communist" (capitalist) China, Allende's Chile, the Paris commune, the anarchist takeover of Barcelona, etc, etc. But what can the American left learn from current struggles in other countries, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico, that appear to be working, at least for now?

Check out this article about the labor movement's relationship with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Business as usual ain't gonna cut it

This just in from Working Life: "In case you've wondered what's up at Northwest since the strike by mechanics, the situation has gotten even grimmer. Now the airline is going back to court to try to use the bankruptcy code to get rid of its union contracts."

Prop 75, Northwest, Delphi, SoCal supermarkets, public employees in Indiana and Missouri. The list goes on and on. How long will it take for everyone to realize that business as usual ain't gonna cut it?

Despite the shortcomings of automatic dues deduction (sometimes used as a crutch in lieu of creating real worker organization), I hesitate to find a silver lining in the coming starvation of the California labor movement's political program. Nor can we put a positive spin on the devastation of thousands and thousands of union members' livelihoods.

But whether we win or lose the present battles, I hope they snap us out of our denial. An advertising blitz (funded by dues checkoff) may save our asses this time. And some of our strikes (such as Boeing) may stave off concessions, proving that militancy still has no substitute. But unless we organize the unorganized, here and abroad, we're gonna lose the next battle if we don't lose this one. Before long, unions like the IAM, UAW, and USWA may simply cease to exist. Let's not wait for that to happen before we decide to do something different.

P.S. There is obviously no consensus that Change to Win represents "something different," or at least something that's different in the right way. Some people think it has mostly to do with money or egos. But I firmly believe that Change to Win is about more than saving money on per-caps. I believe it represents a (still too small) segment of the leadership of our movement that really is hearing the wake-up call. My belief is backed up by my experience with SEIU and UNITE-HERE. We'll have to reserve judgement on how committed the UFCW, Teamsters, and Carpenters are. But we gotta have faith. And I intend to spend the rest of my life making that faith real.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

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.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Welcome sindicalistas

This is an organizer's journal on union organizing, movement politics, and long-term vision. It is for fantasizing about future strategies and debating current tactics. I'm using the Spanish word "sindicalista" partly because it resembles the English word "syndicalist," meaning a believer in syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism, a brand of anti-capitalist ideology with which I loosely identify, but mostly because it translates most literally to the word "unionist" or "trade unionist."

This journal is emphatically not a sectarian message-machine. It is for honest discussion among people who share my passion for organizing for a better society. In spirit I am a socialist, an anarchist, a social democrat, a democratic socialist, an anarcho-communist, a pareconist, a poet, and all sorts of other things, but I belong to no party (nor do I rule out belonging to a party at some point in the future).

As I post my observations, reflections, ideas, and rants, please chime in. And please spread the word.