Reports of the Death of Unions Are Premature

As long as there are owners, they will exploit workers. And as long as workers are exploited, somebody will figure out a way to organize them.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Adam Kader has a nice article on the I.W.W. organizing of Starbucks.

That might sound weird. The I.W.W? Didn’t it disappear 80 years ago? Well, more or less. It’s always been there with a very small membership but the people I’ve known involved in the organization seemed to romanticize the past more than understand how to organize in the present. As a scholar of the I.W.W., I have always found little from its past that is particularly helpful in present labor struggles. The historical Wobblies proved utterly ineffective in running an effective organization or maintaining a union after a rare victory (such as in Lawrence, Massachusetts).

But forget about the past. What can the new I.W.W. tell us about organizing? The Starbucks campaign builds upon 2 key tenets of the old I.W.W. with great relevance to the present. First, it organizes industry wide. Understanding that one shop within the larger Starbucks empire has little meaning, the I.W.W. seeks to build solidarity between workplaces in order to build solidarity and gain additional power.

Second, the Wobblies focus heavily on worker education. One of the real weaknesses of the modern labor movement is a lack of emphasis on educating workers about their own workplace, how unions fit into a larger economic and social justice world, and building workplace democracy. The I.W.W. model is better than the AFL-CIO on all these fronts. Here there is real potential for unions outside the AFL-CIO structure to build quality organizations. The I.W.W. is rebuilding worker education centers and emphasizing larger ideas of workplace justice in its Starbucks campaign.

This alternative strategy makes a lot of sense given the continued failure of the AFL-CIO strategies of workplace organizing since 1980. Harold Meyerson had a recent piece exploring SEIU door-to-door campaigns that have nothing to do with organizing a specific workplace, but rather seek to build a larger coalition of the poor and unemployed. Given corporations’ goal of returning us to the Gilded Age, it makes a lot of sense to start revisiting older forms of labor tactics as a response.

It’s true that pre-New Deal unions always had a tremendously difficult time succeeding. It took government intervention on the side of workers to make unionization happen for most. But that intervention would not have happened were it not for 50 years of agitation by workers determined to improve their lives. It’s time to start rebuilding multiple forms of worker and poor person organization to best prepare for the brutal struggles ahead, struggles that some day may convince the government again to care about working-class people.

There are good reasons for the AFL-CIO to exist and be workers’ most powerful voice. But the big organization has always fought vociferously against alternative models of unionization. This is a mistake. There are multiple models of unionization, each with strengths and weaknesses. This most certainly includes the AFL-CIO, whose weaknesses has made it quite unprepared to deal with the modern globalized economy. I don’t know whether the renewed I.W.W. really represents a workable alternative, but I am certainly happy to see it and the Starbucks workers try.

Not coincidentally, there's a new book out called Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America:

Joe Burns’ incredibly important new book seems to me much larger than the labor movement.

SNIP

Burns argues that for the last 30 years, since 1980, the labor movement has sought ways to succeed without employing the fundamental tool required, and that employing that tool is a choice available to the labor movement and to all workers immediately without waiting for anyone’s approval.

From 1930 to 1980, unions created ever improving lives for millions of workers, improving our economy and our politics in the process. And they did it by striking. They would have found the idea of unions that did not strike unimaginable. Congress and the courts have stripped away unions’ power to effectively strike, but so has corporatist ideology. When the anti-union assault intensified in the 1980s, and ever since, the labor movement has responded in a completely new and completely hopeless manner. Rather than halting production, unions set up picket lines that merely watched scabs replace union workers. And when unions are able to negotiate contracts, they no longer seek to establish standardized wages for a whole industry, but negotiate a variety of standards even at a single corporation.

To survive and succeed, Burns argues, unions must use strikes to halt production and impose their demands; and those demands must be industry-wide. Unions must use secondary or solidarity strikes and boycotts in support of other striking workers. A solidarity boycott is far more effective than the extremely difficult consumer boycotts that well-meaning atomized citizens are always dreaming about. Compelling a store to stop selling a particular product is far easier than persuading consumers to not buy that product.

Because without unions and without strikes, workers are reduced to desperation measures. Like hunger strikes:

Things are so bad now for so many people, it's considered reasonable for companies to outsource -- even though it isn't. It only kicks the people at the bottom. But it's so inhuman. That's why organizers and local clergy hope to bring Cub Foods management to the bargaining table in Minneapolis:

Four retail cleaning workers and four community allies will begin an open–ended hunger strike Saturday to ratchet up pressure on the Supervalu grocery chain. The workers, members of a Minneapolis worker center, want the company to negotiate a code of conduct that guarantees fair wages and conditions for the workers who clean its stores late into the night.

The group, led by immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, also seeks the reinstatement of an illegally fired workplace leader.

“The drastic nature of our action is only equal to the drastic conditions under which retail cleaning workers have to work,” said Mario Colloly, the fired worker. He’s one of the hunger strikers.

After months of requests by workers and their allies for a meeting, and a November march that brought 300 members and supporters to protest in front of several stores, retail cleaning workers in the Twin Cities have said enough is enough. They are organizing with the support of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL), or the Workers United in Struggle Center, along with faith, community, and union allies.
[...] A mad dash to outsource cleaning services to the lowest bidder over the last decades has caused vicious competition among cleaning subcontractors—with severe consequences for workers. Retail cleaners in Minneapolis say wages have been cut from $12 an hour, with some benefits, to minimum wage (sometimes less) with no benefits.

Wage cuts and workload increases have been the most dramatic at Cub Foods, which is run by Supevalu. Other abuses, said CTUL organizer Brian Payne, include sexual harassment, lack of air conditioning or heating, and threats of physical violence.
The industry as a whole is plagued by severe wage theft and human rights violations. Acting on a tip from overseas, the Department of Justice uncovered a slavery ring in Pennsylvania last year where Ukrainian cleaners put in 16-hour days, seven days a week, at retail stores including Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Safeway, for $100 a month. Prosecutors said workers were raped, beaten, threatened, and held in virtual bondage.

Liberals support the rights of workers to organize, to bargain collectively and to form unions to represent them.