Labor Power and Strategy. John Womack with Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek. PM Press, 2023 209 pages.

The first thing that is striking about the new book Labor Power and Strategy is how it is organized. It is set up in a way that should be imitated, and not just for topics like labor.  The way Labor Power and Strategy is organized would work for any field where a critical dialectical engagement would help move the discussion forward: film, music, the life sciences, for starters.   

In Labor Power and Strategy, Womack, a senior scholar, Harvard professor, and economist best known for his work on the Mexican Revolution, is interviewed twice by Peter Olney (co-editor of the Stansbury Forum), one-time organizing director for the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), and Glenn Perusek, who has worked on strategic research for the AFL-CIO, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). The two interviews take up just under half the book. These interviews (edited into one document) are followed by comments by ten labor activists – “some of the best organic intellectuals of the working class” -according to Olney and Perusek. Next, Womack responds to these comments and we see how his reading of their contributions moves his own thinking forward. As a sign that the intention of the authors is to make this book widely accessible, short historical biographies of people mentioned in the interviews are included, ranging from Eugene Debs to John Dunlop, the Dunne brothers and Luca Perrone. There are also long, explanatory footnotes and bios of the contributors, plus an index.  This is all worth mentioning because it signals how many points of access there are to the conversation that is the core of this brief book. The totality actually goes beyond the scope and point of the original interviews.

Womack looks at labor power not to confirm the abstract idea that labor creates all wealth but to identify the strategic points where labor — meaning workers – can “shut it down cold, cut off the plutocrat’s revenue” (27). Speaking of an industrial work process as a network, he says: 

What you want most is that node where the heavy lines, many heavy lines, go, lines you can get to, where you can undo the system, a small network in a small system, maybe a big heavy system to undo the whole capitalist shebang.  (27)

Putting the focus on strikes in perspective

In the interviews, Womack’s focus was on stopping production in order to win concessions from employers and, beyond that, to shift the balance of power within a national capitalist economy. To put this focus in context, Olney and Perusek interviewed him in 2018, two years before the COVID pandemic provided the economy with a rehearsal for a general strike. At that time, the word “strike” invoked memories of the Flint sit-down and other 1930’s dramatic events. For at least a generation, strikes had been viewed as a desperate last-ditch measure, not part of normal strategic planning, so getting the vocabulary of strikes back into ordinary discourse was an uphill battle. Robert Schwartz at WorkRights Press had published a book on strikes in 2009 but let it go out of print (he would follow it with a new edition in 2014). In but 2011, Joe Burns had had to mount an argument in favor of strikes, dealing with them as something that had slipped out of memory for many labor people. He even titled his book Reviving the Strike (Haymarket). It was actually the strike of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2012 that put strikes back into the headlines.  

This point is worth making because of how things have changed in the last ten years. According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 2017 and 2018 the number of workers who went on strike increased from 25,300 to 485, 2000 (Feb 22 2023). The 2018 West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona teachers’ strikes (see Eric Blanc, Red States Revolt, Jacobin) surprised many – they were statewide, public-sector strikes led by the younger generation, and while they did not win everything that was needed, they did not lose. All of these are mentioned in the Womack book in Dan DiMaggio’s comment section. Womack refers to the teacher strikes in his response to the comments, noting that they happened after his 2018 interviews with Olney and Perusek. This is all to put into historical context the focus by Womack on stopping production and how to choose the strategic points (he calls them seams) where workers move the product from one stage of production to another – or not. In the context of the time, in 2018 his point was more radical than it is today. 

The way the book is organized will make many, especially public sector workers, want to go beyond the covers

So Womack’s focus on stopping production makes sense as an important starting point, as the commentaries in the book demonstrate. But once they have read this book, readers today will want to join and extend the discussion. What if what you want to do is not really stop production, but get control of it in order to transform it? This question especially arises if the industry we are looking at is not garments, trains, manufacturing or food processing, but a public service industry like higher education, one of the fundamental sites of social reproduction. 

That is a question that someone reading the book from the point of view of public sector labor – healthcare, transportation, government at all levels — will ask. 

Higher education is a good example of an industry ready for transformation. It is roiled with strikes. Within the last year there have been mass strikes at the University of California, at The New School in NYC, at Rutgers and at various museum schools. The graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia not only went on strike but then voted down a tentative contract agreement. If we go back a couple of years we can include strikes at Harvard, Columbia, and others. This is not just about “wages and working conditions”, either. In Florida, a system-wide student walkout is planned to protest the political intervention from the state (Governor Ron DeSantis, specifically) in curriculum, tenure, and faculty-student relations. More recently, we have strikes at Chicago State, Governors State and Eastern IL, all in IL, U of MI, and the community colleges in Maine. Nor is this limited to one nation: in the UK thousands of faculty were on strike in 2023 and faculty resigned due to exactly the same types of political interference and neoliberal degradation of pay and conditions that is going on in Florida. But when faculty talk about what they would hope to achieve by exercising a labor power strategy, they do not talk about shutting “it down cold”, they talk about what comes next. If we follow the lines of thought pushed forward by the people who commented on Womack’s interviews in the book, it is Jane McAlevey who uses her comment to expand challenges to employers beyond strikes and asks questions about transformation instead of shutdown. Who would have predicted that the old UAW, with more than a quarter of its members working in higher education, would elect a new president and then turn its attention to negotiating over car batteries, organizing in the South, and a national strike in 2028?

This book is well conceived, well executed. Its dialectical and accessible format should be taken as a model. Engaged readers will use it as a place to start conversations.

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