Platform Workers – The New Face of Solidarity
By David Bacon
On May 21 I went to the State Supreme Court Building in San Francisco at 350 McAllister. I went to witness oral argument in the case brought against Proposition 22, the state referendum that overturned Assembly Bill 5 in the 2020 election. Uber and Lyft and other platform/gig companies financed the referendum with $200 million in their effort to undermine the excellent provisions of AB 5 authored by then Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego. AB 5 codified into law a previous Supreme Court case called Dynamex that established a very simple and solid three part test that determines who is an employee and who is a contractor. AB 5 if implemented and enforced would have made Uber and Lyff and other platform employers treat their workers as employees with the right to be protected by labor standards and the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act.
Getting into the State Supreme Court chambers turns out to be much more difficult than getting through TSA airport security. First there is the usual metal screening then there is a second screening for phones and computers, which are not permitted in the chambers. I sat in the overflow room and watched the proceedings on live feed video. My own take and the opinion reflected in the legal press is that the State Supremes are going to basically uphold 22 which will probably lead to more legislative initiatives to bring justice to gig drivers and employees.
Before the hearing I met up with the President of Ride Share Drivers United, Nicole Moore and some of her members. After the hearing Nicole commented that it is a little disturbing to hear bright attorneys on the bench jousting with plaintiff and employer attorneys over fine legal points when the livelihoods of thousands of workers are at stake. The decision of the Court will be within 60 to 90 days of the hearing.
The Stansbury Forum therefore is proud to present interviews with Nicole Moore and leaders of platform worker organizing in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
The interviews and photos were done by David Bacon at a conference organized by the UCLA Labor Center – Global Labor Solidarity Program.
Hosted at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA Fed), in partnership with the and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Foundation-New York Office, this event took place on Feb 9-10, 2024, and builds on the Labor Center’s 18-year history of fostering global labor solidarity initiatives that can play a vital role in facilitating worker rights across the globe. entitled: “Worker Solidarity in Action: A Trinational Response to the US Mexico Canada Agreement”.
Peter Olney, Co-Editor of the Stansbury Forum
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As part of efforts to foster cross-border labor solidarity, the UCLA Labor Center convened over 80 labor leaders and workers from the U.S., Mexico and Canada for the “Worker Solidarity in Action: A Tri-national Labor Response to the USMCA” summit held on Feb. 9-10, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. The present report, written by noted journalist David Bacon, conveys the main objective of the event–to foster transnational labor collaboration and to create a space for strategic discussions surrounding worker rights campaigns in communities across North America. This report was written, the interviews conducted, and the photographs taken by David Bacon.
Hosted at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA Fed), in partnership with the and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Foundation-New York Office, this event builds on the Labor Center’s 18-year history of fostering global labor solidarity initiatives that can play a vital role in facilitating worker rights across the globe.
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Project Director – UCLA Labor Center- Global Labor Solidarity
This is the fourth section of the report. Previous sections had contributions from workers and organizers in the maquiladoras, the auto industry, and in the domestic and home care industry.
On Valentine’s Day, just three days after the Los Angeles conference concluded, workers for Uber Eats, Deliveroo and other delivery apps in Great Britain went on strike, refusing to take orders and drive meals to the companies’ waiting customers. Like their coworkers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the UK drivers are not covered by the statutory “national living wage” of 11.44 pounds. The UK supreme court last November ruled that platform workers aren’t workers at all, in the face of an organizing drive by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain that had signed up over 3000 members.
In an era where workers in one country can follow the actions of workers in another, in real time as they happen, the strike electrified platform workers across the Atlantic.
Los Angeles, California – 10 February 2024: Unions and worker groups from the US, Mexico and Canada in a conference to discuss ways to support each other. All images Copyright David Bacon
JENNIFER SCOTT
Jennifer Scott is a gig worker and the president of Gig Workers United in Canada. She lives and works in Toronto.
Our union started in early 2020 with the Food Stores United Campaign, at a European company called Foodora. This was an app like Uber. Workers wanted to unionize, so we helped them. We put in the papers for the certification of their union, and 89.4% of workers in Toronto and Mississauga voted yes. So we won and that set a precedent at the labor board.
Then the pandemic began and Foodora declared bankruptcy and exited Canada completely. But because of the worker power we built, we were able to get severance pay. The Federal government has a program called the WEP, for workers whose whose employers declare bankruptcy and are not not able to pay severance. We won a settlement of $4.1 million, allocated and divided among workers all over Canada.
After that, we had questions. Do we want to stop? Are we happy? Do we want our rights? What do we want to do? Everyone felt that obviously, we want our rights. After a few months of talking and thinking we figured out what we wanted to do. Workers came together and created Gig Workers United, saying, “Look what we have in common.”
No matter what city we work in or app we work on, whether we’re delivering by bike or walking or car, the problem is we don’t have our rights and we want them. That’s the end goal of Gig Workers United – to unionize.
The main companies in Canada are DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Skip the Dishes, now owned by Just Eat. There’s also Instacart and Corner Shop, which was purchased by Uber. Our Members work on different combinations of these apps. We have a very loose definition of a gig worker, and it’s easy to be e a member.
In Canada they misclassify us as independent contractors. We know we’re not. Our work around organizing has to challenge the misclassification of gig workers, because that’s how apps get away with treating us the way they do. It’s why we don’t have basic rights and protections.
The debate over classification was a big part of the Foodora case and why it was precedent-setting. In Ontario, under the Employment Standards Act, independent contractors have no rights. But you also have dependent contractors, which is a form of employee. In the Foodora case we won because we were classified as dependent contractors.
At Foodora we had to certify a bargaining unit, and after that, workers voted democratically. Presumably if we filed a petition for Uber drivers, Uber would say that we’re not employees and we would have to fight that whole thing all over again. But the precedent has been set. The board looked at our case and at the relationship between the platform and the workers and made the right decision. So it doesn’t have to be as intimidating or feel as uncertain now as it might have in 2018.
Uber in any country always wants to control the narrative. That’s why a win for us on one app or even a win in one jurisdiction is is a win for all us. The companies all work together, and workers have to work together too. A victory at Foodora or the huge fight in California around AB 5, and then the Uber initiative, all affect workers in other countries.
In the UK on Friday WGB [the British gig workers’ union] organized what could be the biggest strike in the history of gig work. They shut down kitchens, with workers standing outside them saying, “We’re not picking up.” There are videos of McDonald’s with 50 or 60 orders lined up and no workers. They were declining orders.
The consequence of a work stoppage is that the algorithm pays workers more for orders. Where on average they paid £3 per order, at the end of the strike Uber was offering £71 per order. That’s amazing. As workers in Canada, we look at that and we’re like, “OK, let’s do that here.” It shows us strategies and tactics that can work.
We know that any app algorithm is sensitive to strike action. As workers we can manipulate that and have big wins. A strike like that not only sends a message to the boss. It also means that a worker who is working that night is going to get paid £71 an order. That might make me think twice about collective power. A great reason to go on strike.
I’m excited to build my family relationships with folks in in the US. Because of the pandemic and being precarious workers, it has not really been possible to travel a lot, so we don’t get to see each other. Being here is really meaningful for building those relationships.
The possibility might exist at some point that an action would take take place in the U.S., Mexico and Canada at the same time. Who doesn’t want that to happen? But what steps would have to be taken in order to get there? Like any aspect of organizing, it’s worker to worker. I talk with my coworkers, and my coworkers say, “I want to take action.” That has to happen every place, and people have to coordinate it. If we’ve got 50 new leaders and they want to take an action, how do we do that?
Presumably we’d have to find organizations with the same set of principles in other countries. I don’t think gig workers can organize in any way other than through rank and file, worker to worker organizing, whether it’s locally in our communities or across borders or global action. It is all rooted in workers.
As a gig worker, every day, all day long, when I’m working I am being confronted with orders – $3 for five kilometers, $3 for 15 kilometers. And I’m constantly looking at things and figuring out if the orders are good for me. Apps frequently send us emails that say, “Hey, we’re making a change in how the app functions and it’s going to be good for you and you’re going to like it.” But then what we see, and what we hear from workers all over the world, is that we fucking don’t like it. It’s not good for us, and we know what is and isn’t.
That that’s the core of organizing. The people who do the work know what needs to change. When we unite together, will know how to take action together. Folks who are not workers have a role to play, an important one. But our core belief is that nobody can change your life for you. You have to do it for yourself.
There’s a community of interest between people in very different industries. There are lots of reasons for us to connect together, but the most important one is that employers like Uber want to bring in regressive labor policy. That’s their end goal. It isn’t delivering food and it’s not about ride share. They want to drastically change what we think work is.
Apps and gig work is coming for all work. Gig work is about lowering employment standards and changing minimums to something that is not tenable, that harms people, that harms our community. Maybe somebody has a good job now. Maybe they have a union job now. But with gig work that won’t exist five years from now. So we have all the reasons in the world to work together.
As members of Gig Workers United we recognize that it is necessary to build relationships internationally with other gig workers. We’ll keep fighting and our relationships with each other can keep us going, can give us a hand when we need one. Now is a moment to start building that, so that a year from now, two years from now, when we need each other, we’re already connected.
NICOLE MOORE
Nicole Moore is a part time Lyft driver and President of Rideshare Drivers United, the organization of 20,000 drivers in California. RDU has a democratically elected Board of Driver Members, and members who pay dues of $15/month to be eligible to vote in the election of officers, held every other year. Today RDU has chapters in Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rideshare Drivers United started in the parking lot of LAX. When Uber started cutting our rates, we started talking to each other. Unlike other workers, we don’t have a big room or a water fountain where we gather. We gather at airports to pick up people. A majority of us are people of color and immigrants, so this gig model is impacting people of color more than other communities.
We did a couple of protests over some of the cuts and brought 50 or 75 people. But we knew it wasn’t enough to really make a change. We knew we had to build substantial power. So in 2018 we took signs and left our cars and organized mini strikes on the sidewalks at the terminals where passengers are getting in and out.
Then we decided we had to build bigger than just airport drivers. Not all of us work at the airport. At that time we estimated there were 400,000 to 500,000 drivers in California, so we needed to organize to scale.
One of our volunteers started helping us build an Excel list. Then we realized we could actually build our own organizing app to help us recruit through social media and other venues. We wanted to build an organization where we could really communicate with each other and build real relationships.
We decided that when we got to 2000 people in our organization, we would do our first public action as Rideshare Drivers United on January 30th, 2019, when the new Governor of California made the alarming conclusion that drivers should get together with companies to come up with a solution. Some of the larger labor unions were already trying to do this, but with no drivers in the room.
As drivers we knew the companies were getting ready to their IPO’s in 2020. They were slowly squeezing drivers to get more money, to look better for the investors. We were feeling it, getting less and less. So we said no. The the governor had barely been sworn in when we protested in front of his Los Angeles office. And instead of 50 people, we had 150.
We knew our organizing model, based on connecting as humans, was working. Lawmakers in Sacramento knew that these companies were fake classifying people as indefinite contractors, and the courts agreed. They passed a law, AB 5, that incorporated the ABC test for determining who is an independent contractor. It’s been used all over the country, so it’s not something radical.
None of us wanted to be employees of Uber, with a 40 hour work week and having to beg the boss for a vacation. Those are the things we associate with formal employment. The companies used that to feed us a line – that we wouldn’t have flexibility if we were not independent contractors.
We needed the state to help. So we threw down to support AB 5, but we expected pushback from our members. But instead they said, “Hell, yeah! These people are treating us like employees, so we might as well have the rights of of all the other folks to at a least minimum wage and unemployment insurance and workers comp.”
We had two gigantic strikes that year, the second right before Uber’s IPO. That one went global. We had people striking on 6 continents because everybody knew Uber was about to make a bazillion dollars. They had cut us from $1.75 per mile to $1.20 per mile to $0.90 per mile to $0.60 per mile.
It was getting worse and five thousand of us filed wage claims because we often weren’t even making minimum wage. But if minimum wage is just based on when I have a passenger in the car, there’s no minimum wage at all. If there are 10,000 drivers in Korea Town trying to pick up two passengers, everybody’s gonna make two cents. You have to look at all of the value of our time, wait time included. The state then ruled that they owed us $1.3 billion. That was huge.
When I hear people from the rideshare union in Mexico, or the platform workers as they call them, I think it’s wonderful that they’re they’re in the same struggles that we’re in. It’s so great not to be alone.
They have a legal system that does say they are workers with rights. But they also are fighting against unions that are trying to trade their rights for money and power. We have very similar fights here, so it’s very exciting to to talk with them. We have an international alliance of platform based transport workers and and have not been able to find a partner in Mexico. Now we have a union we feel we can work with.
Our deactivation report showed the violence, discrimination and and abuse drivers receive, and then we’re we’re fired or temporarily suspended by AI. We tell the company, “I wasn’t drunk. The guy told me he was going to get me fired and get a free ride, so I shouldn’t be fired. I haven’t had a drink in 30 years.” But we’re arguing with the chat bot. There’s no human in this process. Meanwhile we can’t pay our rent or feed our kids. The woman driver from Mexico was talking about the same thing.
We’re looking at global strategies to create standards for this industry. The ILO is doing that, but we want to make sure that drivers like us are in the room when those standards are set.
We’re fighting global organizations, global capital, that are working to destroy labor rights for everyone. And they’re going at it very deliberately and powerfully. It’s no joke. All of us will be deployed through AI or some kind of platform in the future for our work. For the last hundred years, since the industrial revolution, we’ve tried to build workers rights. If we start at zero with the AI revolution, we’re going to be in hell, a 21st century industrial revolution.
ZAIRA BARINO TOVAR
Zaira Barriño Tovar is the secretary for gender of the National Union of Application Workers in México. The union includes drivers for Uber, bicycle workers, and motorcycles that deliver food at home, as well as peoplewho deliver products for Amazon and Mercado Libre.
I have worked in these jobs and been paid badly. We do not have any benefits or rights. The applications have sold us he idea that we are our own bosses, that we are freelance partners, but in reality they don’t want to recognize us as workers, particularly as workers on digital platforms.
Mexican law regarding workers does cover people who work with transnational companies, but digital platforms do not recognize us as workers and or give us the legal benefits that this requires. The Federal Labor Law, although it talks about workers, does not consider us as workers either. The bad thing about this is that they are transnational companies that come to our country. set up shop, and don’t even give benefits to the workers.
In Mexico there is no law that defines us as workers or non-workers. Federal labor law doesn’t doesn’t recognize or deny us worker status. Outsourcing has supposedly been made illegal and disappeared, so digital platform companies are going against the law because outsourcing no longer exists. So we are demanding a reform saying that digital platform workers are recognized as workers..
This is a very masculine sector and women are only 10% of the workforce, but these 10% worldwide suffer a lot of gender violence. Sometimes you arrive at an address and you don’t know what will happen on the street because you are a woman. As Secretary of Gender, in October we had a meeting with women working on digital platforms on an international level. Colleagues came from Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and other countries. We all wrote a letter to the ILO, asking for a report specifically on workers on digital platforms.
We have been a registered union for 3 years at the federal level. We also have sections in the States of Mexico and Colima, and in the city of León. In Tijuana, we are close to organizing a new one. We have an organizing committee there, and sent a delegation from Mexico City to help. We want to start ones in Monterrey and Guadalajara, which are two of the largest cities.
But although we have recognition under the law, we do not have the right to bargain collectively. And since the companies do not recognize us as workers, we cannot force them to sign a collective agreement. Our most important demand is that those companies sit down to negotiate with us, and that the Government of Mexico requires them to do this.
The most important thing for us is to reach 30% membership, to be able to make a demand on these companies and represent the majority of the workers. The most important is Uber because it has a super dirty, anti-union history. This was discovered by prosecutors in the Panama Papers.
Although we have 30% of the workers, which is the normal legal requirement, who knows if they are going to comply. We thought when our membership hit 30%, that Uber and other companies might create white unions. Then we could fight this by organizing to remove those unions, as other colleagues have done. At Audi there was a protection union, but the workers all got together and got it out. So we can do that if we have to. But we have to come together as workers to fight them.
Companies are looking for a special organization that is not a union, they call Decalogue. And this decalogue says that we are not workers, that we are service providers, that they pay us fees, that our job is at their mercy, and that we are only protected from accidents during delivery time. Obviously that would be terrible. The companies hold these organizations’ money. But many people are waking up and saying “No, I am a worker, I work 12 hours, I provide the motorcycle, the car, the bicycle, so I need them to give me benefits.”
We tell them, first of all, that they have to recognize themselves as workers. As a platform worker, we ask, “Do you have accidents? No one protects you if you die. No company is going to be responsible for you. You provide the money for spare parts and gasoline. Don’t you think we have rights as workers?” Then you say, “Well, if I provide everything, I deserve the rights of a worker.”
There is another union, but we call it a yellow union, one that is with the company. They pretend they are on the side of workers, but in truth they are charros.
Some of the people who work on digital platforms are migrants in Mexico. Today we have a humanitarian problem of Haitian migrants, and many of these Haitians are working on digital platforms. Recently in the news a young Haitian who was hired by a construction contractor died and the company did nothing. We want to make this stop. Our fellow migrants are vulnerable, far from their country.
There are also a good portion of LGBT women and some gay men as well. They are victims of homophobia and discrimination.
We have relationships with similar groups of platform workers in other countries. We coordinate with groups in Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil. We also work with groups from other unions.
MUHAMMAD EJAZ BUTT
Muhammad Ejaz Butt is the general secretary of the I-Taxi Worker Association of Toronto, and President of the Toronto Limo Driver Association. He is also secretary of the 20-country International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers.
We have filed a complaint against Uber and those unions that have made under the table agreements, first in UK, then in US, and now in Canada. In any country, unions must recognize the drivers, the gig workers, not just deal with the companies. Any organization of Uber workers should be an organization run by the drivers themselves, 100%.
Uber used to terminate any account for a driver at any time. Now, if a driver has lost his position he can contact with the UFCW without being a member of that union. Then they will arbitrate the case. However, last year fewer than 1000 people registered as members under that agreement. The union doesn’t show clearly the advantages and disadvantages of that agreement. That is why I resigned from UFCW.
In our organization, there are four points to our program. First, drivers need a minimum wage, so we would accept employee status if it gave us opportunities and rights like regular employees, including union rights. Second, we need a minimum shift of nine hours that includes waiting time. Sometimes Uber will give a driver only 3 hours. The minimum wage should apply to all nine hours.
Third, Uber has to stop deactivating the accounts of drivers for small complaints. Sometime a customer is not right or he’s drunk. So we want fairness in deactivations. Last, and most critical, Uber must be transparent. If I pick up customer and drive from A to to B, Uber will only show me what I get. They never show me how much they charge. The Uber agreement says they charge me 25%, but maybe they are charging 40% or 45%.
One day soon they will come to the table and agree with us.
Canada has already decided that by 2030 vehicle emissions must be zero and the vehicles must be electric. That will be a big expense for drivers like us. Auto workers and drivers need to talk together about this, and here we’ve been able to start.
CRYSTAL ROMERO
Crystal Romero is the press secretary at the LA County Federation of Labor. She formerly worked as an organizer with the port truckers campaign of the Teamsters Union.
Organizing port truck drivers at the ports of LA and Long Beach has always been an uphill battle, because they have been classified as independent contractors, rather than being recognized properly as employees. Unfortunately, the majority of the trucking industry seems to believe that truck drivers are independent contractors, despite the law and numerous cases before the NLRB and other tribunals, which have stated that drivers are employees.
The ABC test established the criteria for determining what constitutes an independent contractor, and what constitutes an employee. But there’s disagreement even among the drivers. We need a lot of education to prove to the drivers themselves that they actually are misclassified employees. Even among the drivers it’s always been an uphill battle to get them to recognize that their employers are taking advantage of them.
Employers often just choose to ignore AB 5, so we’re still seeing active misclassification at the ports, which makes organizing a battle. A trucking company will claim, “no, no, no, these guys are not employees.” So you have to fight out the employee issue, and ask for an NLRB union election.
Drivers make abysmally low rates. They’ve got to do multiple loads a day in order to break even. Some truck drivers actually make a negative income, and owe the company money. They are responsible for purchasing the trucks themselves. Each costs a quarter of a million dollars, and the drivers have to pay the taxes and insurance. Maintenance, tires, gasoline, all of that comes out of their own pockets. Essentially drivers are paying to work for multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon.
A lot of positive changes have taken place, however the transition deadline to zero emission vehicles is going to be a huge barrier for a lot of misclassified truck drivers. How can we expect a low wage worker to finance a half-million dollar electric truck? A lot of the problems of the past are going to come back to haunt us if we don’t address misclassification now.
I talked about the combination of passing laws and legal actions with Mexican gig workers. Gig workers there know that they’re getting the short end of the stick, despite a few saying they’re good with what Uber is doing. A big difference is the willingness of a lot of app drivers to recognize the problems and confront them head on.
Here we’ve had 30 or 40 years of deregulation, and the ideology of the independent contractor has really taken hold in the trucking industry. That is not as present in the app-based drivers today, so that’s certainly a difference. But in all of these cases the problem is to get workers to establish their own agency, and get people to say, “Yeah. I’m a misclassified employee. I do have rights.”
Legal action and political action could be an answer for the situation in Mexico, or one of the answers. Still, even here we’ve passed a wonderful law, but we still have billion-dollar corporations that skirt it. There are no real mechanisms of enforcement, or ways to keep these companies accountable that actually affects them in their pocketbooks. That’s an issue that we see across the labor movement. So it’s not the full strategy. I think it’s just two prongs in a multiple prong approach.
In Mexico they are looking at organizing unions specifically for gig workers. Independent unions are part of the solution for them – rideshare and driver unions that can cater to the needs of these workers in a much better way than a very large union representing many different industries.
There’s value in everything though. When you align with a very powerful union, like the Teamsters, you know you have more political clout. But I think one of the wonderful things that we’ve learned here is that we’re all doing similar work. We all have very similar demands, and we’re all fighting these battles in our respective jurisdictions. So how much more powerful could we be when we start really joining forces?And Uber continues to be enemy number one to workers everywhere.
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Muscle Memory
By Robert Gumpert and Peter Olney
Organizing takes grit and perseverance. In September of 2005 the George W. Bush US Park Service awarded the Alcatraz concession to Hornblower and dislodged the longstanding operator, Blue And Gold. Blue and Gold is union as are all the other ferry services in the Bay Area. Since 2005 the Alcatraz City Cruises have been non-union. Finally in September of 2022 the Inland Boatmen’s Union of the Pacific, the maritime division of the ILWU won a National Labor Relations Board election 52-11. The union was certified and began negotiations. To date there is no labor contract and on Saturday morning, May 25th about 50 workers – deckhands and captains walked off the job on an Unfair Labor Practice strike protesting the company’s stalling tactics in bargaining; 36 meetings and no contract.
“The cat is out of the bag and now the workers have muscle memory,” said ILWU Northern California Organizer Evan McLaughlin. He explained that once workers take strike action for the first time and feel their power and impunity, the company is now on warning that their operations are constantly under threat of disruption. Management got wind of the strike early and brought in managers to operate the ferries on an emergency basis. Scabbing resulted in some docking issues and delays.
The President of the SF Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, joined the raucous picket. Peskin has announced his candidacy for Mayor of The City. He has been a constant supporter of the Alcatraz workers and the IBU. The workers picketed from 8:30 AM until 12:30 PM.
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Good news from the U.S.: the “American Lessons” from the Labor Notes Conference 2024
By Salvo Leonardi
On Friday PM April 19 I was scheduled to chair a Labor Notes workshop on “Organizing in the Construction Industry” I entered the designated hotel meeting room and approached the table in front to begin set up. I heard a vibrant Italian speaker and engaged with him. Turned out it was Salvatore Leonardi from the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro – CGIL. He had been a panelist for a discussion of international trade union solidarity. Later I met up with him in the lobby of the O’Hare Hyatt as he headed to Chicago to explore labor history and blues clubs. His solid knowledge of both genres really impressed me. His appreciation for the Windy City was amazing, and I vowed to stay in touch and meet up with him on my next visit to Italia. Soon after my return from Chicago Salvo posted an article he had written about Labor Notes. The article was impressive for its reflections from the perspective of one of the most advanced labor confederations in the industrialized world. I thought it should be published in the USA. The Forum is proud to publish the article in English. And of course, we thank Salvo for permission to publish and his excellent translation. Peter Olney, Stansbury Forum co-editor
“American Lessons” From the Labor Notes 2024 Conference
In recent times there is great ferment on the American trade union scene and it is full of energy and optimism. After decades of setbacks, defeats and disappointments, the world of work in the USA seems to have taken another path, changing the ideological range and organizational practices of the old accommodating “business unionism”, and consequently going on the offensive. This occurs on the basis of a tactical and strategic plan, which has been at the center of US trade union planning for some years, under the banner of a radical, bottom-up social movement unionism, the echoes of which we too have felt in Italy in terms of “organizing” and union reform, for example.
In 2023, more than half a million American workers went on strike, winning average wage increases of 6.6%. These are just some of the concrete examples of this phase of change:
- The recent sensational victories against the three auto giants (Ford, GM and Stellantis)
- The unionization of a large plant in the anti-union deep South (Volkswagen of Chattanooga, Tennessee)
- The paralysis imposed by actors and authors, until victory, in the world of Hollywood
- The unionization of 10,000 employees in 400 Starbucks coffee shops, as well as among the warehouse workers and drivers of UPS and Amazon, in Staten Island (NYC)
- The 25% wage increase in fast food restaurants in California
- Various victories of educators and academic workers
Part of making this possible – to give them their due – is this peculiar network “Labor Notes”(LN). Both an editorial and political-union elaboration, LN was born in 1979, on the initiative of a group of trade union militants and radical left socialists. It first took the form of an information and struggle magazine, publishing some handbooks, two being “Secrets of a Successful Organizer” and the “Troublemakers Handbook”. The latter handbook was a text that the current President of the renewed automotive workers’ union (UAW), Shawn Fain, has defined as nothing less than his secular “Bible” as an activist, inspiring him in the radical renewal with which he first climbed the ranks of the organization, and then guided it – in these last two years – towards goals that would have seemed unthinkable, until now.
But Labor Notes is also a Conference that is organized every two years, with continuous and exponential growth between one edition and another. April 19-21 saw as many as 4,700 grassroots delegates and trade union officials converge on a big hotel in Chicago from all over the United States. There was also representation from various other countries, including some of us – from FIOM and FDV-CGIL – brought together to discuss, exchange experiences and ideas in almost 300 workshops on trade union and industrial relations topics. This was a very interesting format due to its extremely pragmatic, operational, horizontal and decentralized character. Aimed at achieving maximum valorization and comparison between fighting practices conducted, mostly in single production units, it was a search for the most effective and successful tools and methods. The key to this grassroots unionism lies in the connection that can and must be built between organizing – understood as the ability to represent the unorganized – conflict, and collective bargaining aimed at an agreement truly full of improvements reflected in wages, and general working and living conditions. The workshops began with short keynote speeches and many concrete experiences shared to be passed on to network and establish contacts.
With just a couple of moments in plenary, at the beginning and at the end, the conference was a very dense program that lasted late into the evenings. Moments of leisure, and musical or theatrical performances, produced an atmosphere of great effervescence, because of the extraordinary presence of young and very young people. Children and grandchildren of that “Other America”, which has now powerfully returned to the international political and media scene, thanks to the pro-Palestine mobilizations on many university campuses. The keffiyeh was, even in Chicago, a dominant symbol placed on t-shirts and organizational jerseys: UAW, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) or teachers, flight attendants, Amazon, UPS or Starbucks employees.
“How to overcome the apathy of your colleagues?”, “Overcoming workplace divisions”, “You can’t do it all yourself: learn it, do it”, “Planning for a strike”, “Before, during, and after negotiations: step-by-step strategies”. These were just some of the titles of the many workshops that each participant could choose to go to and listen and speak out in. They often sang in the halls of the Hyatt Hotel, and sometimes it almost seemed like attendance at a session of collective self-awareness, as when a workshop discussed “What to do when your union breaks your heart?”. But there were also presentations about history, as in the workshop about Socialists at work, or on the legendary figure of Walter Reuther, leader of the UAW during the “Thirty Glorious” years, from 1946 to 1970.
What was striking, at least from an Italian viewpoint, was the almost total lack of speeches and debates regarding the current political situation. Both with respect to the Biden presidency – which had initially proclaimed itself to be the most pro-union since Lyndon Johnson’s times, and which was supportive of the autoworkers during their three-week strike – and with respect to the risk, although clearly perceived as catastrophic, of a new Trump victory. Politics, conventionally understood, was simply the great absentee of the three days in Chicago. The reason can probably be found in the idea – typical in the USA – that workers and their union representatives must first know how to do it themselves. Meaning being able to face and seek the solution to their problems with their own strength, without placing too many expectations on the policies of “friendly” governments or diverting forces and energies into an unequal clash with hostile executives. The structurally decentralized character of the U.S. state, as well as of the trade unions and North American industrial relations, has evidently contributed to this. Collective action has always had to deal with the deliberate cumbersomeness of the procedures for accessing representation in the workplace, and – above all – with the virulent hostility of employers to union recognition, representation and collective bargaining.
There are many States where, in the name of a misunderstood (and legally sanctioned) “right-to-work,” employers can do everything they wish to ostracize requests for representation and strikes, including the systematic use of scabs. The bosses are therefore the first and true target of trade union action; and only secondarily does state power become the target. The inter-sectoral dimension: class, gender and race are intertwined. Yet research, discussion and mobilization are not dispersed in a thousand streams but are, as they say, “focused”, on the concrete possibilities that the trade union movement can realistically translate into conquests. A well-known orientation, however, since the times in which Selig Perlman, Samuel Gompers or Walter Reuther defined the theoretical outlines for the AFL-CIO. This had significant repercussions also on the Italian trade union scenario, traditionally skeptical in its left-wing towards that “trade unionism”, stigmatized by Lenin, to be ideologically weak (more job consciousness, than class consciousness). This theory was learned and translated by the greatest master of Italian labor law, Gino Giugni, who had discovered it in the 1950s, during his Fulbright at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With his special doctrine on collective autonomy and auxiliary legislation, as the 1935 Wagner Act, which inspired the Italian Workers’ Statute of 1970, largely edited by the Giugni, at the time adviser of the socialist Ministry of Labor. Today that old and classic “voluntarist” matrix lives again in a radical sauce, as it did in our “hot” 70s keeping its distance from those bureaucratic and collaborationist encrustations that we had known at the time when Marchionne of FIAT, in Detroit, embraced the UAW leaders and extolled their virtues and exemplary values to their Italian colleagues. A piece of that UAW union leadership – let it be said here – came to an end following scandals and convictions for the corruption of having exchanged concessions for personal gain at the expense of workers.
Today the UAW wins again and does it in a big way as beacon of hope offering a model for everyone. The union proclaimed, and successfully concluded, three weeks of strike:
- With resistance funds capable of covering 500 dollars a week, for each striker (when will we reflect on this instrument profitably used by many unions abroad?)
- Increases of 25% in four and a half years (+11% immediately)
- Re-introduction of the so-called “COLA” (cost-of-living-adjustment)
- End of the two-tier regime, depending on professional seniority
- Increase in the starting hourly wage, from 16.25 dollars to 22.50
- And even a reimbursement of 110 dollars a day, lost during the strike pickets.
The agreement passed with large majorities in all the plants that voted on it. Victories, in trade union matters, are fundamental and contagious. “We have finally ended 40 years of concession bargaining. It’s the best contract of my entire life”, testifies an elderly GM union officer. The success against the Big Three of the automakers sparked a chain reaction. With a roar in the room, on Friday the 19th of April, the news of the victory in the vote, held at Volkswagen of Chattanooga, was welcomed, with 73% in favor of finally allowing the union to represent the 4,300 employees of the plant, after two attempts failed in the recent past.
In Chicago there was a large representation of trade union delegations from various countries; obviously Mexico – around fifty workshops were in Spanish, because of the strong presence of Latino workers. There were also significant delegations from Japan, South Korea and Europe: Unite, from the United Kingdom, the secretary of the German ver.di in person, Yanira Wolf,together with various exponents of IG Metall and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The Swedish IF Metall was there to talk about the strike at Tesla (did you know that that union has one and a half billion euros – you read that right – in strike funds?) Italy was represented by the CGT and, for the CGIL, a delegation from FIOM and your author, for the Fondazione Di Vittorio (the CGIL institute of economic and social research), to report in an international workshop on a series of experiences of struggle carried out by the CGIL, in recent years.
The speech given by Michele De Palma, General Secretary of the metalworkers federation (FIOM-CGIL) aroused great interest, and enthusiasm. He spoke in the final plenary on Sunday morning, about our common struggles alongside the star of the whole event, the UAW’s Shawn Fain, who closed the conference. His rise to the presidency of the UAW, two years ago, was made possible thanks to the campaign of its most radical faction: the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD). Their rejection of any bureaucratic and collaborationist drift, their promotion of militancy and democracy from below, and an offensive strategy, produced a foundational strategy that did not take long to produce its fruits. Starting with the contract for the Three Bigs Fain’s pose and prose are all a tribute to the class imagery of his people. And, in those rooms, he pronounces highly effective phrases, which warm the heart and generate a contagious enthusiasm. The concepts, already expressed in recent speeches reported on in the “Labor Notes” magazine sounded more or less like this:
“We are here to put an end to business unionism, endless concessions, union corruption and the shackles that have bound us. I have said many times that negotiating good contracts leads to good success, even on an organizational level. These are two things that go hand in hand. From this point of view, our strike was not only against the “Big Three”. It belonged to the entire working class. And it is proof of one thing: that the working class can win. It can change the world. We don’t win by playing defensively or by always just reacting to things. We don’t win by being nice to the bosses. We don’t win by telling our members what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working class people the tools, inspiration and courage to stand up for themselves. From this point of view, I think, that the working class represents the arsenal of democracy, and that the workers are the liberators”.
When Shawn Fain finished his remarks, paraphrased above, the big hall of the hotel was rocked by a chorus of applause and chants at the end of this heartfelt speech. In the end he proposed to organize a united general strike on May 1, 2028; date on which the UAW collective agreement with the automotive “Big Three” will expire.
Yes; the data on unionization do not show any significant changes, union density remains a modest 10% only thanks to the strong contribution of public employees (33%) – and there could be serious repercussions if a Trump election were to result in an entirely pro-employer composition, within the crucial National Labor Relation Board (NLRB). But for now that audience of fierce and enthusiastic trade union activists enjoyed this moment of unexpected successes, after the many, too many disappointments of the past years.
There is a beautiful sunrise in Chicago, we will soon see whether it is the sign of a new and lasting spring for the American trade union movement. Let us hope that these recent conquests will speak and reverberate here in Italy too for the work and the fight that awaits us. But here in Chicago, we have seen conference methods which, due to the organizational format and – above all – the content of the approaches, it would be useful for us to scrutinize by adopting the best spirit of comparison and mutual and emulative learning.
…
A Tale of Two Labor Candidates
By Steve Early
East Bay CA Senate Race is Now Re-Match Between Big Money and A Black Socialist
In late October, 2018, East Bay DSA members and other progressives organized a pre-election rally at a Berkeley High School auditorium. A wildly-cheering crowd of several thousand came to hear Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Welcoming everyone to the event was 34-year old Jesse Arreguin, who was backed by Sanders when he ran for mayor of Berkeley two years before.
On the platform with them was Jovanka Beckles, a former Richmond City Council member then running—with backing from DSA, Sanders, and Lee—for a State Assembly seat against a corporate Democrat named Buffy Wicks. As the SF Bayview reported, Arreguin’s “repeated mention of Jovanka’s name evoked prolonged chants and a standing ovation for JO-VAN-KA!”
When the two appear on stage again this fall, Arreguin won’t be leading cheers for Beckles. That’s because they are now competing to represent Senate District 7, covering 850,000 residents of Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and smaller East Bay communities.
That contest to replace State Senator Nancy Skinner, in a liberal stronghold, has already become one of the most expensive in the state. Super PACs funded by Uber, Lyft, PG&E, McDonalds, associations of builders, realtors, and landlords, plus the California Correctional Officers union spent millions on mass mailings and TV ads to insure Arreguin’s March 5 primary victory.
In an East Bay echo of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary race put-down of Sanders, Arreguin attributed his first-place finish to “a track record of not just being a strong progressive advocate, but getting things done. My approach to leadership is to be progressive and pragmatic.” (emphasis added)
Thanks to 20 years of grassroots electoral work by the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), Beckles’ home base is “the only city in the United States with a DSA-endorsed city council majority,” So EBDSA volunteers joined forces with RPA, other community groups, Our Revolution, Teamsters Joint Council 7, the ILWU, and ATU Local 192 to build a small-donor based, grassroots campaign that raised $170,000 for a black working-class candidate, who pays dues to DSA,
Labor Candidate Competition
Currently an elected member of the AC Transit Board and a retired Teamster, Beckles placed second in a field of five Democrats and one Republican. (Arreguin got 32% of the vote, while she received nearly 18%.) Among those who lost were Dan Kalb, a liberal Oakland City Councilor, who raised twice as much as Beckles, and Kathryn Lybarger, a heavily-funded first-time candidate little known outside labor circles.
Lybarger is president of the 2.3 million-member California Labor Federation and top officer of a big UC-system campus workers union affiliated with AFSCME. The latter spent a reported $1.9 million on her disappointing fourth-place finish, while other AFL-CIO unions, along with SEIU, generated nearly $500,000 in direct donations for her. (Despite his own $200,000 worth of building trades donations, Arreguin had the chutzpah to complain about this “special interest” spending on Lybarger by other unions!)
According to multiple sources, Lybarger’s campaign relied too heavily on local union officials, their paid staffers, and a controversial political consulting firm. Its founder is a Sacramento lobbyist who has worked not only for unions but also for Chevron and other foes of California property tax reform. (This bad move was reminiscent of Wick’s campaign use of a San Francisco consultant whose past clients have included Airbnb and, in 2018, the city’s Chamber of Commerce.)
In the East Bay, some young workers like Antonio Gomez decided that Lybarger was not their preferred labor candidate. Gomez first got involved in electoral politics as a community college student in Stockton. After moving to Oakland to be closer to a job in Walnut Creek, he learned about Beckles’ campaign from social media posts by the EBDSA electoral committee. Even though not yet a DSA member, he liked what he saw on Jovanka’s website and decided to canvass for her throughout the district. “It was a scramble,” he says. “Everybody else spent all that money. But, at the end of the day, it’s knocking on doors that gets results.”
That’s an opinion shared by Beckles’ campaign manager, Otto Pippinger, who coordinated a crew of well-trained and highly motivated volunteers like Gomez. “Progressive campaigns don’t come easy,” Pippinger says. “They depend on tireless outreach– in countless personal conversations at the doors and on the phone.”
A Rematch Against Big Money
The SD-7 primary outcome sets up a re-match between Beckles and some of the same corporate interests whose unlimited spending prevailed six years ago in AD-15, when Beckles lost to Wicks, by 54 to 46 percent margin. A former director of Hillary Clinton’s Super-PAC, Priorities USA Action, Wicks now represents AD-14 and favors Arreguin. For more on the $3 million worth of independent expenditures (IEs) and direct donations that enabled big business to buy an Assembly seat for Wicks in 2018, see this still informative EBDSA website, https://buffywicks.money/.
Pundits from Politico to local commentator Steven Tavares agree that in, the latter’s words, Beckles “faces an uphill battle against Arreguin, who will have nearly every aspect of a campaign on his side—endorsements, fundraising, powerful IEs, and most unions.” By that Tavares means more conservative labor organizations—affiliated with state and local building trades councils and the Northern California Council of Carpenters. They’ve already spent heavily on Arreguin, along with employers in their industry.
The Berkeley mayor comes with his own family ties to organized labor, via the United Farm Workers (UFW). He is the son of farm workers and was mentored, as a ten-year old, by legendary UFW leader Dolores Huerta (who has endorsed him). By age 20, Arreguin was an elected member of the Rent Stabilization Board in Berkeley. Four years later, he was elected to the city council. At age 32, he beat a business backed candidate for mayor by portraying him as someone “in the pocket of developers, real estate interests, and landlords.”
Ironically, that’s how local critics view Arreguin today. As Jack Kurzweil, a retired engineering professor at San Jose State and member of Berkeley’s Wellstone Democratic Club told me: “Jesse’s become an obstacle to everything pushed by the progressive community. After getting elected, he did a 180 degree turn on development and housing. He went from extremely conservative NIMBY politics to becoming a conservative YIMBY in the blink of an eye.” (Arreguin prefers not to use such “pejorative acronyms,” he told Business Insider three years ago when interviewed about his evolving views on housing.)
A Fighter from Richmond
Working in Beckles favor, Tavares believes, is the fact that she’s “a fighter and hands-down more progressive than Arreguin.” Ten years ago, running for a second term on the Richmond City Council, Beckles and her fellow RPA candidates (one of whom is now mayor) overcame $3 million in corporate spending against them and in favor of a pro-Big Oil slate.
That media blitz was funded by Chevron, the city’s biggest employer, its right-wing building trades allies, the Richmond police and fire-fighters’ unions. That’s a story told in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City,
As part of Big Oil’s pre-election onslaught against Beckles, she was repeatedly gay-baited and harassed by old guard Black politicians and their supporters in Richmond, which is a 80% non-white city of 115,000. They claimed she wasn’t a “real African-American” due to her background as an immigrant woman of color from Panama.
After the SD-7 primary in March, Beckles was endorsed by former State Assembly member Sondre Swanson from Oakland, the only other African-American in the race. In early April, she won the backing of U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a House champion for labor law reform, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal, who is a leading critic of corporate PAC influence in politics. On her website, Beckles reminds voters that she is a “proud queer spouse, mother, and grandmother,” with endorsements from the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Harvey Milk Democratic Club.
Within labor, Beckles is seeking to expand her base of support by signing up more small donors, volunteers, and individual endorsers here. She is also wooing the county central labor bodies and local unions that backed Lybarger in the SD-7 primary or, in the case of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) remained neutral. These same local affiliates of SEIU, California Teachers, Auto Workers, and CWA, plus the California Nurses Association, backed Beckles during her general election fight against Wicks six years ago.
Lybarger’s own AFSCME Local 3299 was among those labor allies then. At the time, she hailed Beckles as someone “strongly aligned with our values and so representative of our members…We are utterly confident that she will continue to fight for us when she gets to Sacramento.” So far, neither she nor AFSCME has yet to make a similar post-primary endorsement of Beckles in this year’s senate race. (Lybarger did not respond to several email requests seeking comment for this story.)
An Under-Represented Working Class, White or Black
The two working-class candidates in the SD-7 primary took different routes to electoral politics. Lybarger is a white left-leaning, former UC-Berkeley gardener; she made her original run for AFSCME local president as a rank-and-file reformer. She later became a top leader of the AFL-CIO in California and more main-stream labor figure, while continuing to get arrested for causes like marriage equality.
Beckles spent her entire public sector career as a union rank-and-filer, doing very demanding child protection work for Contra Costa County. But, after hours, she worked her way up the traditional ladder of local politics—through her engagement with a neighborhood council, Richmond city commission work, and then 2-terms on the city council, before trying to become a state legislator.
Successful candidates for that body in California and others states tend to have professional, managerial, or ownership class backgrounds, with accompanying personal affluence or ties to others with greater wealth. They leverage their law, business, consulting, or incumbent office-holder connections to build big campaign war chests, filled with contributions from industry associations, corporate PACs, and wealthy individuals. With far greater ease than any blue-collar or service sector worker, they can take time off to campaign, particularly if they’re already on the public pay-roll as an “elected” (like Mayor Arreguin).
Due to class and race-based disadvantages, only 116 out of 7,400 state legislators in the entire country come from working class backgrounds, according to a recent academic study. Just 2% of the Democrats and 1% of Republican legislators “currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical, or labor union jobs.”
Amanda Litman, who recruits young progressives to run for office, says this data confirms “it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich–or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families–to enter politics. And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”
Uber’s Safe Bet
Business-backed front groups—with names like JobsPAC, Housing Providers for Responsible Solutions, and the Keep California Golden Ad Hoc Committee—definitely view Jesse Arreguin as their safest bet in Sacramento. While these corporate funders were demonizing and drowning out Lybarger’s pro-worker message, some also paid for unauthorized mailers touting Beckles, based on the assumption that she would be a weaker general election opponent against their best boy from Berkeley.
According to Tavares, a veteran political reporter in the Bay Area, Arreguin’s corporate funders conducted “a master class in negative campaigning that bordered on character assassination,” One of their main smears against Lybarger involved public safety. A glossy mailer from the JobsPAC, a “Bi-Partisan Coalition of California Employers,” painted her as “too extreme” for the East Bay because she “put the community at greater risk” by “calling for defunding local police.”
According to this hit piece—paid for by Uber, McDonalds, the California Building Industry Association, and other big donors—Arreguin has a “blueprint for safety” that involves “work[ing] with law enforcement to keep families safe” and better reflects true “progressive leadership.” Anti-union Uber alone spent at least $250,000 on pro-Arreguin messaging like this, while buying $800,000 worth of negative ads and mailers against Lybarger, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Healthcare and Housing Differences
To counter a similar propaganda offensive against her this Fall, Beckles will try to shift the debate to voter concerns about healthcare and housing (which Arreguin cites as his “number one issue”). To make medical coverage universal and more affordable, she has long supported a single payer system. Arreguin is backed by the Political Action Committee of the California Medical Association, which does not favor replacing job-based medical insurance with a government-run universal healthcare program of any type.
The candidates are also likely to clash over rent control, given Arreguin’s backing by the California Apartment Association and California Realtors Association. The Tenants Union in Berkeley, which endorsed Beckles in the primary, argues that the mayor is “a danger to tenants, affordable housing, and every progressive issue.” In contrast, Beckles will have the chance to champion a ballot initiative that would, among other reforms, abolish current state-wide restrictions on the ability of cities like Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland to expand the scope of their existing rent control measures. (Arreguin did not respond to an email request for clarification of his position on this hot topic.)
In early April, Beckles joined housing activists at a two-day strategy session in Los Angeles that included Sanders, Khanna, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and Michael Weinstein, whose AIDs Healthcare Foundation (AHF) helped get rent control expansion on the ballot again. (It was defeated in 2018 and 2020.) “There are 17 million renters in California—that’s 45% of the population,” Weinstein reminded the group. He called the Justice for Renters campaign “a battle for the poor and working-class people” who find housing in the state increasingly unaffordable.
Beckles is also the candidate most opposed to the Biden Administration sending billions of dollars to the Israeli military at a time when there are so many un-met social and economic needs in the East Bay. Throughout months of turmoil on the Berkeley City Council, Arreguin has blocked passage of a pro-cease fire resolution–quite a departure from the city’s many past official stances on controversial foreign policy issues.
Looking ahead to November, Beckles sees the general election in SD-7 as a contest “between a corporate-free and a corporate-funded candidate”—with her campaign being labor’s only hope of stopping big business from buying another seat in the legislature. It will be up to Beckles’ supporters who belong to unions–which bet heavily on Lybarger and lost badly–to remind their leaders that the fight is not over. Otherwise, organized labor in the East Bay will be handing a second-round victory to arch-enemies like Uber.
…
Labor’s Moment
By Mark Erlich
On April 22, I returned from the Chicago Labor Notes conference and found Mark Erlich’s essay from Commonwealth Beacon in my inbox. This essay is a perfect capstone to the inspiring Labor Notes conference where 5000 mostly young labor organizers and activists assembled to discuss and debate the future of labor in the USA. On Friday night, April 19, the results came in for the historic UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee and we were off to the races. Thanks to Brother Erlich for permission to publish his excellent essay. Peter Olney, co-editor of the Stansbury Forum
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In a historic breakthrough, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted decisively on April 19 to be represented by the United Auto Workers. Following two previous failed efforts, the newly reinvigorated UAW leadership had committed $40 million to build off their successful 2023 strike by challenging labor’s long and durable inability to organize workers in the South. The vote at the VW plant represents the first successful union drive at a foreign automaker plant in the US South. Next up: workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, who will be taking a union vote in May.
The Tennessee workers overcame yet another round of virulent opposition from political leaders. Before the vote, six Southern governors issued a letter warning that union success would halt economic growth “in its tracks.” The governors claimed they had “worked tirelessly” to attract companies to relocate to the low-waged union-free South.
Has the UAW’s victory sent the region’s anti-union walls tumbling down? Is this extraordinary development a one-off anomaly, or the latest indication of a resurgence in labor’s ranks?
There are signs in recent years that suggest a renewed labor movement may be taking root.
Six years ago, the “Red for Ed” teachers’ strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, and other states with a minimal union presence initiated a heightened level of union activism. A little over two years ago, a Starbucks store in Buffalo voted in a union, and since then Starbucks Workers United has won elections at nearly 400 locations. In April 2022, workers voted to unionize at the 8,000-worker Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York.
These events shocked both employer and labor observers. Neither Starbucks baristas nor Amazon warehouse workers with their high rates of turnover fit the image of standard union members, and both companies had made clear their implacable hostility to unionization. During that year, the largest number of workers on strike were in the education field, including graduate students at universities – again, another group that did not correspond to the stereotypical unionist.
In 2023, a series of campaigns involving the automotive and entertainment industries, health care, hotels and casinos, UPS drivers, and airlines further captured the nation’s attention. The UAW’s clever, strategic “stand up” strikes kept the Big Three auto companies off balance, unaware of where shutdowns would occur and harkened back to the great sit down strikes of the 1930s.
Leaders of the Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild argued for the need to protect their members from the imposition of AI and other new technologies, and celebrity actors consistently advocated for their less well compensated brothers and sisters. There were remarkably few defections among a community more famous, or infamous, for its individualistic accomplishments.
These organizing drives and strikes were generally greeted with a high degree of public support. The teachers’ strikes sought better pay but many also insisted on reducing class size and called for additional public funding to improve the quality of educational services. Parents and students rallied to their cause.
Nurses’ campaigns have often adopted a similar approach, sometimes labeled bargaining for the common good, by incorporating demands for decreased patient care load in order to provide better treatment in the highly stressed health care sector. And the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, repeatedly referred to the sacrifices workers had made in the wake of the 2008-09 recession and COVID, linking the auto workers’ fight to the society-wide struggle against corporate greed.
A TALE OF TWO NUMBERS
The striking contrast between the strong level of public support for unions today and the small share of US workers they represent frames the enormous opportunity – and challenge – facing the American labor movement.
For decades, Gallup has annually polled Americans on their view of unions. In 2023, 67 percent of the American public had a favorable view of unions, consistent with the 71 percent favorable view seen in 2022, levels not seen since the mid-1960s.
A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report announced that there was an increase of 191,000 union members last year. In February of this year, Michigan became the first state to repeal a right to work law. All these developments occurred in the context of an administration led by the self-described most pro-union president in history.
And yet. Despite last year’s uptick in union membership, there was actually a slight decline in the percentage of workers represented by unions due to overall job growth in a strong economy. Organized labor today represents only 10 percent of the total US workforce and just 6 percent of the private sector workforce.
The striking contrast between the strong level of public support for unions today and the small share of US workers they represent frames the enormous opportunity – and challenge – facing the American labor movement.
For all the encouraging news, the reality is that the fundamentally low rate of unionization can only be understood by a 50-year story of the transformation of US labor relations.
During the period between World War II and the early 1970s, corporate America reluctantly accepted unionism and exchanged collective bargaining agreements for labor peace. Union density peaked at around 35 percent. It was the era when, as the bumper sticker says, unions built the middle class.
Racial and gender discrimination were undoubtedly essential elements of economic life. Black and white industrial workers may have both been members of the newly organized unions but after work each group went home to segregated neighborhoods where racism defined much of our nation’s social life. And the Rosie the Riveters who kept industrial America humming during World War II ended up being replaced by returning male veterans and relegated to domestic work as homemakers. Still, economists have rightfully called this period “the great compression,” as it was the only extended time in modern American history when income inequality was actually reduced or “compressed.”
From 1948 to 1973, the income of the lower fifth of households increased by 42 percent while the upper fifth only increased by 8 percent. But the notion of shared prosperity disappeared from the corporate handbook to be replaced by an obsession with maximizing profits and shareholder value. Free market ideologies reigned in the boardrooms. A shift to open and constant hostility to unionism accompanied globalization, with outsourcing and the structural transformation of our economy all contributing to the decline of union density and the return of income inequality.
THE CHALLENGE AHEAD
The prospects for union growth are limited by this backdrop. In the face of organizing campaigns, most US employers can be counted on to resist and twist the laws to their advantage. The National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that established the playing field for labor relations, sought to create an environment in which workers were enabled, and even encouraged, to organize a union free of employer intimidation and interference. But over time, the National Labor Relations Board has lost its bite, ranging from an openly anti-union to, at best, a toothless agency, depending on which federal administration is in power.
Employer threats to close businesses, cut wages, and fire union supporters commonly occur without reprisals. A study from last year found that employers successfully stonewalled over 40 percent of all the cases where workers fought through employer tactics and actually won an election. When companies can “just say no” and ignore their employees’ wishes without sanctions, it puts a serious damper on worker activism. What is the point of risking our jobs, say workers, when the deck is stacked in the employer’s favor?
Amazon recently spent $4.3 million to defeat the fledgling under-resourced organizing group at its Staten Island facility, and routinely mobilizes “employee resource teams” at the first sign of worker discontent to undermine collective activity at any of their facilities. The company’s refusal to bargain has not only blocked a first contract, it has had precisely the intended effect of demoralizing union supporters.
The Amazon Workers Union has been roiled by dissension as the new union members have turned on each other. Similarly, there had been a large number of firings and resignations among Starbucks workers until a recent reversal of corporate policy. It takes courage and tenacity to create a new union out of whole cloth. Inevitably, some workers have questioned whether the financial, psychological, and emotional risks were worth it in the absence of a tangible result for their clear and overwhelming support for unionization.
Efforts to promote labor law reform and restore legal balance have consistently failed. The “Protecting the Right to Organize Act” (known as the PRO Act) has been introduced in Congress over the past few years and would, among other important improvements, provide an arbitration process for a first contract similar to the laws in many Canadian provinces.
Clearly, the legal system that governs our labor relations needs to be overhauled to give organizing a chance. Winning a first contract would lay the foundation for organizing successes. But in the real world of Washington politics, the likelihood of enacting the PRO Act or any other meaningful reform is a pipe dream as long as Congress is ruled by its current state of dysfunction.
Jennifer Abruzzo, appointed by President Biden as the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, has moved to reinvigorate the board’s original mission. And yet, once again, Amazon, Space X, and Trader Joe’s are currently in the courts arguing that the NLRB is, in and of itself, unconstitutional at a time when it finally has become relevant.
Ultimately, a commitment to organizing depends on the labor movement. The AFL-CIO is a decentralized umbrella operation without the authority to lead long-term national campaigns.
The power and the resources lie with the individual internationals. Unlike labor, the anti-union forces in our society have demonstrated time and time again that they have the financial wherewithal, coordination, strategic vision, singular focus, and the long term commitment to develop and lobby for anti-worker legislation at the state and federal levels, challenge collective bargaining rights in the courts, and promote political programs committed to undermining union power.
The absence of a national labor strategy is not for lack of resources. A recent study suggests that America’s unions hold over $13 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Fortunately, a number of internationals, like the UAW, have demonstrated a commitment to organizing, while others continue to reserve their assets for servicing functions focused on their current members.
It is more complicated than just turning on a spigot. After all, trade unions were built to advocate for members with the collective bargaining function at the core. But in order to move beyond 6 percent representation in the US workforce, unions cannot limit themselves to a service-only posture, which will simply perpetuate the status quo.
Many members feel that their dues should be used to advance their own conditions rather than assist workers outside the union fold. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA, UAW, and Teamster UPS campaigns relied on strong internal education to mobilize members, which can be models for a similar type of external messaging that has to consistently declare that the House of Labor welcomes, will support, and is prepared to represent all workers, not just those who already pay dues.
The underlying dynamics of our economy and the changing nature of work figure into the equation. While the extent of the gig economy is often overstated, the concept of workers as solitary individuals making their way through the world of work is increasingly celebrated.
Independent contractors still only make up 7 percent of the workforce, and gig or platform workers are a subset of that number. But it is part of a trend of treating workers as “YOYOs” – you’re on your own. While there are people who are legitimate independent contractors, the problem of misclassification – an employer strategy for saving money and shedding responsibility for employees by wrongly treating them as contractors – affects the very concept of organizing.
Gig employers spin the status of independent contractor as one that offers independence, freedom, entrepreneurship, and the chance to be your own boss. Uber and Lyft have repeatedly beat the drum that flexibility – the characteristic that attracts most rideshare drivers – is dependent on being an independent contractor. Yet there is nothing in federal or state employment laws that prevents employees from having flexible schedules.
Federal law only allows employees, not independent contractors, to form unions. And all the benefits provided by legislation dating back to the New Deal – overtime, unemployment, workers compensation, as well as the right to form a union – are only available to employees.
The issue of employee status for rideshare drivers is being litigated around the country, including in a lawsuit filed by the attorney general and potential November ballot initiatives here in Massachusetts. In the meantime, these drivers and other gig workers are in limbo, forced to try to improve their conditions by a variety of convoluted tactics, none of which yet include straightforward union organizing.
In another promising development, Starbucks’ new CEO has abandoned founder Howard Schultz’s relentless opposition to unions and has promised to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. A first contract at Starbucks and UAW victories at the VW plant in Chattanooga and Mercedes in Alabama would be landmark developments.
Two of the major demographic groups that have long been outside the union fold are young retail and service sector workers, such as Starbucks baristas, and industrial workers in the South, such as the auto workers. These victories could spark a new surge of unionism that has not been seen in many decades.
With 67 percent public support for unions, it ought to be possible to grow union membership from its current level of 6 percent of the private-sector workforce. But even taking advantage of that support to double its share would require the kind of upsurge that hasn’t been seen since the 1930s.
Five million workers joined unions from 1933 to 1937. It is hard to imagine a resurgence on that scale without overcoming some of the legal and political hurdles facing labor. It is even harder to imagine a revival without a deep and fundamental resource commitment by all of organized labor to fulfilling the aspirations of the 67 percent, tapping in particular the apparent openness to unionism among younger workers.
The past history of labor-management conflict in the US may be the most violent of any major industrialized nation. In the modern age, companies hire lawyers, lobbyists and union avoidance consultants instead of thugs and goons. Unfortunately, there is continuity in some of the underlying attitudes. As Henry Ford said over 100 years ago, “Why is it that I always get the whole person when all I want is a pair of hands.”
To those who say unions may at one time have been necessary but are obsolete now, Ford’s dehumanizing comments are consistent with a more subtle but just as degrading contemporary corporate outlook. We cannot afford to be YOYOs. We can’t afford to be on our own. Unions may be more crucial than ever if we are to move toward a more just society. The victory in Tennessee could be a major step in revitalizing labor’s role and restoring a path towards greater economic equality.
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A Great Way To Organize a Book
By Helena Worthen
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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A Housing Assistance Council report shines new light on rural America’s housing crisis
By Kristi Eaton
This piece originally appeared in Barn Raiser
Rural America has nearly 29 million homes, but experts say that’s not enough to house the roughly 46 million people who live there.
A recent report by the Housing Assistance Council, a nonprofit that supports affordable housing efforts throughout rural America, found that rural America is losing affordable housing at an alarming rate, fueling a growing housing crisis.
“There’s a lack of affordable housing stock nationally,” says Lance George, director of Research and Information at the Housing Assistance Council. “But it’s even further exacerbated in rural areas [because] there’s a dearth of good quality rental housing or even rental housing of any type in many rural communities.” Over 1.4 million homes fail to meet basic standards of shelter, safety or essential services like water, sanitation and electricity, according to the report.
The report also found that rural homeowners and renters are becoming increasingly cost-burdened, as housing prices continue to rise in rural communities.
Though housing tends to cost less in rural areas, the report found that over 5.6 million people, or about a quarter of rural households, pay more than 30% of their monthly income on housing costs, and less than half of rural homeowners own their houses outright. (The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines families who pay more than 30% of their income for housing as “cost-burdened.”)
One reason there’s less affordable housing stock in rural America is due to the rise of “vacation homes,” or homes unoccupied for seasonal or recreational use.
Approximately 6 million homes, or 20%, are unoccupied in rural America, lower than the nationwide average of 11%. According, to the report, about 53% of all vacant seasonal or recreational homes nationwide are in rural areas, which account for nearly half of all rural home vacancies.
Further complicating the picture is the fact that some rural areas have seen their populations rise, as the Covid-19 pandemic helped spur migration from urban to rural areas.”
‘In the Shadows’
Homelessness in rural America is also prevalent, although experts and housing advocates say it’s less visible compared to urban parts of the country.
According to the report, “Rural homelessness may be simply less visible, as rural homeless people do not usually sleep in visible spaces, and emergency shelters may not exist in rural places.” Many rural people experiencing homelessness live in their cars or campers.
George says the homelessness population often go unnoticed in rural settings, especially those with precarious employment like farmworkers, who are more susceptible to homelessness.
“[Farmworkers are] a really overlooked group,” says George. “These are people who are working [in settings where] there’s no place to stay. So, they’re living [and] sleeping under trees or in their cars. And that is truly a homeless population. I think it’s really in the shadows.”
Farmworkers with employer-provided housing may not be better off. Recent investigations by ProPublica have revealed that immigrant dairy workers often live in substandard employer-provided housing, due to the fact that some state and federal laws exclude dairy farmworkers from housing protections. ProPublica found several farms in Wisconsin where workers lived in houses that had black mold covering the walls, crumbling ceilings, exposed electrical wiring and lacked functional toilets, appliances or heating systems.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that approximately 87,000 individuals, including 6,000 veterans, are currently homeless—about 19% of the total homeless population in the U.S. An estimated 58% of the rural homeless live in shelters.
Hsun-Ta Hsu is an associate professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on using big data tools and artificial intelligence to study homelessness and housing solutions.
Hsu said that poverty and a lack of affordable housing are the leading causes of homelessness in rural America. Other issues include a lack of access to mental healthcare resources and temporary housing or emergency shelters.
“It’s different in many ways compared to urban homelessness,” Hsu says. Rural people experiencing homelessness are “more likely to be unsheltered, and they’re more likely to be hidden. A lot of times, they’re doubling up [living with friends or family]—they’re couch surfing,” he says.
In 2023, Hsu received a grant from the National Alliance to End Homelessness to study rural homelessness in Missouri. As part of their research, Hsu’s team convenes what they call a “community action board” made up of community leaders, policymakers and people who have experienced homelessness to understand a community’s specific needs when it comes to addressing homelessness.
One promising avenue of Hsu’s research has been the Housing First approach. Housing First is a model that connects people with stable housing without preconditions, such as sobriety requirements, and then provides wraparound services to meet an individual’s needs. In recent years, it has also come under attack by conservatives. Sen. J.D. Vance, (R-Ohio) claimed at a Senate hearing last year, without evidence, that Housing First has a “social contagion effect” by normalizing bad behavior such as drug use, and Donald Trump has pledged to place homeless people in “tent cities.”
Despite the skeptics, Hsu is convinced about Housing First’s results. “To address rural homelessness, we know that the Housing First model works,” Hsu says. “So now the issue is the lack of affordable housing, [where] we have a bottleneck of people who are waiting a long period of time in order to get in the queue of supportive housing.”
Rural evictions are another hidden feature of the housing crisis. More than 200,000 rural families face an eviction each year, as rural renters face a lack of affordable rental housing and insufficient income with over half of rural renter households having an annual income of less than $35,000, a situation that particularly affects Black rural Americans. With few affordable rental options, rural evictions can become a fast track to homelessness.
Mobile Home Parks Face Rising Rents and Neglected Landlord Maintenance
Jaime Izaguirre is a community organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. He works in rural areas across Iowa to address homelessness.
“I think there are three types of issues regarding housing in Iowa: cost, availability and quality,” he says. “The housing shortage is real in Iowa. There are not enough apartments or homes, especially for low- or extremely low-income families. The quality of housing stock in many places is under attack by corporate entities that see these homes as line-item investments on a spreadsheet. And in some cases, population and job growth is hard to sustain or encourage due to the lack of availability.”
He says one major issue in Iowa and across the country is mobile home investment groups that buy up trailer parks and hike rents while doing less than adequate maintenance and improvement practices.
“In some cases, these corporations are even using federal financing through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae,” he said. “To our estimation there are at least 42 mobile home parks financed by those two enterprises in Iowa. We’re working with mobile home residents and associations across the state to help organize themselves and get much-needed repairs and improvements done in their parks.”
Izaguirre says housing is a mixture of policy, organizing and power.
“Why do we build housing? I believe the answer to that question should be as simple as because people need homes,” he says. “How we shape housing policy and planning shapes a city, a rural community, and the lives of the people living in said housing.”
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A Review: PRESENTE – Herb Mills – Hard Ball Press 2023
By Peter Olney
A Lesson for Today’s ILWU?
Herb Mills passed away in 2018 before he could finalize his historical novel, Presente. His wife Rebecca Mills had promised him that she would get the novel edited and published. At her request some of us took a look at what Herb had written and said that it was not suitable for publication. But Becky valiantly persisted, and talented labor historian Peter Cole joined the project. It took six years and some excellent editing by Stephanie Fay and Mathew Tallen, and Presente was issued by HardBall Press in 2023. The delay was fortuitous for the labor movement because the subject of Presente, the ILWU’s boycott of arms shipments to the murderous Salvadoran regime in December of 1980, is very relevant to labor’s stance on a ceasefire in Gaza and the US government’s arming of the murderous Israeli war machine. (On April 23rd, at 8 PM Eastern Time there will be a Zoom discussion of Presente! – links to join are at the end of this post)
Herb’s narrative is a thinly disguised autobiographical tale of his successful effort to block arms shipments to the El Salvadoran dictatorship in December of 1980. The protagonist of the novel, Steve Morrow, is Mills himself, the Secretary Treasurer at the time of San Francisco Local 10, who successfully internally organized his union and built broad national community support for longshore worker refusal to load arms. The US government, in the face of this public militant pressure, canceled the arms shipment.
The novel also tracks the successful pressure applied by the ILWU at the same time on the government of South Korea to stop the execution of dissident democratic reformer Kim Dae Jung. I remember when I was first hired as Organizing Director of the ILWU, the President of the ILWU at the time Brian McWilliams, invited me into his office to view an invitation from Kim Dae Jung to attend his inauguration as South Korean President in 1998. The ILWU was being so honored for saving his life!
Just because a union is successful in raising the living standards of its members and protecting on the job safety and security doesn’t automatically lead to advanced political stances
Based on historical facts, Presente reads like a fast moving TV series. It has the shortest chapters of any book I have ever read, which means that it is an accessible page-turner but full of wonderful organizing lessons. Morrow is Mills with such memorable phrases as, “Hey that’s pretty good old bub” “Hey old bud what’s doing?” “I mean I was totally knackered.” And photographs in Mills /Morrow speak are “snaps”. I can hear Herb talking and I get a clear take on his style as an aggressive union representative in the days before cell phones. Remember the pager??
In fact many of the narratives are tales of him addressing workplace safety and compensation grievances with his San Francisco Pier based stewards. He is an aggressive and effective union rep. Part of the reason the members respond to calls to action around larger political issues is because the union wins their respect on the job. Steve Morrow tolls the bell and makes the record!
Since this is “fiction” based on factual history it is important to point out one of the gaps in the narrative. Just because a union is successful in raising the living standards of its members and protecting on the job safety and security doesn’t automatically lead to advanced political stances like blocking arms to El Salvador. Those acts require conscious political leadership and education and training of the members. Paul Murphy the fictional International President of the ILWU is fully on board with the mission from the get go. That “Paul Murphy’” was in real life Jimmy Herman, the President of the union starting in 1977, who succeeded the legendary Harry Bridges, the founding President. Herman was a political guy who was a member of the radical Marine Cooks and Stewards Union with years of political experience on the left. The other officers of the union at the time, represented as fictional characters in Presente,were also touched and formed by left wing politics. Herb Mills himself was an amazing character with a rich history and educational background. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Michigan. He was a graduate student in political science at the University of California, who participated in the 1960 protest against HUAC at San Francisco City Hall. In 1963 Herb dropped out of graduate school and became a Bay Area longshoreman. In 1968 he was granted a leave of absence for a year from Local 10, and he finished his PhD at UC Irvine. The union rises to the occasion in defense of Kim Dae Jung and in opposition to the Salvadoran dictatorship because its leaders had a very clear internationalist political perspective.
The clear and definitive action in Presente is in stark contrast to the present day ILWU’s failure to even take a stand in favor of a ceasefire let alone act to block arms shipments. Even the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) leader Randi Weingarten has called for a cease-fire and for Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. This to the amazement of many from a union, the AFT, long a passionate supporter of Israel and a purchaser of Israeli war bonds. The ILWU has always had a strong and clear policy of support for Palestinian rights and certainly “Paul Murphy”/ Jimmy Herman would be speaking loudly and clearly in favor of a cease-fire and dramatic action where possible to support it.
Herb Mills has left us with an important and timely legacy novel based on his own true to life experiences in building international solidarity from the bottom up. Hopefully the ILWU at its forthcoming convention on June 17th in Vancouver, British Columbia will rise up once again and embrace its historic internationalism. The Dispatcher, the voice of the ILWU, on January 8 of 1981 after the historic actions described in the book, published a lengthy statement ending with the following: “Our hope is that by thus dramatizing the tragic situation in El Salvador, and by refusing to any longer be party to it, we can, in some small way, assist in ending this nightmare, and in restoring security and freedom to the Salvadoran people.”
Do not the people of Gaza deserve the same solidarity from this great union?
Herb Mills Presente! Pick up Presente from Hard Ball Press. It is 230 pages of action packed drama based on true to life history.
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On April 23rd, at 8 PM Eastern Time there will be a Zoom discussion of Presente!
Join here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84809741247?pwd=QWY2QVlZY0JLY0tqVzNtQzc1QnpoZz09
Meeting ID: 848 0974 1247
Passcode: 834937
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Words and history: the trouble with “Genocide Joe”
By Fred Glass
“History is more or less bunk.” This quaint expression, uttered by Henry Ford in 1921, reveals that words, like history, can mean more than meets the eye. Taken out of context his comment can signify almost anything, like the classic Sam Cooke song lyric, “Don’t know much about history”. Ford’s actual remark came in reference to railroad labor struggles, with the billionaire apparently expressing his displeasure with workers remembering past battles between labor and capital.
It’s my hope that people engaged in the righteous struggle to stop the genocidal Zionist war machine in Gaza, contra Ford, will remember some relevant context and history when they consider the coming presidential election.
I am troubled every time I hear someone referring to Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Ascribing personal responsibility to the president for the carnage in Gaza is not entirely wrong. But it is, in fact, mostly wrong: the personalization takes our eyes off the prize, which is the structure of imperialist oppression, on the one hand, and building the broadest possible movement to fight it, on the other.
“A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024 election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions for stopping future events“
The president of the United States is a two-headed beast, as noted in an earlier column. He is the imperialist-in-chief on the international front, regardless of wearing a donkey or elephant pin. As such, his support for the Israeli apartheid regime, planted for three quarters of a century next to the largest oil fields in the world, is reflexive. Joe Biden, the person, is irrelevant to this function of the presidency. Should we pressure him to pull US aid to Israel? Of course. But we’d have to do that no matter who’s in the White House.
United States domestic policy is a different story. For instance, the president appoints judges. We are today living with the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments in the form of the evisceration of women’s right to control their own bodies, among other tragedies. Trump’s misogynist base was fortunate he occupied the presidency when vacancies arose, and all the rest of us were unfortunate that a Democratic president wasn’t doing the appointing instead.
The president also appoints the heads of powerful federal agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board. In an unprecedented move, on Biden’s first day in office, he fired Trump’s NLRB chair, a viciously anti-union lawyer, and replaced him with pro-labor attorney Jennifer Abruzzo. Without Abruzzo and Biden’s NLRB majority there would have been, for instance, no Starbucks Workers United successes on the scale they have occurred. Under a Trump administration the baristas’ organizing would have been greatly slowed and probably stopped dead through lengthy procedural delays and adverse Board decisions. Who is president matters for the American working class and its ability to act collectively on its own behalf.
A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024 election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions for stopping future events like it. Such conditions almost always require a strong, militant progressive movement, with labor playing a big role. Note that this is precisely what has occurred over the past several months, as a powerful anti-war movement has shifted public opinion and the center of gravity within the Democratic Party and organized labor. Note too, that this has transpired within the political space overseen by a Democratic administration.
Compare and contrast with the onset of the second Iraq war in 2003, where a massive but brief anti-war movement crashed and burned against the brick wall of the right-wing Bush administration.
What the performative enunciation of “Genocide Joe” misses, in its virtue signaling, is the practical consequence that will follow a defeat of Joe Biden in November. Throughout the long reign of capitalism as world system it has assumed a number of political forms. It has demonstrated on any number of occasions that it can easily shed a democratic skin and replace it with an authoritarian one. Trump is very clear: this is his plan. When the next Gaza arises—and given American imperialism, it will—the space for a mass movement to oppose it will be tightly constrained and likely violently crushed by the repressive force of a police state under far-right Republican control.
Building socialism is always now
At a recent meeting of my East Bay DSA chapter the comrades narrowly defeated a resolution that sought to make opposition to Trump official DSA policy. Since there is no chance that DSA will be endorsing Trump, the vote foreclosed the possibility of the chapter officially working on behalf of Biden. Two of the people arguing against opposing Trump used the term “Genocide Joe.” One seemed to make the phrase itself his main argument, repeating it several times.
The derogatory “Genocide Joe” enunciation plays in the same sandbox as Trump, who loves elementary schoolyard level nicknames for his opponents. Referring to Biden this way—or anyone else—corrodes reasoned political discourse and tends to end, not engage, rational discussion of the issues.
Part of building a socialist movement is the modeling of socialist human relations, to the extent that that is possible within a capitalist culture. In the late twentieth century we called such modeling “prefigurative politics.” It was a new twist that socialist feminists placed on the concept the Industrial Workers of the World had already promulgated a century ago when it called for “building a new society within the shell of the old”.
Words have meaning, and so does history
Is history predictive? Sometimes. Marx’s idea that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, isn’t the way it always works, although it happened to in the situation he described. Closer might be Mark Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. At the very least we might agree that while history doesn’t necessarily provide a guide to the future, we ignore it at our peril.
It would be in this spirit of informed suggestion, rather than certainty, that we might ask: what do events in 1933, 1968, and 2021 tell us about the coming election and its likely outcomes?
First, in reverse order, January 6, 2021 is an easy one. Trump has repeatedly told us that he won’t accept any outcome except victory. We can expect a more organized insurrection this time around if he loses. He and his lieutenants have had four years to ponder what went wrong, to plan differently, and stoke the resentments and grievances that fueled an attempted coup once before. Although we can’t know how that will turn out—presumably public security forces have also learned from January 6—what Trump will do if he wins is not in question. If he has his way, the democratic experiment called “the United States” will become a memory, and Trump will do his best to distort and extinguish the memory itself.
Second, for someone my age who lived through 1968 as a more or less sentient being, I find it remarkable that some people today think that installing Trump in power, with the accompanying repression of democratic liberties, will awaken the masses and hasten the coming of socialism. Consider the repetition or rhyme: a slice of the anti-war left in 1968, disgusted with Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s support of the Viet Nam War, tried hard to believe a Nixon presidency would bring on the revolution. How did that work out?
Marx’s tragedy repeating as farce? Sure, except a Trump presidency will be no joke, and Trump in power a second time will make Nixon in retrospect look like Eugene V. Debs.
History isn’t inevitable until it has already happened. We still have time—although not much—to prevent a fascist America. But we have to make the right choices based on all the factors in play, not just one elevated above all the rest. Hitler’s rise to power depended on the split between the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party). Together the two left parties held more seats and polled more votes than the Nazis; that numerical superiority was short-circuited by the Communists’ suicidal belief that the Social Democrats were as bad or worse than the Nazis. Calling the SPD “social-fascists”, the Communists refused any overtures to work together.
What did this lead to? Six million Jewish dead, which became the ideological justification for the Zionist state; fifty million World War II dead in all; and the German Communists were the first to be rounded up for the concentration camps. Divide and conquer tactics work best when enthusiastically embraced by the divided parties themselves.
“Genocide Joe” is a contemporary linguistic rhyme for “social-fascists”—an insult that divides people who need to be united and obscures the bigger picture with schadenfreude masquerading as politics. It’s tempting, I know. But please don’t. There’s too much at stake.
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Putting Members First: Ron Carey’s Lessons For Labor Movement Reform
By Rand Wilson and Steve Early
Books about union presidents are usually penned by professional writers — either academic historians, labor journalists, or paid flacks. Past accounts of the life and work of labor organization chiefs like John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, or Cesar Chavez have run the gamut from hagiographic to constructively critical. Few have had a biographer whose view of their leadership role is rooted in first-hand experience as a blue-collar worker in the same industry and union.
Ken Reiman’s personal connection to the subject matter of Ron Carey and the Teamsters (Monthly Review Press, 2024) resulted from his own career as a UPS driver and activist in the local union that Carey led before becoming president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 1990s. Reiman’s insights into the workplace culture and organizational politics of IBT Local 804 in Queens, NY, before, during, and after Carey’s presidency provide a rank-and-file perspective on the challenges of institutional change in organized labor over the past fifty years.
“late 2023, newly-elected UAW leaders were conducting a major strike against U.S. automakers, after building a membership-based contract campaign of the sort never employed by the previous leadership during national bargaining.”
Carey’s story, as told by Reiman, contains many important lessons for younger union activists, whether they are Teamsters or involved in other unions. Organized labor today is in a state of very positive ferment. A reform movement in the United Auto Workers, modeled after Teamsters for a Democratic Union, has had similar success winning direct election of top officers and using that system oust old guard officials.
By late 2023, newly-elected UAW leaders were conducting a major strike against U.S. automakers, after building a membership-based contract campaign of the sort never employed by the previous leadership during national bargaining. Earlier in the year, new leadership in the Teamsters, elected in 2022 with TDU backing, engaged many of the union’s 330,000 members at UPS in a national contract fight that drew on the experience of the UPS strike in 1997, led by Ron Carey.
In California in 2023, workers in the state university system staged the largest higher education walk-out ever and union members at Kaiser Permanente conducted the biggest healthcare industry strike in U.S. labor history. Actors and writers participated in an overlapping work stoppage in Hollywood that involved more than 170,000 workers. Meanwhile, thousands of southern California hotel workers also struck for a new contract.
Workers at Starbucks’ have conducted what now appears to be a successful first contract campaign, after engaging in nationally coordinated protest activity and mini-strikes in particular workplaces. The landscape of labor organizing in Amazon warehouses and distribution centers is replete with similar shop-floor skirmishing between labor and management, including worker-led strikes over local issues in many locations with no formal bargaining rights or union recognition.
A similar dynamic mix of union democracy and reform struggles, at the local and national level, and heightened workplace militancy in many different sectors was, of course, the context for Ron Carey’s own late 20th century career as a union dissident, who became the first democratically elected president of what was, not long ago, the nation’s most corrupt and racketeer-dominated union.
PHoto Earl’s second shot
Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in Putting Members First, is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition-builder with other reformers. Finally, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization, in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power, and personal fiefdoms.
Below are some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles:
· Ousting local union incumbents.
Like many disgruntled members before and since, Carey first got involved in union politics because officials of Local 804, in the late 1950s, were so unresponsive to worker complaints and concerns. He ran for shop steward, beating a fellow driver who “didn’t want to rock the boat.” Rocking the boat became Carey’s “MO” for the rest of his career. But he understood the limitations of being a “Lone Ranger.” Reiman’s account of how Carey assembled a team of like-minded co-workers to take on the union establishment is a good primer for anyone trying to do that, at the local union level, today.
It took Carey a decade, and several election defeats running for lesser offices, before he became 804 president on a platform of cleaning up the local, enforcing the contract, and improving pensions. As he did 24 years later in the “Marble Palace” in Washington, Carey cut his own salary to show that he was serious about putting union resources to work for the membership.
· Using direct action on the job.
The year Ron Carey became a Teamster steward, Local 804 had twenty wildcat strikes; not long afterwards UPS drivers in NYC struck for six weeks, over the objections of local and national union officials. Throughout his three decades in the local, Carey tapped into, rather than tried to suppress, rank-and-file unrest that took form of job actions, whether legal or not.
When Carey became president in 1968, after campaigning for a year as part of an opposition slate, his first challenge was striking UPS again. This time, 804 members walked out for more than two months to win a first-ever “25-and-out-pension” provision with UPS, effectively using contract rejection votes at mass meetings to win a better final offer from management.
· Challenging bureaucratic control of bargaining.
As Reiman reports, Carey quickly developed a reputation for honesty, transparency, and independence from the corrupt regional and national power structure of the IBT. But, in the Teamsters then, and in many other unions today, islands of militancy have trouble surviving in a sea of business unionism. Putting Members First shows how dissident locals like Carey’s 804 must overcome attempts, by the union hierarchy, to undermine picket-line solidarity among workers bargaining with the same employer, but in different locals or national unions. Carey’s methods of thwarting management’s “divide-and-conquer” schemes, aided and abetted by top union officials, are worthy of emulation.
· Networking with like-minded reformers
In the 1980s, the IBT began negotiating more issues with UPS at the company-wide level – via a tightly controlled national bargaining committee – which reduced the scope and impact of local or regional bargaining. To counter this threat, Carey and Local 804 began to ally with UPS dissidents around the country, including those long active in TDU and equally opposed to a then-provision of the IBT constitution which required a two-thirds vote, rather than a simple majority, to reject any tentative agreement with an employer. Jousting with the International Union over imposition of unpopular UPS contracts—voted down by a majority of those covered by them—helped build the movement for democratizing the Teamsters, by linking bad bargaining outcomes to denial of membership rights.
· Winning and using One Member/One Vote
Most U.S. union members have no direct say about their national union officers and executive board members. The latter are elected by smaller groups of local union delegates at national conventions that tend to be leadership controlled, particularly when incumbents are up for re-election. These delegate bodies are resistant to changing national union constitutions to allow the more democratic method used in APWU, ILWU, the NewsGuild/CWA, and a few others.
The only major breakthroughs in direct voting on top officers have occurred, after corruption scandals and resulting judicial intervention involving the IBT, UAW, and LIUNA. Without a rank-and-file reform movement—of the type which backed Carey during his two Teamster presidential campaigns, or which developed recently in the UAW—it remains hard for opposition candidates to win any union-wide election. The lesson of this book is to be ready for that political opening when and if it occurs, while fighting for “one-member/one vote” in the meantime.
· Tackling internal restructuring
When Carey and other members of his reform slate took over Teamster headquarters in 1992, the “Marble Palace” was not just a monument to past Teamster extravagance. It was full of poorly performing departments, with overpaid and/or incompetent staffers hostile to the goals of the new administration. Foes of reform also controlled all the Teamster joint councils, area conferences, and the boards of the many health and welfare and pension benefit funds. These powerful officials wanted Carey and his team to fall on their faces.
Working with TDU activists around the country and a minority of reform-minded local officers, Carey put 75 troubled locals under trusteeship, cut waste, stepped up Teamster organizing, hired aggressive new staff and empowered members. As Reiman documents, the elimination of the “area conferences” was a major restructuring victory—and a blueprint worth following, as needed, in other unions saddled with unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and staff featherbedding.
· Staying close to the members
To his credit, Carey never felt comfortable in his new inside-the-Beltway world (where a sycophantic culture of political hustling and over-paid “consulting” would, in the end, contribute to his undoing.) He liked hanging out with working Teamsters in Queens, not politicians or other high-ranking union officials in Washington. He was a work horse, not a show horse, a hands-on handler of IBT members’ daily problems, large and small. His organizational accomplishments, as Reiman shows, were always rooted in a strong personal connection with the membership, that many elected and appointed officials seem to lose as they ascend through the ranks of their respective union bureaucracies.
· Taking on employers, with new allies
Carey’s finest hour came in 1997 when the presence of someone at the top of the union who sincerely believed in the power of the rank and file made it possible for 185,000 UPS workers to win the biggest nationwide strike in the last thirty years. The UPS contract campaign employed membership education and mobilization, labor-community coalition building, and outreach to UPS customers and the general public, via the media, that the union had never utilized before.
Two years before, the Teamsters, under Carey, had cast 1.4 million votes in the AFL-CIO’s first contested election in 100 years, thereby helping to secure the victory of a new leadership more helpful in labor-management showdowns like the UPS strike. The IBT joined Jobs with Justice, embraced single payer health care reform, and campaigned against free trade. The union ditched its traditional ties to conservative Republicans, while maintaining some—albeit not enough—distance from Democrats who disappointed or betrayed labor.
· Anticipating a counter-revolution
When union reformers win, they still face pushback from entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. Still-powerful bureaucrats who had split their support between two “Old Guard” candidates in 1991, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge, fronted by James Hoffa, five years later. The wealthy Detroit labor lawyer masqueraded successfully as a populist critic of a “New Teamster” establishment that was spendthrift, incompetent, and run by “outsiders.”
As Reiman recounts, the Carey campaign fund-raising misconduct in 1996 was a self-inflicted blow to the moral authority and public reputation of his administration. It was the result of corner-cutting and top-down campaigning that was very different from the bottom up approach that propelled Carey to victory five years before. The moral of this story: if you’re going to take on union corruption and corporate America at the same time, don’t let opportunistic “outsiders,” hitch their wagon to your team. Their greed, bad judgement, and lack of any connection to union reform will lead to grifting of a new sort.
While the tragedy of Ron Carey’s criminal prosecution and eventual banning from the union makes for painful reading, Ken Reiman’s book reminds us that the Teamster reform movement survived ‘Donorgate’ in the mid-1990s and upheld his legacy of opposition to Teamster old guard politics and policies. The work of Carey and many like-minded supporters four decades ago raised the bar and set the stage for Teamster reformers to reclaim their national headquarters nearly 25 years later.
One result of that most recent national-level reform slate victory was the 2022-23 UPS contract campaign which drew on the lessons, experiences, and, in many cases, the leadership of 1997 strike veterans. In much media coverage and analysis of last year’s grassroots contract campaign and its results, Carey’s name, memory, and past strike role were often invoked.
To TDU members and the many other Teamsters whose votes made him the first directly elected national union president, Carey remains a heroic, not just tragic, figure. In a union where to this day, many local officers are wary of TDU, the pugnacious ex-Marine and former UPS-driver from Queens was a unique ally in a vibrant reform movement that has now spanned five decades. During that period, we had the privilege of working with Ron in different capacities and seeing him in action behind the scenes and in public, during several critical junctures in the union’s modern history.
We salute Brother Ken Reiman and Monthly Review Press for bringing Ron’s story to a new generation of labor activists faced with the unfinished task of revitalizing and reforming the U.S. labor movement. Reiman’s book will help ensure that Carey’s singular role will be remembered — and rightfully honored — long after his critics and detractors have been forgotten.
(In the late 1970s, Steve Early was an organizer, lawyer, and newspaper editor for the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), a Teamster reform group that became part of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He assisted Ron Carey’s 1989-91 campaign for the Teamster presidency and, while on loan from the Communications Workers of America, served as a member of Carey’s headquarters transition team in early 1992. A longtime labor activist, Rand Wilson worked at Teamster headquarters in the union’s communications department, under Carey. He helped plan and implement the UPS contract campaign in 1997, and handled publicity for the subsequent two-week strike. In 2022-23, he worked as a TDU organizer aiding membership education and mobilization in support of the IBT’s latest UPS contract campaign.)
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This piece has also run in Jacobin and CounterPunch