Aside perhaps from our disagreement about the impact of the Taft-Hartley Act, Rich Yeselson and I mostly agree about the trajectory of the American labor movement over the past three quarters of a century, its current plight, and its future prospects. I would add just two suggestions to Yeselson's autopsy of the contemporary labor movement. First, although he is right about the episodic or wave-like aspects of union growth, it takes more than a readiness by workers to act to set labor in motion. Most often as happened in Flint in 1937 and elsewhere, it takes a militant minority to move the mass. In the past that militant minority tended to come most often from parties of the left or radical movements such as syndicalism or what I might call labor/worker Populism. Where will such sparkplug unionists emerge from today and tomorrow. Second workers unbound by union contracts, today the great mass of employees, have broader rights to engage in direct action, that is to strike, than employees bound by union contracts whose right to strike has been effectively curtailed by judicial rulings.

Let me also note a final irony, Taft-Hartley rather than being a totally separate piece of legislation was instead a series of amendments to the NLRA (Wagner Act, whose preamble remained part of the law), many of which were proposed and/or vetted by AFL leaders and their attorney in the late 1930s.

Two questions:
Is it correct to say the decline of the middle class since the 1980s parallels the decline of unions?
Is there a cause/effect relationship?

This was an interesting read, but I have to disagree with the conclusions you've reached.

We already have fortress unionism. It's the current state of affairs, and it's wholly unacceptable. The 'fortress' has already been breached in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, and we are being stabbed in the back by our putative allies in Philadelphia and Chicago. The notion that you can just turtle up and wait until worker militancy increases is not a winning strategy. We do not have sufficient resources to hold back the onslaught of capital against us in the North. Only by forcing capital to divert resources to protect its strongholds in the South and parts of the West can you alleviate pressure on the union states.

Labor's future is in the South. Multiple unions need to pool resources to organize entire Southern cities. Have the organizers work for CLCs and create federal locals that affiliate with an international after victory. Turn CLCs into social centers, resources to for nonunion workers to get advice about dealing with shitty bosses and HR or places to get support for protests against wage theft. If you start turning major Southern cities into union hotbeds, the effort becomes self-supporting, and the resources from the AFL-CIO can be shifted to other cities to repeat the process, which would force business interests to redouble their efforts back home and would reduce pressure against organize labor in places like Ohio or Michigan.

While I appreciate the work that went into this piece, the answer to 'what is to be done' is the same as it ever was: organize and fight.

May I suggest http://www.ocnus.net/artman2/publish/Editorial_10/Labour-Movements-And-The-Politics-Of-Globalisation.shtml

One more thing you neglected to add: Educate our youth. From kindergarten on to high school, ther should be labor studies progrms that explain what unions are, that chronicle the gains made for working families by the labor movement, and that discuss current labor-based initiatives and campaigns. This should be doable because: a) most teachers are unionized; b)state educational standards all include at leat allusions to the labor and other social justice movement, and c)nearly all kids in public schools come from working class families. I said educate, NOT brainwash. emphasis should be on critical thinking, cooperation, and analysis, so students can reach their own conclusions.

This is a tight, galloping, survey of the decline of labor. But, two major premises of this piece, the importance of T-H and the idea of "fortress unionism" seem off the mark. If it was just T-H, then labor would have been able to come back and fight under Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, or Obama. Labor law reform failed every time under all these administrations. We need to think about the historic weakness of organized labor while still accounting for the one-time Great Leap Forward of the thirties and forties. As for the future, one word: immigrants.

One response to "Fortress Unionism"

http://itsaboutpowerstupid.blogspot.com/2013/06/building-fortresses-or-tearing-down.html

Local UE506 Builds locomotives for General Electric at its' Erie, PA plant. The union is seeing over 1,000 of their jobs moved to Texas to a new locomotive plant GE built. The Erie plant is one of GE's most productive and profitable, however GE figure it can make more money re-establishing operations in right to work, low wage Texas and won't have to deal with pesky unions. After these 1,000 jobs disappear, there will be about 4,000 employees left at the plant. What their long term fate will be, no one knows. This is a tragic loss for the workers involved and the city of Erie which is already downtrodden after many companies relocated or simply went out of business in the last twenty years.

I'd quit right now, if I thought Rich's sad conclusion was correct. Today's unions will die unless we actively pour resource into building a movement of the impoverished unorganized. That doesn't mean old style shop-by-shop organizing. It does mean watering and nurturing the seeds of upsurge rather than passively sitting back and waiting for them to sprout. One great example is the fast food workers' rebellion which has spread coast to coast in just the last few months.

To my old friend Steve Askin, I respectfully say: I think you have misread the article. I proposed a full agenda that would keep you and your colleagues busy for several decades. My point is simply that people who say "labor will die unless it does something "really big" don't quite grasp how big that something has to be. Way way bigger than today's campaigns. So, I've got some ideas in the meantime. Realistically, understanding what is required for massive growth to occur isn't pessimism--it's hard headed analysis. To grow in already existing areas of strength would, in itself, require thousands of organizers and millions of dollars. Let alone to train the next generation of worker leaders and actually buttress today's weak local union structure. As I said, plenty to do for a long time to come.

To Melvin Dubofksky and Jefferson Cowie, two of the most brilliant and significant living historians: Yes, a militant minority is critical to building something bigger. There's no CP or ALP or other radical vehicles for that today. But, somehow, a small group of worker leaders must convince a larger group of peers to take risks they've never taken before on behalf of unionization. Per MD's point about non-union workers having more legal flexibility--yes indeed. In fact, it's very difficult for today's "mature" unions--will millions in building/pension fund assets--to take the institutional risks that the moment requires. They are in a sweet spot of weakness--too big to take large risks, too small to have much power in civil society or politics.

Per JC's point about subsequent failure to enact labor law reform: I'm not sure what is particularly surprising about this. The paradox here is a long standing one: when unions are strong enough to win enabling legislation, they need it least because they are so powerful in civil society. When they are desperately in need of protecting legislation, they are too politically weak to push it thru. Plenty of ways that T-H contributed to that weakness, won't rehearse that now. You also mentioned that you rejected the "fortress unionism" ideas, but didn't mention why. As for immigrants--yes, they are best chance to become the militant minority. Many are already experienced activists in very tough union and political conflicts in their native countries.

Yeselson may be correct that a solid defense is the labor movement's best move in 2013; nevertheless, there are two major considerations we should take into account as we have this discussion.

First, we should consier a broader definition of success than expanding union density. Who care is unions are big, so long as the movement makes this world a better place to live for workers and their families? Our goal is economic and social justice, not necessarily big unions. For example, the dominant narrative on the women's association 9to5 seems to be - "great idea, but they didn't succeed." Really? Yes, they did not make unions get bigger. But they helped put sexual harassment on the map as a workplace issue and helped transform the working experience for entire future generations of somen workers. Seems like a success to me.

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Second, Yeselson highlights the big moments of union growth, and asserts that we should hang tight and "wait" for workers to drive such a moment. Do we really think workers built those growth moments out of the blue? These surges grew out of decades of patient and persistent organizing. The seed so the 1930s uprising were planted throughout the entire Progressive Era, starting in the late 19th century. Workers learned to form organizations, build broad coalitions, and that "success" would have to come through changes in federal law (a new paradigm then.)

Now is not the time to wait. Now is the time to understand that the unions in which all of us have been working for 20, 30, 40 years are specific creatures from the New Deal and Wagner Act, and that we need new creatures that are more fitting for the Wal-Mart economy that Yeselson describes so well. Yes, real change can't happen without worker activism and passion. But workers need structures and tools, and the ones that we are offering them today are the wrong shape and size. So what tools should we build building to support a new wave of worker power? That's the conversation I'd like to see us engaged in.

The militancy led to the Wagner Act, not the other way around. Most of the growth was post the Act actually being implemented, (after court challenges). Laws don't generate worker activism--worker activism generates laws.

Today, for example, the only way labor could obtain something like the Employee Free Choice Act would be thru a massive upsurge in activism/strikes/militancy. Your other point about planting the seeds is well taken--which is precisely what I argue re: training the leaders of tomorrow for today. This is quite clearly stated in the essay.

I think some readers so the "just wait" remark in my article, and that so annoyed them that they forgot what I wrote immediately above it. There's a large program outlined there, including, as I said, training leadership for future struggles. Plenty of work to occupy labor.

So, yes, Working America is precisely, Lane, one of the tools you wish we should have a "conversation" about. Which is precisely why I praised it in the essay!

Was writing quickly so want to clarify: most workers organized between 34-39 did so via recognition strikes, not the NLRB elections. Based on the historiography of the era, and Freeman's essay, one can make a strong argument that most of these workers organized under he Act, if not all, would have organized themselves anyway via recognition strikes, so potent was labor then in civil society.In short, the
NLRA ratified the power of labor, it did not create it.

Good advice, I do think you missed a very important component. In addition to the above strategy, a public relations campaign must be funded and followed for the foreseeable future. Labor cannot allow the disinformation campaign being waged against it to continue. It must create a stable of pundits, media personalities, think tanks, etc. to stem the attacks on labor. Bottom line, win the public back.

One thing the article leaves by the wayside (as do many of the comments) is whether unions provide a useful service. The author notes that the working class is mostly uninterested. This may be because in many industries, unions are simply no longer needed. Instead of fighting about how to perpetuate them (without regard to purpose), why not consider whether they're still useful?

The author also notes that 'right to work' laws cause unions to spend great sums on administration. I'd mention from personal experience (admittedly with a public sector union), that 'fair share' requires transfer the burden to workers - in the form of annual hours of querying and form-filling in order to opt out and claim back (back!) the portion of funds used for political purposes (usually laughably small, despite unions' demonstrably aggressive political work). Why should workers pay in time or money for what benefits only the union? From that point of view, 'right to work' is a good thing. If that weakens unions, so be it. No other organization has such special privileges. Unions shouldn't have them anymore, and the more they defend them, the less popular they become, which over the long run weakens them, even if it props them up in the short run.

To some extent, I wonder why today's labor movement and its progressive allies shouldn't push for broader employment protections such as the right to know why you were dismissed or stronger overall disclosure of labor violations by companies (similar to health dept inspections).

I feel these measures might be easily supported by the general public in any referendum on the question. If workers see tangible benefits from the efforts of unions, the false employer arguments that unions just take dues and return nothing would be less effective.

Your argument is based on an assumption that unions have tried comprehensive campaigns in organizing and this model has failed. The problem with this argument is that it is not backed up by the numbers. Speaking as some who has done extensive research on organizing campaigns in the private and public sectors, both Board and non-Board, card check, elections, and voluntary recognitions I can tell you that only a small percentage of organizing, now or in the last 25 years has been done through comprehensive campaigns. Equally significant, even those unions that say they are engaging in comprehensive campaigns in most cases are not running what we would consider a comprehensive campaign but rather are throwing tactics against the wall and seeing if they'll stick. Some campaigns lack a worker or community component but simply consist of staff leveraging employers; others are community based but have nothing focused on the decision makers in the firm; even fewer have done serious strategic corporate research before the campaign, in fact the majority of lead organizers from ALL unions I have researched did not know the correct parent company for the company they had organized. As for the comprehensive campaigns that put everything together and do it right we only see a handful of those campaigns a year. However we used to see only one a year so it is an upward trend. This means rather than being a time to stop comprehensive campaigns this would be a time to increase education and resources devoted to convinces more unions to follow the full model. It is most important to understand how many unions are just starting to develop capacity to run comprehensive campaigns.

The other confusion in article was your assumption about where unions have support. For the last 20 plus years the units that are winning in every sector are those with low wage women, workers of color, especially immigrant and black women. They are changing the face and the focus of the labor movement. But these wins are NOT just in big cities. These workers have been organizing in large numbers in call centers, education, building services, health care, home care, and day care, and light manufacturing, much of it outside the big urban areas you talk about. Many of these jobs have also brought immigrants to the Midwest, Southeast and other otherwise rural white communities. The Towers don't make sense if those with the greatest propensity to organize are locked outside the Towers.

These are challenging times for the labor movement to be sure. But they are even more challenging for workers if the labor movement is limiting itself to a chosen few. This sounds a great deal more like the language of the AFL at the turn of the last century when it wanted to protect its ever shrinking pie than the vision and values of our current movement. It may be small but was at the forefront of the battle for immigrant rights, bank regulation, and other issues central to organized an unorganized workers but it is their newest members who been most active on these issues. Shutting them out would eliminate an important new voice in the political landscape-- up-and-coming black and immigrant women labor leaders.

If Walmart can be knocked off its game, along with the Fast Food Stores, by these women and the corporate media think its so dangerous they have to do a news blackout, why would we choose this time to shut any part of the movement down?

Well, hi Kate, nice to hear from you. To match your own brusqueness: your second point about non-urban organizing is interesting and suggestive, your first about comprehensive campaigns has zero merit. And your claim that my argument evokes the AFL in the first decade after its founding is just goofy and totally belied by what I actually wrote in the article.

Let's deal with that first point. Your argument is like that of the idealistic Marxists during the middle of the 20th century: sure, "actually existing socialism" is Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is pretty crappy, but **we haven't tried real socialism yet!** Similarly, you argue that its not that campaigns don't increase density, it's that they really haven't been tried yet! How long do we have to wait for comprehensive campaigns to deliver a huge spike in union growth, Kate? They've been around for 30 years, and, during that time, density has declined by 40%! You say that the unions aren't sufficiently prepared and competent to do so, staff doesn't know who the parent company is, etc. Um--doesn't that tell you something? After 30 years?? Like maybe these campaigns are too difficult--even after 30 years!!--for most unions to understand, let alone run effectively. Maybe, for whatever reason, unions can't or won't hire and train competent staff to do them, can't or won't commit the time and money to them. Maybe the necessary training is just too labor intensive. How long should we wait for most of the labor movement to know how to run a campaign, Kate? Another 30 years?? 50?? Moreover, in your haste to refer to your own research, you failed to actually engage what I wrote. I noted that even **effective** campaigns take too long to organize too few workers--the opportunity costs are simply too high. Taking four years to, say, organize 10,000 workers--which would be considered a great success by most unions--just isn't cost effective. And that's assuming you even win the campaign. CtW was founded just to do campaigns--a dedicated campaign shop. How many workers has CtW organized in almost 8 years? If CtW, with a staff devoted only to campaigns, led by crack SEIU staff, can barely initiate large campaigns, let alone win them, who can? I'm not talking about treading water --the point of campaigns, when they first came into vogue, was said to be to turn labor around, to get that big spike in membership, to compensate for the weakness of the rank and file by generating a massive air campaign. Well, as I wrote, campaigns have had some successes--J4J, organizing Vegas, some of the defensive fights that you are familiar with--but they are unable to generate any growth, let alone the huge spikes that I discussed in my essay. Only massive civil unrest or the total production requirements of a world war causes those kind of spikes. So let's stop hanging our hopes on campaigns, shall we? I worked on them, they are things of beauty when they work well, the brilliant, determined people like our friend Joe Uehlein are wonderful trade unionists. But campaigns are not the answer, and claiming that most unions still don't understand how to do them or have the appropriate staff after several decades only proves my point, not yours.

Your remark comparing my ideas to the 19th century AFL is laughable. Again, did you read what I wrote? I argued for continued organizing links to the Latino community, for outreach to every other progressive community out there from environmentalists to the GLBT community to feminists to community activists. I argue that unions should reach out and train worker leaders even in non-organizing situations, so that these leaders will be ready to organize their co-workers when that moment comes. I explicitly argued to link organizing to ethnic identity and activism. I argue to push alt unions or any other institutional framework that will help to socialize workers into supporting unions. None of this sounds like the parochial craft union focus of the 19th century AFL. None of it argues for "shutting out" new union leaders, as you inaccurately accuse me of proposing--indeed, quite the opposite! Honestly Kate: what the hell are talking about? That remark was simply intellectual bad faith.

Finally, you do raise an interesting issue regarding current organizing outside of major metropolitan areas. I did not argue to confine organizing to cities, but to buttress core regions/sectors/companies--all of them. I would look at the sectors and regions you mention, and perhaps commit more resources to those which show the most promise and growth. It is has been true for awhile that African Americans and Latinos are more amenable to organizing--if a particular region or industry is already a surging area of strength, sure, it's smart to build on what's already happening. But again: this kind of organizing doesn't create the spike that's required.

Which was kind of the point of my essay. I want people to understand that it's even harder than they though it was--the big spikes have happened only four or five times in the **entire western world**. The rest of the time unions simply don't grow, in fact usually decline.

Your remarks about the Walmart actions are revealing. These workers are very brave, but the actions have not grown or spread **significantly.** That's how the spikes happen, that's how the Teamsters "leap frogged" from city to city in the thirties organizing truckers, how the UAW went from plant to plant, how SWOC swept into the steel towns. You know this history--this worker militancy had the speed and force of a hurricane. These Walmart actions do not. The "corporate media" would be thrilled to cover a story of massive civil unrest, like what we have seen recently in Istanbul and in Brazil. But Walmart is not that. It's brave, it's clever, but don't make it into something that it isn't--it's not nearly as dangerous as you say. We know what real dangerousness looks like--the 1934 San Francisco general strike, or Flint or the Minneapolis truckers strike or the doomed 1934 textile strike, and on and on. Right--a very rare thing, a frankly high risk thing, with workers breaking thru the careful lawyering to take incredible risks. It's understandable that workers today don't want to take those risks,--but let's not pretend that a couple of hundred workers are "dangerous" to Walmart or the giant fast food companies. They're not--they're annoying, a problem to handle, yes, but they're not dangerous. Maybe in couple of weeks or months, they will be dangerous. But if these things don't grow quickly and dramatically, they don't reach sufficient scale to become as truly dangerous as you imagine them to be today.

So maybe the first thing we should do is to stop fooling ourselves with such overheated, romantic rhetoric. Then we can figure out what to do next.

Rich
Debate is a good thing and it only happens when people put up thought provoking ideas. I probably should have started out with that in my first response and then maybe you wouldn't have felt so attacked. However, as I learned early on, when you put your ideas out there you have to expect them to be challenged, and the more thought provoking they are the greater the challenge. That's a good thing not a bad thing.

I disagree with you but I am not attacking you neither do I see you as a proxy for CTW. Actually I did not know who you were most recently working for nor do I associate comprehensive campaigns as a CTW thing. They were first used by industrial unions in a bargaining context as you well know, and it wasn't until the 1990s with campaigns such as SEIU's Justice for Janitors Campaign or the AFA's CHAOS campaigns in the airlines that you saw comprehensive campaigns move beyond the industrial sector to organizing. But in terms of saying they have been around for 30 years that is asking a lot of a labor movement where many unions didn't have a fully funded organizing departments until the late 1990s and only got fully functional research departments in the last decade. One of the positive outcomes of the split was that SEIU and UNITEHERE (before it's divorce) helped build research capacity in IBT, LIUNA, and the UFCW, while the AFL-CIO focused on building capacity in building trades and transportation unions that had not gotten as much attention before. That is why that it is only in the last decade that we have unions with the capacity to run these campaigns but instead of running comprehensive organizing campaigns they have spent all their resources running "comprehensive" political campaigns.

There are other deeper philosophical disagreements between us. I also do not consider top-down campaigns comprehensive campaigns but rather strategic or coordinated campaigns because they do not include some of the signature emplements of comprehensive campaigns-escalating internal and external tactics by workers and allies targeted at interfering with connections between key decisison makers, key relationships, profit centers and growth strategies. Thus a union must have research capacity, it must have engaged and involved workers and allies at every level of the campaign, and it only costs a lot of money and takes many years in those cases where it has to. Many of the most expensive and long comprehensive campaigns are bargaining strikes which are defensive actions where the comprehensive campaign starts after the union went out on a traditional strike and was already at impasse. Getting fired workers back in a plant and scabs out involves very different legal and financial stakes for the employer than getting a union in. Thus there is much more variation in cost and length in the union comprehensive organizing campaigns depending on the effectiveness of the campaign.

I also do not believe that worker centers and other union alternatives can thrive without the labor movement continuing to actively organize in conjunction with them. Almost all of them are foundation funded, they can only organize so far or they lose their 501c3 status. Thus, for example, whether it is the USW in the West or RAPNY in the East, the Car Wash Workers start out at workers center's but end up in unions. It is the 9to5 Local 925 model that worked so well it organized Equitable Insurance in Syracuse in the 1980s. But 9to5 alone, as much as it accomplished, could only get women so far. It was the combination that was so effective and the fact that no union has been willing to take on the jurisdiction of organizing women clerical workers when they have shown over and over they want to organize, proves again how much work there is to do before battening up the hatches.

Finally I never compared your model to the 19th century. I said the beginning of the last century which was the 20th century. I was referring to the 1920s when the AFL was afraid to take risks because their density was so low and they felt it was better to hold on to what they had than risk taking on big battles with employers and getting the state riled up against them. That is what I was referring to. Not their membership make up or their craft but low density making them cut down on organizing. There was no great insult intended, you simply miscounted centuries.

I will stop there. I need to write up my latest results and should have it done by the end of the summer. But I promise you they do not show the high point being 30 years ago and downhill from there. It has been the reverse, with most of the activity starting in 1999 and increasing from there.

Thank you for making us all think,
Kate

I want to congratulate Rich for his article Fortress Unionism. I read his viewpoint the following way: At the end of the day, workers make history. Organizational forms come out of struggle, not the other way around. His article does not say give up. It says keep going, but be smart, be strategic, and don't over promise. Understand the objective conditions, and be prepared to adapt and harness when they ripen. No more rose colored glasses.

Yes, you're right, Kate. A collegial acknowledgment that we know each, even if out of touch for many years, would have been a nice touch--maybe using my name, as you did here, rather than "you." Yes, I found that very off putting. Would have been good to make this second post your first and we would have more amicably proceeded from there, albeit still in disagreement.

I can take the criticism and fully expected it--and, yup, the essay is getting it. But I still don't buy what you're saying about campaigns. I think they have a place--to help to extend existing areas of strength. UNITE HERE in Vegas should usually all relevant tactics to organize the remaining non-union strip motels. Campaign techniques--top down or bottom up--make a lot of sense. Similarly--and at a much larger scale--you could make an argument that the best thing the Teamsters could do--on a 20 year timetable--is put 90% of their organizing/researching resources, including UPS loa's, into organizing FedEx. Again, this is expanding on an existing area of strength, but the challenge is tremendous. Still, as daunting as such an effort would be, at least it would evolve organically from the great powerhouse that is the existing UPS division (I don't submit this as an iron clad proposal--I've thought about this, tweeted about it--but, at least throw it out there as a thought experiment. ) Better that than trying to organize a few hundred or thousand at a time--sometimes it's a few dozen. So, there's a place for campaigns, however you define them. But they will not enhance density at the pace needed because only civil unrest makes the costs to the employer and political elites an unbearable one. Or, if you "prefer", only crushing government pressure on employers in a World War, does something analogous. The latter, of course, no union can initiate or anticipate. And, understandably regarding the former, no "mature" union institution today--unlike the many start up unions of the 1880s or 1930s--will expose themselves to the kind of legal risk that would come from being seen as an "agent" of massive strikes and civil unrest. Unions can't "do" Pullman today, or the SF general strike, or Flint. This is precisely that "sweet spot of weakness" I discussed--institutionally too big to risk radical measures, too small to have the kind of political and economic power labor had in the 1940s.

Btw, I did not believe, Kate, that you were holding me accountable for CtW's program in the last several years. I only brought up CtW as an example of how difficult it is to do campaigns on what people call "sufficient scale." Here's an organization whose entire mission is to do campaigns. It's run a a couple for six-seven years--brilliantly inventive work. But, on balance, hardly anybody is organized this way. 10,000 workers in almost eight years really isn't a lot (I'm actually not even sure that's the number--pretty much a guess) given the costs of these campaigns. It's nobody fault--the staff is talented and hard working, the workers who come forward take great risks, the union officers have supported the work with large budgets. But unions used to organize that much in the late 1940s at the apex of white supremacist brutality in Mississippi. Some well known people imagined that the CtW could be a 21st century version of the CIO when it first began. But we are in a much different structural moment--I wanted, in my essay, to contrast what real union strength looks like compared to the more common periods, like today, of weakness.

This why I'd like unions--stuck in that sweet spot of weakness--to do the stuff they can comfortably do, the stuff I outlined, and not imagine that they can do stuff--increase density dramatically--that they can't do or won't do because the institutional risks are too high. You will never get the general counsel of a union to "approve" massive civil unrest or even massive (not a kabuki style arrest of a 15 people) civil disobedience. That has to be a more organic process emerging from a worker leadership, which the unions follow, not lead. But unions can certainly try to enhance existing areas of strength, buttress their membership, seek out the next generation of leadership, work with the rest of the progressive left. Yet this is still a **lot**, plenty of work to tackle, not an easy lift. But, at least, it's an imaginable lift.

Finally, Re: AFL comparison. Ok, I take your clarification, although, again, I **still have an organizing proposal going forward** as I outlined above and in my essay. I don't at all argue for zero organizing. The confusion came with your remark referencing the AFL "at the turn of the last century." The "turn" to me usually means around the first years of the century, not 20 years in. The AFL was founded in 1886, so I tacked ten years on and got to ca. 1896. But fine.

I realize we are all on the same side, and debate is healthy. And, yes, I am happy that serious thinkers like yourself and many others have taken the time to engage what I wrote.

Just want to acknowledge Greg Tarpinian's remark here, and thank him for it. It concisely expresses **exactly** the bottom line conclusions I wished to convey to readers.

We can and should argue about whether my ideas are good ones, but Greg's pithy summary is, essentially, what I hoped readers would take away from the piece.

I would be interested in reading more, from Rich Yeselson, on the impact of technology on union organizing. I refer, more specifically, to industries of the "information economy" in which significant numbers of employees work remotely, via computer or other media, in "production."

As I read his article, his comments seem to be appropriate for and directed to economies in which workers gather at a workplace and come together in the production of goods. The workplace may not be, for example, Ford's River Rouge plant. Increasingly, it may be a hospital or school. But it still tends to be some variation of a "bricks and mortar" site, with on-site management and labor.

I am far from a whiz in economics, but I read enough to know that the advent of the information economy, the increased pace of technological progress, digitalization, and the proliferation of work remote from physical sites is having some sort of an effect on traditional labor/management definitions and relations.

I wonder what Yeselson thinks might be the effect of all of these phenomena on future union organizing?

Rich and myself have had a spirited discussion over the last week. Far too often we talked past each other. My main difference with Fortress unionism is the degree to which Rich emphasizes protecting what we have will waiting for a new upsurge to happen. Labor has to talk and chew bubblegum at the same time. We have to continue to used proven strategies on an expanded scale, develop new strategies for organizing and building a workers movement on a larger scale AND we have to to the long-term work of building a workers movement in the streets out of which the leaders of tomorrow can emerge. Generating increasing mobilization and confrontation wherever we can is essential for developing the next leaders of the upsurge. I suppose you could boil the difference down to what is the relationship between the subjective factor (unions) and the development of a new leadership and what should we do in the meantime? I think Greg Tarpinian also makes a good point that we have to "Understand the objective conditions, and be prepared to adapt and harness when they ripen. ". The question is what should we be doing to help shape those objective conditions?

Please excuse the numerous typos.

Now is not the time for unions to adopt a defensive stance and "wait for a worker upsurge." That's a recipe for disaster, as unions are not strong enough to survive in a defensive posture, and worker upsurges don't occur spontaneously. As Lane Windham says, workers need structures and tools. So what are the proper structures and tools for today's labor movement?

It is hard to understand how an otherwise insightful article on the decline of US labor could relegate one the most important factors in the decline to a one-time mention of "globalization," with no discussion of the ways in which the outsourcing of production has weakened labor and no discussion of any possible counter-measures.

In today's global economy, national unions are not adequate to take on the corporations alone. Most corporations have adopted the "supply chain" or "outsourcing" model, and have become complex international systems of production that cannot easily be challenged by workers in a single location or even a single country.

This means that unions must shed the blinders of narrow nationalism and become truly international structures, using the tools of cross-border solidarity to build power throughout the corporations' systems of production. The "global union federations" that have existed for many decades have not yet proven adequate to the task, although there are signs that they have recognized the need to transform themselves into more action-oriented organizations, and to provide direct support to union campaign coalitions. American unions have been very slow to come to the realization that their fate is bound up with the struggles of workers in the developing world, and most have devoted very little energy or resources to building the relationships that would make coordinated cross-border industrial action a reality. Some positive examples do exist, however, in the Steelworkers' alliance with the Mexican Mineros, the CWA alliance with the Mexican Telefonistas, Teamsters support for UPS workers in Turkey, and CTW's support of workers in Walmart's supply chain. Perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of the kinds of international trade union structures that can take on the global corporations and reverse the global decline of labor.

Of course it is important to recognize that as unions join in solidarity with their counterparts in other countries, they must also become more effective at encouraging the participation of their own members in the governance and activities of their unions.

Overcoming narrow nationalism and bureaucratic stagnation are tall orders for a movement that has often been purged of radicals and is for the most part led by adherents of American exceptionalism and pragmatism, who until very recently have been characterized by their uncritical support of US foreign policy and domestic capitalism, and by their acceptance of a top-down presidential model of union organization.

The bottom line is that, rather than retreat into "fortress unionism" the American labor movement should undertake a serious effort to build "international unionism" and at the same time revitalize its internal structures to engage its members in global campaigns against the global corporations that now control our destiny.

Great article. Great history. From my perspective as a rank & file Teamster,truck driver for forty years, except for the 12 years I was a full-time elected S/T and BA, the greatest obstacle to organizing the unorganized is fear. The fear of losing one's job during a union organizing campaign. The fear that standing up for your legal and human rights will result in loss of income and resulting poverty. Unions and all organizations concerned with economic justice need to build a movement to spotlight the glaring inadequacy of the NLRB's ability to protect workers who engage in "protected activities". Given the opportunity to join a union and win bargaining rights, I believe reality and research show, a majority of U.S. workers relish such an opportunity.

Secondly, and I speak from personal experience in the Teamsters, rank and file union members need the same rights to engage in concerted activity within itheir union; to actively participate in a democratic organization, in which they have a tremendous vested interest, without fear of reprisals from union leadership. I've worked union and I've had to work non-union jobs since I was a f/t union officer. On a non-union job the grovelling that goes on is sick and demeaning. But so is the grovelling that goes on within the union, due to fear of economic reprisal; blacklisting of members, going through the motions or ignoring legitimate grievances.

The greatest benefit of being a union member is realizing dignity and a voice on one's job and in one's union.

I enjoyed the history in this article especially. It helped educate me on an aspect of unionism that I was not familiar with. I was hoping someone can point me at other works that cover what I see as the critical failing of current union structure. Mainly that the benefits unions provide have not changed as worker habits have changed. I am not a union member and haven't been. I usually switch companies every 3 years or so. Generally these moves have been to take advantage of better job opportunities. Most union benefits like job security, advancement, and pensions are built around seniority (which I generally don't accrue). I am a white collar worker but my 30 yr old next door neighbor is a journeyman plumber (about 2 years from being a master). He is also on his 3rd company in the 6 years we have lived by each other. He has switched for more money and because he was unhappy with company rules. I know the current slowdown has hurt the ability of workers to move when unhappy but I don't see this as a permanent sea change, but rather a temporary phenomenon. I think if unions want to regain their dynamism and have membership be something that is widely sought it will have to figure out how to appeal to a world where workers don't accrue seniority the same way and where moving to a new company is considered a good way to deal with intransigent management. Both of my grandfathers were lifelong union members and I don't like seeing labor so weak but when I talk to friends and neighbors no one feels that unions are a path to a more secure or prosperous future.

Those who underestimate the impact of Taft Hartley on the future of the labor movement should note what the Court did this morning. It agreed to hear UNITE HERE vs. Mulhall, based upon the 11th circuit's reading of the "bribery" clause in T-H. Based on that reading, they will likely gut card check next term, eliminating employer neutrality and union access to the workplace.

That's one of the "ticking time bombs" I talked about in the law. Next year, it's probably going to explode.

Ah Richard, you are trapped within a failed paradigm. Back in the day, when I asked my mom how she was doing she never responded by reciting union density data. That's not the point of life.

People want to prosper. If we are to judge how unions are doing, and what they should be doing, we need to think within that paradigm. How big is the middle-class? Is it getting bigger? Is it getting more prosperous?

And yes we know it is going backwards. That's the depressing data that should be keeping you up at night.

Despite the challenges that we confront us I remain confident that we can strengthen and expand those enjoying economic security and a taste of the good life. Organizing more industries into unions is a key strategy. But those unions can't raise their members' take-home-pay within an economy unraveled by extreme inequality.

To complement union organizing success we need innovative policies for a new economy of inter-connected mega regions, dynamic industrial clusters and value chains where the powerful prosper at the expense of everyone else. We need new policies to lift up workers in industries that do not have the power to prosper. We need new policies to shift resources from industries that a prospering but have few low wage workers. And we need unions in healthy industries to raise pay above the legal mandated minimum and living wage.

Though I think the history and much of the reasoning for the decline of unions in this article is great, I have to question one of the basic assumptions which leads to the idea of "Fortress Unionism": that "An aggressive organizing strategy, of the sort labor attempted when John Sweeney took the helm of the AFL-CIO, just doesn't work because the smart union strategists can't compensate for a mostly (though not entirely) uninterested working class."

Richard Freeman has an excellent article called "Do Workers Still Want Unions? More Than Ever," which goes a long way in disproving this: http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp182/bp182.pdf.

The biggest factor restraining unionization is not the working class, but the employing class and the existing legal framework.