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US Unions Must Look Beyond Themselves to Save Themselves
Either we think about unionism in new ways and establish new ways of joining other movements, or most of our unions die a long, slow, painful death.
May 26, 2024
The labor movement in the United States used to be respected and looked to for leadership; people cared about what positions labor took, watched when they mobilized, and noticed the causes they supported. This was especially true among the left. Today, for most of the country, crickets. Including much of the left. And yet, labor is a source of potential power unrivaled by any other bottom-up social grouping in the country.
As one who has written extensively about labor around the world and in the United States—see my list of publications with many links to the original articles—I have been thinking over a number of years about the future direction of the U.S. labor movement. But this thinking is not just based on writing or academic research; I’ve done that and also have years of experience as a labor activist and as one who has worked in blue, white, and pink collar jobs over the past 40+ years and in multiple locations across the country.
I argue that we haven’t had a labor movement in the U.S. since 1949, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled 11 so-called “left-led” unions with somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million members; we’ve had only a trade union movement. What’s the difference? A labor movement looks out for the well-being of all working people in the country, while a trade union movement only looks out for members of its member unions.
We see workers creating reform movements trying to transform their unions for the benefit of the entire membership, if not all workers.
And, especially since 1981, when the trade union movement failed to defend the striking air traffic controllers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike when attacked by then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the trade union movement leaders have done little but watch its ranks shrink, its prestige fall, and its power decline. Millions of jobs have been shipped overseas while the manufacturing economy has been decimated, and most of the service sector jobs since created have remained ununionized, underpaid, and with many fewer protections for workers. Yes, acting together, the trade union movement has worked to elect Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to office, but between signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and the failure to pass a bill to enhance labor organizing, I’d say neither could be considered blazing successes. Individual unions have succeeded here and there, but only episodically and not consistently, and usually only because of some tactical feature that gave them a winning advantage in a particular struggle. Inspiring not.
The only consistent trade union success since the early 1980s has been in sucking up U.S. government money—often between $30-75 million annually—which has allowed AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders to act behind the backs of most of the organization’s leaders and all of its affiliated union members, in our name, in efforts generally intended to undercut foreign workers’ struggles against multinational corporations and U.S. government foreign policy projects.
Worse, even while nonetheless being helpful to foreign workers in a few cases, the AFL-CIO has acted to legitimize the imperialist National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by serving as one of its four “core institutes,” along with the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, and the international wing of its domestic archenemy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in NED’s on-going project of supporting and advancing the U.S. Empire.
Thus, the trade unions’ leadership has generally done little to advance the interests and well-being of U.S. workers, while acting in differential manners—usually bad—with foreign workers. I don’t think this was what Karl Marx and Frederick Engles were expecting when they echoed the French feminist, Flora Tristan, urging, “Workers of the World, Unite!”
Yet, despite the general failure of the trade union movement leadership, especially since 1981, the reality is that unions are one set of institutions that, at their best, are of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers. You see workers fighting to make their unions “real”—trying to make them part of a labor movement that serves the interests of all workers if not the entire society—over the years. We see workers creating reform movements trying to transform their unions for the benefit of the entire membership, if not all workers.
Perhaps the most famous of late has been the reform organization Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) inside the United Auto Workers. UAWD came together to fight for direct elections of UAW leadership instead of the convention elections, which had led to a one-party state since 1946 and the election of Walter Reuther. Over time, a number of top-level UAW leaders were charged with corruption, and in a consent agreement with the federal government, the UAW had to shift to direct elections for top officers. UAWD put forth a partial slate headed by Shawn Fain, and then proceeded to win every leadership position they sought, ultimately gaining control of the international union’s executive board.
In turn, Fain and his administration led the 2023 fight against the Big Three auto companies—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler—and won the strike in the fall. While the UAW did not win all of its demands in the strike, it clearly demonstrated the power of organized workers who have a leadership that will fight for and with them. And following that successful strike, Volkswagen workers at Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted to join the UAW, with help from the German union, IG Metal, although in the face of governors from six southern states telling them to not do so.
It is critical to understand that unions are important to many workers; that they make a difference in the workplace; and that they usually mean higher wages, better benefits, seniority systems, and a recognizable “rule of law” in the workplace, the latter which places some limits on management authority and discipline; a big difference from the situation of most workplaces where workers give up most if not all of their rights when they enter company grounds.
So, where does this lead us?
I want to build off a study that I did originally for my doctoral dissertation in 2003. It was a comparative-historical sociological study of unionization in the steel and meatpacking industries in the greater Chicago area (including northwest Indiana) between 1933-1955, examining how the unions addressed racial oppression in the workplace, union, and communities in which these workers operated. Long story short: Despite drawing from the exact same labor pool—white ethnics from Eastern and Southern Europe, African Americans from the rural South, and some Mexicans—the steelworkers’ organizations ignored the issues of white supremacy and racism, while the packinghouse workers directly confronted it. In 1939, in racist, segregated Chicago, 8 out of 14 packinghouse local unions were headed by African Americans!
From this study, and differing from much research on the CIO—the labor organization both of these unions ultimately joined—I recognized there were two different conceptualizations of trade unions within the CIO; ultimately, I referred to that of the steelworkers as a “business” union and that of the packinghouse workers as a “social justice” union. And this was important because I found that how the members thought about their union determined subsequent organizational behavior.
Transforming business unions into social justice unions offers a solution: They build on their foundation in the workplace but join with community members—however defined—to work together in ways to improve life for all concerned.
And that brings things to where we are now: There are still two forms of unionism available to unions and their members. Business unions focus the power they are able to mobilize to fight for workers in the workplace, such as wages, working conditions, seniority, “rule of law,” etc. However, they generally ignore anything beyond the workplace, despite workers having lives outside of the workplace. Social justice unions focus that power in the workplace to not only address workplace issues, but they use the power in the workplace to also address things in workers’ lives beyond the workplace, including things such as racism, misogyny, and homophobia, as well as things like healthcare, education, the climate crisis, etc. Ideally, unions becoming or transforming themselves into social justice unions would consider the range of interests from the local to the global, ultimately seeking to join with unions and other people’s organizations around the world to make things better for all.
Recognizing these two different possibilities and what union members want to do in light of this understanding is important. It is important that these issues get discussed by the members of each union themselves; this is not limited to union leadership or even activists.
The reality is that the trade union movement today is so weak that unions rarely have a chance to win their battles without gaining public support. Unions have often recognized this and have appealed to community support to help them win. Yet, what do the communities get back from the unions? Often nothing. This one-way form of “solidarity” is simply not sustainable; you can only withdraw from the well so many times without giving back before it runs dry.
Transforming business unions into social justice unions offers a solution: They build on their foundation in the workplace but join with community members—however defined—to work together in ways to improve life for all concerned.
There are issues that simply cannot be solved on a local, regional, or even national basis; the climate crisis jumps immediately to mind, although there are other issues such as global sexual slavery and related issues, pandemics, war, and empire that can only be approached from a global perspective. We have to understand issues such as these from a global perspective and begin educating and organizing our union sisters and brothers on this level. But our ideas about our unions must at least allow for this, if not actively encourage work on this level by all members. Key to this is implementing an educational program that confronts these issues and encourages workers to think about how their union could work to address issues key to workers in this larger sense. The old slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” encapsulates these ideas.
This, however, is not going to change by itself: Activists in each union need to stimulate discussion within their organization about whether they should confine their unionism just to the workplace, or to use that power for the good of all.
I would suggest trying to find a group of union members that think having this debate within one’s union is crucial, and work to unify this core. Then they could create a campaign to spread this issue throughout the union, initially through one’s workplace and local and then through the national or international union they are affiliated with. It should be run the same way as any organizing campaign; and that is to win.
When confronted by this question—how do we want our union to go forward, alone or with our neighbors (from the local area to the globe)?—this is a question that encourages workers to think about these issues and get involved in participating in strengthening the union. Once a union is seen as something everyone participates in, or at least as many as possible, instead of just something that “others” do, we strengthen our individual unions. When we come to common responses, then we can extend our conceptualization of the union to other unions, locally, regionally, and nationally.
This can be extended globally when we find out what is happening elsewhere: There are workers across the planet seeking to join to fight for a better world for all. Yes, this is happening among workers in other imperial countries but, as we see in the case of Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights, workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are finding ways to unite across their geographical regions and the globe to organize. I think they would be delighted to have North Americans join in their project, and that can only happen when unions take that broader, social justice union approach.
In short: innovate or stagnate. The business unionism of the past 40 years (in particular) has been a failure. Either we think about unionism in new ways and establish new ways of thinking about and joining other movements, or most of our unions die a long, slow, painful death.
It’s time we start rebuilding the labor movement: for the good of all!
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How to the Labor Movement Can Make the UAW’s 2028 General Strike Dream Come True
This could be the beginning of the most exciting resurgence of American organized labor power in a century. Or, it could just be a tweet.
Nov 12, 2023
The labor movement is a capricious friend—it hands out heartbreak as much as it hands out joy. But every once in a while, it is able to wave a triumphant flag and give us all a glimmer of what its potential could truly be.
The recently concluded UAW strike offered just such a moment. It wasn’t just the contract agreements themselves, which were a material success, but also the union’s public call for movement-wide coordination to build the possibility of mass action around the May 1, 2028, expiration of the next auto contracts.
“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” the UAW declared on October 29.
This is a powerful, national union with more than 400,000 active members, fresh off winning a consequential industrial strike, that is shining the Labor Movement Bat Signal high in the sky and beseeching its peers: Join us!
This could be the beginning of the most exciting resurgence of American organized labor power in a century. Or, it could just be a tweet. What happens in the coming months will determine which of those things is the case.
The general feeling of a labor power resurgence since the pandemic has been fueled by a procession of high profile wins: The Starbucks and Amazon union drives, the massive organizing on college campuses, the friendly Biden administration and its uniquely pro-union NLRB, the historically high favorability of unions in public opinion polls, the periodic mini-strike waves at a variety of fed-up workplaces. This year, we have seen a trio of actions—the Teamsters backing down UPS with a credible strike threat, and the successful WGA and UAW strikes—that show what can be won with the power of strikes at a larger scale.
All of this is encouraging. All of this is evidence of a real shift in public sentiment. All of this, however, does not add up to a robust and lasting change in the balance of power between capital and labor. Right now, what we have are a bunch of discrete occurrences, a bunch of data points that amount to proof of potential.
There are two things that will determine whether or not this promising moment leads to a true, historic revival of the labor movement. The first is easily measurable: union density. Barely 1 in 10 American workers is a union member today. Despite all of the wins just mentioned, that number has not risen in the wake of the pandemic. The primary thing that unions need to do today is to organize more union members. Without this, organized labor is a walled and shrinking garden, rather than a legitimately expansive force for society-wide change.
The second thing is related to the first, but it offers a broader menu for action: We must see some tangible coordination of action across the U.S. labor movement. It is great when one union wins a contract, or organizes an important new company, but those isolated events will not be enough to take on the combined power of trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their political allies. Not even when they involve tens or hundreds of thousands of workers. Big unions, the ones with the most resources, along with whatever non-union groups want to help them, must be able to sit down and plan and carry out big national campaigns together if we want to have any chance at winning the class war. Amazon will never be a unionized company without an enormous, multi-union campaign. Nor will the powerful and wealthy tech industry be organized without an enormous multi-union campaign. We will never achieve the eternal goal of “organizing the South” without an enormous multi-union campaign. Nor will we ever pull off strategic general strikes without an enormous multi-union campaign.
The process of scaling up from some unions making incremental progress to a national labor movement strategically building and exercising labor power wherever and whenever it needs to, all in order to drown the monster of inequality once and for all, will require a whole lot of coordination. That sort of coordination—the sort that happens in service of movement goals, rather than those of individual (and sometimes feuding) unions—really doesn’t happen today.
Ideally, an organization like the AFL-CIO would have begun coordinating such an effort years ago. But they haven’t, and there is little evidence that they will. So unions will have to build these coalitions themselves. And that’s what made the UAW’s public call for other unions to line up their contract expiration dates with theirs so exciting.
This is not some meaningless fringe group. This is a powerful, national union with more than 400,000 active members, fresh off winning a consequential industrial strike, that is shining the Labor Movement Bat Signal high in the sky and beseeching its peers: Join us! If we get ourselves aligned, in four and a half years, we can really put the capitalists in a headlock.
There is much to love about this strategy. It is both powerful and achievable. Lining up contract dates does not require the blood, sweat, and uncertainty of huge new organizing campaigns. It is a way to make existing unions stronger by drawing their influence together into a single point. (Look at the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, currently threatening to strike the entire Las Vegas strip, for an example of what can be won with this tactic in practice.)
There is not a lot of time to waste. But on a more positive note, this is a uniquely plausible opportunity for a historic boost in organized labor power.
Doing this not just in one union or one industry but across many unions in many industries can set the stage for a mass walkout. It can make political power brokers pay attention in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t. It can captivate the public, and draw them into the fight even if they are not union members. It is a real world example of scaling up. It is not just one group of unionized workers making a demand for themselves; it offers the promise of workers in general making demands for the entire working class, backed up by the threat of a general strike. It’s not a dream. It can be done. The UAW is exactly the sort of credible organization that can be the launching point.
What it will take is other major unions taking this call seriously. Most union contracts are three years long, give or take. That means that unions must begin planning for this now. Contracts that are negotiated in 2024 and 2025 need to set their expiration dates for May 1, 2028. Realistically, the UAW and its allies need to convince many of their fellow big unions that this is a real goal within the next six months. There should be furious inter-union lobbying already taking place. The more radical unions, who have an actual vision, should publicly sign onto this plan in the near future, and then they should fan out and try to draw in the less radical unions, by arguing that this action is low-risk common sense. It’s a good argument!
The bigger this gets, the stronger it is, and the more it helps every union. And the more it helps every union, the more leverage it gives this broader coalition of unions to make larger demands that will benefit everyone in the working class, unionized or not. Union leaders need to be made to see the virtues of this argument soon. The case then needs to be made to individual units, and to individual workers, who will have to decide that they want their own contracts to be a part of this strategy.
There is not a lot of time to waste. But on a more positive note, this is a uniquely plausible opportunity for a historic boost in organized labor power. The path to achieving this goal is very straightforward, and there is no part of it that is not within the capabilities of existing unions, their organizing staff, and current members. It does not require finding a huge amount of new resources. It just requires today’s unions to have a little vision, and to be willing to work together.
Sometimes, ironically, those qualities are in short supply in the labor movement. But there is no reason we can’t stop being our own worst enemy, right now. Big things are on the table. Let’s reach out and take them.
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We Should Organize for a 20-Hour Work Week
The UAW demanding a 32-hour workweek, a reasonable demand that has the potential to help meet part of our current crises, and we should all be asking for more.
Sep 28, 2023
May 1886. As part of a national movement to win an eight-hour workday, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago are on strike. Police attack, killing at least one person and injuring multiple others. The next day, labor leaders organize a peaceful mass rally at Haymarket Square. A bomb goes off, and police indiscriminately shoot protesters.
The confrontation became an international rallying cry for labor advocates, but it would be 54 more years before the 40-hour workweek became enshrined by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. A year later, the rapidly growing United Auto Workers brought to heel the Ford Motor Company—perhaps the most anti-union of the Big Three automakers at the time—by securing workers’ first collective bargaining agreement with the company.
The growth of the industrial economy, along with a militant and newly organized working class, would force meaningful concessions from capital. But the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek would require a global crisis—in this case, capital’s need for labor peace during World War II—to become a reality.
In a time of record corporate profits, when workers are continuously exploited and life expectancy is declining, there’s no reason workers shouldn’t demand everything.
We now have the great opportunity of existing not in the midst of a single global crisis, but a “polycrisis.”
As historian Adam Tooze writes, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”
Yes, we are potentially overwhelmed and left adrift by the convergence of a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic, the unmasking of the deep impacts of climate change, the protracted armed conflicts in Ukraine and across Africa and the Middle East, and an uncertain transition to a future beyond neoliberal economics. But therein lies the opportunity.
Our climate future demands nothing less than a transformation of our political economy to focus on human needs over shareholder returns. Where better to start than a reimagination and recalibration of our relationship to capital and production, to the amount of time we are compelled to spend doing what Americans do best, which is to say, work?
This summer, the United Auto Workers, led by its first popularly elected president, Shawn Fain, began its next contract campaign with the Big Three. A union whose strength has been gutted by decades of deindustrialization couldn’t be blamed if it chose, in a moment of enormous industry change, to mount a purely defensive fight. But the union seems to be rising to the moment and is clearly going on the offensive.
“We have to work longer and harder just to maintain the same standard of living that we had before,” Fain recently told his union. “That means more time at work, and less time living life. That means missing Little League games and family reunions. It means less time outdoors, less time traveling, less time pursuing our passions and our hobbies.”
Fain is demanding a 32-hour workweek, a reasonable demand that has the potential to help meet part of our current crises. And we should all be asking for more. In a time of record corporate profits, when workers are continuously exploited and life expectancy is declining, there’s no reason workers shouldn’t demand everything.
A 20-hour workweek would require the kind of shift in economic common sense necessary for a future worth living. Our ability to imagine that livable climate future depends upon our ability to connect with each other, to take care of the basic needs of our society, to create meaningful work for all. In a polycrisis, we can’t tinker around the edges. To create the world we need, we must make the kind of demands that can deliver real transformation.
Of course, we’ll take 32 today. And we’ll use those eight hours to organize for tomorrow.
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