Tell the Bosses We're Coming. Shaun Richman

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СКАЧАТЬ of risking the boss’s ire with a public demonstration of union support, they’re going to chicken out—or worse—when the most crucial test comes along.

      Meanwhile, if your rank-and-file activists are trained on a 4-point assessment scale that includes an “unreliable supporter” option, you wind up with funny debriefs:

      “She signed the card but it took five minutes to convince her to wear the button. She’s a 4.” “All right. Good observation. But, since today’s test was signing the card and wearing the union button, she has passed the most recent test, so that makes her a 2 tonight. But check back tomorrow and make sure she’s still wearing the button and we can revisit the assessment.”

      In the AFT charter school organizing division, which I headed, we imported a number of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ tactics that I learned from my time working for its New York local. We also marched on the boss to announce that we had formed a union. This always meant negotiating with the organizing committee about what it would look like for their particular school. Sometimes the committee wanted to politely schedule a meeting with the principal or board chair and have a small elected delegation present their petition and explain why they’d chosen to organize. Other times, the committee wanted all union supporters to corner the principal at the start of the day to do the same. I had no particular religion on the question except that there must be some kind of march on the boss.

      We also had all the supporters we could muster write a short testimonial about why they were forming a union. This turned our “beautiful people” lit piece—for most unions, pictures and names of union supporters designed to give them some legal protection and to signal to the boss that the workers are not afraid—into a brochure, if not a book.

      We demanded voluntary recognition, rarely ran NLRB elections, and filed tons of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges. Escalating actions could be basically shutting down school board meetings with parents and community allies and eventually preparing for strikes.

      We won most of the campaigns we took on. But we walked away from many times more schools because we couldn’t get the workers to the high level of support necessary to win in a union recognition process that is rigged in favor of recalcitrant employers.

      And overall, the AFT did not grow. In fact, we lost density. State takeovers of urban districts like New Orleans and Detroit resulted in the legal fiction of “new” school districts that were carved out of the union contracts. The proliferation of charter schools is little more than the educational equivalent of “offshoring” to avoid the reach of the union. In higher education, colleges and universities used their “managements rights” to shift most of the workforce to part-time instructors, who have little or no job security or benefits, to erode union power. The AFT’s strong commitment to an organizing model did help the union preserve much of its membership and relative power, particularly in the face of a coordinated corporate attack under the guise of “education reform.”

      Finally, let’s look at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Probably more than any other union, SEIU devoted substantial resources to organizing. It’s fashionable on the left to take swipes at their more staff-driven model, and perhaps a tendency to cut corners on the organizing model in some campaigns. However, unlike many other unions, they organize on a much larger scale, chasing units of thousands of workers at a time. And they actually grew! SEIU gained at least one million members in the twenty year period leading up to 2010.³ But then the Supreme Court aimed directly at knocking out their public sector bargaining unions. The Harris v. Quinn and Janus v. AFSCME decisions cost the union a lot of the membership gains they had managed to eke out in a decade of organizing.

       Rethinking the System

      Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to make some kind of “why bother?” argument. The unions that are using the organizing model should continue to do so and certainly be willing to make room for improvement. And the unions that have not embraced an organizing model like Bronfenbrenner has laid out should do so and commit serious resources to running strategic comprehensive campaigns.

      But if every union was spending down their treasuries on organizing model comprehensive campaigns, we wouldn’t grow on the scale or at the speed that we need. Because the system makes us organize shop by shop, company by company, and industry by industry and gives employers every opportunity to delay, to impede, and to refuse, we just wouldn’t get to the kind of union density levels that are needed for the system to actually work the way it was once intended by its New Deal architects as a federally enforced check on rampant inequality and an impediment to periodic economic depressions. When unions represented one in every three jobs in the economy, collective bargaining was the rising tide that lifted all boats.⁴ And because unions organize from positions of strength—that is, within industries in which we already have a toe-hold or in ancillary or related industries—the long decline in union density means that we would be hard-pressed to expand into the essential areas of the economy in which unions are all but locked out, such as information technology and financial services.

      The breathless focus that many on the left have on the organizing model often carries with it an implied oppositionalism. Sometimes it comes with an explicit challenge against union leadership. Maybe here and there a union’s leadership is an impediment to change, and fresh blood and a new approach to the work would be helpful. But, in general, I don’t think pushing out one set of leaders for another is much of a solution.

      I’m of a similar mind as the character President Roslin in the television series Battlestar Galactica who kept a running tally on her whiteboard of surviving humans following a robot holocaust. There are so few of us left doing this very hard work of trying to keep the labor movement going that it takes a lot for me to conclude that someone needs to get pushed out the airlock. All leaders would be trapped by the same system. I’m much more interested in education with a line of critical inquiry that has little patience for easy answers or sacred cows.

      One of the shibboleths among leftists in the labor movement is to bemoan the Cold War purge of Communist activists as a singular tragedy and a key turning point for the labor movement. With the bravest leaders and organizers gone, the thinking goes, unions slid into business unionism and stopped organizing.

      That’s just a bunch of romantic hooey. It’s a close cousin to the idea that some sort of wholesale leadership change is the magic solution to our problems. What the purging of the Communists did that actually was and continues to be detrimental to union strategy is that it purged the last bulwark of disagreement from the labor movement. I don’t even necessarily mean good, wise, or principled disagreement. Just simple disagreement: looking at a challenge or opportunity and proposing an alternative plan. With the Communists dispatched, the AFL and the CIO merged, and a broad consensus developed that our peculiar union shop is simply what unions are, and what they should be.

      For example, as states went “Right to Work,” unions all basically accepted the rottenness of the free rider problem. There was no serious debate, at least not until recently, about whether to continue to accept the burdens of exclusive representation. As the courts proved to be incredibly hostile to workers’ rights and NLRB decision-making, unions mostly accepted that the courts suck and should be avoided. There’s been remarkably little debate about developing our own proactive legal strategies for winning a stronger constitutional basis for workers’ rights.

      There’s been a remarkably broad acceptance of the rigged rules of the system. And organizers are actually some of the worst about this. There’s this macho culture of telling workers, “Well, the boss is allowed to do that; he’s allowed to fire you. That’s why you need a union.” As if the idea that the default status of workers (at least, of non-union workers) is at-will and the ever-present threat of termination shouldn’t at least be debated and possibly challenged.

      There СКАЧАТЬ