By Harold Myerson
Celebrate Labor Day.
Since the emergence
of capitalism, workers seeking higher pay and safer workplaces have banded
together in guilds and unions to pressure their employers for a better deal.
That has been the approach of the American labor movement for the past 200
years.
That approach,
however, has begun to change. It’s not because unions think collective bargaining
is a bad idea but because workers can’t form unions any more — not in the
private sector, not at this time. There are some exceptions: Organizing
continues at airlines, for instance, which are governed by different organizing
rules than most industries. But employer opposition to organizing has become
pervasive in the larger economy, and the penalties for employers who violate
workers’ rights as they attempt to unionize are so meager that such violations
have become routine. For this and a multitude of other reasons, the share of
unionized workers in the private sector dropped from roughly one-third in the
mid-20th century to a scant 6.6 percent last year. In consequence, the share of
the nation’s economy constituted by wages has sunk to its lowest level since
World War II, and U.S. median household income continues to decline.
Unions face an
existential problem: If they can’t represent more than a sliver of American
workers on the job, what is their mission? Are there other ways they can
advance workers’ interests even if those workers aren’t their members?
(Editors note; See also post on labor and the immigration struggles on www.antiracismdsa.blogspot.com)
These questions are
anything but easy. Unions have begun to experiment with answers, even if, as
the unions readily admit, they’re a poor substitute for collective bargaining.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has detailed dozens of
organizers to fast-food joints in a number of cities: There have been one-day
strikes of fast-food workers in New York and Chicago, and such actions are
likely to spread. The goal isn’t a national contract with companies such as
McDonald’s but the eventual mobilization of enough such workers in sympathetic
cities and states that city councils and legislatures will feel compelled to
raise the local minimum wage or set a living wage in particular sectors. This
means, however, that the SEIU is helping to build an organization that won’t
produce anywhere near the level of dues-derived income that unions normally
accrue from collective-bargaining agreements. This new approach may not pencil
out, but neither does the slow decline in membership that labor will continue
experiencing unless it changes course.
The AFL-CIO has
embarked on a similar — and perhaps even more radical — roll of the dice.
“We’re not going to let the employer decide who our members are any longer,”
federation president Richard Trumka told me in a recent interview. “We’ll
decide.”
Instead of claiming
as its members only the diminishing number of workers in unions whose employers
have agreed to bargain, the AFL-CIO plans to open its membership rolls to
Americans not covered by any such agreements. The first part of this plan is to
expand its Working America program, a door-to-door canvass that has mobilized
nonunion members in swing-state working-class neighborhoods to back labor-endorsed
candidates in elections in the past decade. In New Mexico in recent months,
Working America enrolled 112,000 residents on their doorsteps in a campaign
that raised the minimum wage in Albuquerque and then in an adjacent county. But
the goal of such campaigns, says Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director,
isn’t just to win a raise; it’s also “to get as many workers as we can involved
in winning the raise and hope this carries over to specific workplace
activism.” They aim to build a workers’ movement — even though, as with the
SEIU campaign of fast-food workers, securing workplace contracts (and the kind
of membership dues that sustain unions) isn’t on the horizon.
The AFL-CIO’s plans
don’t end there. “We’re asking academics, we’re asking our friends in other
movements, ‘What do we need to become?’ ” says Trumka. “We’ll try a whole bunch of new forms of
representation. Some will work; some won’t, but we’ll be opening up the labor
movement.” Forming a larger organization of unions and other progressive groups
isn’t out of the question, though it would take time to pull off.
The labor movement that emerges from
these reforms might resemble a latter-day version of the Knights of Labor, the
workers’ organization of the 1880s that was a cross between a union federation,
a working-class political vehicle (it championed the eight-hour workday) and a
fraternal lodge. With working Americans unable — at least for now — to advance
their interests in their workplaces, unions are looking to mobilize workers to
wage those fights in other arenas. They don’t know exactly where they’re
headed, but they’ve begun to make their turn.
Editor’s Note: This article was
submitted to the Democratic
Left magazine but for reasons of
space only is published as a blog post. One other
article submitted to the magazine will follow, as well as articles that also
appear in the printed version.
Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect
and a columnist for The Washington Post.
He is a Vice Chair of DSA.
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