Abstract
Labor activists and scholars have been on parallel tracks for the last forty years. Activists have steadfastly fought to organize workers to improve wages and working conditions even as union membership has plummeted, wages have stagnated, and work has become increasingly precarious. Meanwhile, scholars (many of whom are former or current labor activists) have been dutifully analyzing the latest campaigns for that glimmer of hope that labor’s plight might be turning around, and they have been theorizing how even the smallest victories might reveal key strategies to labor’s revival.
The latest addition to this genre is an edited volume titled No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement in a New Economic Age. Through seventeen chapters in which both scholars and activists analyze different types of labor organizations, movements, and campaigns, the book examines an array of strategies for advancing labor’s cause, depending on the industry, workers, and labor markets in question. The editors group the chapters into four uneven sections: Building Organizations; Bargaining; State and Local Policy; and Working Up the Chain.
The first section, Building Organizations, is by far the longest, encompassing the first half of the book. Of the eight chapters in this section, the first five focus on workers’ centers, with four examining some aspect of the immigrant workers’ centers about which Janice Fine wrote her 2006 book Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. The material in these four chapters is interesting. However, the introductions to each cover so much of the same background material that one wonders if they couldn’t have been combined, especially since Fine coauthored two of them.
Two of the last three chapters in this first section revolve around more traditional union organizing. In fact, Jane McAlevey’s account of a successful organizing drive and strike for a first contract among nurses at the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia goes to great pains to demonstrate that successful organization-building is no different today than it was in 1950, when John Steuben published Strike Strategy. Regrettably, one of the key findings of a previous chapter on the job satisfaction of labor organizers reveals that they spend precious little of their time doing precisely the type of organization-building McAlevey makes clear is necessary for union success.
Slightly out of place in this section on organizing, Joseph A. McCartin’s chapter on “Innovative Union Strategies” does an admirable job categorizing the strategies modern labor activists are employing in a manner that incorporates most of the campaigns described in the rest of the book. It would have made good fodder for an introduction or conclusion to the book.
The second section of the book, Bargaining, only has two chapters. This is not surprising, considering the decline in unionized workplaces and the weakened state of the unions that remain. In fact, the two chapters both focus on finding ways for workers to regain lost bargaining leverage. One reviews modest successes public sector unions have had employing a strategy of “bargaining for the common good” by combining workers’ bread-and-butter issues with concerns shared by the general public in an effort to overcome arguments that public sector unions are a burden on taxpayers. The other chapter seeks to categorize some successes private sector workers have had bargaining through nontraditional means by broadening the scope of bargaining, bargaining with the “ultimate profiteer” when it is not the workers’ legal employer, and engaging in “community-driven bargaining,” which looks a lot like bargaining for the common good.
The three chapters in the third section on State and Local Policy offer the best examples of concrete, measurable advances for workers. As labor scholars know, public support for labor causes often exceeds workers’ capacities to mobilize and negotiate within their workplaces. And so we have seen a small wave of public policy initiatives to raise the minimum wage, create mandatory family and sick leave, and otherwise regulate the employment relationship, particularly in industries where workers are most precarious. Of course, as Chris Rhomberg points out in one of the volume’s more theoretically developed chapters, while these victories often come with the support of unions, they seldom expand collective bargaining or increase union membership.
The final section of the book, Working Up the Chain, is a bit of a catchall. The first two chapters suddenly shift focus from the United States to strategies for improving working conditions in the far-flung supply chains of U.S. manufacturers and retailers. Both these chapters essentially argue for codes of conduct to halt the race to the bottom. Yet they manage to fundamentally disagree with one another on a fundamental issue. The chapter on Worker-Driven Social Responsibility insists that such codes must put workers at the forefront of campaigns affecting their labor standards. The following chapter details campaigns to set labor standards without including the affected workers at all. The last two chapters then return focus to the United States. One argues that the efforts of the National Domestic Workers Alliance to raise working conditions among domestic workers might serve as a model for organizing other gig workers. The other concludes the volume by considering the plausibility and pitfalls of worker-owned cooperatives teaming with unions to return control and profits back to workers.
There are some really interesting chapters in the book, offering important analyses of current labor activism in a variety of areas. But the volume also serves as a reminder of just how bad things are for labor. As each chapter frames some small victory in its broader context, the reader is repeatedly bombarded with the grim reality that union density in the United States has dropped below 11 percent overall, and 6.5 percent in the private sector, for a litany of reasons almost too long to list: anti-union employer animus; anti-union public policy; a hostile Supreme Court; outdated labor laws; union inertia, globalization, neoliberalism, deverticalization and offshoring of supply chains, automation, the decline of the manufacturing sector, the rise of the service sector, the gig economy, temp work, decentralized workplaces, the rise of nontraditional employment relationships, and so forth.
Considering this overall decline of the labor movement, it is fair to ask whether the collection of labor successes recounted throughout the book are mere anomalies to the broader trend of union decline or the seeds of labor’s revival. And given the book’s overwhelming focus on campaigns, organizations, and workers that operate outside the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Act, are we to interpret this as an acknowledgment that traditional unions and collective bargaining are relics of the past? Is the next great wave of labor activism going to look completely different than the last? If so, how?
It would have been interesting to get the editors’ perspectives on these questions, as well as some guidance on how they would like us to interpret the contents of the book as a whole. All they tell us in the book’s five-page introduction is that the collection “demonstrates the breadth and depth of the creative search for leverage” (p. 6) in which labor activists are engaged and that it should “stand as a corrective to those who have been blithely insisting that the labor movement and worker organizations ran out of ideas and died 40 years ago.” For those of us who don’t need such a corrective, a theoretical frame from which to interpret the chapters and what they mean for the future of the labor movement would have been helpful.