Abstract
Albert Einstein was reputed to have said that continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results was the definition of insanity. He wasn’t referring to the labor movement, but it would seem to be an apt assessment of how poorly the idea of collective bargaining has fared since at least Ronald Reagan’s election. In truth, union membership and political influence were in decline before the PATCO strike. But it was not until AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka came to Chicago in 2013 and declared that “the basic system of worker representation is failing to meet the needs of America’s working men and women by every critical measure” that old models of union behavior were no longer the default organizing mode.
Some unions had always been creative about how they behaved, and many used innovative techniques to win organizing campaigns and good labor agreements. It’s not that everything that organized labor was doing was failing—just too much of it. The fault of labor’s retrenchment lay in many areas. First among them was that the political climate turned decidedly hostile. Labor’s enemies were diverse but united behind a “union-free” ideology. Legal protections for union organizing and bargaining were never robust, but since the 1970s, federal attacks on the National Labor Relations Board and state restrictions on public- and private-sector unionism have degraded respect for “industrial democracy.” Additionally, trade agreements shipped millions of union jobs someplace else, and fiscal policy shifted increased shares of wealth into fewer already well-provisioned hands, which squeezed the life out of public budgets, further eroding the benefits of unionization.
As the external threats multiplied, however, organized labor mostly accepted concessions and, more fatefully, defaulted to the familiar practice of accepting changes over which it had no influence. When the ground was collapsing underfoot, the labor movement assumed a fortress mentality. Live to fight another day became the battle cry of a badly damaged army of workers. Perhaps the biggest loss was the conceptual flattening of collective bargaining. From a powerful process for creating economic prosperity and democratic problem solving, collective bargaining was reduced to an inconvenience. While employers had mostly only learned to tolerate what they couldn’t avoid, the idea of democracy in the workplace had once held out the promise that all labor could be valued and that the rules we work under could contribute to a broadly shared prosperity. But truthfully, it seems that only unions and groups that stand for workers see the future in such inclusive shades.
Yet despite repeated predictions of labor’s ultimate demise, unions have proven to be remarkably durable institutions. Fight remains. The cause is no less right. But how does labor respond to falling rates of unionization, the passage of right to work laws, the election of antilabor political officials, and the inactivity of too many rank-and-file members this time? Additionally, maybe unionization, in its conventional and legally crafted form, needs to make room for and support other worker organizations and advocacy approaches. Are the remarkable benefits of collective bargaining only possible within the confines of labor law? And is a labor agreement the only virtuous product of worker organizing? In this special issue of LSJ, we present four case studies of alternative approaches to representing the collective interests of workers. Two of them involve unions, while the others engage other means. The articles are drawn from a series of papers on the theme “New Models of Worker Representation,” presented at the 2014 United Association for Labor Education Conference.
In “Victory at Pomona College: Union Strategy and Immigrant Labor,” Victor Silverman examines how a UNITE HERE local organized dining hall workers. The drive was successful, but the importance of the story is how it illustrates the obstacles to organizing low-wage immigrant workers employed by powerful institutions opposed to unionization. Silverman asks often-unexplored questions, like what accounts for the union’s fortunes when labor wins. He also provocatively claims that “the limitations of the campaign and missteps by the workers and the union made the process longer and more painful than it might otherwise have been.” Nonetheless, “in the end,” the dining hall workers “won their union and their contract, despite mistakes on their part and that of UNITE HERE.” Their empowering experience, Silverman contends, stands as an example of what makes the labor movement a movement.
A second article by Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson provides us with an account of how foreign consulates, working with national labor unions, can operate as a defense for undocumented workers. Their article, “A New Approach to Migrant Labor Rights Enforcement: The Crisis of Undocumented Worker Abuse and Mexican Consular Advocacy in the United States,” offers a critical assessment of transnational labor advocacy and labor rights enforcement in the United States through diplomatic institutions. Their account details how the Mexican consular network launched an annual “Labor Rights Week” to promote the rights of its 11.5 million citizens living in the United States. With the support of labor unions sensitive to the needs of low-wage immigrant workers who inhabit a “precarious and vulnerable labor market position,” the consulate efforts involved navigating a “complex web of relationships with U.S. labor standards enforcement agencies and immigrant labor advocates.” Bada and Gleeson’s article suggests a new transnational partnership for the regulatory enforcement of labor standards in the United States and beyond.
A third study by Kevin Riley and Linda Delp also addresses the potential of using regulatory enforcement to buttress worker rights. Titled “Worker Engagement in the Health and Safety Regulatory Arena under Changing Models of Worker Representation,” it focuses on the efforts of a labor-community partnership to confront violations of workplace health and safety standards by employers of nonunion workers in low-wage jobs. Here we find a “worker engagement model” featuring workers and worker advocates participating in the regulatory arena “absent union representation.” The authors argue that this approach constitutes a potentially viable form of issue representation that allows nonunion workers a voice by using the regulatory process.
Finally, Bruce Nissen and Rick Smith present an innovative case of a union representing workers well beyond their membership. In “A Novel Way to Represent the Interests of Workers: The People’s Budget Review in St. Petersburg, Florida,” the authors demonstrate how a public-sector union, Service Employees International Union, took advantage of the obligations that city governments have to approve budgets, to conduct a “People’s Budget Review (PBR).” The PBR did what union protesting and legislative maneuvering in many states and cities has been unable to do; it reversed “austerity budgeting.” It also convinced St. Petersburg’s city council to raise taxes to avoid cuts in services and to put funds aside for “disadvantaged youth jobs programs, neighborhood development grants, and programs to reduce poverty in the primarily African American south side.” Here then is a story of a union, leveraging itself as an institution, to achieve major gains for not only its members but also working-class people across the city.
The case studies presented in this issue represent only a small slice of the possible options for workers who wish to act collectively. They share in common that millions of workers badly need representing. Each of the articles also recognizes that the current labor-management system doesn’t work for a majority of America’s nontraditional, contingent, temporary, low-wage, retail and contracted workers. Together the cases suggest that organized labor, worker advocacy groups, and governments are essential to reconstituting a labor movement. The collected works also implicitly recognize that Einstein was right.