Abstract
Those looking for an analysis of recent trends and events in the USA’s beleaguered trade-union movement will do no better than Save Our Unions, by the long-time union organiser, socialist, and labour journalist Steve Early. Save Our Unions is not another dreary look at declining union membership and concessionary agreements. Nor it is a rerun of the by now superannuated debate between the ‘serving model’ and the ‘organising model’ as the universal salvation of organised labour in neoliberal America. Rather, Early turns an experienced and critical eye on what is actually happening beneath the conventional industrial relations radar. In this highly readable volume, we find not only fading confidence in labour-management co-operation schemes, but the new forces implementing different approaches meant to fit situations that unions have not always found familiar. Early in the book, we meet the ‘unorganised’ fast food workers who struck at McDonalds and other major chains in cities across the USA in 2012 and 2013. Though supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they were not union members, and nor were they seeking traditional union recognition or formal agreements from their employers. Rather, they have merged into a movement known as ‘Fight for Fifteen’, demanding a US$15 minimum wage. No doubt the long-range goal is union organisation, but the methods are more those of social movements than those of traditional trade unions. Similar tactics have been used by workers in the huge concentrations of warehouses at the centre of the USA’s reshaped just-in-time logistics system, found near Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New Jersey. Again with some backing from unions, these workers have formed their own workplace organisations, and have taken various levels of action to win small gains and grow.
In seeking possible ways out of organised labour’s decline, Early also looks inside the more conventional unions; offering a history of the rank-and-file rebellions that have often appeared in US labour history. Starting with the Miners For Democracy in the 1970s, which threw out the corrupt leaders of the United Mine Workers, the author takes us through the 1990s, when the Teamsters for a Democratic Union-backed reformer Ron Carey beat an equally corrupt clique in one of America’s biggest unions. Both rebellions eventually saw grassroots mobilisations beat back attacks by powerful employers for a time. Early also looks at more recent rank-and-file upsurges in large local unions of the Teamsters, Communications Workers, and Machinists, among others. All these rebellions reveal a strong desire for change from below, and an ongoing, possibly accelerating trend. Most notable of these was the 2010 victory of the grassroots Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the Chicago Teachers Union, the second-largest local teachers union in the country. This electoral overthrow was followed by one of the best organised strikes in recent years, when in 2012, more than 27,000 teachers beat back most of the tidal wave of neoliberal ‘reforms’ proposed by the mayor and backed by the Obama administration.
What all of these rank-and-file movements have in common is a commitment to union democracy, a rejection of the labour-management co-operation ethos of the last three decades, a greater willingness to employ militant direct action tactics, and the construction of dense workplace organisation – in other words, a turning away from the norms of US ‘business unionism’. The driving force behind these movements, and the author’s leading candidate for trade union revival, are what Early calls ‘the stewards army’: ‘the tens of thousands of shop stewards who still form the backbone of the labor movement [and who] remain key to its revitalization today’.
Save Our Unions also examines organising trends and occasional union competition in a number of key industries, notably healthcare, hotels, retail, warehousing/logisitcs, and wireless telecommunications. The stories sometimes get complex, as with the multi-union competition to represent healthcare workers; but once again, there is a thread of analysis here. These industries are among those that have grown and been transformed as the contours of the economy and workforce have changed in the last thirty years. The USA’s 5,000 ‘community’ hospitals, for example, have gone from being local charities to becoming part of corporate chains operating for profit. With this change has come ‘lean’ production methods and pressures on the workforce once associated with manufacturing. These, in turn, have increased the demand for union representation. All these industries represent what is new, growing, and changing in the US economy. They are for the most part ‘landlocked’ industries less susceptible to ‘offshoring’ and international competition. Early, however, is aware of the many obstacles to unionisation that are also growing there and elsewhere, from intransigent employers to ‘Tea Party’ zealots in high political offices. There are few optimistic predictions and no triumphalist proclamations in Save Our Unions. Instead, there is a great deal of useful critical analysis.
The politics of US labour are viewed mainly through a focus on the fight for healthcare reform, particularly by those unions willing to go beyond the limitations and problems presented by ‘Obama Care’. Here, the lens of critical analysis is brought down on the fight for a Canadian-style ‘single-payer health care system’ in the small state of Vermont. This is a state in which independent left and labour politics have achieved a sort of ‘balance-of-power’ prominence. The Vermont Progressive Party, which has operated for some thirty years, holds seats in the state legislature as well as in some cities. Along with several unions, the Vermont Workers Centre, and the state’s Democratic governor, the Progressives have fought for a single-payer plan called Green Mountain Care, after the state’s nickname, in which the state would be the sole insurer and healthcare free on delivery. Again, the obstacles are great and the outcome uncertain. One final thing that makes Vermont’s left and labour politics unique is that this state’s electorate has sent independent socialist Bernie Sanders to the US Congress for thirty years, most recently as a US Senator. One can be sceptical of whether there can be, as Early puts it, ‘Two, Three, Many Vermonts!’ in the near future, but the examination of how these radical Vermonters organise is worth taking seriously.
Save Our Unions was published in 2013, but is far ahead of most attempts to look at the changes in the US trade-union movement. For those who wish to understand what is churning beneath the ‘business union’ surface of US labour, Save Our Unions offers a one-of-a-kind crash course.