Revitalizing Unions,Rebuilding Labor Studies

Union Revitalization and Immigrant Organizing

Alongside rising inequality and economic instability, global migration is at an all-time high, with more than 232 million people working abroad in 2013 according to the International Labour Organization. While states have loosened the regulations that allow investors to move money and jobs across borders, they have in places tightened the restrictions for people who move from one part of the world to another. This gross imbalance enhances the degree to which migrant workers are vulnerable to unscrupulous labor contractors, abusive employers, and anti-immigrant movements that blame them for problems caused by global capitalism.

Mobilizing Against Inequality is based on research from four countries, conducted over 4 years, examining the potential for unions and worker organizations to organize immigrants and challenge the neoliberal regulations that provide so many rights to employers and so few to migrant workers. The book contains 9 chapters, written by 11 authors. Two chapters set the stage, giving the broader context regarding the relation between unions, immigrant workers, and the changing labor force. The next four chapters provide the case studies on the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The final three chapters offer comparisons, a few notes on comparative methodology, and policy implications.

Each of the case studies highlights similar dynamics: a growing share of foreign-born workers, union decline, and neoliberal attacks on the working class. Each case study also shows that, while unions may have been slow to adapt, many are now adopting innovative organizing tactics to address these challenges. In particular, unions are building alliances with community organizations and other social movements and utilizing tactics from those arenas to organize precarious low-wage workers.

Lee H. Adler and Daniel Cornfield provide an overview of immigration trends and policy in the United States and then profile five campaigns that highlight the potential and challenges of immigrant worker organizing. These include carwash workers in Los Angeles, roofers in Arizona, taxi cab drivers and poultry workers in Tennessee, and the work done by the union LIUNA to work with day laborers. These cases varied in scale, home country of the immigrant population, organizing strategy, and immigrant legal status. For example, the car wash campaign brought together the United Steelworkers and AFL-CIO with community allies to launch an industry-wide strategy that resulted in the historic first union contract in the industry. Although it impacted fewer than 100 workers, the authors conclude that it was a success because it built new lasting alliances between coalition partners and established the clear commitment on behalf of the labor movement to listening to, and working with, immigrant workers. In another case, Muslim Somali poultry workers in Tennessee worked with their union to include the holiday Eid al-Fitr as one of the paid holidays in the collective bargaining agreement. This is perhaps a small victory, particularly as it was won as a replacement for another day, but it symbolized a historic step on the part of U.S. unions in recognizing and fighting for benefits for particular immigrant groups.

Lowell Turner argues that, despite the many challenges, “the French labor movement refuses to die” (p. 82). Instead, Turner points to numerous examples of the unions’ willingness to mobilize, including on behalf of immigrant workers, through high-profile strikes and occupations of restaurants and other workplaces, coalition-building through the sans papiers movement, and sustained support efforts in several campaigns and organizing drives.

Unlike France and the United States, Maite Tapia points out that the United Kingdom “has not been a traditional country of immigration” because for many decades it was characterized by net emigration. Although the country began recruiting migrant workers in the post WWII period, the trade unions did not develop an active organizing approach to immigrant workers until relatively recently. Even then, experiences vary, with the most common approach being the provision of services such as English classes. Tapia profiles five case studies where unions have taken a more active approach to organizing immigrant workers and around immigration issues. This includes an effort to organize cleaners that grew out of a living wage campaign, an effort to prevent the election of right-wing politicians, campaigns to unionize immigrant care workers, and the establishment of a migrant workers branch of the GMB. Four of these efforts were successful. For example, the cleaners campaign organized 2,000 cleaners and established a new cleaners branch within TGWU/Unite. However, migrant organizing is often hampered by employer intimidation, interunion rivalries, and funding challenges, as most efforts have depended on raising external funds.

In their study of German trade unions, Lee H. Adler and Michael Fichter highlight some of the positive history and current examples of inclusive labor organizing as the large unions and federations have mostly pursued a broad strategy of integrating migrant workers into union and labor institutions. For example, the unions pushed to allow foreign workers to participate in Works Councils. However, anti-immigrant movements have been growing in Germany, and some data suggest that, in recent years, the migrant worker union membership may be declining more quickly than union membership overall. It may be difficult for the unions to maintain an inclusive approach to organizing in the context of growing rightwing and nationalist movements, particularly as German workers fear job loss as the EU expands to incorporate more countries. Furthermore, in Chapter 7, Gabriella Alberti, Jane Holgate, and Lowell Turner note that the German unions have stressed that foreign workers must learn the German language as a precondition for gaining full labor rights. This may explain why there are fewer cases of German unions organizing newly arrived, undocumented, precarious migrant workers in the ways that we see in other countries.

Alberti, Holgate, and Turner also offer some commentary on methods for doing cross-comparative analysis. Noting that much of the union revitalization literature is country specific, and that it can be difficult to compare countries given the national industrial relations systems that vary so greatly, the authors suggest an alternate approach. They argue that comparative work in this field cannot be limited to country as the unit of analysis and that, instead, scholars might examine industry or immigration regime to get a broader picture. In this chapter, the authors compare pairs of cases based on different union strategies within and across countries and attempt to draw lessons at the crossnational, intranational, and international level. Through various comparisons, they develop six key findings, including that unions are increasingly coming to see that they must take seriously the need to organize immigrant workers. Where unions are weak or absent, labor organizations can still experience some successful campaigns, particularly by focusing on zone or industry rather than a single firm, strategic targeting within subcontracting chains, and recognizing and understanding ethic identities and cultures.

In the two concluding chapters, Janice Fine and Jane Holgate, and Daniel Cornfield, lay out some lessons derived from the case studies. In both chapters, the authors assert that unions in the global north must continue to find ways to engage immigrant workers and movements. They also note that, historically, this kind of engagement has been shaped by larger macroeconomic conditions and immigration policy. However, it is crucial for unions to find ways to interact with immigrant movements and nonunion worker organizations. This includes finding new ways to function, including being open to experimentation, working with local community organizations, and finding ways to engage with and relate to campaigns even when they are not necessarily connected to unionization efforts.

Mobilizing Against Inequality offers a close look at the ways in which unions in four global north countries have attempted to adapt to changing labor markets and organize immigrant workers. In all cases, unions face attacks in the face of neoliberalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Despite the challenges, the cases offer some hope that unions can find ways to adapt and revitalize, rebuilding the labor movement in a new direction. Unlike many edited volumes, this one is solid not just for the individual chapters but the ways in which the cases and chapters fit together. It is clear that the project was a collective one. All authors are in dialogue with other authors in the book, making for an easy read and consistent narrative.

Of course, the story of immigrant organizing and movements is not just a global north one. The volume cries out for a companion study of case studies from the global south—both the immigrant-sending countries and immigrant-receiving countries (some countries, such as India, are both). To develop a full analysis of migration patterns and potential for organizing, we must examine the causes of migration as well as opportunities to improve conditions in sending-country economies and engage in projects that link workers on both sides of the immigration chain. For example, the American Federation of Teachers in the United States has been developing relationships with teachers unions in the Philippines. This started as an effort to protect the rights of Filipino guest worker teachers in the United States but has grown into a more ambitious project that is attempting to find solutions for teachers, students, and teacher unions in the Philippines as well. It would be too much to ask this particular book to address the global south campaigns as well, but the volume may have been enriched from incorporating more assessment along these lines.

One exciting aspect of the book is that it links with a Web site that provides a greater number of case studies than found in the book. At http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/workerinstitute/mai/Case-Studies.html, readers can get detailed information about more than a dozen cases in the four countries, such as the U.K. case, “UNISON and the Filipino Care Workers Campaign, 2007,” by Maite Tapia or “The Case of Somali Workers in Middle Tennessee: Taxi Drivers and Poultry Workers,” by Dan Cornfield. The site also provides valuable literature reviews, links to relevant organizing unions and networks, and links to other research.

Revitalizing Labor Studies

In addition to its contributions as a research volume, Mobilizing Against Inequality also reflects on the changing nature and potential of the field of labor studies. The research for the book was carried out under the auspices of several institutions, primarily with the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. Over the life of the project, some of these scholars also helped develop the Cornell Worker Institute, which, according to their Web site, “brings together researchers, educators and students with practitioners in labor, business and policymaking to confront growing economic and social inequalities, in the interests of working people and their families.”

Richard Dwyer (1977) characterized several phases in the life of labor studies, beginning with the worker education period in the early 1900s, when programs like the Rand School of Social Science, or later, the Brookwood Labor College, were founded to provide general education to workers so that they would be educated and skilled to run their own economy in a postcapitalist world. After the National Labor Relations Act was passed and unions grew dramatically in the late 1930s and 1940s, labor education programs emerged to train union staff and leaders how to administer their organizations. These programs focused on skills such as grievance handling and collective bargaining. The third period turned to labor studies, when union leaders began demanding credentials for their work and the field became professionalized. The University of Massachusetts-Amherst created the first master’s degree in labor studies in 1964.

Over the past few decades, labor studies programs have been undergoing further transition. Whereas they once focused more heavily on union administration, the range of courses, programs, and research projects at labor studies departments such as the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Rutgers University, University of California, the Murphy Institute at the City University of New York, and Cornell University have broadened. While not abandoning their connection to unions, these programs could perhaps now be called labor movement studies. They have opened up to a more expansive notion of labor studies that goes beyond traditional unions and collective bargaining agreements and includes worker centers, immigrant rights movements, labor-community coalitions, and international labor solidarity efforts. In part, this evolution was perhaps a natural, and necessary, transformation due to the decline in union density and power, but it reflects the growing significance of nontraditional worker rights organizations and movements as well as the fact that many unions have been open to experimentation and innovative approaches. As Ana Avendaño points out in the introduction to Mobilizing Against Inequality, “only 7 percent of the world’s formal economy is organized into free and independent trade unions” (p. vii).

This shift in labor studies has not come without a price. Over the past 10 years, labor programs at several universities have come under attack. In some cases, labor studies programs were singled out for cuts or elimination under the guise of budget issues. For example, for several years California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would exercise a line item veto to cut funding for the University of California labor studies programs.

In a few cases, these attacks were openly political. Around 2007–2009, the Landmark Legal Foundation issued complaints with the State Attorney General in California, Massachusetts, Florida, and elsewhere, calling for an investigation of public university labor centers. They charged that the labor centers were using public funds to promote union organizing. In early 2014, the Michigan State Senate passed a budget proposal which would penalize any public university $500,000 for offering any labor studies program or teaching labor-related classes. Most of these attacks were stopped before doing major harm, but nonetheless they required labor studies faculty and staff to expend resources and political capital to defend their existence.

The formation of the Cornell Worker Institute represents one of the examples of academics and practitioners fighting the attacks on labor studies by not only defending existing institutions but also by expanding and growing in a way that broadens their mission. Just as a few traditional unions have done, labor studies programs are looking to experiment with new models and initiatives, growing beyond the boundaries of the traditional trade union movement.

Similarly, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Labor Center has moved in a direction of working with worker organizations in addition to trade unions. Last year, they hired a professor of practice to conduct applied research and work with local and state unions and worker centers. The labor center is also a supporter of a newly formed worker center in western Massachusetts, founded by one of their alumni.

At the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education, City University of New York, professors Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott supervised a team of graduate students to conduct case studies of 13 alt-labor organizations in New York City. After a year of research and writing, the cases were compiled into a volume titled New Labor in New York.

These are just a few of the ways in which labor studies scholars and centers are adapting to a changing labor force and attempting to revitalize in the same vein as trade unions. In each of these three examples, senior scholars have worked with young scholars in an effort to maintain continuity in the field. As Dwyer points out, the content and character of labor studies have changed alongside changes in movements. As traditional trade unions adapt and grow, if haltingly, to orient to a changing labor market and global economy, so too have labor studies programs in the United States. No longer focused solely on the world of formal industrial relations and collective bargaining, labor studies scholars are expanding their research and teaching to include immigrant, precarious, and marginalized workers, along with nontraditional and alternative forms of worker organizing. Mobilizing Against Inequality assesses some of the cases in which global north unions are doing the same. While not all positive cases, the book offers hope that labor unions can remain relevant to broad sections of the working class, and ideally, lay the foundation for the workers movement to provide a necessary countermovement to the crisis of capitalism.