A Feminist Political Economy Critique of ‘the Militant Minority’

Introduction

Amidst the recent upsurge in strike activity in the United States and Canada – driven primarily by teachers and other education workers – North American scholars and activists have refocused their attention on ‘rank and file’ workers as both the key to recent successes and the primary ingredient for revitalizing labour (Blanc, 2019; McAlevey, 2016; Uetricht, 2014). As well, union campaigns among gig economy workers in North America and Europe have generated interest in new organizing among workers in nonstandard forms of employment (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). In reflections on these developments, two manifestations of the ‘rank and file’ thesis – Kim Moody’s ‘The rank and file strategy’ (2000, 2019; see also Schiavonne, 2007) and authors broadly associated with the concept ‘the militant minority’ – have become particularly prevalent (Post, 2016; Uetricht and Eidlin, 2019).

Through a feminist political economy lens (Cameron, 1995; Forrest, 1995; Fudge, 2005; Fudge and Tucker, 2001; Fudge and Vosko, 2001a, 2001b; Vosko, 2000, 2002, 2019), this commentary reflects on recent interest in the role of rank and file mobilization in rebuilding the North American labour movement. The article raises questions about the lack of attention to – and at times dismissal of – institutional and legal reforms in some union renewal literature (Uetricht and Eidlin, 2019). It contends that many writers focusing on the role of union militancy and member mobilization have missed the seriousness of the institutional mismatch between North American labour law’s highly decentralized bargaining system – known in the literature as ‘Wagnerism’ after the American National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 – (Tucker, 2013), and contemporary labour markets. Feminist political economists’ critiques of the gendered biases of worksite-based systems of collective bargaining are used to show how this form of industrial relations has impeded unionization for workers in nonstandard and typically feminized forms of employment. Additionally, the article points to recent organizing efforts, scholarship and reforms, which could lead to forms of sectoral regulation and broader-based bargaining.

The ‘rank and file strategy’ and the ‘militant minority’

Writing on the importance of rank and file worker engagement and building an activist layer within the labour movement, which many refer to as the ‘militant minority’, has grown considerably over the past several years. Teachers and other public sector workers in North America are a focus of much of this work (Blanc, 2019; Uetricht, 2014), as is the role played by labour-community alliances in deepening the reach and effectiveness of unions (Black, 2018; McAlevey, 2016; Moody, 2007; Scheiderman and Martin, 2018). Additionally, research on organizing campaigns among workers in precarious forms of employment, particularly immigrant and migrant workers, has contributed important insights to this literature (Fine, 2006; Però, 2019; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). Across work contexts, debates about Kim Moody’s ‘The rank and file strategy’ (2000) have played out in union activist circles (Eidlin, 2019; Elliot-Negri, 2019; Evica, 2019; Forman, 2017; Moody, 2019) as well as in social movements (DSA Build, n.d.; Elbaum, 2019; Scheiderman and Martin, 2018).

The questions with which these various authors are grappling have a long scholarly history. To take only two closely related iterations, work on US union renewal (Bronfrenbrenner and Juravich, 1998; Kumar and Schenk, 2005; Milkman and Voss, 2004; Voss and Sherman, 2000) and critiques of the ‘labour aristocracy’, largely in the UK (Darlington and Upchurch, 2011; Hyman, 1989; Kelly, 1988; McIlroy, 2014; Weinbaum and Lafer, 2002), both previously traversed similar intellectual and political terrain. Moreover, exchanges in Canada concerned with ‘social unionism’ (Ross, 2008), or ‘social movement unionism’ (Camfield, 2011), have also raised important questions about how member engagement, union democratization and intensive organizing can contribute to union revitalization.

What sets the latest reflections on union strategy apart, or moves them beyond their predecessors, is their focus on two more clearly defined and related strategic concepts: the rank and file strategy and the militant minority. Kim Moody’s ‘The rank and file strategy’ (2000) provides a sort of working document for many union activists and thinkers in North America. In it, Moody traces the rise and decline of the American labour movement and focuses explicitly on questions of class consciousness. He writes that, ‘The gaping lack in the U.S. at this time is the lack of a sea of class-conscious workers for socialist ideas and organization to swim in’ (Moody, 2000: 3). On ‘the militant minority’, Uetricht and Eidlin (2019) offer the clearest distillation of thinking about the importance of an activist layer in the labour movement. In the present commentary, I take these two texts as helpful reference points for the broader writing about union strategy currently taking place.

Much as Croucher and Wood (2017) have highlighted in the British context, militant minority authors argue that a committed layer of activists played an important historical role in the early-to-mid 20th century North American labour movement. For example, Post (2016) draws heavily on examples of rank and file militancy from the pre-New Deal strike wave when Communists, Trotskyists and other radicals were instrumental in building the American labour movement. Uetricht and Eidlin (2019) devote considerable space to discussing the relationship between a segment of militant industrial workers and these workers’ approach to organizing during the same period. Moody (2000), as well, takes inspiration from Communist Party labour activists and the Trade Union Educational League. These authors hope to draw contemporary lessons from the periods of massive working-class upsurges in the 1930s and 1960s (Moody, 2017; Post, 2016). Uetricht and Eidlin (2019), for example, trace the current and rather long-standing fall in American union density to the absence of such a militant layer of workers in the ranks of labour. They critique union responses to falling membership numbers – which they group into ‘policy’, ‘technical’ and ‘political fixes’ (Uetricht and Eidlin, 2019: 38–39) – and contend that rebuilding worker power at the workplace and community levels is the necessary prerequisite to labour movement revitalization.

Although I do not disagree necessarily with this argument – the historical examples on which these writers draw are both convincing and instructive – by focusing so heavily on organizing and the activist layer ostensibly integral to rejuvenating it, we underestimate how impactful the mismatch between North American labour law and the contemporary economy has become for workers. Radical scholars interested in union renewal frequently dismiss the notion that changes in the economy and their relationship to labour law have made unionization more difficult (McCartin, 2018). Yet, the growth of small workplaces and nonstandard employment, the spread of highly gendered and racialized precarious work, and the move towards vertically disintegrated supply chains, or ‘workplace fissuring’ (Weil, 2014), in the contemporary workplace, have combined to place substantial distance between the material conditions that many workers face and the regulatory edifice through which they must pass to actually form unions. Without a struggle aimed at overhauling the processes through which unions are certified, the level at which bargaining takes place, the scope of bargaining unit coverage, and the relationship between workers who gain access to collective bargaining and those dependent on statutory employment standards, there is little likelihood that even the most militant layer of committed activists could reverse what are now decades of union decline. Indeed, among scholars studying new organizing and representation forms – particularly among workers in precarious forms of employment – bypassing the formal channels of labour law is a common theme (see, for example, Fine et al., 2018). However, rather than celebrate this distance from the state, we should take this as further indication of the need to transform North American industrial relations to be more responsive to workers presently unable to access formal collective bargaining. There is thus a strong need to combine new organizing models with an attention to policy reforms which have the potential to create forms of representation, bargaining and regulation reflective of contemporary employment relations.

‘Wagnerism’ from a feminist political economy perspective

Feminist and critical political economists have produced a sizeable body of research criticizing the historical limitations, as well as the fossilized status, of the Wagner model of decentralized collective bargaining units in the United States and Canada (Burkett, 2013; Fudge and Glasbeek, 1994–1995; McCrorie, 1995; Slinn, 2014; Tucker, 2013; Vosko, 2000). The particularly feminist critique of ‘Wagnerism’ (Tucker, 2013) links the unique decentralization of bargaining units in North American industrial relations to the highly gendered bifurcation between labour law (industrial relations) and employment law (minimum statutory labour standards). The normative framework undergirding this legal bifurcation has historically given male workers greater access to collective bargaining and ‘industrial citizenship’ (Fudge, 2005), while women – presumed to be dependent on a male breadwinner and thus secondary labour market participants – came to depend on poorly enforced minimum labour standards legislation (Fudge and Vosko, 2001a, 2001b).

The primacy of decentralized, usually worksite-level, bargaining units is a uniquely North American phenomenon. In many other industrialized countries, workplace bargaining units are either subordinated to and/or work in concert with higher-level bargaining structures (Vosko, 2000), though a key feature of neoliberalization has been the undermining of more centralized systems of bargaining throughout Europe (Howell, 2016). Multi-employer master agreements in the United States and Canada never extended beyond large industrial concerns, such as those in auto and steel. Where pattern bargaining briefly prevailed, it resulted from sectionalized union strength and particular industry characteristics, such as monopolistic market power, and was never codified in labour law (Litchenstein, 2013).

In North America, decentralized bargaining units fit within a particular class and gender configuration forged during the 1930s and 1940s, but their persistence represents a considerable impediment to labour movement revitalization. The unions historically formed out of the organizing that many current scholars of the militant minority and rank and file strategy describe were accommodated within a particular capital accumulation strategy in the postwar period. Industrial relations and collective bargaining became inserted within a system of ‘weak Keynsianism’ (Tucker, 2013: 2), constituted by large, integrated production units able to make long-term commitments to employees. Indeed, as Linder (1990) and Andrias (2019) have demonstrated, the US government never intended for the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act and worksite-based unionization to extend beyond large, industrial workplaces; minimum employment standards were to be the extent of protection for the majority of American workers, particularly those presumed ‘secondary’ in the male breadwinner/female caregiver ‘gender contract’ (Vosko, 2010: 7). The process of regulatory bifurcation in Canada is quite similar (Cameron, 1995). Governments and unions crafted the machinery of certification, collective bargaining, grievance arbitration and the other day-to-day operations of industrial legality around the specificities of large, male-dominated, bargaining units. Moreover, what was an employer strategy to contain the spread of collective agreements and union power further generated cost disincentives for any union attempting to organize small bargaining units or build strength in sectors made up of many workplaces with few workers (O’Grady, 1992). By crafting industrial relations around the normative industrial workplace, governments raised the costs for unions attempting to service small bargaining units, and perhaps more importantly, disadvantaged workers in small workplaces (most often women) without having to explicitly prevent them from unionizing.

The gendered consequences of this system of industrial relations are clear: men, concentrated in large, industrial workplaces and resource extraction regions, had much greater access to unionization and its benefits. Indeed, as Forrest (1995) has succinctly argued about the Canadian context, industrial unionism became wedded to the preservation and extension of a system of remuneration centred on the ‘male breadwinner’, producing a union landscape with a decidedly gendered character (see also Meyer, 2016).

Although public sector unionization has increased the share of women in the labour movement, unions have had difficulty making headway in the private service sector – where women, racialized minorities and recent immigrants are overrepresented. As scholars of precarious employment have been pointing out for some time, the ‘marginal’ or nonstandard forms of employment historically associated with women and the racialized have grown and spread. Not only do they now represent a greater share of overall employment, they also shape the contours of employment relations more broadly (Vosko, 2000). Because collective bargaining and other social benefits were crafted around a normative and male-dominated ‘standard employment relationship’ (Vosko, 2010), fewer workers are now able to gain access to them. This remains the case for unionization in the private sector. In particular, the outmoded character of certification and collective bargaining are structurally unable to meet the needs of workers in precarious employment, who are more likely to be employed by small firms and more likely to be in nonstandard forms of employment (such as part-time, contract or temporary employment).

The current focus on education, health care and logistics as ‘strategic’ industries for organizing drives (McAlevey, 2016; Moody, 2017) could potentially reproduce in new form what has historically been a highly unequal, and sectorally limited, system of union access and coverage. Moreover, although Uetricht and Eidlin (2019) downplay the influence of vertical disintegration, supply chain growth and other forms of ‘workplace fissuring’, these are in fact serious obstacles when combined with the outmoded industrial relations machinery in North America. Most measures proposed to deal with the growth of small firms and subcontracting, such as various mechanisms for making lead firms responsible for the employment conditions of their contractors in common law regimes (Fine and Gordon, 2010; Hardy and Howe, 2015; Weil, 2009), address minimum labour standards, not access to collective bargaining coverage. Little effort has been made to increase worker voice in the realm of labour standards, or to break the wall between collective bargaining and minimum standards. To address this situation, where the vast majority of – and most vulnerable – workers remain institutionally prevented from the benefits of formal unionization or collective agreement coverage, policy changes to the ways unions are formed, the institutional levels at which they operate and the scope of collective agreement coverage are needed.

Discussion: Organizing in the contemporary workplace

The transformations in the political economy of North America, such as industrial deregulation, financialization and workplace fissuring (Choi and Spletzer, 2012; McCartin, 2018; Weil, 2014), have increasingly rendered access to formal unionization elusive for many workers. When considered together with the growth of various forms of nonstandard employment, which increased quite dramatically from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and then stabilized (Fudge and Vosko, 2001b), we see that workers encounter an economic landscape markedly different from the one in which collective bargaining rights were first established in the North American private sector. The barriers to unionization for many workers arise not from outmoded organizing models but from the disjuncture between the ‘scope of interest’ (Fudge, 1991) as it is defined in the regulations determining bargaining unit certification, on the one hand, and the size and collective strength that unionized workers would actually need to make significant material gains, on the other hand. Nonstandard forms of employment and variegated ownership structures combine to dis-organize workers in ways that make forming unions difficult in the private sector in both the United States and Canada, while also limiting what workers can accomplish if they do manage to certify a union.

The issues confronting workers in small workplaces and nonstandard forms of employment demand a renewed attention on how to restructure collective bargaining and labour market regulation more generally towards expanding the scope of bargaining and collective agreement coverage. The critique that feminist political economists have made of Wagnerism points to the areas where current thinking about union renewal falls short. As well, other recent research on sectoral regulation shows further promise. Kate Andrias’ (2016, 2019) work on the Fair Labor Standards Act’s early industrial committees and sectoral regulation demonstrates that broader-based bargaining is not foreign to American labour law and should serve as a catalyst for thinking about how sectoral bargaining could be shaped to the 21st century economy. Although the prospect of moving towards a sectoral bargaining system federally in the United States is remote at present, we are beginning to see some promising signs regionally – for example with the various statewide Domestic Workers Bill of Rights laws (Burnham and Mercado, 2018) – some of which provide for greater worker voice in the negotiation of standards (Office of Labor Standards, 2018). It remains to be seen how much power workers will manage to exert on these institutions, but by scaling up along occupational lines these Domestic Workers Standards Boards are an example of sectoral regulation that is both broad-based and attempts to bridge the divide between collective agency and statutory protections. A movement building towards a more encompassing – hopefully national – system of sectoral bargaining could learn and gain much from state/provincial or regional variations (Andrias, 2016).

It is common for proponents of the militant minority and rank and file strategy to be sceptical of policy solutions which aim to address labour’s problems (Galvin, 2017). Some scholars contend that unions and activists often pursue policy and technical solutions as a substitute for dealing with the more pressing issue of rebuilding the labour movement through intensive organizing (Uetricht and Eidlin, 2019). However, neatly counter-posing policy fixes to intensive organizing risks losing a fuller understanding of the structural features of our contemporary economy which make the legal channels available to workers seeking unionization increasingly unworkable.

By drawing on the tradition of Canadian feminist political economy, contemporary scholars of union renewal can provide a more theoretically informed account of how the regulation of unions articulates with our agenda for organizing and improving labour standards. Thinking about industrial relations, collective bargaining and unionization as separate and detached from the improvement and enforcement of labour standards for all workers is strategically inadequate (Galvin, 2017; see Vosko, 2000 for a critique of this separation). Promising organizing throughout the 21st century economy, particularly among gig workers and migrant workers, shows how labour standards and worker voice can often be improved through collective organization outside of the formal channels of labour law and formal collective bargaining (Fine, 2006; Però, 2019). However, these successes remain limited without greater emphasis on reforming industrial relations to grant formal access to collective bargaining for these workers. Ultimately, if we want a broad-based labour movement that is able to organize – and is accessible to – all workers in the contemporary economy, labour scholars need to address how collective action and labour market regulation can be brought into conversation with one other, and how collective action outside of the formal labour law regime can be brought to bear on reforming it.

The slow breakdown of Wagnerism in North America opens an opportunity to re-evaluate our system of industrial relations and worker organization more broadly. That union density never reached a majority of workers and was always characterized by gender and racial exclusions – wedded as it was to a now outdated normative employment model – should push us to reconsider the forms of collective representation North American workers seek to achieve. Looking to the pre-history of ‘Wagnerist’ industrial relations in North America, particularly to the proposed models of sectoral regulation and representation to which Andrias (2019) points, offers a window onto a potential future of labour regulation and worker voice. As well, taking cues from the tripartite models of sectoral bargaining dominant at the height of Nordic social democracy offers further insights into the advantages and challenges of such models of worker representation (Western, 1997). Although there are no pre-made panaceas, historical examples offer guidelines to future blueprints for a more just system of worker voice. Having the correct policy prescription of course does not solve the problem of devising strategies for how to achieve the desired outcome; however, understanding the limitations of the labour relations systems with which we presently contend and developing models for alternatives are vital steps in building systems of greater worker power.