The Joseph S. Murphy Student Essay Prize Winner: Janus,the Roman God,and the Labor Movement

The Janus case pending before the Supreme Court is an important moment in the ongoing battle between labor and capital in America. Labor is anticipating the case with dread. Capital anticipates a major victory. The case is invoking familiar legal arguments such as constitutional questions, the rights of the individual, and fair pay for services rendered. There is, however, another lens through which one might view this case, a symbolic lens that may open up our collective thinking about the issues involved, clarifying the strategies that are needed to move forward.

The case revolves around Mr. Mark Janus, a public-sector worker from Illinois. He has declined to pay membership dues to join his workplace’s union in order to distance himself from the unions’ political actions. He protests that even agency fees, which pay for contract negotiation services, force him to support political positions to which he does not adhere, violating his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. However, Mr. Janus still expects to receive the wages and benefits of a union-negotiated contract.

It is expected that the conservative majority court will rule in Mr. Janus’ favor, allowing all public-sector workers to opt out of paying agency fees, while remaining covered under their contracts. It is expected that many workers will take advantage of this new option, depriving the labor movement of millions of dollars in financial support.

Labor is preparing to swallow another defeat. How can anything positive for the American working class be salvaged from this situation? For answers, let us ask Janus, not the state employee, but Janus the archetypal force, the Roman god.

The Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses is one of Western civilization’s oldest systems of symbolic thought. The gods and goddesses represent qualities of human nature, variously configured and embodied in its many characters. Janus is depicted as having two faces looking in opposite directions, one in the front of his head and one at the back. Janus was, thus, a god of wisdom and knowledge, as he could see both the past and the future simultaneously. ¹

Consulting the gods is not typical in labor movement sociopolitical analysis. This is unfortunate. Rational, statistical analyses can get us only so far. We can compute the latest percentage of union density in the workplace, but what does this tell us, really? Unions have always contracted and expanded. A symbolic method of inquiry can help us break out of overly familiar patterns of thinking. Symbolic analysis activates other regions of our brain, and of our collective memory and wisdom.

According to the Encyclopedia of Religion, Janus is the god of passages. ² This aspect reveals itself in many ways. Janus presides over the beginning of things, such as the rites of passage into a new stage of life, or the beginning of the year, and hence the name of our first month, January. Janus is, therefore, the divine aspect that is invoked at doorways, portals, thresholds, and gates, as one passes through from one place to another. These moments of transitions, when taken consciously, offer us an opportunity to reflect upon what is passing away and what is coming into being. It also gives us an opportunity to choose which threads of the past we want to carry with us, and to choose what kind of future we will weave into being.

If we untangle the various threads of the labor movement’s history, there is much to celebrate. We see a past when the working class expressed spontaneous and overwhelming solidarity during the great sit-down strikes in Detroit that eventually created the United Auto Workers (UAW). We see a past where the Knights of Labor organized producer and consumer cooperatives. We see the legacy of the International Workers of the World that stood for all working people, unionized or not, and in the present, we see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers standing for the human rights of farm workers.

Looking to the labor movement’s past, we also see many things to regret. We see conservative unions that refused to grant membership to the unskilled, women, and workers of color. We see union leadership, seduced by association with the political class that has bargained away workers’ lives for a few crumbs of secular power. More recently, we have seen some unions that are willing to risk a sustainable future for the temporary gains of a few short-term jobs.

. . . [T]oday many labor unions are mere providers of specialized professional services, negotiating contracts and arbitrating grievances for paying clients.

We have also seen a labor movement that has become increasingly domesticated. Whereas labor used to be about working people fighting for human rights, fair wages, and decent working conditions, today, many labor unions are mere providers of specialized professional services, negotiating contracts and arbitrating grievances for paying clients. We see a similar domestication of the labor movement in the nature of its educational institutions. Early labor colleges taught economics and politics to members of the working class. Over time, much labor education has shifted to providing training programs for professional union staff to learn the practical skills needed to bargain contracts. Unfortunately, this type of training can produce labor leadership that does not question the capitalist perspective and, instead, creates leadership that colludes with capital to maintain a disciplined, and docile, workforce.

The doorway currently being held open by the Janus case exists for the capitalist class as well. Which aspects of the past will it take into the future? It does not take strong eyes to see that the business class is keen to maintain its control over the story of labor in America. Labor unions are declining, they say, because they are no longer needed. American workers prefer, they say, the right to be free of mandatory union dues. The business class, which looks like it is on the winning side of Mr. Janus’ case, will likely continue its campaign of legal warfare and propaganda, thinking that its ultimate goal, the annihilation of unions altogether, is assured.

If public-sector workers can opt out of agency fees, and if further legal attacks result in national right-to-work legislation, as is expected, the labor movement will have no other choice but to organize outside the standard National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) framework. History reveals that some of labor’s greatest actions were initiated by small groups of workers operating outside of contract terms before modern labor laws existed. At present, federal guidelines dictate that employers are obligated to negotiate with a union only after an officially sanctioned election where a majority of the workers vote in favor of unionization. This strategy is no longer effective given how frequently unions have been on the losing side of elections.

Imagine a labor future where pro-union workers are organized into hundreds of nonmajority unions . . .

This is where Janus is of help. Nonmajority unions are a thread from the past that may be able to pass through this present doorway of opportunity and be woven into the future in new ways. The digital age and social media have demonstrated that individuals and small groups can be quickly and powerfully organized into large collective actions. Imagine a labor future where pro-union workers are organized into hundreds of nonmajority unions, which are in turn networked together regionally, or by industrial sector.

For those who think that the inability to force an employer to negotiate a contract leaves a union with nothing to do, please think again. Without the pressures and restrictions of workplace contracts, unions could pour time and energy into grassroots projects that organize the working class as a whole. Workers could be rallied into action for voter turn-out campaigns to elect progressive candidates, boycott products, and even provide mutual aid during extreme climate events. Unions could once again stand for something in the community and regain their moral credibility as standing on the side of justice for all workers. In other words, unions can still do what unions have always done without the workplace supplying the geographically defining boundaries.

. . . [U]nions can still do what unions have always done without the workplace supplying the geographically defining boundaries.

There are nonmajority unions working now that are having success in their struggles with their employers. The United Campus Workers (UCW), in Tennessee, for example, is a group of public-sector workers whose members pay dues voluntarily. They have recently had enormous success in a very red, right-to-work state, where their conservative governor is trying to outsource portions of the state’s workforce. UCW pressures their state legislators directly, not through campaign contributions, and are maintaining a strong media relations presence to bring public opinion to the workers’ side. ³ Members of Fast Food Justice, in New York City, are experimenting with a different type of nonmajority worker formation. They are seeking to sign up 500 individual members, from multiple workplaces, in order to gain the ability to deduct voluntary union dues from members’ paychecks, as provided for by a recent New York City ordinance. Fast Food Justice hopes to aggregate its workforce in this new way to achieve time-honored union goals. ⁴

The NLRB, filled with new, conservative appointees, has just issued new rulings that make micro-unions, ⁵ subsections of workers organized from within larger workplaces, harder to organize and harder to establish that joint employer relationships exist. ⁶ Why should the labor movement continue to willingly confine itself to work within a system that has been completely coopted by the business class? Why not organize pro-union workers, wherever and however they can be found, into neighborhood locals, industrial sector locals, or regional locals? Yes, it will take more time, but given the present dominance of the forces of capital over our political systems, the labor movement has no other choice but to radically reinvent itself in order to build any future at all.

Let us remember that the business class has been organizing for this moment for a long time. It invented the entire field of “human resources” as a strategy to replace the need for unions in the minds of the workforce. Once unions were weakened, employer-sponsored benefits could then be withdrawn and conditions of work degraded. We can see this happening today. Everywhere workers are experiencing the return to longer days, shorter weekends, less security, an increase in hazardous conditions, and the intensification of work. Will labor sit by and allow this negative thread from the past go unchallenged into the future?

Why should the labor movement continue to willingly confine itself to work within a system that has been completely coopted by the business class?

The current Gilded Age that we are living through is not passing unnoticed. The public grows ever more aware of the degree to which the state serves wealth. The power of the business class to manipulate the processes of government in their own interests appears strong. However, capital’s apparent victory over labor may be an illusion. Perhaps their efforts are instead helping to disassemble the chains that have tamed and shackled the labor movement for far too long. The long-term outcome may still favor workers. Impoverished workers do not have the spending power to generate economic growth and profits indefinitely. And, capitalism, as we have known it, is not physically sustainable. The Earth’s ability to withstand being pillaged is vast but not unlimited.

In the past, the labor movement’s goals have been modest: to work with dignity and live a decent family life. Perhaps we need to envision a future with loftier goals. Capitalism itself must once again be questioned. Perhaps even the term labor union needs to evolve. Perhaps worker assemblies, or labor alliances, will become the new phrases of choice. Whatever we call ourselves, whatever the shape of our collective organizations, we must remember the essential truth that labor solidarity, workers’ collective love and care for one another, is still more powerful than the collective power of greed. Today, people all over the world are organizing themselves to resist, standing at the threshold of a new era. Will labor join them? This is the bright future that we might see through the portal with the forward-looking eyes of Janus.