This article is based upon an interrogation of two books: Gregg Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 200 pages, $17.00, paperback; and Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement
(New York: Verso Books, 2012), 318 pages, $25.95, hardcover. Each book
is about an iconic union. Gregg Shotwell writes about the United Auto
Workers (UAW), and Jane McAlevey the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU). What they report gives us reason for both deep concern and
hope concerning the future of organized labor.
The U.S. labor movement is in disarray, with declining union density
and fewer members each year. There have been positive signs of movement
revival, such as the revolt of public sector workers in Wisconsin in
2011 and the Chicago school teachers’ strike in 2012. But overall, the
future of the labor movement does not appear very bright. In what
follows, we examine the state of organized labor through the lens of the
recent history of two unions, as seen by a rank-and-file worker and an
itinerant union organizer. We ask what kind of people might lead the
U.S. working class.
The
U.S. labor movement is in disarray, with declining union density and
fewer members each year. There have been positive signs of movement
revival, such as the revolt of public sector workers in Wisconsin in
2011 and the Chicago school teachers’ strike in 2012. But overall, the
future of the labor movement does not appear very bright. In what
follows, we examine the state of organized labor through the lens of the
recent history of two unions, as seen by a rank-and-file worker and an
itinerant union organizer. We ask what kind of people might lead the
U.S. working class.
The United Auto Workers
Gregg Shotwell, now retired, was for more than thirty years a
rank-and-file machine operator for General Motors and Delphi, one of the
world’s largest auto parts manufacturers. Angry with the UAW’s
increasingly cozy relationship with the companies, he started an
in-plant broadside,
Live Bait &Ammo, which he hoped would
be bait for the bosses and ammo for the workers. His provocative and
lively prose, combined with good fact-based analysis, struck a chord
with his fellow unionists, and the newsletter gained a wide circulation
in union auto plants. His book is an organized collection of
Live Bait & Ammo
essays, covering developments in the UAW and the automobile industry
from the late 1990s until the Federal government’s bailout of General
Motors and Chrysler in 2009. The wonderfully rendered essays are cries
from the heart of workers degraded daily by their employers and betrayed
by their union.
Some background on the UAW will put Shotwell’s dissidence in
historical perspective. The UAW was forged in the courageously fought
and radically led sit-down strikes of the Great Depression. Its members,
their families, and their communities built upon these bitter struggles
to make the UAW a militant industrial union. Not only did those who
labored on the assembly lines and in the shops transform themselves from
factory serfs to class-conscious workers, but they also took control of
the shop floor from a management notorious for oppressive treatment of
its “hands.”
Shotwell tells a story on the first page of his book that illustrates the power of the union:
I hired into GM and joined the UAW in 1979. I didn’t know much about
how unions worked. I soon learned. At six thirty one morning, we were
sitting around sipping coffee and trying to wake up to a new day of the
same old shit. A foreman who was new to the area told us to get up and
get to work. “Right now,” he said. “I’m the boss.” We said, “Yes sir,
boss.” We went right to work. Thirty minutes later, every machine in the
department was down. The skilled trades came out, tore the machines
apart, and went off to look for the missing parts. They didn’t come
back. There was no production that day. Every department behind us went
down like a domino.
The next morning, the same foreman said, “Good morning, gentlemen.” Then he left us alone to do our jobs.
The shop floor was our turf. We controlled the means of production
because we were the masters of the means. We didn’t plan this direct
action. It was automatic. It was natural. We called it “showing the boss
who’s boss.” That’s what old timers taught me about unionism.
As his book makes clear, this does not happen today. The UAW has hit
hard times. Membership has plummeted from a peak of 1.53 million in 1979
to 380,719 in 2011. Most commentators point to the decline of domestic
manufacturing in the United States and the corresponding increase in the
foreign operations of U.S. car companies, along with a ruthless
anti-union strategy begun by employers when profit margins fell sharply
in the mid–1970s, as the reasons for this. However, Shotwell provides
many examples of how the failure of the UAW to organize the foreign
“transplant” automobile manufacturers in the United States and the auto
parts segment of the industry has also played a major role.
Much of Shotwell’s book shows why the UAW has not organized the
nonunion sections of the industry, and worse, how it has become
complicit with capital in making certain that these will not be
organized. The union has, in effect, become the junior partner of the
companies. As he says about former UAW president Ron Gettelfinger:
Gettelfinger is a corporatist: that is, he believes our fortunes as
union members are tied to the company’s apron strings. At the Ford
sub-council, where union members convened to devise a bargaining
strategy, he invited Lord Ford and his stooges to explain how sacrifices
would be necessary. Ford’s problems are not the fault of union members
or union wages. Does Ford invite UAW members to Board of Directors
meetings to advise them how they should make sacrifices for the good of
the community?
The beginning of the UAW’s demise can be found in the employer
backlash against the radicalization of much of the labor movement during
the Great Depression and the tremendous strike wave after the Second
World War. The latter, along with the onset of the Cold War, provided
good public relations cover for the corporate counteroffensive, as a
war-weary public wanted to buy the commodities they were not able to
purchase during the war (and still could not because of the strikes) and
also began to succumb to relentless Cold War propaganda against the
Communists. The first big postwar victory of capital was the
Taft-Hartley legislation, which, among other things, compelled union
officers to sign an oath stating that they were not Communists.
Most union officials signed the oaths, and many leaders used refusals
to sign as an excuse to purge radicals from their ranks. The UAW was
home to a large number of reds, and they were among the best, most
class- conscious members and leaders. Unfortunately, Walter Reuther, one
of the leaders of the agitations that helped form the union in the
1930s, used Taft-Hartley to red-bait his left-wing opponents and win
power.
Reuther and his successors parlayed the postwar prosperity of the
industry into pacesetting wages and benefits for autoworkers. At the
same time, they built a UAW political machine, the Administrative
Caucus—Shotwell refers to it as the “Rollover Caucus”—which has been
called accurately a “one-party state.” They worked out an “accord” with
employers: the union promised to let the bosses manage free from the
threat of wildcat strikes and work slowdowns. In return, the
corporations agreed to regular wage increases, cost-of-living
adjustments, and generous health-care and pension benefits. UAW leaders
used the power of incumbency to contain any challenges to their control
of the organization.
As democracy in the UAW waned and members chafed at the union’s
concession of workplace control to management, rank-and-file movements
arose. The union suppressed these efforts, but it was impossible to
eliminate dissent altogether. One of Gregg Shotwell’s UAW mentors, the
late Jerry Tucker (who wrote the Foreword to the book), engineered
several “work-to-rule” campaigns at UAW plants in the Midwest. Patient
education convinced workers to slow down production by sticking strictly
to the letter of their collective bargaining agreement and their
supervisors’ instructions. Workers refused to show the initiative that
makes every workplace run smoothly and efficiently. Inevitably,
production fell dramatically. As Shotwell notes, each of these
“in-plant” work stoppages succeeded; all concessions that management
wanted were denied, workers won better contracts, and none lost their
jobs.
Tucker became so popular that he was elected a Regional Director. But
when he brought his rank-and-file empowerment strategy to the national
union leadership, they mounted a vicious campaign to unseat him (union
staffers were forced to give part of their salaries to his opponent’s
campaign). He lost his directorship, but then helped form the New
Directions movement to wrest control of the union from a leadership now
far removed from the shop floor. These efforts failed, but the New
Directions spirit lived on. Shotwell and other union dissidents began
Soldiers of Solidarity, to return the UAW to its members. Work-to-rule,
national strikes, solidarity, an end to concessions, and union
transparency are the weapons Soldiers of Solidarity argues are needed if
automobile workers, and by extension all laborers, are to reverse the
downward spiral in which the working class finds itself.
There are startling revelations of UAW autocracy and disdain for the rank-and-file in
Autoworkers Under the Gun, which the author describes in vivid language but can be simply summarized here:
• Members cannot
democratically influence what the union does. The union’s conventions
are run dictatorially, and most of the delegates are appointed staff
persons. The chair silences the microphone when dissidents make critical
comments or ask embarrassing questions. “You’re done brother, shut off
the mic,” UAW president Yokich said to Shotwell at a union convention
when he had had enough of Shotwell’s trenchant analysis of the union’s
self-imposed weakness.
Dissidents are spied upon, and the top officers routinely lie about
what they have done in collective bargaining. Shotwell gives especially
detailed examples for his employer, Delphi. Union leaders guaranteed
Delphi workers that they would always have the same contract provisions
as GM employees, that GM would still be the majority owner of Delphi
after it was spun off by GM. Not only were Delphi workers soon earning a
fraction of what those at GM earned, but they lost all their GM pension
credits. Things only got worse when Delphi declared bankruptcy.
Autocracy in the UAW is so blatant that the Administrative Caucus
voted to transfer tens of millions of dollars from the union’s seldom
used strike fund to pay the salaries of the national staff. Interest on
the strike fund is similarly diverted.
• The UAW sells its
locals short. It does not inform them about national negotiations;
complex issues are presented to members at the last minute, with dire
warnings that failure to agree will lead to disaster. The union settles
national agreements before local agreements have been completed, leaving
the locals with little leverage over their employer.
A particularly egregious example Shotwell gives of the union’s
betrayal of its locals concerns Local 2036 in Henderson, Kentucky. The
UAW sanctioned a strike against wheel supplier Accuride in 1998. When
the workers rejected a company proposal but agreed to return to work,
the corporation locked them out. A dance then began in which the union
paid strike benefits, then stopped payments, threatened the local with
trusteeship, and, in 2002, when at least 100 employees were still
holding solid against Accuride, disavowed any interest in representing
the workers. The disavowal letter was sent to the company but not to the
long-suffering strikers. The union never organized solidarity actions
by union members who were installing the scab wheels in Ford and GM
assembly plants. The best it did was urge GM, Ford, and Chrysler to
convince Accuride to settle. Shotwell contrasts the UAW’s (in)action
with that of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), which seceded from the UAW
in 1984: “When Navistar attempted to bust a Canadian Auto Workers (CAW)
local, CAW president Buzz Hargrove said, ‘We are prepared to shut down
all of our operations. We are not going to allow them to scab our plants
and steal our members’ jobs.’ The CAW kept scabs out and won a fair
contract.”
• As capital’s
anti-union campaign accelerated in the 1980s, the UAW rejected a
militant counterattack, as New Directions was demanding. Instead, they
embraced class collaboration—more benignly called partnership, or
“jointness.” The union and the corporations would work together to
ensure the profitability of their joint enterprise. If workers labored
hard to make their plants more profitable, employers would share some of
the money with them. The union agreed that foreign competition, mainly
from Japanese manufacturers, was the source of industry distress. To
beat the foreigners, UAW members would have to work harder, smarter, and
in cooperation with their employers. The tacit deal was that if the
workers did not go along with this, the union would discipline them
itself.
To sweeten the pot, the corporations agreed to pay several cents per
hour of employee labor into jointness funds, set up as independent
corporate entities and administered by union and management. These
funds, which soon contained millions of dollars, are not subject to the
financial disclosure obligations that unions have under the
Landrum-Griffin Act, and the UAW has refused to show the members how the
funds’ monies are used. Shotwell tells us that they, in part, pay the
salaries of hundreds of union staff persons who work in the plants as
the union counterparts in labor-management teams that deal with all
manner of workplace issues.
With jointness and the jointness funds, the UAW committed itself
fully to a class-collaboration strategy. Corporations have as their aim
the accumulation of capital, made possible by the exploitation of wage
labor. The latter is realized by management’s attainment of as much
control as possible over the labor process, that is, of how work is
performed. Labor-management cooperation means that the union is an ally
of its class enemy, committed to helping it achieve its goals.
The first targets of the union-employer partnership were Japanese
automakers, who were accused of unfair competition. The degree to which
the company-union partners vilified the Japanese can be seen in an early
program paid for by the funds, a week-long educational, with mandatory
attendance by every union member. I witnessed this firsthand when I
taught economics in a one-day session in such a program to groups of
Pittsburgh autoworkers; the session held just prior to mine was an
eight-hour orgy of Japanese bashing, with the most blatant stereotyping
of Japanese culture and behavior.
Once the competitive ethos began to be instilled in union members,
the focus shifted from foreign competition to that between domestic
automobile companies. Workers at GM were now in competition with those
at Ford and Chrysler, even though they were in the same union. From
there, it was a short step to pitting employees at one plant against
those at another of the same company. So as the corporations began to
close plants to remain competitive, workers were forced into a
competitive mode, doing whatever they could to keep their particular
plant open. Solidarity went out the window, replaced by a war of all
against all.
Shotwell predicted what would happen:
Competition between workers will decimate, not solidify, our ranks. A
Competitive Operating Agreement is a Trojan horse loaded with three
lethal concessions:
- the expanded utilization of temps, which is in effect two-tier;
- the implementation of nonunion labor into the plants;
- the manipulation of union members as “team leaders” in supervisory roles.
He was right. The end result was a sequence of corporate demands and
union concessions: lump-sum wage increases instead of percentage raises
built into the base wage; two-tier wage agreements in which new hires
earn much less than senior workers (now less than half as much); fewer
benefits, with workers paying more and more for them; defined
contribution pensions instead of defined benefit plans; pensioners
sacrificed to ease the pension cost burdens of the businesses; and on
and on, with no end in sight.
Union givebacks ultimately led to the decimation of the UAW during
the Great Recession. GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy, and the
federal government demanded—and received—draconian concessions from the
union in return for a bailout, in which the owners suffered nothing. And
in a final blow to workers and the union, partnership and the resultant
worker demoralization helped make possible the recent enactment of a
right-to-work law in Michigan, the very cradle of industrial unionism.
Throughout all of this, the automobile manufacturers continued
unilaterally to pursue their interests. While the union bashed the
Japanese, the corporations partnered with Japanese companies. They took
the profits they made from union concessions and invested them in
foreign operations, which, the author informs readers, are now the major
source of their profits, and where corporate assets are not subject to
U.S. bankruptcy laws. They began to spin off their parts components,
converting them into quasi-independent corporations that now supplied
modular components to them (such as steering wheel assemblies and
seats). These new entities either operated union-free or, with UAW
cooperation, remained union but with much lower wages and benefits, and
weaker work rules.
A union that collaborates with employers, must, by definition, be
hostile to the rank and file. In any workplace, laborers face a
relentless enemy. Management continually imposes new stresses on the
workers, routinely violating the collective bargaining agreement. A
cooperative union must then either negotiate ever-weaker contracts or
ignore the grievances that workers file. As Shotwell documents in the
latter case, when workers grieve they must confront the union-management
teams in the plant, both parts paid for by the employer, who have a
stake in shunting the grievance aside or settling it jointly in a
corporation-friendly manner, regardless of the needs of the aggrieved
employees. When this fails and grievances accumulate, the national union
simply concedes them in the national bargaining. When workers protest,
the one-party state votes them down.
What then should workers do? How do you wage a struggle against both
your employer and your union? Shotwell is a proponent of “work to rule,”
which he correctly sees as a potent form of sabotage that both
pressures employers to settle disputes with workers and helps workers
stop and reverse the erosion of their control over the labor process.
But to put this into practice will require much patient organizing both
inside and outside the workplace. It will be a difficult process, but
really there is no other choice, except complete capitulation. As he
poetically puts it:
Strike back.
Strike back because your brothers and sisters are laid off.
Strike back because you hate the bastards.
Strike back to redeem your dignity.
Strike back for full employment.
Strike back to abolish inequality.
Strike back because your job is a bore and your boss is an ass.
Strike back for freedom.
Strike back to restore the balance of power.
Strike back because you are human and care about life.
Strike back to break the corporate chokehold.
Strike back to get the leeches off our backs.
Strike back for more democracy.
Strike back because they never listen to you.
Strike back to control the means of production.
Strike back because Medicare doesn’t cover prescriptions for your mother.
Strike back because politicians retire in splendor.
Strike back because injunctions are only against unions and never against management.
Strike back because judges are the lackeys of industry.
Strike back because no one believes in the system.
Strike back to show we can strike back.
Strike back.
The Service Employees International Union
Unlike Shotwell, Jane McAlevey was never a rank-and-file worker. She
was appointed to various union staff positions after working in a number
of social-change organizations. Most of her book describes her tenure
as executive director of a large local of public and private sector
workers in Las Vegas. She tells readers that
Raising Expectations is
about organizing; it is, but it is also a memoir centering on herself
and her wars with the SEIU’s top leadership. Nonetheless, she has much
of interest to say about both how successfully to help workers organize
unions and negotiate good collective bargaining agreements and why most
unions do neither.
Just as with Shotwell’s book, McAlevey’s account of her time with
SEIU should be put into historical perspective. Founded in 1921, the
Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) initially
organized janitors, elevator operators, window washers, and doormen. It
eventually began to organize other types of workers and to merge with
other unions. In 1968, it became the SEIU, and since then it has
continued to grow and to merge, most notably with a majority of the
locals of the left-led hospital workers’ union, 1199. Today the SEIU is
one of the largest labor organizations in the country, with about 1.8
million members. It is a major union in health care—where McAlevey did
most of her SEIU work—with nurses, hospital staff persons, nursing home
employees, and home health-care workers among its members.
The two persons most associated with SEIU’s rapid growth are John
Sweeney and Andrew Stern. Sweeney led the large New York City local of
SEIU, the often-corrupt Local 32BJ, and moved from there to the
presidency of the national union, where he helped engineer the famous
Justice for Janitors organizing drives. Not long after Sweeney became
president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, Stern was elected SEIU’s president.
Stern believed that only by raising union density, through organizing
in a particular market, could a union gain enough power to improve the
lives of its members and achieve enough political leverage to gain
further improvements, for its members and the entire working class.
However, Stern’s other ideas undermined this model’s logic. Like most
top union leaders, he was a proponent of labor-management partnership
and an enemy of the strike. He said that strikes and class struggle were
remnants of a bygone era; the modern union had to offer employers
“added value,” that is, a bigger bottom line. As we saw with the UAW,
such a philosophy ultimately weakens the union and stifles democracy.
As in the UAW, the SEIU’s partnership strategy faced internal
resistance. And like the UAW, the SEIU is a one-party state, intolerant
of internal rebellion. Stern demoted or fired those who opposed him and
trusteed (took over) dissident locals. When one of the largest, most
militant, and successful locals, California’s United Healthcare Workers
(UHW), led by Sal Rosselli, was trusteed in January 2009, SEIU’s
UAW-like class-collaboration trajectory reached its logical conclusion.
Rosselli was an Executive Board member; a great organizer; had work
experience as a SEIU member; had helped workers win pacesetting wages,
benefits, and working conditions; and was a strong advocate for patients
in the hospitals his local had organized. However, in 2007–2008, he
began to question SEIU’s partnership approach and to argue in favor of
greater membership control over the national union through direct
rank-and-file election of its top officers and board members, rather
than the convention selection method used by SEIU that was more easily
controlled by Stern. This won him Stern’s enmity. Rosselli then defied
Stern further by bringing a platform of reforms and constitutional
changes to the union’s convention in Puerto Rico in 2008. He ran as an
independent for election to the Executive Board, but was defeated by the
Stern slate. A few months later, Stern trusteed his local. Rosselli and
his allies left the SEIU and formed a rival health-care workers’ union,
the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). This organization has
achieved considerable success, but it has faced unrelenting hostility
from SEIU, which has spent millions of dollars filing lawsuits against
NUHW and individual members of it, and has actively colluded with
employers to defeat NUHW in certification elections.
Jane McAlevey’s account of her labor union work begins during the
exciting early days of John Sweeney’s New Voice team, which took charge
of the AFL-CIO in 1995. The new officers were committed to organizing,
and the author tells us that she was tapped to help lead an innovative
project in Stamford, Connecticut, one that would build union power by
concentrating on what she calls in her book, “whole worker organizing.”
Unions would aim to organize the “whole worker,” that is, not just in
the workplace but in all of the institutions and structures that
constitute working-class life.
The major tool McAlevey used in Stamford, and in all of her
organizing efforts, was Power Structure Analysis (PSA). She describes
the PSA as follows: “You identify the real power players in a given
community or area, determine what the basis of their power is, and find
out who their natural allies and opponents are. Based on that knowledge,
you formulate a plan for enhancing the power of your allies and
neutralizing that of your opponents.”
The “quantitative phase” involved an “exhaustive study of
demographics, voting trends, political donations and the like.” To this,
she added “the qualitative phase,” an “equally exhausting pooling of
the collective knowledge of our members.” The quantitative part of the
PSA was conducted by professionals, hired by McAlevey, while the second
was done by the members themselves.
Not only was the PSA important as a descriptive device, pinpointing
who had power, but it also served as an educational tool. With it,
McAlevey taught workers about power and showed them how to increase and
use their own strength. In Stamford, the PSA-inspired mobilization of
the members of the unions participating in the project succeeded in
increasing union membership in the area, stopping the planned demolition
of a large tract of public housing (where many union members lived),
and winning millions of public dollars to improve that housing. And in
nearly all of the places McAlevey worked in her ten years as an
organizer, the PSA technique proved exceptionally useful: in identifying
public housing as a key concern of workers in Stamford; in mobilizing
support in Kansas City to stop the sale of a public hospital; in
figuring out in several places which local politicians could be
compelled to support her organizing efforts and which could be defeated
in elections; and in how to pressure employers to meet bargaining
demands.
Most of McAlevey’s organizing was done for the SEIU. She agreed to
work for the SEIU because it had the money to make organizing possible,
but she tells readers that the union was riven with “turf wars” waged by
various powerful union chieftains, and that these hampered her efforts
wherever she went.
McAlevey was an unusually talented organizer. So, even though she
frequently ran afoul of union turf wars, she always managed to have
powerful allies who sought out her skills. In 2004, she was appointed
Executive Director of SEIU Local 1107 in Las Vegas. Her four years there
were tumultuous. The local had 9,000 members—some were county public
employees and others worked at private and public hospitals—but many of
the workers under contract were not in the union. The local’s officers
were not much concerned with organizing; finances were in disarray;
contracts were expiring; some negotiations had stalled; prosperous
private hospitals remained unorganized; and member morale was low.
McAlevey set about bringing 1107 to life and making it grow. She had
considerable success. Her account of what she did, and why, makes for
riveting reading and valuable “how to” lessons for organizers. It is
what anthropologists call “thick description,” so detailed that the
description itself becomes an analysis. How does an organizer identify
the persons in each department of a workplace who are its natural
leaders? How do you get them to lead the union, or in some cases, become
union members? How do you meld the leaders into a coherent team? How do
the leaders organize the workers? How do you prepare workers for
inexorable employer antagonism? How do workers show the employer that
they are not afraid? How does the union win allies politically and in
the community who will help it defeat adversaries? How does an organizer
negotiate the tensions that might exist between local and national
union strategies? These and many other questions are effectively
answered by the author as she tells readers what she and her allies did
in “Sin City.” McAlevey’s ability to think and act creatively is
graphically and humorously portrayed in her description of her first
bargaining session with a large private hospital.
Breaking with typical
bargaining protocol, which limits the union negotiating team to a few
members, she had scores of nurses at the bargaining table, with
individual nurses making the initial union proposal to the flabbergasted
management team. Not only was the employer thrown off guard, but the
workers felt a sense of empowerment that carried over to future
sessions.
The Las Vegas chapters of the book are exceptional in terms of the
nuts and bolts of organizing and bargaining. In them, she conveys a
message of utmost importance to those who want to rebuild the labor
movement. Workers can be organized. They are willing to join unions in
large numbers, even when they face hostile labor laws, brutal employer
opposition, and considerable personal risks.
McAlevey’s work in Las Vegas was short-circuited, according to her, by the endless turf wars in SEIU. She says,
I operated on the assumption that, if you just kept winning in a
principled way, the work you were doing would create the conditions for
its own continued existence. The people at the top might not like you…but
if you consistently succeeded at the assignments they gave you,
ultimately they would give you more assignments and the work would go
forward. I was wrong….
Past a certain point, winning actually becomes a liability, because the
people at the top will feel threatened by the power you’re accumulating
unless they can control it; they cannot imagine that your ambition
would not be to use that power in the same way they use theirs. It took
ten years of banging my head on a wall to finally knock that into it.
The militant local she had built was, in her view, just too much for
Stern, who was more interested in partnering with the employers against
whom McAlevey was waging war. The pretext for her departure took place
in 2007 when she faced charges by members of her local of illegally
interfering with elections to the local’s Executive Board. She writes
that she was unaware that she had violated any laws. She says that she
was so burned out from the constant turf wars and several years of
nonstop work that she was simply “off her game” and caught off guard. To
keep the peace, she agreed to resign her post in June 2008, as did the
local’s president, who had been her long-time adversary.
While
Raising Expectations contains much of interest, it
contains critical flaws: problems that are reflective of what is wrong
with organized labor in the United States, and are associated with the
intra-union power struggles and top-down governance criticized by the
author.
For example, the author has a limited sense of history, of the truth
that we all build on the efforts of those who came before us. Nothing
that McAlevey did was new, but she often writes as if it was. She makes
it appear that she invented Power Structure Analysis, at least its
adaptation to labor organizing, when in fact such techniques have often
been used by labor unions. Jerry Tucker did a sophisticated PSA in his
1978 defeat of a right-to-work initiative in Missouri, and in many other
campaigns. Similarly with “whole worker organizing,” she ignores a long
history of union efforts to integrate workplace and community
organizing. Packinghouse workers in the 1930s spread their organizing
from the meatpacking plants into the workers’ communities, leading the
drive for the racial integration of local businesses. Unions have built
hospitals and housing for their members. The UAW strongholds in Michigan
and Ohio created entire “union towns,” in which victories in the
factories translated into the creation of local working-class
democracies. This history escapes McAlevey, who gives the impression
that every situation in which she finds herself is a
tabula rasa, to be filled by her innovative strategy and tactics, always in the face of ignorant and recalcitrant labor leaders.
McAlevey also often fails to see that building a labor movement is a
collective effort. She makes much of her isolation in the right-to-work
state of Nevada. However, Las Vegas is not an isolated town in the
nonunion South. It is home to a strong labor movement, with a vital and
large union of culinary workers, and considerable political muscle.
Furthermore, California, with strong unions facing the same employers
she did, was just across the border. Private-sector hospitals in
California had been organized, with workers winning superior wages,
benefits, working conditions, and patient protections. She would not
have been able to win good contracts with the private hospital
corporations in Las Vegas without the prior success of her California
counterparts. Yet, she gives them no credit and seems to go out of her
way to say that they did not help her at all, which, I have learned
since reading her book, is not true.
Finally, a reasonable reader might question the depth of her
commitment to rank-and-file workers. She frequently denigrated the
local’s officers, but instead of doing a PSA of the local to find out
how they could be won over to her vision, she illegally tried to
overthrow them. She argues that a modern union needs a paid professional
staff, presumably comprised of people like her, recruited from outside
of the local union. But it seems not to have occurred to her that the
rank-and-file members could be trained to be professionals, to do
anything she could do, and with the advantage of having performed the
work of the members they represented.
I was surprised to find out, again after reading the book, that
despite all of her sharp and accurate criticisms of Stern and the SEIU
leadership, she agreed to serve on the national union’s Executive Board
in 2007; in fact, she was appointed by Stern. Then in 2008, she ran (and
won), on Stern’s team, in Executive Board elections, after the SEIU had
long since gone down the path of UAW-like partnership. How is it
possible that you can be a champion of member empowerment and serve on
the very executive body of a union that opposes it?
Conclusion
The trajectories of the UAW and the SEIU tell us something profoundly
depressing about organized labor in the United States. Despite their
radically different histories and recent growth rates, both unions
embraced labor-management partnership with gusto, with the attendant
autocratic leadership, member disempowerment, and limited gains from
collective bargaining. How can this be? Consider something I once wrote:
organizations workers form to combat their oppression will find it
difficult to avoid being influenced by the hegemony capitalism seeks to
impose over society. It has been the rule rather than the exception that
labor unions become bureaucratic and conservative, even if they were
radical in the beginning. The labor movement in the United States, for
example, was an active participant in the anti-worker Cold War, purging
and persecuting its left-led unions and radical union leaders. Unions in
the rich capitalist countries have actively supported the imperialism
of their nation’s businesses and governments. Unions around the world
have been sexist, racist, and homophobic, dividing workers just as
surely as have the employers they fight against.
Capitalism brings forth behaviors and modes of thought in its own
image and likeness. We are forced to act in certain ways if we want to
survive and prosper. But these cannot liberate us; they only help to
recreate an oppressive system. Unions might raise wages, improve working
conditions, and force governments to enact worker-friendly laws. These
are good things, but they do not challenge the rule of capital. And if
unions come to mirror their class enemy, they would not even be able to
achieve these victories. If the UAW and the SEIU hold themselves up to a
mirror today, the faces they see will be those of GM and Health
Corporation of America.
And still, capital’s power is never absolute, and this is what gives
us hope. The brutality of its rule always calls forth rebellion.
Shotwell and McAlevey show us two kinds of rebellion. Shotwell’s is
rooted in the daily misery of his fellow workers. He expresses what they
feel and helps make them conscious of the sources of their subjugation.
His essays reflect their desire for escape from the bosses’ control and
to use democratically what is rightfully theirs—the union they and
their forebears sweated to create. When automobile laborers look at
Shotwell, they see themselves. When they read his words, they feel what
he expresses. He is an organic intellectual, risen up from the ranks to
give voice to his class.
Shotwell grasps that it is only through the power workers have in
their workplaces that they can challenge capital. Work-to-rule is his
preferred method of class struggle, but he is not averse to anything
that might defeat the employers. Upon the intelligence and efforts of
the Shotwells of the world, and with their leadership, a working-class
movement worthy of the name might yet be made, one that both the
employers and their union junior partners will fear.
McAlevey’s rebellion, however, centers too much on herself. Her
actions were not rooted in the daily work experiences of those she
helped organize and whom she represented at the bargaining table. This
was not just because she did not have such work experiences. She simply
does not have a working-class consciousness, a sense of herself as an
interchangeable part of a collectivity. Her sensibility is essentially
bourgeois—individualistic and narcissistic. Collective give-and-take,
much less self-criticism, are not in her vocabulary. When workers see
her, they do not see themselves, just her. In the end, capital and the
union chieftains are not afraid of such people.
While these two books chronicle the specific experiences of two
people in two unions, they contain the seeds of several general lessons
for building a labor movement. First, unions as presently constituted
are hostile to the attainment of class power. They are often nearly as
much the enemy of workers as are employers. Second, people from outside
of the working class can ally themselves with workers, but they cannot
comprise the bulk of its leadership. Such persons cannot understand what
it means to be a worker, to feel the stress and alienation of the
assembly line, the hospital ward, the office cubicle. Unless they at
least spend time laboring in such places, they are bound to be separated
from those they lead. Third, the most important thing experts can do is
teach workers to become experts. Workers must lead themselves, and
there is no reason why they cannot learn whatever is necessary for them
to do so. Fourth, a labor movement has to concern itself with every
aspect of working-class life: jobs, unemployment, community, politics,
family, the environment. Fifth, while workers can be organized and
unions can make their lives better, unless these efforts are part of an
explicitly anti-capitalist project, victories will always be partial and
temporary. Human liberation will never be at hand unless we strive for
the abolition of the working class, for an end to wage labor, for a
society in which the empowerment and improved circumstances of each is
but a moment in the struggle for the collective betterment of all.
Notes
- ↩ Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from the Shotwell or the McAlevy book.
- ↩ Michael D. Yates, “Removing the Veil,” from In and Out of the Working Class (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2009).
