The Crisis Of Labor
SEIU Executive President Andy Stern, right, shakes the hand of Obama supporter David Pedro on Westlake Avenue in Parma, Ohio on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008
Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below. Verso, 2007, 320 pages.
Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice. University of California Press, 2008, 324 pages.
As the global economic crisis deepens, the attack on working people escalates. In New York, as in many places in the country, unemployment is shooting up while public services are raising rates and cutting back. The statewide budget crisis has reinvigorated the gospel of austerity, which is being used by management and its political allies to pressure public employees and their unions to accept layoffs and consider wage freezes and contract concessions. At the same time Americans are being forced to pick up the tab for those who have gone bust after many years of gambling on Wall Street. Even the casual observer can see that the crisis facing American workers is extraordinary.
However, as new books by both Kim Moody and Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin demonstrate, this crisis facing working people is not new but is part of a decades-long assault on workers. Moody’s U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition and Fletcher and Gapasin’s Solidarity Divided both make it their purpose to explain the current crisis facing American workers, to analyze the response by the leaders of the American labor movement, and to offer an alternative plan to rebuild labor and restore working class power. Each of these books adds to our understanding of the American worker’s position in the current economic meltdown. Together these books can help organized labor shape an approach that will defend union members and advance the whole working class.
Both books begin by reviewing recent labor history in order to understand how American workers reached the current crisis point. According to Kim Moody, the collapse of American labor began in the mid-1970s, triggered by the repeated global economic crises of the decade. Citing the economic downturn of the 1970s as the origin of labor’s decline is hardly new. However, Moody challenges the traditional narrative that claims deindustrialization and loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States were to blame for declining union density. Instead, Moody argues that the attack on labor and the resulting disappearance of union jobs must be understood as the product of new strategies by capital to increase profitability and competitiveness in the world economy. Beginning in the mid-1970s employers began to implement strategies, such as a reorganization of production and the introduction of new technologies. This drive to reduce labor costs and increase profitability included reducing wages, increasing hours, cutting health care and pension coverage, and fighting unionization. Taken together, this new campaign was responsible for a massive “transfer of income and wealth from the working class to capital and its owners.” This employer assault, Moody contends, rather than the disappearance of American industry was the cause of labor’s decline.
If Moody is correct in his diagnosis of labor’s problems, then he is also correct that “there are strong implications for labor’s response.” The leadership of the American labor movement, the author shows, failed to respond to management’s offensive. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s employers began an extensive process of industrial restructuring, one element of which was shifting production from the industrial Northeast and Great Lakes regions to the politically conservative and mostly union-free Great Plains, southern, and southwestern states. Instead of following this geographic shift and attempting to organize these new regions, labor leaders accepted declining union density, claiming that unionized industrial jobs had been permanently lost overseas.
Failing to fight job loss was symptomatic of a larger failing of union leadership: their widespread acceptance of business unionism. This philosophy, which downplays class struggle and highlights the common interest of labor and capital, found a welcome home among labor leaders puzzling over how to respond to the movement’s decline. Moody shows that business unionism led labor to accommodate employers’ demands, granting greater and greater concessions through the 1980s. But rather than serving to placate profit-hungry capital, these givebacks only increased employers’ appetite for more concessions. And when the rank-and-file pushed against concessions and business unionism, leaders suppressed their resistance, weakening labor’s base that would have been critical to any approach other than retreat. By curbing rank-and-file militancy and by surrendering the workplace to employers, Moody argues, leaders of the American labor movement are largely responsible for the current crisis facing working people.
In Solidarity Divided, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin also argue that business unionism is a major cause of labor’s current crisis, but they come to this conclusion from a different angle. Rather than focusing on employers’ drive for increased profits and labor’s failed response, Fletcher and Gapasin review the labor movement from the perspective of the struggle between those calling for an inclusive movement and those in favor of a more exclusive movement.
Viewing twentieth-century labor history from the perspective of inclusion versus exclusion is an interesting approach that yields useful insights. In the early-1900s the chief advocate for an exclusive movement was AFL President Samuel Gompers. Believing that the labor movement existed primarily to serve the interests of skilled craft workers and that labor should limit its goals to workplace demands (to be achieved through an amicable relationship with employers), Gompers was, in the authors’ analysis, the original business unionist. Another labor leader in the same period, Eugene V. Debs, challenged Gompers’ exclusive vision for labor by calling for a more inclusive movement based on industrial unionism and ultimately for the creation of a new socialist order in the United States.
Having established Gompers and Debs as the symbols of exclusion and inclusion in the early labor movement, Fletcher and Gapasin briskly take the reader through the rest of the century. The period between the two World Wars was a time when the movement shifted in the direction of inclusion, incorporating unskilled industrial workers in the newly-formed CIO and drawing greater strength from radicals and left-wing unions. This inclusive stance was not to last, however, as the close of World War II ushered in Cold War unionism and labor leaders collaborated with both employers and anti-Communist politicians to crush the leftist unions and purge radicals from the movement. With the expulsion of the Left, the way was clear for traditionalist labor leaders once again to narrow the scope and boundaries of American unionism. Though the vision of a more inclusive and radical movement was kept alive throughout the 1960s and 1970s by black trade unionists, union reformers, and members of the radical caucus movement, American labor retained the narrow, conservative shape it took during the Cold War. While for Moody labor’s decline came when labor leaders surrendered to employers in the 1970s and 1980s, for Fletcher and Gapasin the descent began in the earlier post-World War II period when leaders purged the Left and abandoned the broader goals that had been embraced by many in the 1930s and early-1940s.
Fletcher and Gapasin and Moody agree that any successful campaign to rejuvenate the American labor movement must abandon narrow business unionism and rebuild the movement from below by empowering rank-and-file union members. A critique of labor leaders’ failure to move away from business unionism and their inability to empower the movement base is the second focus of each book.
By the late-1980s and early-1990s the declining rate of union membership was the main concern of many union leaders. The solution that emerged was the “organizing model,” a critique of past union practices that purportedly favored organizing the unorganized and mobilizing rank-and-file union members. The problem, Fletcher and Gapasin argue, was that what appeared to be a new approach was still a top-down affair. Staff-driven organizing campaigns did not lead to meaningful rank-and-file involvement, and most elements of business unionism remained, despite the apparent inclusivity of the “organizing model.” So when John Sweeney successfully challenged the Old Guard leadership for the Presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995 and promised to rebuild the movement through organizing, he implemented this flawed system. As a result, the Sweeney administration failed to reverse the downward slide of the movement.
Fletcher and Gapasin demonstrate the Sweeney administration’s failure in a number of areas. The AFL-CIO under Sweeney could have utilized Central Labor Councils (CLCs) as a key tool to build local political and economic power. But the federation failed to harness the power of local bodies like CLCs within a larger nationwide program. In addition, national labor leaders missed numerous chances to support local movements, like that of the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project and the cause of the Charleston 5. These missed opportunities kept labor from promoting rank-and-file empowerment and encouraging stronger ties between the traditional labor movement and social movements rooted in workers’ centers and community organizations. When labor leaders obediently fell in line behind President Bush and supported his “War on Terror” following 9/11, they further weakened the movement, since unconditional support for Bush’s foreign policy meant remaining mostly silent on the economic elements of that foreign policy.
Kim Moody presents a similar critique of the Sweeney years. He agrees that bypassing rank-and-file organizers for “corporate-style campus recruitment” was one of many consequences of Sweeney’s top-down approach. And even this organizing message, lacking in so many ways, was not being carried out by most unions. In fact, the Sweeney administration never strayed far from the old business unionism that “embraced not only capitalism in general but the American system in particular: meaning the belief in persistent growth, the well-being of American business, the belief that high wages are in the interest of U.S. capital and . . . that labor and business should ‘remain partners.’” This philosophy led labor to fail once more when it effectively halted organizing in 2000 to mobilize voters in support of the Democratic Party. Although labor’s setback with the 2000 election of George W. Bush was greater than it would have been if Al Gore had been elected, Moody argues that the Democrats, like business union leaders, cannot be true supporters of working people. Because it receives funding from business and is a steadfast supporter of the capitalist system, the Democratic Party cannot deliver a political program that would effect real change for American workers. The Democrats, like business union leaders, will remain fearful of the one thing workers must turn to: class conflict and mass rank-and-file mobilization.
According to Moody, criticism of the Sweeney administration was reaching a climax by 2003. A new coalition of five unions calling itself the New Unity Partnership called for reorganizing the movement into a series of “mega-unions” that would have jurisdiction over core economic sectors. This drive for consolidation continued when in 2005 the New Unity Partnership morphed into the Change to Win Coalition, led by the country’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its president, Andrew Stern. To address the labor movement’s dwindling numbers, SEIU and the other Change to Win (CTW) unions called for an even more sweeping program that would consolidate membership and power into fewer unions. CTW also declared that labor should seek increased “political flexibility” that aimed to remove labor as a reliable Democratic supporter and make both parties work to gain labor’s support.
Fletcher and Gapasin demonstrate that the program put forward by Change to Win was, like the plan implemented by the Sweeney team, utterly incapable of dealing with the crisis facing labor. The authors criticize CTW’s “elevating consolidation to a principle” as “inconsistent and strategically shortsighted” since such an approach obfuscates diverse balances of power and pressure points within different industries. The idea of “political flexibility” was also problematic for the movement because, by accepting the limits of the two-party system and moving labor closer to the Republican Party, this form of flexibility would further cement labor’s role as the “junior partner of capital” rather than have the liberatory outcome the CTW leadership foresaw. Despite all the fanfare surrounding Change to Win’s formation and its proposals for a new movement, Kim Moody believes CTW’s maneuvering was simply one more attempt at “reform from above” which, he argues, is the only sort of reform Andy Stern and the SEIU’s “corporate unionism” could offer.
When the SEIU led the Change to Win coalition to break with the AFL-CIO in 2005, it did so without a program that had any more hope to transform the movement than the one Sweeney had overseen. But an even greater problem with the CTW departure was that the vast majority of union members played no part in the decision to split from the AFL-CIO. Both Moody and Fletcher and Gapasin present a powerful case that rank-and-file union members were excluded from the debate that eventually produced the split, a disaster for rank-and-file members who had no input about the future of the movement. It was particularly damaging for women and people of color, who not only were outside of the high-level negotiations amongst white, male union leaders but whose particular concern with ongoing racial and gender discrimination at the workplace was completely ignored in the debate.
There is little doubt that the efforts to restore labor to power in the last decades have failed. The works of Kim Moody and Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin both offer compelling evidence that the reform movements of John Sweeney and subsequently of Andy Stern and Change to Win failed to address the crisis facing American labor. Furthermore, a key reason these efforts failed was because they neglected to involve rank-and-file union members in a meaningful way. One question remains: in the wake of these failures and the ongoing crisis facing labor, what is to be done?
First, Fletcher and Gapasin argue, the labor movement must be reoriented around social justice unionism. Social justice unionism acknowledges the inevitability of class struggle, eschewing narrow business unionism that has so long limited the scope and the potential of the movement. This new social justice framework would broaden the labor movement beyond the workplace, promoting labor-community alliances like those between unions and the North Carolina Black Workers for Justice. Expanding what labor has traditionally considered a “legitimate domain of struggle” stems from the understanding that “class struggle is not restricted to the workplace” and “neither should unions be”; a labor movement (not just a trade union movement) must organize cities rather than just workplaces within cities. Social justice unionism would also prioritize antiracist and anti-sexist practices, not only because racial and gender discrimination intertwine with class oppression but also because attacking racial and gender oppression is one of the best ways to promote consistent democracy within the movement. Finally, social justice unionism would require American workers to engage in a new kind of solidarity with workers internationally, one that recognizes that “working people engaged in class struggle around the world have both strategic and tactical interests in common.”
Fletcher and Gapasin see this reorientation as an urgent project for a “conscious Left force” that would seek to build a “mandate for social justice unionism” among union members. The other implement to carry out this change, the authors argue, should be Central Labor Councils and other local workers’ bodies, without which the rank-and-file can play no significant role in their own movement.
Kim Moody’s proposals for labor’s way forward often complement and even overlap with those offered by Fletcher and Gapasin. Since workers cannot expect meaningful change from above, they must look to themselves and movements at the base for paths forward. The good news, according to Moody, is that we can always count on this resistance at the base; capital’s never-ending drive for greater profits “necessarily compels resistance and struggle in one place after another.” We saw this in the West Coast grocery workers’ strike in 2003, in the New York City Transit Workers Union strike of 2005, and in the nationwide immigrant protests, work stoppages, and student walkouts in 2006. Resistance and struggle at the base will also inevitably spring up whenever union leaders fail to defend the membership from employer attacks or when leaders attempt to exclude the rank-and-file and stifle dissent.
The movement then, needs to fashion strategies that will direct this willingness to struggle in constructive ways. Like Fletcher and Gapasin, Moody calls for a more inclusive movement that would work closely with workers’ centers and “non-majority” and “pre-majority” unions. Since, as Moody has demonstrated, a significant industrial base remains in the United States, labor must once again target industrial workplaces and no longer settle for service industries. This will require organizing the South, which will force labor to draw upon “pockets of unionism,” workers’ centers, and other resources that already exist. Furthermore, if the movement is ever able to harness the capacity of rank-and-file workers to engage in creative struggle, it cannot ignore union democracy. When unions are run by their members, they will reflect the interests of the rank-and-file. An active and empowered base is the only way labor will be capable of exercising power. The broad goal, according to Moody, should be “social movement unionism” which would require a radical reorientation of the way unions function both internally and externally.
What, then, should union members do with these insights? The answer depends on one’s position within the labor movement. Rank-and-file members should remember that without radical union democracy in which they run their own union, they will never see the change they are seeking. Union leaders need to discard business unionism, accept the inevitability of class struggle, and construct an inclusive movement that is led from the base. Both union leaders and rank-and-file members must reorient the movement around social justice unionism, seeking to bring together a mass convergence of workers’ organizations (both traditional and non-traditional.)
The way forward for working people depends on a mass mobilization at the very base of the movement. As Moody and Fletcher and Gapasin have shown, organized labor can play a crucial role in this process.
Leave a Reply
