Labor’s bad recall in Wisconsin?: An online debate in The Nation
Four contributions by Gordon Lafer, Doug Henwood, Jane McAlevey, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Adolph L. Reed. Plus a new item: Michael Yates, in Counterpunch. All five items are enclosed; see the original posting on The Nation for numerous lengthy comments on the four Nation contributions.
Posted to The Nation on June 15, 2012
Nation Editor’s note: Gordon Lafer and Doug Henwood debate organized labor’s electoral and organizing strategies in the wake of its defeat in the Wisconsin recall, with new contributions from Bill Fletcher and Jane McAlevey, and Adolph Reed, Jr.
1. Lessons from Wisconsin
One: Unions need to invest in mass participatory education. And two: they need to stop focusing on union rights.
by Bill Fletcher and Jane McAlevey on June 26, 2012
Before Wisconsinites voted down the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, and certainly since, principled progressives inside and outside of unions have disagreed on whether or not the campaign should have happened. In fact, between the two of us, we don’t fully agree about whether or not the recall was the correct tactic. But with the defeat in the rear view mirror, two clear lessons can be drawn from Wisconsin: unions need to reinvest in mass participatory education—sometimes called internal organizing in union lingo; and, unions need to stop focusing on “collective bargaining” and actually kick down the walls separating workplace and non-workplace issues by going all-out on the broader agenda of the working class and the poor.
Once you get past the reports that Walker outspent the Wisconsin workers by 7:1, the next most startling fact is that 38 percent of union households voted to keep the anti-worker Governor. That’s slightly more than one third, and had the pro-recall forces held the union households, Walker would no longer be Governor. With major media outlets drubbing us with the 38 percent number, the liberal political elite seem stuck on a rhetorical question: why do poor people and workers vote against their material self-interest? Actually, in our own experience, the poor and working class don’t vote against their self-interest—but there’s a precondition: we have to create the space for ordinary people to better understand what their self-interest is, and how it connects with hundreds of millions in the US and globally.
Participatory education can best be carried out within unions through an on-going organizing program. We know from years of experimenting that adults learn best through taking direct action. Actions themselves are often transformative. And how to calibrate the learning and action dialectical is the work of good organizers—paid and unpaid. But today’s unions have all but abandoned organizers, educators, organizing and radical, participatory education. Why?
First off, many union leaders, despite their rhetoric, do not believe in the critical importance of worker education. Instead they believe in “PowerPoint.” They invest truckloads of money into pollsters who perfect their quick and fancy presentations with graphics which all too often aim to dazzle rather than educate. They believe that worker education cannot be quantified and does not necessarily translate into a specific, tangible outcome, thereby making it worthless.
A second reason for the anemic internal education is the legacy of the Cold War and McCarthyism. “Big Picture” education that truly examines the roots of the current economic crisis and the nearly forty year decline in the living standards of the average US worker leads to a fundamental critique of capitalism. This conclusion scares many leaders who fear being red-baited, or may even harbor a fantasy that that they will at some point be re-invited to the ruling circles of the USA.
A third reason is that an educated and empowered membership can be unpredictable. They may start asking questions that many leaders wish to avoid. They may start suggesting different directions. And, horror of horrors, they may actually run for office in the unions themselves.
The second big lesson from Wisconsin is that we can’t do it alone. While the attack by Walker was a frontal assault on women, people of color, workers, the poor and more, unions all too often kept the focus on collective bargaining. When unions allowed the battle in Wisconsin to go from mass collective rage over the excesses of the One Percent to a battle for union rights, it was all but game over. Criticism of Democratic candidate Barrett’s refusal to go along with labor’s messaging on collective bargaining is beside the point—in our opinion, the campaign was lost before the May primary. Reassured by polls showing a majority of Americans (61 percent) support the “right” to collective bargaining, union leaders failed to anticipate the power of a barrage of wedge messages about over-paid government bureaucrats, taxes, union bosses, the unfairness of why public sector workers get pensions and so-called private sector ones don’t and much more. Walker had the apparatus of the state and he had bought the media—he essentially turned Wisconsin into one big captive audience meeting, subjecting Wisconsites to the kind of unbearable pressure that workers in private sector union elections are all too familiar with. We don’t poll in elections where workers are going to vote as to whether or not to form a union because we understand polling is useless in a hotly contested, deeply polarized fight.
In union elections, the sophisticated union busters want to ratchet the tension up so high that everyone associates the new tension in their life with this thing called “the union.” And the boss drives a message that if the union goes away, everything will go back to normal. And normal, which wasn’t OK before the campaign, suddenly sounds good because the venom and hate feel much worse. To have any chance of beating these kinds of campaigns, the campaign can’t be about “collective bargaining” or “the union.” It has to be about a bigger fight for dignity and economic justice that can deeply appeal to a much wider audience.
It is true there’s been an uptick of unions declaring the importance of building allies and “working with the community,” but still the community is too often treated as if it’s a separate species from “the workers.” The workers are the community, and yet union leaders act like ‘the community’ is some foreign land that requires visas, formal paid ambassadors and a Rosetta Stone language learning kit. The reason most labor leaders don’t understand the community is because they stopped trying to understand their members and the unorganized workers who live side by side in every union member’s house. The way back to winning big majorities of Americans to the cause of labor is for labor to take up the causes of the majority. This isn’t rocket science, it doesn’t require pollsters or power point—it requires thousands of meaningful conversations with tens of thousands of people. It requires rebuilding our organizing muscle.
But the phrases, “organizing doesn’t work, it’s too slow,” or the variant, “organizing doesn’t work, it’s too expensive,” have become like a mantra in union headquarters (and the offices of foundations). And yet for our entire adult lives, almost every time we have seen workers and poor people given the opportunity to stand up and fight back, they did.
What about the recall? Wisconsin was a wicked short timeline—unions and their supporters were trying to overcome forty years of no real education or organizing among the rank and file. The recall failure has led to an open season on unions, but this isn’t just a problem with unions. Multiple institutions have failed workers for decades, starting with the Democratic Party. And if that’s not enough, there’s our public school system—including universities and legions of intellectuals—that fail to teach students how to understand the actual power structure in our country or what unions are or have done. And, corporate owned media that have long distorted the real story of unions.
The reason that unions themselves, not front groups, need to take up the key issues facing their base when they aren’t at work is because this model of community work helps to develop even more worker leaders—it provides an ongoing action-learning program for the members when their contract has been settled. And, pedagogically, it helps the members to better understand all the forces keeping them down. “The boss” becomes the economic and political system rather than simply the swing shift supervisor or the foreman or the CEO.
There are plenty of important structural issues that the rank and file could be engaging, including the on-going housing, credit, climate, public transportation, and child care crises. And there’s the matter of bringing the worker’s sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters home from unwinnable wars of aggression. The very best way for unions to build real alliances with non-union groups is via their own members—the very people who make up “the community.” If unions expanded their issue work by engaging their own rank and file, we could develop even more skilled leaders, not simply ‘worker faces’ for a press conference. The organizing-education model assists people in creating better lives for themselves, rather than relying on paid professionals to do the work for them. And the results are that we build mini social movements, not special interest groups.
Organizing is incredibly hard work. And it’s messy work. And the liberal elite, including most union leaders, are constantly investing in everything but deep organizing. The real reason we lost in Wisconsin is the same reason that progressives have been on a four decade decline in the US: it’s because of a deep and long-term turn away from organizing and education and towards something that more resembles mobilizing. Organizing expands our base by keeping our energy and resources focused on the undecideds, and on developing the organic leaders in our workplaces and communities so that they become part of an expanding pool of unpaid organizers. Mobilizing focuses on the people who are already with us and replaces organic leadership development with paid staff. That and the split between “labor” and “social movements” account for the failure of progressive politics, the loss in Wisconsin, the ever shrinking public sphere, and the unabashed rule of the worst kinds of corporate greed.
The work we are describing isn’t an election 2012 program, it’s not a 12 month program; it must happen every day, every month and every year. It’s ongoing. Workers are every bit courageous enough and smart enough, but they experience a lifetime of being told they are not worthy, not smart, and not deserving. In other words, sit down, shut up and listen. Unions have to challenge this paradigm, not reinforce it. When conservatives suffered their own strategic defeat and lost the election in 1964—by much larger margins than the recall in Wisconsin—they didn’t say, “well, no point trying.” They instead built for the long haul and in 1980 it paid off with Reagan.
And with the Supreme Court edging eerily close to a ruling that will make all of America governed by “Right-to-Work” laws, unions have to start acting like they are already operating in a “right-to-work” environment. The education-organizing program outlined here is the very same program unions will need to survive let alone thrive under the current Roberts Court. The sooner unions stop acting like a special interest and start behaving like a social movement; the closer we will be to making lasting, positive change.
2. Beyond the Echo Chamber
There are no shortcuts to building a movement—and it can’t be built in the heat of a fight like Wisconsin.
by Adolph Reed, Jr., on June 27, 2012
I suppose I should begin by noting that, although I don’t know Andy Kroll, I’ve counted Doug Henwood, Gordon Lafer, and Matt Rothschild as friends and comrades for twenty years or more. I know, and they all do as well, that each of them is a committed leftist. Each of them has been a staunch critic of how an ever more neoliberal Democratic Party has corralled progressive aspirations and screwed us over. So we can dial back on the breathless rhetoric about “silencing” and the like. No one is trying to silence anyone; nor is anyone, contrary to some of the overheated, scurrilous attacks on Lafer that have flown over the internet, angling to become a pinky-ringed lapdog of a stereotypically corrupt “union bureaucracy.”
The problem beneath this debate about the labor movement’s role in Wisconsin is that since the economic crisis we’ve all been confronted by our weakness and irrelevance as a left in American politics. This isn’t really news, or shouldn’t be. The left has been a solipsistic fiction in this country for years. It lives in an echo- chamber universe of actions, critiques and debates that have no institutional connection to anyone outside our own ranks and no capacity to influence the terms of national political debate. Reluctance to face up to that grim reality is understandable, and the relentlessness of the right’s increasingly bloodthirsty attacks – on multiple fronts simultaneously — also understandably inclines progressives to look ever more desperately for hopeful possibilities. That in turn fuels a tendency to discover magic bullets, single interventions that will knock the shackles from the people’s eyes, spark popular outrage and mobilize it into action. The Democrats’ fecklessness in responding to these attacks and their acquiescence and, often enough, active collusion in supporting a regime of intensifying regressive transfer of income and wealth only exacerbates the problem.
Thus we’ve seen proclamation after proclamation that some new right-wing move has gone too far, or some new line in the dirt – Jesse Jackson’s and Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns, Seattle, Katrina, Jena, the 2006 immigration marches, Barack Obama’s election, Republic Windows, Wisconsin, wage theft campaigns, Occupy Wall Street — will galvanize the popular movement that will begin to turn the political tide back in our direction. Merlin Chowkwanyun (“The Crisis in Thinking About the Crisis,” Renewal [2009]) catalogues the hyperbolic proclamations that the 2008 crisis itself would automatically bring about – if it hadn’t already brought about — the death of neoliberalism. That essay should be a cautionary tale for those tempted by this sort of wish-fulfillment politics. We didn’t wind up in this situation overnight, and we aren’t going to get out of it overnight. Yes, the dangers that confront us are truly nightmarish, and the thought that we may not have the capacity to curtail the worst – elimination of protections on the job, pensions and benefits, including Medicare and social security, destruction of the public sector, if not the very idea of the public, the panoply of can-you-top-this assaults on women’s reproductive freedom, just to name a few – certainly can push toward despair.
But there are no shortcuts to building a movement capable of responding effectively. The Spark is a myth, and the tendency to believe in it – consciously or not – will generate unreasonable expectations and then dash them. There is no ready-made constituency out there waiting to support a left political program if only it were properly announced. That constituency has to be built, and it can’t be built in the heat of a fight, least of all when we’re on the defensive.
That fact should inform how we think about the Wisconsin defeats. The initial defeat was that Scott Walker won the 2010 election. Everything after that was an uphill fight, and increasingly so because Walker had the huge advantage of control of public authority, including a state legislative majority, and then there was that cornucopia of right-wing corporate money. Yes, the response mobilized against his legislative blitzkrieg was impressive and inspiriting, but it was also a struggle against very long odds. And there was always a tendency among leftists, in keeping with the myth of the Spark, to romanticize the “taking to the streets” element of the Wisconsin fightback, which meant that a couple of important lessons were, if not missed, at least underappreciated. Many observers have noted that the Madison occupation depended on intense, aggressive, even extraordinary mobilization by unions, and not only unions in Wisconsin. That point has underscored the labor movement’s centrality to any mass action of that sort because it alone has the capacity – people and organizational and economic resources — to pull it off and sustain it. The other side of that coin, however, is that the intensity of effort required to sustain that kind of action could not be maintained indefinitely. It is too easy to imagine, as the numbers in Madison grew, that the mobilization had taken on a life of its own, that the People were rising. However, generating and sustaining that mass action required great commitment of effort and resources – effort and resources that weren’t going toward meeting other pressing needs and commitments. In addition, while attention and focus were on the battleground in Wisconsin, other states passed legislation every bit as anti-labor and hostile to the public sector as Wisconsin. We couldn’t match the Wisconsin mobilization everywhere.
I don’t mean at all that the effort in Wisconsin was misplaced. Rather, my point is that mass protest is not the end all and be all of political action. It does not necessarily mark going on the offensive or seizing political initiative; it can just as easily be the opposite – an act of desperation or an attempt to create a little space or breathing room to try to recover from a serious blow. It is only the fetish of the Spark that underwrites the default assumption that mass protest or street action equates with radicalization and expansion of the struggle. How many of us have ever really seen (i.e., not simply read or heard about – everybody tells that fish story) a protest action grow entirely on its own to a point where it overwhelms political opposition or converts into a new insurgency?
The belief that politics works that way suggests a perspective similar to what Doug Henwood, along with Liza Featherstone and Christian Parenti, quite perceptively criticized some years ago as “activistism” – a commitment to public action as the sole meaningful and intrinsically self-justifying form of political engagement. [“’Action Will Be Taken’: Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents”]. So what gives?
The tendency to scapegoat the labor movement for Walker’s most recent victory in Wisconsin – and, to be clear, that is what I see in Henwood’s, Rothschild’s and Kroll’s arguments – stems from frustration and desperation and, ironically, recognition, if only backhanded, of the fact that labor was the only element of the coalition challenging Walker with the material and organizational capacity to set and pursue a strategy. What other organized political forces could be identified in order to be blamed? This scapegoating not only rests on a naïvely formalist juxtaposition of street action and electoral action; it also feeds on a long-standing suspicion in many precincts of the post-Vietnam era left of a politics rooted in institutions in general and unions in particular. Gordon Lafer is correct that these criticisms misunderstand what unions are and how they operate as democratic structures, the realities of union leaders’ accountability to their members. I don’t need to reiterate that argument, which he makes very well. I would also commend Corey Robin’s blog posting offering a “Challenge to the Left” to consider what actually attempting to organize a constituency to support an unconventional program requires. For those who want to build a left, that’s the mindset of slow, steady, face-to-face base-building we need, not lurching from one self-gratifying but unproductive action to the next. The point of politics is after all, to resuscitate an old Maoist dictum, to unite the many to defeat the few. Our objective has to be to create that “many,” not merely assume it’s out there already.
At bottom, the problem is that this left has lived in the fictional echo-chamber universe for too long. Not being connected to practical politics anchored in institutions removes an important constraint of interpretive and strategic discipline and leaves too much space for indulging appealing but simplistic fantasies about political mobilization and what it requires. To wit, Matt Rothschild’s and Andy Kroll’s assertions that the popular actions in Wisconsin could easily have been expanded and sustained over a wider span and longer period fundamentally misunderstand the limitations of political action. Electoral mobilization is difficult enough; trying to spread the Madison direct action over the state would have been exponentially more so.
On that score, Bob Fitch was an exemplary person in many ways and a good guy, and we are all that much lessened by his death. That said, Doug knows, I suspect all too well, that I’m one of those who “detest” Bob’s views of unions. Ultimately, as I said more than once to Bob himself, in his view the only sort of union worth having is one that it’s not possible to imagine existing in the circumstances in which we have to operate. He was quick to reject out of hand as tainted beyond hope initiatives that had support of existing union leadership. Like so many flavors of Trotskyists, syndicalist romantics, and rank-and-file fetishists, he saw unions less as vehicles for workers to define and advance their interests than as corrupt entities holding back the development or expression of their members’ “true” interests. To the extent that that view of unions dovetails with the right’s contentions that unions are, well, corrupt entities holding back the development or expression of their members’ true interests and stealing their dues money like a collective Johnny Friendly, and to the extent that it proposes eliminating protections like the union shop, Gordon is correct that it is substantively a form of left anti-unionism. I don’t see how that is at all like a McCarthyite charge. It’s closer to, as we used to say when I was a kid, calling the thing by its natural name.
Like Doug, I think Sam Gindin, the long-time Canadian Auto Workers official, is very much a person whose perspective on the relation between the left and the labor movement is worth taking to heart. In an article in the forthcoming 2013 Socialist Register Sam makes the point that a labor movement that is disconnected from a vibrant left is impoverished, and a left that is not linked in some dynamic way to the labor movement is ultimately impossible. The project most vitally confronting us, Sam argues, is to begin trying to build a left that is committed to a socialist vision linked directly to the felt and expressed concerns of workers as articulated largely, though not exclusively, through their unions. If this debate can help throw that project into relief, it will have been productive.
I have one final comment about the “silencing” issue. I think it is appropriate to consider that some topics are, for reasons of political sensitivity (and, yes, concern that statements could wind up on the National Right to Work Committee’s homepage qualifies as such a reason), best not discussed in open forums like The Nation or the Progressive. I do not think that such concerns violate some principle of responsible left journalism. Rather, denial of such constraints speaks to the left’s disconnectedness from actual struggles; it is a luxury of our irrelevance as a left.
3. Labor’s Many Dead Ends
The current union strategy of sucking up to Democrats and organizing in the workplace alone are no longer viable. We need a new approach.
by Doug Henwood on June 19, 2012
Gordon Lafer apparently thinks I’m some sort of reactionary. Because I’ve written critically about unions and dared to say that they have a lot to answer for over Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin, I’m enjoying “the momentary rush of being on the same side as power” and joining an “anti-union attack.”
Aside from being a low, dishonest charge, that sort of defensive reflex isn’t going to help anyone but employers and their politicians. You might think that an endless series of defeats, going back at least thirty years, would lead to some self-reflection in the labor movement. But it hasn’t. Lafer might find it hard to believe, but there are few things I’d be happier to see than a revived labor movement. It’s hard to see how we can have a better society without stronger unions. We’re not going to get those by just doing the same thing a little better.
“The work of organizing,” Lafer discloses, “is slow and incremental.” In fact, the current model of labor organizing is impressively decremental. Last year, 6.9 percent of private sector workers were organized—that’s half as many as in 1986 when private sector unionization stood at 13.8 percent. The decline in the overall union density rate has been milder—from 17.7 percent in 1986 to 11.8 percent in 2011—thanks to stability among public sector unions. But that looks to be changing rapidly. Already under attack for the last few years, Walker’s victory is certain to intensify the war on public sector unions.
Those attacks have been made easier by the fact that unions aren’t all that popular with the broad public. In my original piece, I cited a number of Gallup polls showing that people thought that unions had too much power, were too interested in themselves and not the broader public and ranked toward the bottom of the list (rivaling banks and HMOs) in Gallup’s annual survey on confidence in major institutions.
To this, the standard union response—and Lafer is no exception—is to cite polls showing that 40 million American workers would like to join a union. The source for this is usually a series of surveys by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. Hart is a Democrat, and his firm lists sixteen unions among its clients on its website. I’m not saying that Hart cooks his results, but it is curious that independent pollsters find nothing like the support that Hart does. (For a review, see the Public Service Research Council.) But the election results in Wisconsin, as well as overwhelming votes to cut public sector pensions in San Jose and San Diego, suggest that the public is not overcome with love for organized labor.
In the face of all this, the reaction of many union people is to blame corporate power, big money, relentless antiunion propaganda, restrictive labor laws and the far right. All true enough, but that’s only a partial explanation. Those obstacles are going to be with us for a long time. So the question really is, How do you operate in this world?
The traditional approach towards organizing the private sector—trying to recruit a majority of workers and win a representation election—looks as good as dead. (For example, there were about 6,000 representation elections in 1980 and not quite 1,600 in 2010, the latest year available, a decline of almost 75 percent.) Employers are unfraid of breaking the law, and workers are afraid of losing their jobs. And the traditional approach to organizing the public sector—electing sympathetic politicians—looks seriously ill, if not terminal. Next to this, slow and incremental progress would seem quasi-revolutionary. Though it’s hard to get the likes of Lafer to admit this, business as usual is no longer an option.
So what then? I argued that if it’s ever to turn things around, organized labor has to act consistently and convincingly in the interest of the broad working class and not just its members. The United States would be a very different country had unions—which still have a lot of money and people to work with—spent the last five years agitating for single-payer health insurance. Or, as Sam Gindin, a long-time staffer with the Canadian Auto Workers’ union now teaching at York University in Toronto, told me in a radio interview , public sector unions could bring up the quality of public services in bargaining, threatening to strike over them if necessary.
Unions have to think about how to root themselves in communities and not think of the workplace as what it’s all about. Turnover is too high, and people have lives outside of work. Or, less politely, unions could take a page from the Occupy movement—maybe help bring it back to life even—and occupy. Many techniques of direct action were practically invented by unions—in days when strikers could get shot by Pinkertons. Some of these things may be against the law, but unions were not organized by people in thrall to the law.
Now, labor’s notion of political action is contributing to and campaigning for Democrats—and that’s about it. It’s donated enormous sums to a party that has given it little in return. The Democrats are not actively hostile, like the Republicans, of course—though that distinction may be eroding quite rapidly. Remarkably, the building trades unions in New York have contributed to governor Andrew Cuomo’s SuperPAC, which has been going after public sector unions for givebacks. It is very hard to see what return labor gets on its investment. Shouldn’t business unions ask businesslike questions?
In response, Lafer contends several things. One is that the unions have no choice but to get active in electoral politics, especially in the Walker case. But unions have almost no leverage over politicians after they take office. They never withhold money or endorsements. No Democrat need fear retribution. The relationship gets pathetic at times. According to former top AFL-CIO officer Bill Fletcher Jr., a senior union guy once told him that it was better to be at the table and not listened to than it would be to be outside. But outside is labor needs to be if it’s ever going to have any influence.
Lafer, who is not shy about painting others as identifying with power, is certainly embedded in the union status quo himself. Tom Chamberlain, the president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, is the chair of the board of advisors at the University of Oregon’s labor research institute, where Lafer is an associate professor. Its board is full of other union leaders. The institute’s curriculum is heavy with service-y stuff like grievance handling, bargaining technique and even labor-management cooperation. While these aren’t all evil pursuits, they don’t seem the most compelling material for labor’s intellectuals to be concentrating on in a time of institutional crisis.
Along with declarations of the need to go along comes the assertion that labor is already doing many things on behalf of the broad working class that mere bloggers like me don’t understand. Unions are at the forefront of efforts to protect the minimum wage and promote pay equity, says Lafer. Nice, and true in some sense, but these commitments lag badly behind the devotion to electing Democrats—Democrats who do almost nothing to advance these causes and who can’t always to be counted on to defend them.
Lafer points to the nurses’ union’s efforts to tax the 1 percent. By that I presume he means National Nurses United (NNU). NNU is doing many very good things, but they’re outliers in the labor movement. And in this little spat, it seems more on my side than Lafer’s. NNU’s Michael Lighty said of my first Wisconsin blog post: “Terrific piece that challenges much conventional thinking.” NNU also recently revealed to the world that the Service Employees International Union was working with the California hospital industry to weaken minimum staffing requirements—the opposite of agitating for the public good.
Sam Gindin makes several other points worth stealing. One is that the labor movement has suffered from the decline of the left, one that could provide history and systematic analysis—and with some critical distance. Such a left, he says, should be both inside and outside labor. And unions organized along sectional—professional or industrial lines—may not be the ideal agents of a broader classward turn. To do that you’d need what Gindin calls “intermediate” organizations, coalitions of members of many unions (and why not nonmembers too?) rooted in communities rather than around employers. These are important things to think about.
But, really, whatever the details, the most urgent thing to do is admit that things are dire and a serious rethink is in order. Dismissing critics as giving aid and comfort to the enemy will virtually assure that the union density rate will approach zero in a decade or two.
4. Left Anti-Unionism?
In the aftermath of the defeat in Wisconsin, left critics attacked labor’s decision to invest in the recall. But none of them offered a realistic alternative.
by Gordon Lafer on June 15, 2012
In the days following the Wisconsin election, a number of progressive journalists responded to the heartbreaking defeat by venting their anger at a surprising target: the very unions that Scott Walker waged war on. Doug Henwood in Left Business Observer, Matt Rothschild in The Progressive and Andy Kroll of Mother Jones each have different analyses of what went wrong, but all agree that unions were guilty of what Henwood terms the “horrible mistake of channeling a popular uprising into electoral politics.”
The Wisconsin movement “began to disintegrate the moment the leaders decided to pour everything into the Democratic Party,” Rothschild explains. That decision, he argues, “destroyed the lesson that you can exercise power outside the electoral arena.” Indeed, Kroll insists that the electoral strategy would have been a “loss” even if Walker had been defeated, since “the Madison movement would have found themselves in…the same broken system, with…little hope.”
Really? The limitations of electoral politics are obvious, but the assumption that electoral strategies per se are always wrong is hard to fathom. The loss in Wisconsin is very serious. But that loss would be the same if unions had forsworn the recall. Around 175,000 employees would still be stripped of union rights, with all that entails for them personally and for the material and organizational basis for progressive mobilization. And while the electoral loss no doubt emboldened anti-union conservatives, not challenging the governor would have conveyed much the same message: It’s politically safe to follow Walker’s example—after all, the unions didn’t even have the guts to take him on! Labor leaders confronted a genuinely hard choice: roll the dice on the recall, which everyone knew would be an expensive and uphill battle, or give up.
For that matter, how should we account for last fall’s referendum in Ohio, where voters overturned a copycat law modeled on Wisconsin’s? The Ohio labor movement chose an electoral strategy—and won big. Was that also a “horrible mistake”? If not, what—besides the outcome—makes the Wisconsin choice obviously wrong, a crime instead of a tragedy?
Critics insist that union leaders should have chosen a more radical path, overturning the Walker regime by harnessing the people power of the capitol occupation. Rothschild calls for mass civil disobedience, slowdowns and strikes; Kroll for consumer boycotts and a new political party; Henwood for grassroots education and lobbying.
But none of these offers a realistic alternative for restoring labor rights in Wisconsin. At their core, these prescriptions fundamentally misunderstand the reality of how unions generate mass action. Both the tremendous strength and real limitation of the labor movement is that, alone among “left” organizations, it is not a vanguard movement. Unlike the Sierra Club or Occupy, its members do not join based on pre-existing ideological beliefs. Overwhelmingly, they become members because they get a job someplace that happens to have a union. Union members are, almost entirely, exactly the same as any other working-class Americans.
Pundits sometimes write as if all that’s needed is for a union leader to make the right decision in order to generate radical action (thus Rothschild suggests that “unions could have told their members simply to ‘work to rule’,” assuming that hundreds of thousands of employees would risked their jobs to answer this call.) This imagines an institutional discipline that doesn’t exist. The work of organizing is slow and incremental. The task of building a serious workplace or political organization entails taking normal, apolitical, nonconfrontational people and moving them to a clearer understanding of the economy and a fiercer will to confront those who rule it. For any reader to sense what this is like, just go into work tomorrow and start asking co-workers to put their jobs at risk by striking over a demand for single-payer or taxing Wall Street. How long would it take to get your fifty closest co-workers to strike? How many would stay out after their personnel supervisor calls them at home telling them to come back?
How do employees go from being mild-mannered workers to fighting the power? Many get transformed through struggles in their workplace. Workplace fights are where the hypocrisy of management is unmasked; where the injustice of budget priorities becomes apparent; where people experience the capriciousness of elites and the potential power of collective action in a very visceral way; where people who are personally conservative and not activists end up doing things that require bravery (in most jobs even signing a petition creates some risk of retaliation) and emerge from it feeling more powerful and more ready to do the next thing. In a less transformative way, many more people are educated through conversations with stewards who are carrying out union education programs. Generally, these conversations are short and few—so union members end up thinking and voting more progressively than otherwise similar people, but not hugely so.
Radical actions remain possible. But we have to be realistic. The notion that the path to victory is clear if only dim-witted union leaders would listen to progressive bloggers reflects not just magical thinking about organizing but also the hubris of being far enough removed from the action to believe you’re the only one to have thought of a new idea.
In fact, hundreds of union leaders and activists have been working for years to build a broader movement—stronger, more militant, with a broader reach into the community and a more expansive vision. Apart from Occupy, the main organization running big public actions to tax the 1 percent is the nurses’ union. SEIU sent hundreds of field organizers to working-class neighborhoods in seventeen cities, knocking on doors of non-union families, seeking to build a progressive political movement to the left of the Democrats. The Laborers’ union launched efforts in multiple cities to team up with immigrant day-labor centers in order to reorganize parts of the residential construction industry. The UFCW is organizing Wal-Mart employees to fight store- and community-level battles over back wages long before there’s any plan for a union contract. The AFL-CIO itself has devoted significant resources to Working America, a program of political and educational outreach to non-union workers.
My point is not that everything is already being done that should be done. We’ve been losing, so obviously the current strategy can’t be sufficient. But the problem is much more serious, and more difficult, than just the strategic choices of union leaders.
Many unions can do a lot of things better, and should. But the depth of the attacks from the left—and the choice to launch them at this particular moment—is curious.
Henwood sees Wisconsin as evidence that the American public has turned against unions—and for good reason. “Unions just aren’t very popular,” he explains, because people correctly perceive that “unions…are too interested in their own wages and benefits and not the needs of the broader working class.” The core problem, apparently, is that unions are too focused on organizing workers and negotiating contracts, activities no longer viable in the twenty-first century. “Unions have to shift their focus from the workplace to the community,” he says, proposing a popular campaign to “agitate on behalf of the entire working class and not just a privileged subset with membership cards.”
But unions are supposed to be organizations of workers who improve their own conditions in their workplace. The problem is not that the model is bad, but the opposite: the best thing that could happen in our economy is for more people to have the right to bargain with their employers in exactly this way.
Here too Henwood blames unions. American workers don’t join unions, he says, in large part because they’re controlled by cronies who enrich themselves at the expense of their members; he approvingly quotes Bob Fitch’s equation of elected union officials with “feudal vassals” living off “serfs who pay compulsory dues.”
At this point we’ve left real economic analysis. Polls show that 40 million non-union American workers wish they had a union in their workplace. This is unsurprising—all other things being equal, workers with a union make 15 percent more and have a 20–25 percent better chance of getting healthcare or pensions than similar workers who have no union. The top reason that more Americans aren’t union members is not because they’re alienated; it’s because the anti-union industry is so aggressive (almost 20,000 Americans a year are economically punished for supporting unions in their workplace), and the law is so toothless that workers correctly fear for their jobs if they try to organize. After all, if the real problem was overpaid union bureaucrats, then radical unions like the Wobblies or United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers.
Furthermore, even while workers mostly focus on improving their own conditions, unions are by far the biggest force working to protect the interests of working people in general. Even as unions have been under such ferocious attack in state legislatures and struggling to repel those assaults, they’ve also been at the forefront of fights to protect minimum wage, child labor laws, unemployment insurance, pay equity, class size, immigrant rights and tax fairness—none of them union-specific issues. That, indeed, is why Walker and his corporate backers are so intent on dismantling them. The past two years have seen some of the country’s biggest private corporations devote millions of dollars to attacking public sector unions. This is not primarily because of ideological beliefs or a desire to pay less taxes. They see what some critics apparently miss—that unions remain the only serious counterweight to the unbridled power of the corporate elite.
Most employees naturally want their dues money to be mainly devoted to caring for themselves and their co-workers. Every time a campaign is undertaken to preserve class size or fight free trade agreements, people are making a decision to spend their dues money on something other than themselves. So, while more could be done, the criticism of union members and leaders for being too selfish is not based in reality.
Here’s the hard truth. We’re living in a dark time, and it’s gotten very hard for normal working Americans to win either at the workplace or in politics. We are massively outspent, and people are so scared of losing their jobs that it’s hard to fight back on a large scale. We have not figured out a reliable way to win. But the fundamental dynamics of power are the same as they ever were. We need to fight as smartly and as powerfully as we can, understanding that the game has not changed but simply gotten a lot harder. Of course there are things unions can do to be better and more effective, and those matter. But declaring organizing and contracts a thing of the past is not part of that.
The only serious choices we have are to keep fighting even though times are hard, or to give up, or to enjoy the momentary rush of being on the same side as power and join in the anti-union attack.
Author’s clarification (June 19, 2012): While I have serious criticisms of the columns about Wisconsin written by Matt Rothschild, Andy Kroll and Doug Henwood, it was wrong to term their writing “left anti-unionism” or to suggest that they were driven by the desire to cozy up to power or enjoy the thrill of attacking unions. Those words were written in a moment of anger, and they were a mistake. There are real enemies of working people and workers’ organizations, and they’re not these three authors. Nothing in this piece, or anything I’ve ever written, was designed to silence anyone. The tradition of left criticism of union practices—while I agree with parts and disagree with others—has helped make the labor movement more accountable, more democratic, and stronger. I posted an “author’s clarification” comment on the Nation website within hours of the piece going up, but knowing most people don’t read the comments, I wanted to append this note to my original piece. These authors do important work and don’t deserve to have their motives called into question.
The body of the piece—in between the headline and last line—I stand behind. I look forward to moving on to have a debate on the substantive issues on which we disagree. For now I want to be clear that from my point of view, that’s a debate that will take place among people who, in the most important way, are on the same side, and want to apologize to Matt Rothschild, Andy Kroll and Doug Henwood for implying otherwise.
Scapegoating the Wisconsin Debacle
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an “Anti-Labor Leftist”?
Commentary by Michael D. Yates, published in Counterpunch, July 2, 2012
The recent defeat of the Scott Walker recall in Wisconsin, an election in which Walker soundly defeated the same Democratic challenger who ran against him when he became governor in 2010, has generated much discussion. Why was the Wisconsin Uprising of early 2011, where hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites took to the streets and occupied the Capitol building to protest Walker’s attempt to destroy public employee unions and eliminate social welfare programs, diverted by the Democratic Party and labor leaders into a recall effort? Why was the man chosen by the Democrats to run against Walker a person who had himself been an enemy of labor unions and who distanced himself from organized labor every chance he got during the recall campaign? Why didn’t the unions build on the Uprising to reconstitute the state’s labor movement on a more militant and class conscious basis?
Several people, including radical economist and Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild, took labor leaders to task for not taking advantage of the mass anger and willingness to protest shown by the Uprising. Henwood said,
Suppose instead [of the recall]that the unions had supported a popular campaign—media, door knocking, phone calling—to agitate, educate, and organize on the importance of the labor movement to the maintenance of living standards? If they’d made an argument, broadly and repeatedly, that Walker’s agenda was an attack on the wages and benefits of the majority of the population? That it was designed to remove organized opposition to the power of right-wing money in politics? That would have been more fruitful than this major defeat.
Rothschild said,
Nor were more creative strategies tried. The Teamsters with their 18 wheelers, whose support was so emboldening, could have driven down Interstate 90 and 94 at 45 mph all day long for a week’s time to demonstrate that workers in Wisconsin weren’t going to take this lying down. No coordinated workplace strategies were adopted. Every union in the state could have caught the blue flu, so that workers in one trade after another would call in sick on alternating days. Or unions could have told their members simply to “work to rule”—doing the bare minimum that their contracts required. But none of these options were taken, and the only channel that all of the people’s energy was poured into was the very narrow and murky channel of the Democratic Party. There was a failure of imagination, and a failure of nerve, and a failure of process.
For this, Henwood, Rothschild, and those of us who agree with them, have been subjected to sharp criticism. Gordon Lafer, professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, called Henwood, et. al. “anti-labor leftists” who don’t understand that organizing is slow, difficult, incremental work, that unions have primary responsibility to protect their own members, and that labor must engage in politics. Labor had the choice in Wisconsin of going for the recall or throwing in the towel. Henwood’s and Rothschild’s suggestions are just so much pie in the sky, offered by outside commentators who aren’t serious about organizing and don’t know what they are talking about. It is the slow, painful, incremental organizing that, in the end, radicalizes workers.
Corey Robin, professor at Brooklyn College, agreed with his “comrade” Lafer, accusing those who pointed out Lafer’s close ties to top labor and Democratic Party leadership of making ad hominem attacks. Robin got on his high horse and penned a blog post asking us to imagine how difficult it is to organize people to take risky actions. We “anti-labor leftists” simply don’t comprehend the wealth and power of employers and the hostility toward workers of the government. When we point to such things as the high salaries of union leaders and their sometimes corrupt practices as reasons for labor’s decline, we are making an irrelevant argument.
The acerbic Adolph L. Reed, Jr, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of the stillborn Labor Party, put the icing on the cake, unambiguously endorsing the views of his friends Lafer and Robin, not only reiterating the “anti-labor leftist” charge, but accusing us of scapegoating labor for Walker’s victory, of waiting idly by for the “Spark” that will spontaneously ignite working class revolution, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy by having the temerity to criticize the labor movement in public forums!
Unfortunately, the errors and omissions of our triumvirate of political science professors are many. For example, they fail to place the difficulty of organizing workers into its full context. Organizing is going to be especially hard when unions have been granting debilitating concessions to employers for more than thirty years. Officers of some of the very public employee unions whose members led the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011 gave major concessions to the Walker government. Henwood correctly points out that unions are not as popular as Lafer thinks they are. Maybe concessions are one reason (along with those high salaries and corrupt practices). What is more, organizing is an ongoing process, which doesn’t end when a union has won a representation election. How will a local union become a fighting force when its leaders agree to two-tier wage agreements, and a new hire earns half as much as his more senior workmate for doing the same tasks? If my neighbor tells me that solidarity went out the window in his union, why would I want to join it?
Lafer asserts and Robin agrees (perhaps Reed does too, given the stridency of his support for his colleagues and disdain for the “anti-labor leftists”) that labor can’t abandon politics and in Wisconsin had to choose between trying to recall Walker and throwing in the towel. Not only is the recall versus capitulation a false dichotomy if ever there was one, but these scholars of the labor movement ought to know that there is the politics of a recall in which both candidates are hostile to organized labor, and there is the politics of building a labor movement, independent of Republicans and Democrats.
Let’s look more deeply into the difficulty of organizing and the dangers workers face when they try to form a union. Robin’s blog post sounded good on first reading. But then I began to think, isn’t nearly everything hard. It’s hard to organize people, knock on doors, talk to those with whom you don’t agree but whose support you need, write an article much less a book, raise kids, do most any kind of work. Yet, people do hard things all the time. Take risks too. When one thing doesn’t work, you try another, even if it takes a lot of effort and is risky.
Some labor leaders used to know this. When AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was leading the United Mine Workers and spearheading the strike at Pittston Coal Company, he led an occupation of the mine. Other tactics weren’t working. Something like a quadrillion dollars in fines were levied against the union. But it won the strike. His famous union forefather John L. Lewis was a conservative, but he hired communists to organize and made peace with radical rival John Brophy, once his enemy. Today, Trumka talks, while the house of labor burns. Where is the action? Phone banking and house calling for Walker’s opponent, a guy who took labor’s money but ran away from labor’s support at every opportunity? Doing the same for Obama? Life is too short to waste on such trivial pursuits. As Dr. Phil says, “How’s that going for you?” Is it scapegoating or much needed and honest criticism to say, “Well, Brother Trumka, what you are doing isn’t working? Do something else.” Rank-and-file insurgents like Jerry Tucker and Gregg Shotwell have been saying this to UAW leaders for years. Are they scapegoating? Isn’t the burden of proof on those who run the one-party state UAW to explain to the members why there is so little democracy in the union, why staff have better benefits than those who do the work, why there has never been a public accounting to the membership of the hundreds of millions of dollars in “jointness funds” paid by the corporations and used to create thousands of sinecures for union staff.
Workers will take chances too, even losing a job, when there is something worth fighting for. I put my own employment in jeopardy many times in union organizing campaigns when I was a young teacher, campaigns not just for teachers but for custodians, grounds keepers, and maintenance workers. Vietnam awaited me had I been fired. But our cause was just, and our leadership was radical and democratically chosen, with the aim of doing nothing less than democratizing the university. We never hesitated to put our jobs and careers on the line.
Similarly, I once had a group of steelworkers in a collective bargaining class. Their local leadership, in cahoots with District staffers, gave their (profitable) employer unnecessary mid-contract concessions. The members were outraged. My students taped every class, took what they learned, and, through good organization of the members, defeated the incumbents in local elections. An aroused and empowered rank and file soon forced the company to rescind the concessions. They took risks because their cause was just and they had a chance to succeed. They did that hard work.
No one will commit to demanding endeavors like building a union and a labor movement unless principles worth fighting for underlie them. What are labor’s principles? What will leaders fight for, with every weapon at their disposal? If anyone can tell me, please do. Our labor leaders won’t wage war for national healthcare, the expansion of social security, or reform of our horrendous labor laws. The teachers’ unions won’t even go to the wall to end the insane testing of our children and the gutting of our public schools. Endless concessions, two-tier wage agreements, costly turf wars, limited internal democracy, little or no member education, labor-management cooperation, all of these actions (or inactions), engaged in by most of our unions, are poor excuses for principles. Not many workers are going to go all-out to win them.
By Reed’s standards, this essay no doubt gives aid and comfort to the enemy. So be it. For me, not criticizing those who should know better, who claim the mantle of all of the labor stalwarts of the past, would be to dishonor every poor working stiff in my own extended family–miners, steelworkers, secretaries, clerical workers, glass workers, construction laborers, hospital workers, plumbers, homemakers, all those men and women who did shit work all their lives.
Former economist for the Canadian Auto Workers and eminent labor scholar and left-wing organizer, Sam Gindin, says that the labor movement cannot be rebuilt without a strong left. This means that the task at hand is to revitalize the left, to make it relevant to the lives of the working class. He puts it this way:
What a left has to offer is making connections between people across workplaces, bringing in a class analysis so they see it’s not just them. They can never win if it’s just a few of them against the state. They have to see there’s actually a class involved here. Giving them some alternatives, you know, giving them some historical memory, so they see how workers did this—in fact in more difficult circumstances in the past. Giving them some comparative analysis of what’s going on in Greece and elsewhere—how did people organize. So the left can play that role, in terms of bringing a class perspective, resources, memory into the picture. The truth is the left that we have now isn’t capable of doing that. So I think one of the questions that comes out of Wisconsin is not just “what’s wrong with unions?” but “what kind of a left could actually do that?”
You won’t find much help answering these questions in the Wisconsin pronouncements of Lafer, Robin, and Reed. Let me add that a vibrant left would be there to help channel something like the Wisconsin Uprising into a long-term confrontation with capital. Because contrary to professor Reed’s blathering about the Spark, revolts can and do arise unexpectedly. When they do, that slow patient organizing of workers into collective bargaining units won’t do the trick, unless there is a left inside and outside the unions, always educating, radically.
Corey Robin made a particular point of chastising the “anti-labor leftists” for failing to provide clear alternatives to Lafer’s argument that unions should continue to do what they have been doing, only more of it and better. Of course, it might seem to most people that it is incumbent upon them to explain why their model has failed so spectacularly. And Reed spent years trying to organize the Labor Party, to pretty much no effect, so shouldn’t he have explained why the great promise the Labor Party showed never materialized. Perhaps the reason they didn’t do these things is because honest inquiry would force them to confront the many roadblocks unions and labor leaders have established to prevent the building of new structures of resistance to the rule of capital.
Still, it is a fair question to ask critics of labor to offer at least some elements of a new strategy. I will review some suggestions made by organizers and scholars in another article. Here, let me say, first, that Henwood and Rothschild did make pertinent remarks on what labor might have done in Wisconsin, while their critics have not. Second, the Sam Gindin interview contains several interesting propositions worth pursuing. Third, Labor Notes writer Mark Brenner recently offered a variety of actions local union members can take. Fourth, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Jane McAlevey have provided excellent proposals for labor education. Fifth, master organizer Fernando Gapasin has actually implemented an action plan, which he calls “communities of solidarity” in the unlikely terrain of Eastern Oregon. Finally, readers might find it worthwhile to read the histories of the left-led unions in the United States, whose expulsion by the immediate predecessors of today’s labor chieftains corresponded with the beginning of the long decline of the labor movement as a force for working class empowerment.
MICHAEL D. YATES is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist’s Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. He is the editor of Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com.
