Workers looking for jobs, unions looking for members

Monthly Review, April, 2004 by Michael D. Yates

* envision the labor movement as something larger than labor unions and struggle for community goals such as low-cost housing, while at the same time building workplace power through community alliances;

* support, ally with, and give monetary assistance to labor friendly and nontraditional labor groups, such as the global justice and anti-sweatshop movements, worker centers such as the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, and Jobs with Justice;

* face issues of gender, race and ethnicity head-on and make such issues central to organizing.

It is interesting to note that the strategies and tactics described and analyzed by Clawson are very much like those used by the labor movement in the 1930s, which were fundamental to building the left-led CIO unions. They were also critical to the successes of a remarkable group of what Vanessa Tait calls "poor people's unions" that came to life from the 1960s onward, the period in which the AFL-CIO and most of its member unions had abandoned even the pretense of building a labor movement. (15) What successes labor unions have had in recent years are the result of doing the things done by groups such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN's United Labor Unions, the Revolutionary Union Movement, workfare unions, and workers' centers.

Clawson believes that the growing union embrace of movement building, combined with the growth of the global justice and other movements, puts labor in a position for a new "upsurge" of rapid growth similar to that of the CIO in the 1930s. Clawson may be right, but he may also be engaging in wishful thinking. Which brings me to my second point. What Clawson and most commentators on the labor movement nearly always fail to discuss is the left. In the 1930s there was a vibrant left-wing politics in the United States and many left-wing organizations. The left already had a long history in the United States at the beginning of the Great Depression, and the various strands of the left, including the Communist Party, were critical to labor's upsurge. Not only did leftists build the new unions, pioneering the tactics praised by Clawson, but they also were committed to building a radically different society. Their ideological commitment sustained them in hard times, and more importantly, helped them to impart to workers a class way of looking at things and a feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves.

Today, there is nothing like this within organized labor or, for that matter, in most other progressive movements. Sweeney's "New Voice" was a revolution from above, and, like all such "revolutions," envisioned change as limited and moving from the top down. As such, this revolution has clearly failed. One sign of its failure is the appearance of a new group, mainly situated within the AFL-CIO called the New Union Partnership (NUP), led by the leaders of five large unions: the Service Employees International Union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, the Laborers International Union of North America, and the Carpenters Union (which is not now in the AFL-CIO). The NUP argues that union density must be increased if labor is to regain its power, and its leaders argue that a structural reorganization of unions, involving the consolidation and elimination of many unions, the strategic division of union jurisdictions among the few remaining unions, the elimination of local control over central labor councils, and the devotion of nearly all union resources to organizing and politics is pivotal to union success. I cannot go into the details of the NUP plan here, but at this point it is not clear that it is suffused with the vision embraced by Clawson and Tait. (16)