Tons of them. The Cold War ended, of course, and the AFL-CIO elected new leadership in 1995 that embraced the hiring of more movement-based staff, many of them veterans of the 1960s New Left. As Joe Burns notes in his book Reviving the Strike, “Despite their background as part of the political and ideological left, the views pushed by many ex-1960s activists today demonstrate a remarkable pragmatism.”5
That pragmatism consists of largely accepting the rigged rules of the system as a given and pushing against the boundaries of the law rather than challenging or outright breaking the law. There is a pervasive tendency in our movement to accept that when it comes to labor structure, strategy, and law, “It is what it is.” The horrible structures of American collective bargaining rules are a given, and we don’t have much opportunity to change them.
My generation was trained by that generation, and we largely respected the experience and expertise of those who came before us and mostly accepted this structural trap. Because we hammered out strategy in airless rooms where leaving with a consensus plan was a valued goal. Because Grandma’s pot roast tasted like home.
I had to get out of the room. Toward the end of my tenure at the AFT, I read Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Life of American Labor,6 in which he names the trap that unions find themselves in “contract unionism.” He argues that the scope of bargaining and the drudgery of contract bargaining and grievance handling, combined with no-strike clauses, structurally limits the vision of what unions are or can be and saps us of our potential for militancy. His experience in union leadership, as part of a successful opposition movement in his faculty union after a career spent criticizing bad leadership, drew him to the conclusion that the system is a trap no matter how well-intentioned the leadership is.
I couldn’t unread it. His arguments gnawed at my sureness in what we were doing as organizers and as a left within labor. As soon as I found myself not working for a union for the first time in my adult life, I started playing with some of his ideas as I began to write for In These Times. Frankly, I think my writing made me unemployable for a while. I know that it’s pissed off some of my friends. Stanley Aronowitz pisses people off way more. I mentioned the book to a friend, a union staffer in New York who is one of the labor movement’s more prominent and thoughtful public intellectuals, and he instantly became agitated about Aronowitz’s radical proposal that unions abandon contract bargaining entirely.
But at least he read it and thought about it. I’m often disappointed that my former colleagues at AFT don’t read, or at least don’t read anything that’s critical about union strategy. It’s not because, as they claim, that they don’t have the time to read. It’s that nobody who works their ass off for a union wants to let a nagging thought in that their hard work, combined with everyone else’s at all the other unions, isn’t going to restore the labor movement.
We need those nagging thoughts. We need questions that agitate and annoy. We need to critically reevaluate structure, strategy, and history. We need to read more, and talk more across unions, across generations, and across disciplines. We need to get out of those airless rooms. We need to cook that pot roast dozens of different ways.
Using the Crisis
Finally, another shibboleth is that there will be no labor law reform until we create a crisis through militant demonstrations of worker power—like sit-down strikes. These are particularly unhelpful when paired with a macho pose, so it’s pointless to even think about or discuss labor law reform until that wave of sit-down strikes is in process.
In broad strokes, this is not wrong. But it misses some crucial nuance because there are really two kinds of crisis that can influence labor law. One is the crisis of capitalism, when the system, left to its own devices with no effective checks on its power, leads to political and economic turmoil that frightens a faction of the capitalist class into loosening some of the restrictions on unions in the hopes of stabilizing the economy and body politic. The other crisis occurs when we workers use the limited opening we’ve been provided to demonstrate our collective power—to ourselves and the bosses—to win a more accepted representational role in the workplace and in government.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was the first kind of crisis, and the Roosevelt administration provided an unanticipated opportunity. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, unions were at one of their weakest points in history. Membership levels had declined from postwar highs, and strikes were uncommon. The American Federation of Labor did not endorse in the election, and there was no reason to expect the Democrats to do anything for labor.
And yet, one of the first acts of the New Deal administration, the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, guaranteed in Section 7 that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
Now, the main purpose of the law was to get competing firms to engage in price collusion to stabilize big business. The sad reality is that the weak nod to labor in the NIRA was merely a sweetener to help get a few extra votes for its passage. But its tripartite industrial boards, consisting of one representative each from companies, unions, and “the public” for each major industry, did have the power to establish minimum wages and work rules. Strong unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and United Mine Workers were able to press the boards to raise wages and spread union standards across non-union firms in their industries. Elsewhere, the boards gave little thought to working conditions except for their dogged determination to keep on union-busting.
This gets lost in a popular understanding of labor history. First of all, Section 7’s “right to organize” had no enforcement mechanism, yet workers nevertheless took it as a signal that the government would have their backs. John L. Lewis famously sent organizers into the coal fields with the message, “The President wants you to join the union!” and restored the United Mine Workers sagging membership and power before similarly turning his attention to the steel industry.7
There’s a lesson in this, in knowing what we have the power to change, and in being smart enough to recognize that the political environment has changed enough that our own approaches to the work should change too. Section 7 wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on but to just enough workers in 1933 it meant something. The sit-down strikes that started in 1934 and the Wagner Act (NLRA) of 1935 might not have happened without that earlier signal.
Today, capitalism is in a crisis that exceeds the Great Depression as an existential threat to our democratic institutions. It’s not just the rampant poverty and massive inequality but the resurgence of racist authoritarian violence. The decades-long attack on unions is a large contributor to these problems, a political reality that has not gone unnoticed among liberals and a large section of the centrist establishment.
The Democratic primaries saw almost all of the candidates, even those who were boosters of charter schools and other assaults on public education, fall all over themselves to endorse and support teachers strikes.8 And, prodded by SEIU, every candidate who remained in the race long enough put out detailed and robust labor platforms endorsing the union’s demand of “unions for all.”9 Even centrists like Beto O’Rourke10 and Jay Inslee11 endorsed some version of the proposals I will outline in this book. This is different from the usual vague platitudes that Democrats are expected to spout in order to vie for union endorsements. This is an opportunity. Now, I’m not holding out any Democratic president as labor’s savior, but what I am saying is that we’d be fools not to be debating legal reforms now that might be in consideration in the near future. What do we gain by abstaining?
Moreover, we must be much more strategically
