with possibilities. We should pursue reform as a dialectic. There are the changes that we have the power to make ourselves, and those that will be granted or imposed by the system itself. But every change—no matter how minor, no matter if it comes from above or below or if it’s imposed on us by our enemies—creates the possibilities for more change. We should be constantly debating strategy and reexamining the political environment and workers’ attitudes. We must be ready.
TWO
Our Peculiar Union Shop
IF THE SYSTEM IS A TRAP, then we need to understand what that system is and how it developed. Let’s start with the framework under which most union leaders and activists would consider a workplace “unionized.” It is a peculiar thing, from a historical and global standpoint. In the United States, a union shop is one in which one union, among many possible alternatives, serves as the exclusive representative of all employees within a legally defined bargaining unit based upon the majority of the affected workers’ preference. And all workers in a union shop are expected to join the union or pay an agency fee.
To union members, leaders, and staff this feels totally normal and desirable. It is what a union is. Even as the “Right to Work” laws passed now by a majority of the states and the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision have made this arrangement illegal in many workplaces, we still strive to turn as many workplaces into union shops as we possibly can, even if that means changing the law where we must. But the fact is that this is a totally unusual structure. Unions in other countries do not look like this! This isn’t even how unions have always been structured in this country.
We tend to assume that the collective bargaining framework was the product of active strategic choices. Surely Walter Reuther, Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis and other leaders of labor’s great upsurge in the 1930s sat around a table, debated all the possible alternatives, and decided that this framework is what we should pursue. However, the reality is that much of our system was produced by accident, the result of differing and conflicting strategies.
The Closed Shop and the Roots of the Labor Movement
The idea that everyone in a workplace should belong to a union is in the DNA of the U.S. labor movement, like the vestigial tailbone is part of the genetic code in human DNA. It’s largely a holdover from a time we don’t remember. It’s rooted in the craft unions and the building trades that formed the first permanent worker organizations in this country.
Although unions have been around since the earliest days of the Republic, they were usually short-lived and inchoate efforts. Often, the focus was more on passing wage and hours legislation on a city or state basis, and so labor unions looked more like labor parties.12 As modern capitalism and large corporations took shape and the world of work was restructured, unions’ definition of who was a worker and who was a boss evolved slowly. The most prominent union of the 1870s and 80s, the Knights of Labor, extended membership to “all who labor.” For the Knights, this included small business owners and supervisors (but excluded saloonkeepers and lawyers!).
This was a boom-and-bust era of labor organizing. Union ranks would swell during good economic times as worker demands for a fairer share of corporate profits frequently led to substantial strike waves. When the economy crashed, as it did about once a decade, employers would target the loudest union activists for layoffs and blacklisting, and the unions would be smashed.
The craft unions were able to form more permanent organizations by being deliberately smaller. The carpenters’ union, for example, didn’t want “all who labor” to join the union. They wanted all who labor as carpenters. They wanted to define the skills of the carpentry trade, control the training of new apprentice carpenters, and force employers to come to them when they needed skilled workers on a job site.
And employers needed the crafts. During economic downturns, they had little ability to fire union activists or recruit scabs because the craft unions functionally controlled the jobs. So, while less construction might mean fewer carpenters working, those who were working were doing so on a union basis. And when construction picked up during the next economic recovery, it too would be done on a union basis.
These unions would survive. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters was formed in 1881. It still exists today. It was one of the unions that formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as an umbrella organization of all the various craft unions. For decades, these craft unions were the labor movement. It shouldn’t be surprising that the industrial unions and public sector unions that eventually followed longed to emulate the model in which everyone on the job site has to belong to the union as a defining characteristic of a union shop.
But a craft union shop is actually a closed shop, and it is a model that is very difficult to emulate. Union membership in a craft or trade union precedes the job. You join the union. The union trains you in the craft. The union gets you hired on a job site where a contractor has signed a collective bargaining agreement with the unions for the duration of the construction. Of course, it’s reasonable that the building trades unions demand that only union members get hired for the job and that everybody on the job is fully paid up in their union dues.
But that’s not how most of the economy is structured. Consider the fate of one of the other founding affiliates of the AFL. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was a craft union that functionally controlled steel production for a brief time in the 1880s. They defined the smelting process for making iron and steel. They controlled the training and supply of workers. They controlled the quality of the product. They controlled the pace of work, they controlled who worked, and they controlled prices.
This amount of worker control was unacceptable to the new captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie, who was buying up major steel mills and metal works factories in order to gain monopoly control of the industry, forced a confrontation at the Homestead Steel Works in 1892. He locked out the union and hired a private army of Pinkertons to wage armed warfare against the union men. In the entire bloody, violent, and murderous history of American class warfare, the Homestead strike still stands out for its barbarism.13
Bosses gave Carnegie’s new economic model the ironically bloodless name “the open shop,” and later and more sinisterly, “The American Plan.” What this meant was that union members were not welcome. The company would choose who gets hired, take control of training, and de-skill the jobs to the greatest extent possible.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the new methods of mass production that would come to define the “American Century” were designed to thwart the craft model of worker organization. It would not be the last time that corporations restructured the economy to counter the way that unions are organized and, in the process, avoid unions altogether.
Exclusive Representation and the Modern Labor Movement
The model of one union exclusively representing and bargaining on behalf of all the workers in a bargaining unit is a product of the law, but it was probably an unintentional development.
With bosses that would literally rather wage armed warfare on their workers than deal with a union, it became clear to the Roosevelt administration that crawling out of the Great Depression would require government intervention to legally force employers to recognize and bargain with unions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 had bare-bones procedural requirements. A union proves that it has members in a shop. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) then directs the employer to meet with union representatives and bargain “in good faith.” The Act was much more focused on preventing and forbidding common union-busting tactics called unfair labor practices.
In
