of eligible voters in a bargaining unit vote for union representation. When we represent a workplace, we must do so on an exclusive basis that forces us to take both the credit and blame for the pay, benefits, and work rules that everyone must labor under. We are also responsible for ensuring that all members of the bargaining unit do not protest, except under incredibly proscribed limits and during a small window of time. And if we’re in a “right to work” state—or, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Janus decision—in the public sector, unions have to expend significant financial resources representing workers who refuse to pay for them.
We’re expected to deliver big wages and generous benefits for our members, but that only worked when we represented all the companies in the major industries and were able to make employers bear the costs equally, thereby taking wages (and benefits) out of competition. Once that became the framework, any foreign competitor or start-up could be instantly competitive by dint of their lower payroll costs. Our existing unionized employers had a financial incentive, and legal protections, for outsourcing and subcontracting jobs to remain “competitive.” And all bosses have an economic drive to bust their unions or remain union-free.
Our “right” to strike, which would only be meaningful if it included the right to return to the job, has been severely curtailed. As a result—even with the recent uptick in strike activity—industrial actions are at a historical low ebb and very few workers understand their power and how to exercise it. One reasonable pathway to reviving the strike could be the spontaneous protest activity of union members, but the no-strike clauses in most collective bargaining agreements legally bind union representatives to clamp down on such job actions.
Meanwhile, management’s rights and our restricted scope of bargaining give bosses near-dictatorial control over daily decision-making, and whether union members can even have reasonable job security.
Finally, when a group of workers gets brave enough to join together, when they have a union certification election scheduled, and when their employer exercises his right to force them to attend mandatory captive audience meetings to campaign against the union vote, what are the devastatingly effective statements he’ll make?
• A union could make our company less competitive, and we might have to lay some people off.
• Unions only get what they want by going on strike, but if you go on strike you could lose your job.
• The union can’t protect your job.
There is truth in all those statements. We let this happen. This is our trap.
FOUR
Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing
IN 2005, THE LABOR MOVEMENT split, ostensibly over a disagreement about the institutional priority of organizing for membership growth. A number of unions seceded from the AFL-CIO to form a rival federation, Change to Win, only to (mostly) return quietly to the fold. Other unions merged, only to attempt to divorce shortly thereafter. There have been trusteeships34 and membership raids, and some very good comprehensive campaigns for new members and new bargaining units. But, as the dust settles from this period of union conflict, the decline in union density has not been arrested. Moreover, significantly fewer unions seem to be engaged in large-scale organizing, and the broad consensus within labor on the need to prioritize organizing has faded.
The story of labor’s wars could be thought of as a tug of war between competing institutional interests within the existing union framework—actually, a twin set of tensions. The first is between keeping decision-making and financial resources at the local union level and pooling resources and concentrating power in the international union. The other tension is between devoting resources to organizing the unorganized and focusing on winning better pay, working conditions, and rights for existing union members. These twin tensions are closely related but worth evaluating separately.
The Local vs. the International
The concept of Change to Win was inspired by Stephen Lerner’s “Immodest Proposal: A New Architecture for the House of Labor,” that unions should merge into ten to fifteen sector-focused international unions.35 Lerner’s thesis was that diluting labor’s resources among sixty-six international unions (particularly when fifty-one of them accounted for less than a quarter of AFL-CIO membership) was untenable if unions were to grow. That dilution of resources gets even more hair-raising when one considers that international unions are divided into anywhere from a couple dozen to a couple thousand local unions, and that most union dues remain at the local level. Many locals barely have enough money to properly serve their existing members, let alone organize new members.
A lot of the response led to a merger mania at the local level. UNITE HERE engaged in a thoughtful process of merging locals with overlapping geographical jurisdiction, in the hope of committing garment worker resources to new organizing in the hotel industry. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) utilized more blunt force to forge mega-locals that cover multistate regions. Such efforts were not limited to Change to Win unions. One of the projects I worked on at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was convincing nine New Jersey stand-alone locals of adjunct college faculty to merge into one statewide union in order to pool resources and hire a full-time coordinator of bargaining and contract campaigns.
More power and resources were concentrated at the international level. Constitutions were amended to give international leaders and staff more decision-making authority in organizing and even bargaining. Per capita dues were increased, giving the international unions (internationals) the power of the purse strings (and those internationals that left the AFL-CIO got even more money).
It is true that big campaigns against multinational companies can only be run with big resources and national coordination. But local unions with serious organizing programs (these do exist!) may have priorities that do not align with the international’s plans. Too often, the hard work of hammering out a plan that works for both sets of interests is undermined by secrecy and manipulation. In her memoir, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade of Fighting for the Labor Movement, Jane McAlevey provides a good, if somewhat biased, view of this tension from the perspective of an SEIU local that was not entirely “on the program,” as they say.
I saw some of these tensions firsthand while I was a young staffer at New York City’s hotel workers’ local, the New York Hotel Trades Council (NYHTC). The newly merged UNITE HERE’s first major campaign was coordinating the expiration dates of as many citywide contracts as possible to end in the same year. This campaign was probably one of the biggest successes of the Change to Win era, as the threat of shutting down a significant percentage of hotel chains’ business resulted in both substantial pay and work-rule improvements in the existing locals’ contracts and neutrality deals that allowed the international union to grow in other parts of the country. (At their best, neutrality deals are legally binding agreements by employers not to campaign against employee unionization and to give unions reasonable access to bargaining unit employees for the purpose of organizing.)
But I do not think anyone at UNITE HERE told the leadership of NYHTC that the plan was to line up everyone’s contracts with their 2006 expiration until after four or five cities’ expirations were already aligned. And the chain that UNITE HERE most wanted to single out did not make strategic sense for the NYC local. Finally, those neutrality deals also involved signing away some locals’ rights to organize other properties that the chains considered off-limits. Unfortunately, no one sought the locals’ consent. I am not sure that any of these disagreements were properly aired until the day that NYHTC president Peter Ward and Las Vegas local president D. Taylor stood in the office of UNITE HERE General President Bruce Raynor and told him he would not be reelected (thus precipitating the disastrous “divorce”).
The pressure to gain more members is one that international unions feel acutely, while many locals do not seem to feel that burden if they are able to continue to bring in decent contracts and get their officers reelected. This is particularly true for locals who represent only one employer or who