Lessons from Wisconsin - Debate in The Nation

OpinionNation: Labor's Bad Recall?
Where progressives come to debate.

Gordon Lafer, Doug Henwood, Jane McAlevey, Bill Fletcher Jr.
and Adolph L. Reed on June 15, 2012 - 3:57 PM ET

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168435/opinionnation-labors-bad-recall#

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.

=====

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 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.

=====

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.

=====

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 unafraid 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.

=====

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.

========== 

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