This is a response to an article by Ronaldo Munck on the need to build towards an international labor movement. For context, check out the original article.
Ronaldo Munck’s article reminds us of the relevance of organized labor, which has, until recently, seemed like a footnote in the activism of the last several years. However, worker organizations have traditionally been at the forefront of movements for social change, in particular those that at one point seriously aimed to democratize the economy. Though widespread campaigns aimed at undercutting union participation have taken a toll over the past several decades, I agree that we cannot simply treat unions as relics of the past. The recent organizing and success achieved by striking teachers across the US is hopefully reminding many of labor’s relevance.
A four-part agenda for revitalizing organized labor comes to mind: continuing to build connections between workers in different nations must be a priority, but at the national level there should be at least three additional goals: rebuilding unions, democratizing them, and broadening workers’ vision for change. With Munck having focused on developments in transnational collaboration, I’ll make a few comments about the three national goals, which all build a stronger base for an international labor movement.
Rebuilding Unions
First, there should be a large-scale effort to rebuild unions. In the mid-1950s, at its peak, just over one-third of US workers were members of a union. Today, the number is less than seven percent in the private sector. This is a result of concerted efforts by corporations and the wealthy to destroy unions. Munck suggests that “The three decades following World War II were known as a ‘golden era’ for the upper strata of labor in the US and Europe, when workers secured more rights and social protections.” However, elites were already working to undermine unions when the war ended. Labor organizing in the US was only guaranteed as a legal right with the Wagner Act of 1935—an achievement resulting from massive Depression-era organizing—but immediately following WWII the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act took away many of the gains US unions won. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s book Selling Free Enterprise is dedicated specifically to the “business assault on labor and liberalism” of the 1945-60 period. Propaganda campaigns meant to “indoctrinate” the population “with the capitalist story” (a quote from P.R. literature) and dissolve its sense of solidarity and union support reached millions of people. These efforts accelerated in the 1980s, with the US government refusing to enforce labor laws meant to protect organizers and strikes. After decades of successfully dismantling organized labor in the private sector, business set out to wither public sector unions, a desire that the Supreme Court recently attended to by undermining union fundraising in its 2018 Janus decision. These corporate campaigns have culminated in today’s low union membership. The obvious desire of elites to destroy unions illustrates their importance to public interests, and this should be impressed upon today’s activists, since labor organizations are likely an essential part of any movement aiming to go beyond reform and transform society. The New Deal came about in the midst of major labor militancy that forced sectors of business to accommodate worker demands. If there is to be a Green New Deal, it seems that rebuilding unions should be part of activists’ program for transformation.
Democratizing Unions
We must also democratize unions, ensuring that they’re governed by their members. It’s not uncommon for American unions to be controlled by leaders closer to the corporations that oppose workers’ wellbeing than the workers themselves. As long as this continues, public interests will only be pursued so far. And with members distant from union decision-making, we shouldn’t assume that the positions of union leadership reflect the views of the grassroots. For example, recent polling around the Green New Deal resolution, presenting talking points for and against it, suggests that voters favor the broad outline of the idea. This contrasts with the recent statement by the AFL-CIO that calls the resolution a “threat” to its members. Does this official position reflect the views of a majority of its members? And how many workers come to adopt their leaders’ pro-business positions? To have any chance of unions taking positions that conflict with the priorities of industry, activists must ensure that these institutions are democratically accountable. The democratic character of unions also has direct impacts on transnational solidarity, since pro-business national unions won’t support democratic international labor organizations. In fact, after WWII US labor leaders worked with political and economic elites to undermine unions in Italy, France, and other countries because they were too democratic. Unions are important means of collective action and they influence the behavior of working people, thus activists can’t ignore them. Of course, in the event that we create unions that are guided by their grassroots participants, individual workers’ analysis of the most pressing issues and their ambition for change becomes even more important. This is the subject of the third goal for revitalizing organized labor.
A Full and Ambitious Analysis
Finally, we urgently need to broaden the vision of workers so that better wages and working conditions are not the ultimate goal but a stepping stone to a transformed society. The question is how to build this vision. Ongoing education programs about the authoritarian nature of economic relations in our society seem foundational. Institutions dedicated to educating workers not just about the basics of labor action but about broad topics relevant to all of us as human beings should be created. For instance, workers should learn about how Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare led to the destruction of organized labor in the 1920s, while the 1930s saw its powerful resurgence. Thousands participated in sit-down strikes—occupying their workplace—which threatened factory owners with the prospect that workers would realize they could run the operation without bosses. Learning about this period could give workers inspiration, a strategy for rebuilding, a sense of their own power, and hint at the broader vision of social liberation they could adopt and help to bring about. As members’ consciousness develops, it could lead unions to join more ambitious campaigns that would provoke a stronger business backlash and reveal these conditions of domination even more clearly. Ultimately, the public’s lack of freedom to shape the economy must become common sense, and our toleration for it should be questioned.
A major part of this consciousness-raising process must be the development of ecological awareness within labor unions. I believe that a popular education program that sparks discussion of ecological issues, the extent to which we live in a democracy, social movement history, and other major topics is vital to deal with climate change and other crises, and unions could serve as ready-made groups with gathering spaces to hold these programs.
Conclusion: Bridging the Present and the Future
As workers develop an ecological analysis, ecological activists should develop their sympathies for the plight of labor—something already taking place. An important challenge for climate activists is developing strategies that connect struggles for present and future survival. This is one of the reasons that a job guarantee is an essential policy within a Green New Deal. Working people are rightly mindful of maintaining their job and means of providing for their family as society changes. A job guarantee ensures that the fear of unemployment is addressed directly, though instituting it at the federal level is most straightforward since central banks can simply create whatever funding is necessary for the program. Achieving it would secure workers’ interests in the present and allow them to fight for their future. But in the meantime, before a movement powerful enough to achieve a federal job guarantee is built, activists working at the state and local levels could perhaps fight for joint proposals that pair ecological policies with programs to ensure economic well-being. They could go beyond advocating for a “just transition” for impacted workers by sketching as clearly as possible the details of training and employment plans at these levels, based on an analysis of state and local budgets, to eliminate what may be the main barrier to broad support for ecological policies. This builds the bridge between the present and the future.