A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor
This Labor Day, with public opinion firmly in favor of unions and teachers racking up victories across the country, the news for the labor movement is actually hopeful.
A Chicago teacher takes a break from picketing during the union's 2012 strike. yooperann / Flickr
Despite many setbacks, this Labor Day, the news for the labor movement is hopeful. Public support for unions has been increasing with the realization that they improve working and living conditions for both unionized and non-union workers.
Sustaining this reversal requires that we fight for good unions — democratic unions that make demands for the whole working class central to their agenda, integrate struggles against social oppression, and are willing to take direct action like strikes.
This is what the past year’s #RedforEd teacher walkouts has taught labor. It’s also why we should, yet again, thank a teacher this Labor Day.
Workers are suffering from capital’s successful attacks on the political and economic gains that labor and its allies have won in a century of struggle and sacrifice. Labor is still reeling from its diminished influence in politics, and young workers especially are suffering from capitalism’s offensive. As the New York Times “workologist” advised readers, employees who are dissatisfied with their working conditions have almost no legal protections.
They may think suing an employer will bring relief, but the only legal protections workers have are in cases of discrimination. The exception, ignored by the “workologist,” is if you have a union contract and are willing to enforce it.
Labor desperately needs vision and courage. And this is the context in which teachers have demonstrated a new grammar for unions to build political support as well as win economic gains.
The state-wide walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona and a one-day protest in North Carolina occurred because working teachers dared to challenge conditions their unions had accepted as inevitable. While some teacher activists were officers of their local unions in state affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), neither union represented more than a handful of school employees.
The vast majority of teachers who walked out were “ordinary” teachers and school workers. They weren’t union members. Moreover, this was a movement started and sustained by workers, independent of and often in defiance of the union apparatus.
The “red state” walkouts follow in the steps of teacher activists in US cities who have been transforming their unions through reform caucuses, inspired by the bold strike of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2012. #RedforEd and the burgeoning movement of reform caucuses in both NEA and AFT show how we might create workers’ organizations that are democratic, defend labor’s political purposes, and build collective action at the workplace.
Unions can’t bring democracy to the workplace if they are autocratic and hierarchical, or if they continue to cast the union as a business that provides services to members, who in turn, pay dues and do little more. The term “free riders,” workers who are represented by a union but don’t join and pay dues, which the Right intends the new Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME to produce, in droves, is symptomatic of this destructive mindset. It casts workers’ alienation from their unions as an individual moral failing, as occurs when dining out with friends but then refusing to pick up your share of the bill.
Organized labor has not yet figured out how to mount a counter-offensive against what was identified forty years ago as a one-sided class war against us. Yes, we need laws that defend workplace rights. How will we win this legislation when we can’t even win the right to strike and don’t demand it from Continue reading: A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor
