Leland Olds responds to the recent Labor Notes conference with an analysis of the current state of U.S. labor organizing and proposes a syncretic strategy for socialist trade unionists that includes both reformism and independent unionism.
On Friday April, 19, as the final ballots were cast in a Chattanooga, Tennessee Volkswagen Plant where the UAW won an election, militants from across the U.S. labor movement demonstrating in solidarity with Palestine faced off against police 500 miles away on Bryn Mawr Ave, in Rosemont, Illinois.
Across the street from the police lines, inside the Hyatt playing host to the Labor Notes conference, Brandon Johnson addressed an anemic crowd in the main ballroom. Most of the energy was outside, sapping the enthusiasm from a speech that, in other times, might’ve served as a high point.
Police, attempting to clear the street, detained at least two of the demonstrators and attempted to drag one into the Rosemont convention center across the street from the Hyatt. Crowd pressure, and the unpreparedness of the police for such a large demonstration, led to the de-arrest of at least two—and I think all—of the detainees.
The events at Labor Notes serve as a useful moment to take stock of the forces on the left wing of the U.S. labor movement. Because, while the AFL-CIO continues its long slide into national irrelevance, there is a real dynamism at the left edge of the labor movement that raises strategic questions that will determine the success of the U.S. socialist movement.
The Defensive-Offensive
Organized labor in the United States is in a uniquely weak position, and has been since the middle of the Trump administration. The Federal Judiciary is in the process of weakening the NLRA ever further, to the point that companies can now sue unions for losses of revenue caused by strikes, and private sector union density remains flat. In Nevada, long the political base of UNITE HERE, the liberal political model for remaking sunbelt cities in the image of the AFL-CIO’s most progressive union has broken down almost completely.
At the political level, Labor is licked.
Labor Notes bars recording or specific reporting on individual panels, save those it itself films, given the sensitive nature of topics discussed therein, so this piece will speak in generalities. Reform-oriented union officials and staff present at Labor Notes spoke of a profound crisis for labor, but also an opportunity. The severity of Labor’s decline and the weakness of the country’s political institutions has opened an opportunity for shopfloor militancy to become political militancy, in this telling. Labor, with nothing left to lose, must embrace its reform wing, confront employers, and start a political struggle oriented around more radical demands than those embraced by longstanding leaders, these officials say.
The general strategy of the reformists goes a little like this: re-elect Biden to secure the NLRB, struggle for one-member-one-vote within existing unions, take aggressive bargaining positions, and seek to align union contracts for a confrontation between organized labor and organized capital in the spring of 2028. Call it the Shawn Fain school—though Fain himself seems notably cooler on re-electing the Delaware Genocidaire than some of his followers.
The central conceit here is that organized labor has to fight, and fight now, or collapse as an organized force. I broadly agree with that strategic insight, though I disagree with the reformers’ support for Biden, which translates—ceasefire resolutions aside—to an endorsement of the destruction of the Palestinian people. But a political strategy to discipline the Democrats for backing genocide is not the topic of this article, and is beyond my (limited) expertise. And, during the writing of this piece, the confrontation between the mobilized anti-genocidaires and the repressive apparatus has sharpened the contradictions in the U.S. to a point unseen since the summer of 2020.
That organized labor has reached a point on the defensive where the only option left is to counterattack was obvious for the UAW, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA when they struck last year: It is obvious now in media, especially journalism, where—as WGA and Newsguild members said at Labor Notes—the ad-supported model of media has completely collapsed. Meanwhile the UFCW is in the midst of a profound battle over reform, while the Teamsters leadership has executed a turn towards the right that includes monetary support for the most reactionary fascists in the U.S. political system.
Outside of these unions and several industries including aircraft manufacturing, academia, and public education, the case for an immediate offensive by all elements of the labor movement is less clear. One of my contacts in the restaurant labor movement recently told me that she was bullied by her coworkers for merely expressing sentiments in favor of collective action. Substantial sectors of the U.S. working class remain unorganized, and—under NLRB-approved methods—likely un-organizable at scale.
While Starbucks Workers United broke through towards collective bargaining this past spring, their success is likely replicable only at Chipotle, CAVA, and a handful of other fast-casual chains with a structure based on exclusive company-operation of stores, in contrast to franchising. This contradiction will be the subject of a forthcoming essay in this magazine.
How the Labor Bureaucracy Approaches the Crisis
So what to do about the hundred and fifty million unorganized workers in the United States?
The two answers offered by the labor movement’s bureaucracy are: (a) Nothing, and (b) SEIU-style “air wars” that culminate in sweetheart wage deals with industry. See, in the former case, the foot-dragging of the UFCW on opposing the vast Kroger-Albertsons merger, which could break the back of that union, and in the latter, the AB-1228 wage deal, often known as the $20 fast food minimum wage, for California workers.
The wage deal is worth recapitulating here, as it marks the labor establishment’s greatest political victory in years. In 2022 the California legislature passed a bill that set up a standards council that amounted to a form of weak sectoral bargaining in fast food and guaranteed a sectoral minimum wage of $22 an hour by 2024. The industry freaked out, raised $60 million dollars, put together a fraudulent referendum campaign, and challenged SEIU to a titanic political duel.
SEIU, for its part, raised little, put together an anemic petition to support the wage board and went to Gavin Newsom. The union, isolated from the rest of the California labor movement as a result of carve-outs in the law that left thousands of workers uncovered and endangered the collective bargaining agreements of many institutional food service workers, worked with Newsom to bring the industry to the table and avoid a catastrophic defeat at the polls. (I’m not convinced they would’ve lost).
Newsom revived a Progressive-era state agency, The Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC), that had the same wage- and condition-setting powers as the fast food council, and state-level Democrats put pressure on restaurants with a bill that would’ve turned franchisors into true employers. The clear political move for SEIU was to keep the restaurants at the table through the 2023 legislative session with the promise of a deal to kill “joint-employer;” that provision had been removed from the original council bill in a shameful compromise in the summer of 2022. They would then scrap the deal at the eleventh hour before the industry could mobilize effectively, move to pass “joint-employer” and dare the industry to fight a widely-popular bill (“If they wear your uniform, they’re your employee” is a reasonable standard for “joint-employer” to most voters).
In the event such a gambit failed, SEIU wouldn’t have to worry about the 2024 referendum because the IWC would act as a regulatory backstop for the Fast Food Wages and Standards Council. The Democrats could have used the IWC to ram through some real workplace rule changes in early 2024 with the implicit carrot that an end to the referendum battle would mean an end to the IWC and its broad authority. The industry’s position was weak and they likely lacked the votes to kill “joint-employer” on the floor.
But SEIU blinked.
Oh my god, how they blinked.
They signed a secret deal with the IFA, NRA, and Newsom. Restaurants ran the tables on SEIU: the standards-setting power of the council was reduced to a laughable advisory power; the $22 minimum wage was cut to $20; the IWC went without funding; “joint-employer” was scuttled; the restaurant industry got to save $100 million or more on the referendum battle; and the wage-setting power of the council was curtailed to a literally-deflationary roll. Sure, there’s a $20 minimum wage in fast food, but every year between now and the council’s sunset in 2030 that wage will increase by either 3.5% or CPI inflation, whichever is lower. The industry even got an easy excuse to jack up prices by 10% and blame it on worker demands.
So, that’s the best that the labor establishment can offer workers: deflationary wage bargains that surrender hard-won reforms for temporary advisory committees.
The fools.1
On the shop floor, SEIU can offer you a bit more. Its CFFWU and USSW subsidiaries are engaged in a fair degree of shop floor organizing and militant struggle, and Workers United is on the march through coffee shops everywhere save New England, where the Joint Board stayed with UNITE HERE in the 2009-10 civil war.
Labor Reformists and Socialist Strategy
The reformers, including a great many opportunists and economistic trade unionists, offer another path forward: spadework.
I’ve heard this described in MUG Discords as “do-the-work-ism,” which is both a fitting descriptor and a bit flippant.
Memorably described by Alyssa Battistoni in an NPlusone essay, spadework refers to the specific mechanisms of organizing: one-on-ones, house-visits, long strategizing meetings, endless committee work. “Do-the-work-ism” holds that this process of agonizing, slow labor is what produces the workers for themselves, rather than in-themselves. Daisy Pitkin, Jane McAlevey, Richard Bensinger, and a host of other salts or organizers made significant contributions to this school of thought.
Virtually everyone who participates in the spadework of the labor movement knows that it is not enough. If shop floor power were enough to bring about revolution, Richard Mueller’s name would be right up there with Lenin and Marx.
A union in the first world, even a fighting union with real connections across the proletarian sectors of its community, is still embedded within the structures of the capitalist economy. Its struggles only very rarely become revolutionary, or quasi-revolutionary, as seen in the 1934 strikes, or the protracted agonies of the Steelworkers union between the Sadlowski run and the failure of the Alperovitz plan for worker control in the mid-1970s.
The “do-the-work-ists” still see organizing labor as the key act for the regeneration of left-wing power in the United States. This is how the war of position plays out on a daily basis, in the lives of individuals: as a grinding effort to remake the structures of personality and desire in a democratic fashion.
The successful leap from what we might call activist, or class-conscious, to revolutionary subjectivity is, in my opinion, usually produced by the experience of direct repression. Because revolutionary subjectivity requires one to acknowledge and embrace the possibility of extreme suffering and death, it is generally produced in sufficient quantities for mass action only by cultures which embrace martyrdom, or by the personal experience of violence.
If there is a way to precipitate revolutionary consciousness from activist consciousness, it is not by the tools of spadework. At least, not directly. Breaching the barrier between these two states—the present and the future—requires bringing contradictions to their sharpest possible point.
This is the role of the Reds in Labor, and the role of the fighting union in the economy. Dramatic demands like those raised by the UAW in the Stand Up strike force industry into a confrontation. The stronger labor organizing is, the denser the organizational muscle mass of the working class, the more it can push, until it can precipitate a direct battle over control of industry. Spadework, union reform struggles, and economistic labor battles are the industrial training exercises of the class war.
I believe this is doubly important in the United States, where the intense mediation of everyday life and the fragmentation of physical space into privatized, non-intersecting spheres makes conscious spadework more important. In the absence of other socializing institutions, the working class has to produce its own social reality. Though I wish, and have spent most of my life wishing, for an alternative to the grinding, uncertain work of creating a proletarian social reality, I do not think there is a viable option. I think the creation of a dynamic revolutionary party in the United States requires a much greater depth of organization on the Left. If the DSA is to become the main force in the eventual creation of a revolutionary party, it will be because it commits itself root and branch to this particular sort of reality production in every sphere it touches.
When that sociality reaches a sufficient power, or labor organization in an industry becomes a meaningful impediment to accumulation, it becomes possible for self-conscious, ideologically-motivated groups to intervene directly in history.
A number of Labor Notes panels addressed this topic in oblique terms: salting as a way to build power; union democracy and union-organizing as the laboratory of democratic or revolutionary decision making.
Now that I’ve bored you all by posing two contradictions, I’d like to propose a synthetic strategy for the DSA and its membership, which I think could bring political militants into the labor movement, strengthen the reformist caucuses and fighting unions, and open new areas of class struggle.
A New Committee for Industrial Organizing?
While I watched Cesar Ortega of SITUAUDI speak before Shawn Fain at the closing session of Labor Notes, I was moved to think back on the long and sordid history of the AFL-CIO and its role in the destruction of the global Left throughout the Cold War, its shameful embrace of company unionism in Latin America.
And I thought too of the role the AFL played in its day; the class-collaborationist, productionist leadership; how they failed to respond to the crisis of 1929-34; as well as how this set the stage for the great strikes of 1934 and the emergence of the CIO and of industrial organizing generally. That emergence was preceded by a generation of thankless organizing by left-wingers, which created the ideological, organizational, and strategic ground on which the CIO grew and, for a few fateful years, flourished. Similar organizational efforts in the academic sector produced the explosion of unionization in universities in recent years, without those decades-long struggles, those unions would not exist.
Every victory has a prehistory.
As the long, hot summer of 2024 approaches, and the contradictions of U.S. imperial policy have once more precipitated a showdown between radical students and the police state, Labor must commit itself to that battle on the side of the anti-imperialists. But the moment calls for more than that, for a general offensive.
The long decline of the AFL-CIO in the present century is setting the stage for a break with labor tradition similar to that seen in the mid 1930s, though the form it takes will, doubtless, differ. The left can exploit this by building democratic movements within unions and joining up with existing, progressive unions as discussed above and by initiating strategic organizing drives elsewhere.
I’m not calling for a repeat of the Change To Win strategy—which union’s president decides to be the John L. Lewis of the 21st century’s CIO is impossible to predict in the present. Rather, the DSA needs to take the lead on creating the embryonic forms of class unionism. The DSA, in part through its experience collaborating with the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, has developed some experience in organizing workers, and an admirable tradition of picket line solidarity. But its efforts remain spasmodic, localized and reactive (I’m assuming there is some number of DSA salts I do not now, and never should, know about).
To counteract that, the DSA needs a culture of strategic research into local political economies. It is of vital necessity for socialists to begin studying the compositions of their local economies for the purpose of identifying large pools of unorganized workers, and then to either salt those pools of workers, or find, identify and train militants within them. This is what I mean by a strategic offensive—a coordinated, national effort to initiate organizing everywhere there are unorganized workers.
Usually, we will lose. For a long time, it will seem pointless, even counterproductive, to try to build class-struggle unions in unorganized industries. But we have seen the failures of reliance on spontaneity, and seen too how the political opportunism of the PSL generates membership—and can even achieve some temporary victories—but ultimately yields little. And the technological superiority of the U.S. state makes an insurrectionary strategy impossible in the present. If spontaneity, opportunism, putschism, and liberalism are all dead ends, perhaps a program oriented primarily towards organizing workers as workers, and organizing workers with the explicit goal of a confrontation with capital, can create the ideological substrate necessary for an offensive by U.S. socialists.
Before I get accused of vulgar workerism, I want to reiterate a point made by Gabriel Winant: deliberate, often in-person organizing is the only thing capable of producing the social reality and experience of popular struggle necessary to overcome the reactionary culture created by neoliberal atomization.
Without a program of strategic, shop floor organizing, and without a thorough understanding of regional political economies, we will be caught flat-footed by the next crisis and, armed only with the weapons of bourgeois politics, we will be soundly beaten.
Trader Joe’s Union shows that it is possible to build an independent union in the service sector in the 21st century. Starbucks Workers United’s strategic missteps—insisting on Zoom bargaining when a different strategy might’ve drained the company’s resources through store-level bargaining tables—illustrate the difficulties that a worker-led campaign is likely to encounter by affiliation with older unions.
Given the low union-density in the U.S. private sector, it makes sense for the DSA to pursue a strategy that hews close to the reformists where the reformists are strong, taking them as temporary allies against the leadership of the legacy unions, while trying to build newer, independent unions in largely unorganized industries. The decision to pursue independent unionism is likely to exacerbate antagonisms between the DSA and existing unions, so independent unionism should, in my opinion, only be pursued in shops where it will not provoke an immediate conflict over jurisdiction. In unionized workplaces, or those in high union-density regions and sectors, it would be more politically-advantageous for the DSA’s labor efforts to fuse with reformist elements or, if those do not exist, to identify and make contact with the militant elements who could eventually form the basis for union-reform movements.
This sort of all-of-the-above strategy is, I think, the most viable path towards building DSA labor power in the next several years. I don’t think the DSA should have a direct role in the management of organizations that emerge from the efforts of its labor committees, in large part because such control is likely to be toxic on the shop floor. But, by infusing new organizing with socialist cadres, the DSA’s labor efforts could inoculate organizations against the reactionary tendencies of the broader U.S. labor movement. Such a strategy, I believe, could lay the foundations for a more radical union future.
After all, if we want there to be a new CIO, we have to build it ourselves.
- SEIU Local 26 is a notable exception to the supine posture of the national union, and their credible multi-sectoral strike threat is the sort of thing you’d expect reform and rank-and-file leaders to look towards as a possible model for May Day ‘28.