SEIU: 1,845,500 members; AFT: 1,732,808 members

September 2, 2024 4:43 PM

While labor’s net assets have risen 225% since 2010, membership has declined by 1.8 million workers. According to the latest Gallup poll, approval of unions is at the highest level since the 1960s, yet only one-tenth of one percent of workers in the private sector got the chance to vote for a union.
posted by spamandkimchi (17 comments total)

I mean, there are labor unions organizing new shops in the south. that hasn't happened since the 1970's, I feel.

the oil industry depends on a massive amount of internally displaced southern men from Kentucky to Mexico, any unionization of the southern region is extremely welcome, and affects the rest of the region, as is also the only way the USA will ever see any action on climate. none of the work is anything but massively fragile migrant labor.

I have talked to guys who quit working petrochemical manufacturing jobs that were non-union, but made near 90k annually with a GED--the problem being that, as at will contractors, they were really only working 6 months a year at the refinery.

They quit to work non profit gigs, and discovered PTO and sick days, and medical benefits for the first time in their lives.

so, i mean, bring back the OCAW if you want any capital discipline on Exxon at all. the US Senate is not cutting it
posted by eustatic at 4:57 PM on September 2 [6 favorites]

Once again going to plug the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee if you have issues in your workplace (or want to donate). I have seen several shops in the past few years look at the news, see successful strikes, and think, "hey we can do that!" without doing any of the legwork to learn state labor law or even to see if their coworkers agree. EWOC provides trained folks to sit with you and determine the best route. It might be forming a union, in which case they help guide you to which parent union would be appropriate. It might be a quick fix, like coaching to talk to the boss.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:27 PM on September 2 [16 favorites]

In my opinion, the labor movement needs a concrete way to harness this energy beyond traditional shop unions.

I know a lot of people who are pro-labor organizing and have time, energy and money to devote to the cause but workplace organizing isn’t a good fit. Some are freelancers or contractors, some are retirees or students, some are management, some work in environments they know are not receptive to organizing, some don’t have the skills or personalities needed to organize a union.
posted by smelendez at 5:30 PM on September 2 [14 favorites]

END ACT 10 is what I wrote on the "what's the biggest issue facing labor?" board at LaborFest today. It had a lot of decorations when I strolled back by the board a few hours later to get to roll call.
posted by humbug at 5:40 PM on September 2 [3 favorites]

I helped start a union at my non-profit job, we are not a factory, we are not a service industry, we just needed better treatment for our staff, better pay, and less shitty working conditions.

You can unionize anything, if you want tips let me know!
posted by stilgar at 6:36 PM on September 2 [16 favorites]

I don't think anyone can point to specific numbers on this, but its not cost effective from a "dues revenue gained per shop" perspective to organize new workplaces to their first contract. Organizing can have benefits to unions and the working class even when it fails, like scaring employers into treating employees better or forcing them to negotiate on better terms with their unionized shops. But from a class war perspective its a bad situation. Workers are forced to fight inefficient battles that are generally cost effective to counter. Meanwhile, employers continue to innovate on employment standards to make organizing even less efficient.

We deride the capitalist class as greedy profit chasers but that's not their most vicious side. They'll fight even harder to maintain their status, the power that creates it, and the power that flows from it. If Trump wins the election, I suspect some finance people would find it a fair trade for taking a haircut on the twitter loans.

So even if unions decided to open up the war chests and lose money like startups, seeking enough to organizing to fundamentally change current class dynamics, I'm betting capital would spend them down if there was a threat of a significant shift. It would be a campaign with a breadth and funding that dwarfs the $2.8 billion Koch network.

It would have been nice to have a President who was aware of this dynamic and willing to spend political capital to turn it around. Since that didn't work, I'm just not sure what grand strategy labor can pursue.
posted by Hume at 7:01 PM on September 2 [4 favorites]

Darn, why don't programmers unite, then we could all have googlish salaries of $250k.
posted by sammyo at 7:32 PM on September 2

This is an important article on the abject failure of major unions to organize new shops. Thanks for posting.
posted by latkes at 7:37 PM on September 2 [5 favorites]

My experiences with unions have wildly varied, depending entirely on who's working for them. I went from abandoned to helped, depending on who was working there. Now I've switched unions to one of the ones in the title. They cost $70/month to be on retainer in the event that anything happens to me, which since I have had things happen to me in the past, I feel that I have to pay. I've heard a WIDE variety of reviews of them so far, ranging from "fuck that" to "they did help" and a whole lot of "they didn't do shit to prevent return to office." A lot of grumbling that they don't have too much power, though I did crack up at the story of a woman who physically attacked our union rep and then went to the union for help. You think the government fires people slowly? Not in that case.

It really depends on, how much can/does the union help? You'll get more support if they can and do, but I'm never sure how much they can do. My union rep helped me figure out how to deal with my impending firing and more specifically how to strategically postpone it until I could get another job, but it's not like anyone was going to get their bacon saved from a firing--everyone I ever knew who was targeted for firing got fired (except me). My old job acted like they were intimidated by the union, but in practice, not really. There's only so much one can do when they don't have power--the best you can get is advice, I suspect.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:49 PM on September 2

I don't think anyone can point to specific numbers on this, but its not cost effective from a "dues revenue gained per shop" perspective to organize new workplaces to their first contract. Organizing can have benefits to unions and the working class even when it fails, like scaring employers into treating employees better or forcing them to negotiate on better terms with their unionized shops. But from a class war perspective its a bad situation. Workers are forced to fight inefficient battles that are generally cost effective to counter.

I hope I've quoted enough that I'm not oversimplifying, because I do appreciate your point. It seem plausible that organizing has lousy ROI in terms of dues, and from institutional union decision-makers' perspective it may be hard to justify.

But as your comment makes clear you know, there's more to class war than dues ROI! And it's not just in scaring employers, but in engaging more people for the longer term.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:23 PM on September 2 [5 favorites]

I wouldn't try to claim the IWW or the CIO are prophets of current times, but article today in The Forge on Staughton Lynd and solidarity unionism seems relevant.

There was no union security where, by virtue of an agreement between an employer and a union institution, workers must pay into a union. In mainstream labor, even the left wing typically considers union security a great and necessary thing. With those provisions, a union can most readily retain a membership and receive dues from it.

Woods’ experience with and co-leadership of a dynamic, fighting union at work led her to the opposite conclusion. Staughton would return to her words often over the long haul:

“We never had check-off. We didn't want it. We said if you have a closed shop and check-off, everybody sits on their butts and they don't have to worry about organizing and they don't care what happens.”

These anecdotes line up with a historical reality on a national scale: By the mid 1940s the dynamic worker-led unionism of the early and mid 1930s, much of it aimed at significant societal change and durable economic security, had been subsumed into an establishment unionism. The traditional unions, led by officials not employed on the shop floor, gave up vital rights to strike and the struggle over control over production in return for mandatory dues payments from workers –– the provision Sylvia Woods opposed –– and a junior varsity seat at the establishment table.

The benefits of that establishment unionism accrued disproportionately to white male industrial workers. Critically, as the heightened anti-unionism of what is known as neoliberalism became ascendant in the 1980s, the establishment was able to dismantle many of the gains workers and unions had made because the dominant union model was so dependent on the establishment.

Establishment unions' coffers of dues won't save us, though they could and should help. A U.S. President won't save us either, though they could and should help too. Enough of us have to do enough of it ourselves.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:40 PM on September 2 [10 favorites]

there's a recent, unprecedented in the example chart, sequential yearly increase in union elections, immediately after the article says: Looking at the historical data, it’s harder to support the contention that labor is “organizing like never before.”

also fta: to my knowledge, no union has gone on record to explain the rationale for stockpiling assets
multiple sources say: dues reduction, e.g.
"Once the UAW Strike and Defense Fund reaches $850 million, the lower dues structure shall become effective" [California Association of Professional Scientists]
posted by HearHere at 11:52 PM on September 2 [3 favorites]

A union without a massive strike fund is a cannon with no gunpowder.

You simply cannot strike if you can't pay your members for weeks, months, or even years. Smaller unions with smaller assets simply can't fight as hard.

And no, ad-hoc Venmo mutual aid is NOT a substitute.

(That said, some unions do have curiously high executive compensation ... but that pales in comparison to the necessary size of a strike fund.)
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 8:46 AM on September 3 [3 favorites]

Darn, why don't programmers unite, then we could all have googlish salaries of $250k.

Sadly, my SEIU negotiated wage as a Programmer Level 3 (the highest) was like 20 percent of that. I had to negotiate to barely break even on my previous government sector job they were recruiting me away from. And then it turned out they were in furlough -- mandatory unpaid leave.

After I was laid off, I was able to hop to one of the big companies my student employees were landing work at out of school, and I now make 10x what SEIU negotiated. Unions offer a lot of benefits, but from my point of view what they offer is protection from abuse more than higher wages.
posted by pwnguin at 10:32 AM on September 3 [1 favorite]

I mean, there are labor unions organizing new shops in the south. that hasn't happened since the 1970's, I feel.

One of the reasons for this is that the whole south is "right to work," and so it's incredibly difficult to collect dues to service your contract, build up the local, etc. SEIU tried to organize janitors in Texas 10 or 15 years ago and there was really mixed success--there are some union janitorial shops in TX but I think the free rider problem and the additional barriers to organizing there made it a really difficult investment to justify, as opposed to using those resources to build density in places where you can have a union shop instead of a right to work free for all.

Because worker protections are bad in the US and those that do exist are typically only enforced months or years after the fact, this is often what it looks like for a union taking on a large-scale boss with any resources

1. Spend months building committee
2. Committee members get selectively fired, destroying the effort
3. Die hards keep on trucking, often by filing Unfair Labor Practice accusations which can justify a strike, but which frequently result in large scale community turnout protests rather than impactful strikes
4. The union continues to wage an air war in lieu of there being any meaningful way for workers to choose a union
5. Once the union has begun to threaten the boss's bottom line, they file a RICO suit against the union.
6. The terms of the RICO settlement determine the union's power to organize--maybe they get card check neutrality in a single shop, or maybe across the company, or maybe in a single region, or maybe in a cascading series of regions ordered low-to-high by competitiveness of the industry

In other words, it takes years and untold dollars to get to where a LEGAL SETTLEMENT creates a way to enforce the boss obeying EXISTING LABOR LAW. You essentially move labor law from the legal code to court settlement to contract law, which is where the law first becomes enforceable on any kind of term or timeline that works for workers.

And then on top of that, in the South you can't collect dues. This is why large-scale organizing efforts don't work in right to work states.

That's not to say that I don't think people should organize in the South. It just goes to explain why a lot of the recent efforts we've seen have started from the bottom up rather than from, say, SEIU saying "we're going to go organize workers in Tennessee." It also goes to explain why the exciting organizing recently has sometimes ended in failure.

A lot of this is why it was so devastating that Obama and the whole Dem majority took a pass on Employee Free Choice Act way back when. And why we need the PRO Act now.
posted by kensington314 at 11:58 AM on September 3 [2 favorites]

And don't even get me started on workers who are under the Railway Labor Act instead of the National Labor Relations Act. Nightmare.
posted by kensington314 at 12:01 PM on September 3 [1 favorite]

It seem plausible that organizing has lousy ROI in terms of dues, and from institutional union decision-makers' perspective it may be hard to justify.

Bohner helpfully links to a dissenting view in his piece (which I enjoyed!), and that link uses a real-world example that I think sort of illustrates this:

But the general membership of the UFCW does have direct elections. The delegates of that convention were all directly elected by members in secret-ballot elections. The UFCW constitution lays out the process in excruciating detail, one that guarantees members the right to vote.

UFCW is an interesting example because at some point in the last decade, they were out there genuinely trying to organize Wal-Mart. New national leadership was voted in and substantially downgraded the commitment to organize Wal-Mart. A lot of the labor-left online commentary at the time asserted that new leadership--as voted in by members--had decided it wasn't worth it, that it was better to use union dues to service members' existing contracts rather than organize new shops.

And that is a genuine tension: using members' dues on members, versus on building union density, which is tremendously expensive and has a high rate of failure under existing labor law.

Anyway, the UFCW goes into every round of contract bargaining having lost more of their density to Whole Foods, Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart--the four horsemen of the food retail labor apocalypse--so I'm on Team Organizing. But that's way easier said than done.
posted by kensington314 at 12:16 PM on September 3 [4 favorites]