Is Organized Labor Fighting Mad?
In June 1892, as Barbara Tuchman tells it in The Proud Tower (1966), “in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the steelworkers’ union struck in protest against a reduction of wages by the Carnegie Steel Company. The company had ordered the wage cut in a deliberate attempt to crush the union…. On July 5 the strikebreakers recruited by [the company] were to be brought in to operate the plant. When they were ferried in armored barges across the Monongahela and were about to land, the strikers attacked with homemade cannon, rifles, dynamite and burning oil. The day of furious battle ended with ten killed, seventy wounded, and the Pinkertons thrown back from the plant by the bleeding but triumphant workers.”
While the enactment of the NLRA and the creation of a National Labor Relations Board by no means ended labor violence, by 1967, Economist J.K. Galbraith could claim confidently in The New Industrial State, “as this is written, unions within the industrial system have long since ceased to expand and have, indeed, lost ground. In almost any view they are less militant in attitude and less powerful in politics than in earlier times. Industrial relations have become markedly more peaceful as collective bargaining has come to be accepted by the modern large industrial enterprise. Unions and their leaders are widely accepted and on occasion accorded a measure of applause for sound social behavior both by employers and by the community at large.”
Galbraith concluded, “All this suggests some change.” Indeed.
In 1981 an early act of the Reagan administration was to bust PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union. The hiring of permanent replacement workers for economic strikers had always been allowable under the NLRA. In the world described by Galbraith, wherein Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government co-existed and conspired in what he called “Control of the Wage-Price Spiral,” major unionized industries rarely exercised this right. By the 1980s the three-legged stool supporting Galbraith’s new industrial state was tottering in the teeth of intense foreign competition. The migration of manufacturing off-shore was already well underway. Reagan’s decisive destruction of PATCO signaled a new standard in labor relations. Greyhound Bus Lines was among the first major private-employers to follow suit.
Organized labor’s primary reply was to circle the wagons, stemming the relentless erosion of members, money and political influence as best it could. Labor’s best wasn’t very good. Today fewer than one worker in ten in the private sector is represented by a labor union.
The obvious answer would seem to be “organize.” As Robert Reich rightly pointed out in his 1991 The Work of Nations, “All Americans used to be roughly in the same economic boat…. We are now in different boats…. The boat containing routine producers is sinking rapidly…. The second of the three boats, carrying in-person servers, is sinking as well, but somewhat more slowly and unevenly.” So it would seem these groups were ripe for organizing. Organizing drives, however, often turned out to be money pits, swallowing scarce union resources and resulting in few new labor contracts. Many labor leaders and liberal professors blamed the NLRA and the Board that enforces it. The process of prosecuting unfair labor practices was too slow and the sanctions too mild, they complained. Flouting the federal law, they argued, was just another corporate cost of doing business. Union-busting law firms and consultants used PR and civil legal process, where the Pinkerton detective agency and the Reading Railroad’s Coal & Iron Police had used firearms, undercover agents provocateur and the gallows.
Still, some unions persisted in organizing the lumpenproletariat. Notably, the Service Employees International Union’s “Justice for Janitors” movement met with marked successes. More than emblematic of the impact such successes had on the mind-set of organized labor was the ascension of SEIU’s John J. Sweeney to the AFL-CIO presidency a decade ago. This fact has made all the more startling the disaffiliation late last month of the SEIU, along with the Teamsters, from Sweeney’s umbrella organization. Explained a feature on the Workers Revolutionary Party website: “The SEIU and other unions have for ten years tried to get the AFL-CIO to adopt changes that would unite the strength of millions more workers in each industry.”
Along with the SEIU and the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers and a forth union, UNITE HERE, have created the six-million-member Change to Win Coalition. According the Morgan, Lewis, an international law firm with a long history of management-side labor-relations representation, “The effect of the schism… will impact the country’s employers, whether organized or unorganized…. The Coalition’s members intend to devote even greater proportions of their dues receipts to organizing.” And, adds Morgan Lewis, “Organizing will not take its traditional forms.Most of the Coalition’s member unions have expressed disdain for the National Labor Relations Board’s processes for determining majority representation…. Under [President] Andy Stern’s direction, the SEIU has become one of the most creative unions in its organizing methods, having garnered 900,000 new members in nine years. In addition, SEIU-represented employees and their counterparts in the Teamsters have long been adept at utilizing various forms of secondary pressure to secure additional members.”
Another group prepared to defy a national labor law which they believe to be politicized and unfair is “Get Up,” the organization seeking to represent graduate students who work as research and teaching assistants at such major private universities as Penn, NYU, and Yale. In 2000 union organizing among grad assistants took flight in the wake of a decision by the Clinton-appointed NLRB, which held by a bare majority that the GAs at NYU were predominantly employees protected by the labor act, rather than primarily students who could not be. The upshot was a successful representation election, which brought the United Auto Workers to the bargaining table on the GAs’ behalf, where they won an initial labor contract from the college.
Since then, the Clinton appointees have been replaced by Bush nominees to the Board. Last year another bare majority of Board members reversed the NYU ruling in a new case concerning GAs at Brown University. As the initial NYU-UAW collective bargaining agreement moves toward expiration on August 31st, the university’s administration advised the union earlier this month that it would not be returning to the negotiation table. Rather, NYU elected to withdraw recognition.
Responding to this news, Penn grad student Bill Herman, the new spokesman for Get Up, commented to me, “We’re trying to support NYU’s GA union as they try to get the school to continue to negotiate with them. We hope to create enough of a firestorm to force them to treat with us.” He observed, “They are not quite sure what to do with us. Brown is a set-back for sure but we have tools at our disposal.”
What those “tools” might be can be gleaned both from pre-NLRA labor history, as well as from the SEIU’s modern methods, which have included mass picketing, consumer boycotts, and sympathy strikes at secondary sites. A significant segment of organized labor appears to be fighting mad. We won’t have to wait long, I predict, to learn what that means.