Tag: Organizing

Why and How Class Still Matters / by Nick French

A custodian working on a stairway at the Zakrzewska Building in Boston, Massachusetts, October 5, 2022. (David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Originally published in Jacobin on January 21, 2023

Review of The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn by Vivek Chibber (Harvard University Press, 2022)

It’s fashionable to declare that Marxism doesn’t have much to say about complex, modern societies. But class and the material interests it generates are still the central features of capitalism.

Though Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, and other developments have brought the themes of class and economic inequality back into public consciousness in recent years, this resurgence has been accompanied by denunciations of Marxism as an outdated framework for social and political analysis. Pundits and politicians warn us of the dangers of focusing too much on class or treating it as in any way “more important” than other social identities or forms of hierarchy.

These popular refrains echo claims that have become dominant in academic social theory for decades. Where Karl Marx and his followers saw economic forces as central to understanding social stability and conflict, proponents of “the cultural turn” in social theory give pride of place to noneconomic factors. If class is a matter of a person’s location in an economic structure — whether, say, they own means of production or must sell their labor for a living — then class has little predictive power in explaining why people do what they do, culturalists argue. We should look instead to contingent cultural factors: social norms, values, and religious practices.

It’s easy to see the attraction of these arguments. Despite renewed concern with economic inequality represented by Sanders and related phenomena elsewhere (Corbynism in Britain, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise), class-based critiques have failed to capture the support of the working classes on a large scale. The old parties of the Left are in decline, with ever more workers gravitating to the Right. Global politics continues to undergo class dealignment: compared to the early and mid-twentieth century, class is becoming a less and less salient category of political identity and conflict. Partisan divisions are hardening, but no side credibly claims to represent the interests — or can win the loyalty — of workers.

If class is so important, why do so few people think so? Why, as the chasm of economic inequality widens, aren’t workers rallying around the red flag and trying to overthrow the system?

In his recent book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn, sociologist Vivek Chibber argues that dismissing the importance of class analysis is a grave error. A proper Marxist understanding of class, he argues, can rise to the challenge of culturalist arguments in social theory. But more than that, Marxism can give us a framework to understand why workers under capitalism will be more likely to acquiesce to the capitalist system than to revolt against it — and can shed light on how to make revolutionary change a reality.

Economic Structure and Culture

At the core of Chibber’s argument is an elegant explanation of the relation between the class structure of capitalism and culture. Culturalists argue that all intentional human behavior is mediated by the “interpretive work of human actors,” as social theorist William Sewell puts it. For a social structure — like, say, the capital–wage labor relation — to become effective in motivating behavior, the agents participating in that structure must learn and internalize the appropriate cultural scripts.

This argument, Chibber writes, suggests that “the very existence of the structure seems to depend on the vagaries of cultural mediation.” If I am a worker, I must learn and internalize the fact that I have to find and keep a job in order to sustain myself, and I must learn and internalize the norms and habits required to do so (norms of speech and dress, certain skills, a “work ethic,” and so on). If I’m a capitalist, I need to learn and internalize the fact that success means maximizing profits, and I must learn and internalize the norms and habits that allow me to do that (a single-minded focus on expanding market share and cutting costs, for instance, which requires a ruthlessness in dealing with my employees.)

So, it may seem that human motivation is explained by culture “all the way down.” But this isn’t so. Though culturalists are right that people must adapt to certain cultural scripts to participate in social structures, Chibber admits, it doesn’t follow that these cultural scripts have causal primacy in explaining the structure. Instead, the economic structure itself explains why people need to learn and internalize the relevant scripts in the first place.

Consider what happens if a worker fails to internalize the cultural script appropriate to their role. That means they will fail to secure a job; or, if they do manage that, they won’t be able to keep it for very long. The outcome will be destitution, hunger, and worse. Likewise, a capitalist who fails to internalize the script relevant to their role will soon find their firms going under — and if they don’t get their act together, they’ll eventually find themselves in the desperate situation of a propertyless proletarian.

For capitalists and workers alike, the economic structure generates powerful material interests that compel them to internalize the cultural scripts corresponding to their class positions. The fundamentals of their individual well-being are on the line if they fail to do so.

None of this is to deny the importance of culture. But it is to say that, if we want to understand why people in capitalist societies act as they do, economic structure must be given a primary explanatory role. This claim is borne out, Chibber argues, by the global spread of capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Far from particular cultural understandings being either prerequisites or insurmountable obstacles to the development of capitalist class structures, the imposition of capitalism has transformed cultures around the world — including those once thought to be inimical to capitalist relations — to suit its purposes.

The False Explanation of False Consciousness

Marxists argue that capitalism essentially involves the exploitation and domination of the working class by the capitalist class. Because they don’t have access to “means of production,” workers must sell their labor power to those who do: the capitalists. Once a worker secures a job, they are subject to the tyranny of the boss, who will attempt to get as much work out of them for as little pay as possible. Though workers are the ones who produce the goods and services that the capitalist sells, the capitalist gets to keep the lion’s share of the social surplus produced by their employees in the form of profits, while workers receive a pittance in the form of wages.

This antagonism of interests involved in the capitalist–wage labor relationship, and the harms it imposes on workers, leads to conflict. Marx, observing the nascent labor organizations and political movements of his day, thought that this conflict would take on an increasingly collective and revolutionary form: workers would band together to resist their exploitation and eventually “expropriate the expropriators,” abolishing private property and doing away with capitalism entirely.

This didn’t happen. There were, of course, socialist revolutions in countries where capitalism was just starting to develop, beginning with Russia in 1917, but these societies soon degenerated into authoritarian regimes and by the end of the century were evolving in a capitalist direction. In the West, socialist parties gradually accommodated themselves to the capitalist system and eventually moved away from even promoting significant reforms to the system and representing their traditional working-class bases. Even labor unions have now been on the decline globally for decades.

Why didn’t Marxism’s revolutionary prophecies come true? According to thinkers of the New Left, the answer lies in culture. Workers do have an interest in organizing collectively to defend their well-being and, ultimately, in overthrowing the capitalist system. But they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology to accept the system as morally legitimate, and anesthetized by the shallow consolations of “the culture industry,” the promise of consumer goodies, and the like. If only workers could pierce the veil of illusion and recognize their true interests, the thought goes, they would revolt.

Chibber deploys his materialist understanding of class to dismantle this argument. The problem with this explanation is that, as a result of their class position, workers daily experience pervasive harms and loss of autonomy at work, anxiety over finding or keeping a job, and the struggle to maintain a comfortable standard of living. To say that the working class in general has fallen prey to ideological indoctrination is to say that ideology has overwhelmed these prominent features of workers’ lived experience — that the influence of “bourgeois culture” is so strong as to induce systematic “cognitive breakdown” — in other words, false consciousness. Worse still, this explanation bizarrely positions the theorist as having more insight into the workers’ experience than the workers themselves.

And, in fact, workers do often resist their exploitation. They shirk when they’re on the job; they call in sick when they’re not; they occasionally engage in acts of petty theft and sabotage against their employer. These widespread forms of individualized resistance show that working people aren’t simply dupes of pro-capitalist myths.

Why Workers (Only Sometimes) Revolt

So, why don’t workers revolt? The answer lies in the costs and risks associated with collective action. Workers depend on their jobs to sustain themselves and their families. It is not the case that workers “have nothing to lose but their chains”: in organizing or taking action with their coworkers, they could very well lose their livelihood. “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all,” the economist Joan Robinson quipped.

Besides the vulnerability to unemployment, there are plenty of other obstacles to a strategy of collective resistance. Workers have diverse interests that sometimes push against collective action. For instance, while the vast majority of workers would benefit from building powerful labor unions and political organizations in the long run, in the short term, lucky or very skilled workers may be able to secure a better deal for themselves through individual bargaining with employers.

Then, there is the problem of free riding: while everyone benefits from the fruit of collective effort, no individual worker will be worse off if they don’t contribute. That creates a strong incentive for workers to shirk their responsibilities to collective organizing efforts — but, if enough individuals shirk, the efforts will of course fail.

Chibber’s conclusion is that Marx was wrong to think that capitalism would naturally produce its own “gravediggers.” Instead, the material interests generated by the class structure usually militate against collective action and instead push workers to advance their interests by working hard and “keeping their heads down,” while engaging in occasional acts of individualized resistance. New Left theorists who say workers don’t revolt because they’re under the sway of bourgeois ideology make the same mistaken assumption as Marx — they think the reasons for workers’ acquiescence must come from outside the economic structure. In fact, in most times and places, the class structure provides strong-enough reasons of its own to eschew collective resistance, let alone revolutionary activity.

But workers can and do sometimes organize together to fight their exploiters. Under what conditions does collective action become feasible? A crucial ingredient, Chibber argues, is the creation of a culture of solidarity:

[Workers] have to make their valuation of possible outcomes at least partly on how it will affect their peers; this stems from a sense of obligation and what they owe to the collective good. . . . In directing every worker to see the welfare of her peers as of direct concern to herself, a solidaristic ethos counteracts the individuating effects normally generated by capitalism. In so doing, it enables the creation of the collective identity that, in turn, is the cultural accompaniment to class struggle.

When workers come to see their own well-being as bound up with that of others, the normal obstacles to collective action become smaller. They become more willing to take individual risks, and they become averse to free riding on the efforts of their comrades.

Again, culture is constrained by material interests here. A solidaristic ethos is not the same as an altruistic ethos, in the sense of a selfless concern for the welfare of others. Solidarity is rather about forming a sense of reciprocal obligation around shared interests. Knowing that, in the long term, they all stand to benefit from strong workers’ organizations, workers internalize norms that change how they weigh the costs and risks associated with collective action. My sense of obligation to my coworkers may allow me to overcome my fear of the boss’s retaliation; it may encourage me to see an individual wage increase here and now as less important than the security offered by a union contract; it will make me see free riding as a shameful betrayal of my comrades.

Where workers build cultures of solidarity, they are more likely to pursue, and succeed in, strategies of collective resistance. But we should emphasize that class-based organization is not the only way that workers under capitalism might pursue their interests collectively. They also of course belong to formal and informal organizations based on race, ethnicity, religion, kinship, and other social identities. Workers may use such networks to navigate the vicissitudes of labor market competition by hoarding resources and job opportunities; the usefulness of these strategies gives rise to justifying ideologies of racism, ethnocentrism, and the like.

Such collective identities, then — like class — have a basis in the economic structure of capitalism. Yet over time, workers’ prioritizing their identification with (say) members of their race or coreligionists makes it less likely they will forge large, durable coalitions to advance their interests and makes it easier for capitalists to pit workers against each other. (If a union refuses to admit nonwhite workers, for instance, it will sooner or later find the bosses employing those excluded workers as scabs.)

So, the reason to treat cultures of class solidarity as particularly central is not because we chauvinistically regard class oppression as more morally significant than other social hierarchies, as some ill-tempered critics charge. It’s because organizing along class lines is the only feasible long-term strategy for resisting and eventually overcoming capitalist domination and thereby undermining the material basis of racial and other forms of oppression.

Class, Politics, and Class Politics in the Twenty-First Century

It follows that class formation — the transformation of workers from a “class in itself” to a conscious, organized “class for itself,” in Marx’s terms — is an extremely fraught proposition. The material incentives generated by capitalism’s economic structure discourage collective class organization and instead push workers to seek individualized means of pursuing their interests or otherwise to fall back on networks of kinship, race, and so on that pit them against their potential comrades in arms.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of ideologically committed left-wing organizers to build cultures of solidarity, the workers’ movement was born and grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These organizers were aided by propitious circumstances. Rapid industrialization brought ever-greater numbers of workers into large factories and dense urban centers and decreased workers’ fear of long-term unemployment. In most of the capitalist world, workers were politically disenfranchised, strengthening their sense that they were unjustly treated and making clear the need to organize along class lines to demand political well as economic rights. Workers lived close to each other in city slums, segregated from other elements of society, facilitating an awareness of their shared interests and the forging of a collective identity.

These structural and institutional facts were fertile ground for the growth of powerful labor movements and socialist parties. Those organizations fought for a partial “humanization” of capitalism, redistributing wealth and income toward the poor and working classes. For a while, especially in the postwar era, rapid economic growth meant that employers could (reluctantly) absorb unions’ and left parties’ redistributive demands. Yet a decline in profit rates starting in the 1960s forced employers to be less tolerant, and capitalists began to fight back, successfully crushing unions and rolling back the welfare state across much of the developed world.

This story brings us to the neoliberal period, which workers haven’t yet been able to fight their way out of. For decades, they have suffered from stagnant wages and the erosion of public goods. At first, Chibber notes, workers responded by retreating from political activity and civic life. But recent years have seen active expressions of discontent, in the form of an uptick in strike action (though still at historically low levels) as well as explosions of anger at the ballot box in the form of support for populist, antiestablishment parties and candidates of both the Left and Right.

This pattern of working-class disaffection and anger is understandable in materialist terms — as are the obstacles to a renewal of the organized labor movement and mass working-class political parties. The structural and institutional factors underlying the birth and expansion of the Old Left are no longer in place. Globally, capitalist economies are now deindustrializing, which has meant slower employment growth; the dispersion of workers into smaller firms; and less job security. Workers in most capitalist democracies now have full political rights, and they are no longer geographically isolated in their own densely populated communities but spread out in the suburbs among other classes.

These facts mean the project of organizing workers has a totally different character than it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Workers’ electoral status and social conditions once worked in tandem with the class structure to push workers toward a common identity,” Chibber writes, “but this is no longer the case.” Their electoral status and social conditions today pull workers apart, exacerbating the tendency to adopt individualized or parochial modes of resistance.

Back to Class

The Class Matrix is not without its flaws. Nowhere does Chibber explicitly offer or defend a definition of material interests, a notion fundamental to his account of human motivation under capitalism and to his distinction between materialist and culturalist explanations of social structure. Nor does he discuss the connections between interests, preferences, and motivations — a topic that has long bedeviled philosophers as well as social scientists, and one on which Chibber makes some controversial assumptions that he does not entirely bring to the surface. (Very briefly: he seems to be working with a definition of material interests as universal components of well-being, rooted in human biological needs and capacities, that systematically regulate people’s preferences and motivations across cultural contexts. That is certainly a plausible and defensible conception of interests, but not, I think, a self-evident one.)

Finally, many of the book’s formulations suggest a dichotomy between individualistic forms of resistance to domination and class-based collective action. But as discussed above, and as Chibber himself acknowledges at points, collective strategies of interest advancement can also take the form of reliance on racial, ethnic, and other nonclass collectivities. There is, of course, an important similarity between individualistic forms of resistance and reliance on parochial networks to hoard advantage: they mean failing to unite workers to challenge capitalism at the root and are, for that reason, ultimately self-defeating.

However, these are complaints about presentation rather than substance. Overall, The Class Matrix is a clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we’re to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms.

Socialists today face the difficult task of building cultures of solidarity on different, and less favorable, terrain than our predecessors. Whether and how exactly we can do so are questions Chibber leaves to his readers. But his contribution to understanding what class is, and why it matters, will likely be indispensable to finding the answers.

Nick French is an assistant editor at Jacobin.

No contract, no coffee: Starbucks baristas strike, demand bargaining / by Mark Gruenberg

Starbucks baristas on strike in Memphis, Tenn. | via @Un1onBarbie on Twitter

In Seattle, Starbucks baristas at CEO Howard Schultz’s home store, The Roastery, brought Scabby the Rat to their picket line. Chants and signs from coast to coast—including in crayon on a Baltimore County, Md., car—declared: “No contract, no coffee!”

At an unidentified Starbucks, Santa had to strike: “Even my elves are in unions!” he said in a film clip. “Shame on you, Mr. Schultz.”

At the Starbucks store at Ashland Ave. and Irving Park Road on Chicago’s North Side, so many customers honored the picket line that at 11 a.m. on Dec. 16—the first day of a 3-day nationwide forced strike—managers closed the store.

“Who shut it down? We shut it down!” the exuberant picketers shouted via bullhorn.

“SHAME ON STARBUCKS” read a big bedsheet banner during what participants called “mega picketing” at three Starbucks St. Louis stores. Minnesota participants, joined by members of the Communist Party club there, thronged to the picket line, despite typical Minnesota December temperatures, even at midday: 5 degrees below zero.

Scabby the Rat on the picket line at the Starbucks Roastery story in Seattle. | Starbucks Workers United Seattle

And in Ithaca, N.Y., at a store the giant chain keeps threatening to close—in retaliation for unionizing—workers added a song for their Jewish customers, just before Chanukah began, sung to the children’s tune of Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel:

“Union, union, union

A fair contract we say.

And if we don’t get it,

We will strike all day.”

The object of all this activity: To force Starbucks’ bosses back to bargaining with the workers who have unionized at 260-plus of the monster coffee chain’s stores since the grassroots organizing drive—aided by Starbucks Workers United (SWU), a Service Employees affiliate—achieved its first success in Buffalo just over a year ago.

The three-day forced strike #DoubleDownPicketing on the weekend of Dec. 16-19 was the latest effort by the workers to get the bosses to bargain in good faith, despite CEO Schultz. There were two short sessions in late October.

In the first, lasting about five minutes, the workers barely began to present proposals when the bosses’ union-buster called a caucus and led management in a walkout. They never came back. The second was even shorter: Bosses refused to talk because hundreds of Starbucks workers nationwide had tuned in via Zoom.

The weekend action, which SWU described as the longest against the giant coffee chain, showed yet again that Starbucks baristas, like other underpaid and overworked workers—especially in fast food eateries, coffee shops, and bars—have had it up to here with corporate exploitation and greed, and have taken to unionizing and to the streets, in response.

They join port truckers, retail workers, adjunct professors, museum workers, Amazon workers, and warehouse workers—among others in a mass movement agitating for union recognition, better pay, safer working conditions and respect on the job, in numbers infrequently seen in decades, and certainly not coast to coast. But that’s what happened here.

They also got wide public support—despite a few “brew your own coffee remarks”—from the Twitterverse.

St. Louis Starbucks workers on the mega-picket line. | via @CMRJB on Twitter

“Switching up my routine to support@SBWorkersUnited,” one tweet said. “This #Union brother won’t cross picket lines. #BoycottStarbucks Solidarity is more than just a word, it’s a conscious action that requires commitment. Be an active part of the #StarbucksStrike. Retweet in #Solidarity.”

“SCABS TRIED TO SLOW US DOWN AND WE CAME BACK STRONGER,” another reported. “#DoubleDownStrike #NoContractNoGiftCards #NoContractNoCoffee #SBWU #UnionStrong.”

“Those big executives that are sitting up in their offices picking their noses all day are about to find out real fast who actually runs the company,” a third tweeter commented.

The strikers picked up heavyweight intellectual backing, too, of a sort. A new study from the Harvard Business School of the nation’s 250 largest corporations, listing the 50 best for workers on various quality of life issues—not just pay, but benefits, diversity, and opportunities for advancement—showed Starbucks was second to last in its category, retail. Only McDonald’s was worse.

“Starbucks earned one of the lowest ratings in the study, placing it in the bottom 50 of the surveyed companies, beneath brands with notably poor reputations for worker treatment including Walmart and Dollar General,” the news story on the study adds. The study didn’t distinguish between unionized and non-unionized firms.

Starbucks’ exact finish in the multifactor rankings could not be determined, from the confusing way it posted its findings. But another pro-worker group posted the survey anyway, noting in irony the Howard Schultz Foundation—yes, the CEO’s non-profit—financed it. The overall #1? AT&T, which is unionized.

Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.El galardonado periodista Mark Gruenberg es el director de la oficina de People’s World en Washington, D.C. También es editor del servicio de noticias sindicales Press Associates Inc. (PAI).

People’s World, December 20, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/

Labor law failings, workplace organizing challenges, and possibilities for union renewal / by Martin Hart-Landsberg

Trump’s new Medicaid rule prohibits automatic payment of union dues. (Photo: Peoples Dispatch)

If you follow the news it must seem like joining a union is a step outside the norms of U.S. law. Afterall, the media is full of stories about how big companies like Starbucks and Amazon threaten their pro-union workers with dismissal, spy on their employees and deny them the right to meet and share information during legally mandated break and meal times, require their workers to participate in 1-on-1 and group meetings with managers where they are routinely told lies about what unions do and the consequences of unionization, find ways to delay promised union elections, and refuse to negotiate a contract even after workers have successfully voted for unionization.

Yet, the National Labor Relations Act, which is the foundational statute governing private sector labor law, boldly asserts that workers should be able to freely organize to improve the conditions of their employment. As the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) states:

The National Labor Relations Act forbids employers from interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of rights relating to organizing, forming, joining or assisting a labor organization for collective bargaining purposes, or from working together to improve terms and conditions of employment, or refraining from any such activity.

So, one might reasonably ask, how do businesses get away with the kind of behavior highlighted above? One answer is that a series of Supreme Court decisions and NLRB rulings have reinterpreted the country’s labor laws in ways that have given employers a free pass to engage in a variety of anti-worker actions. Another is that Congress has refused to adequately fund the NLRB, leaving the organization unable to hire sufficient staff to do the needed investigations of worker complaints and oversee elections even during the rare periods when the NLRB has actively sought to protect worker rights.

President Biden has taken two actions that offer some hope for a progressive turn. The first is his inclusion of a significant increase in funding for the NLRB in his proposed 2023 fiscal year budget. The second, and more important one, was his 2021 appointment of Jennifer Abruzzo, a former attorney for the Communications Workers of America, as NLRB General Counsel. Abruzzo is pressing the NLRB to ban “captive audience” meetings as an unfair labor practice and to restore the Joy Silk doctrine, which would allow the NLRB to immediately recognize a union if a strong majority of workers signed cards or a petition demonstrating their support for unionization.

It remains to be seen what will come from either action. At the same time, labor activists have shown tremendous determination in the face of corporate opposition and their organizing work appears to be paying off.  We should celebrate their bravery and support their efforts. However, gains shouldn’t have to be so challenging—if organizing to improve working conditions is a guaranteed right, it should truly be protected.

We have a business-friendly labor law

Private sector labor law has, over time, become increasingly business, not worker, friendly. For example, the NLRB originally required employers to remain neutral when workers considered whether to unionize. However, in 1941, the Supreme Court ruled that employers had the right to make their case as long as their actions were not “coercive.” The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 gave new meaning to the court’s decision by inserting into the NLRA what is known as the “employer free speech” clause, which opened the door for businesses to push their anti-union position in captive audience meetings. In the 1970s, the NLRB decided that it was acceptable for management to use those meetings to threaten workers with a loss of benefits or even employment if they voted for a union. It later also ruled that management had the right to ban union supporters from attending captive audience meetings and even ban employees from speaking during the meetings.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that businesses did not have to agree to recognize a union regardless of the number of worker-signed cards or names on a petition expressing support for unionization. Instead, they could insist that the NLRB conduct an election. Later NLRB rulings have stretched out the time between card filing and voting and allowed companies to further delay elections by requiring that unfair labor practice charges and company challenges to the proposed bargaining unit be settled before voting. Delays, of course, give companies more time for captive meetings, to threaten dire consequences from a positive vote for unionization, and to intimidate and sometimes fire union activists.

Many more examples can be given. Here are just a few recent ones. NLRB rulings have made it easier for companies to reclassify their workers as independent contractors (thereby removing them entirely from the protection of labor laws). Other rulings have given employers the right to deny union organizers access to company parking lots or other public spaces, even if they are open to the general public, such as cafeterias, and workers the right to use their company email system for communicating about workplace issues even if it is regularly used for nonwork purposes.

As Lawrence Mishel, Lynn Rhinehart, and Lane Windham carefully document in their Economic Policy Institute study of reasons for the decline in private sector union membership, “Though these employer-friendly laws were on the books in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it was not until the 1970s that employers began to take full advantage of their power.” And take advantage they did. In fact, the authors make a strong case that one of the most important reasons for the steady decline in private sector unionism was the ruthless corporate exploitation of the new legal environment.

A weak National Labor Relations Board

Sadly, even at its best, the NLRB has limited power to protect worker rights. A case in point: if the NLRB actually determines that an employer illegally fired a worker for their pro-union activity—a process that can take up to two years because of a lack of staff—all it can do is order the employer to rehire the worker and pay them their back wages (minus whatever they earned while unemployed) and post a sign in the breakroom acknowledging that the worker was illegally fired.

As Mishel, Rhinehart, and Windham describe:

Workers do not receive monetary damages to compensate them for the economic harms inflicted by their illegal treatment. Unlike other employment laws, workers have no right to bring a lawsuit against the employer for violating their NLRA rights; they are entirely dependent on the agency pursuing their case. In contrast, other employment laws, such as civil rights laws, provide much greater penalties and provide for a private right of action so workers can bring cases on their own and collect attorneys’ fees if they prevail.

Here is a recent real-life example of how the NLRB, even when it acts in support of worker rights, is hamstrung by the class-biased framework underlying the NLRA. A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board ruled in April 2022, in response to charges filed by the Starbucks union, that the company had indeed engaged in illegal actions against union supporters. As reported by the New York Times, the regional director found the company guilty of:

firing employees in retaliation for supporting the union; threatening employees’ ability to receive new benefits if they choose to unionize; requiring workers to be available for a minimum number of hours to remain employed at a unionized store without bargaining over the change, as a way to force out at least one union supporter; and effectively promising benefits to workers if they decide not to unionize.

In response, the regional director ordered top management to record a video that can be distributed to all stores making clear that workers do have the right to engage in pro-union activity. That’s it—no fines. And, of course, the company is appealing the ruling. At the same time, it is unlikely that the company would have been found guilty under the regime of the previous NLRB General Counsel.

Some reasons for hope

President Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 calls for an increase in funding for the NLRB from $274 million to $319.4 million. If achieved it would be a big deal. The NLRB’s last budget increase was in 2014 and according to its staff union the agency has lost over 30 percent of its staff since 2010. The lack of staff translates into fewer investigations into unfair labor practices and delays in elections.

But it remains to be seen whether Biden will fight for this increase and if so, whether Democrats will stand firm in the face of Republican opposition. The 2022 fiscal year budget included $301.17 million for the NLRB, which the agency said would allow it to add nearly 150 staff. However, at the last minute, the money disappeared from the final budget agreement. As C.M. Lewis explains:

In the deal-making to reach an omnibus spending bill that could secure Republican votes, Democratic leadership made their priorities clear: and they didn’t include defending the right to organize. Congressional leadership and the White House have both demonstrated a willingness to take a victory lap for proposing increased funding while quietly continuing austerity for the sole federal agency tasked with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act.

More hopeful is the work of General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Under her leadership, the NLRB has been aggressive about responding to worker charges of unfair labor practices. More importantly, Abruzzo is pushing the NLRB to reverse its current position on captive audience meetings. According to an NLRB Office of Public Affairs statement:

National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memorandum to all Field offices announcing that she will ask the Board to find mandatory meetings in which employees are forced to listen to employer speech concerning the exercise of their statutory labor rights, including captive audience meetings, a violation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). . . . Forcing employees to attend captive audience meetings under threat of discipline discourages employees from exercising their right to refrain from listening to this speech and is therefore inconsistent with the NLRA.

The memo explains that years ago the Board incorrectly concluded that an employer does not violate the Act by compelling its employees to attend meetings in which it makes speeches urging them to reject union representation. As a result, employers commonly use explicit or implied threats to force employees into meetings about unionization or other statutorily protected activity.

Abruzzo has also filed a brief in a case brought before the NLRB by the Teamsters in which she calls for the immediate reinstatement of the Joy Silk doctrine. Under that doctrine, which shaped NLRB policy some 50 years ago, an employer could be ordered to recognize and bargain with a union if the union was able to show that it was supported by a majority of workers in the bargaining unit. An election would be required only if the employer could demonstrate that its refusal to bargain was based on its good faith doubt about the union’s majority status. Currently, as Fran Swanson explains in an Onlabo r blog post, “a bargaining order may only issue in cases where an ‘employer’s misdeeds are so widespread they make a fair election impossible,’ a standard which the brief argues has ‘failed to deter employers’ from interfering with elections.”

Of course, Abruzzo doesn’t have the last word. She has to convince the 5 member NLRB to accept her position on both captive audience meetings and the Joy Luck doctrine. Board members are appointed by the President, with Senate consent, and serve for five years. Each year, the term of one member expires. That means that the majority of the board predates Biden’s election. It is unclear how they will decide.

There is no doubt that if the NLRB receives a long overdue budget increase and Abruzzo is successful, workers will find it easier to organize. At the same time, it would be a serious mistake to believe that changes in labor law by themselves will be enough to ensure the revival of the labor movement. That will require the sustained hard work of rank-and-file organizers. Of course, it’s the combination that offers us the best chance for success. So, let’s keep the spotlight and pressure on the NLRB while continuing to support the kind of smart, aggressive organizing that has companies like Starbucks on the defensive.

Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; and Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His areas of teaching and research include political economy, economic development, international economics, and the political economy of East Asia. He is also a member of the Workers’ Rights Board (Portland, Oregon) and maintains a blog Reports from the Economic Front where this article first appeared.

MR Online, May 23, 2022, https://mronline.org/

Maine Poor People’s Campaign mobilizes for national ‘Moral March on Washington’ in June / by Evan Popp

Photo: A day of action organized by the Maine Poor People’s Campaign in Bangor in 2021 | Photo courtesy of Maine Poor People’s Campaign via Facebook 

Mainers from across the state will travel to Washington, D.C., next month as part of a march to demand that those in power stop ignoring the 140 million poor and low-income people living in the U.S and work with them on a moral agenda of justice and equality. 

The event, called the “Moral March on Washington & to the Polls,” will take place June 18 at 9 a.m. in the nation’s capital. The rally is being organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a national coalition building power across marginalized communities to change the moral narrative in the U.S. and demand an end to a series of interconnected injustices. The organization is based on a campaign of the same name created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s to unite poor and impacted people around the country. 

In Maine, the state chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing to bring hundreds of people down to D.C. to participate in the June march. 

“There’s going to be impacted speakers from across the country,” Joshua Kauppila, a Bangor-based organizer working with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said of the event. “We’re going to be lifting our moral agenda up to those down in D.C., and really highlighting how these interlocking injustices of systemic poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the war economy, ecological devastation and that distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism are all part of the problem that we need to solve and that those solutions need to come from poor people.”

Kauppila said the event will feature speeches, music and cultural arts, and a voter registration drive as well as the opportunity for people across the nation to connect over shared issues of injustice. 

“We’re facing just crisis after crisis and … poor and low-income people are so often shoved aside,” Kauppila said. 

Along with building power through community connections and solidarity, Kauppila said the event will also serve as a way to advocate for the policy priorities the Poor People’s Campaign is pushing for. Some of those political goals include comprehensive COVID-19 relief that prioritizes essential workers and marginalized populations, quality health care for all, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and universal guaranteed housing. 

Traveling to D.C.

Kauppila said the Maine Poor People’s Campaign is working with the bus share system rally.co to get people down to D.C. for the event. According to that site, there will be bus pickup locations in Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, Dover-Foxcroft, Lewiston, Portland and Waterville in the evening on Friday, June 17, to bring people to Washington. Kauppila said participants would return to Maine on Sunday morning, the day after the rally. 

More information on the bus schedule can be found here. Information on how to RSVP for the event can be found here. 

Kauppila said the group has raised funds to ensure that those who can’t pay for a bus ticket or other associated costs of the trip can still go, as the group wants as many low-income Mainers as possible to attend to demonstrate the potential political power of poor people. 

“We recognize that group of voters has not been activated for the primary reason that their issues are not being addressed and the politicians who claim to promote their issues don’t follow through,” Kauppila said. 

Marcella Makinen, treasurer for the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, added that the mass gathering in D.C. has the potential to be transformative in terms of demonstrating the reality of a U.S. system in which inequality has continued to skyrocket.

“It’s important to be changing the narrative on why people don’t have enough resources to eat and don’t have enough resources to pay their rent. It’s too easy to blame oneself and then that leads to depression,” Makinen said, arguing that “discovering that there’s a system where rich people get richer for not doing anything can be really liberating in and of itself.” 

Willie Hurley, another organizer with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said he hopes the June rally will help connect disparate grassroots campaigns together in a shared push for justice. 

“We have all these separate tiny little movements and organizations all working on their different things. This is an opportunity to bring all those things together,” Hurley said. “It’s 40 percent of the country, poor people. It’s the sleeping giant.”  

Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.

Maine Beacon, May 11 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/

Maine Poor People’s Campaign mobilizes for national ‘Moral March on Washington’ in June / by Evan Popp

Photo: A day of action organized by the Maine Poor People’s Campaign in Bangor in 2021 | Photo courtesy of Maine Poor People’s Campaign via Facebook 

Mainers from across the state will travel to Washington, D.C., next month as part of a march to demand that those in power stop ignoring the 140 million poor and low-income people living in the U.S and work with them on a moral agenda of justice and equality. 

The event, called the “Moral March on Washington & to the Polls,” will take place June 18 at 9 a.m. in the nation’s capital. The rally is being organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a national coalition building power across marginalized communities to change the moral narrative in the U.S. and demand an end to a series of interconnected injustices. The organization is based on a campaign of the same name created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s to unite poor and impacted people around the country. 

In Maine, the state chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing to bring hundreds of people down to D.C. to participate in the June march. 

“There’s going to be impacted speakers from across the country,” Joshua Kauppila, a Bangor-based organizer working with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said of the event. “We’re going to be lifting our moral agenda up to those down in D.C., and really highlighting how these interlocking injustices of systemic poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the war economy, ecological devastation and that distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism are all part of the problem that we need to solve and that those solutions need to come from poor people.”

Kauppila said the event will feature speeches, music and cultural arts, and a voter registration drive as well as the opportunity for people across the nation to connect over shared issues of injustice. 

“We’re facing just crisis after crisis and … poor and low-income people are so often shoved aside,” Kauppila said. 

Along with building power through community connections and solidarity, Kauppila said the event will also serve as a way to advocate for the policy priorities the Poor People’s Campaign is pushing for. Some of those political goals include comprehensive COVID-19 relief that prioritizes essential workers and marginalized populations, quality health care for all, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and universal guaranteed housing. 

Traveling to D.C.

Kauppila said the Maine Poor People’s Campaign is working with the bus share system rally.co to get people down to D.C. for the event. According to that site, there will be bus pickup locations in Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, Dover-Foxcroft, Lewiston, Portland and Waterville in the evening on Friday, June 17, to bring people to Washington. Kauppila said participants would return to Maine on Sunday morning, the day after the rally. 

More information on the bus schedule can be found here. Information on how to RSVP for the event can be found here. 

Kauppila said the group has raised funds to ensure that those who can’t pay for a bus ticket or other associated costs of the trip can still go, as the group wants as many low-income Mainers as possible to attend to demonstrate the potential political power of poor people. 

“We recognize that group of voters has not been activated for the primary reason that their issues are not being addressed and the politicians who claim to promote their issues don’t follow through,” Kauppila said. 

Marcella Makinen, treasurer for the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, added that the mass gathering in D.C. has the potential to be transformative in terms of demonstrating the reality of a U.S. system in which inequality has continued to skyrocket.

“It’s important to be changing the narrative on why people don’t have enough resources to eat and don’t have enough resources to pay their rent. It’s too easy to blame oneself and then that leads to depression,” Makinen said, arguing that “discovering that there’s a system where rich people get richer for not doing anything can be really liberating in and of itself.” 

Willie Hurley, another organizer with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said he hopes the June rally will help connect disparate grassroots campaigns together in a shared push for justice. 

“We have all these separate tiny little movements and organizations all working on their different things. This is an opportunity to bring all those things together,” Hurley said. “It’s 40 percent of the country, poor people. It’s the sleeping giant.”  

Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.

Maine Beacon, May 11 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/

Southern workers gather to build Workers Assembly Movement / by Southern Workers Assembly

Photo courtesy of Southern Workers Assembly

DURHAM, N.C. – Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!,” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 – May 1. Workers came to the school from Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Tidewater Virginia, Richmond, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, Eastern North Carolina, northern Kentucky, and elsewhere.

Over the last year, the network of areas building workers assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry based councils – including Amazon, healthcare, and education workers – and growing interest to develop assemblies in additional locations as well. The gathering in Durham was an effort to consolidate this growth, draw lessons from these experiences to inform the methodology of building workers assemblies to organize the unorganized, to develop worker cadre, and to collectively chart a course for our work going forward.

Workers who participated in the school came from a wide range of different sectors, including strong participation from Amazon workers, domestic, healthcare, education, local municipal, manufacturing, meatpacking, and service industry workers. A major emphasis of the school was building Black worker leadership.

Photo courtesy of Southern Workers Assembly

The school was rooted in an assessment of the current political period of both growing self-organization and activity among various sectors of the working class, as well as the growing danger of right-wing reaction, and the role that workers assemblies in the U.S. South must play in relation to these and other developments.

In his opening orientation, Ajamu Dillahunt, member of the Southern Workers Assembly Coordinating Committee and a leader of Black Workers for Justice, noted: “We have to take advantage of this moment. As the Black Panther Party said in the 1960s, we have to “Seize the Time” and build a rank and file led social movement unionism that organizes workplace committees that are connected to each through Workers Assemblies in multiple Southern cities.”

Southern workers political program

A main focus of the meeting was engaging the rank and file base of the assemblies in a discussion of a draft political program that could be the basis of broad unity and collective action in the months ahead. This program would help workers to see their workplace fights within a broader social movement struggle for power and justice.

In break-out groups, workers discussed their priorities for wages, benefits, housing, education, racism, gender oppression, labor rights, the environment, immigration, war, and voting rights to contribute toward the development of such a program. There was a high level of unity around expanding labor union rights, including ending right-to-work (for less) laws, overturning bans on collective bargaining, and making union busting and captive audience meetings illegal.

From there, workers discussed plans to develop a unifying campaign that the various assemblies can implement together that can engage coworkers and leaflet other large workplaces across the South with these political demands. The hope is to develop a broad consciousness that we, as workers, have common needs and interests that are distinct from the owning class, and to engage wide layers of our class in ongoing and escalating activity to open a public struggle for power. The first stage of this campaign will lead up to the midterm elections in 2022, which will be an important battleground for the working class to raise its demands with employers and the politicians running for our votes.

Leaflet brigades and industry councils

There was a great deal of discussion throughout the weekend on the methodology of building workers assemblies, beginning first with small group discussions on the ‘Ten Building Blocks to Building a Workers Assembly’. These discussions offered a venue for workers at varying levels of developing their local assemblies to exchange and offer lessons from their experiences thus far.

One of the core tasks of the local workers assemblies is to identify workers and supporters who can establish a leaflet brigade, with the goal of leafleting at major workplaces in their area to agitate and make contacts with worker-activists.

Leaflet brigades that consistently and regularly engage workers from major workplaces in their geographic areas have proven to be a critical component in the developing workers assemblies, and some of those experiences were shared during the school. One particularly valuable lesson in the role of these brigades came from the Raleigh-Durham area. Last year, in the midst of the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon union election, brigades consistently leafletted the Amazon RDU1 Fulfillment Center, RDU5 Sortation Center, and the DRT1 Delivery station. This led to the formation of CAUSE (Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment), an organization of rank-n-file Amazon workers across the area that was recently publicly announced.

“These are exciting times for the labor movement in the Triangle and Charlotte for Amazon employees and CAUSE members,” said Rev Ryan Brown, an RDU1 worker and leader of CAUSE. “The support that we’ve received from our coworkers and the Southern Workers Assembly has been overwhelmingly encouraging in our leaflet brigades and petition campaign. Amazon employees at CLT2, DRT1, RDU1, and RDU5 are anticipating much needed changes in our low wages and our grueling working conditions at their respective locations through CAUSE efforts.”

In the months since the initial brigade work at these locations, over 600 Amazon workers at these three warehouses have signed up for more information. A handful of work stoppages have also occurred in this time frame with workers taking action on their own responding to the leaflets, including about 50 third shift workers that walked off the job in mid-March, followed by the day shift being shut down the next day when management convened an all-worker meeting to hear from workers. Later, workers also refused to go back to work when celebrating the exit of a beloved co-worker.

Photo courtesy of Southern Workers Assembly

These and other experiences were shared during a session of the Southern Workers Assembly’s Amazon Council that convened during the school, where Amazon workers from several Southern states shared reports on the organizing in their facilities, their efforts to engage other Amazon workers in their areas through leafleting brigades and other assembly work, and took up a discussion of deepening their coordination around raising demands and taking workplace actions. Another point during this discussion was how to connect Amazon workers together into networks with other workers organizing in different cities across the South.

“In New Orleans, we’re bringing together hospitality workers, film and television workers, Amazon workers, and teachers to form a local Workers Assembly,” Meg Maloney shared during the session. “We’re training together, learning about our rights to concerted activity and workplace organizing, and sharing our experiences and learning from one another in the struggle. We’re stronger when we’re united in our workplaces and communities, together we will win!”

By the end of the weekend, workers from the local areas in attendance all met to discuss their efforts to build local worker assemblies in their areas and lay out immediate next steps based on the discussions throughout the weekend. Workers identified major employers in their area and mapped out plans to continue supporting workplace committees, connected to a social movement framework to draw in more workers to our movement.

Deepening and expanding the work

In the weeks ahead, workers who participated in the school and the local workers assemblies will continue discussion to finalize the Southern Workers Program and a plan for action for the remainder of the year.

A particularly exciting outcome from the school was the establishment of new relationships with areas interested in building local workers assemblies. There was a strong delegation of educator activists from Richmond, Virginia who had recently won the first-ever local government union certification election for collective bargaining in their state. Members of the Richmond Association of Educators, and the Virginia Caucus of Rank-n-File Educators (VCORE) shared lessons about building rank-n-file worker engagement in the fight for the school board to recognize their union.

“We not only won back our right to collectively bargain but won our union election with a 99% “yes” vote. And we did all this by revamping our union’s workplace organization, by training a new layer of union worksite leaders, and by agitating for a democratic, worker-led union with a class-struggle orientation,” Patrick Korte, a Richmond teacher and member of Richmond Association of Educations and VCORE shared during the school. “We have encouraged our union to adopt a class-wide perspective by practicing solidarity with striking Nabisco workers, with Starbucks workers struggling to unionize, and with all public sector workers fighting to win collective bargaining rights.”

By every measure, the school was a qualitative step forward in the development of workers assemblies as the infrastructure to anchor a rank and file led, independent workers movement that can organize the South.

People’s World, May 10, 2022, https://peoplesworld.org/

Building worker power and solidarity across the South!
https://southernworker.org/

Women take on union busters by stepping up union organizing / by Mark Gruenberg

Women Innovating Labor Leadership (WILL Empower) is an initiative that identifies, convenes and trains women labor leaders. They sponsored the recent discussion about women battling union busters. Photo courtesy of WILL

WASHINGTON—Women across America, learning firsthand about the extent to which bosses try to destroy unions, are taking the lead in confronting and battling back against the union busters. At one notorious workplace, the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, they battled union busters who tried all kinds of tactics to defeat the union organizing drive, including harassment following them home at night.

Jennifer Bates, a lead organizer at Amazon’s monstrous Bessemer warehouse, talked about this in a recent discussion. The illegal following of workers to their homes happened in the middle of their second drive to unionize the 5,000-plus workers at Bessemer, the majority of them workers of color, after their union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, lost the first election, in 2021, by a two-to-one ratio.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) tossed out that first vote due to rampant company labor law-breaking, officially called unfair labor practices. So RWDSU came back for a rerun, culminating in a second election earlier in 2022, again facing Amazon and its founder and dominant force, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the U.S.

And this time, applying lessons learned in the runup to the first vote, Bates and her RWDSU colleagues undertook intensive education of their co-workers, even as Amazon’s hired union-busters trailed the organizers on their way home and on their house-to-house campaign visits to co-workers.

The union-busters, as usual, also forced workers into “captive audience” meetings, complete with harangues against unions in general and RWDSU in particular. “The anti-union consultants really angered me,” Bates told a recent session on the rising role of women in the union movement, sponsored by Georgetown University in D.C.

“One employee asked them: ‘Why do we see you all only during election time?’”

And when the union-buster stood up and bleated about how unionizing would economically hurt workers, even in low-wage Alabama—starting from zero, if you will—“one anti-union person stood up” in the captive audience meeting “and said, ‘That’s a lie.’

“The point is they”—companies and their “consultants’—“should not be allowed to interfere with our efforts.”

It was incidents like that, plus a lot of one-on-one meetings and education, that produced a win among 600 tech workers at the New York Times, that led to a mail-in election now occurring at a Starbucks in Cleveland, and produced a rerun race too close to call in the second Bessemer vote.

Georgetown’s Women Innovating Labor Leadership initiative brought Bates, Times senior software engineer Nozlee Samadzeh and Cleveland Starbucks worker Maddy Van Hoek together for the zoom discussion on the rising role of women in the labor movement. Instead, the session ranged far afield.

One big point all three agreed upon: While almost half the U.S. workforce is female, and while women are discriminated against on the job in pay, benefits and promotions, most women—and most workers—know little if anything about unions, and how organizing can help them improve their lot and lessen pay and benefit inequality.

“Doing basic agitating about working conditions can make you a lot more familiar” with people’s individual problems on the job—and how they’re all similar—said Samadzeh, in a statement Bates agreed with. “Workplaces are built for people not to unionize…We understand we’re all workers and can improve conditions by having a (union) contract.”

Jennifer Bates talked about the battle against union busters at the Amazon Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. | video screenshot

“We thought it would be easy” to organize Bessemer, “because a lot of people understood what a union was,” Bates added. They didn’t and it wasn’t. “They should begin teaching about labor education in middle school–and have it be a requirement, not an elective, in college.

“So the second time around” at Bessemer “we did a lot more education.”

That education involved a lot more one-on-one communication. At Bessemer, it was door-to-door, in the parking lot after shift changes, in break rooms and house to house. For the Times workers, all in its tech arm, it was the web.

“The Internet makes it so much easier to be in contact” with co-workers “and to meet people where they are at,” said Samadzeh (her emphasis). It also helped counteract past sketchy knowledge of unions as white-male dominated “and something your grandfathers did,” one of the three added.

Again, an internal company decision set the organizing drive off. At the Times, it was “a homophobic op-ed” the paper published, which left the staffers at the tech arm irate. They began looking for an united way to express their outrage. “And a number of people had been advocating for gender-neutral restrooms,” too.

The New York News Guild, which has had wall-to-wall representation in the paper’s newsroom for decades, was the answer.

Personal stories about how unions helped, too. Samadzeh had her own, from the shop she worked at before joining the Times, Watts Media Productions in Manhattan.

“The company abruptly moved to pay us in arrears,” meaning after a pay period ended. And sometimes the checks were late. “There was a two-week period where no one got paid and everybody was freaking out.” Unionizing was the staff’s answer.

At Starbucks, said Van Hoek, it was the realization the impression the firm gave “that it’s a decent place to work,” isn’t altogether true. “A lot of people in the community said ‘I thought you were treated well.’ But even if Starbucks did live up to its standards, we could still form a union, for accountability.”

Mark Gruenberg is an award winning journalist and head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

People’s World, May 10, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/

Maine News: Joining wave of organized newsrooms, BDN journalists look to unionize / by Dan Neumann

Photo: Yevgen Romanenko, Getty Images

The newsroom staff of the Bangor Daily News and other Bangor Publishing Company newspapers announced on Wednesday that they had shared with management their plans to unionize.

Organizers said an overwhelming majority of eligible staff have signed cards declaring their desire to join the News Guild of Maine, Local 31128 of The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America.

“It started last fall as a conversation about working conditions and a more equitable pay structure,” said BDN photojournalist Troy Bennett, one of the organizers. “It has not been a hard sell for people. We have close to 90% support on our document that we delivered to management this morning.” 

The union would represent about 30 BDN journalists, digital editors, page designers, photographers and editorial page writers, including staff at the Bangor Publishing Company’s other local news sites, St. John Valley Times, Fiddlehead Focus, The County, Piscataquis Observer, Aroostook Republican, Houlton Pioneer Times, Presque Isle Star-Herald and the Penobscot Times. 

Bennett explained that increasingly insufficient staffing levels has led to high staff turnover at the state’s only independently owned daily newspaper. 

“Especially in the last few years, it’s been a revolving door,” he said. “The working conditions are tough. So people are immediately looking for greener pastures as soon as they get here.”

Bennett said that newsroom staff want a seat at the table to fix the problem. 

“We’re just being made to work faster, faster, faster,” he said. “We’ve been asked to do more with less for so long, we assume they’re going to ask us to do everything with nothing,” he said, adding, “Why don’t we have a seat at the table and a say in our own future?” 

BDN political reporter Jessica Piper echoed Bennett’s concerns. “In the bit more than two years that I’ve been with the BDN, I’ve seen many smart, caring reporters come and go,” she said in a statement issued by the organizers. “For the newspaper to thrive, we need talented staff to stay.”

BDN journalists’ push to unionize is just the latest swell in a wave of media professionals getting organized that began in 2015. Since then, journalists or tech support staff at the New York Times, Politico, The Atlantic, Kansas City Star and Los Angeles Daily News, among other newspapers, digital outlets and broadcast stations, have all successfully certified their unions, some voluntarily recognized by management and others proceeding with elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. 

The ongoing wave of media unions has been a source of optimism for workers and advocates who are hopeful that the country is witnessing a renewal of the labor movement, as demonstrated most recently by Starbucks and Amazon workers unionizing previously unorganized sectors of the U.S. economy.

In Maine, Maine Medical Center nurses and Portland Museum of Art workers won union elections in 2021 amid opposition from management. Preble Street workers won big pay raises in their new contract signed in April. 

BDN staff are hoping that management voluntarily recognizes the union, making a union election unnecessary. Organizers and supporters are sharing a petition asking management to recognize the union.

Bennett said management has not formally responded. “They were accepted cordially and said they’d be in touch,” he said.

Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.

The Amazon Labor Union Victory, Lessons for All Workers / By Ed Grystar

Amazon Workers in Staten Island, NY Vote to Unionize in Historic First | Democracy Now!

In one of the most remarkable labor organizing victories in decades, the Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize with the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU). This is the first organizing victory for any union at any of Amazon’s 110 warehouses across the USA, the nation’s second largest employer with over a million employees.

This was a real bottom-up organizing effort potentially highlighting an effective way forward for the rest of labor – a victory that gives momentum to workers not only in the other Amazon warehouses but in all industries. It demonstrates how and why rank and file workers are the essential elements of not only a successful organizing drive but critical to a revitalized labor movement based on struggle.

In a remarkable moment of candor, the Financial Times, which always speaks for big business, admits Amazon workers took great inspiration from none other than legendary communist William Z. Foster.

Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island is a thoroughly 21st-century workplace where human “pickers” select items from shelves brought to them by a fleet of robots. Yet when the leaders of the newly formed Amazon Labor Union wanted to unionize the place, they turned to a manual called ‘Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry’ from 1936. The pamphlet recommends among other things a “chain system” whereby workers recruit other workers.

That Amazon workers should look back to the history of the steel industry is not as strange as it might sound. Steel was a vital sector of the American economy a century ago, as is ecommerce today.

Justine Medina, Amazon organizer, described Foster’s Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry in Labor Notes as a “must-read”.

Why Follow William Z Foster? And Why Now?

While written in the 1930s, the short but informative pamphlet illustrated and combined the necessary ideological foundation, strategic outlook and practical tasks needed to take on the biggest Steel corporations and win. And it remains relevant today.

Unfortunately the strategy and victory for the ALU is an exception to the norm in today’s labor movement. A combination of red baiting, de-industrialization, and lack of desire to actually fight has seen the broader labor movement completely abandon any semblance of class struggle for class collaboration since Foster’s time.

Not only have traditional unions been largely unable to organize large militant units like the ALU just did in Staten Island, but the same losing class-collaborationist approach was most apparent when unions were unable to protect workers who were already organized. In the late 1970’s and onward, the de-industrialization of the USA was in full swing. Steel, coal, auto, rubber, transportation were just a few of the basic industries that were offshored, downsized or dis-invested by capital. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, communities were devastated, as infrastructure and public services took a major blow.

The causes of this man-made disaster were pictured and portrayed by politicians, business, the media, and labor as inevitable results of living under the magic of the capitalist market. The mayor of Pittsburgh, Richard Caliguiri remarked that workers should leave the city for greener pastures, essentially defending the bosses’ shut down of the steel mills in western Pennsylvania. Rather than use their existing political and organizational muscle to mobilize the tens of thousands into a grand coalition to put up a fight, unions simply folded into a charity-based approach, reducing their credibility and giving credence to the bosses’ arguments that the unions caused the offshoring because they “asked for too much”. Given that all these industries were unionized yet collapsed without a mass struggle is crucial for workers today.

Labor’s efforts today, with the exception of a few unions in particular sectors, largely mirror this defeatist approach.Tied to the bosses and the twin corrupt mainstream political parties, labor’s efforts are reduced to lobbying, email campaigns, media releases, and excessive legalistic strategies. For years, rather than attempt to unionize many low-wage sectors, labor lobbied for a federal minimum wage bill, something still yet to come to fruition.

This is what makes the Amazon victory so exciting, and one can see the incredible relevance today that is exhibited by the Foster pamphlet used to organize the Steel Industry decades ago. The parallels for the labor movement today and in the late 1920s and early 1930s are remarkable:

The organization campaign must be a fighting movement. It must realize that if the steel workers are to be organized they can only rely upon themselves and the support they get from other workers. While every advantage should be taken of all political institutions and individuals to defend the steel workers’ civil rights and to advance their interests generally, it would be the worst folly to rely upon Roosevelt, Earle or other capitalist politicians to adopt measures to organize the steel workers. There is every probability that only through a great strike can the steel workers establish their union and secure their demands, and this perspective must be constantly borne in mind.

Although the steel workers must not place their faith in capitalist politicians, they should utilize every means to develop working class political activity and organization in the steel areas. Especially there should be organized local Labor parties in the steel towns and thus foundations laid for an eventual Farmer-Labor Party.

Christian Smalls, leader of the ALU, in an interview on Fox News commented on being ignored by politicians in the runup to the NLRB election, “Whether they showed up or not, they didn’t make or break our election. We just had to continue to organize.” Like Foster, Smalls is setting an example in which unions chart an independent course, focusing on confidence and mass support of the rank and file over tacit support from politicians – worrying about whether AOC or Bernie Sanders attends a photo op rally is not a priority.

Democracy Defined as Rank and File Control and Involvement

For both Foster and now the ALU, mass participation among the rank and file and a captivating positive attitude among the organizing committee were crucial.

The necessary discipline cannot be attained by issuing drastic orders, but must be based upon wide education work among the rank and file and the development of confidence among them in the cause and ultimate victory of the movement.

A central aim must always be to draw the largest possible masses into direct participation in all the vital activities of the union; membership recruitment, formulation of demands, union elections, petitions, pledge votes, strike votes, strike organization, etc. This gives them a feeling that the union is actually their movement.

This critical strategy to draw in the workers to participate in the drive was necessary to destroy management’s attempt to picture the union organizers as “outsiders” that can confuse employees and reduce the union‘s credibility. Unfortunately, Amazon was successful in defeating the first Alabama organizing drive by the RWDSU by constantly highlighting the out-of-town supporters who would pass flyers or visit workers instead of rank-and-file workers at the sites. Solidarity support and professional staff are critical but only work when following a worker-led movement.

What Kind of Union Do Workers Need Today?

Can we learn from our past mistakes? Unions are essential for protecting the workers on the job and that’s why the capitalist class is relentless in opposition to workers organizing. But the Amazon Labor Union model can not exist in a vacuum. Its approach is a guide and for the working class to move to the offensive its principles must be extended far and wide.

The ALU and other new leaders in labor must shift the broader labor movement away from the strategy of class collaboration in order to be strong enough to withstand the ongoing attacks by capital. Workers can only actually go on the offensive once campaigns are moved beyond individual bargaining units to a class-level fight.

The ALU has shown the working class in simple and practical terms that it’s more important to build bottom-up solidarity among all workers than building an identity with your boss. This is something we should understand and help to nurture and grow.

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Ed Grystar has more than 40 years experience in the labor and healthcare justice movements. He served as the President of the Butler County (PA) United Labor Council for 15 years. He has decades of experience organizing and negotiating labor contracts with the Service Employees International Union and the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals.

ML Today, April 18, 2022, https://mltoday.com/

Bernie Sanders: Amazon Labor Union victory has launched a national movement / by Jake Johnson

At left: Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, center, with other members of ALU marching at the Amazon JFK8 distribution center in Staten Island, Oct. 25, 2021. At right: Sen. Bernie Sanders. | AP photos

On an organizing call Monday night with leaders of the Amazon Labor Union, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., said he believes the grassroots group’s historic election victory in Staten Island earlier this month has empowered workers across the nation to collectively face down their corporate employers and fight for better conditions.

“All across this country, people are saying, ‘Whoa! If these guys at Amazon can take on that company, we can do it as well,’” said Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. “What we’re looking at, I think, is a national, sweeping movement.”

In the days since the independent union’s victory—which Amazon is attempting to overturn with a slew of formal objections—workers at more than 100 of the retail giant’s facilities across the United States have contacted the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) about organizing their workplaces, a nightmare scenario for management.

ALU’s landmark win also came amid a wave of union victories at Starbucks locations nationwide. After Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y., voted to unionize in December, employees at more than a dozen of the company’s shops scored election victories in the weeks that followed—momentum that Starbucks executives are actively trying to blunt.

“People are sick and tired of corporate greed,” Sanders said during Monday’s call, which featured ALU president Chris Smalls, chair Angelika Maldonado, and Workers Committee member Michelle Valentin Nieves.

“I know that I have colleagues in the Congress who feel the same as I do,” the Vermont senator added. “Our demand now is that [Amazon’s billionaire executive chairman Jeff] Bezos and Amazon sit down and start negotiating a contract. Our demand is that they stop spending millions trying to prevent workers from exercising their constitutional right to form a union.”

In an attempt to galvanize additional union drives, the call directed viewers to a website that aims to connect employees with organizers and provide them with key information and resources.

But Smalls, who was fired by Amazon in 2020 after he organized a walkout at JFK8 over the company’s inadequate pandemic safety protocols, emphasized that face-to-face conversations are essential to help workers “really understand what unions provide.”

“Find somebody that’s in a union and have a conversation with them,” Smalls suggested to workers. “And not just one conversation, it takes several conversations…. At the end, you’ll probably make the decision to want to join one.”

Maldonado, a current employee at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island, similarly stressed the importance of in-person interaction and education in laying the groundwork for unionization.

“No matter where you work,” said Maldonado, “you deserve to have certain rights that other workers in other companies do.”

The organizing call came as ALU is gearing up for a second union election in Staten Island on April 25, when voting is set to begin at Amazon’s 1,500-worker LDJ5 warehouse.

As The City reported Monday, ALU’s demands “remain the same at LDJ5: a $30-an-hour minimum wage, better working conditions, including two paid 30-minute breaks and an hour-long paid lunch break, better medical leave, additional paid time off, and eliminating productivity rates that require workers to pick a certain number of items an hour.”

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

People’s World, April 13, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/