Tag: Union Organizing

The Supreme Court Struck a Blow Against Workers’ Rights / by Alex N. Press

The US Supreme Court building is seen on April 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case involving Starbucks and its union, seeing all justices side with the company against workers. The decision will make it easier for employers to get away with firing workers for unionizing

Reposted from Jacobin

It just got easier for employers to get away with firing workers for organizing a union.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with Starbucks in a decision against Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that continues to organize Starbucks locations across the country. The union has organized more than 440 stores representing some ten thousand workers since the campaign began in December 2021.

The case, Starbucks Corporation v. McKinney, concerns the “Memphis Seven,” whom Starbucks fired during their store’s organizing drive in 2022. The workers claim that they were fired in retaliation for their organizing activities, alleging that the policy the company cited as the cause of their termination — the workers reopened the store after closing time, inviting nonemployees, including a television crew, inside — are not usually enforced.

SBWU filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over their termination, arguing that it constituted a violation of the workers’ legally protected right to engage in concerted activity. In response, the board issued a complaint against Starbucks, writing that the reason it fired the Memphis Seven was because they had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” The NLRB then asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the seven; in August 2022, six months after they were fired, the judge issued that order.

Even as Starbucks finally agreed to get serious at the bargaining table with SBWU, stating that it hopes to reach a first contract by the end of the year, the coffee giant did not drop its objections to the injunction, which it appealed to the Supreme Court. But the NLRB’s actions were an attempt to remedy the chilling effect of the company’s actions: if other workers see that Starbucks can fire seven workers for engaging in protected activity and those workers have to wait years for justice to prevail in the legal realm, it will make them think twice about organizing.

“Starbucks has committed more than 400 violations of federal labor law, including firing 59 union leaders and supporters, according to decisions of administrative law judges,” wrote twelve former Starbucks workers who have been disciplined or fired in response to organizing in a friend-of-the-court brief. “More than 60 additional complaints against Starbucks are awaiting decisions.”

An employer’s ability to stall worker organizing by forcing workers to wait as legal matters wend their way through the courts is particularly damaging for SBWU, for whom momentum has been a key tool to spreading the organizing victories. That dynamic is why NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo called the federal judge’s granting of an injunction “a crucial step in ensuring that these workers, and all Starbucks workers, can freely exercise their right to join together to improve their working conditions and form a union.”

The Supreme Court judges disagree. Starbucks’s argument was that federal judges have different standards for granting injunctions to reinstate workers: some courts only require the NLRB to show that there is “reasonable cause” to believe an employer has violated labor law, while others make the board prove that not reinstating workers would cause “irreparable harm,” and that the board will likely prevail in its legal case. The NLRB called the difference semantic, arguing that there is no discrepancy in need of intervention by the Supreme Court.

Eight of the court’s nine judges agreed with Starbucks’s argument, ruling in favor of the stricter standard. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority opinion, “But, the reasonable-cause standard goes far beyond simply fine tuning the traditional criteria . . . it substantively lowers the bar for securing a preliminary injunction.” Justice Thomas noted that the stricter standard is usually applied in cases where other laws allow a judge to issue a preliminary injunction.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that concurred with the overall judgment but stated that it’s easy to show irreparable harm to workers who have been terminated and will have to wait years for reinstatement as a case makes its way through the legal process. Thomas’s opinion, wrote Justice Jackson, ignores Congress’s “clear and comprehensive” directives in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as to how courts should exercise discretion when it comes to the Board’s authority over labor disputes.

“Unfortunately, today’s decision appears to be another installment in a series of labor cases in which this Court has failed ‘to heed Congress’s intent,’” she wrote. “I am loath to bless this aggrandizement of judicial power where Congress has so plainly limited the discretion of the courts, and where it so clearly intends for the expert agency it has created to make the primary determinations.”

“Working people have so few tools to protect and defend themselves when their employers break the law,” Workers United president Lynne Fox said in a statement. “That makes today’s ruling by the Supreme Court particularly egregious.”

The case is but the first of many in the works from employers seeking to diminish the NLRB’s capacity. Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have all made arguments challenging the constitutionality of the board. These companies are taking advantage of the court’s rightward swing: the court is currently poised to remove power from federal agencies broadly by overturning a legal doctrine known as the Chevron deference, which establishes that judges must defer to federal agencies when interpreting ambiguous laws. Overturning that principle will be a major blow to the government’s regulatory power and as such is a priority for the Right.

Employers seeking to undermine the NLRB are but one prong of that broad attack. They’re chipping away at an agency that has been a thorn in their side in recent years, consistently objecting to union-busting campaigns across the country. With last week’s Supreme Court ruling, they’ve scored a victory in that project.

Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.

Amazon Labor Union Looks Set to Affiliate With the Teamsters / by Luis Feliz Leon

Demonstrators during an Amazon Labor Union rally outside an Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York, US, on April 11, 2023. (Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This week, the Amazon Labor Union and the Teamsters announced an agreement to affiliate. If ratified, the agreement would charter a new New York City local, Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

Reposted from Jacobin

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and the Teamsters have signed an affiliation agreement.

“Today is an historical day for labor in America as we now combine forces with one of the most powerful unions to take on Amazon together,” wrote ALU President Chris Smalls on Twitter/X. “We’re putting Amazon on notice that we are coming!”

Smalls and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien signed the agreement on June 3, according to a copy I obtained.

The affiliation agreement charters a new local known as Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ALU-IBT Local 1) for the five boroughs of New York City. That may signal that Amazon workers will not be integrated into existing locals with other Teamster crafts.

The ALU is the fledgling independent union that sent shock waves through the labor movement two years ago when it won a landmark election to organize eight thousand workers at Amazon fulfillment center JFK8 on Staten Island, New York.

The Teamsters announced the affiliation in a tweet, saying the agreement had been approved unanimously by its board. The ALU’s rank and file hasn’t yet voted on it.

Surprise Announcement

The union’s reform caucus supports the affiliation, but was surprised that the Teamsters had announced the news publicly before rank-and-file members had voted.

“Ultimately, the agreement reflects what we would have wanted out of this process,” said Connor Spence, who’s running for president of the ALU and was one of the key organizers of the successful union drive at JFK8. “We would have liked a different timeline, namely holding the vote after the leadership elections, but we’re going to organize in support of the agreement either way.”

Leaders of the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, including Connor Spence, Brima Sylla, Kathleen Cole, and Sultana Hossain, and current and former members of the ALU Executive Board, including Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, Claudia Ashterman, and Arlene Kingston, met with O’Brien and other Teamster officials in Washington, DC, on May 20, after weeks of conversations about what an affiliation would involve.

Since its blockbuster win in 2022, ALU’s efforts to make inroads at other Amazon facilities have gone down in defeat. The union has also faltered in efforts to bring Amazon to the bargaining table.

These organizing failures gave rise to the caucus, which won the right to hold democratic elections for the union’s top spots.

As the ALU struggled to advance further at Amazon, workers at the air cargo hub KCVG in Northern Kentucky voted to affiliate with the Teamsters in April and will redo their ALU union affiliation cards. They made the decision after the tug and ramp workers at a nearby DHL facility joined the Teamsters and won a lucrative first contract in January.

Teamsters launched an Amazon Division last year to bring together various Amazon organizing efforts under one big tent.

“If we’re going to bring Amazon to the table, we need to build a national movement of Amazon workers who are strike-ready,” said Spence. “Trying to build that without some kind of institutional backing is a long shot.”

Amazon Teamsters have extended picket lines to other Amazon facilities after the Teamsters organized delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, last April. These eighty-four workers were nominally employed by an Amazon contractor, the Southern California company Battle-Tested Strategies — one of 2,500 “delivery service partners” that carry out package deliveries while Amazon retains full control.

Since then, more of the independent groups organizing at Amazon have worked with the Teamsters, hoping its backing can help them organize their own facilities.

New Elections

ALU will hold officer elections in July at the JFK8 facility. Eligible voters will include all current employees who are not seasonal workers. The affiliation agreement says the Teamsters “will provide resources to effectuate an internal election for ALU-IBT Local 1 in a manner so that potential officers may reach, with equal access, as many eligible members in JKF8 as possible.”

The internal election became possible only after the ALU’s reform caucus sued the union last year for violating the ALU’s constitution because it “refused to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”

The ALU was supposed to hold elections within sicty days after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified the union. But before the NLRB certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership, changing the time frame for officer elections to after the union ratified a contract with Amazon. The reform caucus asked a Brooklyn court to compel union leaders to hold an election.

Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes

Unions and Tenant Organizations Are Natural Allies / by Fran Quigley

Demonstrators hold signs during a KC Tenants rally outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 30, 2020. (Chase Castor / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Across the US, labor unions are starting to ally with tenant organizers around affordable housing and tenant protection campaigns. The efforts reflect a growing sense of shared interests — and shared corporate enemies

Reposted from Jacobin

Hope Vaughn was a tenant union organizer before she knew there was a tenant union. When her New Haven, Connecticut, landlord Ocean Management refused to address the rodents and mold in her apartment and the standing, rancid water in the building basement, Vaughn’s response was obvious to her. After more than a dozen years as a long-term care certified nursing assistant member of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199 NE, she had no intention of fighting back alone. She began knocking on her neighbors’ doors and gathering signatures on a petition demanding repairs and a cleanup.

“My union experience taught me that it may be easy for a landlord to ignore one tenant’s complaints, but even powerful people in high places are forced to listen when a lot of us come together,” Vaughn says. “There is strength in numbers.”

Then one day, Vaughn overheard someone else outside a neighbor’s door, asking the same questions she had been posing about the bad conditions in the building. A tenant union organizer was making the rounds. Vaughn joined on the spot, and soon became vice president of the Quinnipiac Avenue Tenant Union. She was part of the team elected by fellow tenants that last year negotiated an agreement with Ocean Management to rescind eviction notices to sixteen residents and enter into Connecticut’s first-ever agreement to collectively bargain with tenants.

The public rallies in support of those tenants were bolstered by a big union presence, and every member of the tenant negotiating team had labor-union experience. “Tenants and workers have one thing in common: they have a rich person who is oppressing them,” says Dave Richardson, a longtime Carpenters Union member who joined Vaughn on the tenants’ negotiating team. “The contractor and the landlord are both committed to giving as little as possible.”

Labor Unions Fight for Affordable Housing and Tenants’ Rights

The Connecticut partnership is just one of the ways that labor unions across the country are turning their attention to housing. The Chicago Teachers Union’s current bargaining proposal includes the city and the Board of Education creating ten thousand affordable housing units with a priority for Chicago Public Schools students and families, along with identifying unused city and board property that can be transformed into public housing. Multiple unions played core roles in supporting Los Angeles’s successful mansion tax ballot measure in 2022, which is expected to yield $600 million a year for affordable housing and eviction prevention.

In Tacoma, Washington, United Food and Commercial Workers’ canvassing, phone-banking, and funding helped push through a November 2023 ban on cold-weather evictions and school-year evictions of households with students or teachers. Collective bargaining rights for tenants in San Francisco and Minnesota rent–control legislation both passed thanks to campaigns that featured active union involvement. Unions like American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3299 in California are demanding that both worker pension funds and employers divest from rent-gouging corporate landlords.

Labor attention to housing is on the upswing, but it also has plenty of precedent. The landmark National Housing Act of 1937 was pushed by the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Labor Housing Conference. During the twentieth century, unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America built cooperative housing for workers.

“There is an obvious reason why housing should be part of the labor agenda,” says Stephen Lerner, the architect of the SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign and senior fellow at Bargaining for the Common Good, a partnership between unions and community organizations. “Even if we negotiate a great wage increase for our members, they are losing ground if rent goes up by twice that amount.”

This is not an idle concern. Since 1985, rent hikes have outpaced wage increases by a whopping 325 percent. So it is no wonder that, when unions ask their members about their priorities, housing dominates the answers. “Regardless of if you’re a janitor or a nurse or a health care worker or a home care worker, everyone overwhelmingly said the number one issue was housing affordability,” David Huerta, the president of California SEIU State Council told Vox last year, describing a member survey. “We have members sleeping in their cars, who have big families sleeping in one-bedrooms, who are traveling hours and hours to get to work because they can’t afford to live near their jobs.”

When unions turn their attention to housing, they often find familiar names and faces on the other side of the struggle. “Increasingly, the same people who own the housing are the ones who are screwing over workers,” Lerner says. He and others cite the example of Blackstone, the private-equity firm that is the nation’s largest landlord, employs well over a half million workers, and is notorious for hiking rents and opposing rent control. “When you look to see who the members of the ruling class are, who are the ones with deep political and legislative influence, they are in real estate, especially in urban cities,” Lerner says.

“They Get It, Because They Are Living It”

One of the most promising examples of labor-tenant partnership is the success won by Vaughn, Richardson, and their fellow members of the Connecticut Tenants Union. Rob Baril, president of SEIU Local 1199 NE, points out that the union’s long-term care workers in Connecticut often struggle to make ends meet in a state where it can cost $90,000 a year to cover the high cost of living. “We won 33 percent raises in 2020, but that can quickly get eroded by inflation, especially the cost of housing,” he says.

So 1199 began collaborating with the tenants union, not just with organizing help and rally turnout but also with financial support. “Our members were very ready to have some of their dues money going to support tenant organizing,” Baril says. “They get it, because they are living it. Even if they individually are not getting crushed by housing costs, they know many coworkers who are.”

Hannah Srajer, president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, says the collaboration with Local 1199 has helped the tenants create a labor-inspired organizing methodology that prioritizes democratically elected committees, majority-based membership, and strike readiness. “A lot of people in labor know how to fight, they know how to win material gains for their members, and they know how to build lasting organizations,” Srajer says. “We are starting to do all that in tenant unions.”

Tara Raghuveer of KC Tenants and the national Tenant Union Federation agrees. “Labor has figured out not only how to build power but to exercise power, in a way that the tenant movement is still learning how to do,” she says. “For example, the strike power is a profound one. A labor strike and a rent strike are not identical, but there are a lot of lessons to be learned from organizers who have taken shops out on strike.”

Beyond alliances with tenant unions, there is deep labor support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would dramatically increase the stock of social housing. This support makes sense for labor on multiple levels. A massive investment in social housing would help workers meet their housing needs while at the same time creating union jobs in the building of those homes. Those social-housing construction jobs can endure during the economic downturns when jobs in the for-profit construction industry traditionally dry up.

For anyone familiar with housing successes in other nations, a growing labor-tenant alliance is exciting stuff. Organized labor played a big role in the creation of social housing in places like Sweden, where workers have come together to form a cooperative that builds and manages housing, while a National Tenants Union bargains for tenant rights and lower rents. The labor movement also played a major role in Vienna’s historic commitment to building and maintaining social housing.

Labor and tenants coming together will help both movements grow, Connecticut Tenants Union’s Srajer says. “A lot of our members are working low-wage jobs where they need a workplace union,” she says. “We are all fighting against corporate greed in the end. The same guys who are buying up whole neighborhoods, jacking up rents and no-cause evicting folks are the ones bankrolling the nursing homes that underpay and mistreat their workers.”

SEIU Local 1199 NE’s Baril agrees. “We have to construct a twenty-first century, integrated movement for working-class rights. That obviously has to include the ability to have shelter fit for human beings to live in,” he says. “Tenant unions are going to be the tip of the spear for that effort, but some of the resources needed are going to have to come from labor unions. Us doing that is not charity. That is self-interest.”

Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

“The Working Class Is the Arsenal of Democracy” / by Shawn Fain

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain speaking with autoworkers at the a Stellantis assembly plant on July 12, 2023, in Sterling Heights, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain: “We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.”

Reposted from Jacobin

On the night of Friday, April 19, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced the results of its National Labor Relations Board election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Workers there voted 73 percent in favor of joining the UAW — a historic victory for the union after two failed drives there, in 2014 and 2019.

Last weekend, fresh off the victory in Chattanooga, UAW president Shawn Fain gave the closing speech at the 2024 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Jacobin is pleased to publish his remarks here. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Something’s happening in this country, something we haven’t seen in a long, long time: the working class is standing up.

Forty-eight hours ago, four thousand workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, did what many people said was impossible. We did what the pundits said couldn’t be done. Every time I was interviewed by people and we talked about organizing the South, they would always do an eye roll and say, “Do you really think you can win in the South?”

You know what? Those workers stood up for themselves, and they voted for a union.

I want to recognize a person in this room, because this battle wasn’t won by me. It wasn’t won by one person, but there is one person that we injected into this drive midway through, with a group of people we brought in to help get things back on track and moving, and that’s Carla Villanueva. We took a group of organizers and leaders like Carla, and we injected them right into the belly of the beast in the American South, where the working class has been shut down and shut out and told to shut up for decades — where the pundits said that we couldn’t win.

It’s not just Volkswagen we’re here to talk about today. It’s also the five thousand workers at Mercedes-Benz in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Those brave workers down there are ready to vote for a union, and they’re going to be voting in the second week of May.

It’s also the seven thousand Daimler workers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. I want to talk about those workers at Daimler because they told management that if they don’t get the deal by next Friday, they’re going to shut shit down.

With our victory at Volkswagen, autoworkers around the country are speaking with one voice now. We’re telling corporate America that their time is up — let me assure you of this. When I was at Daimler Truck, we came up with a saying: when I say, “Time’s up,” you say, “Tick-tock, motherfucker!”

Labor Notes and Union Reform

It’s not just corporate America that has something to learn from our union family at Volkswagen. It’s us — it’s the labor movement. Over twenty years ago, I was a young union activist who was ready to fight the boss. I was ready to fight for a better life. I was stunned when I got elected to my first term as a committeeman at my plant, to find myself in a union with leadership that seemed to have no interest in that fight.

When I travel around and speak about faith, I’ve been known to bring my grandmother’s Bible with me. But as a young union activist, I had another bible: The Troublemaker’s Handbook from Labor Notes. This was my bible when I became a union rep, and it taught me how to fight the boss and how to fight company unionism at the same time. I’ve got a section here flagged. You can see the multiple highlights I have in this section, chapter five, which is “Dealing with Labor-Management Cooperation Programs.” Because we were living them at UAW.

This bible taught me another kind of faith. It taught me faith in the membership; it taught me faith in the working class. It’s that faith that carried the UAW to our new chapter in history.

About two years ago, I put my faith in the membership of UAW, and I ran for office. I was supported by — and I would not be standing here today as president of the UAW if it wasn’t for — the badass members of UAWD [Unite All Workers for Democracy], a reform caucus. I’m a proud member of UAWD. As UAWD said then, we’re putting an end to company unionism, an end to concessions, an end to corruption, an end to tiers.

In UAWD, we were also inspired by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. We drew a boatload of inspiration from Labor Notes and everybody else who has fought to put the movement back in the labor movement.

We put our faith in the membership, and the membership spoke. The members chose to end company unionism. The members chose to fight. We took that fight straight to the companies of the Big Three, and we took them on like we’ve never taken them on before.

After years of concessions and givebacks, we put forward very bold demands, and we were laughed at for it in the beginning. We kept the companies guessing, after years of them getting a free pass. We won things nobody thought was possible, and we’ve secured the reopening of a plant [near Chicago], Belvidere Assembly, after decades of closures.

When I took over as president, the electric battery industry was on a race to the bottom, with starting pay at $16 an hour, and after seven years $20 top pay. We went after that. We went after putting [electric battery construction] in our master agreements, and we laid the groundwork for a just EV [electric vehicle] transition.

We killed the wage tiers. We shortened the progression to full pay. We won back cost-of-living allowances. We ended the abuse of temps. But more than anything, what we won in that contract is, we got our union back. We put the membership in charge, and we remembered how to fight, and we remembered how to win.

The Working Class Is the Arsenal of Democracy

We noticed something after we won all this, after we put the membership back in charge. It started by the dozens, then the hundreds, and then the thousands. Nonunion autoworkers were reaching out to join our movement.

When I was campaigning for this job, I said a lot that bargaining good contracts leads to organizing success — they go hand in hand. So the stand-up strike wasn’t just about the Big Three. It was about the entire working class.

It was about proving one thing: that the working class can win. We don’t win by playing defense or reacting to things. We don’t win by playing nice with the boss. We don’t win by telling our members what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.

In the 1940s, during World War II, UAW members were building B-42 Liberator bombers at the Willow Run plant. Those bombers were a big piece in the arsenal of democracy that helped defeat the fascists, who were seeking to divide and conquer the working class. The UAW was responsible for creating the arsenal of democracy that led to the United States winning the war.

At Willow Run, on that day the president visited us on the picket line, I said that we found ourselves facing a new enemy, a new authoritarian threat. But it wasn’t some faraway country; it wasn’t some other state. It was right here at home in our workplaces, and that enemy is corporate greed.

For decades, corporate greed has threatened to destroy the working class. Workers are told that their rights end at the workplace door and told to shut up or starve. For decades, workers have been led to believe there’s no other way. They’ve been led to believe that resistance is futile, that the class war that has been waged on us for decades is unwinnable. Workers have been led to believe that working-class people don’t have the power, the will, or the courage to fight back.

Today, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Chicago, Illinois, we say: Hell no! We say the working class is the arsenal of democracy and the workers are the liberators. The one thing I’ve seen throughout this fight, and the one thing we know, is that it’s not a CEO that’s going to save us. It’s not a president that’s going to save us. It’s not me and it’s not you — it’s us, and it’s a united working class. That’s how we’re going to win.

Shawn Fain is the president of the United Auto Workers.

Workers Can Halt the War Machine / by Nick Troy

Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces stand with weapons as smoke rises from bombardments on Gaza on March 4, 2024, in southern Israel near the border with Gaza. (Amir Levy / Getty Images)

In 1974, Scottish workers refused to fix the fighter jets of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. As the West continues to supply Israel with arms, unionized workers could again refuse to stop the flow of weapons of mass murder.

Reposted from Jacobin

History is often understood through the stories of “great men,” reflecting capitalism’s encouragement of the individual and suspicion of the collective. Socialists, understandably, have traditionally sought to reject such narratives; a famous example is in the final address of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who, before his death in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, assured listeners that “history is ours, and the people make history.”

The postindustrial area of Nerston, East Kilbride, echoes this sentiment half a century on. This town on the outskirts of Glasgow is not known for its monuments to famous generals or statesmen; instead, there is a humbler tribute to an alternative history that was, until recently, largely forgotten. In 1974, six months after Pinochet’s coup against Allende’s elected government, three thousand members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in the Rolls Royce plant in Nerston, led by Communist Party member Bob Fulton, “blacked” a batch of Hawker Hunter jet engines that were to be returned to Chile after repair. Nowhere else were engineers qualified to repair those engines.

At a union branch meeting, the workers had already voted to condemn the coup. “The people being tortured and murdered, they were just like us — trade unionists,” explained Stuart Barrie in a 2018 interview with the Guardian. In the same interview, John Keenan outlined how crucial organization was to AUEW members at Rolls Royce, who had a history of taking political action: “The only reason we could do what we did was because we were organized. We took strike action for the [National Health Service], the Shrewsbury pickets, you name it.”

When the boycott came, it lasted four years, and workers were able to significantly undermine the capacity of the Chilean Air Force. Their action, alongside actions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’s members’ refusal to allow a Chilean warship to dock in Oakland, California, became part of a global community of workers whose defiance of tyranny is accredited with the release of tens of thousands from Pinochet’s prison cells and torture chambers.

Today, as we watch on as incomprehensible barbarism is unleashed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, much of our response is stifled by illusions of helplessness and despair. The Rolls Royce workers shattered that illusion in 1974 and showed us the best way to combat tyranny, whether in Chile or Palestine: through industrial action in our workplaces.

Imperialism and the Workplace

In Allende’s final broadcast to the nation, as Pinochet’s Hunter jets rained hell upon the Presidential Palace, he detailed the reality of the coup that had toppled Chilean socialism and outlined the role of imperialism in the assault against democracy:

At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition . . . hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

Allende was right. It was the United States, fearful of Chile’s reformist program of nationalization and Allende’s firm friendship with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, that orchestrated the coup with the aid of Chile’s ruling elite and its military allies. The imperialist world system — led then, as it is today, by the United States — intrinsically links the source of extraction to the imperial metropole. It was the United States’ interest in exploiting Chilean natural resources that made Allende’s government a target, just as it was Britain’s manufacturing capacity — itself sustained by imperialist exploitation — that brought Chilean-owned jets to the workshops of East Kilbride.

If these links are the source of imperial power, then the ability of workers to undermine them in their workplaces is also a major pressure point. The action taken by Fulton and his comrades illuminated the tangible impact workers in the imperial core could have on the lives of those in the Global South.

Today, we can also contextualize our own workplaces in the imperialist system and pinpoint its weaknesses. This is critical to building a more effective, dynamic movement for Palestinian liberation in Britain. Israel — itself a heavily militarized outpost of US imperialism — is fundamentally tied to the Western economies that keep it afloat. By understanding those ties in our own workplaces, we can begin to organize workers in the same vein as Fulton and his comrades.

Workers Against Genocide

Today, Scotland’s industrial base is comprised in large part by weapons manufacturers. The work of groups like Palestine Action and Workers for a Free Palestine in shutting down these factories should be applauded, but we must also ask what comes next.  The 1974 Rolls Royce boycott lasted four years — considerably longer than any direct action, and with the collective power to protect workers from the state repression we see now.  Sustainability is a principle from 1974 that we must carry forward to inform our strategy today.

At present, our tactics disrupt the running of weapons plants short-term, without the support or endorsement of the workers inside. To develop a movement of workers that is truly anti-imperialist, we must build in stages and engage proactively with workers in weapons factories, with the aim of organizing sustainable, long-term boycotts inside these factories themselves. Building inside weapons manufacturing facilities like BAE and Thales in tandem with a wider drive to organize Scottish workplaces around cultural and economic boycotts of apartheid Israel has the potential not only to bolster our campaigning on Palestinian liberation, but also to strengthen our movement industrially and reestablish its foundations.

The British trade union movement is still traumatized by the shattering defeats of the Margaret Thatcher era. Timid ideas of service-model trade unionism have grown alongside a reluctance to branch into the political sphere beyond the parameters set by the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Thatcher’s victory over organized labor was embellished with a wave of legislation that has hampered the ability of unions to politically intervene, with the threat of financial and legal reprisals often hanging over them.

Lay-members must consider an organized offensive against this repression as a critical factor in workplace organizing around Palestine and beyond. The broad public support for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine should provide trade unionists across the British economy with fertile ground upon which to nurture a politicized trade unionism that can raise British workers’ empathetic response toward Palestine into a political one that engages people in their daily lives.

Elsewhere in Scotland, workers are already showing the potential of their power. Unite Hospitality’s Glasgow branch has recently launched the “Serve Solidarity” campaign, which is organizing worker-led boycotts of apartheid produce in the city’s social and cultural spaces. The successful campaign by workers at the Stand Comedy Club has led to the boycott’s enforcement in all three venues. From Belgium to South Africa and India, transport workers’ unions have refused to touch arms shipments destined to Israel, while garment workers in Kerala will no longer make Israeli police uniforms.

The proximity of these industries to imperialism, and Israel in particular, will naturally vary. What is key is their contribution to a wider global movement taking sustained, material action to halt the ongoing genocide. Leonardo Cáceres, a radio broadcaster on the day of Pinochet’s coup, said in an interview for the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran that, although the Rolls Royce trade unionists might have seen their gesture as “something small,” it was in fact extremely valuable: “They proved to the dictators in Chile that despite the support of certain governments, their actions were condemned by the majority of human beings.”

Rebuilding Internationalism

What Fulton and his comrades at Rolls Royce were able to demonstrate was not solely the collective power of workers in the international arena, but also that the workplace is a weakness of the imperialist world system. They proved to the world that acts of defiance can undermine a seemingly insurmountable enemy, while illuminating the material relationships that link workers and their interests everywhere.

When the workers of Rolls Royce extended the hand of solidarity from East Kilbride to Santiago, it removed fascist planes from the sky. Our movement must now do the same for the people of Palestine and use our own hand of solidarity to shatter the reactionary, insular ideas that have seen our movement become weak and disorganized, and redirect it toward being a force that can challenge imperialism and change the world.

Nick Troy is the chair of the Glasgow branch of Unite Hospitality.

New Podcast: ‘Organize the Unorganized’ / by the Editors of Jacobin

Sit-down Strikers guarding window entrance to Fisher body plant at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, 1937.(Sheldon Dick / Library of Congress)

Reposted from Jacobin

Jacobin’s limited podcast Organize the Unorganized tells the story of the CIO and the 1930s and ’40s labor upsurge with the help of historians and activists. Start listening today.

There have been many moments of labor upsurge in America: the influx of members into the Knights of Labor in 1886, the dramatic growth of unions during and after World War I, and the great wave of public sector unionism in the 1960s and ’70s. But none matches the period of the 1930s and ’40s, when millions of workers unionized under the aegis of the great labor federation the Congress of Industrial Organizations. If we’re looking to get millions of private sector workers into the labor movement today, there’s no better example than the ascendant period of the CIO.

In Organize the Unorganized, a podcast produced by the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University and Jacobin, author Benjamin Y. Fong tells the story of the CIO with the help of prominent labor historians, including Nelson Lichtenstein, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Steve Fraser, Erik Loomis, Jeremy Brecher, Robert Cherny, Lizabeth Cohen, David Brody, Melvyn Dubofsky, and others. The multipart series begins with a short history of the organization from which the CIO broke off, the American Federation of Labor, and explores the central causes for the CIO’s founding: the broken promises of welfare capitalism, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the mass strikes of 1934.

Organize the Unorganized will be available weekly on Jacobin Radio starting January 9. Subscribe and join us as we explore the rise, importance, and legacy of this crucial labor federation. In the meantime, check out its trailer today.

Subscribe on Apple and don’t miss an episode. Please rate us five stars there if you enjoy the material, too, so we can reach more people.

Jacobin Editors

A Class Struggle Spirit Is Returning to the Labor Movement / An interview with Joe Burns

Members of the Unite Here! Local 11 hotel workers union picket the Four Points Sheraton after walking off the job on Monday, July 10, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Reposted from Jacobin

In the past year, we’ve seen large, militant strikes by autoworkers, Hollywood writers, and others. It’s a promising sign that, after decades of weakness, the US labor movement is ready to take the fight to the boss.

Over the past six months, strikes and threatened strikes by autoworkers, Hollywood writers and actors, United Parcel Service (UPS) Teamsters, and LA hotel housekeepers have resulted in industry shutdowns and major contract victories across the United States. This wave of militancy represents a departure for the US labor movement, which for the past several decades has seen both declining union density and reluctance to use the strike weapon.

Joe Burns, a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer, sees this turn to more militant organizing as informed by the long tradition of what he calls “class struggle unionism,” a perspective and set of strategies that emphasizes the importance of worker-led unions in making transformative change. In his most recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, he makes the case that adopting such an approach is necessary for significant workplace victories. Sara Van Horn and Cal Turner spoke with Burns for Jacobin about divergent visions of union strategy, the militant approach behind recent victories, and why it’s important for labor to have a broader political vision.

SARA VAN HORN

Can you give us a brief recent history of class struggle unionism? You note in your book that union militancy dwindled toward the end of the twentieth century, but that there have been promising movements in the opposite direction. Where did this revival start?

JOE BURNS

I started doing labor work in the late 1980s. I caught the tail of a class struggle trend, where thousands of radicalized students and antiwar and civil rights activists entered the labor movement because they saw that as a fundamental vehicle to make change in society.

Over time, a new trend that I call “labor liberalism” developed. Labor liberalism tried to find alternatives to sharp class conflict. It looked at other ways of fighting, such as corporate campaigns and community coalitions. But it sacrificed the traditional elements of class struggle unionism. In 2011, I wrote a book called Reviving the Strike because I realized that the strike had been virtually abandoned. I got a lot of odd looks, even among labor activists.

Nowadays, everyone believes that the strike is an essential tool. UPS Teamsters got their deal right before their strike deadline in August. We’ve had teachers over the last decade striking in high numbers and production workers at General Motors and Nabisco a couple years ago. We’ve also seen a lot of reform efforts in recent years, which have a view of unionism that breaks with what I call “business unionism.”

CAL TURNER

Could you describe the hallmarks of business unionism and labor liberalism? Why is the distinction between those approaches and class struggle unionism so important?

JOE BURNS

Business unionism has traditionally been — and still is — the predominant form of unionism. Business unionists see themselves as having a fairly limited role, which can be summed up with the slogan “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”

They see their struggles as involving a narrow group of workers in a particular factory or industry instead of as part of a larger class struggle between labor and capital. This form of unionism tends to be fairly bureaucratic, following rules and relying on lawyers or experts in the field. They don’t go looking for trouble, but sometimes they do get into sharp disputes because they need to.

Labor liberalism developed in the 1980s as a third way, a unionism that positioned itself between business unionism and the sharp fights of class struggle unions. Labor liberals did a lot of good: they broke away from the racist and anti-immigrant stance of the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations] in the ’80s, which was also deeply anti-communist.

One of the problems of labor liberalism was that it situated itself too much within middle-class staff activists and lost some of the rank-and-file character, opposition to business unionism, and democratic functioning that are core principles of class struggle unionism. It also lost some of the class-versus-class struggle, because even though the labor liberalists do a lot of picketing, when you look closely at how much of it is worker-led, these intense struggles are more like one-day publicity strikes. The goal is not so much to take on an employer but to get legislation passed. I argue that if we want to revive the labor movement, we have to look back to the proven formula, which is class struggle unionism.

SARA VAN HORN

Besides the strike, what strategies differentiate these approaches?

JOE BURNS

Let’s look at the strikes that have been happening in recent years, like those of the production workers at General Motors and Nabisco. If you really drill into them, what you see is that the initiative to strike came from the workers.

They repeatedly voted down tentative agreements. They made demands that went beyond the narrow wage demands of the union and staff bargainers. Their demands were bold and audacious: they wanted to end two-tier schemes [in which one group of workers receives lower compensation than another]. They wanted to take control of the work schedules and weekend work. They wanted to take control of their lives with breaks between shifts. Both in terms of where the strikes came from and the demands the strikes made, they really were worker-led.

CAL TURNER

The strike threat, in addition to striking itself, seems to be experiencing a revival this summer. Why is normalizing strikes as a bargaining tool important? How should unions strategically use the threat of strikes?

JOE BURNS

Traditional labor theory viewed the strike as the essence of collective bargaining. It was hard to think about true bargaining without the strike threat.

There was a long period where the strike threat was ignored, and you ended up with backroom deals born out of weakness. But recently things have been very exciting. For the Teamsters to be throwing down the gauntlet with the largest employer in the United States a year in advance of bargaining by saying, “We’re going out on strike unless our demands have been met” — I’ve never seen that with a major national employer that far in advance.

For Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to put forward the demands at the beginning and then carry them through to the brink of a strike — I think that’s amazing. And O’Brien didn’t just materialize out of thin air: there was a forty-year reform effort within the Teamsters, led by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, that supported him.

We also have the United Auto Workers breaking from business unionism. Instead of the behind-closed-doors negotiating of the last four decades, where often only the national union president knew what was going on, UAW president Shawn Fain gets into office and shakes hands with the members at the plants, puts forward a list of members’ demands, and tells the automakers that either they’re going to have a deal or the workers go out on strike. It’s a fundamentally different kind of bargaining.

There’s been a big shift in our model. It stems not from different organizing techniques — because those follow behind it — but from the labor movement taking a different stance in how we relate to the employer and how we relate to our members.

SARA VAN HORN

Where does “salting” — organizers seeking jobs at a specific workplace with the goal of forming a union — fit into your analysis of class struggle unionism?

JOE BURNS

Fifty years ago, student radicals getting involved in labor didn’t talk about it as salting. They viewed themselves as joining a labor movement not at the behest of the union officials, but with an independent objective to help build the rank-and-file power that would lead toward more strikes, more militancy, and a more effective labor movement.

In recent years, that’s morphed into the idea of salting, which has the flavor that you’re going in as agents of the union and working for the union. Over time, that creates some tensions, because the union’s goals or imperatives in organizing may not fit with what you find on the shop floor.

I also think people should set their sights a bit higher, because we need people not just to go in there and help established unions organize, but to go in there and help get our unions on a class struggle agenda. That takes a different relationship to the union bureaucracy.

CAL TURNER

Where else do you see worker leadership in the high-profile organizing this summer? What role has this played in the organizing efforts and victories we’re seeing across industries?

JOE BURNS

Strikes and militancy are contagious. Strike waves happen because workers see workers striking in other industries and realize that they can do that as well. We certainly saw that with teachers in the wake of the Chicago teachers’ strike; that eventually led to teachers all over the country striking.

Some writers make it out like these workers just had different organizing techniques or were reaching out to the community. But, again, the key difference is that they had a class stance. The teachers said, “We’re going to break with decades of the teachers’ union cozying up to the Democratic political hacks who are destroying public education in our cities.” The teachers’ union had accommodated these hacks for years and tried to play nice with people who wanted to destroy them.

SARA VAN HORN

Why is it important to pinpoint billionaires as the enemy? How does this play out in recent high-profile labor struggles like the SAG-AFTRA [Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] and grad student union strikes, where there’s often a public perception of prestige and proximity to power?

JOE BURNS

Class struggle unionism begins with a view of society and how it’s organized. The reason we have billionaires is because workers create all value in society, but during their work shifts, that value gets siphoned up and trickles upward to a handful of billionaires.

Class struggle unionism has always viewed unionism as part of a larger struggle against the employing class. The problem with business unionism and some other forms of unionism is that they think they can just plod along and bargain their contracts. Even if they get the best contracts in the world, guess what? Their enemies are amassing more and more capital. And what is capital? Capital is a social relationship. Capital is power.

What are employers going to do with more and more power? They’re going to use it against you. The Koch brothers are funding initiatives to undermine labor rights. We can bargain the best contracts with our employer, but we’re still bargaining the terms of our exploitation. Not that it’s a bad thing to make improvements — that’s what I do as a union negotiator. But we have to have a bigger vision too, because our enemies do.

In that light, all these other distinctions that people try to draw between different groups of workers become less material. Certainly, there’s a special place for strategic workers and workers in production in terms of creating value in society and actual things. But unless you own enough that you don’t have to work, people are working, and to the extent that they are, they’re suffering exploitation. Public employees and grad students relate to this whole system differently, but they’re very much part of the class struggle.

Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of Strike Back and Reviving the Strike. His latest book is Class Struggle Unionism.

Sara Van Horn is a writer living in Serra Grande, Brazil.

Cal Turner is a writer based in Philadelphia.