Sticking To The Union

As an institutional force, the labor movement has failed. Union headquarters in Manhattan might be across the way from Goldman Sachs. Yet there is no parity between labor and finance in the money game, or labor and management in the organizing game. The movement’s 2011 recall campaign against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker came to naught, as did its attempt to enshrine collective bargaining rights in Michigan’s state constitution. Last year, only 11.3 percent of the workforce belonged to a union. The movement is locked in a negative-feedback cycle. After each defeat at the ballot box, conservatives and corporate types smell blood in the water, and grow bolder in their drive for right-to-work laws and other curbs on labor. Union membership drops. The process repeats.

For the most part, labor is not to blame for its shortcomings, mainly the product of countervailing historical forces. In 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which granted private-sector workers the right to form unions, collectively bargain, and strike. Growing in number, unions eventually counted one-third of the American workforce in their memberships.

In 1947, the rules were changed. With the approval of the Taft-Hartley Act, secondary strikes were prohibited, right-to-work laws allowed, and communists forced from the union. Bereft of its ideologues and robbed of useful tools, the movement was defanged and institutionalized. Labor, helmed by conservatives, hung to the back of the 1960s civil rights struggle, inspiring a biting critique from folk-singer Phil Ochs. The unions lacked the vital energy to even defend themselves, as automation and globalization ate away at hard-won gains and decimated the ranks.

In the seven years of famine that have been the past three decades, Pharaoh has never starved—and it’s not because he stored the country’s grain. Institutionalized, unions developed their own bureaucracies, with outrageous perquisites for bosses—million-dollar salaries, food allowances, chauffeurs, junkets. Executive excess, aside from its tawdriness, has impeded remedial action.

If it is to survive, American labor must abandon the suites for the streets, putting a renewed focus on grassroots organizing and popular education. It must adopt an ethos of confrontation and unconventional tactics, working outside systems that structurally disadvantage labor.

The union authorization process, with its ample opportunities for employer intimidation and appeals, has become one of these systems. Hearkening to the era before the Wagner Act, some have stressed collective action for better wages and working conditions over the traditional organizing push. At Wal-Mart, where numerous unionization efforts have stalled, the United Food and Commercial Workers has sponsored OUR Walmart, a non-union organization, which has encouraged the store’s associates to vent their frustration through day-long strikes. Fast-food employee advocates have urged similar strategies.

A return to the pre-New Deal model should exclude a return to the period’s ideology or aesthetics. Labor is not going “to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,” nor will the Wobbly dream of “one big union” ever be realized. Clenched fist salutes, renditions of  “Solidarity Forever,” and shouts of “the workers united never will be defeated” are hokey and anachronistic. Too often, this iconography is shamelessly appropriated—a phenomenon evident on our own campus—and meaningful activism lost in the welter of spectacle. How to inspire today’s workers in the absence of yesterday’s messianic, socialist vision is a problem of considerate proportion, and it vexes labor as much as other progressive movements.

The self-aware leftist, of course, need not discard the labor songbook. Scores of Woody Guthrie tunes are as relevant to the Walmart superstore as they once were to the assembly-line. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, Guthrie’s music was a common refrain. Labor’s success, however, depends on the evolution of new modes of expression for working-class desire and angst.

Only with a renascence of proletarian culture is there hope of raising the class-consciousness of the American worker. We, in the United States, as has been observed time and time again, view class as fundamentally malleable. In a contemporary idiom, labor culture could undermine these assumptions, which are insidious to items of popular consumption.

Labor doesn’t need its own buildings if it has Goldman’s.