Helping America Get the Labor Movement It Wants
By: Art Shostak
What do we want from Labor? And why? In the aftermath of the August breakup, the Gallup Organization asked us what we thought would happen next, and what we wished might happen. We expect the split will weaken Labor, but as 58% of us hold a positive opinion about the
nations’ largest social movement, we do not want any further loss in Labor’s strength. Quite the contrary! A plurality (38%) actually wish Labor’s influence in American life would soon increase.
Why? It is not rocket science. Average Americans understand that in the nation’s City Halls, State Capitals, and Congress it is Organized Labor that especially speaks for working class folk. When exploited workers (new immigrants, undocumented folk, high school dropouts) desperately need a defender, Organized Labor steps forward. When jobs are threatened with a wage-cut race to the bottom, Labor leads the response. When fierce competition tempts employers to cut corners in safety matters, Labor blows the whistle. When employers need the cooperation of knowledgeable experienced employees, Organized Labor can facilitate it. When something goes terribly wrong at work, a Shop Steward bests the Personnel Department every time in assuring a fair hearing for an accused worker. In short, when the nation’s non-union workers wonder what high-quality wages and fringes might really resemble, and what a written guarantee of adult treatment at work might help assure, the sagest of them look enviously at unionized workplaces.
Given the strategic value of Organized Labor, how might it avoid the weakening the public expects, and achieve instead the renewal the public prefers? Four changes would seem required. First, unions in both the AFL-CIO and the Coalition for Change must resist the temptation to maul and raid one another, as only anti-unionists finally profit from such retrograde and tasteless misbehavior.
Unorganized workers are put off by such antics, and dues-payers don’t think much better of it. The paltry gains possible in the transfer of one’s unions’ ex-members to another never covers (often hidden) expenses, and leaves wounds behind that fester for decades.
Second, considerable power must be allocated back from union headquarters to union locals. Across the spectrum of unions power has been increasingly concentrated at the top, a power grab abetted
by low morale in the trenches. Unless and until local unions are helped to remake themselves into vibrant and consequential organizations no substantial renewal of Labor is possible, since it is in the local that rank-and-filers “live” their unionism, or, slough it off. As the best organizers have always been the organized, no gains in numbers are likely without the emergence of grass-roots unionists newly energized by their empowered locals.
Third, there must be more value offered in exchange for dues dollars. In recent years past members could enjoy low-cost vacations at union-operated resorts (as in the Poconos), live in outstanding
subsidized city apartments (downtown Philadelphia), expect first-rate care at union-operated health facilities, and retire to first-class projects in the Golden South. For a variety of reasons (only some of
which pass muster), these and other like benefits are now only memories (or nearly so). Along with new timely options, such as subsidizing the purchase and use of computers, many of these benefits
should be renewed. Likewise, storefront centers devoted to teaching English to newcomers, and others set aside for senior citizens, belong in an array of new goods and services for the rank-and-file.
Finally, every possible creative effort should be made to build an “electronic community” out of a local. Members should be asked to share their e-mail addresses with the local’s web master (a volunteer), and the local should create a web site so inviting, so rewarding, as to earn almost daily visits from an appreciative membership. Labor must brand itself as modern, progressive, and technologically adept. Working class men and women increasingly use the Internet at home, and one of their regular surfing way stations should be their local union, which, in turn, diplomatically pushes out to the members material likely to strengthen their attachment to the Labor Movement.
These four changes are affordable, doable, and available for initiation later today, if not sooner. They beckon both to unions that remain within the AFL-CIO and those now aligned in the Coalition for Change. Indeed, the American Labor Movement would be better off if the two rival organizations competed to outdo the other in advancing on these fronts. Let them try and outdo one another at avoiding raids, empowering locals, expanding services, and upgrading their “electronic communities.” In this way Labor might gain the influence many Americans tell Gallup they want it to have.
Art Shostak is a retired Drexel University sociologist and Labor Educator (shostaka@drexel.edu). He taught at the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies from 1975-2000. His books include
CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology (1999).
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