Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Anthropologists, Activists, and the Labor Movement
Emma Braden
"I want to know why you are doing this," Sylvia said as she stared at me across the coffee table in our university cafe. She was referring to the local union internship I had recently accepted. It was with the same union she had worked for the year before when the food service workers at my university won a union contract. I stared nervously at her and the union organizer sitting beside her. I was trying to figure out what they wanted to hear. He was wearing a suit and tie, and she was in her barista uniform.
"Don't just tell me what I want to hear," she said. "Tell me what you actually feel."
I took a sip of the coffee she had just made me and thought that over. "Well, I don't know much about unions, but I do know that I have a lot to learn. I have been told that if I care about immigrant rights, then I have to pay attention to unions. And if I want to learn how to organize, this is where I need to start."
She nodded her head. "When it gets down to it, all of the social justice stuff that students talk about is just talk," she said. "I want to see that you want to fight. You've gotta have a reason to fight."
Sylvia was no stranger to fights. A couple of years ago, the food workers on campus fought for and won a union contract with the cafeteria management company. They are known as one of the most successful university cafeteria management companies in the United States and one of the leaders in locally sourced and ethically produced foods. The company prides itself on both the quality of its food and the career opportunities for its workers. However, until that summer they had refused to allow workers to unionize. As one of the leading negotiating committee members, Sylvia was instrumental in that campaign's success. After they won the contract, she spoke to the press.
"I've been a cashier at [this university] for more than 6 years," she said. "I feel so proud that we now have a contract that gives consistent wage increases, immigration rights and protections, cheaper health insurance for myself and my coworkers, and most importantly, job security."
When I began interning with Local 000 in February of 2015, my confession to Sylvia was true; I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I began working full-time in the service industry to pay rent and tuition and worked for the union during my time off. Over the next year, the pieces of this complicated and bizarre world slowly began to fit together. One piece came from the workers who shared my table in the cafeteria and the women who squeezed next to me in the locker room before work. Another part came from the union organizers, workers, and fellow interns who supported me in various cities around the United States. The final part came from my anthropology courses, the dozens of texts, and academic contacts that provided me with the language and the questions with which to interpret it all.
Paul Durrenberger invited me to an international workshop on labor and anthropology in Iowa and then asked me to write a chapter for this book from the perspective of a student in the thick of the labor organizing world. To prepare, I maintained contact with many of the anthropologists who attended the workshop and interviewed most over Skype and phone and via e-mail. I also interviewed two union organizers in my city. My findings are based on these interviews, as well as four union workshops, various peer-reviewed articles and books from social science researchers and activists involved in labor research, and media posts from the websites of various unions including the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UNITE HERE, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). I have changed all of the names of the people in this chapter.
High Tide
It's October 2015. A young white woman stands up in front of a room of diverse young adults. She has been working at a local union since college and is now a full-time organizer. Like many organizers recruited to work for unions in the past ten years, she came into radical activism in college and was committed to a larger vision of social justice within the movement. The room is in the basement of an old union building that has been standing since the mid-1900s — the air is thick and stale; you can nearly taste seventy years of smoke and dirty boots that gathered in the carpeted, windowless rooms. This particular training is meant to build connections with different movements around the city, to give young activists the skills they will need to organize, and to recruit promising young adults to work for the union (whether in the research department, on the boycott team, or as active organizers). A couple of people in the crowd work at nonunion workplaces, some are social workers, many are still in school, but all of them have fought for something in their past. That is why they are there.
The woman faces the crowd and poses a question.
"What is your rent like?" Folks slowly begin to shout out their rent prices — $650 for a bedroom in a five-bedroom house before utilities, $1,000 for a studio apartment, $600 for a one-bedroom thirty minutes outside of the city.
"Who feels like their rent is too high?" Everyone raises their hand. Five years ago, when moving to the city, you could find a one-bedroom apartment for $500 easily. If you wanted a really nice apartment in a great part of the city, it would cost you $1,200.
"How much is the bus?" she asks. "Who has had their bus routes reduced or cut since they have been here?" Half of the room raises their hand. "Now take your income and imagine adding a family to that...."
People begin to shift in their seats, many eyebrows furrow, a couple of folks take out a pen and paper and jot down notes. The energy in the room is electric, and it seems as if everyone knows where she is going.
"Food and retail jobs usually don't pay a living wage, let alone enough to support a family or pay back student loans...."
The average restaurant worker in this large US city made an estimated $15,000 in 2009. The reason for this disparity is not due to the economy; in 2014 this city boasted one of the highest economic booms. There are forests of new skyscrapers growing all over town; the skyline is almost unrecognizable from five years ago. The tourist industry is doing better than ever before. This past summer multiple hotels in downtown were sold out every week, setting all-time records in profits. Yet their workers are still getting paid minimum wage or less. If their employers offer insurance coverage, they still spend ridiculous amounts each month paying the premium, and they are overworked as a result of intentional understaffing.
"This is happening to people all over the city," the union organizer explains to the room of nodding heads, "and we see the solution to this is organizing — for people to fight, to change laws, to create new public policies, but also to fundamentally change the way that these jobs are experienced in this city. ... [Our city] has one of the top fastest-growing, highest-revenue-producing hospitality industries in the country."
What she said seemed to reverberate with the people in the room. The hospitality industry is enjoying record-breaking profits, but none of this wealth is getting to the workers cleaning hotel rooms, or cooking guests' food, or checking guests into their hotel room and making reservations at the swankiest restaurants in the city (STR Analytics 2015).
This issue is impacting people in all sectors. It is an issue of vast and rapidly growing income inequality. It is an issue of privilege, power, and access. It is an issue of capitalism. America's twenty wealthiest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people (Collins & Hoxie 2015). This money has dominated American politics for decades. The vast majority of the money flowing to candidates, parties, and super PACs comes from a tiny number of wealthy donors (Loiz and Kennedy 2012). Winning candidates are accountable to this small minority who finance their campaign rather than the average American. In fact, a study in 2005 determined that low-income constituents have zero impact on US senators' voting record (Loiz and Kennedy 2012:17). As the pockets of big business get heavier and their war on their last remaining obstacle — organized labor — escalates, the strength of unions and the living standards of working people continue to fall.
Business Unionism
Many union organizers, sociologists, and activist anthropologists see the role of unions in this climate as critical to any change. American sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld found that the decline of organized labor unions since the 1970s can account for as much as a third in the increase in income inequality in the United States (Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Their analysis suggests that unions helped shape the structure of wages not just for their members, but for workers across the labor market.
"The decline of US labor and the associated increase in wage inequality signaled the deterioration of the labor market as a political institution," they write. "Workers became less connected to each other in their organizational lives and less connected in their economic fortunes" (Western and Rosenfeld 2011:512, 533). This signaled not only a division between workers based on wages but a rift between workers on an organizational level. Workers no longer viewed their own success as contingent upon the success of their fellow workers.
Durrenberger, in his conclusion to this book, imagines a world where labor unions have the ability to change the political or economic system. Rooks (2004) outlines the reasons why union organizers join the labor movement. According to her research, many of the longest-lasting labor organizers started working for unions out of a desire for broader social change. These organizers tended to work for established unions that functioned under a business model. They were interested in making these unions more democratic, radical, and committed to building the power of the working class.
In the early twentieth century, organizers understood that a successful union practiced aggressive grassroots organizing. In the auto plants of Flint, Michigan, in the 1930s or the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, organizers and members depended on underground, community-based campaigns. But this model did not last through the century.
There are many reasons why business unionism became the dominant model for most labor organizations during the late twentieth century. The Taft-Hartley amendments, an intensification of employer opposition to labor, and weak labor laws hurt the movement (Human Rights Watch 2000). Other analysts have attributed the decline to the choices made by labor leaders (Aronowitz 2005; Moody 2007:246), problems of "bureaucratic conservatism" (Voss and Sherman 2000; Moody 2007), and the very model on which US labor law is based (Adams 1993). Labor activist and scholar Kim Moody says that business unionism comes out of the defeat of socialism in the United States (Moody 2014). June Nash explained in an interview that more than a half century ago she nearly made the same career choice that I have made, but it was the McCarthy era and the truly democratic unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE) were prime targets of the Red Scare. A generation of organizers were purged for being communists or socialists. With them went a wealth of strategic knowledge and organizing experience (Green 1980:195–205).
For most industrial unions in the 1950s and 1960s, organizing new members was accomplished through a top-down approach through visits by union officers to nonunion employers or simply handing out authorization cards at the plant gate (Bronfenbrenner 1998). Because the rank and file in these unions are rarely involved in the strategizing and operations of the union, they see the union as a commodity — much like insurance — something they buy into every month for the benefits. Union reps are more likely to be accommodating to management, and this accommodating approach, whether paired with corrupt practices or a result of a real threat of layoffs or plant closures, often came at the price of lower wages and fewer benefits for members.
These business unions, or servicing unions, function as mediators between workers and owners in order to keep workers working and money flowing (Neal 2011). Union representatives focus primarily on responding to workplace grievances and negotiating a new contract when one is due. These unions operate from the rhetoric of "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" and "getting the job done." Unions that adopted this approach most adamantly were those that evolved from skilled craft guilds such as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. Union leadership mirrored the leadership in corporations across the nation — very white and very male. They entirely ignored, and in many cases consciously neglected, immigrants, women, and workers of color who occupied high-turnover, low-wage, low-skilled jobs (Bronfenbrenner et al. 1998). Thus union jobs tended to be held and defended by white men.
These unions worked for members as long as they controlled a majority of the market (Bronfenbrenner 1998:24), but once employers became more aggressive and sophisticated in their anti-union strategies, organizing success plummeted (Chaison and Rose, 1991: 26). Employers used a combination of techniques, including harassment, discharges, captive audience meetings, misinformation, interrogation, threats, promises, bribes, and surveillance, in order to create a climate of fear and intimidation (Bronfenbrenner 1998:25). By the mid-1980s companies used anti-union consultants in 71 percent of private-sector union organizing campaigns (Bronfenbrenner and Juravich, 1995). By 1995 the number had increased to 90 percent (Bronfenbrenner 1997a).
Whatever its origins, the memory of these kinds of unions is powerful today. A widespread distrust of unions remains, despite the efforts of democratic and radical unions, and the rank-and-file workers who drive them, to transform the labor movement. Sociologists have described the legacy of business unions and how unions work to overcome them through grassroots organizing (Ganz et al. 2004; Lopez 2004; Penney 2004). Lopez (2004) compares union campaigns that address the workplace's cultural memory and work creatively to understand and address workers' negative views of unions versus campaigns that have little understanding of the union opposition within the workplace. His study suggests that grassroots organizing that integrates the histories of the people and the place is much more successful in addressing antiunion sentiments.
Social Justice Unionism
In response to this steep decline in union membership and heightened employer opposition, many unions such as SEIU and UNITE HERE refocused their resources in the 1990s on organizing new members (Van Dyke, Dixon, and Carlon 2007:195). In 1995 John Sweeney ran for president of the AFL-CIO. His campaign promised to focus the federation's energies on just two tasks, organizing and politics (Sweeney, Trumka, and Chavez-Thompson 1995). As soon as he was elected, the new leadership reorganized the federation's budget so nearly one-third of it was devoted to organizing (Turner and Hurd 2001). Rather than unions simply assigning staffers to organize, the union would enlist members, including workers of color, immigrants, LGBTQ workers, and women. The strategy called for organizing janitors, nursing home workers, and others the labor movement had historically ignored. Sweeney's administration also focused on organizer recruitment, creating a project called Union Summer in 1996, based on Freedom Summer, a historic civil rights campaign launched in June 1964 to register African American voters in Mississippi. The primary goals of the Union Summer program are to "(1) build union power by providing activists to assist on campaigns, (2) attract and commit new organizers to the labor movement (including more white women and people of color), and (3) instill a prolabor sentiment among interns" (Bunnage 2002).
At the heart of this radical restructuring was the vision that the union struggle goes beyond wages and working conditions. Unions would once again be committed to the development of working-class consciousness and mass mobilization that was once the norm (Bronfenbrenner and Hickey 2004; Neal 2011). Fletcher (2008) describes this as "social justice unionism," or one that considers unions part of a broad working-class political and social movement.
Earlier in the century in the auto plants in Flint, Michigan, organizers understood that their success depended on running "slow, underground, community-based campaigns" (Fairbrother and Yates 2003:37). Even the slightest evidence of union sympathy was met with violent employer opposition. Because of this, a successful union drive depended on underground community networks and allies to combat the fear tactics of bosses (Cameron 1993:117–69; Kraus 1947:1–87).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Uncertain Times"
by .
Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado.
Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
