There Is Power In a Union
I wrote this essay four years ago. I’m reposting today because of the Janus decision. I’ll post a consideration of that decision later.
I wrote this essay four years ago. I’m reposting today because of the Janus decision. I’ll post a consideration of that decision later.
There is power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hand of the worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand
There is power in a union.”
— Billy Bragg
The setting is the work floor of the OP Henley Company, a textile manufacturer in North Carolina. Workers stand, crammed tightly into the room and watch as votes are counted. It is the penultimate scene of Norman Ritts’ 1979 film Norma Rae, and the audience waits along with the workers, unsure until the final tally is announced: 373 against the union and 427 for it. Tension broken, the workers erupt in cheers and chants:
“Yeah, we done it, baby! Union!”
“Union! Union! Union! Union! Union! Union! Union! Union!”
For me, that is the film’s iconic moment, when victory is secured and the collective action of the workers rewarded. Norma Rae was released in March 1979 — 35 years ago — and I can remember being drawn to my feet when the votes were tallied and the union won.
Norma Rae was an unexpected hit. It was a film focused on a single-mother in a small North Carolina town, whose anger over her working conditions becomes the fuse that ignites a larger organizing effort. It was a film that seemed outside of its own time — the total number of union members in the United States was at its highest, but its percentage of the work force was down precipitously — and seems even more ancient today, given that much of the news about unions has been bad in recent years.
The latest blow to unions came in Washington state in early January, the machinists union representing Boeing workers caved to threats from the company and voted to convert its pension plan from a defined-benefit system to a 401K, or defined-contribution plan. Boeing, one of the most profitable companies in the nation, had announced it planned to move out of state unless the union made concessions. The union initially balked — a November vote defeated the givebacks — but pressure from the International Association of Machinists and politicians in the Pacific Northwest, who feared Boeing would make good on its threat, forced a revote.
As Jim Levitt, a member of the machinists union, wrote on Labor Notes after the vote that only 100 union members were in the union hall for the vote-count and the “few hardy souls” in attendance “seemed stunned when the results were read. Only one or two shouted anything, and within a minute the room was empty. It all ended with barely a wimper (sic).”
That’s quite the contrast with Norma Rae, but also consistent with recent labor-movement trends. The ability to move work to lower-wage areas — whether within the United States or globally — has tipped the playing field in the favor of employers. Boeing is just the latest example, following in the footsteps of the major automakers and other manufacturing firms. It gives companies an advantage at the bargaining table.
There have been legal setbacks, as well. The Michigan and Indiana legislatures, for instance, turned those states into right-to-work states, which means workers can take benefits from a union in their workplace — negotiated contracts, agreed-upon disciplinary procedures and protections, etc. — but are no longer required to pay union dues. The goal is to starve unions of cash for organizing — bringing unions to new workplaces — and political activities and to further weaken an already weakened institution.
Wisconsin stripped its state workers of most of their collective bargaining rights in 2010, while legislatures and governors in other states — New Jersey, New York — have forced union workers to pay parts of their healthcare costs and to pay into their pensions, givebacks that have traditionally been a part of the collective bargaining process.
These are only the latest in a long string of legislative and legal losses for labor dating back almost to the moment Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, officially recognizing labor’s right to bargain collectively. They include Supreme Court decisions ruling sit-down strikes illegal and allowing companies to hire scabs (or replacement workers) and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which codified the court’s rulings and outlined a long list of labor actions deemed as “unfair” practices.
The prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s masked some of the effects of this — money was rolling in and, to ensure it continued to do so, business saw the benefits of sharing it with workers to keep the peace.
The result was what is sometimes called “business unionism,” or a union movement less involved in larger social issues and more focused on the specifics of collective bargaining and protecting members. Unions would focus on individual workplaces or employers, joining workers into a single, larger entity that would keep individual employees from competing with each other while expanding the power of the workforce as a collective entity.
That worked when textile shops like the one depicted in Norma Rae — based on the real JP Stevens factory — were limited in their ability to relocate and in the competition for their products, said David Bensman, a labor historian at Rutgers University.
This model began to fray in the 1970s with the globalization of the economy (goods and services can be produce anywhere and are consumed everywhere) and a renascent conservative movement that saw unions as antithetical to their view of free-market democracy and elected politicians (Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, the current governors of Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan).
“The competition fostered by globalization and public policy that is less oriented toward creating stability for workers is making it difficult to wall off and protect workers the way unions did before,” Bensman said.
Roland Zullo, a research scientist with the University of Michigan Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, agreed.
“To some extent, the business union model reflected a large part of what workers wanted,” Zullo said. “Not all workers, but certainly a significant chunk of the membership wanted unions to behave in that way. As long as they were able to negotiate contracts and achieve steady gains, that model was fine. But we are now in an era where that is hard to do. The law has changed, quite radically because of Supreme Court decisions, but also because the economy is more global.”
The right-to-work movement is an element of this, Zullo said. The law, which was passed as part of a budget bill at the end of 2012 in Michigan after Indiana previously passed a similar bill, is designed to strip unions of operating cash. This has three effects. First, it makes it harder to negotiate and administer contracts, which are expensive processes. Second, it bleeds strike funds, leaving less money available if a union opts to walk off the job. And third, it makes unions less likely to engage in political behavior, because of the fear that politics — in particular, support for progressive politicians — will members to opt out of official union membership.
“This is about making it more difficult for the labor movement to politically support progressive politicians in (Michigan),” he said. Because of this, he said, the impact goes beyond individual unions. “It is about workplace safety, the minimum wage — those things, too, are affected by the right-to-work law.”
The political and legal barriers have increasingly constrained unions, leading to retreats on the contract front and a continued decline in membership and political clout. According to federal estimates, membership, as a percentage of the workforce, has been in decline since the 1950s with just one in 10 workers now being a member of a union. More than one in three workers belonged to a union in the ‘50s, the high-water mark for union membership.
This has real-world consequences, according to the Economic Policy Institute, because union workers earn 13.6 percent more than their non-union counterparts, receive better health benefits and are more likely to have retirement plans. Therefore, as the union share shrinks, inequality grows — which is the best argument I know for why America needs a strong labor union movement.
Many workers understand this, which is why we have been witnessing what might be viewed as a rebirth of worker-focused organizing and political activity. The move to organize low-wage work — the fast-food industry, Walmart, home-health aides — and efforts like state referenda raising the minimum wage and local sick-time requirements have gathered some steam. And the larger unions are lending what remains of their clout to the efforts.
“Unions are recognizing that the situation has changed fund and that they have to change their strategy fundamentally,” Bensman said. “They are trying to reach out to unorganized workers and tying to find ways of creating strength and solidarity when is becoming impossible to organize and gain collective bargaining rights.”
Zullo says the efforts are not unusual — “unions have always done both” — but the legal barriers mean they need to focus even more on other approaches.
“It is so difficult to bargain in the workplace, vis a vis their employers, and it is so difficult to form a union today to help workers through private bargaining,” he said. “That is forcing them to become more political and to raise their base outside of unions.”
Cesar Pink, a visual artist with the Brooklyn-based Arete Living Arts Foundation, is making a film on the history of the labor movement called Strength in Union he hopes will be released later this year. He said unions had become complacent, to a degree, focusing more on contracts than movement building and making sure the average American understood the need for unions. The Occupy protests, which started in New York City in 2011 and spread to other cities around the country, altered the debate. It injected income inequality and class divisions into the national dialogue far more effectively than anyone had in recent memory.
“It got ’99 percent v. 1 percent’ into everybody’s mind,” he said. “Everybody knows it is an issue facing the country and labor is at the front line of that. This has the potential to help labor.”
The fast food strikes — periodic one-day walkouts from fast food restaurants around the country — are part of this renewal process, he said, and have the potential to shift the political landscape, as well.
“People feel strongest about unions when they are in a struggle,” he said. “The fast food workers and the Walmart workers, they are struggling for representation.”
The national unions are starting to understand this, Bensman says. The AFL-CIO at its 2013 convention endorsed the creation of greater connections between the nation’s largest labor organization and other community and social-justice groups, though what these connections will look like remains unclear. Collective bargaining will remain a focus of the labor movement, Bensman said, but unions are once again trying determine how best to address the needs of workers whether or not they are members of unions through public policies — like a minimum wage increase — and less formal agreements that result in workers’ concerns being addressed.
Whether workplace concerns are addressed by an individual union or a larger movement, the key is collective action. That is what forced the federal government to recognize a worker’s right to organizer and bargain collectively in the 1930s and it is what will empower workers across the income spectrum today.
Collective action is necessary as a counterbalance to industry, to prevent the abuses that are part of the chase for profit, as Reuben Warshawsky, the labor organizer played by Ron Liebman in Norma Rae, tells the small group of textile workers assembled in a small black church.
“The textile industry in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole of the United States of America that is not unionized,” he says, standing at the pulpit. “Therefore, they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work.”
Warshawsky is talking to textile workers, but he easily could be talking to the thousands of low-paid fast food workers and part-time Walmart employees who have been agitating for higher wages. He is talking about joining a union, but he also is talking more broadly about the need for collective action, for workers to act together for their mutual benefit. He is talking to us and we have a responsibility to take him up on his challenge.