Minority Report: A Different Sort of Unionism
Writings by Alexis Buss
Nowadays people in the Industrial Workers of the World tend to talk about our way of organizing mostly using the term “Solidarity Unionism.” The term comes partly from a book called Solidarity Unionism by Staughton Lynd. Some people used to call this “minority unionism.” Some people used to call it “direct unionism.” One of the ways that these ideas got worked out and spread around in the IWW was by some columns written by Alexis Buss that appeared in the Industrial Worker newspaper. The columns were printed under the title Minority Report. They’re all online at http://www.iww.org/en/organize/strategy/solidarity.html. Some of this material has also been reprinted by the Chicago branch of the IWW under the title “A Union On Our Own Terms.” We’re reprinting them in this pamphlet partly as a piece of recent IWW history. (For more of that history, see the book on the first 100 years of IWW history by Fred Thomson and Jon Bekken.) More than that, though, these columns have ideas that are still relevant to IWW members and to anyone who wants a powerful labor movement and working class.
These are columns written by Alexis Buss under the column title Minority Report. They’re all online at http://www.iww.org/en/organize/strategy/solidarity.html
July 2002
For the past few years, I've been contributing an occasional column called "Wobbling the Works" focused on how labor law affects union organizing. I'll still be writing on this topic once in a while, but lately my attention has been on a concept which I'll call "minority unionism," a way to describe a method of organizing that does not wait for a majority of workers in a workplace to win the legal right to bargain. This month I'm going to share some of the things that piqued my interest and pointed me in this direction.
I recently had to redo the IWW's constitution for our fellow workers in IWW Regional Organising Committees, who were tired of American misspellings of words like labour and organising. Searching through the constitution got me thinking about the idea of job branches. A job branch is a group of five or more IWW members at a given workplace who are charged with getting together on a monthly basis. The plain implication is that they would discuss grievances, come up with strategies to resolve them, and build a union presence on the job.
I am working on a project that started out as a video version of the classic IWW pamphlet A Worker's Guide to Direct Action, but has grown a bit in scope since we started. Researching the video, I saw Miriam Ching Yoon Louie speak about her book Sweatshop Warriors, which provides some excellent examples of how immigrant workers centers have helped individual workers understand their rights and organize on a variety of work and community issues. I also got the chance to interview Barbara Prear, a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina and president of UE Local 150, when she visited support staff at Swarthmore College, who have been conducting a living wage campaign for six years. The UNC union has no legal right to bargain, but has been very successful in using pressure tactics to get administrators to the table and negotiate improvements for the lowest-paid workers on campus.
I have been thinking quite a bit about ways that workers who do not have a legal mandate to bargain and have no contract can act union, using the law to augment their work. This came up because Staughton Lynd asked me to work with him on a new edition of Labor Law for the Rank and Filer at a moment when I had become particularly cynical about the potential for using labor law in organizing. I've just come back from spending a weekend with the Lynds, people from the Youngstown Workers Solidarity Club and their rank-and-filer-troublemaking cohorts from near and not-so-near places, veteran activists, and student organizers.
The club developed as a "parallel central labor body" to fill a void when the local central labor council could not provide sufficient support for a strike. Hanging out with these folks was the antidote for the cynicism I was feeling; not that I now have more confidence in the law, but I feel more able to look at the possibilities... A month ago I saw a documentary on the Overnite trucking strike, "American Standoff," which I reviewed last issue. "Standoff" illustrated a lot of problems that labor has not adequately confronted. How do we deal with organizing in companies that are so anti-union that they are willing to spend millions of dollars to keep workers from even getting to the bargaining table? The Teamsters' Overnite campaign, which is now on a road so difficult that it isn't clear it can be salvaged, is one of a long string of campaigns that seem to have left labor scratching its collective head, wondering what to do in the face of self-destructive upper management and backwards labor law. Clearly, the answer is not to give up. It isn't to settle for a minority clique of agitators in each workplace. It's to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.
And last but not least, several fellow workers from across the water forwarded me an article on minority unionism that ran in a recent issue of The Nation. The article, by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, argues that the AFL-CIO should develop a plan for organizing that does not depend on having a majority at a workplace. The thing that was so great about getting multiple copies of this article in my inbox was the puzzlement of the non-American unionists who sent it. The way us backwards Yanks do things is absurd. Few countries do unionism the way it's done in the U.S., with the union being the sole bargaining agent of a declared majority. I think it would help if more workers I talk to knew how other places do it, and would also be good if folks outside the U.S. saw the implications of how it's done here.
So, that's the point of this column. I want to share these stories and experiences. I want to connect my fellow workers with resources that others have found useful to their work. I can't offer a recipe for success . not all of these examples will be appropriate for everyone. But smart thinking on a way forward isn't just possible, it is happening. And by developing resources to try these things out, we will give one another the confidence to turn comments like "what a good idea" into "I'm going to give that a try."
October 2002
At the recent IWW General Assembly, I got a chance to be on a panel to share ideas on how to rebuild the labor movement. My talk was on minority unionism. Here are some excerpts:
If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8hour day and built unions as a vital force. One way to do this, is what has become known now as "minority unionism." It.s to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.
Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition. It is not about settling for creating a tiny clique of professional malcontents. It should aspire to grow, but in the short term gives an example of what kinds of organization is possible when we decide that our unions are going to exist because we need them to.
U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context, this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.
The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn.t have been. One hundred years ago unions had no legal status (indeed, courts often ruled that unions were an illegal conspiracy and strikes a form of extortion) - they gained recognition through raw industrial power.
When the IWW fought for the 8-hour day in the timber and wheat fields, they didn't decide to prove their majority to the boss through elections. Workers instead held meetings to decide what their demands were, elected shop committees to present those demands, and used tactics such as walking off the job at the end of an 8-hour shift to persuade recalcitrant bosses to agree to those demands. Union recognition in the construction crafts was built through a combination of strikes, direct action and honoring each others' picket lines .(the latter not often enough).
The wave of sit-down strikes that established the CIO in auto and steel, for example, was undertaken by minority unions that had a substantial presence in workplaces with a history of agitating around grievances. The unions then drew upon that minority presence to undertake direct actions that galvanized the larger workforce in their plants - and inspired workers across the continent.
Unionism was built through direct action and through organization on the job. But in the 1930s, the bosses found it increasingly difficult to keep unions out with hired thugs, mass firings and friendly judges. Recognizing that there was no way to crush unions altogether, and tired of the continual strife, they offered a deal: If unions would agree to give up their industrial' power and instead work through proper channels - the National Labor Relations Board in the United States, various provincial boards in Canada - the government would act as an "impartial" arbiter to determine whether or not the union was the bona fide representative of the workers.
In the short term unions were able to short-circuit the need to sign workers up one by one and collect dues directly. The bosses traded union busters in suits for the gun thugs they had previously employed. And after a short burst in membership, unions (particularly in the United States) began a long-term downward spiral. Under this exclusive bargaining model, unions do not attempt to function on-the job until they gain legal certification. That legal process affords the bosses almost unlimited opportunity to threaten and intimidate workers, and to drag proceedings out for years. It is a system designed to interfere with workers' right to organize-and the IWW pointed this out when the National Labor Relations Act was passed.
However, while the labor law regime is designed around this majority-designated majority status unionism, it does not actually require it. As long as workers are acting in concert, they enjoy the same basic legal rights - such as those are - whether or not they are in an officially certified union. Indeed, in certain cases they enjoy greater rights, as the courts have ruled that most union contracts implicitly surrender the right to strike. It is illegal to fire members of a minority union for their union activity, to discriminate against them, to fire them for striking, to refuse to allow union representatives to participate in disciplinary hearings, etc. An organized group of workers has legal rights, though it would be' a mistake to expect the labor boards to enforce them any more vigorously than they do for unions that have been certified. And an organized group of workers, even if it is a small minority, has much more potential power than unorganized individual workers.
For the most part you have as many legal rights as a minority union as a majority union does - with the single exception of being certified as the exclusive bargaining agent with the sole authority to negotiate a contract. A minority union has the right to present grievances (though there may not be a formal grievance procedure in place); to engage in concerted activity, to make demands upon the boss; to seek meetings, even to strike (though this isn't a great idea if you don't have majority support).
If you pick your issues well and use them as an opportunity to talk with and engage your fellow workers, you can simultaneously fight for better conditions and build the `union: In campaigning around issues that matter to your coworkers you are building the union's credibility, you are gaining experience in self organization, you are learning who can be relied upon you are establishing that the union is workers on the job and that were in it for the long haul.
The labor movement was built when groups of workers came together and began agitating over conditions: Sometimes they persuaded their fellow workers to approach the boss and demand that some problem be corrected. Sometimes they refused to work under unsafe conditions or in unsafe ways, and persuaded their coworkers to do likewise. Sometimes they acted on the individual job, sometimes they held citywide demonstrations over issues of common concern, such as working hours or unsafe-work.
The important point is that they acted. They identified key issues of concern; they met together, they decided upon a course of action, and they acted upon it. That is unionism-in action. It does not require official recognition, it does not require a contract. It requires workers to-come together and act collectively.
If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model and return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force. Minority unionism is about forming meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class. It is a process, a process that offers hope for transforming our greatest weakness--the fact that our members are scattered in many, largely disorganized workplaces--into a strength.
November 2002
In this column and at other times, I have written about a major advantage the IWW has over business unions, specifically when it comes to our practice that any worker can join and find meaning in his or her membership through organizing regardless of whether or not a majority of workers on the job have declared in some fashion that they want to bargain with the boss: Minority Unionism.
There are other advantages to the IWW -- we abide by the principle of one member, one vote. Every officer and representative in this union is elected, and the folks sitting in these seats rotate frequently. Every change in the structure of our union is voted on, including dues rates and constitutional amendments: Democracy. Our membership also tends to be very eager to engage in struggle to win better conditions. Wobblies are often the first to arrive on the picket line and the last to leave, even when the picket doesn't benefit them directly: Militancy. These elements shouldn't make us unique, but sadly often they do.
Increasing militancy and democracy can only benefit any workers' organization, especially business unions, and there are people who work quite hard for that kind of reform. But these are very limited reforms for unions that stay tamely within the limits of the labor law regime.
Since I wrote the first installment of this column, I have come to realize how troublesome the idea of minority unionism is to the business union model, particularly when it comes to jurisdictions. Let's look at the following hypothetical example:
Alice, a loading dock worker at Best Buy (an electronics superstore), is told that she must buy her own pair of safety shoes. That's legal. She doesn't want to, the safety shoes are expensive. Let's say for the sake of argument, most of her co-workers agree they shouldn't have to pay for the shoes. The policy that has been handed down is going to go into effect in two weeks.
Alice talks to an electrician who came in to run service for some new gadgetry. The electrician is an IBEW member, and tells her that if she were union, the shoes issue wouldn't happen because the union would make the company pay the cost of any safety-required clothing.
Alice calls the IBEW and says that she wants to join the union. This is crazy talk to the person who took her call. She'd need to go through the apprenticeship program and there's a big waiting list. And there's not enough work in the area to support new members. Alice hangs up the phone, bewildered by her encounter with craft unionism.
She talks to a trucker making a delivery. The trucker is a Teamster. The Teamster also tells her that making a union is a way to handle this situation. Alice calls the Teamsters and asks to join the union. Let's say in this case that we're dealing with a local that is experimenting with minority unionism, because they also have things going on at Overnite and they needed to develop some strategy that would keep a union presence on the job (please note, I'm saying this for the sake of argument -- it's not something that has actually happened). The Teamsters say, "Yes, join us."
But one of Alice's co-workers has a brother who works in the public sector, also on a loading dock, and is represented by SEIU. That worker joins the SEIU.
The UFCW, representing retail workers, gets wind of the fact that this is going on and demands the memberships of these workers, which the AFL-CIO awards them. But neither worker wants the UFCW because that union is misrepresenting the folks at the shopping market across the way. Instead they buy their own pairs of safety shoes and forget about talking union.
I know the above is a scenario of my own invention, but I think it can help to illustrate the problems that would pop up if business unions adopted any kind of minority unionism or direct affiliation program. The reason I think it would likely turn out the way I describe above -- maybe not in all cases, but often enough that it would be problematic -- is that business unionists made a decision to abandon minority unionism in 1935 when they advocated for the Wagner Act.
The Wagner Act -- while it allows for protections for workers engaged in minority unionism through its provision protecting concerted activity -- was welcomed by officers of business unions because, among other things, the law guaranteed exclusive bargaining rights to unions that won representation and facilitated maintenance of membership provisions like dues check-off. And the AFL-CIO takes this even further in its structure with anti-raiding and jurisdictional language, which has protected the worst of the affiliate unions by blocking workers who cannot hope to imbue democracy and militancy in a union representing them, and instead wish to throw the bums out and get a new union.
In Australia, government, chartered unions, and the bosses have carved up the work life of the country into industrial jurisdictions. Unions are given exclusive bargaining rights for industry standards like time off, pay rates, safety regulations, hours and working conditions. They have the right to bargain regardless of the density of their membership, but the outcome of the bargaining affects every worker in the industry, union member or not. When a worker becomes a member, they often do so to address particular conditions in their own shops. One worker can be a union member and use the union to agitate for his own individual interests or for the entire shop. Because of the history of American unions' fights for legal rights, I can imagine a system that apes the Australian system, but without the legal right to bargain for entire industries.
It would happen by the AFL-CIO carving up jurisdictions and agreeing that only unions with jurisdiction over an industry could take a member working in that industry. Much of this work has already been done, it has just been strayed from in these lean years. The Australian system came about because workers' activity was on the rise. Many went "union shopping," changing organizations as it suited them in pursuit of the maximum possible level of militancy. Instead of encouraging this militancy, a choice was made to control the workers by only allowing them membership in a very circumscribed manner.
An interesting side note: the Australian system isn't true industrial unionism. For instance, there is a secretaries' union. Secretaries are a necessary part of almost any industry, but instead of being part of the union that represents their industry, they are represented by a craft union. Ironically, although women overwhelmingly do the job, the union is controlled by anti-feminist men, largely because the union has very few voting members. The union does little to organize the people it represents, and even undoes the work of members looking to reform the union. The union can behave this way because it can maintain bargaining rights in spite of a very low number of actual members. So this allows a group of people who have come to be very unpopular with secretaries to exclusively represent them.
Back to the scenario of Alice, what would the IWW do? We'd get to work on the shoes issue right away. Alice would most likely first encounter either a mixed worker local (a General Membership Branch) or an Industrial District Council, an organization that helps unite all workers regardless of what industry they work in. She would be put in touch with other members, and given training and solidarity. She would learn how to organize to win demands, and how to build the union's presence on her job.
The IWW is open to all workers, and our system of industrial unions is made in order to enhance our power. The only reason to worry about which industrial union one should be in is to give ourselves the most bargaining power and job control possible .not to protect jurisdictions. The IWW opposed the Wagner Act when the thinkers who brought it into existence first thunk it up. That's because we saw the danger of asking laws to do our organizing for us, and we wanted nothing of the stifling bureaucracy, limited vision and anti-solidarity methods of the business unions.
Orienting ourselves towards building our movement this way makes us different in a very profound way. We are choosing to experiment with new methods of organizing, methods that have potential not only to succeed in winning small grievances, but in building a movement capable of making a real difference.
December 2002
Most union campaigns get off the ground by finding out what problems exist in a workplace or industry. Workers form union committees, a campaign is launched, and workplace issues are articulated to attract more and more support for the union's cause. Most often, this organizing is done with the goal of the union being formally recognized by the boss, either by a card-check agreement or an election of some sort, so that a contract can be bargained.
But what usually happens when it is time to sit down and bargain the contract? It isn't true to say that at negotiation time the boss and union come to the table as equals and work out the best possible deal for both parties. The union most usually comes to the table from a very weak position, because it has been built not to fight for and enforce its demands, but rather to ask the boss to give it legitimacy.
This method came about when NLRA was enacted in 1935. "Labor peace" was a desirable concept for the bosses, the government and entrenched union bureaucracies. The bosses were tired of dealing with rising labor militancy -- factory takeovers, strikes, walk-outs, sit-ins, etc. Government officials had to deal with helping their pals in big business recover from the effects of this kind of organizing. And the labor bureaucrats were worried by workers who were getting too uppity and demanding the same kind of respect from them that they were demanding from the bosses. So a system was created for bosses to be given a legal mandate to bargain with the unions, and a set of laws and rules were created so that bargaining became a gentleman's game.
The expected way that unions and bosses dealt with each other was that the contract was improved upon with each new set of negotiations, so long as the company was in good health. This has changed. It is now routine for companies, ones with and without unions, to shut down plants and offices, downsize jobs, reduce pay and benefits, and generally show no consideration to workers, even during profitable times.
But here's something that has been true ever since our present set of laws was enacted: it is usual and expected for contracts to contain completely useless (worse than useless, positively harmful) language for workers -- the management prerogatives clause, and no-strike clause.
Because most unions accept that workers are on earth to be managed, and bosses should run the world as they see fit, it isn't a surprise that most union contracts allow management to have total control over a workplace. During the term of a contract, when the union is entitled to collect dues from workers through dues check-off, limiting the ability of workers to strike is also desirable for many unions to make sure that their main revenue streams are not cut off. Let alone the added benefit of avoiding the hassle of "managing" uppity workers.
When we think of how we can turn around the labor movement, we must keep these things in mind. We can't just accept "more organizing." Because even if we had more organizing of the kind we have now, we would still have to address the issue of unions not helping workers to pursue job control. We would still have to deal with concessionary bargaining.
How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing. Our unions and networks of solidarity must be able to deal with the issues that inspire most campaigns -- wages, benefits, working conditions. But just as necessary is to have a way for us to organize to address the respect (or lack of respect) workers feel on the job, our ability to control how we work, how our workplace is going to interact with our community and our world.
We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.
This is one of the potentials of minority unionism (by the way, this is the last column that I'll be using this term -- in the next month, I'd like your help in figuring out a new name to describe the kind of unionism we've been talking about in the pages of the Industrial Worker). The point of unionism as the IWW sees it is to organize workers in ways that our power cannot be ignored or co-opted. Minority unionism is one way to do this, because we can organize around demands without worrying about if we have a contract or legal standing. As much as possible, we should seek to avoid situations where our power is replaced by laws and contracts.
If contracts and agreements help us hold bosses to their promises, that's great. But if bargaining becomes an exercise in what rights we will give up, and deciding that bosses should in fact have total managerial control over our working lives, we're going about it the wrong way.
June 2003
At recent IWW organizer trainings, we have been talking about the kinds of agreements that solidarity unionists would make with a boss. After all, we aim to secure better conditions and build upon them -- part of that means being able to negotiate with management and memorialize the agreements we reach.
Readers of my columns will regularly see me criticize elements of contracts that I think are best left out of the picture if we are to be a strong movement. Some of these elements are desired by entrenched union bureaucracies, some are desirable for management, and some serve both interests, forsaking the workers. I'm talking about dues checkoff, management prerogatives and no-strike clauses. There are other features to contracts, like binding arbitration as the last step of a grievance procedure, time lines favoring management, zipper clauses and so on that I've been known to gripe about too.
But what are the kinds of agreements we should make? Typically I talk about agreements in terms of using direct action to gain power over specific situations and negotiating to memorialize the outcome. But there are elements in present-day contracts that are very useful. What remains to be seen is if a more encompassing contract that truly protects and expands the rights of working people can be negotiated in the present climate.
To my mind, when setting out to negotiate, workers should seek to get:
* 1) an end to employee-at-will status;
* 2) a grievance procedure;
* 3) whatever economic and working condition improvements they may want and;
* 4) a past practice clause.
Most contracts contain a "progressive discipline" or "firing for cause" clause, which effectively ends employee-at-will status. I'd be interested to hear from veteran unionists what kind of progressive discipline clauses worked well in your experiences. One that we negotiated here relied on the idea of not making it easy for staff to be disciplined for simple wrongdoing. Management was obliged for each discipline to write an essay discussing the good qualities of the person being disciplined, outline specifically how performance was to be improved, and have regular meetings with the worker to discuss progress. Because it's a bit of a pain in the ass to do this, only the most serious offenses are taken up, and the former trifling nit-picky disciplines have all but vanished.
Grievance procedures are the systematic way that issues that arise in a shop are handled. Many clauses limit the definition of a grievance to issues covered by the contract, effectively cutting off workers' ability to grieve issues not anticipated by the contract. One could argue that issues that aren't covered by the contract are free from the confines of the resolutions proscribed in the contract, so perhaps this isn't the worst thing that could happen. But having a procedure that management has agreed to follow when a any kind of conflict comes up can be very advantageous to workers.
Too often I've seen the wind taken out of the sails of organizing campaigns with promises from management that are never delivered. A clear process shows everyone when they're just being blown off, and workers can more quickly decide how to up the ante. It's my preference for the last step in a grievance procedure to effectively be 'all bets are off.' Yes, have steps beforehand -- meetings to discuss the issue, put it in writing, bring in a mediator, whatever makes sense in the structure of your workplace. But letting a third party who does not have to work under the agreement he's binding you to make the ultimate decision is not ideal. Past practice clauses effectively say, "Unless we reach an agreement, the workplace stays as it is now." What this does is put the burden of changing the workplace on the shoulders of the employer. They must come to the union to talk about changes, and the union can agree or not, or negotiate. When the workers decide that a situation needs to be fixed, the grievance procedure can be used to put the discussion on a timeline. These clauses have largely disappeared from present-day contracts, but I think it's time for a revival.
Your experiences with the particulars of contracts you've worked under will help your fellow workers understand the benefits and pitfalls of certain kinds of language. Here's your invitation to share your stories -- contact us now!