On Labor's Role in a Better Nation
11-29-2024
On Labor’s Role in a Better Nation: There’s lots of hand wringing going on, as the election results show a significant portion of organized labor’s membership continues to move away from the Democratic Party. Add to that, the same noticeable shift among the 90% unorganized workers in the nation. The Media and the winners are making much of this divergence between the advice of labor leadership and the actions of our rank and file. What should labor do about this situation, going forward?
First of all, this is not a surprise to most labor leaders. The disillusionment of workers, with the Democratic Party, and their shift to the R’s has been going on for a long time. In this election, that dissatisfaction was strong enough to tilt the election to the Trump camp. Add to that the reality that labor’s advice to its members was more of a “better of our two choices”, than full throated enthusiasm for the Harris campaign. Several high-profile unions went neutral on the election, avoiding the disunity a Harris endorsement would cause within their ranks.
This is not to say that those unions that did endorse Harris were wrong or giving members bad advice. Union endorsements are advice from union leadership on which candidate will best look out for working people’s interests. Faced with one candidate who has demonstrated outright hostility to unions in particular and vowing to attack the foundations of worker’s rights, the endorsements of Harris were well founded. Harris herself failed to build on those endorsements with a clear and targeted set of policies that would have shored up the economic and legal fortunes of working families. She chose, in spite of the urgings of labor and other worker-oriented strategists, to avoid making a working family agenda central to her campaign. It still came down to voting for someone who would do less harm, vs a candidate sworn to degrade workers’ rights. Workers reality is that the fight to not only shore up workers rights, but enhance them to meet today’s workplace, goes on no matter who is in the White House. It’s just do we want to fight from where we are, or after being pushed back 30 yards.
It is that fight that Labor has to focus on. On that score, Labor is in a better position than its been in decades. Public approval of unions is at an all time high. The number of workers seeking to organize has taken a huge upswing. The organized 10% of the workforce are standing up to the boss and demonstrating to unorganized workers that unions are the path to substantial economic, workplace, and life-quality improvements. Labor leaders are gaining public attention for a more militant stand against our rigged economy and reasserting basic labor principles of unity and mutual support. If there ever was a time for Labor to reassert its principles and mount a fight for stronger working family rights, we are in it.
The hurdle Labor must surmount has to do with the nature of today’s workforce and today’s workplace. With the exception of newly organized workplaces, today’s workers are generations away from the struggles and sacrifices that built the foundations of their current protections and rights. If we don’t know the history and the importance of what we have, there’s no way to give them priority in our choices. Additionally, there is a new generation of workers filling our nations job pool. They have a different attitude about work ethics, quality of life issues and personal well-being. This in no small measure due to their clear understanding that today’s companies have absolutely no commitment to them. The Uber driver is a good example, where someone can decide how many trips they want to take and get paid immediately for that work. That model provides a flexibility that a 9-5 job and work schedule can’t. We can bemoan this difference or meet the new workforce where they are.
Hanging over the change in worker’s attitudes and goals are a vastly changing workplace. The traditional model of large facilities with concentrated groups of workers is lessening as technology allows for remote work, smaller production units and global sourcing of products and services. One of the attacks on labor rights has allowed the growth of sub-contractors, temporary employees and leased facilities. The “company” workers face, is often now a multi-headed monster that defies current labor law.
Amongst all these changes lies a golden opportunity for Labor. If we dedicate ourselves to listening to the new workforce and defining ways to make the modern enterprise work for workers, we can spur a resurgence of both unionized workers and a worker’s agenda that garners broad support. Then we fight for that agenda, no matter what political party currently holds power. In reality, if Labor doesn’t take up this challenge, no one else will. Labor is the only institution in the nation that is solely dedicated to improving the lives of our working families. If not us, then who?
Building that agenda has to be a two-way conversation. The current workforce needs an education on what the pre-union era was like for working families, the laws and rules that were built to overcome those horrors and a continuing discussion about how the incoming Administration if it further erodes workers’ rights. That’s just half of the conversation. Labor leadership needs to do a deep dive into the attitudes of workers (union and non-union), their goals and aspirations, the challenges they face in their newly reconstructed workplaces and their ideas on how to make things better. Tactics will also have to change. The Amazon organizers in New York faced a multi-lingual and cultural workforce. One unique approach was to cook ethnic foods and serve them at the warehouse gates as a way to connect. Labor also has technology available that can vastly change how we identify interested workers and communicate with them. This will take both human and financial resources. But it will be the best investment Labor has made in a very long time.
Because support for worker’s rights is influenced by economic, cultural and social issues, labor’s agenda needs to be broad and inclusive. This is critical to attracting support from outside the workplace. Labor once had solid alliances with the communities we live in. Minimum wage increases referendums require broad support of the voting public. The Catholic Church once had a widespread movement to support working family’s issues. The connection between civil rights and labor rights was starkly evident when Martin Luther King Jr was murdered as he supported the labor struggles of sanitation workers. When workers have to strike, community small businesses often come behind their struggles. Those external support groups have to be rebuilt and made part of labors coalition. That will give us the political juice to make change happen.
This is hard work. We need to train our activists to be both educators and heavy-duty listeners. The most successful change efforts are accomplished through one-on-one conversations that are continuous and have a way to capture and feed back the ideas and information those conversations generate. This is one way the building of a new agenda uses traditional tactics. But even here, we know training is required on how to hold a productive conversation. We know what works. We have to deploy that knowledge.
In the same way Labor successfully overcame the corporate globalist approach to trade and jobs, Labor can gather a consensus about how the working families of this nation should be treated. There aren’t shortcuts to this work. But the environment has never been better. The goal is to build worker power strong enough to counter the power of wealth. This has been a long and difficult fight. A fight this nation’s workers and citizens must win.
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