I’ve been following these series of posts (both yours, Henwood’s, etc.), and I wonder one thing when I read them – how many of the writers and contributors to these threads have ever worked a real blue collar job? I’m sorry, but organizing teachers assistants at a nice university ain’t working class experience.

I’m a coppersmith by trade. I work, currently, for $15 an hour, in Memphis, TN. I made $22 an hour prior to 2008 when my company (a lighting manufacturing company) made deep cuts, first laying me off, then hiring me back part-time at a lower wage. Prior to working in the South, I worked in the much more union friendly state of Minnesota. I have worked in both union and non-union shops. I currently am a dues paying member of the IWW, though mostly for nostalgic reasons. There is no real Wobbly presence to speak of in my city. I’m also a member of CPUSA, but I am to the left of that Party – I belong because I am a red diaper baby whose father was a communist who worked in shops.

My mother-in-law is a diet tech at a state run facility in WI. She makes $13 and change an hour. She voted against Walker, twice now, but she is not at all happy with her union. She gets shit wages and her union protects people who are worthless employees – there is no self policing within the union and workers who do nothing are nearly impossible to fire, which is surely a factor in keeping wages down for workers like my mother-in-law. Her union does, which also covers several other trades, does little to advocate for diet techs. Now, I know any good liberal can postulate theories as to why such union orientations might come about, but to the extent that you embrace them you distance yourselves from actual working class persons who give a damn about the work that they do, which is to say, the majority of them. Lower wage non-union (and union!) workers have little regard for unions, and until the reasons for this are acknowledged and dealt with on a systemic level the unions will continue to be mostly impotent. The only unions that show much promise at the moment are those working outside the box – like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

When it comes down to it, I agree with Henwood in this fight. The article linked to here reads like something one would read in an on-flight airline magazine. It doesn’t follow logically that because the mainstream unions are the problem that the radical unions would see great success, I mean, please. The line “Union members are, almost entirely, exactly the same as any other working-class Americans” is vague, useless, and immature. The skilled unions are notorious in taking care of their own, in spite of other workers. My own shop tried to organize some years back the the local sheetmetal workers union told us that all employees would have to test into the union. Our shop has all sorts of workers, skilled and unskilled, and we knew this would only serve to help some of the skilled workers so the decision to go union was tabled, because the workers in my shop wanted, of all things, to act together. Most of my coworkers, skilled and unskilled, could not see what they would get in return for the $80 a month in union dues. That’s 8 or 9 hours a month of work for most of the guys I work with. A day a month worth of work may not sound like much to people who sit in front of computers during most of their workday, but, when it comes down to it, fuck that sort. Gordon Lafer was said to have been a union organizer before his current digs. My question – did he ever spend years as an actual working worker, sweating and bleeding with the people he sought to organize? You can talk down the idealism of Doug Henwood bloggers till kingdom come, and whatever, his background is Ivy League too. But I daresay every one of the guys in my shop can identity with that sort of criticism of unions that Henwood gave. Most of them don’t think the Democrats and the machines that feed them are seriously vested in their interests, even if my coworkers that bother to vote do vote Dem.

The unions in WI had given in to virtually every single one of Walker’s demands prior to his call for an end to collective bargaining, austerity measures out the wazoo, but they fought like hell against the first thing which really threatened the potential future income of union bureaucrats. In February of 2011 I took my family up to Madison to protest in solidarity with my mother-in-law. The energy there was amazing. I’ve never felt so proud to be working class. Ordinary working class folk were energized for radical action, and/or at least for all sorts of options. Then the “Fab 14” came home from Illinois and told them to leave Madison and go work for the Dems. The energy among rank and file working class folks dissipated nearly immediately, and then loss after loss came. When are “mainstream leftists” like Lafer going to admit that their tactics aren’t doing my class any more good, in terms of expedience, than Henwood’s blog posts are?

I’d say the article itself a pretty good example of how not to think. Starting with the title, which obliterates any distinction between being anti-these-unions and anti-union.

The quote you pulled is absurd on two counts: first for constructing the straw man argument that someone is contending that highly-paid union bureaucrats are the only impediment to union growth, and second for the brazen ahistoricism of ignoring red-baiting and repression by both the employing class and the mainstream labor movement against the IWW and the UE.

The article is full of loose thinking like that. Most laughably, offering up the serial incarnations of the UFCW’s failed Wal Mart campaign and the AFL-CIO’s Working America as examples of innovative/effective strategies.

Lastly:

“But unions are supposed to be organizations of workers who improve their own conditions in their workplace. The problem is not that the model is bad, but the opposite: the best thing that could happen in our economy is for more people to have the right to bargain with their employers in exactly this way.”

Trying to counter the argument of Henwood for industry and class-wide organizing by blindly reaffirming/naturalizing the peculiar atomized weakness of US labor movement is hardly a good example of “how to think.”. The US model is not the worldwide model.

I’ve published more than a million words on unions

Can you address Lafer’s arguments in fewer words than that? I want to be sympathetic to you, but you’re just doing an appeal to authority (your own). Can you – or anyone here – answer ONE question? It would have been better to respond to Walker….how? No one has made a good case that a general strike or something like that – assuming it could have been pulled off – along with walking away from electoral politics, would have been more efficacious. I am as disgusted with the Dems as anybody else, but I don’t believe in being emotional about that when trying to plot strategy. There was a pretty good case to be made for challenging Walker – who was, after all, critically injuring unionism – which is what they did. All of the above criticism of old unions can be true, but that still holds.

I will admit to having no expertise in the labor field – my only experience with unions is a.) having belonged to two shitty, semi-corrupt locals – Musicians and AFTRA; and b.) voting to unionize a workplace in the late 80s. But I’m virtually sure that neither I nor anyone else who needs convincing about any of this stuff wants or needs a million words to do it.

If you bury a pearl in a pound of shit, people are going to shake off the shit first.

Acting in solidarity with your co-workers is indeed a radicalizing experience. A union may or may not be involved in with that. If a union is involved, very often it is to attenuate the radical expectations produced by the act of solidarity. Perhaps I’ve been involved in too many hotshop campaigns, but the radicality does not originate with or belong to the union. All too often the union will not know how to deal with that. I started a union drive wher I worked, and it did indeed radicalize me and my co-workers, but that conversion had little to do with the union, which suffered the embarrassment of having its leadership indicted and convicted by the Feds during our campaign.

Are the irony quotes around “class-wide organizing” supposed to mean anything ,or are you just indulging in the semiotics of snark?

Since WWII, I think a little less than 1/4 of all work stoppages in the U.S. have been wildcat strikes, and that includes most of the better known strikes, and most of the strikes in which there was any notable radical presence whatsoever. I’d bet my house that a study of worker opinions in the U.S. would show that most workers working in union companies believe that they are just as likely to have to fight their union in the future as to have to fight their company.

Look at the percentage of workers who vote in most union elections – it is generally minuscule. The state of affairs makes the unions quite happy – they get nervous when participation is on the rise, and this almost always corresponds with a challenge to union leadership. Once a union has won a contract with a shop/company, the last thing they want is a radicalized or agitated workforce, they want complacency at that point, and this is exactly what they work for.

When a union tries to organize a shop/company, it is amazing how little the rhetoric coming from the union proper actually confronts employer coercions and exploitation. I’ve even been amazed at how little the union promotional materials dwell on “what’s in it for you.” The materials and messages coming from the union are generally a mix of that vague “themeism” political type language used in political campaigns today, and defenses of unions themselves, with a lot of “we’re not as bad as you’ve heard” type messages and a lot of “we’re not going to destroy your company” messages which emphasize the union’s ability to work with your management despite your management suggesting otherwise. In fact the unions typically mimic Democratic political strategies in a sense – they portray themselves as a moderate, civil, genteel force in contrast to the outlandish, bomobastic, uncivil anti-union rhetoric coming from management. Well, just as in politics, this doesn’t work, because even in the rare event you win, you lose, because you have to de-radicalize and sell the farm in order to gain anything in this game. Of course there is a big caveat here – and that is that the ground troops in any given union organizing struggle are, sometimes, more leftist/progressive than the union leadership, as union organizing attracts true believers on the low end of the ladder (you’ve either quit or compromised if you have climbed the ladder into union leadership). And in some cases these low level union organizers do somewhat radicalize a particular shop or a particular portion of a company. But as a person who has been in a meeting where a co-worker of mine asked a union organizer why they sounded so different from the materials coming out of the union leadership and the union lawyer who got sent to speak to us, my sense is that a radical on the local level can only do a little bit of nudging when the union itself is committed to the status quo. And once that contract is won, the union has a strong interest to push down any radical tendencies and any radicals that were born during the organizing time are now acting as free agents if they are doing any agitating.

But one last thing – if we aren’t discussing the WI unions being little more than cash funnels for the WI Dems here, and are instead focusing on union organizing as a radicalizing force, then I still don’t see why Henwood & Co. are being painted as “pie in the sky” escapists who can’t deal with reality as it is presented to us. I mean, seriously, how many people in WI have, since Walker took office, become dues paying union members because of union organizing efforts? How many shops and companies have been organized in WI since the beginning of 2011? I’d venture to say that the total number of new members of unions in WI who became new union members because of union organizing efforts (and not just because they got a job at an already union shop/company) is less than the number of readers Henwood has in WI. I’m sure as hell the number is far less than the number of non-union people who showed up to protest in Madison in February of 2011.

johnnybutter, if you write to me at mikedjyates@msn.com, I’ll send you a couple of things. If you’d prefer not to write me, then just google my name and labor unions and you can pick something less than a million words!!

Doug’s comments are right on the mark. And so are Matthew Rothschild’s at http://progressive.org/lafer_discussion_wisconsin_loss_walker.html

Doug’s best line turns Lafer on his head. Rather than organizing being slow and incremental, Henwood suggests that the reality of organizing has been decremental (and rapidly decremental I might add).

Corey accused me above of an ad hominem attack on Gordon. Is he prepared to level the same charge against Doug?

While I am at it, here is a story. I worked for the United Farm Workers in 1977. I wrote an article for the Nation critical of Cesar Chavez. The union’s attorney threatened to see the Nation, and I was accused of the same sort of thing Lafer now accuses leftwing critics of organized labor in the United States. Given that the UFW has degenerated into a racket run by Chavez’s relatives, much as organized labor as a whole has degenerated if not into a racket then into a sclerotic shadow of what it was and could be, who was right? Who is right in this debate now. My money is on those supposed anti-labor leftists.

I’ll set aside all the personal animus on this thread which I don’t really understand. Corey sent me a free copy of his book when I was unemployed and for that I am very grateful as it is an excellent book in my opinion and I have tried to get dozens of people, including conservative friends, to read it, with some success even.

I think Corey makes a good point about SEIU doing exactly what Henwood was suggesting, and about the amounts of money involved, and pointing out that this resulted in a big fat zero. Perhaps Henwood’s original suggestions were too vague and too broad. Perhaps traditional unions like SEIU are dead ends to begin with because they are already so associated with anti-worker bureaucracies and corruption. Perhaps they just did a really shitty job with their initiative and with some practical reforms they could make a better go of it in the future. But this thought does come to me – the SEIU campaign was one effort, albeit one with a lot of money behind it. It constitutes one failure. But for over a generation we have seen failure after failure after failure after failure with regard to the traditional tactics of mainstream unions, and they are still committed to that path. If we judge Henwood’s suggestions a dead end by the evidence of the SEIU failure, aren’t we all the more obligated to suggest that the status quo outreach/political operations of mainstream unions are also a dead end?

In Corey’s book he brilliantly observes that the reactionaries use radical and revolutionary tactics against the left, and frequently they use them with more success than the left does. Corey notes how we see this in the right wing populism of our day, which in so many cases mimics prior leftist populisms. The thought occurs to me that the GOP, the Koch brothers, ALEC, and the like would never keep throwing dollars at institutions with the rate of failure our unions have. Without a decent “return on their investment” fairly quickly they would quit an effort that wasn’t working and try something else. Look at the brilliant political success they have had in state legislatures across the country, which has given them a great advantage in recent redistricting manipulations. That effort was an incremental effort on their part, but one which showed steady positive results for them over time. The focus on state level politics was born in the 80s when conservatives realized that they couldn’t plan on winning on the national scale long term if they kept loosing so many local battles. I don’t think they would ever defend a given method using the “slow and incremental” language if it wasn’t at least slowly and incrementally making progress for them. With mainstream unions we aren’t even talking about 2 steps forward, 1 step back, hell, we aren’t even talking about 1 step forward 2 steps back. If the data Henwood gives us is correct, It’s more like 20 steps back, one step forward. Is there not some point at which we admit that we will never win if we are not as ruthless in rejecting methods which don’t work as our opponents are?