We Don't Know What We're Doing

Review of Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy and Shaun Richman, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century

 

What Is To Be Done?

There’s an inverse relationship, it seems, between the strength of America’s union movement and the number of ideas about what to do with it. As a percentage of the American workforce, unions are weaker than they have been in a century or more. Actions by the U.S. Supreme Court, notably the Janus decision stripping public sector unions of the right to collect fair-share fees, and the comic-book-villain level of anti-worker decisions issued by Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, show that we are deep in the hole.

And yet, in these dark hours, everyone’s got a plan for organized labor in the United States. From the DSA’s rank-and-file strategy to David Rolf’s campaign for universal basic income, we are living in a golden age of ideas for what the labor movement ought to do. 

Joe Burns’s 2011 book, Reviving the Strike, is as good a place as any to date the beginning of this golden age. Burns traces the evolution of American labor from the scrapping 1930s to the cautious, incremental 21st century, concluding that a decline in militancy is at the core of our problems. A polemic as much as nuanced theory, many of Reviving the Strike’s conclusions are a little too pat and Burns’s historical glasses a little too rose-tinted. But his overall argument is clear. The labor movement already has the tools to change the game but needs to do everything better, more militantly, more assertively, more powerfully.  

A vivid counterpoint to Burns is Rich Yeselson’s 2013 essay, “Fortress Unionism.”  Much of what Yeselson says sounds like Burns ⁠— the labor movement has become a ghost of its former, powerful self ⁠— but the important difference between the two is in their views on how a revival can take place. Yeselson argues that union power is built during relatively brief periods of working-class energy and that it is largely beyond the power of unions to hurry history into one of those periods. “The workers will signal ⁠— loudly,” he writes, “when they want to organize,” and unions have to accept that they cannot control when that will happen. The job of the labor movement, until then, is to support and uphold its bases of strength, build coalitions across the Left, and maintain itself in readiness to support the next worker upsurge, whenever it comes.

A crude and reductive distinction between the two points of view is around the agency of the labor movement: Burns believes that the labor movement has it in its power to bring about the change we need. Yeselson believes that the labor movement, or at least its institutional component, must wait for the workers to initiate that change.

The question of whether the labor movement is master of its own fate is a big one, and it’s notable that we have no idea what the answer is.  

If you dig into the ideas for reforming, rebuilding, or remodeling the labor movement today, you’ll find disagreement is the norm: On even the most basic questions of where the labor movement is, where it ought to go, and how it ought to get there, we are nowhere close to consensus.

Nor is there any useful way to tell right answers from wrong ones. For the most part, the labor movement is built on anecdote, half-remembered history, conventional wisdom, and cliches treated as if they were scientific fact. If there is anything we can know, it’s that we really have no idea how unions do what unions do, what works and what doesn’t, and how to build more power and a stronger labor movement.  

Two of the newest entrants in the debate over labor’s future, Jane McAlevey’s A Collective Bargain and Shaun Richman’s Tell the Bosses We’re Coming, have a lot of useful things to tell us about the labor movement. But they also show how far we are from understanding the path forward.

McAlevey’s A Collective Bargain is written in the Joe Burns vein. She argues that “[w]e don’t need to innovate”; we have to do what we already do better, more carefully, more skillfully. Not every union does the deep organizing McAlevey prescribes, but they could and should. Richman openly follows in Yeselson’s footsteps, although it’s his belief that unions need to “inspire” the uprising to come. Things aren’t working, he asserts, and we need to accept that and change the game.

Taken on their own merits, both books make a strong case for their point of view, but both have weaknesses that show how far we are from knowing what the right answers actually are.

Tell The Bosses We’re Coming

Shaun Richman is the Program Director of the Labor Studies program at SUNY-Empire, with a long career as an organizer and a labor writer behind him. Experienced in both public and private sector organizing, Richman knows his subject matter as well as anyone. His somewhat acerbic public persona makes him controversial, and Tell the Bosses We’re Coming is not free of strong opinions. This only proves that Richman is an organizer.

Richman has been part of many strategic campaigns, some well run, some poorly run. His takeaway from his experiences is that we’re playing the wrong game. We continue to let the bosses define the field of play for us, and that means we’ve half lost already.

Take, for example, the question of exclusive representation. The American labor movement is built around the notion that a single union exclusively represents a group of workers in a workplace under a single contract. But, as Richman notes, ‘twas not always thus. And accepting a labor relations system that includes exclusive representation has meant accepting other things, most notably the concept of the no-strike clause in contracts. This means, in so many ways, that a union is forced to be on the same side as management, enforcing labor peace until the contract expires. 

Richman is one of many (this author is another) excited by the legal/historical arguments of Charles Morris’s The Blue Eagle at Work. Morris shows in convincing detail that many of the first unions created under the National Labor Relations Act were not exclusive representatives.  They were “minority unions”; they represented only the workers who wanted to belong, and they went on strike when they wanted to strike. There was no duty to represent nonmembers and, therefore, freedom for the union to act as it wanted to. Richman is well aware that, in the 1930s and earlier, minority unions were used to exclude women and people of color from union protection and that the development of the Duty of Fair Representation was intended in part to prevent unions from such discrimination. His view is that today's labor movement is diverse enough and has enough of an established tradition of social justice that such discriminatory practices would be unlikely.

Richman’s slim volume looks with envy on German works councils and French cadre unionism, drawing tantalizing pictures of how industry-wide labor boards could operate. His most useful insight is to position such structural changes not as opportunities for permanent institutional strength but as loci for worker action. Right now, stuck in the legal strictures of exclusive representation, workers across the country experience the same problems as the grocery workers striking on the West Coast in 2003-04: You can have all the power you need in your workplace, but if the non-union competitor across the street undercuts you on consumer prices, you can’t win.  

Richman also does some intriguing exploration of how freeing labor from the confines of labor law might make strikes more, not less, possible. Current labor law can punish unions financially for what are deemed illegal strikes. A workers’ movement, not part of a formal labor institution, has no treasury to fine. In fact, in so many ways, from free speech rights to the right to secondary boycotts, non-union worker actions are better protected under current law than union actions are.  

We need books like this. Richman shows that many of the labor movement’s foundational ideas are nonsense and that there are reasonable and rational alternatives to them. But I got to the end of this book and kept asking: How do we make any of this happen? There’s a certain kind of question begging here: A labor movement that is powerful enough to enact the changes Richman advocates and has the ancillary support needed to make those changes stick (e.g., a judiciary that won’t toss out all the reforms, a National Labor Relations Board willing to rule the way he thinks it should), is a labor movement powerful enough that it doesn’t need to make those changes to begin with.  

For example, Richman’s fifth item in the lengthy appendix, “Labor’s Bill of Rights,” is to mount legal challenges to anti-union state laws. He approvingly notes a challenge recently filed in West Virginia to its 2016 right-to-work law. The West Virginia Supreme Court upheld the law this April. No one has any illusions about how the U.S. Supreme Court would rule. Richman isn’t wrong that a legal case could be made against right-to-work laws, but such a case wouldn’t work until the composition of the courts is radically different. One gets the sense that Richman’s ideas were originally developed prior to the 2016 election, as a progressive platform to push a Clinton administration to do more on labor issues; now, with the Trump administration packing the courts with anti-worker judges, the prospect of any significant positive change coming from the judiciary within the next decade or more seems laughable.

At times, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming reads a bit like an exercise in wish fulfillment rather than, as its subtitle would have it, a new action plan for workers. Richman clearly struggles with this himself, and the most practical parts of the book focus on the importance of experimenting rather than choosing not to act out of fear it won’t work. Indeed, what Richman wants most is for the labor movement to be brave, to take chances, and to think about the ways that it is holding itself back.

A Collective Bargain

A Collective Bargain is Jane McAlevey’s third book on the labor movement in the last eight years. Her first, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand what union campaigns are like on the ground. A skilled organizer and gifted writer, McAlevey’s Raising Expectations has a “you are there” quality that makes it hard to put down. At times, it is genuinely harrowing (a scene in an elevator where McAlevey is assaulted by management goons) and, at other times, greatly uplifting. It’s hard to think of a book that better captures the real-life experience of union work in such detail.

But Raising Expectations also paints a misleading picture. The book mostly focuses on the story of McAlevey’s time as Executive Director of SEIU Local 1107 in Las Vegas. During her years there, the union organized new bargaining units, used powerful member-engagement strategies, and won a lot of great victories. McAlevey, in the book, credits this to the local’s embrace of “whole-worker organizing.” In Raising Expectations, and in her second book, No Shortcuts, she effectively presents this kind of deep organizing as a choice unions could make more often, but don’t. In her view, the weaknesses of Local 1107 before she arrived were weaknesses of will as much as anything else. The union didn’t want to build power, so it didn’t.

The story looks compelling until one notices that McAlevey never mentions money. During the less than three years she spent at 1107, the local received millions in subsidies from SEIU, increasing its spending from $3 million a year to $6 million. McAlevey doubled the size of the local’s staff, attracted top-notch talent from around the country, and poured money into mailings, legal services, communications, and all the other things that go into big organizing today.  

Good for them. There’s nothing wrong, and plenty that’s right, with a union pouring resources into organizing. McAlevey took the money and did a lot of good things with it. But the fact that she largely ignores this part of the story raises serious doubts about her basic thesis. Were McAlevey’s successes in Las Vegas the result of a shift in strategy or a flood of resources?  Could McAlevey have had the same success without the extra millions? Before she got to Las Vegas, was the union unwilling to do the kind of organizing she advocates, or unable, because it lacked the resources? 

A Collective Bargain suffers from the same problem. This is a somewhat scattershot book, but its core argument is that unions can only win if they use “the key leveraging mechanism of unions,” the strike and the threat of the strike (9).  Throughout the book, McAlevey hammers home the point that building a “lasting supermajority of workers” (159) is the key to victory.  Once again, McAlevey focuses on one part of the story, ignoring other important factors that are hiding in plain sight.

McAlevey tells a number of good stories, but two of them stand out. One is an account of a campaign McAlevey herself led, helping the Pennsylvania Associations of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) win a series of victories in Philadelphia. The other is an account of the buildup to the Los Angeles teachers strike of 2019. Both stories are well told, and organizers of all kinds would be well served to read them.  

In each case, McAlevey reiterates that it was these unions’ ability to demonstrate overwhelming majority support that mattered. Escalating pressure tactics, McAlevey rightly reminds us, aren’t just important for the impact they have on the boss ⁠— they are tests of the union’s strength.  It’s just as important that members see their power as it is for the boss to see it. And demonstrating that you have the power to strike is often the thing that prevents it from happening. The workers in McAlevey’s PASNAP campaign never had to walk the picket line ⁠— the boss knew the union was ready to walk, and that was enough.

As with Raising Expectations, however, it’s the parts of the story that McAlevey leaves out that cause me to question her argument. Philadelphia and Los Angeles are two of the most heavily-unionized urban areas in the country. Both are full of political figures willing and able ⁠— with the right pressure ⁠— to stand with unions and support their militancy. 

Erik Loomis’s recent A History of America in Ten Strikes makes the argument that American unions have only been successful when political leaders have been willing to support them. The victorious Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37 would have been yet another story of failure if Michigan Governor Frank Murphy hadn’t refused to send in the National Guard to shoot down the strikers. By contrast, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO) stared down Nixon, Ford, and Carter, but using the same playbook on the hardline Reagan administration led to one of labor’s biggest disasters.

In both the campaigns McAlevey chronicles, outside political support and labor allies are as important as any other factor. The Mayor of Los Angeles helped settle the teachers’ strike. Key state senators in Pennsylvania went on the record in support of PASNAP’s campaign, and the union was also able to get hospital trustees ⁠— who lived and socialized in Philadelphia’s Democratic Party and related orbits ⁠— to contact the CEO and push for a settlement.

McAlevey would surely counter that the workers made this possible. If they had not been able to come together and demonstrate their solidarity and power, no politician in the world would have spent the political capital to save them. And there’s truth there. But this particular chicken-and-egg question looks reasonable from all directions: How much did PASNAP’s organizing successes depend upon workers knowing there were political powers ready to come to their aid? How much came from there being a vibrant labor community, with examples of union success, from which the workers could draw hope and raise their expectations?

The reality is that McAlevey’s prescription doesn’t guarantee success. She accidentally says as much in her conclusion, when she asserts that “we must put the pedal to the metal on the kind of supermajority strikes that began in West Virginia in 2018” (245).  No one will deny that the West Virginia educator strikes of 2018 were amazing and inspiring, but it’s not at all clear that they have led to any structural change, and on balance the 5% raise they won feels… anticlimactic. Attempts to unseat anti-union state legislators in the 2018 elections were uniformly unsuccessful. The cost of health insurance for West Virginia school employees, while held in place for a couple of years because of the strikes, is still terrible. There is no sign that West Virginia, as a whole, is experiencing a labor renaissance. It is a useful natural experiment ⁠— even when 100% of the workers in an industry strike across an entire state, the gains can be fleeting. Clearly supermajority strikes, alone, won’t always get the job done.

Unionball

This leaves me with the strong impression that McAlevey’s stories of success, while powerful reading and worth your time for the lessons they impart, don’t prove all that much. Unions might win when they have full member power on board. This isn’t a particularly novel idea. As to how unions might develop full member power, the closest McAlevey comes is when she talks about the need to hire “staff skilled in the science of effective struggle.” 

Science?

This is the nub of the problem: Labor organizers of all kinds are certain that their approach for how to do things isn’t just a good idea or something to work on but close to the absolute truth. There is a near-universal conviction in the labor world that there are right answers that can be used, even though there is considerable disagreement over what constitutes the right answer.

McAlevey, for example, opens her chapter on the Pennsylvania nurses’ struggle by distinguishing between “hot shop” organizing, where unions pick their organizing targets based on wherever there seems the greatest current appetite for organizing, and “strategic sectoral or geographic organizing,” where unions pick targets that they think will build the most power. McAlevey is downright contemptuous of unions that do hot shop organizing: They are “clueless," and they “couldn’t tell you what” good organizing was. 

Missing from McAlevey’s broadside against clueless hot-shop organizing is any evidence or data to back up her assertions, for the simple reason that none exists. Nobody has any idea if hot shop organizing is fundamentally different from, better or worse than, or more or less common than strategic sectoral organizing. Heck, ask ten organizers just to define the difference between the two concepts, and you’ll get a minimum of eleven answers.

I actually tried this once. Back in 2016 I created an online “Survey of Union Practitioners” that eventually reached about 350 people. I asked a series of questions about organizing, forcing people to pick between two binaries. Which is better: hot shop organizing or strategic targeting? Can anyone be an organizer or only those with special talents and training? Is social media a new way to organize or just the same old thing? Do people join unions based on their own conditions and experiences or because a good organizer convinced them?

I never once got close to unanimity on any of the questions. To be clear, this wasn’t a scientific survey or a representative sample of answers ⁠— it was friends of friends passing an email link around. But I suspect its findings are nevertheless indicative of something ⁠— there is no clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Tell the Bosses We’re Coming opens with the closest thing the labor movement has come to figuring out “what it takes to win” (15), the massive 1998-99 project Cornell professor Kate Bronfenbrenner and others undertook to study the tactics and strategies used in more than 400 NLRB elections. Bronfenbrenner’s study (and two earlier studies she undertook in the 1980s and early 1990s, also often ignored) is the most thorough investigation to date of how unions win representation elections.

But however important and trailblazing that research was (and it was both), its limitations show how little we know. It was a study only of campaigns that made it to NLRB elections, excluding the public sector completely. It also excluded any campaign that stopped before an election, either because the union abandoned the organizing effort or recognition was obtained via card check or some other non-election method. It relied upon the self-reported memories of organizers, who quite understandably might have been inclined to remember victories more fondly than defeats, and it doesn’t have any means of fact-checking their claims. It doesn’t always connect the organizing campaign to a contract campaign, so we don’t know what kind of contract came out of the campaign.

And, the kicker: Bronfenbrenner’s work is more than two decades old. What it should have been, and what I have no doubt Bronfenbrenner wanted it to be, was the beginning of a more serious effort to look at how unions do what unions do. Instead, it’s still the gold standard.

The sheer volume of what we don’t know is staggering. Here’s a small sampling:

• We don’t know where existing unions are. The patchwork of federal and state laws means that no government entity has a comprehensive list of union worksites and neither do unions themselves. The new project started by the Bargaining for the Common Good network to track contract expirations around the country is a marvelous endeavor, but its mere existence shows how little we know. As many others have noted, it’s truly mind-boggling that no part of the American labor movement has taken on this task before now. What kind of labor movement goes nine decades in its modern form without bothering to think about keeping track of where unions are?

• We don’t know how to measure the quality of contract settlements. Every contract ever negotiated has had some people saying it was a brilliant success and others saying it was a sellout to the boss. We have no way to be sure. The variables in a contract — across-the-board raises versus raises weighted to those who make less, intricate pension systems, complicated insurance plans, and so on — make apples-to-apples comparisons across even a single industry difficult and comparisons across industries, or across different parts of the country, nearly impossible. We don’t know what wins look like, or, to put it another way, we have no common basis for assessing whether something was a win. 

• We can’t agree on basic things like how to assess workers’ commitment to the union or their readiness to take action. An old friend and I have had a running argument for twenty years or more about whether a proper assessment scale for measuring a worker’s support of the union or their militancy is 0 to 4 or 0 to 5. Each of us could produce volumes about why we are right, but what’s really amazing is that there’s no uniform answer to this. There’s no agreement on what counts as a real commitment from a worker or what the “shelf life” of such a commitment is. There’s no agreement on the best structure of an organizing conversation. There’s no agreement on whether, all things being equal, it’s better to send organizers out in pairs, knowing you will talk to fewer workers but maybe have better conversations, or send organizers out singly to cover the most ground.

• We don’t know why some workers step up and others don’t. You can take two workplaces with nearly identical characteristics; one turns into a union powerhouse and the other a dud. At best, we have anecdotal guesses, nothing more. In this, the labor movement needs to point the blame squarely at itself and its disengagement with the academic world. There is a lot of really interesting research into why some workers commit to union activism and others don’t. Jack Fiorito at Florida State University, for example, has authored or co-authored a half-dozen papers on the relationships between union membership and union activism. Not only are few in labor aware of his work, almost no one is reaching out to him and his many co-authors for internal research. In addition to Fiorito’s work on union commitment, folks like Rebecca Givan at Rutgers; Cedric de Leon, Eve Weinbaum, and the others at the Labor Studies program at UMass-Amherst; and Daisy Rooks at the University of Montana have produced fascinating work on all kinds of subjects related to union practices, but their work is little-known in the wider labor world. The comparison with electoral work is telling. As Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab shows, political parties have poured time and money into figuring out the most effective ways to motivate voters. Unions use the results of that work in their own electoral efforts but have not shown interest in applying similar methods to understanding how unions do what they do.

• We don’t know how best to allocate our resources. As I noted, McAlevey’s great successes in Las Vegas were partly due to SEIU pouring bargeloads of cash into the organizing there, but we can’t really be sure how direct the relationship is between the money and the organizing. Andrew Martin at Ohio State University has done some fascinating research trying to connect union spending as reported on LM-2 reports with organizing activity. While his data is far from complete and his conclusions necessarily tentative, there clearly is information out there to be had.

• Last but not least, we don’t know if there are answers to many of these unknowns. Take organizer training: What training makes an organizer effective? Does training matter at all to their effectiveness? If you think about how much time and money we spend on training organizers, it sure would be nice to know if it works, but we don’t even know if that’s a question that has a semi-universal answer or if the only answer is, “it all depends on the circumstances.”

There are many reasons we don’t know the answers to these questions and ones like them. A critical one, surely, is the lack of trust across unions. Unions put up a brave front when communicating with other unions. They don’t talk in detail about successes, and they say nothing about failures. Chris Brooks of Labor Notes wrote a series of news stories about the UAW’s organizing failures in Mississippi and Tennessee in recent years, but the UAW itself has said next to nothing publicly about what went right and what went wrong. How can we learn from your mistakes if we don’t know what they are?

But perhaps the single most important reason the labor movement knows so little is that we don’t ask. If you click over to unionjobs.com you’ll find plenty of jobs that have the title “Researcher.” Nearly all of them are outward-facing. Your job is researching employers, following financial flows, mapping shareholder networks, and so on. Important and necessary work.  

You’ll look in vain for jobs that call for researching and analyzing what the union itself is doing. Talk to organizers, and they’ll all tell you that post-campaign debriefings, when they exist, are a joke. There are no “lessons learned” meetings that go into a level of detail greater than an article in Dissent.  

What we do get are stories like the ones in A Collective Bargain. Valuable, often fun, sometimes infuriating, these stories do nothing to help us understand what actually works, what doesn’t work, and how to tell the difference.

And what we get are great plans like the ones in Tell the Bosses We’re Coming, but no clear idea of how such plans would be enacted, let alone who is responsible for enacting them.

C.S. Lewis said that when one reads a new book, one should also revisit an old one. In that vein, I suggest the most useful companion volume to Tell the Bosses We’re Coming and A Collective Bargain is Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

Moneyball is perhaps best known for chronicling the group of people who brought intensive statistical analysis to modern sports, especially baseball, a development that many regard with trepidation bordering on hatred. It’s not practical or desirable to turn the labor movement into a mathematical exercise. But reading Moneyball as an organizer, you’ll see it’s not really about statistics. Moneyball is about an American institution started in the nineteenth century and developed into its modern form between the World Wars, primarily in the large industrial centers of New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and the Midwest. Its height of power, fame, and influence was probably the 1950s. A defining characteristic was institutionalized racism that has largely, but not completely, been overcome.

In Moneyball, the people in charge of baseball got there without any formal credentialing process — there is no license you can have or test you can take to prove you are good at it. Promotion to a higher level within the institution is based on perceived success at the previous level, as well as an ability to demonstrate to the existing leadership that you share their thinking about how things should be done. Therefore, the primary means of knowledge transfer is generational — people learn the lessons of those who have gone before. Because so many factors go into success or failure, quite often the criteria by which one is judged is the degree to which one adheres to the conventional wisdom’s understanding of how things ought to be done; those who do things “the way you’re supposed to” are forgiven and their failures blamed on external factors outside their control.

Moneyball is the story of people who looked at this institution and realized that many of the truisms they had taken for granted had gone unexamined, unchallenged, and unproven. These people recognized that if you simply stopped and asked yourself what you really knew to be true — and what you didn’t know at all — you might find out that what you were doing was wrong all along.

It’s a story, therefore, from which we in the American labor movement might learn useful lessons.