Modified slightly from my essay, “Holding the Fort, Birthing a New World – or Why Labor Unions Matter” with permission of the editors and publisher of How Win Win: Energizing Strategies, Voters, and Agendas - I strongly recommend picking up your own copy of this excellent compendium. Find my co-contribotors here: https://emergencyelection.org
Holding the Fort, Birthing a New World – or why labor unions matter even more than you think
Ben Manski
I have been asked to deliver a kind of monologue on the role of labor unions in the search for a good society. I'll begin by stating that I’ve been a union member for 35 years. I've been active in unions as a rank-and-file member, as a steward, as an officer, and as support staff, in five different union locals in the AFT, NEA, and UAW as well as in the IWW. Members of my family have been involved in unions for at least a century. I’ve never known a time when unions were not a part of my life, and so I find it difficult to imagine a social movement from which unions are absent.
What I know and see is that labor unions are vital to two tasks in this long period in which the world system is in terminal crisis. Unions are capable of defending the republican promise of a government of the people and for the people. And unions are increasingly providing leadership in bringing government by the people – democracy – into our economy and into our relationships with the rest of nature. To paraphrase two legendary labor songs, unions today can both “Hold the Fort” and, at the same time, help “bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.”
I see the power of today’s union movement all around me. But even so, others don’t. A common view is shaped by the question of how many workers belong to unions today as opposed to 80 years ago. This is often described as the problem of union density, and it goes like this: because the percentage of workers who belong to labor unions in the U.S. has hit somewhere between 10 and 11% of the formal workforce, down from a height of more than 30% a couple of generations ago, unions are no longer able to force the boss class to compromise.
That argument has a lot to it. It is certainly the case that historically, in the mid-20th century, unions were foundational for the broader social movement in the United States. The strength of union organizations and the resources they were able to mobilize meant that all kinds of other possibilities emerged far beyond factory walls and union halls. The bosses had to come to the table to strike bargains with working people – bargains that went by names like “The New Deal” and “The Great Society.” Those bargains were the bargains that people of my parents’ generation and their parents’ generation grew up with, and they treated those bargains as normal.
For this reason, as unions lost membership precipitously at the end of the 20th century, and as unions were driven out of their close relationships with government agencies and the managers of our major institutions, many people of the 1930s and 1960s generations concluded that this meant that the labor movement was no longer going to be as central as it had been to the project of social change. For many of them, this meant that the possibility of the United States becoming some form of a social democracy – something that not only seemed possible in the late 1970s but which I believe really was (for better or for worse) possible – was no longer on the table. What we’ve seen since the 1970s is that the earlier normalcy of the social contract between capital and labor has proven to have been the exception in American history. The Cold War period was an aberration, not the rule. Thus, I agree that the decline in union membership means that unions will not play the same role they might have played when I was born.
But having said that, it remains true that, as they were prior to the Cold War period, unions are incredibly important organizations for achieving real democracy.
Let’s remember, to begin with, that it was in the periods in which unions were illegal and in which violence against organized workers was at its greatest level – replete with massacres, mass deportations, blacklists, and mass imprisonment of labor activists – that the labor movement built and wielded its greatest power. The right to vote, municipal home rule, public education, direct election of U.S. Senators, direct legislation, social security, and a host of workplace safety, child labor, working hour, wage, and other economic justice laws were won by a labor movement facing what the novelist Jack London called “The Iron Heel” of the capitalist state.
Today, as we're in a period in which (at least for the moment) we're not experiencing anything close to those levels of repression, unions are approaching levels of creativity, dynamism, and inclusivity more similar to the leading edges of the labor movement more than a century ago than to the unions of the Cold War period. We are seeing again what the United Farm Workers and Marshall Ganz have taught us about strategic capacity: It’s not the resources that unions hoard that make them powerful, it’s their resourcefulness in what they do that makes unions powerful.
Today we are seeing the fruits of a union reform movement that began in the 1970s, just as union membership was beginning to collapse. That movement struggled with the ossified and often corrupt union bureaucracies of the past, fought to democratize unions, and led the way toward a union movement that advocates and strikes for all working people regardless of gender, sexual ity, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, ability, economic sector, or location in the world system. That movement has worked to make unions social again: to build unions that fight for society, not just their members.
Since the late 1990s, we’ve been seeing signs of the reform movement’s success. We saw it with the fight against NAFTA, the UPS Strike of 1997, and the Seattle Uprising against the World Trade Organization. We saw it with the May Day “Day Without an Immigrant” in 2006 and the participation of many unions in the immigrant rights and antiwar movements of the 2000s. We saw it again on a massive scale with the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011, and then the participation of unions in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere. We saw unions grappling with police brutality and white supremacy and deciding what side they were on as tens of millions declared that Black Lives Matter. We saw general strikes and wildcat strikes in public education from Chicago to California and West Virginia to Oklahoma. We saw the railroad unions prepare for a national strike to demand public ownership of the railroads. And this past year, we’ve seen a new UAW promising to “Unite All Workers for Democracy,” winning massive strikes, organizing auto workers across the South, and inspiring nearly 5,000 union activists gathered at the latest Labor Notes conference in Chicago.
This is a very different union movement than that of my parents’ generation. Popular support for unions has doubled to 70% compared to what it was when they were my age. How could this movement not fill me with optimism? Yes, union density is down. But union power is up.
Power to do what? I’ll start to address that by taking on another knock on union power. It’s often pointed out that union density would be much lower were it not for the growth of unions in the public sector. This criticism reminds me of Republican staffers in my home state of Wisconsin who would claim that “if it weren’t for Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin would be a conservative state.” Putting aside the fact that Wisconsin is filled with progressive rural communities, not just urban ones, my response was always, “Madison and Milwaukee couldn’t exist anywhere other than Wisconsin.” The same holds true for the public sector: The U.S. has a public sector, needs a public sector, and wouldn’t be the U.S. without a public sector.
Beyond this and more to the point: The fact that unions have so much power in the public sector matters because it is public institutions that we rely on for so many of the strategies for achieving economic and political democracy in this country. For example, if you're working to build community wealth by bringing together major anchor institutions to deploy their resources to develop local economic systems filled with worker-owned businesses, cooperatives, community services, land trusts, social housing, local exchange, and the like, then you are relying on institutions that are unionized. Whether we’re talking about Richmond, Virginia, Richmond, Indiana, or Richmond, California, unions matter in local governments, hospitals, universities, and the other major institutions that anchor economic development. This means that unions in general, and public sector unions in particular, matter for community wealth building.
Another place where unions matter is in building cooperatives. This is new, or at least, new in a back-to-the-future kind of way. Just as the railroad
and farmers’ unions of Eugene V. Debs’ day dreamed of a North American “Cooperative Commonwealth,” today the union movement is finally getting past its 20th century addiction to state-sponsored collective bargaining and beginning to back worker and community ownership. I’d seen glimmers of this shift in various places in recent years. But we saw evidence for this change all over the place at the Labor Notes 2024 conference, with case after case of electrical workers, carpenters, pipefitters, auto workers, nurses, machinists, professors, railroaders – you name it – building hybrid union cooperatives or mobilizing for public ownership. This trend is especially strong among those working to speed the transition to renewable energy and a climate-safe future.1 As The New Republic’s Katie Myers recently wrote, “UAW’s Latest Labor Victory Is a Huge Climate Win, Too.”2
This is not happenstance. It’s happening because of a lot of smart, hard work that people of different backgrounds and generations in unions, the environmental movement, and community organizations have done together. Let’s give a special shout-out to the Labor Network for Sustainability and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Those folks are doing incredible work.
Now, I have spoken in general terms, with a kind of overview. Let me begin to close with a list of examples worth further exploration. To start, I'll return to Railroad Workers United and the recent votes to authorize a national railroad strike. Union reformers within the rail sector, coordinated across 13 different unions by Railroad Workers United, building over decades, were successful not only in bringing all of their unions together to vote to strike, but also in coming together around the demand for public ownership of the railroads. Congress and Biden stepped in to outlaw the strike. But the railroaders’ campaign for public ownership is ongoing. I expect it will continue to resonate across other sectors of American society in a significant way.
In the energy sector, there are a number of innovative examples of IBEW union locals moving forward for renewable energy. In Wisconsin, for example, utilities signed on with IBEW, North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters, the Wisconsin Laborers’ District Council, and the Wisconsin Operating Engineers 139, to work on an anticipated 100 new renewable energy projects in the coming decade. These will generate and store some 16 gigawatts of energy annually.3 In the Southwest, IBEW signed a project labor agreement to build a $1.3 billion, 580-mile transmission that will connect 3.5 gigawatts of wind power to communities across the region.4 In the Northeast, in Massachusetts and New York, you find the IBEW coming to terms with public ownership and energy alternatives.5
At the level of organizational innovation and creating new economic relationships, I refer readers to Rebecca Lurie and Bernadette Fitzsimons’s excellent “A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions.”6 In it, readers and activists will find accounts and analysis of some of the inspiring work that today’s unions are involved with. One case they document is that of Coop Dayton, a nonprofit formed to address food apartheid. Its earliest
investments came from labor unions. Their support included providing a union staffer dedicated to devoting her efforts to forming a coop. Labor movement support also helped mobilize the public to get local governments behind the coop.
In another exciting example, rank-and-file members of IBEW Local 3 formed the People’s Choice Communications Cooperative (PCCC), a multistakeholder coop uniting workers, consumers, and under-resourced communities. They seized the restructuring of the cable industry as an opportunity to build their coop. When an expanded Time-Warner Cable corporation was acquired and rebranded as part of Spectrum Cable in 2017, unionized workers came under attack, with cuts to their healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. Moreover, the company refused to bargain in good faith. More than 1,800 unionized technicians went on strike. The company replaced the striking workers and eventually, in 2022, the five-year-long strike was officially called off. However, the workers went on to form a cooperative offering internet connectivity to low-income communities at a critical time: during the pandemic. While PCCC has had mixed results and had to deal with (often corrupt) competition from the for-profit corporate sector for access to public housing contracts, it nonetheless demonstrates a new face of labor – one for community empowerment and cutting across the worker-consumer divide.
In their work, Lurie and Fitzsimmons identify seven key, though not always obvious, elements that labor unions bring to the cooperative and economic justice movement. Foremost among these is an “openness to innovative organizing” (which to me also means democracy) – a readiness to engage new voices within the union or the broader community. Secondly, unions have professional expertise and paid staff. A third element is that unions have facilities, physical spaces, and communications that are vital but often lacking in under-resourced communities. Fourth, unions have training funds; under some circumstances, these can be leveraged to access federal and state workforce development funds. A fifth element is access to capital that can leverage access to financial institutions for the benefit of communities. In their routine operations, trade unions develop expertise in a sixth element – negotiations. This too can be deployed to assist communities and cooperatives. The seventh element involves the awareness that unions develop as they organize, expand, and bargain, about the socioeconomic sector in which they operate; this kind of sectoral analysis of everything from supply chains to the environmental context to legislative politics can benefit workers in coops and the broader community.
All in all, it is the resourcefulness of unions in what they do, not the resources that they hoard, that makes them powerful. Forging a new compromise with the bosses? Yes, maybe that’s off the table. Instead, unions are DIYing it – doing it themselves – and in the process, playing a vital role in making possible a next system beyond the bosses.
Maybe that’s just too much happy talk for some? Okay, I’ll humor you.
For another system to be possible, it must not only be born but also live long enough to become resilient. This is where “holding the fort” comes in. Unions today are by far the strongest organizations in the United States capable of defending voting rights and the promise of democratic elections. They have shown time and again that they can bring numbers, organization, discipline, solidarity, and technical expertise into the fray. No other social movement organizations come remotely close.
Now let’s turn to our current moment. At the beginning of this decisive decade, the Republic was preserved in a shocking way. It survived because on January 6, 2021, civic republicanism proved to be alive in the U.S. armed forces. Officers and enlisted personnel both refused to participate in a fascist coup. In the final analysis, nothing else stood in the way. If in 2024 the U.S. military remains the last bastion against a repeat of January 6, the prospects for a next system that’s better than our current one become much worse.
During the American Revolution, the emergence of a professional military was regarded as “the bane of liberty.” I’m glad that civic honor and a sense of republicanism are alive in the U.S. military. But today’s labor unions are a much better bet if we’re to hold the fort long enough for new forms of democracy to gain strength.
Union density may be down, but union power? It may be here just when it’s most needed.
Notes
1 “2024 Labor Notes Conference: April 19–21,” Labor Notes, November 8, 2023, https://labornotes.org/2024.
2 April 28, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/180958/uaw-volkswagen-chatta- nooga-just-transition.
3 Erik Gunn, “Wisconsin Electric Utilities Sign on to Union Labor for Clean Energy Projects • Wisconsin Examiner,” Wisconsin Examiner (blog), March 24, 2024, https://wisconsinexaminer.com/briefs/wisconsin-electric-utilities-sign-on-to-union-labor-for-clean-energy-projects/.
4 Matt Spence, “IBEW Signs Agreement for Largest Renewable Energy Project in North American History,” IBEW Media Center, December 13, 2023, https://ibeworg/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2312/RenewableEnergyProject.
5 See A.J. Ruther in this collection on Public Power in New York.
6 Rebecca Lurie and Bernadette King Fitzsimmons, A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions (New York: The Community and Worker Ownership Project at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, Autumn 2021), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pl7154R4_XHY3qTzRlPxpHPS30kK9b-e/view.