Top Quotes: “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age” — Jane McAlevey
Introduction
“What is almost never attempted is the absolutely essential corollary: a parallel careful, methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power structures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the fight.”
“My hypothesis is threefold. First, the reason that progressives have experienced a four-decade decline in the United States is because of a significant and long-term shift away from deep organizing and toward shallow mobilizing. Second, the split between “labor” and “social movement” has hampered what little organizing has been done. Together, these two trends help account for the failure of unions and progressive politics, the ongoing shrinking of the public sphere, and unabashed rule by the worst and greediest corporate interests.”
“Liberals and most progressives don’t do a full power-structure analysis because, consciously or not, they accept the kind of elite theory of power that Mills popularized. They assume elites will always rule. At best, they debate how to replace a very naughty elite with a “better” elite, one they “can work with,” who wants workers to have enough money to shop the CEOs out of each crisis they create, who will give them a raise that they will spend on consuming goods they probably don’t need. The search for these more friendly elites frames the imagination of liberals and progressives. An elite theory of power for well-intentioned liberals leads to the advocacy model; an elite theory of power for people further left than liberals – progressives.”
“People participate to the degree they understand – but they also understand to the degree they participate. It’s dialectical. Power-structure analysis is the mechanism that enables ordinary people to understand their potential power and participate meaningfully in making strategy. When people understand the strategy because they helped make it, they will be invested for the long haul, sustained and propelled to achieve more meaningful wins.”
“Global and regional trade accords also give multinational corporations the right to buy land anywhere in almost any country, and new corporate landlords have forcibly evicted or cheaply bought off millions of people from self-sustaining plots of land, directly contributing to a huge rise in immigration into the United States and Europe.”
“Mobilizing is a substantial improvement over advocacy, because it brings large numbers of people to the fight. However, too often they are the same people: dedicated activists who show up over and over at every meeting and rally for all good causes, but without the full mass of their coworkers or community behind them. This is because a professional staff directs, manipulates, and controls the mobilization; the staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear – enough for a photo good enough to tweet and maybe generate earned media. The committed activists in the photo have had no part in developing a power analysis; they aren’t informed about that or the resulting strategy, but they dutifully show up at protests that rarely matter to power holders.
The third approach, organizing, places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all – that’s the point of organizing. In the organizing approach, specific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved. The organizing approach relies on mass negotiations to win, rather than the closed-door deal making typical of both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.
In unions and SMOs in the United States today, advocacy and, especially, mobilizing prevail. This is the main reason why modern movements have not replicated the kinds of gains achieved by the earlier labor and civil rights movements.”
“A critical factor in the failure of the union revitalization effort after 1995 has been the strategic choice made by key leaders of New Labor to move away from workers and the workplace. Because of adverse labor laws and unfriendly court rulings, these leaders decided they could no longer win traditional union elections. They shifted their strategy to securing so-called card-check and neutrality deals and fair election procedure accords. with employers. Such agreements are anchored in a core idea: getting the employers to stop fighting unionization. New Labor unions invented new mechanisms for what they deemed carrots and sticks. Carrots included rewarding corporations by helping them increase their government subsidies and decrease their taxes, and also promising to cede control of the workplace and instead focus narrowly on wages and material benefits. If these carrots failed, there was the stick: the union’s ability to impose potential costs on the employer. This might be done through a “corporate campaign,” including publicity offensives against the employer’s brand and stockholder actions (“brand damage”); by lobbying to have various public subsidies that flow into the so-called private sector decreased or cut off; by adding lawyers to press for environmental and other reviews; or by delaying or preventing zoning changes. Many of these tactics rely on politics, and so unions also invested more money in politics – not politics as in voters-to-the-polls, but politics as in million-dollar check writing and backroom “gotcha” deals.
Corporate collaboration isn’t new, but when the labor-run corporate campaigns first developed in the 1970s as a response to the degeneration of worker protections under U.S. labor law, they were designed to complement worker organizing. By the early years of the new millennium, they had all but replaced it. The strategy of weakening employer opposition to union organization through corporate campaigns made employers – not workers or their communities – the primary focus of New Labor’s energy. Today, corporate campaigns continue to locate the fight in the economic arena by threatening to disrupt profit making, but not through workers withholding their labor. Instead, a new army of college-educated professional union staff bypass the strike and devise other tactics to attack the employer’s bottom line. New Labor’s overreliance on corporate campaigns has resulted in a war waged between labor professionals and business elites. Workers are no longer essential to their own liberation. New Labor’s leaders, many of whom self-identify and are seen as progressives outside the union sector itself, have rationalized “carrots” and accords reached with big business that have stripped workers and their communities of the tools to defend themselves against their employers.”
“The loss of the strength gained through whole worker organizing was one serious consequence of the alliance of business unionism with McCarthyism, which drove most organizers skilled in the CIO-era method out of the labor movement. Today, like World War II veterans, many CIO veterans have died, leaving few to tell their war stories. On the heels of the McCarthy era, union leaders adopted an increasingly accommodationist strategy that for a few decades achieved material gains and union security, but at the price of surrendering the option to strike and, often, all other real rights on the shop floor. Once the production-crippling strike weapon was abandoned, union leaders no longer saw a need to build a strong worksite-based organization among a majority of workers – one powerful enough that a majority decides to walk off the job, united, together, with common goals. New Labor doubled down on strategies that involved fewer and fewer workers, reinforcing instead of challenging the mistakes of the generation of leaders they replaced. As a result, wage increases and improvements in working conditions have come to a halt.”
“I explore a group that organizes the working class as a class, but is not itself a union. Make the Road New York is a social-movement organization that is also a worker center, but it locates the worker center inside an organization that has managed to come as close to a modern union as any nonunion group in the United States today. With over 155 full-time staff, the organization combines direct services, advocacy, and mobilizing into a tight blend, and it has enjoyed more success than most similarly situated groups. Interestingly, many of the group’s specific legislative victories, as well as their workplace efforts, largely rely on the continued strength of New York City’s unions. While their work is impressive, it raises a fundamental question of whether groups like this can continue producing wins if the unions they rely on — which exist as key players in only a handful of states — get weaker.”
“Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. If we are surprised at what these people accomplished, our surprise may be a commentary on the angle of vision from which we view them. That same angle of vision may make it difficult to see that of the gifts they brought to the making of the movement, courage may have been the least.”
“People buying a car don’t meet and confer with the workers whose hands create it; they don’t walk up and down the assembly line insisting that a tweak this way or that might make a better ride. But parents picking their kids up from school often meet with the people who spend more waking hours with their kids than they do: the educators who are helping their children prepare intellectually and socially for adulthood. And parents participate in the educators’ production process, attending meetings and volunteering in the classroom. Similarly, nurses and other health-care workers charged with repairing the victim of a car crash are in constant contact with the family, who are also allowed in the workplace, that is, the patient’s hospital room. The case studies in the following chapters are filled with evidence that these mostly female, multiracial service workers are as capable of building powerful organizations as they are of building a child’s mind or rebuilding a patient’s body. In fact, they are among the only workers today engaging in production-shuttering strikes. Their organic ties to the broader community form the potential strategic wedge needed to leverage the kind of power American workers haven’t had for decades.”
“This book offers case evidence that those who rely more on the CIO-era methodology — a bottom-up model in which workers have primary agency and are understood to be their own lever of liberation — can also win life-altering improvements. They can do it by systematically structuring their many strong connections — family, religious groups, sports teams, hunting clubs — into their campaigns. That a more organic relationship with the public exists for some workers, such as mission-driven service workers, doesn’t mean that only they should tether their quality of life to that of the broader community. All workers, whether their shop floor is a call center or a factory, can tell the story of their overstressed work situation — ordinarily not seen by the consumer, but certainly understood by the rest of the working class. Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing.
Service workers tend to be less structurally powerful economically in the workplace than the mostly male workers of the CIO era, because it is easier to replace them and because when they do strike, not only the employer but also the consumer immediately feels the repercussions of their collective action. But they are more structurally powerful when it comes to engaging their community in a fight. For today’s service workers to restore the strike, still the most effective lever available to the working class, the additional power source they need is not a corporate campaign or funds for bigger political donations, but rather a more systematic way to merge workplace and non-workplace issues. There is enormous value to this approach, starting with the political education it offers. Plenty of CEOs whose workplace policies hurt workers on the job also serve on local and regional boards, commissions, and task forces whose public policies hurt the same workers at home and in their neighborhoods — for example, by promoting development schemes that displace working-class renters and homeowners and the shopkeepers they rely on. Workers who understand how corporate power is wielded both in the workplace and outside it can strengthen themselves in both spheres and carry the fight into both, tapping their social and community networks, including key people with access and influence, such as religious leaders.”
“Employer opposition in those days included physical attacks against workers, and even the strategic use of murder, which ought to help put today’s employer offensives in perspective.”
“Other methods of drawing in new members included music, and “social affairs such as smokers, boxing matches, card parties, dances, picnics, various sports, etc.” involving the workers and their wives. The radicals in the CIO understood that workers were embedded in an array of important workplace and non-workplace networks, all of which could be best accessed — and, for organizing on a mass scale, only accessed — by the workers themselves.””
Chicago Teachers
“ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2012, CHICAGO’S teachers walked off the job in the largest strike of the new millennium. Against the backdrop of a well-funded effort at the national and local level to demonize teachers and their unions as authors of the ills of public education, the union enjoyed unprecedented backing from parents, students, and the broader Chicago community. Over nine days, teachers and their supporters in the community trounced one of the best-known big-city mayors in the country, former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. With the parents of more than 400,000 school-age kids scrambling to keep up with their own jobs and schedules and a mayor appealing to the parents in paid ads and press conferences to turn against the teachers, the teachers sustained majority support throughout the strike. Not only that: Two years later, two major polls found that the head of the Chicago Teachers Union was significantly more popular than the mayor.”
“CORE members held a convention and began to solidify their structure. They set affordable dues: $35 per person per year. They ratified a mission statement. And they continued attending CPS board meetings. They began discussing the possibility of filing a discrimination charge against the CPS administration based on the fact that most of the teachers being impacted by the closures were black. The number of African-American teachers was declining rapidly as the turnaround schools hired Teach for America recruits and younger teachers, changing the demographics of Chicago’s teaching force, bringing down the pay scale, and, perhaps most importantly, rupturing the tradition of teachers living in the neighborhoods where they taught.
By June, CORE had decided to file a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Education Commission (EEOC). Though this challenge would later be dismissed, the organizing and media around the EEOC complaint increased CORE’s base among black teachers and helped CORE build a relationship with the union’s black caucus. The EEOC complaint and several other school and teaching profession-specific fights that CORE led during the summer of 2009 were part of CORE’s ever-expanding reach into all aspects of the union, pushing beyond the school-closings battles.”
“From September 10 through September 18, the Chicago Teachers Union closed the Chicago schools, under a limpid sky. Schmidt noted gleefully, “God gave us nine of the most perfect-weather days in Chicago history!” On day one of the strike, an estimated 35,000 teachers and their allies marched through the heart of Chicago, effectively shutting not just the schools but the entire downtown and marking the largest rally in the city since McCarthyism first chilled the voice of Chicago labor. Not since the declaration of the end of World War Il had Chicagoans showed up in such force to let their voices be heard. Each day, the teachers would picket their schools, then join together in downtown marches. Three days into the strike, the CPS management had consolidated 600 schools into 120 designated cluster schools, desperately trying to keep enough classes open to reduce the number of parents demanding that they settle with the teachers. Then the teachers’ union and their allies consolidated their pickets too, sending them only to the cluster schools, maintaining strong lines during the school day wherever the CPS tried to keep classes open, before moving downtown for daily direct actions. Teachers at almost every consolidated picket line felt the validation of the parent committees, many of which were even cooking meals for them, keeping the picket lines well fed during their long school-day vigils.”
“The mayor did win a longer school day, but the union exacted a pay raise in exchange. And on Emanuel’s second major objective, merit pay, the union defeated him, maintaining the system of raises based on years of service (called steps) and educational skills (called lanes). Finally, the mayor was defeated in his attempt to gut tenure.
It had been a defensive fight for the teachers’ union, and defend they had. Throughout the strike, parents and students had stood arm-in-arm with them, squaring off against the man some called the bully-in-chief. Emanuel’s real objective had been to destroy the teachers’ union, and instead he had unified a group of workers who had been suffering insults for years — on top of a ferocious attack on their profession and on the reason most teachers teach: their kids.”
The Slaughterhouse
“In 2008, in the county’s tiny town of Tar Heel, 5,000 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork factory voted to form a union with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It was the single largest private-sector union victory of the new millennium. And it happened in the South, in the state with the lowest rate of union membership in the entire country: 3 percent. The new, ratified contract not only guaranteed a $15-an-hour wage but also paid sick leave, paid vacation, health care, retirement benefits, overtime pay, guaranteed minimum work hours, job security through a “just cause” provision, and tools to remedy dangerous working conditions. The wage alone far outranks Washington’s; given the dollar’s buying power in Bladen County, King County workers would have to earn $26.40 an hour to equal it.
Because the union signed a gag order as part of the final deal to reach a fair union election process, little has been said or written about the campaign since the workers won it, depriving other Southern workers of a very important example of how labor can win in the new millennium in the many manufacturing plants that have moved to the region.”
“The pork plant in Tar Heel opened for production in 1992. Today, 32,000 hogs a day are slaughtered and processed in this single plant. Five thousand workers staff departments with names like the Kill Floor, the Gas Chamber, and the Hanging and Rehanging Rooms. Meat production is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.”
“They opened up a small worker center, aimed mainly at mutual assistance efforts for the now majority-Latino workforce in the plant. By providing basic immigration legal services and responding to other, largely non-workplace issues facing the new Latino population in the area, they began to make worker contacts.”
“It took almost 40 minutes for Hunt, Slaughter, and Ludlum to get from the parking lot to their station. They would soon turn that already long walk into a saunter, doing union work along the way, work only the worker-leaders themselves could do, since union staff were barred from going anywhere near this factory.”
“On the heels of this walkout, Bruskin and key worker-leaders, the very ones who had just met for the Black-Brown BBQ, agreed that they needed a way to get the black employees activated and working together with the Latinos. Their idea was to demand that Martin Luther King Day be an official holiday at the plant, with paid time off for those who requested it and double time for everyone who had to work shifts that day. The union immediately began to produce literature in Spanish and English, with King’s picture on one side, Cesar Chavez’s on the other, describing the common values and the liberation efforts of these two leaders. Additionally, the demand that Smithfield honor Martin Luther King Day was one that union activists could use to rally the broader community to their cause. When the nationally recognized holiday arrived, a majority of workers had signed a petition demanding a paid day off, and the company’s refusal generated press headlines sympathetic to the workers. Smithfield then reversed its decision, but did so in a manner that denied the workers’ victory; the company announced a new policy to give all workers in all their facilities nationwide the holiday, effectually denying their decision had anything to do with local worker demands.”
“He had just made a successful run for president of the state branch of the NAACP. He beat a do-nothing incumbent who had routinely accepted financial contributions from Smithfield Foods during the horrific period of deportations, firings, and racist company shenanigans.
One of Rev. Barber’s first public acts as president was to refuse a check for $10,000 from Smithfield, informing the company that the NAACP would no longer be complicit in the company’s abuse of their workers’ human rights.
He became a key figure supporting the Smithfield workers in their unionization effort and used the campaign against Smithfield to help renew a moribund NAACP chapter. Suddenly the workers had a historic civil rights group with considerable legitimacy in North Carolina helping to lead the charge, in addition to the emerging religious leader’s coalition.”
“The picketers declared that Harris Teeter needed to stop selling Smithfield’s products until the company began to treat the community right. The decision to target North Carolina-based Smithfield pork in North Carolina’s home-bred and popular chain grocery with North Carolina preachers calling on the company to treat “the community” with decency was an instant success. Harris Teeter, which had a board dominated by evangelical conservatives, immediately began calling Smithfield to demand they “get these people out from in front of our stores.”
According to Bob Geary, a veteran North Carolina journalist who filed more than two dozen stories about Smithfield and is currently a columnist at the North Carolina Indy Week, “Nothing made a difference with the union campaigns all those years until they brought the campaign to Raleigh [the state capital]. No one goes to Tar Heel, it’s all by itself, this giant plant in a tiny town. Smithfield had no incentive not to fight. When they [the union] made it statewide, and made it a broad political fight, they won.””
“After the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, unions in the United States were barred from calling boycotts or secondary boycotts (one of so many examples of how fundamentally anti-democratic the workplace is under United States laws). But community groups, religious organizations, and other nonunion groups are able as consumers to call for consumer boycotts. [Note to unions: workers are also community members, religious, and consumers.] One of the most effective tactics that Jobs with Justice deployed in the national consumer strategy was its campaign targeting Food Network celebrity chef Paula Deen. Deen, wildly popular at the time, written up in The New York Times and elsewhere for her butter-heavy Southern cooking, had been hired by Smithfield to promote its products. The effort to get Paula Deen to drop Smithfield’s products and sponsorship unfolded. It was the kind of opportunity creative activists look for.
Deen was on a national tour promoting a brand-new cookbook. Jobs with Justice tracked Deen’s schedule of public appearances and began mobilizing their activist network in the places where they had enough strength for folks to picket and handbill Paula Deen. According to a Jobs With Justice internal report and evaluation of the Smithfield campaign, the Jw] coalitions publicly confronted Paula Deen at events in Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Louisville, Kentucky; and Chicago. The group also intervened in numerous Deen radio interviews by having community allies call in and ask specific questions about the situation with Smithfield workers at the Tar Heel plant, including, most notably, during the Diane Rehm show on NPR.55 When Deen came to promote Smithfield products in Chicago, the city where Oprah Winfrey produced her show, more than 200 union sympathizers turned out to protest, generating a good headline for the campaign in the Chicago Tribune.”
“Though the union wanted Deen’s appearance canceled, the compromise was that the Oprah Winfrey Show forbade Deen from saying the word “Smithfield,” and they prevented her from using Smithfield products. The reason Smithfield was underwriting Deen was for her to use her biggest public appearances to promote their hams. There was nothing bigger than the Oprah Winfrey Show using its clout to shut down the Smithfield’s promotion. According to legal documents, the company had preordered 10,000 special hams for the show, none of which were sold. In fact, these same legal documents identified this one event as crucial to their exaggerated claim that the “union effort” was costing them $900 million.”
“The workers voted “yes” to unionize the plant, 2,041 to 1,879. Obama barely won North Carolina, and made history. The Smithfield workers barely won their election, and made history, too, one month later. Their win represented the single largest private sector unionization effort of the new millennium.”
“According to UFCW national executive vice president Pat O’Neill, the most important long-term development from the Smithfield campaign is that today in Tar Heel there is a local union that is already helping nonunion workers in a nearby poultry plant to form their own union in Bladen County. “What’s important is that we have a local union that’s actually organizing unorganized workers,” he says. At least equally important is the internal organizing work spearheaded by that local union, a program that has achieved a steady membership of 80 percent in this right-to-work state. And, they’ve done it because, in the words of the once-fired-worker Keith Ludlum:
We’ve created an organizing culture. I meet every single new employee hire at the orientation and talk about the struggle to win the wages, benefits, and rights we’ve won. I tell every worker that the first thing the boss knows going into our contract negotiations is what percentage of workers are in the union – anything less than 80 percent and the employer won’t be taking our concerns very seriously. Keeping our internal membership high isn’t just my job, it’s everyone’s job here, just like helping the workers down the street at the Mountainaire poultry plant, where 2,000 workers work under horrible conditions. The first thing those workers say when we talk to them is, “We want the Smithfield contract.”
By defeating the company, the Smithfield workers achieved much more than a contract. They won confidence in themselves – including the confidence to go down the street to a chicken factory to help teach 2,000 unorganized workers exactly what they need to do to beat their employer. Through the vicious fight inside the pork plant, the workers learned also to take on controversial right-wing wedge issues like immigration and even gay marriage. These 5,000 workers are now key to the effort to help change the political conversation among thousands of workers in rural North Carolina.”
“That almost no workers elsewhere in the U.S. South know this story is a travesty.”
MRNY
“A key strategic improvement was that MRNY and its collaborators were targeting a more stable industry within the desperately low-wage retail sector: Car wash owners have a lot invested in big machinery that they won’t easily abandon or move.
By the spring of 2013, the campaign was under way. At the first-ever citywide Car Wash Workers General Assembly, dozens of immigrant car-wash workers used a form of popular theater common in social movements throughout the Latin American countries they’d emigrated from: a play about their plight. In front of an audience of 200, they dramatized the bad treatment and dangerous conditions in New York City’s car washes. In the play’s final act, the carwasheros unfurled six homemade, body-length banners to communicate their demands: (1) Respect; (2) Better pay, paid vacation, and sick days; (3) Health care; (4) Protection from abuse; (5) 100 percent of their tips, on top of the minimum wage; and (6) A union contract.
It’s that last demand – “¡Un sindicato!” —that brings the folks in the middle of the hall to their feet, loudly stomping and chanting, “¡Si, se puede!” The bulk of the audience is indistinguishable from the actors, made up mostly of other carwasheros. But around the outside walls of the room was an impressive lineup of New York City power brokers, including then-city council speaker Christine Quinn; about as many city council members as it would take to have a quorum; the Manhattan borough president; and all sorts of lesser-known candidates running for local office in one of the largest cities in the world.
In the campaign’s first year, workers at seven different car washes had voted yes to forming a union in National Labor Relations Board elections, which require a majority to win. Workers at three more car washes have formed unions since then. For 1,000 workers in the industry not yet under union contract, $4.5 million in back pay claims were secured through litigation.”
Conclusion
“No amount of spending could erase five decades of newly hired employees blaming their union-not their employer, not corporations-for their lesser status and share of compensation under the union contract. This was the result of strategic decisions decades earlier by leaders in the UAW to accept two-tier contracts rather than to fight like hell against them, as their counterpart to the north, the Canadian Auto Workers had done. New employees’ anger at being on the lower tier and less well compensated than their colleagues may also help to explain why 38 percent of union households in neighboring Wisconsin voted to retain their anti-union governor, Scott Walker, when labor attempted a recall campaign.”
