Global Labor Strategies

Fighting Doom: The New Politics of Climate Change

[Editor's Note: The following article was written by GLS Co-Founder Brendan Smith for the Labor Network for Sustainability in preparation for the upcoming climate meetings in Cancun.]

I am not an environmentalist. But all I think about these days is the climate crisis.

I admit I have arrived late to the party. Only recently have I begun to realize what others have known for decades: The climate crisis is not, at its core, an environmental issue. In fact it is not an "issue" at all; it is an existential threat to every human and community on the planet. It threatens every job, every economy in the world. It threatens the health of our children. It threatens our food and water supply. Climate change will continue to alter the world our species has known for the past three thousand years.

As an oyster farmer and longtime political activist, the effects of climate change on my life will be neither distant nor impersonal. Rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures may well force me to abandon my 60-acre farm within the next forty years. From France to Washington state, oystermen are already seeing massive die-offs of seed oysters and the thinning shells science has long predicted. I can see the storm clouds and they are foretelling doom.

But my political alter ego is oddly less pessimistic. Rather than triggering gloom, the climate crisis has surprisingly stirred up more hope than I have felt in twenty years as a progressive activist. After decades of progressive retreat it is a strange feeling. But I am haunted by the suspicion that this coming crisis may be the first opportunity we have had in generations to radically re-shape the political landscape and build a more just and sustainable society.

The Power of Doom

The modern progressive movement in the U.S. has traditionally grounded its organizing in the politics of identity and altruism. Organize an affected group -- minorities, gays, janitors or women -- and then ask the public at large to support the cause -- prison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortion -- based on some cocktail of good will, liberal guilt, and moral persuasion. This strategy has been effective at times. But we have failed to bring these mini-movements together into a force powerful enough to enact broad-based social reform. It takes a lot of people to change society and our current strategy has left us small in numbers and weak in power.

The highlights of my political life -- as opposed to oystering -- have been marked by winning narrow, often temporary, battles, but perennially losing the larger war. I see the results in every direction I look: growing poverty and unemployment, two wars, the rise of the right, declining unionization, the failure of the Senate's climate legislation and of Copenhagen, the wholesale domination of corporate interests. The list goes on and on. We have lost; it's time to admit our strategy has been too tepid and begin charting anew.

This time can be different. What is so promising about the climate crisis is that because it is not an "issue" experienced by one disenfranchised segment of the population, it opens the opportunity for a new organizing calculus for progressives. Except for nuclear annihilation, humanity has never faced so universal a threat where all our futures are bound inextricably together. This universality provides the mortar of common interest required for movement building. We could literally knock on every door on the planet and find someone -- whether they know it or not -- who has a vital self-interest in averting the climate crisis by joining a movement for sustainability. With all of humanity facing doom, we can finally gather under one banner and count our future members not in the thousands but in the millions, even billions.

But as former White House "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones told the New Yorker in 2009, "The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so your main icons are Joe Six-Pack, Joe the Plumber, becoming Joe the Solar Guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun." The climate crisis is carrying us into uncharted waters and our political strategy needs to be directed toward making the climate movement an "everybody movement."

Let me use a personal example. As an oysterman on Long Island Sound my way of life is threatened by rising greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures. If the climate crisis is not averted my oysters will die and my farm will be shuttered.

Saving my livelihood requires that I politically engage at some level. Normally I would gather together my fellow oyster farmers to lobby state and federal officials and hold a protest or two. Maybe I would find a few coalitions to join. But we would remain small in number, wield little power, and our complaints about job loss would fall on largely unsympathetic ears in the face of so many suffering in so many ways. And what would we even petition our government to do about the problem? Buyouts and unemployment benefits? Re-training classes? Our oysters will still die and we will still lose our farms.

Labor Faces Hard Times

Two recent images of the labor movement in this time of crisis stand out for their stark contrast.

One is a photograph of UAW President Ron Gettlefinger sitting at the witness table before a Congressional committee with the heads of the Big 3 auto makers, pleading for help. The other is a photo of jubilant workers celebrating their victory after a six day sit-in at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago.

It is not stretching things to say that these images crystallize the problems and possibilities of organized labor today.

Missed opportunities

Gettlefinger’s testimony was a sad coda to an era in US industrial relations that actually ended in September 2007 when the UAW reached a concession packed agreement with GM following a two day strike, and  similar agreements later that year with the other auto makers. The agreements froze wages for production workers; reclassified and placed “non-production” workers on a lower wage scale; and set a new hire rate at about $14.00 an hour—about half what incumbent workers earn—with inferior benefits. A buyout program was designed to push as many senior workers out the door as possible to make room for the new hires. The union promoted the contract as a way to buy time for the companies to reorganize and retool.

Nothing much happened. The restructuring took the form of plant closures. The retooling remained a promise by the Big 3 to produce more energy efficient cars. But all the while the companies kept up their incessant advertisements for SUVs, pick-ups, and other gas guzzlers.  And they continued to pursue their lobbying and lawsuits against tougher mileage standards. The spike in gas prices and the credit crunch provided the coup de grace to a dying industry.

In October 2007, we asked on this blog, whether the UAW could turn its collective bargaining defeat into a strategic retreat by regrouping and developing an independent survival plan for the industry? Now we know the answer: they could not. Tragically, the UAW kept marching in lock step with the very companies that were destroying the US industry. The union even supported the companies’ opposition to tougher mileage standards because, they argued, it would unfairly hurt sales of light trucks and SUVs and imperil many jobs.

Had the union taken an independent course things might now be different. They might have been able to mobilize popular opinion behind a plan to produce greener cars and new vehicles for public transportation, preserving the jobs and the economies of the communities that depend on them.  Instead, there is no plan to rally around, only a demoralized plea for a bailout.

Social Movements 2.0

On September 27, 2007 the world experienced its first virtual strike.  In response to a wage dispute, IBM workers in Italy organized a picket outside their company's virtual "corporate campus" based in the 3-D virtual world of SecondLife.  According to a report in the Guardian, workers "marched and waved banners, gate-crashed a [virtual] staff meeting and forced the company to close its [virtual] business center to visitors...The protest, by more than 9,000 workers and 1,850 supporting 'avatars' from 30 countries", included a rowdy collection of pink triangles, "sentient" bananas and other bizarro avatars.

While the strike was playful, it was also buttressed by careful planning and organization. Workers set up a virtual strike taskforce, developed educational materials in 3 languages, and held more 20 online worker strategy meetings.  The hard work paid off. According to Christine Revkin of the Swiss union federation involved in the strike, the protest led to new negotiations and the workers securing a better deal. Twenty days after the initial protest the Italian CEO of IBM resigned. (Here's a YouTube video from the strike and the new virtual IBM protest museum.)

Stories like this offer a glimpse into the powerful potential of the emerging 2.0 world, a place where workers use social networking tools to quickly reach across national and workplace borders, outflank their bosses, and wield collective power. But right now, the type of virtual solidarity seen in the IBM strike remains more promise than reality.   People are willing to sign petitions, donate money, trade information and join in political discussions online, but translating these activities into labor solidarity built on trust and a willingness to take economic or physical risk on another's behalf is exceedingly rare.

As a result, political action online has been largely relegated to electoral politics and tepid humanitarianism: it's been great for raising money for Tsunami relief and mobilizing voters, but pretty flaccid when it comes to wielding social movement power. (One exception is organizing around highly repressive regimes, where workers, students and others have successfully used mobile phones, twitter, etc. to organize escalating protests and free jailed activists.)

This tension around the pros and cons of online organizing has spurred a healthy debate inside and outside global labor and social movements. Earlier this year Eric Lee, the Godfather of the online labor movement posted an article entitled "How the Internet Makes Organizing Harder", which drew a flurry of responses. More recently community organizers in the US have been debating on DailyKos the merits of an article entitled "Real Change Happens Offline", written by Sally Kohn, campaign strategist at the Center for Community Change

GLS has been experimenting with online strategies for close to a decade now, largely spurred by our earlier work in the 1990's trying to figure out how to build and maintain a large but informal network of North American contingent workers. We come to the problem as longtime chroniclers of social movements interested in the underlying forces at work online, how these forces can help or hinder social movement building, and how they challenge existing union and social movement structures.  Over the coming months we'll be tracking some of the latest strategies and tools of 2.0 social movements.  This first post begins to layout out some basic trends and questions GLS has been tracking.

What's New and What's Not

Social networking is not new and not about technology.  It's not about Myspace, Facebook, or YouTube; instead it's what everyone does every day: kindle and expand networks of friends, family, co-workers, etc. In the political context it's about finding and building communities of interest, linking common struggles, and acting collectively. Facebook and other online social networking tools are just a new way for people engage in this age-old activity.

But at the same time the online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter.  Nor is it simply a new technology like cable television -- merely bringing more channels into the home.  Instead the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those that could not read by spurring the protestant reformation and scientific revolution.

During just the last several years the internet has evolved from its first generation as a static information portal (e.g. websites) to what is now referred to as Web 2.0, marked by the explosion of user-generated and interactive content (Clay Shirky, author to Here Comes Everybody, has done some of the best work on the implications of Web 2.0 for organizations.) There are five reasons why this newly evolved electronic space is especially relevant to the future of the global social movements:

1. Group Formation: New social networking tools, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to email and listserves, make forming groups—and hopefully social movements—much easier. Every time labor organizers knock on doors, hold a community meeting or organize a protest the primary goal is to entice individuals into group activity; they hope to transform isolated actors with little social power into a powerful force for social change.  The problem is that group formation has always been very hard to do. 

What is new about tools like Facebook is that they make more varieties of group formation possible.  Now, totally on their own, millions of people are finding others who care about the same things they do, whether it be around oyster farming, workplace complaints, or radical politics. What the web has revealed is that there were thousands of these latent groups that for hundreds of years were never able to form because it was too difficult for people to identify others with similar interests and too difficult for them to efficiently communicate when they did.  So now even the most transient and marginalized sectors in society can potentially form support and sharing networks. Thousands from the homeless community, for example, have gathered online to share their stories and swap survival strategies, often posting from public libraries.

At their core labor and other social movements are about group formation, and now suddenly the tools exist to make it much easier to bring people together.  In practice, the labor movement might begin helping workers access and learn how to use these new tools, and let them uncover their own latent groups---groups that may well not fit neatly into a narrow trade union agenda. Labor and social movement organizations might also spend more time trafficking where people are already gathering online, such as within the Obama social networks, and practice getting in the middle conversations and shifting debates.

Labor's Dead: Long Live Labor!

It has been decades since Labor Day was a celebration of workers and trade unions as its 19th century founders intended it to be. Today, it marks the end of summer. Perhaps the local paper runs an op-ed or an article with a labor theme. Occasionally it prompts a bit of reflection on the decline of trade unionism, and very occasionally on ways to reverse that decline.

The truth is that conventional trade unionism is pretty much dead. It is now time for post-mortems and for questions about what could come next. Is another labor movement possible? Can existing trade unions survive even if they manage to change or will new ones be needed?

Today only 8% of private sector workers in the US belong to a union. Vast sections of the country are essentially union free. No wonder. The organizational structures, laws, and institutional arrangements that shape today’s labor movement have their roots in an earlier era stretching back to the 19th century. And while capitalism has undergone revolutionary changes in the past few decades, changes we generally refer to as globalization, the labor movement has remained essentially unchanged and nation based.

Three trends, in particular, stand out:

(1) Modern corporations roam the world looking for low labor costs, lax regulations, and weak labor unions. This pits workers and communities against each other in a classic race to the bottom to attract and retain jobs.

(2) Corporations have abandoned the old vertically and horizontally integrated organizational structures, in which companies sought to keep most aspects of production and distribution in-house, in favor of newer core/ring systems in which they perform only core functions while farming out the rest to complex supply chains of contractors and subsidiaries. Workers making the same product, or providing the same service, may be employed by many different employers, making solidarity and collective action difficult.

(3) Corporations divide the remaining in-house workforce into a core group of workers with standard jobs and at least some expectation of long term employment, and a secondary group of contingent workers: part-timers, temps, contract workers, on-call workers, and day laborers usually with sub-standard wages and benefits and little or no job security.

These trends—capital mobility, “dis-integrated” corporate structures, and contingent staffing strategies—all thwart labor’s ability to organize and bargain effectively and make it much more difficult for unions to do the kinds of things that would make them attractive to workers and worth fighting for. For instance, on critical issues like protecting jobs, unions have been unable to deliver, and in recent years labor has had extraordinary difficulty even holding on to gains made earlier in the 20th century.

King’s Legacy Grows Green in Memphis

Today they’d be called “green-collar jobs” - cleaning up the environment. Back then, the workers who performed those jobs were just garbage men. And they were treated like garbage. Martin Luther King Jr. died fighting to make their green-collar jobs be good jobs.

On the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination, the green-collar jobs group Green for All is bringing people from all over the country to Memphis, Tennessee, April 4-6 for The Dream Reborn, a celebration of the life of Dr. King - and a call to create millions of good green-collar jobs as a pathway out of poverty.

The Dream Reborn will “bring together a generation of new leaders who are taking on the chief moral obligation of the 21st century, building a green economy for all.”

The gathering will dramatize the message that “today we must respond with the same courage to perhaps the biggest crisis our species has ever collectively faced: global warming.”

We believe that if Dr. King were with us today, he would be working to build a green economy - strong enough to lift people out of poverty and restore hope to America. He would be standing with those communities that have been locked out of the last century’s pollution-based economy. And he would indeed be working to ensure that ALL our people, the entire beloved community, is included in the emerging clean and renewable economic vision.

The Smithfield and Wackenhut RICO Suits: Forward into the Past

(second in a series)

In our last post we described how the RICO suits filed by Smithfield Packing and Wackenhut Corporation represent a sharp escalation in the long standing corporate assault on human and labor rights. Not content with stripping workers and their organizations of fundamental labor rights, big corporations are now going after basic constitutional rights. We argued that these suits threaten the civil rights not just of unions but of everyone.

There is a back story to these suits that stretches to the birth of the US labor movement over 200 years ago when conspiracy laws were first used to prevent workers from forming unions.

Unions as conspiracies

In 1806, members of the Federal Society of Journeyman Cordwainers—an association of Philadelphia shoemakers--— went on strike to demand higher wages.  In response, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania went to court charging that the action by the 12 year old union was a “criminal conspiracy” since, according to prosecutors, the union used unlawful coercion to achieve its economic goals—for instance, union shoemakers refused to do business or associate with bosses or workers who did not abide by its wage rates and standards.  In a sign of the anti-labor legal bias that would inform much of US history, the prosecution was instigated and paid for by the employers. The government won. The union was broken and its leaders fined. 

In those bad old days, courts defined the effort of workers to organize  as a purely economic question. According to prevailing elite views, unions interfered with the  smooth functioning of the labor market, making them a restraint of trade.  The labor market was viewed like any other market with labor as a commodity like any other commodity.  For most of the 19th century and part of 20th century courts with few exceptions ruled that whenever workers banded together “in combinations” they were engaged in illegal conspiracies. Injunctions generally followed.

The GM Strike: Can the UAW Turn a Defeat into a Strategic Retreat?

The idea of a strategic retreat is an essential element of good conflict planning. Faced with an opponent that cannot be defeated or a situation in which victory would be pyrrhic, a strategic retreat allows you to withdraw from the field of conflict rather than risk losing everything.  A strategic retreat differs from a defeat because it is a planned, orderly, withdrawal from direct conflict that plants the seeds of future action even as it gives ground to the opponent. The UAW could have exercised a strategic retreat in its conflict with GM and the other auto companies. Instead its strike and contact agreement were just another skirmish in a decade long rout.

September’s strike was hardly an epic battle. One writer likened it to two invalids flailing away at each other with crutches.  Another, echoing a widely held sentiment in the press, wrote that the strike was “a fake”, called by the union to show a skeptical membership that it did everything in its power to get a decent contract.  In fact, after Wednesday’s 6 hour Chrysler strike, the New York Times wrote from Detroit, “ A new expression is making the rounds here in the nation’s automotive capital: “Hollywood strike,” as in, “just for show.”

The UAW is clearly in a fix. It is up against the epochal forces which are reshaping the auto industry and the global economy, forces which are gradually gutting union power and eroding work standards everywhere. Now, after decades of defeats, it seems the UAW has chosen to circle the wagons to protect its graying—and rapidly shrinking—membership as they hold on for dear life trying to make it to retirement. And the end is in sight for many: the average age of GM’s existing workforce is 50 years old, and 63.4% are eligible to retire in 5 years. In the process, the UAW has abandoned a significant portion of its existing membership—those employed in “non-core” jobs—and any newcomers to the industry, should there be any. 

It is a cautionary tale which should give pause to those who think that building union membership and increasing union density will lead to a revival of the labor movement.  Union density in the auto industry is over 50%--unimaginable in any other sector of the economy. Even in the lagging parts industry density is far higher than in the most of the private sector economy. In a world of globalized production national union membership and density does not necessarily translate into union power.

Is the situation hopeless? Not at all. The UAW and other similarly situated unions need to exercise a strategic retreat to regroup. We offer some suggestions about what that might look below. But first a look at the current settlement and some historical background.

Globalization and its Discontents

A Financial Times/Harris poll released last week registers broad popular discontent with globalization and the direction of the economies in the rich countries of the world. Among the findings of the survey taken in six countries—the US, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the UK are:

• Less than 20% of people in the UK, France, Spain, and the US think globalization is having a positive effect; in Italy and Germany less than 40% think it’s a positive force.
• More than 75% of people in every country, except Spain, think inequality between the rich and the poor is growing.
• In no country, except Italy, do people admire the heads of the largest corporations. Admiration is lowest in the UK and US.
• Large majorities in every country support higher taxes for the rich.
• Majorities in all European countries support pay caps for top corporate officials, but support for caps in the US is around 30%.

According to the FT:

A popular backlash against globalization and the leaders of the world’s largest companies is sweeping all the rich countries….

Large majorities of people in the US and Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalization.

Viewing globalization as an overwhelmingly negative force, citizens of the rich countries are looking for governments to cushion the blows they perceive have come from liberalization of their economies to trade with emerging countries….`

As if to confirm the public’s increasingly negative feelings about globalization, KPMG, the accounting firm, released a survey of 92 countries that shows a global drop in corporate tax rates last year, continuing a decade long trend. KPMG cites “competition for investment” as the reason for the decline. As a result, value-added taxes and other indirect levies paid by ordinary tax payers have risen to make up for revenue shortfalls. The cuts in corporate taxes are one measure of the way that globalization puts public services into competition.

An opening for labor?

To state the obvious: the depth and breadth of popular opposition to corporate globalization should be a call for labor to step forward as a voice for popular discontent and to find common cause with labor movements in other countries in that effort. Speaking up and linking up could help revitalize moribund labor movements by making them more relevant for today’s economy.

Challenging Corporate Secrecy in China

It’s hard to get accurate information about what’s really going on in China’s economy or its workplaces. This is a big problem for unions that need information about the companies they bargain with and the industries within which they operate. It’s also a problem for consumers who need to know about product safety and regulatory standards—as  recent scandals involving contaminated pet food, toothpaste, and children’s toys make clear—and for environmental organizations, human rights advocates, and other watchdog NGOs—all of which play important roles in the civil societies of the industrialized world.

It’s easy to blame the Chinese government for the information gap. But corporations in China—both foreign and domestic—are as much or more to blame. While how much information corporations can keep secret from the public as “proprietary knowledge” is contested in every country, in China corporations have far exceeded acceptable bounds by creating a raw capitalism based on secrecy and short term advantage. This is at odds with the transparency needed for the rule of law and social accountability. If labor laws, product safety standards, and environmental regulations are to be enforced public access to a wide range of information is required.

Now pressure is building for more transparency. For instance, on a recent trip to China US labor leaders agreed to an information exchange with their Chinese counterparts—something that could serve as the basis for further cooperation between Chinese and non-Chinese unions.  Some corporations are also questioning the corporate climate of secrecy and have even taken steps in the direction of transparency that could serve as the basis for a campaign by labor and civil society organizations to tear down the wall of secrecy that characterizes corporate business practices in China.

How Workers Run Argentina's “Recuperated Workplaces”

In a previous post, we described the process by which workers in 200 workplaces in Argentina occupied their workplaces and began running them themselves.  In this post we will examine how the workplaces are actually run and how their workers are dealing with the managerial, economic, legal, and political questions that arise when workers try to run their own workplaces.  Much of our information comes from a new book edited by Marina Sitrin called “Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina” (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).

After workers had occupied their workplaces and, if necessary, warded off the efforts of former bosses and police to take them back, what happened next?