Inspired by the recent wave of union campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, retail workers at major chains like Target are launching new organizing drives across the United States.
Workers at about a half-dozen Target stores across the country are reported to have “active but early stage campaigns” to unionize. (TaarusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons)
“Because we’re the best, that makes those of us at Target a target ourselves,” says the woman in a 2011 Target corporate video about unions. Noting that the retailer has entered the heavily unionized grocery industry while resisting unionization, the speakers lay out the stakes for the company, offering up a standard fare of anti-union talking points distinguished only by the appearance of a particularly villainous-looking company lawyer.
At the time, the retailer was facing a union drive at one of its Long Island stores, under the aegis of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents grocery workers across the country and was hoping to launch a multistore organizing campaign at Target. That attempt ultimately failed, with workers in Long Island voting 137-85 against unionization.
“Not one group of team members, not one anywhere in the whole company, has ever decided that they need a union,” says the man toward the end of the video.
That is still true, but the company is facing the possibility that it won’t be for long. On May 10, workers at a Target in Christiansburg, Virginia, filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) requesting a union election after management declined to voluntarily recognize the union. The workers in Christiansburg are organizing with the New River Valley General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The Christiansburg workers are in touch with their counterparts at other Target locations. Adam Ryan, an employee at the Christiansburg Target, told the New Republic that workers at about a half-dozen stores have “active but early stage campaigns.” These efforts are taking place under the umbrella organization Target Workers Unite.
At the Christiansburg Target, the collective effort began in 2017, when a boss’s sexual harassment of workers led to a strike that resulted in the company investigating and ultimately removing the manager. Management resistance to workers’ desire to wear masks during the pandemic led to another action in 2020, a sick-out in which around two hundred workers across several Target locations took part. Per Ryan, the Christiansburg worker-organizer, thirty-three of the store’s roughly one hundred workers had signed union-authorization cards at the time of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filing. In January, Target Workers Unite revealed that the company was rolling out new anti-union training guidelines for management. The material lists red-flag behaviors by workers for which managers should look out as signs of a possible union campaign, such as “small gatherings,” “expressions of negative sentiment,” and “talking with others before or after shifts in the parking lot.”
Independent unionism is seeing a nascent uptick in the wake of the unionization of JFK8, an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent union. Workers at an Amazon Fresh grocery store in Seattle are organizing their own union, Amazon Workers United. At Trader Joe’s, concerns about health and safety precautions pervaded the workforce during the first year of the pandemic, leading some workers to speak with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), but no store ever filed for an election. Now, employees at a Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Massachusetts, too, have formed an independent union, Trader Joe’s United. Those workers say health and safety concerns remain and that the company has slashed pay and benefits, too.
The efforts to organize retail are spreading rapidly, in more traditional organizational forms as well. Workers at a Manhattan REI location voted overwhelmingly to unionize with RWDSU in March of this year. Three Apple stores have filed for union elections in recent weeks — one each in Atlanta, New York City, and Towson, Maryland. At the Apple stores, several unions are involved: the Atlanta workers are organizing with the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the New York workers with Workers United, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate, and the Towson store with the support of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). Apple has responded by retaining union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. And, of course, there is the union drive at Starbucks with Starbucks Workers United, an affiliate of SEIU, which has now won NLRB elections at more than seventy stores, with many more votes to come.
What explains the uptick? First, there’s the matter of the tight labor market, reflected in the still-high quit rate among workers who are leaving miserable jobs in favor of better ones. Several rounds of stimulus in 2020–21, culminating in the American Rescue Plan Act, put cash in workers’ hands and heated up the labor market, undoubtedly playing a big role in these shifts, as David Dayen at the American Prospect has argued.
Relatedly, working retail during a pandemic has influenced employees’ views. Workers at company after company say the experience brought their coworkers closer together as they shouldered the increased duties of enforcing social distancing measures — this also meant increased stress, with customers frequently rebelling against such codes, and it is not hard to find stories of retail employees getting punched in the face for simply trying to do their job. And this on top of their conscription into the collective experience of being deemed “essential,” told they should take on the risks of their work for the sake of the broader public, all of which adds up to a situation ripe for organizing.
In the labor world, some call such spread “contagion”: when workers see an organizing campaign succeed at a company like the one where they’re employed, they’re apt to consider whether their grievances could also be addressed through collective action. The Starbucks union in particular is driving such thinking in the retail and service sector. What was previously seen as impossible is now proving doable: at store after store, Starbucks workers are forming organizing committees, taking advice from workers at stores that have already unionized, and filing for elections. Their willingness to strike at a number of stores suggests serious confidence, and workers at other companies consistently cite the Starbucks union as an inspiration.
The number of companies where the contagion has spread remains minuscule compared to those where it has not, but if the wave grows, with more Targets, more Trader Joe’s, more as-yet-unnamed corporations, there is no saying where it could lead.
Workers in America’s fast-food and retail sectors who worked on the frontlines through the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic are continuing a trend of strikes and protests over low wages, safety concerns and sexual harassment issues on the job.
The Covid-19 pandemic has incited a resurgence of interest and support for the US labor movement and for low-wage workers who bore the brunt of Covid-19 risks.
The unrest also comes as corporations have often reported record profits and showered executives with pay increases, stock buybacks and bonuses, while workers received minimal pay increases. Workers at billion-dollar corporations from Dollar General to McDonald’s still make on average less than $15 an hour while often being forced to work in unsafe, grueling conditions.
This year’s Labor Notes Conference (June 17-19, Chicago) will be one for the record books. About 4,000 people are coming—more than ever before—after a long wait.
There’s plenty to celebrate this year, starting with phenomenal new organizing wins at Starbucks and Amazon. Dozens of shop floor organizers from both companies will be there, including plenary speakers Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls (“We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because while he was up there we were organizing a union”) and Michelle Eisen of Starbucks Workers United.
Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!,” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 – May 1. Workers came to the school from Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Tidewater Virginia, Richmond, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, Eastern North Carolina, northern Kentucky, and elsewhere. Over the last year, the network of areas building workers assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry based councils – including Amazon, healthcare, and education workers – . . .
With an eye to this November’s
elections, Paul Spink—like many union leaders in Wisconsin—plans to do his utmost this year to salvage what’s left of
democracy in his state. Spink, president of
the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, in
Wisconsin, says it’s vital to reelect the state’s Democratic governor, Tony
Evers, to preserve some semblance of majority rule in Wisconsin and to keep
some check on what he sees as a runaway Republican legislature that is pushing
hard to lock in GOP rule for the next 10 years.
“It’s really hard to use the term ‘democracy’ to describe what’s happening now in Wisconsin,” Spink said. “It has
been years of them trying to undermine the idea of having average people pick
their leaders.”
In 2010, a year when the GOP made major gains in state races across
the nation, Republicans won control of Wisconsin’s governor’s mansion and both
houses of its legislature. The next year, Republicans approved a gerrymandered district map that ensured continuation of the
GOP majority in both legislative houses in election after election, even when
Democrats won a majority of votes statewide in legislative races. Spink
complains that Wisconsin’s Republicans are now parlaying that decade-old
gerrymander into a more egregious one aimed to lock in a veto-proof majority.
Noting Wisconsin’s progressive,
labor-friendly past—it was the first state to enact
unemployment insurance, for example—Spink
added, “We used to be a laboratory of democracy. Now we’ve become a laboratory
of autocracy.”
Spink, a 43-year-old Milwaukee resident, became head of
AFSCME in Wisconsin in 2015, after years working as a state employee who
inspected childcare centers for safety. Spink typically talks with a calm
demeanor, but when he turns to the precarious state of democracy in Wisconsin,
frustration and anger quickly seep into his voice.
When John Johnson, a Marquette
University law professor, analyzed the GOP’s voting map this April, he
predicted hugely skewed results for this November: that Republicans would win 63 out of Wisconsin’s 99 Assembly
seats and 23 out of 33 Senate seats—this in a state with a population that is
widely viewed as being split 50–50 between Democrats and Republicans. Gerrymandering of
this magnitude is unhealthy in a democracy; not only does it disadvantage
certain blocs of voters over others, diluting the power of their votes, it also
undermines the validity of the resulting government itself. Spink very much hopes that organized labor and its allies
will—by helping Democrats win enough of the
few legislative districts that remain competitive—manage to block the GOP’s ambitions to secure a veto-proof
majority in both houses.
Spink aims to mobilize hundreds of AFSCME
members to knock on doors, do phone-banking, and speak to fellow employees in
the workplace to explain that democracy is on the line and that Republican
politicians, from Donald Trump on down, have delivered far more to corporations
and the wealthy than to the nation’s workers. “It’s up to me and people like me
to beat the odds in some of these districts,” Spink said. “We’re going to have
to run a better political program than we have before. It will be all hands on
deck.”
Making Spink’s political efforts
tougher, back in 2011 Wisconsin’s then-Governor Scott Walker and the
Republican-led legislature enacted a landmark anti-union law that aimed to
cripple most of the state’s government employee unions by creating several
hurdles that made it harder and more expensive for union locals to survive.
(One of those hurdles is a hard-to-win annual recertification vote with rules
stacked hugely against unions.) As a result of that law, AFSCME’s Wisconsin
membership has plummeted to just 10,000 from over 50,000 a decade ago. Indeed,
largely as a result of that 2011 law and other measures to weaken unions,
Wisconsin’s union membership has plunged by 170,000, or 44 percent, since 2009, with the percentage of workers in unions falling to 7.9 percent from 15.2
percent—the steepest drop of any state. Wisconsin’s Republicans recognized that by weakening
labor unions and their treasuries, they would undermine the Democrats’
electoral chances.
Spink said, “We’ll just have to
punch above our weight when it comes to the total number of doors we’re going
to hit and the calls we’re going to make and some of the checks we’re going to
write.”
The GOP push to undermine majority rule by minimizing the
political voice of unions and minority voters will hurt Wisconsin’s workers,
Spink says. He predicts
that veto-proof Republican control will mean new legislation to increase child
labor and little effort to modernize the state’s balky unemployment insurance
system. Wisconsin Republicans have proposed letting 14-year-olds work until 9:30 p.m. on school days and until 11:00 p.m. on non-school days.
“If we don’t have democracy,” Spink
said, “there is no fairness for working people.”
The need for a nationwide effort
Across the nation, many labor leaders share Spink’s alarm
about preserving democracy as well as his goal of punching above one’s weight
in this year’s elections. They view this year’s election and 2024’s with dire urgency, as
a goal-line stand to defend America’s democracy;
and they also understand that, thanks to
organized labor’s ability to mobilize tens of thousands of foot soldiers,
America’s unions, with their 14 million members, are one of the nation’s most
potent and effective political forces.
Labor unions typically focus on
presidential and congressional races, but this year, in Wisconsin and
elsewhere, they plan to focus far more than usual on state and local races—for instance, to defeat Republican
candidates for elections commissions and secretaries of state who support
Trump’s “Big Lie” and who have suggested they will overturn their state’s vote
results in 2024 if the Democratic presidential nominee comes out ahead.
Political scientists say unions can
play a big role in preventing Trump and other Republicans from subverting
America’s democracy. “Unions are a huge mobilizer,” said Paul Frymer, a
political science professor at Princeton. “They’re one of the biggest
mobilizers for the Democratic Party, maybe the biggest.”
Shane Larson, director of government affairs for the
Communications Workers of America, sees a big attitude shift among union
leaders—to far greater
urgency. Larson said that many labor leaders, as usual, wanted to focus
overwhelmingly on jobs and other economic matters and weren’t paying much heed
to warnings that America’s democracy was threatened. January 6, 2021, was a huge “wake-up call” to those union leaders,
Larson said.
Now, he said, “the conversation among union presidents is
that our movement has to do something here for our democracy or we can lose
it.” Larson added
that part of labor’s focus this year “is to hold accountable a number of insurrectionists running for some of
these offices.”
Randi Weingarten,
president of the American Federation of Teachers, said some union leaders,
along with many Americans, “still
don’t have the imagination to believe that this [the destruction of democracy]
could happen in America. There’s a sense that our democracy is so well rooted
that nothing will dislodge it. If there is one thing that I could help change
right now, it is for people to have the sense of imagination that it could
happen here. Once you lose a certain number of democratic institutions, it’s
very hard to get them back.”
Ensuring broader participation
America’s labor unions are pursuing
two interlocking strategies in their effort to protect and preserve America’s
democracy. One strategy is to battle against efforts that would reduce the
voice of minority voters, make it harder to vote, and empower Trump partisans
to twist and even overturn vote counts. The second strategy is to make sure
that Democrats win pivotal states, especially longtime union strongholds, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin, but also states that have more recently moved from red to blue, such
as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia.
“For me, protecting democracy right now means
rebuilding the blue wall in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania,” said Steve
Rosenthal, a former AFL-CIO political director. “Without those states, there is no
way that Donald Trump or the next Donald Trump or any anti-worker candidate
could win in 2024.”
In Rosenthal’s view,
if union households totaled 25 to 30 percent of the vote in those three
industrial states, as they did 25 years ago, instead of
totaling 15 or 20 percent, as they do today, Trump would never have won
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016—and with them the election. Nor would he be able to win those states again in 2024.
There are hundreds of thousands of former union members in those three states,
who are no longer contacted by their union, who no longer receive union
political literature, who no longer have union members knocking on their doors,
and that, many political experts say, helps explain why Trump was able to
narrowly win those three states in 2016. (Many unions were so confident that
Hillary Clinton would win those states that they didn’t mount nearly as much of
a campaign effort as they might have.)
For many labor leaders and
Democratic lawmakers, a major concern is that many blue-collar workers—union members, former union members, and
nonunion workers—have gotten swept into a
right-wing echo chamber that amplifies the messaging from Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Breitbart, Mark Levin,
Charlie Kirk, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. “Where we’re failing is with
the right-wing sound machine and echo chamber—their
message is constantly reinforced,” Larson said. “We have to figure out, how are
we going to counter that story? The one thing we
know is that workers value their union as an information source. In a time when
people don’t trust information sources, we’re constantly finding they see their
unions as a valid source of information—even
if workers don’t agree all the time with their union.”
Rosenthal has founded
a group, In Union, that aims to
counter the right-wing echo chamber and give blue-collar workers accurate
information on what’s happening in the economy and what various candidates
stand for. His group keeps in regular contact with hundreds of thousands of
former union members in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those voters
perhaps lost their union membership when their steel mills or auto plants
closed and they lost their jobs. In Union sends emails and texts, mails
newsletters, and knocks on doors to talk to voters about issues months in
advance of elections and then holds long conversations at voters’ doors closer
to the election about which candidates are pro-worker and which aren’t.
Throughout 2020, In Union was in regular contact with 1.2 million voters in
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (including many nonunion voters who
surveys show share the views of union members). Rosenthal hopes to get funding
to reach out to another three million nonunion voters in the coming months.
With money from
unions, foundations, and individuals, his group seeks to build trust with those
voters and explain, for example, as it did during the 2020 election, how Joe
Biden would do more for workers than Donald Trump would. A
recent In Union newsletter for Pennsylvania voters explains what new
infrastructure investments will mean for Pennsylvania and how Biden’s new rules
mandate that the federal government use its powers to buy American-made goods.
Jacob Grumbach, a political science professor at the
University of Washington, says unions can play an important role in offsetting
the GOP’s repeated use of cultural issues such as transgender rights and critical race theory to create “moral
panics” in order to get blue-collar workers to vote
Republican. “They often vote now based on anti-immigrant views and culture-war
issues,” Grumbach said, “but compare that becoming a priority to how people
voted when unions were the main organizing force for the working class.”
Grumbach said the Biden administration recognizes the
political advantages of strengthening unions. “Hopefully it’s not too little too late,” he said. “It’s
crucial for the Democrats to have this long-term base to structure politics
around material circumstances [such as housing
affordability and access to childcare] rather than around a cultural war.”
Many labor leaders say Democratic lawmakers have
unwittingly undermined their party’s chances by doing so little in recent
decades to stop unions’ membership and clout from declining. More than 20
percent of all workers were in unions in the 1980s, but that has fallen to just
10 percent today.
“For a long time, the Democrats have ignored just how
important unions are to represent workers and raise salaries—and how important they are to the
Democratic Party for winning elections,” said Princeton’s Frymer. “They let the union decline happen right before their eyes.
They didn’t do anything to stop it. They let their coalition decline.”
Over the past 50 years, the Democrats have repeatedly failed to enact
legislation to make it easier for unions to grow. Democratic lawmakers are
quick to note that Republican filibusters blocked efforts by Presidents Carter,
Clinton, Obama, and Biden to make it easier to unionize.
While labor leaders often criticize Carter,
Clinton, and Obama for not doing enough to strengthen unions, they give higher
praise to Joe Biden. Biden and his administration seem eager to reverse the
decline in union membership and union power, all while many Republicans are
clearly intent on hastening labor’s decline. Biden has vigorously backed the
Protecting the Right Organize, or PRO, Act, one of the most comprehensive
pieces of pro-union legislation since the New Deal. But that legislation, which
the House has approved, has stalled in the Senate, not just because of a
Republican filibuster but because several Democratic senators have opposed it,
undermining efforts to get even a simple majority of senators to back it.
It is well known that unions boost election prospects for Democratic candidates by
educating union members on issues and getting out the vote through door knocking
and phone banking. But unions help the Democrats in other important ways.
Various academic studies have found that unions help discourage workers from
backing right-wing populists such as Trump who
appeal to worker resentment. Unions help prevent workers from growing resentful
and alienated by delivering economic gains, by rooting workers in social
networks, and by reducing racial resentment among white workers. Unionized workers are more prosperous than nonunion
workers in comparable jobs. They earn more; receive better health coverage and
pensions; and have more job security, vacation days, and paid sick days.
A study of union
members by Frymer and Grumbach found that by bringing
workers of different races together and having them cooperate in pursuit of
common goals, unions reduce racial resentment. “White
union members,” they write, “have lower racial resentment and greater support
for policies that benefit African Americans.” As a candidate, Trump milked many
white workers’ racial resentment to win their support.
Unions have long played a big role reaching that
much-analyzed, much-discussed demographic: blue-collar whites. That group was
key to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition but has moved sharply away from
the Democrats in recent years. Unions have tempered that shift, however. Frymer
and Grumbach found that white union members vote eight to 14 percentage points more for Democrats than do white nonunion members. This
more Democratic
tilt among white union members accounted for 1.7 percentage points of Obama’s victory margin in 2008 and again in 2012, several studies have found.
“Unions remain the
only set of organizations in the U.S. that can help prevent working-class
whites from going conservative,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at
Washington University in St. Louis. While Trump often boasts that he did
well among union members, Rosenfeld reminds us that Trump lost among union
members in both 2016 and 2020.
It is often forgotten
that unions frequently
educate and engage typical Americans in the basics of
democracy and civic activism. In that way, unions help to get many
nonaffluent Americans involved in politics, and that, at least somewhat,
offsets the disproportionate political voice that corporations and the wealthy
have thanks to their lobbying and hefty campaign donations. Robert D.
Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, has
praised unions for building an important sense of community—with their meetings, marches, protests, and
picnics—and for serving as “schools for
democracy,” where workers get involved in everything from collective bargaining
to debates in union meetings to canvassing in political campaigns.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political science professor
at Columbia University who is overseeing some research for the Labor Department, said, “Unions serve as a school for democracy for citizens by
introducing individuals, particularly those who might not be involved in other
civic organizations, to the rhythms of democracy.”
The ground game
When it comes to
fighting to defend democracy, Unite Here, a 300,000-member union of hotel and
restaurant workers, has perhaps punched above its weight more than any other
union. It was a principal sponsor of a modern-day “Freedom
Ride,” in which 1,500 hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, and other
union members were bused into Washington along with Black Lives Matters
activists and other allies to press Congress to enact new voting rights
protections. In Arizona, Unite Here co-sponsored a hunger
strike to pressure Senator Kyrsten Sinema to enact voting rights legislation.
The union also posted videos and ran full-page newspaper ads to press Arizona’s
Republican legislature not to roll back voting rights, and it pushed Arizona
lawmakers to condemn Cyber Ninjas’ much-derided review of the presidential
vote.
Other unions have
also done their best to dissuade GOP-led state legislatures from making it
harder for people to vote, but that’s an uphill battle in deep-red states where
many lawmakers have swallowed Trump’s lie about widespread voter fraud. In
Georgia and Texas, the Service
Employees International Union ran internet ads that criticized Coca-Cola, Delta
Airlines, Home Depot, and other corporations for donating to lawmakers who
backed new voting restrictions. AFSCME, the National Education Association, and the American
Federation of Teachers held rallies in Washington, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and
Detroit to defend the right to vote
and protest efforts to make it harder for Americans of color to vote. AFSCME also provided plaintiffs in lawsuits
that have challenged new laws that it says
illegally discriminate against and disenfranchise voters of color. Many unions are urging their members to serve as poll
watchers in communities where they fear that Trumpist poll watchers will seek
to intimidate voters of color.
At the same time, AFSCME and other unions are educating people about how to make
sure they can vote despite all the newly enacted voter restrictions, such as
laws cutting back on early voting, drop boxes, and Election Day registration.
“We’re not going to sit back and assume the courts are
going to help us out,” said Brian Weeks, AFSCME’s national political director. “We assume that we will
have problems, and we’ll make sure that our program helps overcome that.”
In recent months, teachers unions have fought a different
type of battle to defend democracy—often by fighting against book bans and defending teachers who face punishment for teaching about
racism. “In many countries, labor
unions have been a bulwark against authoritarianism,” said Weingarten of the
American Federation of Teachers.
Weingarten said her
union might endorse some non-Trumpist Republicans, such as Lynn Cheney, who
reject the “Big Lie” and Trump’s efforts to overturn election results. This
means that in districts where Democrats have little chance of victory, the
teachers union might help elect Republicans who oppose the GOP’s increasing embrace
of authoritarianism.
For the 2020 elections, Unite Here ran a huge
door-knocking operation that some political experts say could serve as a model
for the overall labor movement.
That
union had 500 full-time canvassers going door to door in Nevada and another 500
doing the same in Arizona. Unite Here says its canvassers contacted 48,364 infrequent voters in
Arizona who did not vote in 2016 and
urged them to back Biden. The union says that helps explain why Biden won
Arizona by 10,457 votes, a victory that surprised and shocked the Trump forces.
Many of Unite Here’s canvassers were hotel workers who were laid off during the
pandemic, and their union, often helped by funds from other unions, paid them
about $700 a week to canvas.
All told, Unite Here says its canvassers knocked on three million doors in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Pennsylvania in 2020 and talked
with more than 460,000 infrequent voters. Its canvassers did so well in those
states that Stacey Abrams asked Unite Here to send its canvassers to help push
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff over the top in the Senate runoff in Georgia. The union says it sent 1,000 canvassers to
Georgia from Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and other states.
Chris Smith, a
53-year-old Unite Here member who works as a bartender in San Diego, spent six
weeks canvassing in Georgia. “People whose doors I knocked on, they
got excited,” Smith said. “They asked me a lot of questions. I felt I was
making a difference, that I did matter. We were going to turn the Senate away
from the bullying Republicans.”
Susan Minato,
co-president of Unite Here’s giant union local in Southern California and
Arizona, sees her union’s effort as an example for all of labor. “I want other
unions to have more people canvassing in these races, to do it in every state,”
she said. “That would be huge.”
Gwen Mills, Unite
Here’s secretary-treasurer, said the union’s goal is to have 1,500 union
members canvassing in key races this year, “going door to door, reigniting people to vote.” Mills said, “We try to keep a drum beat year
in and year out: Do democracy at work, do democracy at the doors, do democracy
at the polls, do democracy in the capital.”
With Stacey Abrams
running for governor in Georgia, Unite Here expects her to ask it to send in
some canvassers again this year. The
New Georgia Project is an influential voter registration and mobilization
organization founded by Abrams, and Eric Robertson, its labor liaison, said,
“Labor can have an outsized impact by being out there this year. They have
relationships with workers who are part of these communities. If the unions are
able to activate them, that’s going to move the dial, and moving the dial
is important in this election because the margins of victory will be so narrow.
Labor can really make a difference.”
This essay was commissioned by and is co-published with the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a partnership between socialists and the United Electrical Workers union, is trying to be at the heart of a new mass labor resurgence. Their success could help millions of workers.
As any good organizer will tell you, workers know best how to organize their workplaces. (Getty Images)
During the height of the pandemic, the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America teamed up to launch the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). It represented an ambitious attempt to meld together growing socialist currents with the existing labor movement and to help create new avenues of organizing for workers.
Below, historian Gabriel Winant writes how EWOC has been able to support worker organizing in ways that unions often have not, and shares his experience volunteering as an EWOC organizer. Food-service worker Teagan Harris then recounts how Gabe, as a volunteer, assisted her and her coworkers in winning demands from management at their workplace in Chicago.
Gabriel Winant
For the first time since the 1970s, the labor movement has momentum on its side.
A wave of strikes in the fall of 2021 set the tone for rising worker militancy, although these largely occurred in already unionized workplaces. The spread of new organizing in the nonunion sector, however, signals something distinctive and new: since the landmark victories at several Starbucks stores in Buffalo in late 2021, workers at about 220 more locations have filed for union representation elections; so far, there have been over twenty pro-union votes (a number of them unanimous) and only two defeats. Arguably even more dramatic is the triumph of the independent Amazon Labor Union at the giant JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island in March 2022; ALU reports that it has since heard from workers at over a hundred more facilities seeking support to replicate the feat.
For those of us who are convinced that the labor movement must come back for our democracy — even our civilization, such as it is — to survive, this immediately raises a challenge: What can we do to help? How can we join in?
These are difficult questions, because both the Starbucks and Amazon campaigns are distinguished by their grassroots, bottom-up quality. In fact, it’s the absence of interested outsiders that appears to have been key to their success.
How can workers’ organizing scale up fast while retaining the self-directed quality that has been so critical to these breakthroughs? We see signs everywhere that there is a vast, subterranean river of discontent coursing through the American workplace, far larger than these two huge corporations. How can we help tap into it and bring it to the surface while channeling, rather than checking, its momentum?
ALU is a direct, organic outgrowth of the workforce at JFK8, and it has shunned any formal relationship with a larger labor union. Slightly differently, Starbucks Workers United is an affiliate of Workers United, itself an affiliate of the giant SEIU. Yet the latter campaign itself is proceeding with a high degree of autonomy, spreading far faster than union staffers would be able to accomplish if they attempted to implant the union in each new store themselves.
This autonomy marks a departure from both the successes and the failures of the mainstream labor movement to accomplish new organizing in recent years: where labor has won, it has often been through the concentration of resources (organizing staff, legal and research capacity) at sites where unions have identified strategic opportunities and possible leverage.
On the other hand, where labor has lost, the burdens of existing organizational legacies have weighed heavily. For example, the repeated failures of major organizing efforts in the South (including the prominent Amazon campaign in Bessemer, Alabama) have much to do with the political and organizational baggage of existing unions, which limit the space for workers to see their own participation as a meaningful form of voice and agency.
A paradox of union organizing is that it requires resources, but the investment of those resources tends to shift control (of strategy, tactics, message, and tone) upward, and therefore may tacitly disempower workers — even though the union is trying to do the opposite. Management has become skilled at exploiting this paradox, arguing persuasively that workers will have less voice with a union than without one.
There are good reasons that workers often need support beyond themselves to organize. Some of these needs are obvious: legal counsel, access to political allies, space to meet, money for supplies of all kinds. But even more important is the crucial role of organizing support itself.
It’s true, as any good organizer will tell you, that workers know best how to organize their workplaces. But this is not as simple a truism as it would appear to be, because the things that workers already know are almost always jumbled up with all the confusing, dangerous, and humiliating compromises required by everyday life in the American workplace.
This is true for everyone: consciousness is always contradictory. All of us carry around in our heads fears about the consequences of stepping out of line. We encounter them as the anxieties of loved ones who depend on us, which might make us risk averse; or the painful lessons of past failures and defeats — our own, or those of people we know, or those of the working class on a larger scale; or the optimism of ambitions that we don’t want to spoil, or of relationships (including with bosses) that we don’t want to damage.
To be sure, anti-union campaigning is often clumsy and out of touch (as with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s recent efforts). But more insidiously, the boss also speaks to the worker in the worker’s own voice, in the guise of an internal whisper of doubt and confusion or even simple exhaustion. This is central to how power in the workplace in a capitalist society operates.
Occasionally, you meet natural-born organizers — people who have no trouble sorting out their own ideas from the deposits left in their own thought processes by the employer. Most of the time, though, most of us have to learn to articulate what it is that we already know, and to develop in ourselves the capacity to speak out loud what we actually think, with the employer’s power excised from our own thoughts and speech.
The things that workers already know are almost always jumbled up with all the confusing, dangerous, and humiliating compromises required by everyday life in the American workplace.
Boiled down to its essence, the skill of organizing is the ability to be more honest and direct than is natural for most of us in everyday life, which is structured ordinarily by self-protective forms of politesse and indirection that are inimical to trust and solidarity. When you start organizing, you typically sound stilted and awkward at first, as though you’re trying out someone else’s voice. In a union effort, this often manifests as wheedling, placating, or manipulation.
But when you get good at it, you sound natural — like a more concentrated version of yourself. Sometimes this takes years. (It did for me.) Sometimes it only takes hours.
To make their way through this process, there’s only one thing that workers ultimately need: someone to talk to. In the final analysis, this is all an organizer really is.
Workers find this resource first and foremost among each other, of course. But it’s often helpful, or even necessary, to have someone else with some outside perspective who’s been around the block a few times: do enough organizing and you start to recognize patterns of how certain kinds of conversations go, pitfalls that can be predicted and avoided, and opportunities that might have otherwise been obscure.
Here is where a risk arises. Workers may need someone to talk to about what they’re going through, to flesh out what they want to say and to whom. The organizer who plays this role makes an invaluable contribution by listening carefully and reacting honestly.
But for the organizer, it’s a major effort to give such relationships the time they need to develop. American unions, having shrunk so badly over the past two generations, operate under significant financial constraints, and their campaigns typically follow a template developed out of years of bitter defeats and narrow victories in their particular industries.
In this context, professional organizers often experience pressure to try to speed workers up, overtaxing the relationships of trust that might exist with workers or among them (what Jane McAlevey famously calls “shortcuts”); or to make strategic decisions on behalf of workers, short-circuiting workers’ own self-development into assertive and self-confident organizers.
How can the new spirit of militancy in the American working class find the organizational channels it will need to grow without becoming warped or stunted by these channels? An organization that could answer this question would need to be able to support workers’ organizing without any structural pressure to reshape workers’ struggles in its own image.
Such a group exists. I know because I’ve been volunteering with it since the start of this year. It’s called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC).
EWOC, a joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE, a small and independent left-wing union), functions as a kind of help desk for workers’ organizing. Fundamentally consisting of a network of volunteers with organizing experience, EWOC operates an intake system for workers who request support, and then assigns these workers to a volunteer organizer: maybe someone with experience in the relevant industry, or someone who lives nearby.
Because EWOC organizers are under no pressure to mold workers’ dissatisfaction and solidarity into any particular organizational form, this kind of organizing has a certain pure quality: never in any other organizing work have I felt so free to listen to workers, share my honest assessment of their situation, and then simply ask, “So what do you want to do?”
This distinctive quality of EWOC organizing became clear to me in a conversation with a worker who said to me, at a crucial inflection point, “I’m realizing that I can’t persuade anyone of anything. I just need to tell them what I really think and ask them what they really think, and then they’ll do what they’re going to do and I can’t control that. Oh my God, I just realized that’s what you just did in this conversation with me!”
Since it is not our job to try to persuade workers of anything, we are free to help them test out and develop the forms of organization and tactical approaches that make the most sense for them. Organizing in EWOC, you have no product to sell. (This radical tactical autonomy is also the organization’s main strategic weakness. Unlike unions, which generate financial capacity internally from their members that they may project as organizing resources into unorganized workplaces, EWOC remains for now a strategically passive entity: workers seek us out rather than vice versa.)
EWOC organizers are already playing support roles in Amazon and Starbucks unionization efforts around the country, as well as hundreds more struggles that are less prominent. A minority of these will wind up as union recognition campaigns. Many others will be a success because they secured repayment of stolen tips or won a fairer schedule.
But at some level, all are a success, because solidarity is not a feeling but a habit that can be learned — and the more people who practice it, the easier it becomes for others to cultivate. In this key sense, every struggle is a victory.
What EWOC needs most of all is more people: more volunteers who can organize or want to learn how, and more workers who want to organize their own workplaces. In recent weeks, EWOC has received an influx of requests for support, indicating the emerging opportunity in the American workplace. We should not miss the chance — every worker has something to contribute.
Below is the account of a group of workers that I supported in a fight at a retail food service establishment in my neighborhood in Chicago.
Teagan Harris
It was really my coworker Shannon who reached out to EWOC in the first place. I hadn’t organized anyone or known anyone who had. In fact, out of all the direct family members of mine who were blue-collar, factory, or food-service workers, none of them had been a part of a union.
In Arkansas and Oklahoma, where I grew up, a union was often only visualized through large inflatable rats and passive-aggressive remarks, so I was understandably wary of Gabe when he entered the picture. But we’d been cheated in our workplace, and our bosses, when they decided to cut corners to decrease costs (starting with their workers), left us footing the emotional and physical bill: it’s a food-service place with only six of us working there, and while we were frustrated with lots of things — safety issues, missing tips — the biggest problem was staffing. Management would sometimes schedule only one of us for the rush times, an experience that was often overwhelming. As a more experienced worker once told me, “Don’t worry, the panic attacks stop after a few months.”
So it started with a group chat and then a letter signed by all six of us, and then, as threatened, a strike. We asked our bosses to give us pay stubs, better safety equipment, and fewer solo shifts — that was it. We expected the threat of all the workers walking off the job would be enough for the small business to care, but we quickly found out how replaceable we were in the bosses’ eyes.
So we chose to play the waiting game. In the end, our bosses canceled all shifts, forcing the managers to work seven days a week. After a full pay period, they reached out demanding an unconditional return and mandatory retraining for all the workers.
At this point, the stalling had certainly worked: we had gone from full participation, to half, to just a fraction (the rest waiting for someone else to make the final call). We were no match for a business whose sole interest was keeping us down, especially when many of us had second jobs or school. Which is what made outside assistance not just helpful but necessary.
The first time I’d spoken to Gabe was when we had three people actively involved: Aidan, Shannon, and me. That was enough to keep the whole workforce together. The second time, it was Shannon and me, and the third, it was Gabe and me. Turns out it’s exhausting trying to get demoralized and disempowered workers to show up to a meeting from 7 PM to 9 PM. The long road to unionization was out of the question because of the temporary nature of our working situations as food-service workers and students. Half the time, quitting looked better than fighting it out.
So I sat on the phone for a few hours processing how to get five employees back on board and get our bosses to not just respond but cave to our demands. That was, until I realized that isn’t how organization works.
Our sense of solidarity came through our shared position as overworked and now thoroughly replaceable laborers, and therefore our collective action was not going to come from the passion of a single person but in the rekindling of hope in the group.
We decided that, even if it was just for the workers coming after us, we would not quietly quit or return without change. We had to do the most with what time and resources we had. Had it just been me, my own time would have been the only resource I had to draw on. But with the volunteer work of EWOC and other groups, like a local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and in the wake of food-service workers unionizing all around us at Starbucks, we suddenly had access to the expertise of others in our same position. We had legal counsel, other workers, concerned community members, and organizational help. So we set smaller goals.
To be honest, it started with a vengeful desire against management, but wound up being a second wind of motivation stemming from a renewed sense of hope.
Within days of telling management of our intent to hold a rally outside the store, we had a negotiation time and date in hand. After a successful negotiation, we then spent the next few weeks planning a return to work with the full force of our community behind us. Our employers met every demand, and the new requirements are hung in our place of work for every employee to follow.
It isn’t a union campaign story, but it’s a win for labor organizing nonetheless. Now it’s a matter of making resources apparent to the workers, making the solidarity of workers clear and accessible, and raising up new stories, like our own, that allow people the space to understand that collective action is a threat not to the worker but to the boss who steps on them.
Earlier this week, in a meeting of employer-side attorneys and union suppression consultants, Ken Hurley, the vice president of human resources and labor relations at The Kellogg Co., spoke candidly about a new environment that has shifted the traditional power of employers and emboldened workers and labor unions.
In hushed tones, Hurley described the tactics employed by activists during a nearly 10-week cereal plant strike last fall. The strike prevented concessions from workers and forced Kellogg’s to back off a plan to expand its two-tier wage system. “In my view,” Hurley said, “the union leadership at the bargaining table were behaving more like terrorists than partners.”
The conversation was hosted by a human resources and labor relations trade group called CUE. Hurley said he was surprised by the aggressive nature of the union, which generally has not engaged in confrontational tactics or strikes. Hurley claimed that the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union, which represented workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants, “really became somewhat intoxicated” by other strikes last year, including work stoppages at plants owned by Frito-Lay and Nabisco.
What’s more, he said, workers at the plants benefited from outside support that hasn’t existed in the recent past. Plant employees and union activists galvanized support on social media, including Facebook and TikTok, while Kellogg’s management had trouble connecting with workers.
And in an unprecedented moment, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh walked in solidarity along the picket line with Kellogg’s workers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. President Joe Biden later in December issued a statement sharply criticizing efforts by Kellogg’s to bring in nonunion replacement workers during the strike.
The Biden statement, said Hurley, was “basically an anti-Kellogg public release. … We were really getting it from both barrels.”
Reached for comment, Kellogg Chairman and CEO Steve Cahillane issued a statement in response to Hurley’s presentation at CUE. “We are just learning about these statements, as they were not authorized by Kellogg. We are embarrassed as a company – the comments and the tone in which they were delivered do not reflect the values of our organization or our position,” wrote Cahillane. “We sincerely apologize. We have a long and productive history of working with our unions. We fully expect that will continue moving forward.”
Trevor Bidelman, president of BCTGM Local 3G, which represents workers at the Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg’s plant, bristled at the description of his union as “terrorists.”
“This is a company that keeps coming to the table with hundreds of millions of dollars of profit yet thinks it’s OK to take away from the worker. That’s what this strike boiled down to,” said Bidelman.
The negotiations centered on a two-tier system of pay for many workers, with lower wages of $9 an hour less than “legacy” employees and partial benefits for “transitional workers.” This was a sticking point for union activists, in addition to higher overall wages. The final contract, signed in December, provides cost-of-living adjustments and a pathway for low-paid transitional workers to become full-time legacy status workers, who make around $33 an hour.
“You know, Ken Hurley fully believes that U.S. Kellogg’s workers have too much and we should be giving things back to make sure the business succeeds,” said Bidelman. “Well, I’m sorry, nobody stood up for 20 years and everybody kept acquiescing to the fact that CEOs get paid $10 million and stock profits,” he added.
“This is a company that keeps coming to the table with hundreds of millions of dollars of profit yet thinks it’s OK to take away from the worker. That’s what this strike boiled down to.”
At the conference, Hurley also spoke in awe and derision of a new media startup that covers labor activism, More Perfect Union, which brought viral attention to the strike by interviewing workers and spotlighting creative attempts on Reddit to stifle strike-breaking attempts by Kellogg’s. More Perfect Union was founded in 2021 by Faiz Shakir, formerly Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign manager.
A reporter for More Perfect Union, Hurley said, “ambushed” him when he went to Washington, D.C., for negotiations with BCTGM. “It’s a George Soros-funded, pro-union activist organization; they had a camera, and a reporter was asking us questions as we entered the room,” said Hurley.
Later, during a question-and-answer portion of the conference, Hurley called More Perfect Union a “worthy adversary” and “very sophisticated.” The media outlet, he added, churns out “very impactful videos, and they’re a force to be reckoned with. … I will say, it’s really impossible for a company, a large company, to combat the kind of cinematography and emotion that comes out of those social media posts when they’re produced so well.”
The negotiation “ambush” interview, he said, “was all set up by the union.”
Kellogg’s comments did not surprise Shakir, who laughed at Hurley’s characterization of his small media team as more powerful than Kellogg’s, which has a market capitalization of over $23 billion and teams of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts. He clarified that his organization has received grant money from the Open Society Foundations, a philanthropic network backed by billionaire George Soros.
“The purpose of covering the stories of working people is to make them feel like they have power, and that’s exactly what these union-busters are responding to.”
More Perfect Union, Shakir said, did not coordinate with the union and does not “accept any funding, not one penny, from any union.” The labor union establishment, added Shakir, doesn’t want his media outlet involved in contract negotiations and is generally opposed to confrontational tactics on behalf of workers.
During the meeting this week, Hurley warned the other employers in attendance — including representatives of John Deere, Ross Stores, and Lowe’s — that companies need to “think in new ways and more creatively about how to connect on a personal level with their workforce.” Kellogg’s, Hurley said, set up a special contract negotiations website, monitored social media posts, and communicated almost every day of the contract talks. But it was too little, too late. “We needed to start that four years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago, so that we engage our workforce directly.”
“You got to throw out the playbook. You’ve got to get aggressive, you’ve got to take some risks, you’ve got to get your story out there,” said Hurley.
For proponents of labor power, the Kellogg’s executive’s comments simply reinforce the notion that more labor activism yields greater impact and more victories for working-class Americans. “After strikes at Kellogg’s and John Deere and Kroger, and the victory at Amazon, so many workers now take inspiration from each other,” said Shakir.
“The purpose of covering the stories of working people is to make them feel like they have power,” continued Shakir, “and that’s exactly what these union-busters are responding to. They are fearful and afraid of the fact workers might be taking matters into their own hands to reclaim power and rights that are rightfully theirs.”
