It was a cause – not a job!
That is how I approached my new position as a Union Organizer for the Retail Clerks Union, Local 240 (now the UFCW) in Bellingham, Washington. I had spent four years in the Air Force, graduated with my BA in Political Science and Journalism, been a coordinator for the McGovern Campaign, elected to the Executive Board of the County Democratic Party — had read Rules for Radicals! I was ready to organize!
I grew up in a union family. Dad was a Union Pipe Fitter, my grandfather's were both union – even my great grandfather was a union “Steam Engineer” as early as 1899. It was obvious to me the Labor Movement was the predominant force in this country to fight for the working class and the underdog.
I had taken Labor Studies in community college and felt familiar with Labor History, economics and law. I was thrilled and motivated to go to work for a union. I quit my easygoing job with the county and arrived for my first day of work August 1973. I had worked my way through college as a union grocery clerk so I knew the work, the membership and the union. My only training in “organizing” was what I brought with me from my political activity. As I found out during my many years on union staff little training was ever offered and less given. Often I found I knew more than my staff higher ups.
Fast forward six months. Six months of experience in the real world of organizing and labor law in a world controlled by corporate capitalism. “Worker's Rights” were basically non-existent and the law meaningless. Every organizing program I started, my “key” person was fired. Charges filed – and any resolution months, if not years, down the road. By that time everyone had moved on and union forgotten, Nixon was president and he had appointed an unequivocal anti-union corporate attorney the General Council of the National Labor Relations Board. Allegedly the neutral government agency in matters of labor relations. Nixon's henchmen moved quickly to destroy worker rights especially to organize.
The actual depth of labor's problem hit me as I was walking to a hearing with our regional office's attorney. I expressed my shock at what I was experiencing on my job. The law was not neutral but in fact against us! Certainly the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and the national unions had a plan to deal with it. Well, the long and short of it was – NO – there was no plan! Unions would continue to collaborate with this misrepresentation of “justice.” Business had a plan and all major corporations signed on to in 1970 called the Powell Memo. A plan to destroy organized labor and it has been working very well for them to this day.
Organized labor made up 36% of the private American workforce in 1955. It is now at a disastrous 6%. When I went to work for Local 240, Washington State's union workforce was 26% — today it is 17% and our labor “leaders” (apparently forgetting history) brag about the numbers. Yes, there are lots of economic and political reasons for these calamitous drops in union membership but union organizations have spent 50 years shooting themselves in the foot. No plan, no strategy, no outreach and absolutely no imagination or vision. New ideas are a threat to big egos — “kill the messenger!”
From the national level on down the organizations have too often turned themselves into self-important boosting guilds promoting back slapping wine and cheese political wheel spinning. That and golf is so much more fun than doing internal organizing and the kind of on the ground hard work and planning needed. Unions are people and community organizations but little remains of ways to actually contact the public or members.
“Business Unionism” is the basic philosophy subscribed to by American unions and no where else in the industrial world. In the 1890s the American Federation of Labor made a deal to basically not challenge Capitalism if labor got a cut of profits. And this is what organized labor has done. There is no “Labor Party” as in Europe but instead an acceptance of a very secondary role in the Democratic Party – a capitalist, not a workers party.
The AFL-CIO has pretty much abandoned any effort to reach out to the American public. It has abandoned its newspaper, ceased to publish its once great economic magazine, no longer sponsors its amazing trade shows — “Look for the Union Label.” For several years The Meany Labor College provided the wonderful training I needed when I first came to work – boarded up and gone! Labor has no media presence. Labor has no Harry Bridges, John L. Lewis or Walter Reuther. Leaders of national stature.
I collect a very generous union pension. Since retirement every month a political contribution to the international union PAC comes out of that pension. Don't you think I would be a prime target to recruit to volunteer politically at a local level? Have never heard a word –- not from the International Union or the local where I live. My retiree newsletter endorsing Biden/Harris came the day of the election! I had voted two weeks earlier. Oh yes, they are “on-line” but unions are human organizations and need a human touch and the locals do nothing to point out the on-line sites anyway. Anyone who thinks a website takes the place of human to human organizing is fooling themselves!
Recent big organizing losses by the UAW and at the Amazon Warehouse show there is a major organizational flaw within organized labor that must be dealt with if it is to survive. There has been no plan for years and there seems to be none on the horizon. A plan is needed now and it must be a radical plan based on new imaginative thinking that puts labor as a part of the community union organizations live in. “Business Unionism” says to the public “its just about us” and that only alienates the public whose support is needed. Remember a failure to plan is a plan for failure – and on Labor Day 2021 that is the path American Unions are on. Unfortunately!
Bill Johnston is a retired staff organizer of the United Food and Commercial Workers. He is a member of the National Writers Union (Pacific Northwest Chapter). Email wfjohnstonehs@wamail.net.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021
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