NEW YORK – The American labor movement will soon have something it’s never had before: a centralized strike fund.
Union Now, the new nonprofit and brainchild of Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson, began officially fundraising at a kickoff rally on Sunday, April 12th, in Manhattan. National leaders of the Democratic left were there in support; both Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani made rousing speeches, which suggests that the supporters Union Now hopes to enlist will go beyond those who are already union activists.
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The Union Now fund will be a centralized, national clearinghouse to get money directly into the hands of workers, Nelson told the Prospect. Too often, workers want to organize but can’t because of money. Some are working two jobs so don’t have the time; some get fired illegally for attempting to organize. Funds from Union Now will supplement the incomes of those still employed so they can spend time organizing rather than on that second job, Nelson said, and financially support those who have been illegally fired while they contest the dismissal or get a new job. Grant applications will be available following the inaugural fundraising; Union Now is deciding how it will approve grants and is considering using a workers’ council to do so.
The nonprofit is keeping its overhead as low as possible, Nelson said, and will assess the level of funds raised over the next four to six weeks. The plan is to then send the money to workers fighting to organize and win contracts.
“This all comes from a place of recognizing that our world is screwed up because union density is so low,” Nelson said. Just 10 percent of workers belong to a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, a figure that’s held steady for years in various polls and involves bipartisan backing. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 60 million workers would join a union if they could.
“The labor movement hasn’t had a national strike fund,” Nelson said, and that lack of material support “is a fundamental issue, a fundamental roadblock to organizing.”
Union Now’s first funding targets will include nationwide fights at companies like Amazon, Delta, and Starbucks, because demonstrating huge wins will lift up all other campaigns, she said. These are among the first likely beneficiaries of funds, though Nelson said the organization has not finalized any grants yet.
The group will add strength to organizing support that’s already under way by other organizations, Nelson added, such as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or EWOC, the volunteer-run group organized by the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which helps workers understand the basics of unionizing and gets them started organizing their workplace.
“There’s a lot of people trying to fill the niche of missing support for workers that are organizing,” Nelson said. “We’re trying to keep Union Now really simple, so it can be a value-add for organizing and striking.” Combined with other efforts, she said, Union Now can be an important component in creating “economy-of-scale organizing.”
In the years when economy-of-scale organizing worked, it was usually funded by some existing union’s treasuries. In the 1930s and ’40s, the great organizing campaigns of the nation’s manufacturing workers who worked in auto, steel, and heavy equipment plants, who went on to form such storied unions as the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers, were funded by a handful of other unions, chiefly the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, through their own centralized organizing and strike fund at the CIO—the Congress of Industrial Organizations. When those organizing campaigns began, it was a time, like today, when union density was low, so the hundreds of organizers hired on to those campaigns by the CIO were disproportionately young members of the Communist and Socialist Parties (the Communists then adhering to the Popular Front it’s-OK-to-work-with-liberals line).
If Union Now is to succeed, it probably needs similar financial support from some of today’s major unions and some thousands of the people who make digital, small-dollar contributions to Sanders, Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And if Union Now gets enough funding to scale up unionization campaigns, it likely also needs many of the young socialists and progressives who’ve worked on Mamdani’s and Sanders’s campaigns to devote a year or two to full-time worker organizing. Several unions have already expressed interest in contributing to the group, a spokesman for Union Now said, though it’s unclear whether some of its big-name supporters will lend their mailing lists to the group as it seeks digital donations.
One of the several activists who helped found Union Now, former AFL-CIO organizing director Richard Bensinger, told the Prospect that the ’30s have been on his mind lately, too, because the level of inequality in today’s America has reverted to a level not seen since then. Bensinger, who was the éminence grise to the baristas who began the Starbucks campaign, invests particular hope in Gen Z workers as the age group that has most experienced and recognized corporate greed.
“You have this combination, a perfect storm of anger among young people and economic hopelessness and a huge amount of popularity for unions among the population,” he said. “Trump has created such a climate of anger in young people that it fuels organizing.”
THE RALLY INCLUDED REPRESENTATIVES from multiple unions across industries, as well as the union activists who helped form the new group: Bensinger, the AFL-CIO’s former general counsel and chief of staff Jon Hiatt, UFCW Local 3000 President Faye Guenther, National Nurses United lobbyist Courtney Laudick, labor journalist and author Hamilton Nolan, and #TeslaTakedown national organizer Evan Sutton.
The room was loud, cheerful, and determined, with banners from the American Federation of Teachers, the Writers Guild of America East, and other labor groups hung around the walls.
Mamdani and AFT President Randi Weingarten delivered fiery speeches. Workers shared their stories about organizing campaigns across a wide range of employers, including Delta, Microsoft, New York University, REI, Starbucks, Wells Fargo, and Whole Foods.
Some described organizing for years with no response from management. Others described their anger at how little bosses care for workers’ safety and well-being.
When Amazon delivery worker and Teamsters Local 804 member Jerome Sloss took the stage, he spoke of the toll that employer indifference and hostility can take on organizers, even when they’re determined to keep fighting. “I am doing my best to organize my co-workers but too often the cost of living and exhaustion drowns out my words,” he said. It’s the duty and task of organizers, he added, to look after their fellow workers when managers and owners abandon them, to collect workers’ stories, “to check in on their families, and to build. For everyone out there right now on the front lines participating in mutual aid groups, labor unions, helping workers and organizing, please don’t stop now.” Making clear the need for a strike fund, he concluded, “We can protest and rally until we’re blue in the face, but unless we’re willing to withhold our labor and shut the system down, we’re not going to get anything.”
THE FINAL SPEAKER AT THE RALLY was Sanders, who took the stage to earsplitting applause. The threat against working people, he argued, was part of a project to concentrate wealth, resources, and power in the hands of vanishingly few people.
“This is literally an unprecedented and dangerous moment in American history,” he said. “If Trump and his fellow oligarchs get their way, we’ll live in a society where fewer and fewer people have more and more wealth and power. Where democracy will be undermined. Where workers will be thrown out on the street with no recourse.” The good news, he said, is that if working people can stand together and fight for a government that works for everyone, “there is nothing we cannot accomplish.”
A host of academic studies have shown that employers routinely thwart organizing campaigns by firing the workers leading those campaigns, which is a violation of federal law, but one which incurs no serious penalties. In an interview with the Prospect, Sanders acknowledged the fear working people feel when considering a union drive, especially now, when GOP policies have made prices harder to pay and jobs harder to find. He said that’s exactly the problem Union Now aims to solve.
“I think there are millions of workers in that status. People who understand the benefit of a union, want to join a union, are fearful of getting fired, may not know how to go about joining a union,” he said. “That’s what Sara Nelson is attempting to address right now, making it easier for those workers, give them the kind of support that they need both financially and legally to help us grow the trade union movement.”
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