State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence by Philip M. Dine (McGraw-Hill, 276 pages)
U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below by Kim Moody (Verso, 320 pages)
In their well-regarded 1998 book, Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, labor experts Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravich found that labor unions' strategies matter more than employers' tactics when it comes to determining the success of organizing campaigns. Even workers with their backs against the wall can overcome the financial advantages of their bosses, the authors argue, if they are smart and persistent. Two new books, State of the Unions by Philip M. Dine and U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition by Kim Moody, embrace this premise with gusto. In dissimilar but equally thoughtful works, Dine and Moody propose internal changes that the struggling labor movement can make to regain its influence. While each has its shortfalls, labor leaders serious about sustainable union growth would be wise to engage with these pressing volumes.
No labor tome could ignore the structural barriers unions face in our new Gilded Age, and both writers give adequate weight to the role outside economic and social forces have played in labor's decline. Dine, a veteran labor reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, notes that employer aggression, unbalanced labor laws, and globalization shook the longstanding labor-management balance into what he calls "disequilibrium," with business gaining all the leverage. The owner's advantage is intensified because many of the problems facing workers are intertwined. "Labor is trapped in a Catch-22," Dine writes. "It can't organize because it can't change the policies and laws, it can't change the policies and laws because it can't organize."
Moody, a founder of the grassroots union magazine Labor Notes, is even more comprehensive in detailing the macro factors depressing labor's growth. Global competition after World War II necessitated added investment in fixed capital, which shrunk the profit margin of U.S. businesses by the mid-1970s. Eager to recover, employers sought new ways to eliminate "waste" from production, and labor costs were often first on the chopping block. Work extensions, speed-ups, downsizing, outsourcing, and union-busting followed, shredding unions and working-class living standards alike. "Incomes have been lost as society's wealth moves upward," says Moody, "jobs have been lost by the millions, [and] power has been lost as unions decline and retreat."
But these polemics are short on pity. According to both Dine and Moody, labor's response to these seismic changes has only worsened its plight. Dine is quick to point out that many conventional union tactics -- organizing formulas that lack local specificity, cash-intensive get-out-the-vote efforts, promoting a culture of uniformity -- are ineffective given declining union density and the new obstacles workers face. Yet labor leaders are slow to adapt. "But in settling for what amounted to choosing from among its traditional goals," writes Dine, "labor was seemingly oblivious to the fact that by now it was too weak to make inroads in any of them."
Dine uses personal evidence to highlight one example: labor's archaic approach to the media. Engaging only friendly reporters and relying on cookie-cutter press releases, trade unionists are largely incapable of developing and communicating a coherent message. This stands in direct contrast to the Christian right, which utilizes a "false populism" to subsume economic concerns from political discourse as a means to connect with working-class families.
Similar to Dine, Moody finds labor's strategies outdated and largely ineffectual. But he takes the critique one step further, finding fault not only in specific actions taken by labor leaders but in the "institutional framework and ideology" of their very organizations, what he calls business unionism. Forged through a rancorous fight to expel socialists from the pre-merger AFL, Moody says business unions have become "bureaucratized and conservatized," abandoning the selective militancy that characterized previous eras (such as strikes, rank-and-file reform efforts) in exchange for concessions, labor-management cooperation, and mergers as a substitute for new organizing. Union leaders, he thinks, are retreating at the exact wrong moment.
Of course, reforms have been implemented from above, most notably from the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) and its partners in the Change to Win (CTW) Federation. After the 2005 labor split, SEIU led an aggressive charge to organize and absorb workers. But the union also deepened its centralization and top-down corporate structure, typified by the proliferation of "mega-locals," which Moody argues takes power away from rank-and-file to regulate work conditions on the job. These repeated turns from militancy don't have working people's best interest at heart. "The leadership of a growing number of unions adopted new strategies," Moody writes, "not to make gains, deal with the growing problems of the workplace, or to grow the union, but to preserve the union as an institution and the leadership's position in it."
What in-house changes should labor make to reinvent itself and spur a union resurgence? Dine's blueprint comes in the form of vignettes, stories of underdog unions employing innovative tactics to score improbable victories. Whether it was the diminutive International Association of Firefighters willing John Kerry to victory in the 2004 Iowa caucus or the organization of 900 poor, black women at the Delta Pride Catfish plant in hostile Mississippi, Dine's stories all stress the importance of grassroots participation. "Getting members engaged in their unions is neither an inconvenience nor merely one possible strategy among others," he writes. "It is a prerequisite to a revamped movement, a building block for whatever else labor attempts or hopes to do."
Messaging also plays a crucial role, and Dine argues that communications staffs should "humanize, regionalize, and think big." The public is receptive to many of labor's policy goals, such as the prevention of outsourcing or safety enforcement, but worker conflicts are frequently documented as insular, narrow bids by self-interested employees to boost wages. Instead, unions should find imaginative ways to "marshal the moral authority" of workers and connect to broader struggles. With improved public understanding of the role unions play, workers will also have an easier time reintroducing economics to American political debate, thereby improving their chance at influencing public policy in a progressive way.
For Moody, the inability of overly cautious labor leaders to stand their ground in the face of immense economic transformations does not mean the labor movement will forever languish. But to regroup, he writes, "what needs changing are the two fundamental relationships that define a union: the relationship of leaders to members and that between leaders (and the institution) and the employer." In other words, without union democracy, strong workplace organization, and the guts to challenge employers all the way to a work stoppage, more concessions and less economic and political power will result.
Organizers should stretch beyond their traditional strongholds as well, by focusing on growing the South and in Latino communities. Unions have historically shied away from the former, but Moody reminds us that the civil rights era proved a mass movement built on racial and economic justice can be successful. And as the South becomes more diverse and previously unionized industries like meatpacking and automobiles send more production below the Mason-Dixon, the time may be ripe.
Latino workers could be even more valuable to union growth. From 1975 to 2004, Latinos jumped from 4.4 percent to 13.1 percent of the labor force, and as Moody writes, "[the demonstrations on] May 1, 2006 showed not only the strength of the immigrant workforce ... but the willingness and ability of immigrant workers to act on their own despite the high risk of job loss or even deportation." Many unions, which played a modest role in organizing the May Day marches, are aware of these trends. In fact, SEIU launched an International Latino caucus earlier this year. But because Latino growth is so pronounced, Moody thinks the trends deserve emphasis. Aligning with local organizations like living wage coalitions and workers' centers can present a good entrée into the community, and labor has witnessed some success bankrolling those campaigns.
To be sure, both books have their faults. It seems Dine had one too many interview requests denied in his 20 years on the labor beat, as he focuses too heavily on messaging at the expense of other issues, like race and gender exclusion and immigration. His nostalgia for the "tranquil" alliance between business and labor in the 1950s also overlooks the radical struggles workers underwent in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the wave of strikes in 1945-6, to overcome the callous tactics of capital owners and establish comparable power.
Moody's prose can be overly technical and the hyperbolic language he sometimes deploys masks the complex relationships between union bosses, business leaders, and workers. It's also unlikely that building a separate political Labor Party -- a position he advocates -- would be more beneficial to workers than running pro-labor social democrats in Democratic primaries, given the American electoral system requires a plurality of votes rather than some form of proportional representation.
But paired together, Dine's journalistic feel for narrative and Moody's keen economic eye give readers hope that America's working class can regain the strength and respect they rightfully deserve.
