What Is Not to Be Done

If unions seek to re-create the labor movement of the past, organized labor will die. As capitalism has changed, so must workers’ movements.

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This article is part of our symposium on “The Future of Labor.”

There are moments in history when the world teeters on a razor’s edge—where we can plausibly imagine a country and a world remade on the values of equality, justice, and collective liberation, or one that goes in a very different direction. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the savage inequality, injustice, and failures of our economic and political system. The combination of COVID-19 and growing economic collapse has created extraordinary, and urgent, opportunities to organize and fight for that better world.

We face horrifying consequences if we fail. It’s alarmingly easy to glimpse a future dystopian world devastated by climate change, disaster capitalism, hyper-inequality, exploding racism and patriarchy, and political repression.

What we do in the weeks, months, and years ahead matters as never before. We need to both offer a vision of the world we want to create and lay out concrete steps to address the immediate and long-term impact of the pandemic, economic collapse, and impending implementation of crushing austerity.

It is hard to imagine a movement rising to this moment without workers and worker organizations playing a central role. An upsurge for labor is both possible and essential to all of our futures.

Ironic though it may be, history shows us that economic collapses, wars, pandemics, and other national and global crises, with all their horrors, can nonetheless create conditions for transformational positive change. In the United States, a labor movement born from the solidarity forged in organizing, strikes, sit-ins, and battles of the Depression surged in members and power before, during, and after World War II.

More recently, South Africa, South Korea, and Brazil all saw explosive growth of unions after their dictatorships were defeated. In these countries, unions were aligned with and integral parts of the democracy and liberation movements. When apartheid was defeated in South Africa and democracy was won in South Korea and Brazil, workers felt a sense of exhilaration and power born from the part they’d played in defeating repressive regimes. Unions had a moral legitimacy based on their role in these struggles that fueled their organizing, membership growth, and political and workplace power.

What does this mean, what can it prefigure, for the potential for a labor upsurge in the United States in the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of soaring unemployment, soon-to-be-implemented austerity, and, possibly, a major depression?

Workers are both terrified and angry. Actions and strikes in both unionized and non-union workplaces have begun. Disproportionately, the frontline workers are women, workers of color, and immigrants, many of whom are active in the worker and community organizations that are leading actions to win protections for these “essential workers” and their families and communities. The absurdity and contradictions of workers being told they are “essential and heroes” while their lives are needlessly endangered by employers is a powerful moral foundation that provides an engine to power a movement whose goals are not to recreate the labor movement of the past, but instead birth a labor movement committed to a radical transformation of the political economy of the country.

This leads us to “what is not to be done.”

There will be no upsurge if, guided by rose-colored nostalgia, we try to recreate the labor movement of the past—before the economy was fissured, reorganized, and financialized. If we are on defense instead of offense, we will fail. If we try to re-create workplace-centered organizing and bargaining narrowly focused just on wages and benefits, without looking at the full lives and needs of workers for housing, education, racial justice, and equality, we will fail. If our goal is to limit the damage and protect only existing union members, hoping unions will grow and revive when and if the economy recovers, there will be no upsurge.

We only have to look back to the 2008 financial collapse to see opportunities squandered. The Great Recession left unions weaker, workers worse off, and wealth and power even more concentrated in the hands of the super-rich and corporations. Instead of challenging the growing financialization of the neoliberal economy and its accompanying austerity, many in labor and the progressive political world fell into the trap of seeking a return to the pre-crisis “normal” as the best we could hope for. Instead of union growth, we saw continued decline and the rise of the right in the U.S. and around the world. The super-rich and corporations had a plan to consolidate their wealth and power—which they did—while some in labor seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that unions had at least survived in some form.

A precondition for a labor upsurge is to develop organizing, bargaining, and political strategies appropriate to a world in which power is concentrating in the hands of fewer actors. Monopolies like Amazon and private equity giants like Blackstone and Cerberus increasingly dominate every part of Americans’ lives. For many millions of Americans, they, and corporations like them, are our employers, even if their name isn’t on our paychecks. They own our apartments or homes, manage our pensions, control data and information, provide all of our goods and services, and increasingly monitor and surveil our purchases and even our daily travel from place to place.

If labor isn’t willing to challenge capital, monopolies, and those who control capital, and how it is allocated and managed, not only won’t there be an upsurge, but labor will be swept into irrelevance. While there isn’t a simple and clear road map of how to do this, there are some immediate actions we can take that will help set the stage for this desperately needed upsurge of workers’ power and rights.

Right now, we need to do everything possible to deal with COVID-19’s immediate impact on our communities, workplaces, and jobs. That includes:

  • Organizing and supporting strikes over dangerous conditions at Amazon, Walmart, and other companies where workers’ lives are endangered by the spread of the virus.
  • Empowering low-wage and unemployed renters by organizing and supporting a national rent strike.
  • Come May 1 (aka May Day), there will be millions of Americans who won’t be able to pay their rent. Even before the pandemic, many of them were routinely forced to choose between rent, food, health care, and other essentials. Making a virtue of this new necessity, organizations across the country are calling for a rent strike. Such efforts to organize renters who can’t pay to fight back could lay the foundation for broader class demands for the unemployed and low-wage workers. This ongoing campaign work with newly organized renters, the unemployed, and low-wage workers can create a growing base, anchored by public-employee unions, to oppose the austerity that corporations, conservatives, and politicians will seek to impose. The workers engaged in these anti-austerity campaigns can lead a call to tax the rich.
  • Universities are already responding to the crisis with furloughs, cuts, and a push for “online learning.” Students’ lives have been upended, putting their economic security and health at risk. But workers and community organizations are fighting back. AFSCME 3299, for instance, has pushed the University of California for PPE, protocols to protect health and safety, and a commitment to no layoffs. Unions are organizing to ensure that emergency funding goes to keep workers’ jobs and support students and surrounding communities, and that universities use their rainy-day funds now.

When we emerge from quarantine, we will immediately confront calls for austerity (a call that Mitch McConnell, among others, has already begun). The upcoming elections will be an important moment to fight back, calling out the billionaires and monopolies who were the beneficiaries of the Trump tax cut, have long avoided paying taxes, and have continued to reap benefits from the CARES Act. We have a responsibility to call for what we really need—that everyone pay their fair share to create a system that provides basic human rights to all of us.

Supercharging Our Aligned Power: Mapping a Two-Year Plan for Increased Mass Action

Labor has made its greatest breakthroughs when workers were in motion in many places at once around similar demands. The strikes for an eight-hour day that got workers mobilized in May 1886 helped give birth to the AFL before the end of that year. The mass strikes of 1934 paved the way for the Wagner Act and the formation of the CIO in 1935.

Today’s unprecedented conditions demand that we synchronize our struggles, using the alignment of contract expirations, and countering the right and center-right’s inevitable calls for austerity, in part by reopening agreed-upon contracts to strip workers of wages and benefits. Labor has the opportunity to make Common Good demands in every sector of the economy and geography of the country. Starting in 2021, more than five million workers will be preparing for or in negotiations around the country. An interactive map of contract expirations, organizing campaigns, and budget cycles is being developed and will soon go live as part of an effort to build on the recent movement to “bargain for the common good” that we’ve seen spreading across the country from Los Angeles’s teachers last January to, more recently, janitors in Minneapolis-St. Paul. (You can learn more about Bargaining for the Common Good here.)

Imagine the movement workers can build if dozens of campaigns mirrored, magnified, and built on the common good strikes of the last few years, including those of the teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Paul, who fought for and won not just higher wages but also expansion of restorative justice, support for homeless students, sanctuary schools, and much more.

Suppose this happened simultaneously all over the country? Imagine if hundreds of community groups and unions engaged in overlapping campaigns and potential strikes over coordinated common demands, such as dedicating unused land and more residences and other buildings to affordable housing, and divesting public funds from private prisons and fossil fuels. Imagine if the combination of common good demands painted a picture of the world we want to create, laid out a plausible path to achieving it, and won victories that turned some of these dreams to realities.

It’s not just possible for us to think big and act boldly in this moment. It is a necessity if we hope that the side of the razor’s edge that emerges from this crisis holds the path to a brighter future.

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