Many workers today find themselves asking, “If unions in general are good, why does my union suck?” The member meetings are unbearably tedious, abuses and unsavory conditions are widespread at work, wages keep falling against inflation, health insurance premiums keep going up, and, worst of all, none of the union’s initiatives or campaigns seem to be helping. 

For many workers who are dissatisfied with their union, taking over the executive board appears like the logical way to make their unions better. They think that the union itself is a good thing and all that needs to be done is replace the bad leadership with good leadership. As common as this mindset is among union activists, it ignores a deeper and structural critique of why today’s unions are so dissatisfying in the first place. More often than not, such efforts to win union leadership end up perpetuating the very structures that are responsible for the dissatisfaction in the first place.

Unions have different structures and dimensions that are worth teasing apart and evaluating separately. What’s good about the union is the bringing together of workers to fight for better a better life. At its core, the union is democratic because workers are taken together as all having equal standing and voice. The union is militant because it’s based on workers taking action together. The union is radical because workers deciding and acting together in their own interests sets them apart from and against the overarching economic structures of society wherein workers merely exist to be squeezed by investors for profits.

But as with any good thing, the union can be warped, co-opted, and redirected for other purposes. In capitalist society, most unions lose their radical edge because of the immense pressures to subvert them to capitalist ends. The union comes to play the role of mediating between labor and capital by giving workers a little more but not so much that they compromise capitalist control and profits. In mediating smooth relations between labor and capital, the union easily loses its militant edge as worker action is regulated and mostly replaced by bureaucratic contract administration. In getting caught up in bureaucratic maneuvers, the union easily loses its democratic spirit and becomes stratified under a pile of lawyers, contract agents, and union officials.

What ties all of these structural problems together is the existence of an executive board that monopolizes the information-managing and decision-making functions of the union. Rather than an organization where workers come together to discuss issues and take collective action, under the rule of executive boards union members become at best passive followers of orders from above and at worst totally disengaged and cynical. If the very spirit of unionism is about giving workers a say and agency over their conditions, such top-down structures are totally antithetical to what the union stands for. Once the democracy in unions is lost, their militancy and radicalism soon fall away too.

The notion that the way to make a union more democratic is to seize top-down executive power is topsy-turvy. The executive board’s explicit and unambiguous function is to give decision-making authority for the union as a whole to a small clique. I’m not claiming that winning the executive board doesn’t make some reform possible, but the reach and sustainability of such reforms will be limited due to the self-contradictory strategy of trying to make the union more democratic using its most anti-democratic structures. 

The alternative to top-down change is bottom-up change. What kind of bottom-up change is even possible in today’s unions has so long been off of the menu of openly-discussed options in the labor movement that most union activists haven’t even considered them. If we take the blinders off then all sorts of possibilities immediately avail themselves.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written critically about prominent leftist writers who support taking over union executive boards as well as looked at the history of some unions more committed to bottom-up politics. In this piece I theorize a critique of the executive board at a structural level, look at alternative democratic structures that can be used to transform unions, and briefly illustrate such alternatives with examples from my own organizing.

Top-down vs. bottom-up organizational structures

Top-down organizational structures are those where one person or a small subgroup makes decisions for the whole group. Bottom-up organizational structures are those where the group as a whole generates, discusses, and votes on decisions for the group as a whole.

Top-down structures are morally objectionable because they deny the capacity for self-determination to most people. Top-down structures are efficient only if the priorities of a small subgroup are valued. Top-down structures corrupt and vitiate any group where the ideas, feelings, needs, and well-being of each individual is valued. Top-down structures further undermine the collective ideals of participatory democracy, collective empowerment, and solidarity and mutual aid. 

Top-down structures are politically objectionable because they seek to harvest the power of large numbers of people only by making them subservient and obedient. This necessarily undercuts not only the collective moral agency but also the political power that resides in the knowledge, intelligence, and skills of groups of people. Top-down structures also sap the motivation of groups when the majority are made to feel used and told to do things that they disagree with. While the coordinating costs of getting groups of people to work together to maximize each person’s contribution may be higher in bottom-up organizational structures than in top-down structures, the additional power generated by bottom-up groups far outweighs the costs.

Executive Boards are Top-Down Structures

The prototypical top-down organization in our society is the corporation, where investors prioritize profits, bosses pursue profits, and workers are expected to do what they’re told to minimize costs and maximize profits for investors. But top-down structures in general are just as objectionable in the hands of barely accountable union leaders as they are in the hands of barely accountable CEOs.

In popular discourse, unions exist to give workers a voice in the workplace and a seat at the decision-making table. The critiques I make of mainstream unions governed by executive boards don’t apply merely to those unions with bad reputations. Rather, the unions I’ve had personal experience in have public images as more militant, active, and progressive. In talking widely with rank-and-file in other supposedly “good” unions in the mainstream movement I find the same complaints. Upon closer examination, the lack of democracy and resulting deficiencies all stem from executive boards which monopolize formal authority over their unions.

Authors of the book Fighting for Ourselves argue that contemporary unions have an associational function and a representative function. The associational function is workers coming together to achieve some shared goal, such as withholding their labor to pressure their employer to increase their wages. The associational function is generally what gives unions their potential for organized class power. 

The representational function operates when a small subgroup represents a larger body of workers to the employer. Sometimes politicians or lawyers play this representative role, but in today’s unions it’s primarily elected leadership, particularly the executive board. Such worker representatives speak, decide, and act on behalf of the workers instead of the workers speaking, deciding, and acting for themselves. The representational function as fulfilled in mainstream unions is the cause of much of the labor movement’s stagnation.

Particular forms of interaction where the workers are represented to employers include in contract negotiations, in disputes over contract interpretation and enforcement, disciplinary investigations of workers, in courtroom battles, and in any other instance of conflict between the workers and the employer. Because the relation between workers and the employer is the primary reason for the existence of the union in the first place, the representative role that union officials assume with employers comes to dominate all aspects of the union’s affairs. The large majority of workers become represented by others not only in their external dealings with employers but also in the internal governance of the union.

The representative function of unions combines both top-down and bottom-up aspects. The top-down aspect is a small group of union officials making decisions for the workers as a whole. The bottom-up aspect is when workers vote in elections for union executive leadership. However, in practice in the vast majority of mainstream unions today, the top-down aspects dominate the bottom-up aspects. For example, members may vote once every 2, 3, or 4 years for their union’s president and executive board. But by my estimation 95% of all decision making in the union is conducted by those officials and only 5% is conducted by members.

The top-down aspect of the representative role of union executive boards pollutes union democracy in three ways. The first way is it separates out the active and decision-making components of the union and deposits them in the role of the executive board. This necessarily takes away the agency and responsibility of the rank-and-file to think, discuss, decide, and act for themselves. The union becomes split into the small subgroup of officials who make decisions for members and the mass of members who become conditioned to have decisions made for them.

This is at its worst in unions that follow a “service model,” where union members are given a passive role and are conditioned to only expect services from the union in return for membership dues. But even for those unions that use a so-called “organizing model,” the representatives become the ones that make the major decisions while the membership is mostly told to carry out orders. I was in a mainstream union once that prided itself on its organizing and even went on strike, which may give the outward appearance of it being a bottom-up organization. But in reality, decision-making power was clearly monopolized in the top layer of union officials. I routinely saw union leaders buck the majority opinion of the union membership and go their own way. 

The very power of the union itself derives from the strength of large numbers of workers who have the ability to withhold their labor. But the strength of large numbers is undercut when the majority of workers are kept in the dark and excluded from the vast majority of decisions that affect their actions in the union and their conditions at work. Many workers internalize this passivity and wait to be told what to do, others disconnect from union affairs, some become cynical. When the employer walks all over the workers and the only way to defend their interests is to pull the trigger on a strike, the union’s strength of numbers is squandered by internal division and lethargy.

The second way the representative role of the executive board pollutes union democracy is that the board acquires a separate set of interests from the general interests of the membership as a whole. Splitting the union between the members who pay dues and the officers who are paid by dues sets the stage for their interests to be opposed to each other. The purely administrative work of running a union is plenty of work on its own, and the additional work it takes to organize members to fight the employer is a never-ending endeavor. So paid officers see their job as completing the administrative side of things and giving as much time left over as they can to organizing. 

Because the wages and working conditions of the members depend on how successful the organizing is, it’s in the members’ interests when the officers work more. But the working conditions of the paid officers, now that they have desk jobs at the union hall, is largely independent of how successful organizing is against the employer. So the interests of paid officers is largely to finish their work as efficiently as possible to get things done in a normal 9-to-5 workday and then go home. As anyone who has ever been in a union knows, it’s impossible to wage powerful campaigns to win key demands if the main authorities of the union go home after 5pm. It might be natural to assume that it’s the role of the paid staff of the union to carry out most of the organizing, but the same contradictions affect paid staff (which I elaborate on here).

To resolve this contradiction between members wanting them to work more and union officers wanting to work less, the officers are thus incentivized to take shortcuts and make compromises with employers that allows them to get home in time for dinner. It’s a lot easier and more efficient for the union leadership if they can have smoother relations with employers that allow for quick compromises whenever issues arise. In the short term these compromises might seem adequate to members, but in the long-term these compromises build up and increasingly worsen working conditions and wages. A small clique who see their purpose as making compromises with employers totally undercuts the supposed purpose of a union as being about workers coming together to fight for better wages and conditions.

The pressures on executive board members who are unpaid are similar in some ways and different in others. By taking on an unpaid executive board position they essentially take on a ton of administrative work in the form of extra meetings and being on more committees. The incentive to efficiency, short-cuts, and compromises is even more pronounced for unpaid officers who have to shoulder the weight of these tasks on top of working their day job. 

The unpaid vice president of a mid-sized union once confided in me that ever since she won the election she “felt chopped off” from the membership. She had to spend all of her evenings at higher-up union meetings and had very little time to engage in the more grassroots work and relationship-building side of the union. She, along with the rest of the board, rarely reached out to members for feedback on questions of union governance and made most of their decisions based on expediency. In effect, this vice president went from being a part of the membership and acting alongside the membership to being a part of the executive board and acting in the interests of the executive board. 

The membership meetings of unions are often where these contradictions are most visible and frustrating. At one union I was in, the entire monthly member meeting was given over to reports from executive board members for the official roles they were performing and the committees they were on. It was clear that the officers just wanted to give the reports as quickly as possible and get the meeting over with. They knew that executive board meetings were where the real business of running the union happened, so why waste any more time than they had to at member meetings?

Being a rank-and-filer at such member meetings is extremely alienating as there’s no clear way for members to engage in discussion or introduce proposals or share their grievances and ideas. To make such meetings truly inclusive and democratic would have taken a lot more work from the union officers running the meeting. It takes extra work to show members how to engage in these spaces, how to bring proposals, how to read and think critically about budgets, how to build up a culture of solidarity and respect that fosters democratic deliberation, and so on. In every mainstream union I’ve seen with my own eyes the officers have chosen bureaucratic efficiency over member democracy and inclusion. The interests of the executive board are elevated over and against the interests of the membership.

The third way that executive boards pollute union democracy is through the corrupting effects of concentrated power. Not only do narrowly self-interested people seek positions of concentrated power once they’ve been created, but those who come to hold those positions of power are incentivized to use their power to hold onto those positions once they’ve obtained them. While being a paid union officer is often not a “cushy” job (though it sometimes is), it’s usually preferable to the jobs of the workers being represented. Contests for power over coveted positions pit factions of workers against each other and create ripe conditions for self-serving and corrupt behavior. 

For one union I was in, the office of president was repeatedly used as a stepping stone for those who wanted to become politicians or get higher-up paid jobs in the labor movement. It was not hard to see how these presidents often made decisions based on their own career advancement instead of the best interests of their members. At other times I saw top union leadership use their authority to silence lower-level dissenting officers, fire staff who had more grassroots organizing inclinations, and even collaborate with the employer behind the scenes to intimidate rival union leaders. This union was not publicly portrayed as backwards but successfully built a public image in the labor movement as a beacon of progressivism whose leaders have been interviewed in Jacobin Magazine and made appearances at Labor Notes. The appearance and reality of unions like these are starkly at odds with each other. These contradictions are knit together by the threads of executive boards that project democracy and radicalism but monopolize power for themselves.

In conclusion, it’s not called an “executive” board for nothing. Not only do unions borrow the terms of the corporate world in describing their leadership structures, but union executive positions themselves are quite nakedly top-down structures. That executive boards are so widely accepted and even desired by the left should not obscure the fact that they’re designed to take the ownership and control of the union out of the hands of its members.

One counter to these critiques is that if a union has an executive board that acts in the interests of the membership then it’s an effective and efficient way to run a union. The arguments above aren’t intended to say that all union officers necessarily become corrupt and come to work against the interests of their members. Rather, I’m arguing that this is structurally how mainstream unions are set up, and these structures apply real pressures on whoever holds these offices. Some union officers fight the good fight against these pressures, but the whole system is set up against them. Why take over a broken system instead of fix what’s broken about it in the first place?

Pinning the hopes of our movement on finding a few strong and caring leaders is blissful but ruinous ignorance. There’s a reason why the mainstream union movement as a whole is in a rut even if a few charismatic leaders occasionally appear to buck the trend. The structures of the mainstream union movement are the problem, and until the structures are altered, our unions will remain weak. Rather than ask, “What if we found better individual leaders to hand over our executive power to?”, we can ask, “What if we found ways to democratize the structures of our unions so all members were empowered?”

Bottom-up Structures

Many on the left are apprehensive about bottom-up organizational structures because they mistakenly equate bottom-up with structurelessness. While structurelessness may have the superficial appearance of being a non-hierarchical mode of social organization (something authoritarians and anti-authoritarians are equally guilty of mistaking), in reality organizational structure and organizational hierarchy are independent variables. Organizations with lots of structure can be either top-down or bottom up, and organizations with lots of hierarchy can be either highly structured or structureless. 

I’ve made my case above against structured top-down organizations. Bottom-up structureless organizations might be effective for achieving some goals, such as when individuals should be free to make decisions without regard to the rest of the members of a group. But for bottom-up organizations to be effective at taking coordinated collective action to solve complex questions of strategy and tactics to advance shared interests, then structure is essential. Only organizational structure can smoothly facilitate meaningful democracy via the spread of information, the processing of that information in group discussions, the crafting of plans and policies, and the voting between options.

While our society gives us lots of experiences with highly structured top-down institutions, it gives us very little exposure to highly structured bottom-up organizations. While this isn’t the place for a detailed introduction on the topic, there are a few things worth knowing and misconceptions worth clearing up.

When some people first hear these arguments for bottom-up organizational structures, they think it requires an unreasonably high standard of democracy and an exorbitant investment of time and energy. They surmise that all union decisions be made in weekly all-member meetings with 100% quorum. Rather, all-member meetings are crucial for deliberating and voting on key decisions but don’t have to happen all that often as long as there are other structures in place to advance organizational goals. 

For example, permanent and ad hoc subcommittees are important such structures. Some committees solicit ideas and craft policies to be brought back to the membership for votes. Other committees oversee particular projects or areas of union work with a mandate from the membership. The difference between committees delegated to perform specific roles and executive boards who wield near total executive power over union affairs as a whole is that specific committees are rarely able to concentrate enough power to abuse it or become a permanent separate stratum in the union whose interests evolve away from the membership as a whole. 

Another key feature of bottom-up structures is that they are directly accessible and relevant to members. For any kind of campaign that involves and affects all members, like a contract campaign, the body that makes daily and weekly decisions about the campaign should contain delegates from each workplace. The strike committee of the famous 1912 Bread and Roses strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts had a strike committee drawn from all of the many subgroups in the workforce. Industrial Workers of the World leader Bill Haywood described it thus: 

“the most significant part of that strike was that it was a democracy. The strikers handled their own affairs. There was no president of the organization who looked in and said ‘Howdydo.’ There were no members of an executive board. There was no one the boss could see except the strikers. The strikers had a committee of 56, representing 27 different languages. The boss would have to see all the committee to do any business with them. And immediately behind that committee was a substitute committee of another 56 prepared in the event of the original committee’s being arrested.”

To take another famous example, the elected strike committee of the pivotal 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike consisted of 100 rank-and-file workers. Before the strike, the membership of the Teamster local voted to formally give authority over the strike to the strike committee, totally circumventing the 6-person executive board who was aligned with the national union and opposed to the rank-and-file demands of the strike. This is a prime example of a layer of rank-and-file taking over the most important affairs of a union from below and in total defiance of the top-down structures of the executive board.

A contract campaign of a mainstream union I belonged to had a medium-sized bargaining team (maybe 15 active members) and included rank-and-file members on the team from my workplace. At the beginning of the campaign, the bargaining team, the union staff, and the union officials promised all sorts of democratic practices as a departure from the often opaque and frustrating practices of previous campaigns. But those bargaining team members (at my site and other sites) never used their position in the workplace to systematically gather feedback on key priorities and, rather, actively withheld key information from the rank-and-file at the peak of the campaign as we got close to a strike before settling. When the campaign actually started escalating, the pressures on leadership to do things quickly overrode whatever commitment, performative or sincere, they had to transparency, inclusion, and democracy in the wider union. In the end the top-down structures of the executive board and the bargaining team suffocated any real change of course from decades of previous campaigns where a few people called the shots. 

Building Out Democratic Structures

If not seizing the executive board, how else can union members transform their union? A two-fold strategy is necessary: First, members must take over the existing democratic structures of their union while also creating as many new democratic structures as they need. Secondly and simultaneously, members should gradually weaken and move towards the eventual abolition of top-down structures in the union, such as the offices of the president and the executive board. Together, this two fold-strategy amounts to the taking over of unions from below, which is the complete opposite of the more common strategy of taking over unions from above by winning executive board seats.

The legacy of past struggle, including past militancy, radicalism, and democracy, lingers on in most unions, even the most bureaucratic and inept ones. In their constitution and bylaws, most unions appear much more democratic than they’ve become in practice. For instance, most unions still give monthly member meetings higher authority than the executive board in decision-making. So a decision made by a majority vote at a monthly member meeting can not be countermanded or flouted by the executive board without the executive board violating the very governing principles of the union itself. However, this democratic potential has been almost entirely snuffed out of most mainstream unions today through the gradual weakening of democratic practice in member meetings and the gradual increase in practical authority assumed by executive boards. In my union I can’t remember the last time an impactful proposal was brought to a member meeting to be discussed and voted on by the membership. 

What’s made today’s member meetings so undemocratic is how technical, inaccessible, uninviting, and irrelevant they feel to most workers. For most unions, it’s the officers who either formally facilitate the member meetings by being given that power in the constitution or officers are the ones who end up facilitating because they know the procedures. As noted above, the agendas for these meetings mostly just consist of executive board members talking at everyone else about what they’re doing, and there’s very little discussion or encouragement of rank-and-file participation. In one union I was in of about 1000 members, the monthly member meeting averaged between 20-30 people. In other words, about 2-3% of the union showed up. Furthermore, the attendees were mostly not those most interested in significantly changing the union for the better, but rather those who already hold elected office, a few of their friends, and those union nerds (like myself when I choose to waste an evening) who like to know every last detail about what’s going on.

However, there’s nothing truly stopping a group of members from mastering the rules of the meeting for themselves, attending meetings, and altering the agendas and the meeting style to make them relevant, accessible, and empowering.

Members taking over member meetings I think could be a key tactic in a larger strategy of radically democratizing unions. This can’t be done all at once, and one should expect resistance and a severe lack of enthusiasm for such ideas from entrenched leadership. But if done carefully and with the long view in mind, I think it’s possible to gradually build up a crew of members who regularly attend these meetings, force key issues onto the agenda for discussion and voting, and give attendees a sense of their own power. The strategy could start by bringing smaller items to the meeting and tackling larger and larger issues as the confidence and numbers of attendees grows.

The culmination of such a strategy could be the members essentially governing the union over the heads of the president and the executive board via the democratic authority of the member meetings. If not outright opposition from the board, it seems this strategy would at the very least create major tensions as it threatens the concentrated power of top union officials. How to approach these tensions comes down to specifics, but I generally favor trying to execute this strategy while diffusing as much conflict with the board as possible. Where possible, I’d favor placing board members on other specialized committees to keep them involved, build their trust in the bottom-up organizing efforts, and make use of their expertise and knowledge while still severely curtailing the top-down power of their executive office.

An accompanying strategy that can be pursued is strengthening the steward networks across a union, democratizing the positions by making them elected rather than appointed, and creating a stewards council at the union-wide level with some role in union governance. The difference between a stewards council and an executive board would be that stewards are elected directly by their immediate coworkers and are accountable to them in a way that a small handful of executive board members are not accountable to any grassroots segment of the membership. Strong steward structures typically contain one steward to every ten-to-twenty workers, which stands in stark contrast to union executive boards where each executive board member proportionally represents hundreds or thousands of members but has little direct connection to any of them. While top-down unions often shape the steward position itself to be a bureaucratic endeavor of grievance handling and paper pushing, in the midst of a wider effort to transform a union the steward role itself could be transformed into a vehicle for member organizing and democracy.

Because stewards still work in the workplace and have direct relationships with coworkers, they are inherently a more grassroots structure that has the potential to be recruited into more bottom-up union efforts. Any union-wide effort to transform the union could focus on taking over grassroots structures like steward positions while also transforming the position itself into a bottom-up aspect of union operations and governance.

Many unions use “Contract Action Teams” (CAT) at the workplace level where a committee of people are tasked with spreading information and getting the rest of their coworkers involved in actions during a contract campaign. Because CAT teams are themselves present at the workplace level, like stewards, they are more of a grassroots structure. However, most CAT teams in mainstream unions are expected to be mere foot soldiers of the executive board and the bargaining team who are calling the shots. Higher-ups decide on an action and then tell the CAT teams to go around and get their coworkers to sign petitions or invite them to rallies or persuade them to go on strike. The information and the decisions flow from the top-down even if a lot of lip-service is given to such campaigns being “member-driven.” But like the grassroots position of the stewards, because the CAT teams are rooted in the workplaces themselves there’s nothing stopping members from essentially taking over these teams and running them how they want to.

A crew of fellow rank-and-filers I was with tried this in a campaign in a union I was in. The aim was to essentially take over CAT teams at the building level and try to run the contract campaign in the way we wanted, which was often in direct opposition to what the executive board and the bargaining team was doing. Rather than just using the CAT as a one-way conduit of information to tell members what was happening at the bargaining table and what action to take next, we used our CAT teams to actually engage members about contract proposals and talk about the effectiveness of various actions. We then used that information to apply pressure upwards on the bargaining team to make demands on them about the direction of the campaign and the priorities at the bargaining table. This often meant disobeying directives from higher-ups or significantly re-interpreting how to carry out union actions.

As with all of these ideas for how to take over unions from below, these things necessarily start small. We only claimed leadership over building level CAT teams at a small portion of all the workplaces involved in the contract campaign. But when members were given the opportunity to be involved in a campaign in a democratic and inclusive way, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The CAT team takeover experiment was successful bringing in many more members into CAT and increasing its democracy. 

We started to exercise more and more leverage over the course of the campaign. At one key point we created enough bottom-up pressure to force the bargaining team to take the next step towards a strike in opposition to a major faction of leadership loudly trying to prevent any movement towards a strike. At other points we used bottom-up pressure in the form of member petitions, speaking up at union-wide CAT meetings, and spreading debate on social media to decisively alter bargaining priorities at the table and campaign structures like the strike fund. We didn’t make a fight out of every problem we saw in the campaign, but we picked our spots to confront union leadership whilst also waging a grassroots-inflected contract campaign against our employer.

While most of us involved in this grassroots CAT project were disappointed in the final contract we got in that campaign, we also recognized that our efforts had made the campaign better and enabled us to win a little more than we would have otherwise. Most importantly, we laid a foundation to build on in the future. It’s not hard to imagine how such an effort started in one contract campaign could be built up over numerous campaigns until the CAT teams were strong enough to essentially run the campaign entirely from the grassroots.

Abolish the Executive Board

Spending all of this energy building up democratic structures from below won’t be as effective if all of the top-down structures of the union remain in place indefinitely. Abolishing the executive board is the only way to make a union truly democratic while also opening up its potential for militancy and radicalism that often lies dormant in a workforce.

Procedurally, the abolition of an executive board is a rather straight-forward matter. Changes to a union constitution and bylaws are one of the few things that typically can’t be decided at a normal member meeting. Rather, such changes typically must meet a higher standard of member participation and democracy, which isn’t a bad thing. Changes to the constitution can often be proposed at an annual convention and then sent to the entire membership for a referendum vote.

Any changes should not only formally abolish the executive board but should also make sure not to leave a vacuum of formal authority in its wake. Rather, any formal authority that is needed beyond what already resides in the member meetings should be delegated to specialized committees or other democratic structures like stewards councils. Any particular authority that a president or board has, such as control of union communications and bank accounts, should be explicitly handed over to newly created specialized committees or other democratic structures.

Abolishing the executive board should only be attempted once there is already the grassroots organization and leadership ready to assume the governing role of the union. Useful intermediate steps that might be worth taking before formally abolishing the executive board might be recalling individual board members who flagrantly attack the grassroots initiatives in the union or unabashedly violate the rules to hold onto their influence. Particular authority like control over communications and budgets could be handed over to grassroots structures before the executive board itself is entirely disposed of.

Integrate This Two-fold Strategy into Your Organizing

Focusing on structural changes alone won’t build grassroots power in your union. Some enthusiastic nerds for democratic organization, including a younger version of myself, often fetishize democratic organizational forms, trying to implement them without fully understanding what is needed to set them up for success. 

Most union members don’t care passionately, at least initially, about the technical details of the union constitution that portions out formal authority in this or that way to this or that body. Members will only begin to care about this stuff once it is made relevant. To make these things relevant, you need to organize around issues in your workplace and industry that people care about. In the context of broader fights for better wages and working conditions and other social justice issues, you can raise the issue of democracy and show how it is absolutely necessary to build worker power and win the demands you seek. The executive board, due its own top-down nature and time-sensitive pressures, will invariably get in the way of these efforts, and then you can align the fight for democratic structures inside the union with the fight for demands against employers on deeply felt issues. That’s when the membership will galvanize around the need for bottom-up democracy and demand it as much as they demand a living wage and workplace safety.

Bottom-Up Leadership

For many unionists, one of the appeals of taking over the executive board is that it’s a concrete and straightforward goal for which there is a clear and simple pathway. Building top-down leadership in the union is a step-by-step process facilitated by the pre-existing structures of the union itself. You get a crew of people together who want to run for election on a slate, you build up a group of supporters, you file for election, you make campaign materials, you hold campaign events, you do voter turnout, and then you win the election. Ta da!!! You’ve won the right to exercise top-down authority over the other members in the union.

Bottom-up leadership is of a different mold and has to be built differently. There’s no predetermined set of steps with structures already in place to guide you. Rather than finding the clique of people to give executive power to and trying to rally support around them, bottom-up power is built by bolstering the decision-making and organizing capacity of an ever-growing layer of rank-and-filers. While there’s no strict blueprint for how to do this, a more fluid and overlapping series of steps for taking over a union from below might look as follows. 

First, earn the trust of coworkers and other union activists by emphasizing as many repeated 1-on-1 conversations with them as you can. Learning how to truly listen to people’s needs, feelings, and ideas while also sharing your own needs, feelings, and ideas, and then using these conversations to ultimately build towards shared analysis and vision, is the most important skill of grassroots organizing (I don’t elaborate on this skill set here, but do elsewhere). Use these 1-on-1s not only to organize around grievances against the employer, but also focus on how power resides in the activity of the rank-and-file themselves and how membership will be most powerful when the union itself democratically empowers the membership. Agitate against the employer when they do bad things and agitate equally against union structures and leadership when they get in the way or bog things down.

Second, take the issues and spirit of these 1-on-1 conversations and expand them into group conversations at the workplace and union-wide level in the form of monthly workplace meetings and monthly all-member union meetings. Open discussion and debate is critical to building a powerful rank-and-file that is capable of both fighting for better wages and conditions but also for governing the union without needing an executive board. Take as many opportunities as you can to build the muscle of democratic discussion among the membership.

Such open discussion shouldn’t be treated as a hands-off, anything goes approach to facilitation, as that’s often how these discussions get stuck or boil over into self-defeating power-struggles. Structurally, find ways to keep discussion productive without letting the loudest voices drown everyone else out, such as setting limits on how long and how many times each person can speak on an issue. Craft proposals that focus discussion on issues that are relevant to members so that discussion doesn’t wander off into countless tangents. Relationally, find ways to connect with individuals outside of meeting spaces to amplify quieter and marginalized voices while tempering the most outspoken. Structurelessness in meeting discussion, like in any organizational structure, doesn’t automatically imply democracy. To build democratic and bottom-up discussion into your union’s culture, you need to build the relationships and organizational structures that make them possible.

Third, as your rank-and-file layer of bottom-up organizers grows, look for opportunities to implement in part and then in whole some of the structural changes discussed above. As you build increasing influence through grassroots structures like stewards, CATs, and member meetings, find ways to formally change those structures to facilitate bottom-up organizing needs. Create new union trainings and social spaces as needed to foster community and spread skills among this growing layer of bottom-up organizers.

Entrenched union leadership will likely get defensive and attack any bottom-up organizing efforts. The bottom-up activists will have to discern carefully when, where, and why to engage in conflict with union leadership. It’s important to know how to engage in conflict when it’s productive and builds rank-and-file power and how to avoid conflict when it becomes destructive and devolves into fights between big personalities. Entrenched leadership is the one who wins when they successfully bait bottom-up organizers into fights based on ego, as those fights will rightly appear toxic and useless to the rest of the membership who might then disengage from the fight for a more democratic union altogether. This then leaves the current leadership in power. So one question to ask is, “Does picking this fight with union leadership in this way advance our cause on real issues and does it build member power and democratic unionism?” Picking fights isn’t the same as building power, and you’ll only want to do the former when it involves the latter.

Lastly, as your grassroots power grows you’ll have increasing opportunities to weaken and even abolish the top-down structures of your union, such as the executive board and the presidency. This might be the most controversial step of the whole process, and I would caution against advancing this issue and picking this fight prematurely. Most of the organizing you need to do as a rank-and-file layer can be done before and without having to take this final step, so there’s no need to rush. Only take this step when your forces are strong enough to win it decisively and prepared to implement bottom-up governance for the union as a whole.

Conclusion

Democratic structure by itself is no panacea to solving the problems of the labor movement, but it is the skeleton that holds the union body up. To put flesh on the bones, unions can build a culture of strong and healthy relationships within the membership based on care, trust, and solidarity. To give democratic unions muscle they can be infused with a practice of direct action. To give democratic unions vision to keep from being mollified by mild reforms or performative gestures, unions can focus political education on alternatives to an economic system where workers are treated as mere cogs. 

One reservation I hear from fellow leftists in response to ideas about bottom-up structures is the disbelief that normal workers are capable of running unions in a democratic way. It’s far too common and easy to blame rank-and-file workers themselves for a lack of participation and activity in unions, and that blame quickly turns into a disbelief that workers have what it takes–the intelligence, experience, commitment–to make truly worker-run unions possible. When you don’t believe most people are capable of changing, of growing, of transforming themselves and their circumstances, then it’s only possible to see them as inert lumps of clay to be molded by more enlightened leaders. Handing over authority in the union to a small clique of dedicated unionists seems like the only solution.

In complete opposition to that sentiment, I’ve recently come to the personal resolution that I’m just going to believe in people. I’m not saying all union members at this precise moment are ready to wage and win the biggest battles in our unions and with our employers. Rather, to believe in people means to believe that people are capable of getting there. In getting to know my coworkers I’ve come to admire their journey to where they are now, how they’ve overcome so much up to this point, how they’re potential for growth and transformation appears limitless. What if we had a labor movement designed to harness our collective talents and passions in our unions? Would we be up to the task?

“Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Civil rights organizer Ella Baker said these words in a 1980 interview looking back on the theory of organizing she used throughout her life. No one believed in people more than Ella Baker, and that belief was central to the immense grassroots power she was able to infuse into the mass-based organizations of her day. “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”