Tag Archives: union organizing

A wide shot of the Niagara Falls horseshoe waterfall. The sun is shining and the water is as blue as the sky.

Anarchist Unionism: A Forgotten but Glorious History

[For more of my posts on anarchism visit this page. An abbreviated pamphlet version of this post is available for download and printing here. A computer voice reading of the blog post can be listened to in the player below.]

Why should we think about anarchist unionism?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the push towards capitalist reforms in China, self-proclaimed Communist movements the world over have lost their main sponsors and sources of political inspiration and legitimacy. Subsequently, since the early 1990s anarchism has seen a resurgence within social movements in the US. Some movements, like the early anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street, have more foregrounded anarchist ideas, while all social movements have been touched by an increased number of anarchists within them, such as the abolitionist wing of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The labor movement has long been a central part of social movements in the US, sometimes radical and sometimes not, but always touching the lives of millions of people and putting them into varying degrees of action for reform and occasionally towards revolution. While the US labor movement is at a historical nadir in terms of union membership density, the last decade has seen a broad uptick in strike activity and public support.

With this modest resurgence of both anarchism and union organizing, it’s strange that there’s very little overlap between the anarchist movement and the labor movement in the US today. There are very few anarchist-led organizations or prominent anarchists working within the labor movement, and the labor movement has very few prominent leaders or groupings of its own that identify with anarchism. 

From a historical vantage point this is unusual. In the early 20th century anarchism was at times the dominant leftist pole within the international labor movement, with anarchist-led labor federations claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of members and leading large strikes in countries on five continents. However, the repression and precipitous decline of anarchism as an international social movement from the 1930s – 1980s overlapped considerably with the successful assault on the labor movement in the US (and to a lesser degree in other countries) from the late 1940s – 2000s. These movements shriveled up and became increasingly isolated from each other over the second half of the 20th century. 

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Critical Book Review: Power, Manipulation, and Burnout in Pitkin’s On the Line

On the Line: Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union (2022) by Daisy Pitkin is probably the most well-written book about the labor movement I’ve ever read. The book is an account of the author’s experience as a union organizer in the mid-2000s written as a long letter to the worker organizer she developed a close bond with, Alma. The characters are relatable, passionate, courageous, and draw you in. The author’s first-person organizing stories are interwoven with important union history to astutely draw out themes of labor struggle as true of capitalism of years past as they are today. An allegory of the moth’s desire to fly towards the light of a fire and to its own certain death illustrates the drive union organizers have to keep fighting bosses despite the self-destructive effects these fights have on their mental and social lives. If you like well-written books, you should read this book on these merits.

If you are looking for any kind of inspiration or positive model for what union organizing can be like, you should read a different book. On most pages Pitkin has a caring voice as a writer and a gentle touch as an organizer, but gentleness by itself is no protection from the machinations of personal and institutional power that subtly slice through the chapters. You almost forget how unseemly an image of union organizing this is because the storytelling is by turns electrifying, stirring, and heart-tugging. I’ll leave it to other reviewers to discuss the book’s positive aspects, and I’ll confine myself to the political message and meaning of the story for workers and organizers today.

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Self-Acceptance in Organizing (Listening Series, Part 1)

[This series on listening is part of my larger series of posts on relationship-based organizing.]

Everything that is democratic, caring, and collaborative in human relationships is created through listening. Thus for the relationship-based organizing model that I advocate on this blog, listening is at the foundation of everything. 

And yet, good listening is not easy. Good listening can appear instinctual, unique to each personality, and situation-dependent, all of which make it hard to analyze and strategize about in a way that organizers might find helpful.

I entered adulthood as a bad listener. I wasn’t the kind of person who would talk too much so as to edge other people out of talking, and I listened plenty and asked people questions to evoke their thoughts. But for me the quality, not the quantity, of my listening was what was bad. I didn’t know good listening was a thing, so I just assumed that all listening was more-or-less the same. 

My first lesson in good listening was just noticing that some of my friends were good at listening to me. Being listened to made me feel seen and whole, and that was something I wanted to give back to my friends.

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Not My Union: The Workplace Politics of Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman

[This post is part of a series on relationship-based organizing.]

Despite an increase in buzz and news stories about labor organizing in recent years, actual union membership in the US is continuing its long decline. The most recent statistics show a 10.1% union density in 2022, the lowest on record. 

The image is of a graph of union density in the US from 1955 to 2022, showing a steady downward slope from 35% density in 1955 to 10% density today.
Source.

All of the respectable ideas for fixing this problem have been tried and failed. On the fringes of the official labor movement is an idea that doesn’t get much airtime but might have the ingredients of an effective solution: To save the labor movement we have to abandon the Union movement. 

I capitalize the U in union deliberately to designate the form of union that has become historically dominant in the US. Such Unions include all of the big-name ones in the AFL-CIO and all of the other prominent unions in the US today. Such Unions have two distinguishing features. First, they contain no-strike clauses that prohibit workers from withholding their labor for the duration of the union contract. Second, they contain management rights clauses that take away union voice and influence from workers over job conditions and that declare management alone has the “right to manage” the workplace. Together, these Union clauses amount to telling workers to shut up and get back to work, something workers now hear as much from their Union reps as from their bosses.

Two worker radicals and writers who posed a different vision of unionism were Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman, authors of, respectively, Singlejack Solidarity (2004) and Punching Out & Other Writings (2002) (out of print and expensive to buy used, but downloadable as a pdf). Both books are collections of the authors’ shorter writings and were published shortly after their authors’ deaths. 

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Mostafa Meraji, Vakil Mosque in Shariz, Iran. Big faded brick pillars recede into a dark open hall with an ornately blue and yellow-tiled arching ceiling.

Relationship-Based Organizing with Thorny Coworkers

[This post is part of my series on relationship-based organizing. If you are new to my blog, I recommend checking out earlier entries in this series first.]

Relationship-based organizing (RBO) is a method of union organizing that centers building social relationships with coworkers. Everyone likes social relations, especially in our hyper-isolating and individualizing and anti-social capitalist society, so RBO is just puppy dogs, lollipops, and rainbows all of the time, right?

Of course not. One of the first things that goes through new organizers’ minds when they think about how to talk to their coworkers and build relationships is the question of those coworkers that aren’t easy to talk to or build relationships with. I’ll call them “thorny coworkers.” Like your biological family or your neighbors, you usually don’t have much control over who your coworkers are and you have to find some way to live with what you got. The first temptation upon realizing this is to think that maybe the organizing can just leave the thorny coworkers out of it. Depending on the grievances and social dynamics of any particular moment, this might be an entirely plausible strategy. 

However, as a general approach to organizing your coworkers, leaving the thorny coworkers out of your organizing entirely will likely backfire or severely restrict what you can win. Every coworker you exclude from organizing is another coworker who becomes easy pickings for the boss to turn against you. Every once and a while, you might be at a workplace where just one or two coworkers are thorny and ignoring them doesn’t really create any problems. 

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