There is Power in a Union

I wrote this essay two years ago, but it was never published. I think it still works, though it may be more optimistic in tone than is warranted.

THERE IS POWER IN A UNION

By Hank Kalet

The setting is the work floor of a textile manufacturer in North Carolina. Workers cram the room, watching as votes are counted. It is the penultimate scene of Norman Ritts’ Norma Rae, and the audience waits with the workers, unsure of the outcome. Final tally: 373 against the union, 427 for. Tension broken, the workers erupt in cheers and chants.

It is the film’s iconic moment, a demonstration that collective action can succeed. Norma Rae was released in March 1979 – 35 years ago – and I remember rising to my feet when the final vote was announced.

There hasn’t been much to cheer since then on the labor front. In just the past few months, employees rejected a union at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant despite support from management, buying into Republican anti-union propaganda, while workers at a Washington Boeing plant caved on a contract laced with givebacks. Both votes followed job-loss threats – Tennessee politicians said a union would damage the plant’s future, while Boeing threatened to move from Washington – and are indicative of legal and global trends that have unions on the defensive.

“The competition fostered by globalization and public policy that is less oriented toward creating stability for workers are making it difficult to wall off and protect workers the way unions did before,” said David Bensman, labor historian at Rutgers University.

Yet, there is evidence of a revival. The 2011 Occupy protests and organizing by fast-food, Walmart and undocumented workers has forced wage and workplace issues onto the table – including calls for a more robust living wage, protections against wage theft and municipal rules forcing companies to provide paid sick leave.

“My overall view is that this is a time of crisis and a time of renewal,” Cesar Pink, a visual artist with the Brooklyn-based Arete Living Arts Foundation, said. He is making a six-part documentary on the history of the labor movement called Strength in Union that he hopes will be released later this year.

“The best thing that happened to labor was the Occupy protests,” he said. “It got ’99 percent v. 1 percent’ into everybody’s mind. Everybody knows it is an issue facing the country and labor is at the front line of that.”

The labor movement’s struggles matter. Union membership as a percentage of the workforce, according to federal estimates, has been in decline since the 1950s. Today, just one in 10 workers belong to a union, compared with a historic high of one in three in the ‘50s. This drop-off has consequences. According to the Economic Policy Institute, union workers earn 13.6 percent more than their non-union counterparts, receive better health benefits and are more likely to have retirement plans. Therefore, as the unionized workforce shrinks, inequality grows – hence the need for a strong labor movement.

But first, big labor may have to get out of its own way. The AFL-CIO, at its 2013 national convention, endorsed greater ties to other community and social-justice groups. This came over the objection of some unions seeking to defend a model of unionism – one tied to individual contracts and workplaces — that succeeded in the past.

“As long as (unions) were able to negotiate contracts and achieve steady gains, that model was fine,” said Roland Zullo, research scientist with the University of Michigan Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. “But we are now in an era where that is hard to do. The law has changed, quite radically because of Supreme Court decisions, but also because the economy is more global.”

The right-to-work movement, historically strong in the South but now spreading to the Rust Belt, is part of the shift in the legal environment, Zullo said. Michigan passed a right-to-work law as part of a budget bill at the end of 2012, on the heels of a similar Indiana vote. These bills allow workers to opt out of unions in their workplace, but to receive union benefits (negotiated salaries, disciplinary protections), and are designed to strip unions of operating cash. This has three effects: making it harder to negotiate and administer contracts; bleeding strike funds and weakening the leverage the strike threat provides; and making unions less likely to engage in political behavior, out of fear that support for progressive politicians and causes might lead members to opt out.

“This is about making it more difficult for the labor movement to politically support progressive politicians in (Michigan),” he said. Because of this, he said, the impact goes beyond individual unions. “It is about workplace safety, the minimum wage – those things, too, are affected by the right-to-work law.”

That is because unions aggregate workers and equalize power between employer and employee. The demands of individual workers are easily dismissed, but the demands of a united workforce are harder to ignore.

Consider Norma Rae. As the film opens, Norma – played by Sally Fields, who won an Oscar for the roll – complains to management about her mother’s temporary hearing loss. She is rebuffed, clearly not the first time management has ignored a worker complaint. It is only the threat of the union – triggered by the arrival of an organizer from New York — that changes the dynamic.

Norma Rae, as a film, is a flawed vehicle for a union argument. It boils much of the narrative down to a personal-growth story. But the lesson at its core – that collective action matters — should not be forgotten.

Workers understand this, which is why we are witnessing another rebirth of worker-focused organizing and political activity with the as organizing of low-wage work – the fast-food industry, Walmart, home-health aides – and the passage of local sick-time requirements and state minimum wage hikes gathering momentum.

“Unions are recognizing that the situation has changed fundamentally and that they have to change their strategy fundamentally,” Bensman said. “They are trying to reach out to unorganized workers and tying to find ways of creating strength and solidarity.”

Zullo says the efforts are not unusual – “unions have always done both” contract negotiations and organizing – but that impediments to “bargain(ing) in the workplace” have made “it is so difficult to form a union today to help workers through private bargaining” that it “is forcing them to become more political and to raise their base outside of unions.”

Pink said unions had become complacent, focusing more on contracts than movement building. The Occupy protests, which started in New York City in 2011 and spread to other cities, altered the debate. It injected income inequality and class division into the national dialogue far more effectively than anyone had in recent memory.

And they demonstrated the need for collective action to counter industry as it chases profits. That’s the key argument made by Reuben Warshawsky, the labor organizer played by Ron Liebman in Norma Rae. He tells textile workers that an un-unionized textile industry is “free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you, and to take away from you what is rightfully yours. Your health. A decent wage. A fit place to work.”

Warshawsky is talking about unions, but also more broadly about the need for collective action. He easily could be talking to the thousands of low-paid fast-food workers and part-time Walmart employees agitating for higher wages and lending new energy to the labor movement. And that is Pink’s point.

“People feel strongest about unions when they are in a struggle,” he said. “The fast food workers and the Walmart workers, they are struggling for representation.”

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