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Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement
The labour movement is weak and divided. Some think that it is dying. But Julius Getman demonstrates through examination of recent developments that a resurgent labour movement is possible.
- GenresLaborNonfiction
381 pages, Paperback
First published June 9, 2010
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July 1, 2010
awesome. awesome. a must read for anyone interested in the labor movement. this is a view of the real history of the past of UNITE HERE and specifically HERE. Also, about the way forward to build a MOVEMENT and not just a UNION
January 26, 2013
I believe that to be a good organizer there are two things that you have to not only do well but be comfortable with. One is you have to have a strong, comfortable sense of yourself, and if you don’t have that, your organizing will always be tainted. The other piece of it is connected to that. It is emotionally draining work. You have to be like an athlete in terms of your ability to not only know yourself but to empathize with somebody else. It’s like the ability that writers talk about to become the object that you write about, to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes that Shakespeare, for example, valued so highly—‘where the bee sucks there suck I.’ Organizers have to be able to feel what somebody else feels in order to be really good at it, and it’s not simple, it’s not simple at all, to have to be on their toes all the time. I think you have to have a belief in happiness. You wouldn’t ever, I think, become a union organizer if you didn’t believe that there was a potential for happiness. --Kris Rondeau HUCTW (314)
This book has a very straightforward antidote towards restoring the power of unions: the comprehensive campaign. This means not just telling workers to unionize and not just organizing the workers to strike, but engaging workers to really take power in the company they are working for. And furthermore, to effect the company in such a way that they will respect the workers as a force which contends with those who run things. Workers do the work, investors and owners get all the profit, make all the rules and control every aspect of the way the workplace is run. A real organized union gives the workers a leverage in the way that the company is run; which is not something most corporations necessarily want.
What makes it difficult to come about is a mired history of unions in general, but specifically the unions this book studies mostly, Unite! and HERE; the legislation that has been passed in the past and that is coming up in the future, specifically the Employee Free Choice Act; and the dedication that organizers need to have to really building solid, real relationships with workers to amend their identity as the working class.
A lot of what the comprehensive campaign’s intentions are is a smarter way of thinking in the language that corporations speak, which is basically money. Whether that be damages to their stream of revenue, or it may possibly even be helping it. A case that’s talked about is helping Nevada and New Jersey lobby against federal tax initiatives for their casinos(they have a combined total of four senators) in exchange for negotiations. The union is widespread, so where it can sway political opinion elsewhere helps to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship.(85)
Mostly the comprehensive campaign focuses on costing the company some form of profit. Its an exertion of democracy, in that it attempts to make public the abuses of the company so that there can be a judgment-call on fairness by both its investors and customers.
A few examples would include Yale clerical workers wearing buttons that say “65 cents” to denote sex discrimination amongst female clerical workers, making 65 cents to the dollar of their male counterparts. Or Connecticut State Police doing an action in where all the troopers would pull over speeding motorists and only give them warnings, thus doing their jobs appropriately but costing revenue for the agency.
When Robert Maxey, a notoriously anti-union businessman, became president and CEO of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the union reacted by exposing his loose wheelings and dealings:
The union produced literature that prominently highlighted operating losses in the millions at three separate casinos which Maxey had previously headed…The report was circulated among stockholders, potential investors, lenders… The union also intervened in the MGM’s efforts to expand…The union used its institutional relationships with central labor councils, state federations and other union bodies to help mount opposition to MGM expansion.
Maxey stepped down. The union got a contract.
The same sort of thing happened when the hero of the comprehensive campaign, Vincent Sirabella, attempted to organize the steadfastly anti-union Fremont hotel.
I said to Rich McCracken [a lawyer for both HERE and FAST], ‘I want to send letters to these four hundred people we know that he owes money to. Can I call this thing a creditors’ committee even though we’re not in bankruptcy?’
McCracken said, yeah, sure. And I sent a letter out. I said, ‘Hey, look, he owes you, he owes us, why don’t we get together and get our money?’
My staff does these four hundred envelopes, and then a couple weeks later they say ‘Jeff, did you get any answers?’ I say no.
‘So it failed.’ I said no.
‘What do you mean?’
I said, “You think anyone wants to settle on ten cents on the dollar with us? They are all going after him for 100 percent of their money.”
John Coleman then declared bankruptcy with $180 million in bills and $400 million of assets, none of which were liquid. He calls up Vincent and says, ‘I’m fucking done.’
And Vincent and I go over to the Jockey Club in New York and negotiate the contract. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. Coleman turns to me and says to me—and says, ‘You’re a goddamn terrorist!’
I said, ‘No, John, you just thought we were stupid.’
The current process for unionizing is going through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s election process. This is coming from the 1938 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which sanctioned the NLRB to govern union election processes. But these processes are slighted towards the company. Tom Woodruff an SEIU organizer explains it like this:
Now we’re getting ready to elect a president for 2008. Let’s assume this. Candidate A has a list of all the voters, names and addresses, Social Security numbers, everything about them, and has it years in advance of the election. Candidate B gets a list 30 days before the election and half the addresses are wrong. Candidate A get to appear in all the debates, but gets to decide when the debate is, gets to make an opening statement and a closing statement, and there are no questions allowed. And Candidate B can’t even appear in the debate.
The entire election process is fertile for manipulation and deception; one example is highlighted by the Supreme Court case NLRB v. Kentucky River Community Care, Inc, which was a case where nurses who wanted to be a part of the union could not do so based on supervisory status. A supervisor isn’t part of the bargaining unit of a union, thus excluding them from the election. The point of contention is: what makes a supervisor? The Bush administration’s NLRB board “ignored the fact that an expansive reading had the capacity to remove most of the nursing profession from the scope of the act.” Not to mention employees that fall under the category of supervisor in other professions, making it so that…“today’s decision threatens to create a new class of workers under Federal labor law; workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees…That category…by 2012 could number almost 34 million, accounting for 23.3 percent of the work force.” (187)
The current legislation that is trying to be passed to help declining union membership is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This is an Act which makes a card-check (or employees signing cards given to the union organizer, rather than voting in an election) the deciding force in whether a union is accepted in a shop. There are many problems inherent in this as well, for instance “the EFCA would likely lead to earlier and perhaps more militant employer anti-union campaigns….If employers start early, they can mobilize fear and make arguments against unions before card signing begins.” (265)
Where card check has been achieved, organizing success has followed. Some may assume that giving all unions the benefit of card check would give them the same advantages that unions get from persuading employers to sign them. The problem with this reasoning is that it is not the card-check agreement but the card-check agreement plus neutrality after a comprehensive campaign that has proved so effective. The organizing approach adopted by HERE and other unions achieves card check through combination of negotiation pressure and worker solidarity. By the time card check is achieved, the employer has concluded that it is in its interest not to battle further against the union. But the EFCA cannot legislate this employer conclusion. The passage of the EFCA could lead employers to conclude that they need to battle harder, and they would retain all the advantages that they currently have under the NLRB’s election process.(267)
The book’s point is the EFCA is going to end up being a pretty impotent force really and to really effect change they need to revoke parts of current legislation including the prohibition of secondary strikes, the permanent hiring of replacement workers and maybe some cleaner provisions made about whether a “supervisor” can be within the bargaining unit. They have made it so hard for workers to get the point across that they want to represent themselves as a pertinent force within the place they are working.
What these faults in legislation really come down to though is a negative consciousness about what unions are:
Anti-union opinions are rooted in much more stable concepts—the importance of private property, the interests of shareholders, and the widely shared view that society works best when government lets the free market alone. As long as those attitudes are powerful in society generally, and predominate in the judiciary, it would be foolish to expect the Court to overturn the Mackay doctrine [(or the legislation that allows for permanent replacements during a strike)], which [is used as the] example of the havoc wrought by the judiciary on the basic ideas of the NLRA. (279)
What it comes down to though is where this country stands and the future of the workers within it. People seem to have an idea that they will be allotted a fair treatment because of whatever sake they have in this country fulfilling its dream for the people who are trying to work hard and make that dream possible. The truth is, people with capital are not concerned with the sake of those who help them and will, unfortunately, defy them if necessity leers itself at a given time.
A perfect example of this is the Stations Casino, one of the last casinos in Las Vegas to be holding out on giving the union a contract. And the situation for the workers was pretty commendable as far as positive reinforcement geos, until the recession made it not worthwhile to do so:
They have about 14,000 workers in the classifications that we traditionally represent in Las Vegas: they are all nonunion; they are aggressively anti-union. So two things happened. One, they were bought out. There was a private-equity buyout by a company called Colony Capital, which is a Los Angeles-based private-equity firm which has been especially interested in the hospitality industry. And as is typical with those transactions, they loaded the company up with an extraordinary amount of debt. Had the business continued to boom, they could pay that debt, but the intersection of the enormous debt load and the resulting interest requirement and the collapse of the economy—the local casino business has been way down in Las Vegas just because of the overall economic crisis there—and so they now have come after the workforce with a vengeance. They have reduced benefits; they basically totally abandoned the carrot program. And if an employer never had a carrot program, no one ever noticed, but if you built a whole identity with your workforce on the carrot, and then you take the carrot away, that produces quite a reaction. The workforce is now very disillusioned with the company, and the company’s debt load is staggering in relation to their business, and they are not as strong as they were…
It sounds like a bummer. But thankfully, there are organizers, with a platform for the comprehensive campaign, from Unite Here, who are trying to help the situation.
…Now I don’t underestimate them, I don’t mean to sound cocky about this, but that is the flip side of the negatives of the economic crisis in my view in respect to organizing prospects. (137)
When the company falls back on false promises, there is no greater protective force for the workers than a well-organized and involved union.
This book, the most modern history book i've ever read (it goes up to events happened in 2011), is a very healthy subscription to change the tow of the current economy which has the lowest share of union members in the workforce in 97 years, record high corporate profits despite us being in a recession, and record low worker wages.
We have a problem and this book contends that organization and the comprehensive campaign are solutions.
This book has a very straightforward antidote towards restoring the power of unions: the comprehensive campaign. This means not just telling workers to unionize and not just organizing the workers to strike, but engaging workers to really take power in the company they are working for. And furthermore, to effect the company in such a way that they will respect the workers as a force which contends with those who run things. Workers do the work, investors and owners get all the profit, make all the rules and control every aspect of the way the workplace is run. A real organized union gives the workers a leverage in the way that the company is run; which is not something most corporations necessarily want.
What makes it difficult to come about is a mired history of unions in general, but specifically the unions this book studies mostly, Unite! and HERE; the legislation that has been passed in the past and that is coming up in the future, specifically the Employee Free Choice Act; and the dedication that organizers need to have to really building solid, real relationships with workers to amend their identity as the working class.
A lot of what the comprehensive campaign’s intentions are is a smarter way of thinking in the language that corporations speak, which is basically money. Whether that be damages to their stream of revenue, or it may possibly even be helping it. A case that’s talked about is helping Nevada and New Jersey lobby against federal tax initiatives for their casinos(they have a combined total of four senators) in exchange for negotiations. The union is widespread, so where it can sway political opinion elsewhere helps to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship.(85)
Mostly the comprehensive campaign focuses on costing the company some form of profit. Its an exertion of democracy, in that it attempts to make public the abuses of the company so that there can be a judgment-call on fairness by both its investors and customers.
A few examples would include Yale clerical workers wearing buttons that say “65 cents” to denote sex discrimination amongst female clerical workers, making 65 cents to the dollar of their male counterparts. Or Connecticut State Police doing an action in where all the troopers would pull over speeding motorists and only give them warnings, thus doing their jobs appropriately but costing revenue for the agency.
When Robert Maxey, a notoriously anti-union businessman, became president and CEO of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the union reacted by exposing his loose wheelings and dealings:
The union produced literature that prominently highlighted operating losses in the millions at three separate casinos which Maxey had previously headed…The report was circulated among stockholders, potential investors, lenders… The union also intervened in the MGM’s efforts to expand…The union used its institutional relationships with central labor councils, state federations and other union bodies to help mount opposition to MGM expansion.
Maxey stepped down. The union got a contract.
The same sort of thing happened when the hero of the comprehensive campaign, Vincent Sirabella, attempted to organize the steadfastly anti-union Fremont hotel.
I said to Rich McCracken [a lawyer for both HERE and FAST], ‘I want to send letters to these four hundred people we know that he owes money to. Can I call this thing a creditors’ committee even though we’re not in bankruptcy?’
McCracken said, yeah, sure. And I sent a letter out. I said, ‘Hey, look, he owes you, he owes us, why don’t we get together and get our money?’
My staff does these four hundred envelopes, and then a couple weeks later they say ‘Jeff, did you get any answers?’ I say no.
‘So it failed.’ I said no.
‘What do you mean?’
I said, “You think anyone wants to settle on ten cents on the dollar with us? They are all going after him for 100 percent of their money.”
John Coleman then declared bankruptcy with $180 million in bills and $400 million of assets, none of which were liquid. He calls up Vincent and says, ‘I’m fucking done.’
And Vincent and I go over to the Jockey Club in New York and negotiate the contract. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. Coleman turns to me and says to me—and says, ‘You’re a goddamn terrorist!’
I said, ‘No, John, you just thought we were stupid.’
The current process for unionizing is going through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s election process. This is coming from the 1938 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which sanctioned the NLRB to govern union election processes. But these processes are slighted towards the company. Tom Woodruff an SEIU organizer explains it like this:
Now we’re getting ready to elect a president for 2008. Let’s assume this. Candidate A has a list of all the voters, names and addresses, Social Security numbers, everything about them, and has it years in advance of the election. Candidate B gets a list 30 days before the election and half the addresses are wrong. Candidate A get to appear in all the debates, but gets to decide when the debate is, gets to make an opening statement and a closing statement, and there are no questions allowed. And Candidate B can’t even appear in the debate.
The entire election process is fertile for manipulation and deception; one example is highlighted by the Supreme Court case NLRB v. Kentucky River Community Care, Inc, which was a case where nurses who wanted to be a part of the union could not do so based on supervisory status. A supervisor isn’t part of the bargaining unit of a union, thus excluding them from the election. The point of contention is: what makes a supervisor? The Bush administration’s NLRB board “ignored the fact that an expansive reading had the capacity to remove most of the nursing profession from the scope of the act.” Not to mention employees that fall under the category of supervisor in other professions, making it so that…“today’s decision threatens to create a new class of workers under Federal labor law; workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees…That category…by 2012 could number almost 34 million, accounting for 23.3 percent of the work force.” (187)
The current legislation that is trying to be passed to help declining union membership is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This is an Act which makes a card-check (or employees signing cards given to the union organizer, rather than voting in an election) the deciding force in whether a union is accepted in a shop. There are many problems inherent in this as well, for instance “the EFCA would likely lead to earlier and perhaps more militant employer anti-union campaigns….If employers start early, they can mobilize fear and make arguments against unions before card signing begins.” (265)
Where card check has been achieved, organizing success has followed. Some may assume that giving all unions the benefit of card check would give them the same advantages that unions get from persuading employers to sign them. The problem with this reasoning is that it is not the card-check agreement but the card-check agreement plus neutrality after a comprehensive campaign that has proved so effective. The organizing approach adopted by HERE and other unions achieves card check through combination of negotiation pressure and worker solidarity. By the time card check is achieved, the employer has concluded that it is in its interest not to battle further against the union. But the EFCA cannot legislate this employer conclusion. The passage of the EFCA could lead employers to conclude that they need to battle harder, and they would retain all the advantages that they currently have under the NLRB’s election process.(267)
The book’s point is the EFCA is going to end up being a pretty impotent force really and to really effect change they need to revoke parts of current legislation including the prohibition of secondary strikes, the permanent hiring of replacement workers and maybe some cleaner provisions made about whether a “supervisor” can be within the bargaining unit. They have made it so hard for workers to get the point across that they want to represent themselves as a pertinent force within the place they are working.
What these faults in legislation really come down to though is a negative consciousness about what unions are:
Anti-union opinions are rooted in much more stable concepts—the importance of private property, the interests of shareholders, and the widely shared view that society works best when government lets the free market alone. As long as those attitudes are powerful in society generally, and predominate in the judiciary, it would be foolish to expect the Court to overturn the Mackay doctrine [(or the legislation that allows for permanent replacements during a strike)], which [is used as the] example of the havoc wrought by the judiciary on the basic ideas of the NLRA. (279)
What it comes down to though is where this country stands and the future of the workers within it. People seem to have an idea that they will be allotted a fair treatment because of whatever sake they have in this country fulfilling its dream for the people who are trying to work hard and make that dream possible. The truth is, people with capital are not concerned with the sake of those who help them and will, unfortunately, defy them if necessity leers itself at a given time.
A perfect example of this is the Stations Casino, one of the last casinos in Las Vegas to be holding out on giving the union a contract. And the situation for the workers was pretty commendable as far as positive reinforcement geos, until the recession made it not worthwhile to do so:
They have about 14,000 workers in the classifications that we traditionally represent in Las Vegas: they are all nonunion; they are aggressively anti-union. So two things happened. One, they were bought out. There was a private-equity buyout by a company called Colony Capital, which is a Los Angeles-based private-equity firm which has been especially interested in the hospitality industry. And as is typical with those transactions, they loaded the company up with an extraordinary amount of debt. Had the business continued to boom, they could pay that debt, but the intersection of the enormous debt load and the resulting interest requirement and the collapse of the economy—the local casino business has been way down in Las Vegas just because of the overall economic crisis there—and so they now have come after the workforce with a vengeance. They have reduced benefits; they basically totally abandoned the carrot program. And if an employer never had a carrot program, no one ever noticed, but if you built a whole identity with your workforce on the carrot, and then you take the carrot away, that produces quite a reaction. The workforce is now very disillusioned with the company, and the company’s debt load is staggering in relation to their business, and they are not as strong as they were…
It sounds like a bummer. But thankfully, there are organizers, with a platform for the comprehensive campaign, from Unite Here, who are trying to help the situation.
…Now I don’t underestimate them, I don’t mean to sound cocky about this, but that is the flip side of the negatives of the economic crisis in my view in respect to organizing prospects. (137)
When the company falls back on false promises, there is no greater protective force for the workers than a well-organized and involved union.
This book, the most modern history book i've ever read (it goes up to events happened in 2011), is a very healthy subscription to change the tow of the current economy which has the lowest share of union members in the workforce in 97 years, record high corporate profits despite us being in a recession, and record low worker wages.
We have a problem and this book contends that organization and the comprehensive campaign are solutions.
April 9, 2020
Nice research of union history.
September 5, 2016
I've assigned this book to my Labor Studies students. Useful companion book to a course on union organizing.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews