Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below

by Staughton Lynd, Mike Konopacki (Illustrator), Immanuel Ness (Introduction)

Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd's experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement. While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic. To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers' self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas. This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.

Genres: Labor, Nonfiction, History, Economics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

The son of renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd, Staughton Lynd grew up in New York City. He earned a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD in history from Columbia. He taught at Spelman College in Georgia (where he was acquainted with Howard Zinn) and Yale University. In 1964, Lynd served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project. An opponent of the Vietnam War, Lynd chaired the first march against the war in Washington DC in 1965 and, along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, went on a controversial trip to Hanoi in December 1965 that cost him his position at Yale.

In the late 1960s Lynd moved to Chicago, where he was involved in community organizing. An oral history project of the working class undertaken with his wife inspired Lynd to earn a JD from the University of Chicago in 1976. After graduating the Lynds moved to Ohio, where Staughton worked as an attorney and activist.

Reviews

[Sugarpunksattack Mick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, no bullshit look at radical Unionism that emphasizes the roll of autonomy, and self-direction as a driving force of radical unionism that is an answer to the waning labor movement in the US. Drawing from personal experience as well as the experience of other rank and file workers, this book sets up a framework for understanding the potential of grassroots unionism to fight back the bosses and the hierarchal bureaucratic unionism, or more conservative unionism that has helped the decline of union labor in the US.

[Jun Ogata · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you actually want to get serious about unionism, you should read this book. It's short and easy, just do it. Success doesn't come with a hierarchy that drains the spirit from workers, it comes with direct action. Please feel free to ask me about what's in this book if you don't feel like reading it yourself. I will gladly educate and support you. Solidarity!

[Jessica DMJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently a (newish) union organizer who has been frustrated by issues Lynd discusses in his book. I've never really read a book like this before, and I'm still learning a lot, so I appreciated how accessible this was! It's also a short read, but packed with lots of quotables. Adding this to my favorites list!

[Five · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being written from a largely American perspective, this is accessible to a non-American reader and provides a fascinating (and effective!) introduction into direct action organising. I'm definitely going to seek out more books by Lynd.

[Rocky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Alternative unionism is solidarity unionism. It is relying, not on technical expertise, or on numbers of signed-up members, nor on bureaucratic chain-of-command, but on the spark that leaps from person to person, especially in times of common crisis.”

[Kieran Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well intentioned, poorly executed. Would not recommend.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s good but i wish it had more detailed strategies.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is strong in spirit but weak in body. It’s too bad, because further democratizing the labor movement, and its implications for other struggles is so important. This brief book (more a pamphlet, really) isn’t particularly well written or organized, but it does a good job agitating its union member audience to care about changing its union and the way workers relate within it.

Lynd cares about changing unions because he believes that task is a venue for changing society at large:

“Because of the vision and practice of solidarity, the labor movement with all its shortcomings does prefigure a new kind of society within the shell of the old. And by building organizations based on solidarity, rather than on bureaucratic chain-of-command, we build organizations that by their very existence help to bring a new kind of society into being” (9).

He begins “Solidarity Unionism” by only partly successfully showing how the evolution of unions has led to an impotent movement. But the most important contribution Lynd makes is by defining the spirit of a new unionism; solidarity unionism:

“I do not scratch your back only because one day I may need you to scratch mine…. “In a family, when I as a son, husband, or father, express love toward you, I do not do so in order to assure myself of love in return. I do not help my son in order to be able to claim assistance from him when I am old; I do it because he and I are in the world together; we are one flesh. Similarly in a workplace, persons who work together form families-at-work. When you and I are working together, and the foreman suddenly discharges you, and I find myself putting down my tools or stopping my machine before I have had time to think—why do I do this? Is it not because, as I actually experience the event, your discharge does not happen only to you but also happens to us?” (9)

There are some militants who completely reject traditional unions, but I’m glad that Lynd takes the position that “This does not necessarily mean working outside existing unions. It means that whether we work within or outside existing structures, we must self-consciously seek the emergence of new forms” (22).

The examples of solidarity unionism that Lynd provides are not particularly inspiring, in part because their scale and impact feel limited. I understand the intention to share efforts that are local and tangible, but I’m worried that the reader may leave the book wondering if the effort to forge solidarity unionism is really worth it.

I think that Lynd’s co-authored pamphlet with Daniel Gross, Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks (see my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), is more successful at showing the potential power of solidarity unionism.

[rabble.ca]

http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2015/0...

Review by Daniel Tseghay

In 1982, when service and maintenance workers at a hospital in Warren, Ohio went on strike, they were not alone. Members of the Workers' Solidarity Club from Youngstown, Ohio -- about 200 km away -- joined the picket line. They made leaflets, invited members of other unions to join the hospital workers in rallies every week, and got themselves arrested while chanting "Warren is a union town, we won't let you tear it down."

The Workers' Solidarity Club was not an established union but an alternative to one, created by workers displeased by the organizations meant to advocate on their behalf. It's one among many "alternative kinds of organization, like the shopfloor committee and the parallel central labor union," writes Staughton Lynd admiringly in Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement From Below.

Lynd describes the Workers' Solidarity Club as initially being a forum where workers could get strike support and have discussions about the labour movement. It was created by workers and primarily composed of either them or retirees.

The club fostered an attitude of solidarity with all workers regardless of their union membership or even location. "Having lived through the way big corporations trampled on people's lives in Youngstown," writes the members, as quoted by Lynd, "we found it easy to relate to Native Americans in the Southwest, or to Nicaragua. In 1988 four members of the Club went to Nicaragua and worked there for two weeks. One of them, an electric lineman, returned with a fellow worker to help bring electric power to small towns in northern Nicaragua."

The difference, argues Lynd, between the club and others like it on the one hand and existing trade unions is that membership in a parallel union is voluntary, dues aren't deducted from paycheques, there are no staff members, and direct action is preferred over bargaining with management. But, most importantly, it comes from the bottom up. Rank-and-file workers organize and lead these organizations.

Read more here: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2015/0...

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book was a fantastic presentation of alternative unions. That is, Lynd is concerned by the lack of worker direction in unions. They are run by union bosses who often times simply operate as the police force for the owner/managerial class in the workplace. His proposal is to retake the notion of unionism away from the established unions by self-organized worker assemblies. These assemblies would be joined to one another in solidarity, so that when a few workers are having trouble with management or ownership, everyone who is part of the assembly stops work until the problem is resolved. This pressures management to actually listen to the needs of the workers. Likewise, he argues for larger, local assemblies made up of workers of all kinds in one town or neighborhood. In this case, when the oil workers strike, the nurses and the shopboys and cashiers and mechanics also walk off their jobs in an act of community solidarity and to pressure the entire business ownership of the town or region to pressure for a resolve to the problem through negotiation and compromise. A great short book.

[W M]

Lynd is easy to read, and this book is no exception. I would be interested to find out how this edition is different than the PM Press edition.

The Ed Mann excerpt is a great edition to the book, though it is a bit of a bumpy read when compared to Lynd's prose.

The book focuses a good deal on retirees. As a fairly young person, I wonder how the political scene has changed as new workers are often hired on a different pay scale.

Many of the examples of working class solidarity that Lynd chooses to seem so informal, yet so elusive.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet primer on union work for the future

[Ruben · Rating 1 out of 5]

It just wasn't for me.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing all too groundbreaking or new but a decent (and quick) read.