Unions United defends against the Chamber of Commerce War on Workers by uniting all Unions to act together in Solidarity. We are open to AFL-CIO Unions, Change to Win Unions, and Independent Unions across America.
Truck drivers
from companies that haul cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach start a two-day strike to protest alleged labor violations in
front of Long Beach Container terminal in Long Beach, California April
28, 2014. On Monday a similar strike began, the fourth of its kind in
the past year.
Reuters/Kevork Djansezian
Amid delicate negotiations that will determine the flow of a third of all U.S. cargo container
traffic for the coming months, dozens of Longshore workers at two of
the country’s busiest ports were ordered back to work Tuesday after they
walked off the job in solidarity with a group of fed-up truck drivers.
The Longshore workers returned to their jobs at about 11 a.m. at the Port of Los Angeles and the adjoining Port of Long Beach after a federal arbitrator said their walk-off was against their contract.
The workers began a strike on Monday to express solidarity with about 120 truck drivers backed by Teamsters Local 848 who claim they are improperly classified by their employers as contract workers. Unlike direct employees, contract workers are typically paid less, bear higher payroll deductions and receive fewer if any benefits than regular employees.
The drivers work for three nearby companies,
Green Fleet Systems, Total Transportation Services Inc. and Pacific 9
Transportation, which handle cargo to and from the ports. It’s the
fourth such protest in the past year, including a two-day strike in
April. Drivers were seen picketing the truck yards and following drivers
from these companies to and from the ports.
"Green Fleet is discouraged to learn that outside interest groups
have again decided to block the rights of these drivers to go to work
and earn a living,” the company said in an email sent to IBTimes on
Tuesday. “The fact is that an overwhelming majority of contractors and
drivers affiliated with Green Fleet don't want these groups involved in
their work.”
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which
represents the workers keeping cargo flowing through 30 West Coast
ports, is currently in talks to renew a six-year contract with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents the port operators.
On Monday, the two sides announced a cooling-off period in the heated negotiations that will establish new pay and benefits
for the roughly 20,000 workers that move cargo between the ships,
terminals and trucks. Historically, these talks often run past the June
30 contract-expiration date but are typically resolved by the middle of
July.
“During this break, starting at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8, through 8
a.m. on Friday, July 11, the parties have agreed to extend the previous
six-year contract, which expired last week,” said a joint statement from
the ILWU and PMA.
The longer these negotiations take, the more
likely workers will institute slowdowns, which can force cargo movement
to a crawl.
In 2000, talks went on for months in part over issues
pertaining to port automation, which reduces the need for workers. Port
operators instituted a 10-day lockout that required then-President
George W. Bush to invoke his authority to order the reope ning of the
ports.
The smooth operation of U.S. ports is vital to the country’s
commercial activity. In May, retailers warned businesses to expect
operations to slow this summer.
In the 13 states that saw their minimum wage rise on Jan. 1, 2014, job growth has been higher
so far this year than in states where the minimum wage stayed the same.
Extreme pro-business interests often argue that raising the minimum
wage will lead to job losses, but once again, the evidence suggests
otherwise.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research
looked closely at the data and found states that raised their minimum
wage increase have seen an average increase in employment of 0.99%,
while the static states saw an increase of only 0.68%.
Of the 13 states, all but New Jersey saw employment gains and nine of the 13 states are above the median state in job growth. Four of the 13 states saw their minimum wage increase
because of new legislation, while the rest saw automatic increases
related to inflation.
The states in question are: Arizona, Colorado,
Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio,
Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Girls sit in the US immigration detention facility in Nogales, Arizona
A surge of unaccompanied child migrants has been crossing the US-Mexico border and seeking refuge in the United States
since 2011, and the problem seems to be getting worse. US Customs and
Border Protection says that apprehensions of unaccompanied children are up
a staggering 92 percent from the previous year, with growing numbers of
children coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Since
October, 52,000 children have come to the US without an adult.
They're coming in so quickly that normal immigration facilities
have been completely overwhelmed, and thousands of kids are now being
warehoused in makeshift detention centers, like the one shown above.
Border state politicians, particularly Republicans, want to tighten
immigration restrictions; immigrant rights activists say that's the
exact opposite of what these children need.
Recent studiessuggestthat most of these unaccompanied children
aren't economic migrants, as many Americans might assume — they're
fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries, where things
have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice
but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north. They're
not here to take advantage of American social services — they're
refugees from conflict. Understanding the nature of the violence
pushing them north is crucial for figuring out what to do about the
child refugee crisis on our southern border.
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries that make up
Central America's "Northern Triangle," are experiencing a terrifying
level of violence that's been rising rapidly since the late 2000s. State
weakness and corruption have allowed a number of different armed groups
— including transnational street gangs, drug cartels, and other
organized crime syndicates — to flourish, checked by little but their
competition with one another.
Today, those groups battle for control of drug trafficking routes, residential neighborhoods, bus systems, human-smuggling operations, and more or less anything else that allows them to leverage their skills in violence to extract a profit.
To put the problem in perspective, this chart shows murder rates in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras since 2007:
And this chart shows civilian casualties in Iraq from the same period:
Source: UNODC
These charts show that the murder rate in Honduras in 2012 was a
whopping 30 percent higher than UN estimates of the civilian casualty
rate at the height of the Iraq war. In other words, all three Central
American countries were, statistically speaking, twice as dangerous for
civilians as Iraq was.
Why are children coming in such large numbers?
Are gangs targeting kids specifically?
Children are uniquely vulnerable to gang violence. The street gangs known as "maras" — M-18 and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 — target kids for forced recruitment, usually in their early teenage years, but sometimes as young as kindergarten. They
also forcibly recruit girls as "girlfriends," a euphemistic term for a
non-consensual relationship that involves rape by one or more gang members.
"The gang told me that if I returned to school, I wouldn't make it home alive"
If children defy the gang's authority by refusing its demands,
the punishment is harsh: rape, kidnapping, and murder are common forms
of retaliation. Even attending school can be tremendously dangerous,
because gangs often target schools as recruitment sites and children may
have to pass through different gangs' territories, or ride on
gang-controlled buses, during their daily commutes.
A recent report
on the child migrant crisis from the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) includes testimony from several children who came
to the US to escape gang violence. Here's 17-year-old Alfonso,
explaining why he fled after receiving threats from Mara-18 members at
his school:
"The problem was that where I studied there were lots of M-18 gang
members, and where I lived was under control of the other gang, the
MS-13. The M-18 gang thought I belonged to the MS-13. They had killed
the two police officers
who protected our school. They waited for me outside the school. It was
a Friday, the week before Easter, and I was headed home. The gang told
me that if I returned to school, I wouldn't make it home alive. The gang
had killed two kids I went to school with, and I thought I might be the
next one. After that, I couldn't even leave my neighborhood. They
prohibited me. I know someone whom the gangs threatened this way. He
didn't take their threats seriously. They killed him in the park. He was
wearing his school uniform. If I hadn't had these problems, I wouldn't
have come here."
15-year-old Maritza:
"I am here because the gang threatened me. One of them "liked" me.
Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there
because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador
they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags.
My uncle told me it wasn't safe for me to stay there. They told him
that on April 3, and I left on April 7. They said if I was still there
on April 8, they would grab me, and I didn't know what would happen."
17-year-old Mario:
"I left because I had problems with the gangs. They hung out by a
field that I had to pass to get to school. They said if I didn't join
them, they would kill me. I have many friends who were killed or
disappeared because they refused to join the gang. I told the gang I
didn't want to. Their life is only death and jail, and I didn't want
that for myself. I want a future."
As these testimonies show, merely attempting to get an education can be life-threateningly dangerous for children in gang-controlled areas — which helps to explain why so many feel they have no choice but to leave.
What about the police? Can't they protect the kids?
Members of the Mara 18 gang on trial for extortion and murder in Guatemala City. JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Nope. In all three countries, the police are too weak and corrupt to
offer any meaningful protection. In fact, the police often essentially
operate as dangerous criminal gangs themselves. Nearly three in four killings in Guatemala still go unpunished
In both El Salvador and Honduras, there arenumerous, crediblereportsthat
the police are responsible for hundreds of "social cleansing" killings,
including the murders of youths they suspect to be gang members. The
Salvadoran national police "specializ[es] in obstructing justice and
guaranteeing impunity for those with sufficient amounts of money,"
writes Hector Silva, a fellow at American University who researches police corruption.
Guatemala's police (and military) were so thoroughly infiltrated by
organized crime that in 2006 the United Nations had to set up a special
agency, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala
(which goes by its Spanish acronym, CICIG), to help fight the pervasive abuses committed by "clandestine groups." CICIG has enjoyed some recent successes, but nearly three in four killings committed in Guatemala still go unpunished.
But isn't the journey to the US also dangerous for children?
Yes, it is — but for desperate families trying to save their kids' lives, it's often the best of a bad set of options.
There is no denying that the long overland journey from the northern
triangle to the US is tremendously dangerous. Routes north are
increasingly under the control of Mexico's Los Zetas cartel, according to
a recent report from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which means
that child migrants are at risk of "violence, extortion, kidnapping,
sexual assault, trafficking and murder" during the journey. Sending a
child to the United States is also extremely expensive. "Coyotes"
(people smugglers) charge $5,000 to $7,000 to bring a child to the US, according to the same report — an amount that can represent more than 18 months of earnings for an entire family.
Still, even with all the dangers of the journey north, when children
become the targets of gang threats, there is often no better option
available to their families than to send them to the United States (or another safe country).
Refusing the gang's demands is more dangerous, because it is likely to
lead to violent retaliation. Agreeing to join a gang is more dangerous,
because it means signing up for a (probably short) life of crime and
violence. Acceding to a gang member's sexual demands is more dangerous,
because it means accepting certain rape, as well as the other dangers
that come from being associated with a criminal group. Because the
police do not offer meaningful protection, migration is the only course
of action that remains.
Coming to the US is risky. But for these vulnerable kids, it's the best hope there is.
What can the US do about this crisis?
Children detained at the US immigration holding center in Nogales, Arizona. Ross D. Franklin-Pool/Getty Images
Part of the challenge for the US is reducing the number of children
who arrive at the border in the first place. The most effective way to
do that would probably be to allow kids to apply for asylum (or another
form of humanitarian immigration relief) from their home countries.
That policy would allow children to escape violence at home without
forcing them to risk the dangerous overland journey. It would also ease
the burden on US immigration facilities, because there would be no need
for the children to be detained after entry, or to go through removal
proceedings in immigration court. Unfortunately, that option does not appear to be under serious consideration.
The other part of the challenge is what to do about the kids who are already at the border. For this, President Obama is asking
Congress for additional authority to deport unaccompanied children
quickly. It's likely that that would mean sending them back after just a
brief interview with border guards, without a full hearing on their
asylum claims or an opportunity to request other humanitarian relief.
If that happens, it is all but certain that some children with
legitimate fears of persecution will be sent back to their home
countries, either because they are too young and unsophisticated to
advocate for themselves, or because they are too afraid to tell
interviewers the whole story right away.
As those policies are debated in the coming days, it's important to
remember what Obama is really proposing: to send young children back,
alone, to a conflict zone that is twice as dangerous as Iraq was from
2008 to 2012.
In a victory for new economy advocates, the New York City Council passed a budget last
month that will create a $1.2 million fund for the growth of
worker-owned cooperative businesses. The investment is the largest a
municipal government in the U.S. has ever made in the sector, breaking new ground for the cooperative development movement.
Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker
Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute, hails the New York City Council’s
move as “historic.” “We have seen bits and pieces here and there, but
New York City is the first place to make an investment at that level,”
she says.
New York’s cooperative development fund was the brainchild of a
coalition of community groups—including the Federation of Protestant
Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the
Democracy at Work Institute, Make the Road New York and others—that came together to stage a series of public
forums and advocacy days to secure widespread support for the
initiative on the City Council. Over the next year, the fund will
provide financial and technical assistance in the planned launch of 28
new cooperatives and the continued growth of 20 existing cooperatives,
supporting the creation of 234 jobs in total.
While this may just be a drop in the bucket when it comes to the
city’s $75 billion total budget, cooperative advocates are hoping New
York’s example can help turn the tide in favor of alternative strategies
for urban development.
“We’d like to get to a tipping point where [cooperatives] really have
a measurable impact on the local economy,” says Hilary Abell, a San Francisco-based
co-op development consultant who co-founded the group Project Equity.
She notes that while interest in cooperatives has surged, there are
still fewer than 5,000 “worker-owners” nationwide. Nevertheless, the
model of worker-owned cooperatives has captured the imaginations of many
low-income communities of color hit hardest by the Great Recession, she
says, creating “a window of opportunity to take this to the next
level.”
Last month, Abell released a report called “Worker Cooperatives:
Pathways to Scale,” which outlines a set of strategies to grow the
cooperative movement nationwide. While there are several promising
federal policy
initiatives underway—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, has
introduced a bill that would create an Office of Employee Ownership and
Participation within the U.S. Department of Labor,
as well as another that would establish a U.S. Employee Ownership
Bank—Abell believes that “advocacy for cooperatives may have the
greatest momentum at the state and municipal levels.”
Across the country, similar local economic justice coalitions have
been seeking to persuade municipal governments and local institutions to
throw their resources behind the development of worker-owned co-ops.
It’s those resources, many advocates believe, that could take co-ops
from a niche movement to a broad-based strategy for creating living-wage
jobs and putting economic power in the hands of workers.
To that end, Abell hopes to see more cities follow in New York’s footsteps. In the Bay Area, she tells Working In These Times,
local organizers are currently reaching out to local officials for
support in scaling up worker-owned cooperatives to the point that they
constitute five to 10 percent of the local economy. The coalition is
particularly focused on creating jobs for workers of color in the
low-income areas of the East Bay , as past experiences have shown that
worker-owned co-ops can be particularly effective in redressing racial
inequities in the job market. For example, Women’s Action to Gain
Economic Security (WAGES), a network of nearly 100 worker-owned cleaning
cooperatives in Oakland, has increased members’ incomes by more than 50
percent.
Other hotbeds of co-op development include
Richmond, California, where the city has hired its own cooperative
developer and is launching a loan fund under the leadership of Green
Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. In Cleveland, Ohio, the city’s economic
development department has worked closely with the Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned green cleaning, farming and construction businesses; local hospitals and universities have also thrown their purchasing power behind worker-owned businesses. And as In These Times has reported previously,
several unions have made a foray into the co-op business, combining
place-based growth with a focus on leveraging changes across industries
such as homecare.
Instead of simply appealing to local leaders for support, some activists have sought to build both political
and economic power by building electoral campaigns around the issue of
cooperative development. No city had secured greater local support for
co-ops than Jackson, Miss., a majority African-American municipality
where human rights attorney and longtime black radical activist Chokwe
Lumumba was elected mayor last year on a platform that included the use
of public spending to promote
cooperative enterprises. But following Lumumba’s sudden death in
February, the movement that brought him to office has been left
struggling to implement the vision it had forged.
Local activists say new Mayor Tony Yarber has
been tepid in his support for the cooperative development plan
developed by Lumumba’s administration, leaving them uncertain as to
whether they can count, for example, on city contracts being awarded to
local worker-owned businesses. According to Brandon King, a member of
the group Cooperation Jackson who also worked on the Lumumba campaign,
access to such contracts would have been a huge boon for nascent
construction and waste-management cooperatives, as Lumumba’s campaign
had estimated that
the city would need to spend $1.2 billion over the next 10 to 15 years
on infrastructural upgrades and repairs. What often happens, says King,
is that contracts go to companies located in wealthier and
majority-white suburbs outside of Jackson, with the result that “people
in Jackson aren’t really engaged in building their own city.”
Despite the change of course in city government, King says
Cooperation Jackson “is still working on building co-ops that are
large-scale, and getting as many people engaged in economic democracy as
possible.” The movement has a history of black community participation
in cooperative enterprises to draw from, King notes. Meanwhile, adds
Cooperation Jackson memberIya'Falola Omobola, while the group works to
get childcare and urban farming cooperatives off the ground, with or
without city support, “We’re going to be ready to mobilize around an
appropriate candidate in the next [mayoral] election.”
Noting the particular conditions that have helped secure local
support for cooperatives in New York City and Jackson, the Democracy at
Work Institute’s Hoover acknowledges that activists are still exploring
how these can be replicated elsewhere. But if these cities are
successful in retaining long-term support for cooperative growth, they
can serve as a jumping-off point for other areas. “Our hope is that
these won’t be one-off examples,” Hoover says. “What we need ultimately
is a shift among those doing local development: from, ‘Quick, let’s get a
Home Depot to come in and create jobs, but they’re low-wage and
low-skilled,’ to a deeper and more patient strategy. These places could
really start that shift.”
Rebecca Burns, In These Times Assistant Editor, holds an M.A. from the University
of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where
her research focused on global land and housing rights. A former
editorial intern at the magazine, Burns also works as a research
assistant for a project examining violence against humanitarian aid
workers.
(Image: General Motors, Crime scene via Shutterstock; Edited: EL / TO) General Motors recently released the report it commissioned from the huge Jenner & Block law firm.
The latter's chairman, Anton Valukas, investigated how and why GM
failed - for over 10 years - to recall cars it produced while knowing
they had defective ignition switches. The eventual recall of 2.6 million
Chevrolet Cobalt cars in February, 2014, followed 13 deaths GM linked
to those defective switches (many others were injured, and government
officials believe there were more fatalities).
GM's chief executive, Mary Barra, admitted publicly this April what
Valukas wrote in his report: GM failed systematically to identify, take
responsibility for, and act properly in the face of life-threatening
defects in millions of automobiles it sold since 2002. On June 16, 2014,
GM recalled an additional 3.16 million defective vehicles across seven
of its models. GM's total recalls in North America so far this year
exceed 20 million vehicles.
Lessons from so major a failure go far beyond GM leaders promising to
fix their internal operations. As the Valukas report documents, many
layers of the GM bureaucracy routinely ignored evidence of defective ignition switches
and their risks to customers' lives. None of thousands of engineers and
executives - even those who had recognized the problem or mentioned it
to other GM officials - was able or willing to achieve the recall
decision until 2014. Chief executive Barra attributed this failure to a
"pattern of incompetence and neglect." Five years ago, GM announced
another failure, its own bankruptcy,
and got the US government to bail it out with $ 49.5 billion in
taxpayers' money. We paid collectively to save a corporation whose chief
describes its activities in terms of a "pattern of incompetence and
neglect."
Despite such catastrophic failures over the past decade, we permit, and indeed
subsidize, the continued operation of GM by the same bureaucracy. To
date, a total of 15 engineers and other employees have been dismissed
from GM for failures related to the faulty ignition switch. No one was
fired because of any explicit responsibility for bankruptcy. GM had a
total of 219,000 employees as of 2013.
GM's plunge into bankruptcy
shook the entire economy. That same corporation persistently produced
and marketed life-threateningly defective vehicles. Yet no serious steps
are taken to correct actions that far exceed any reasonable standard
for allowing such enterprises to continue. Are we a society that cannot
recognize or deal with antisocial behavior when the culprits are large
corporations?
Punishing more individuals is not the point. That would change little in the internal corporate system of rewards
and punishments that produced GM's behavior. After all, GM leaders all
knew the company risked major, punishing damage (loss of sales, profits
and market share, law suits
from victims, extremely negative publicity, government investigations,
etc.) by not recalling vehicles that killed, injured, or endangered
people, yet they did it anyway. The market simply did not adequately
discipline GM. The corporation believed it could control its markets (by
mountains of advertising, via political influence at federal, state and
city levels, using massive, costly legal maneuvers, and so on).
Running the firm into bankruptcy
and selling unsafe vehicles happened because GM saw both series of
actions as more advantageous and less dangerous to them than other
options (from earlier recalls, to sharply reduced payouts to executives
and shareholders, to public discussion of mass-transportation
alternatives to producing cars and trucks).
In such calculations, GM is not atypical among large corporations. That
is why damaging the environment; bureaucratic oppression (the
"suck-up-and-kick-down" system); moving jobs to low-wage countries;
producing poor quality outputs; paying their top executives and
shareholders huge amounts and deepening the divide between rich and
poor; crippling public revenues by shifting operations to foreign tax havens; and so many other antisocial consequences flow from those corporations.
The major lesson of GM's failures is that we cannot afford to leave such corporations in charge of producing the goods and services
we all depend on.
Similarly, can we allow that system to keep
purchasing our major parties and politicians to secure its immunity from
real accountability? The answer is that we can and should do better
than a system so obviously failing.
What is to be done? One basic problem is the link
between jobs and incomes. The layers of GM bureaucracy looked the other
way, did not pursue what they knew, avoided making waves inside the
company etc. because they feared for their jobs and incomes. Especially
in an economy with high unemployment
and job insecurity, acting in socially responsible ways becomes too
risky personally. If employees knew that their companies' failures would
not necessarily jeopardize their personal incomes, we could expect far
more socially responsible behavior from many more of them.
If government guaranteed personal incomes even when individuals had
to move from one job or enterprise to another, those individuals could
better face and fix the failures where they work. Making families'
incomes depend on their jobs pressures job-holders not to rock the
corporate boat even when they know they should. We ought to disconnect
our citizens' incomes from their particular jobs (national discussions
of this idea have increasingly engaged the Swiss and others in Europe
over recent years).
Another lesson from GM's failures is the need to broaden the community of people making key economic decisions. If the citizens of Detroit had had real participatory power over GM decisions, GM might have kept more
facilities there and thereby avoided urban collapse. If GM customers
had more institutionalized participation in corporate decisions,
concerns about faulty ignition switches might have gained hearings
sooner and so saved lives and avoided vast financial losses.
Here lies yet another argument to shift from private, capitalist corporations (governed by major shareholders and the boards of directors
they select) to cooperative enterprises (governed democratically by
workers, surrounding communities, and customers/consumers).
Such
cooperatives would democratize enterprises in ways likely to make their
economic decisions far more socially responsible.
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008.
He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.
He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
City College of the
City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting
Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I
(Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at democracyatwork.info.
More and more unions, community groups and other organizations are lining up with the Clerical Postal Workers (APWU)
and backing the union’s boycott of Staples. You can join in, too. As
the APWU says, “It’s that easy,” just don’t buy your office supplies at
Staples.
In May the AFL-CIO endorsed APWU’s boycott of the office-supply giant in response to the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to privatize retail operations by
contracting mail services to Staples, using “postal counters” staffed
with low-wage, high-turnover Staples employees rather than postal
employees.
The USPS began contracting out postal services to Staples in October. So far, 80 Staples stores are part of the pilot program.
But the USPS plans to expand the scheme to 1,500 Staples locations
nationwide at the same time the USPS is eliminating public post offices.
The APWU Union says that the no-bid sweetheart deal will
compromise the quality, security and reliability that consumers expect
and deserve in the handling of their mail.
APWU President Mark
Dimondstein says that an internal USPS document “makes
clear that the goal of the program is to replace the good, living-wage
jobs held by USPS employees with low-wage jobs in the private sector.”
For Inspiration, Look to the History Of Public Worker Strikes
June 18, 2014 / by Joe Burns
An illegal national postal wildcat in 1970—not approved by union leaders—set contract standards postal workers are still defending today. The government tried to use the military to deliver mail. Photo: San Francisco Bay View.
Politicians want to turn the clock back 50 years by restricting the bargaining rights of millions of public workers.
Unions would do well to look back, too, to the great public employee strike upsurge of the 1960s.
Today’s unions, in both the public and private sectors, have a lot to learn from this little-discussed period in labor history. Here are seven lessons:Strikes Worked. Entering the 1960s, public employee unions were weak, engaging in “collective begging” rather than “collective bargaining.”
But then public workers rose up in one of the great upsurges in U.S. labor history. Public workers marched on school board meetings. They conducted slowdowns. And they struck, by hundreds of thousands over the next two decades, to win union recognition.
The civil rights movement inspired sanitation workers’ strikes throughout the South. Teachers in Florida and Utah pulled off statewide walkouts. Postal workers struck nationwide, in a wildcat conducted against the wishes of union leaders. Police and firefighters contracted “blue flu” and “red rashes” to demand what private sector workers already had: the right to bargain.
This wave of militancy won both contracts and changes in labor law. And in the process, public employee union membership surged from 400,000 in the late 1950s to 4 million by the mid-1970s.Strikes, it’s safe to say, created the public employee labor movement.
The Power of Example
Just as today’s activists look to the 2012 Chicago Teachers strike for inspiration, teachers back then looked to a one-day strike in New York City schools, in 1960. According to one scholar, that single, short strike not only spurred the organization of teachers in New York state but also became “the watershed for teachers’ strikes in the twentieth century.” Teachers around the country followed the trail blazed by New Yorkers and struck for union recognition, too.In 1968 teachers struck 112 times—up from zero a decade before.
Of course, not every local struggle will start a prairie fire. The Republic Windows factory takeover in 2008 did not prompt an outpouring of plant occupations. But we never know where a particular struggle may lead and how it may give others the courage to act.
MADE TO BE BROKEN
Don’t Let Repressive Laws Stop You. Today we face a web of legal restrictions specifically constructed to force unions to fight small, pointless battles. Public employee strikes are illegal in most states. Private sector strikers can be permanently replaced with scabs.
Simply put, the rules are rigged. Figuring out how to break free of these rules is a practical necessity.
Until the late 1960s, public employee strikes were illegal in every jurisdiction in the U.S. Yet when the idea took hold and the context was right, hundreds of thousands of public workers struck anyway, violating state laws and court injunctions. And they generally won—achieving recognition and good contracts, and forcing lawmakers to amend state laws to permit public employee bargaining.
Even though strikes remained illegal in the Union strongholds of New York, Ohio, and Illinois, strike levels were high there throughout the ’70s. In fact, one study of 1970 to 1981 found that “70 percent of the most strike-prone states were those where strikes were not legal.”
When their union president was jailed during a 1973 strike, striking teachers in Evergreen, Washington, lined up with toothbrushes in hand demanding to be jailed as well. The flustered judge backed down and when the district refused to negotiate, he threatened to jail the school board instead. The Union won a first contract.
When lawmakers realized that their laws didn’t prevent strikes, in many states policymakers legalized them, hoping to better control the activity.
Union Democracy Matters.
Some say labor can confront giant corporations only by building centralized, vertically structured mega-unions. Union democracy, they say, is a luxury we cannot afford.
But labor history gives little support to that proposition. During the 1960s, public workers fought to transform conservative organizations into fighting machines. Members battled at their union conventions to take no-strike clauses out of their constitutions.
Public workers flocked to more militant unions—forcing others, such as the National Education Association, to adopt the strike or lose members.
A HUMAN RIGHT Treat Striking as a Human Right. When the strike-banning Taylor Law was under debate in 1967, three New York City unions held a packed rally in Madison Square Garden, and passed a resolution stating, “No one, no body of legislators or government officials, can take from us our rights as free men and women to leave our jobs when sufficiently aggrieved.
“When a group of our members are so aggrieved, then indeed they will strike.”
Public employee unionists rejected illogical arguments about why public workers should not be allowed to strike. Better yet, they did not accept that legislators or courts had the right to make that decision; striking was a human right which judges or politicians could not take away.
But few in labor today discuss striking as a fundamental right. Instead we look only at the practicalities: whether a strike seems immediately feasible. When it doesn’t, we forget the principle, and accept restrictions on our right to strike and free speech that earlier generations refused to tolerate.
Build Community Alliances
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, striking public workers could draw on allies in the civil rights movement, as did the 1968 Memphis and 1969 Charleston sanitation strikes.
Public unions allied with still-powerful private sector unions. They could demand equality with the wages and pensions bargained by their private sector counterparts.
But with the waning of the ’60s movements and the organizing climate they helped foster, public employee strikes became harder to win. Over time, as public employee unions became more successful and private sector unionism declined, politicians began painting public employee strikers as greedy and overpaid.
Understanding the economics of public employee strikes became essential to winning them. While the private sector strike aims to put economic pressure on the employer by depriving him of revenue, the purpose of the public employee strike is to exert political pressure.
Winning public employee strikes, then and now, depended on a union’s ability to frame the issues, garner community support, and thereby exert political pressure on policymakers to settle.
Don’t Give Up Hope
When we look at today’s restrictive labor laws, it can be hard to see how to break out of the box. But the greatest lesson of the 1960s is that public employees believed in themselves—and dared to win.
Joe Burns is a union negotiator/attorney in the airline industry and author of Reviving the Strike. He’s a former public employee and Union president. His new book is Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today (June 2014). New Yorkers can hear him talk about the book June 25 at 7 p.m. at Bluestockings Books. See more at: http://labornotes.org/2014/06/inspiration-look-history-public-worker-strikes
from companies that haul cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach start a two-day strike to protest alleged labor violations in
front of Long Beach Container terminal in Long Beach, California April
28, 2014. On Monday a similar strike began, the fourth of its kind in
the past year.
