Why I Want to Encourage DSA Members to Get Rank and File Union Jobs
This post is adapted from a facebook post I made. It refers specifically to a resolution for consideration at NYC DSA’s upcoming citywide convention, encouraging members to get rank and file union jobs.
I’ve got two lines of argument: political and personal/experiential. I’m gonna try and be as explicit about my thinking and the terms I’m using, but please feel free to question basic premises where I’m not clear.
Political (Marxist!)
The core of what I fight for is a world where violence, fear, and exploitation are no longer the dominant factors in our political and economic systems, and are replaced by care, solidarity, and the meeting of human needs in their fullness. That requires revolutionary, fundamental change, and it requires the creation of organizations that build those values as organizing principles brick by brick.
Fundamental/sructural political change comes primarily from who is able to direct, initiate, or disrupt, production and reproduction. By production I mean all the economic processes that encompass work for wages, making things, and providing services. By reproduction I mean the paid and unpaid work that goes into producing, reproducing, and nurturing humans. That change comes from disruption and control of production and reproduction has been born out in the fight for the abolition of slavery, the labor upsurge of the 30s, and the Civil Rights Movement. A tiny group of people directs the system, but most of us participate in it unwillingly for our survival, and our collective participation and obedience keeps it going. Our greatest potential power is in collectively disrupting the stability of regular production against the wishes of the rulers.
The elites have formal control of production and a ton of money and resources. Our only major weapons to disrupt it are 1) huge masses- specifically majorities of people who don’t derive the full fulfillment of their human needs from the economic and political system, and 2) well-placed people at locations of strategic leverage, who are structurally in a better position to shut shit down.
We need majorities, and actually super-majorities, not just masses, because if enough people are available to replace the workers/people who do shut shit down (aka be scabs) then the system keeps on running and the elites can do without us. We lose, and people lose faith that winning is even possible, thus diminishing our numbers, making it harder to assemble supermajorities.
The need for supermajorities and strategic leverage are not moral arguments, but pragmatic ones. Minorities (I don’t mean POC, I mean numeric less-than-majorities) literally cannot shut it down unless they’re in the right place, structurally. For example: coal miners in the 1800s, auto workers in the 1930s, and education workers, medical workers, state workers, and logistics/transportation workers today. They have more ability, not because they’re better, but because of where they’re at in the system to shut down whole regions/ economies, and make fundamental demands for change.
But if to make fundamental change we need supermajorities and strategic leverage, the question then becomes: how do we build supermajorities and how do we occupy spaces of strategic leverage? We need to convince almost everyone* that we need to fight together in solidarity. We need to convince a zillion people who, for specific and good personal reasons grounded in their histories, do not already share our orientation toward what we need to do. We cannot stay content with just the people who already fuck with us/think like we do. We need to be able to bring together people who don’t like each other and disagree vehemently with each other but can find mutual interest in working together. On top of that we should make an extra effort to get people specifically who are concentrated in locations of strategic leverage, because they help us disrupt shit and change shit faster, and nothing convinces people to join like results. Even when those people are assholes. Solidarity is working together even when the other person is an asshole because the alternative is a lifetime of exploitation and maybe dying on the job.
*in the workplace, market, region, country, and eventually world.
This is counter-intuitive. Solidarity goes against much of what we are taught, implicitly and explicitly, which is to mistrust people outside our village/ band/tribe/clique, and to focus on our own well-being and safety as being in competition with others. But solidarity can be taught primarily by experiencing it through sharing and building relationships, and fighting/ defeating a common enemy.
Unions, imperfect as they are, are the only left structure that has most consistently demanded of organizers that we build solidarity across great distance and barriers of mistrust to build supermajorities capable of shutting shit down. In a regular election you can win with 50% + 1. In a community campaign you don’t need everyone to ‘win’ (although I’d argue that the quality of the ‘win’ is contestable). In a union election, you can win 50%+1 and win the union, but you won’t have enough numbers and power to strike. And if you can’t strike, your leverage is supremely limited. Unions are also best situated, at the workplace, to exercise maximal power.
You also need to think concretely about who and how many people it’s gonna take to shut shit down, and by that I mean strike, taking an existential risk. What is going to be motivating enough that folks will stand up to firing and violence to win? Let’s say we’re talking about an #EducationWorkers strike. Can they replace teachers with paraprofessionals (vital support staff who work with students with disabilities)? If so, you better organize the paras, and figure out what THEY want, or they’ll have good incentive to take an offer to teach your classes. Can ANYONE drive the school buses? Do kids NEED to take the bus? If so, what do the school bus drivers want out of a strike? Oh, we don’t know, we need to ASK them. The answers to these questions impact/ determine your chance of success. The questions also determine your approach- if we need to get everyone on board, how do we go about figuring out what to do? (The answer is generally learn what people are willing to fight/ sacrifice for and who they’ll follow when they’re afraid.)
Nothing teaches this better, I’d argue, than workplace organizing. It is easier, in other kinds of organizing to avoid grappling with the implications of needing to get almost everyone. There are few other types of campaigns/ organizing where people face the same challenges and have the same relentless necessity to even think through how to build a supermajority. Even one that goes beyond the workplace, into including the community in your struggle.
Finally, I’d argue that unions occupy a strategic location within the broader progressive left. They have more numbers, more independent resources, and are connected more deeply to the strategic levers of potential disruption than any other organized force on the left. They are definitely imperfect but their potential is unmatched by any other type of left organization. We should do what we can to support salting and organizing low- union sectors, but we should be sober about the resources and scale it’ll take to organize there. Those resources exist primarily in existing unions. We should, as such, want to get our folks, with our strategic orientation, belief in disruption, direct action, democracy; and raised expectations (and hopefully, eventually, stronger organizing skills) into workplaces and unions that are as strategically placed as possible. It is, for our limited size of membership, the biggest potential bang for our buck. And maybe one of the biggest hopes for the left. DSA is in a critical place, where our actions and decisions have real stakes and potential to meaningfully impact the labor movement, and broader fortunes.
Personal/Experiential
I started on the path to the above analysis mostly not through reading, but through an ongoing process of yearning for effective strategy and a caring orientation to organizing people that started with being frustrated and angered by what I saw, as a teenage Iraq War protester, as a lack of strategy and purpose. The first protests I went to were amazing. I defied teachers and principals (something I never did) and walked out of school. There were a million people in the streets, and the atmosphere was like a carnival. And we lost, big. This taught me that a lot of the time we can do things that feel good and feel powerful but do not actually win. We can have huge masses and not be enough to win. We need more. The costs are catastrophic. The masses we assembled were incredible, but they were not positioned to actually disrupt the production that facilitated war, and were not strategically located to politically threaten the establishment enamored with war. We need to build a culture that is sustaining but that is also reflective and honest about assessing ourselves and our strategy. What would it have taken to stop the war? What would it take to stop a war now, taking that question seriously? What would it take to stop the worst of climate change?
I was also turned off by folks who seemed to me, at the time, to be well-off radicals who held the majority/ mainstream in deep contempt. This was the era of liberal- conservative culture war, resentment, and mutual condescension, and many radicals I encountered were not above it, were arrogant and holier than thou. I identified with anarchism because I believed everyone had value, and nobody needed a master. But the anarchists I met were assholes, and seemed pretty skeptical that most people could be reached. I stayed away from politics until the Obama election, and away from the left until 2016. The 2008 election gave me the experience and feeling of power through solidarity again. But this time, instead of marching, I was talking to people who hadn’t been engaged, who weren’t activists, and helping them plug in. It was joyful, relational, personal, and transformative. And, in a too-late repudiation of the Iraq War, we won.*
*kinda
I found Alinskyan/Ganz community organizing after college and was compelled by its logic of relationship building and relational v hierarchical power, the humanism of mutual self- interest, the power I felt in the bonds I built, and its radical democratic implications. I left it for labor when I saw how community organizing was dominated by rich people’s agendas and directives, and how often we were called upon to ignore the people we were organizing, and instead listen to funders and executives. In labor I saw the organizing imperative to avoid the condescension of leftists, and the potential for strategy and real organizing that had been lacking from my experiences with the Iraq War protests, and too often from community organizing.
I worked as a labor organizer for a few years, and they were some of the most fulfilling of my life. I loved working with the workers, seeing the power and joy they felt at fighting back against their bosses, building trust with one another, and being leaders in their communities. Along the way I read about the history of interracial, southern, left-led unions and the intertwined fights for labor rights and racial justice, I read Joe Burns and Jane McAlevey talk about strike strategy and building mass solidarity, and I read about periods in history when strategy and direct democracy in unions brought us closer than we’ve ever been to a radical break from the power of capitalists. But working in labor and reflecting on the distance between my ideal and our practice, I eventually came to feel that our agendas were often divorced from the people we were organizing, rather than democratically informed by them; and that our strategies were lacking and idealistic, rather than grounded in rigorous, realistic power analysis. I didn’t feel that that was inevitable, baked into labor’s DNA, but I didn’t think I had much power to do anything about it. As a not-super-high-up person I figured my best bet was to continue organizing as a union member, rather than staff organizer. In 2016, after the Trump election, I joined DSA and saw in it the potential ranks of a massive shift of volunteer organizers to fighting for the kind of labor movement we need. In many ways DSA helped convince me to make the shift from staff to member, feeling empowered as part of a democratic organization rather than someone who had to follow orders I didn’t understand or believe the logic of. For personal reasons, I also felt the pull of leaving staff organizing and doing work that was stable and rooted in my home community. I gravitated toward teaching, but was afraid of taking the leap.
I would have sat on those thoughts forever if I hadn’t been encouraged by a whole community of people to take action. My friend and comrade Ryan encouraged me with his example of shifting to teaching. Many other DSA teachers did too. So did old friends who were teachers, and did it not for any kind of lefty political reason, but because of the value of the work itself. I applied to teaching fellows and my sister, also studying to become a teacher, coached me through my application process. When I ran into bumps and challenges, other friends and folks in my network helped me through them. My fellows cohort and other friend teachers continue to sustain me.
I can easily say that even though the first year is incredibly tough, teaching and organizing is the most meaningful, impactful work of my life. It feels far more purposeful, strategic, and focused than anything else I’ve ever done. It has forced me to grow as an organizer, facilitated my deepening roots in my community, broadened my thinking about relationship building and pedagogy, and given me a much more realistic understanding of the landscape upon which I consider strategy, and the ongoing question: how do we build supermajority solidarity? For these reasons and more, I think more DSAers getting into rank and file jobs from which we can do workplace organizing would exponentially improve our impact and our skills and perspectives as a mass of organizers, and would be meaningful, fulfilling, and solidarity-building/ connection-creating in a way that few other activities can be for our members. Our work within labor has already born incredible fruit, and will continue to do so the more people we bring into it.
While there are details that need to be fleshed out, I envision the proposal in the resolution functioning as my community of support did for me: helping me organically come to the decision of what job I’d take that would be right for me, helping me think through the steps and ramifications, helping grow our groups dedicated to workplace organizing and building democracy and power in our unions, and continuing to develop my political analysis along with fellow DSA teachers. The more we can make this a community of support and development, the easier it will be for more DSAers to get into the work that’s right for them. Not everyone should be a teacher or a nurse, but there are myriad fields, job titles, and work experiences across the industries and unions we’re talking about. For that matter, many DSAers also do critical work, such as in tech or other under-organized service sectors, where there is less developed a labor movement. In those workplaces we should dedicate real resources to help DSAers figure out how to organize where they already are.
Finally, there are of course many folks with many barriers to engaging with this as I have. Many people in our society don’t work for a boss but their labor, studies, and lives have inherent value and gifts to bring to movement work. Children, people with disabilities + chronic illness, the retired, the unemployed, and every other category of non-worker has played a critical role in the fight for liberation. To me we need to acknowledge that while also not denying that the workplace and labor movement have a critical and unique role within the movement ecosystem and our theories of change that we should focus deliberately on. I think rank and file union members have a particular role to play.
I love thinking and talking about this, so holler if you have questions, disagreements, or thoughts. This post is probably incomplete and there are probably things I haven’t thought of. I hope you’ll consider voting FOR resolution 33 at the convention.
For further reading I encourage folks to check out the following links, and more broadly read /listen to podcasts with Jane McAlevey (much of the thinking in this post is borrowed/inspired by her writing), Joe Burns, Shaun Richman, and the histories of the left unions of the 1930’s. Their example and history have been crucial for my developing perspective, and hope for the future.
Jane McAlevey on Season of the Bitch, commenting directly on DSA debates over labor: https://soundcloud.com/seasonofthebitch/episode-33-may-day-with-jane-mcalevey
Shaun Richman in Belabored: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-podcast-145-labor-rights-rebellions-unions-janus-gop-socialism-shaun-richman
Shaun and Bill Fletcher on Socialists in Labor: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20587/labor-movement-workers-socialism-united-states
Jane McAlevey talking with Eric Blanc on recent education strikes: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/teachers-strikes-rank-and-file-union-socialists
