“Labor Power and Strategy” thoughts and reflections
I recently read “Labor Power and Strategy” from PM Press and I gotta recommend this book for any labor aficionados out there. Great essay from John Womack Jr. and great responses from the ten commentators. Short and concise but very engaging and thought provoking. Many nuggets of strategy to pick up throughout the book.
Diving into the text itself, I have a side note I have to get out of the way. Dan DiMaggio, who is great and whose essay is great, accidentally set me off on this tangent. I quote, “I think the bigger context for thinking about Womack’s points is that any revival of the US labor movement will require the revival of the strike (and slowdowns, work-to-rule, sit-downs, and other tactics in which workers themselves display their power). We all owe a big debt to the West Virginia teachers for proving this point through, as Womack says, “independent, publicly defiant working-class action.”
This is all very true! The problem is one of omission. This was not just a teachers strike, this was a public school employee strike. For a book that speaks so much of strategic position of workers, it is essential to correctly frame this as such, as it was also school service personnel who helped make the strike successful. You can’t open a school without cooks and bus drivers.
You can get scab administration officials and maybe even substitutes to replace teachers, but you must also have transportation to and from schools (especially in a rural state) and you must also have food for students (especially in a state with high poverty). This is strategic position, this is a choke point, if you will. And leaving out cooks and bus drivers is a form of class erasure that is detrimental to the left.
As the pandemic showed clearly showed, schools also serve as de facto daycares for working people. So a strike ripples out to all sectors beyond just schools, giving these public school workers even more leverage and strategic position as a whole.
As also noted on Pg. 110 by Jane McAlevey, “For example, in West Virginia, the education sector is the first- or second-largest employer in almost every county. More often than not it is the largest employer.” McAlevey goes to make great points about the role of women in this sector and strike, focusing on teachers. But, it is worth noting that school cooks are also a profession largely staffed by women.
McAlevey goes on to say, “From an organizer’s viewpoint, the question is, are workers capable of creating a crisis big enough that it forces the employers to make concessions?….It took four days of a 100 percent out strike in Los Angeles for the mayor and the state’s governor to intervene and help find a solution because six hundred thousand kids out of the classroom is more than a “social power” crisis, it’s also an economic crisis at that scale.”
The role of schools as the main employer, especially in small, rural communities with tight relationships between these workers and those in their community, and the ensuing economic impact of a strike are crucial. Again, a great book that I highly recommend if you are interested in labor, the strategic position of workers and choke points for leverage in the economy.
One last random thought and commentary on the book relating to the Russian revolution from Womack’s closing essay in response to the commentary on his original essay. On Pg. 135, Womack makes an interesting point comparing the historical role of peasants to workers in the modern gig economy. “ Both revolutions came from working people, in Russia and China then by far mostly peasants, already in civil struggles on their own against exploitation and oppression. It may look like “peasants” means never applicable to the USA. But, if you think of “peasants” not by where they work, out in the country, but by how they produce value and lose it, as workers at their own or rented means of production, or only borrowed means to use, losing not on wages, but in trade, it is not too stretchy to compare them with the US self-employed, gigsters, contingents, and all the others who are maybe hired but paid like indebted peons. Two working classes, the hired and the daily trade-driven, or two kinds of working class? Call them all together “working people.” On this account we would now have maybe forty million “peasants,” a quarter of US working people.”
But, are these really two distinct kinds of working class in the US, or really just one and the same obscured by smoke and mirrors? The gig economy is an attempt to hide these class relations, to skirt US labor labor in the name of profit. Really these workers are hired and fired like any other, and deal with the same power relations in the workplace, in my opinion.
And to the role of the historical “peasant” in Russia and China. There is another interesting argument to be had about their role in those respective revolutions in relation to strategic position and choke points. As the largest producers and point of production itself of food for urban areas and the nation as a whole, if organized this is quite the leverage point and was in historical context.
I think about the context and role of food production workers and agricultural workers in the US and the systematic exploitation they deal with to keep them powerless and unorganized. Capital seems well aware of the danger of an organized food production and agricultural sector. Hence why there are special labor laws or lack of labor rights governing farm work in the US, and why it is largely passed off to immigrant labor, harder to organize and subject to threats of retaliation by deportation. Hence why capital fought back so hard against the United Farmworkers and this model. All the more reason labor organizers and strategists must know these choke points, as our opponents do.
