An organized labor meta-analysis from The Forge: "We Don't Know What We're Doing"

[Alphabet workers news]

If you've wondered why there appears to be no broadly accepted set of best practices for labor organizing in the U.S, organizer Dave Kamper's recent article for strategic organizing news site The Forge provides a host of insights into the scope of the problem. The article, billed as a review of two recent labor books, is actually more of a litany of what Kamper sees as a decades-long failure by U.S. organized labor, as a whole, to structure, analyze, and share what it's learned in a systematized way.

For any readers seeking to organize workers in Big Tech, or within any non-union industry, I encourage you to read Kamper's article to understand both the vast number of unknowns, and the reasons for the contradictory advice that you may at times receive from different books and different labor advisors.

Here are my own takeaways:

1. There is no One Book Or Article You Should Read about how to organize a worker movement, and in fact it's dangerous to read just one book, because it will be just one opinion, generally peppered with that author's set of personal anecdotes. I've noted strong differences of opinion between people who view Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts as gospel, and people like me who feel that No Shortcuts misses the mark. The underlying reality is more likely that sometimes McAlevey's recommendations will work, and sometimes they won't, and sometimes you might need elements from multiple approaches.

2. Anecdotes about past labor successes are an insufficient substitute for actual strategy, and don't necessarily generalize. As Kamper notes, what worked in one campaign has sometimes utterly failed in others.

3. Corollary: We need to stop using the "small 50-worker coffee shop" framework as a training model for how to organize Big Tech. I've now seen this type of workplace used as a reference model in multiple trainings: "OK, here's how you organize your workplace!". Sometimes it's a coffee shop, sometimes it's a print shop, maybe it's a donut shop, but the general attributes are all the same: the total employee count is fewer than 100 people, the employees are all located in a single physical workplace, there's no use of contract or outsourced labor, there's an on-site manager who has the authority to grant material concessions and hand out raises, and workers are able to immediately and materially damage the revenue stream of the company by withholding their labor. None of these assumptions holds in Big Tech. They might partly hold for Small Tech, such as recent union successes at Kickstarter (fewer than 100 employees) and Glitch (fewer than 50 employees), but the assumptions don't hold for any Fortune 500 Big Tech firm.

I'll put some extended extracts from Kamper's article below, though I encourage people to read the entire piece.

- Bruce

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https://forgeorganizing.org/article/we-dont-know-what-were-doing

We Don't Know What We're Doing            

July 27, 2020

Review of Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy and Shaun Richman, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century

... If you dig into the ideas for reforming, rebuilding, or remodeling the labor movement today, you’ll find disagreement is the norm: On even the most basic questions of where the labor movement is, where it ought to go, and how it ought to get there, we are nowhere close to consensus.

Nor is there any useful way to tell right answers from wrong ones. For the most part, the labor movement is built on anecdote, half-remembered history, conventional wisdom, and cliches treated as if they were scientific fact. If there is anything we can know, it’s that we really have no idea how unions do what unions do, what works and what doesn’t, and how to build more power and a stronger labor movement...

A Collective Bargain is Jane McAlevey’s third book on the labor movement in the last eight years...

McAlevey tells a number of good stories, but two of them stand out. One is an account of a campaign McAlevey herself led, helping the Pennsylvania Associations of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) win a series of victories in Philadelphia. The other is an account of the buildup to the Los Angeles teachers strike of 2019.

... it’s the parts of the story that McAlevey leaves out that cause me to question her argument. Philadelphia and Los Angeles are two of the most heavily-unionized urban areas in the country. Both are full of political figures willing and able ⁠— with the right pressure ⁠— to stand with unions and support their militancy...

In both the campaigns McAlevey chronicles, outside political support and labor allies are as important as any other factor. The Mayor of Los Angeles helped settle the teachers’ strike. Key state senators in Pennsylvania went on the record in support of PASNAP’s campaign, and the union was also able to get hospital trustees... to contact the CEO and push for a settlement...

The reality is that McAlevey’s prescription doesn’t guarantee success...

This is the nub of the problem: Labor organizers of all kinds are certain that their approach for how to do things isn’t just a good idea or something to work on but close to the absolute truth. There is a near-universal conviction in the labor world that there are right answers that can be used, even though there is considerable disagreement over what constitutes the right answer.

McAlevey, for example, opens her chapter on the Pennsylvania nurses’ struggle by distinguishing between “hot shop” organizing, where unions pick their organizing targets based on wherever there seems the greatest current appetite for organizing, and “strategic sectoral or geographic organizing,” where unions pick targets that they think will build the most power. McAlevey is downright contemptuous of unions that do hot shop organizing: They are “clueless," and they “couldn’t tell you what” good organizing was. 

Missing from McAlevey’s broadside against clueless hot-shop organizing is any evidence or data to back up her assertions, for the simple reason that none exists. Nobody has any idea if hot shop organizing is fundamentally different from, better or worse than, or more or less common than strategic sectoral organizing. Heck, ask ten organizers just to define the difference between the two concepts, and you’ll get a minimum of eleven answers...

The sheer volume of what we don’t know is staggering. Here’s a small sampling:

- We don’t know where existing unions are. The patchwork of federal and state laws means that no government entity has a comprehensive list of union worksites and neither do unions themselves... What kind of labor movement goes nine decades in its modern form without bothering to think about keeping track of where unions are?

- We don’t know how to measure the quality of contract settlements. Every contract ever negotiated has had some people saying it was a brilliant success and others saying it was a sellout to the boss. We have no way to be sure...

- We can’t agree on basic things like how to assess workers’ commitment to the union or their readiness to take action... There’s no agreement on the best structure of an organizing conversation. There’s no agreement on whether, all things being equal, it’s better to send organizers out in pairs, knowing you will talk to fewer workers but maybe have better conversations, or send organizers out singly to cover the most ground.

- We don’t know why some workers step up and others don’t. You can take two workplaces with nearly identical characteristics; one turns into a union powerhouse and the other a dud. At best, we have anecdotal guesses, nothing more. In this, the labor movement needs to point the blame squarely at itself and its disengagement with the academic world...

- We don’t know how best to allocate our resources...

- Last but not least, we don’t know if there are answers to many of these unknowns. Take organizer training: What training makes an organizer effective? Does training matter at all to their effectiveness? If you think about how much time and money we spend on training organizers, it sure would be nice to know if it works, but we don’t even know if that’s a question that has a semi-universal answer or if the only answer is, “it all depends on the circumstances.” ...

But perhaps the single most important reason the labor movement knows so little is that we don’t ask. If you click over to unionjobs.com you’ll find plenty of jobs that have the title “Researcher.” Nearly all of them are outward-facing...

You’ll look in vain for jobs that call for researching and analyzing what the union itself is doing. Talk to organizers, and they’ll all tell you that post-campaign debriefings, when they exist, are a joke. There are no “lessons learned” meetings that go into a level of detail greater than an article in Dissent.  

What we do get are stories like the ones in A Collective Bargain. Valuable, often fun, sometimes infuriating, these stories do nothing to help us understand what actually works, what doesn’t work, and how to tell the difference...