A friend of mine recommended that I read some stuff from US-American union organizer Jane F. McAlevey. Around about the same time, when I was still a subscriber to his YouTube channel, Jimmy Dore had her on as a guest:
Yesterday I finished No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.
In No Shortcuts, McAlevey critiques not only the failed business unionism adopted by most unions, but also what she describes as the “mobilizing” model adopted by many more progressive unions. The book describes a model of “deep organizing,” based on the methods used by the emerging radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions in the 1930s and ‘40s. This was a period when working-class militancy put its stamp on U.S. history. As a result of these militant strikes and struggles, the basic industries of auto, steel, rubber, and electricity were organized for the first time – changing U.S. history. She also discusses the central importance of community organizing as an essential companion piece to powerful workplace organizing.
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McAlevey draws a sharp distinction between three different organizing models: Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing. She describes how “Advocacy,” the dominant method of mainstream union leaders, looks to use the courts and political lobbying to win one-time gains and does little or no mobilizing. It is ineffective and does not raise the consciousness of workers. Otherwise described as business unionism, it looks to work out an agreement with the bosses without mobilizing the workers.
The dominant section of the current union leadership see the power of the union rooted in their own “persuasive skills.” At the same time, they seek to find “common ground” with the boss. They see workers as bargaining chips. They see possible outcomes as limited by the “existing political climate,” i.e., the limits of capitalism. Example of this can be found through a quick glance at the methods of the current leadership of the UAW, the building trades, and Teamsters.
She contrasts this to the “mobilizing” model, which, while giving the appearance of being bolder and more dynamic, is very shallow and ineffective. Its central weakness is that it fails to organize an expanding base among workers, thus failing to develop the overall strength of the labor movement.
One chapter exposes the methods of David Rolf and SEIU Local 775 in Northwest Washington State, and the broader SEIU leadership among health care workers between 2005 and 2007 as a particularly obnoxious example of that strategy. In this campaign the workers were used as pawns in an elaborate scheme to use the union contract to get concessions from the Washington legislature to fund the employers, to then pay for a terrible union contract. In this whole process, the workers were passive by-standers.
Her model, by contrast is a return to “deep organizing” of workers in the workplace as done by CIO and that seeks to transform consciousness and is a starting point to sustained struggle.
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McAlevey stresses that real power rests with the workers themselves. Her deep-organizing model can be broken down into the following steps:
- Only strikes can win real gains and we need to build power in the workplace to win a strike
- Success depends on workers building networks in the workplace
- The first essential step is to identify natural leaders who can build such networks
- That involves challenging these leaders to accept the risks and responsibilities
- These leaders then need to build powerful teams around them
- The strength of these teams needs to be tested through escalating public actions.
Workers need to build support in all areas of their life outside the workplace. The more fundamental the struggle, the stronger the structure that needs to be built. Only then will workers be prepared for what it will take to win.
If you didn't click on it, that review was from Socialist Alternative. (The top of the google search.) Here's some links to some other reviews:
Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts is an exciting book. It tells the stories of important struggles and it tackles the big questions facing the labor movement. McAlevey is a former staffer, organizer, and national leader of the Service Employees (SEIU) on the losing side of a power struggle, then an academic and now a consultant.
Readers will recognize the concepts McAlevey promotes as driving many of the rank-and-file struggles reported in Labor Notes over the years. She explains them well and provides historical context. If on some topics she “bends the stick” too far and misses some important subtleties or complications, she is bending it in the right direction.
McAlevey builds her argument with five cases. She compares the approaches of two nursing home organizing efforts in what she calls “Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle.” She goes into depth on the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012, the successful organizing of giant Smithfield Foods in a right-to-work state, and the development of Make the Road New York, a model of community organizing.
The Commons Social Change Library:
McAlevey argues that a movement needs serious power to win serious outcomes, and this power comes from engaging organic leaders who already have influence. This specifically contrasts with the approach taken by most NGOs, and many unions, who engage with people McAlevey calls “activists” who already support the cause but don’t necessarily have a following. Instead of taking the shortcut of working with activists (which might be sufficient for a mobilising approach and low concession costs), No Shortcuts suggests doing the deeper, harder work, of winning over organic leaders.
The reasoning for this is twofold. Firstly, building majority power in a “bounded constituency” (such as is required for a strike) makes it necessary to reach out to every person in that constituency, regardless of their “preexisting interest in the union”. Real power means a committed majority, and that can’t be achieved by only working with an activist minority that already supports the cause: “because the goal is building majorities of a bounded constituency, organizers are constantly forced to engage people who may begin with little or no initial interest in being a part of any group”.
Secondly, it’s worth taking the time to identify and win over “organic leaders” because they already have influence in a workplace. Rather than find people who are supportive and work to build their influence, you find people who are influential and work to build their support. McAlevey argues that developing these leaders is more valuable than training “random volunteers”, as they start “ with a base of followers”. “They”, she notes, “are the key to scale.” So, although organic leaders don’t necessarily support the union (or the cause), they are a natural target because they have influence in the constituency and will shape the views and behaviour of other constituents.
Is this concept relevant outside union organising? While it makes sense to speak of leaders in a workplace, or in a faith community, does it make sense to talk about leaders in civil society in the same way? Outside the shop floor, are there community member who are also organic leaders — who are influential, with a base of followers?
The answer, probably, is yes. But more importantly, the key distinction here is between activists who may display commitment and “leaders” who can move others to act. Recruiting activists is not the key to scale and, in fact, limits scale. If you are using resources to train and coordinate activists who are very supportive but can’t move others to act, you won’t be able to create the sort of distributed leadership structure that mean you can scale up the operation without saddling a few professional staff with an ever-growing workload. Being able to identify leaders, distinguish activists from leaders, win over leaders and develop them as necessary, is the key to building majority power — because leaders build your capacity to grow to scale.
The part about the difference between "leaders" and "activists" reminded me of a chapter in a book I read in university The Romance of American Communism (which I see came out in a new edition in 2020). There was one interview with a CPUSA member who went from university into the factories to spread the socialist gospel but who found that he was more a bookish nerd than leader of the proletariat. He mentioned how genuine leaders would be talking during some workplace struggle and how on the occasions when he did speak up the natural leader (and the few others who bothered to acknowledge his existence) regarded him with pity.
Speaking of memories of other books, in the chapter where McAlevey contrasts the different methods employed in unions for nursing home unions in New England and Washington State, she mentions the radical, worker-driven local 1199. Seeing that number reminded me of a book by an eloquent weirdo named Martin J. Levitt called Confessions of a Union Buster. Whatever his faults, I don't believe that Levitt fabricated the scene where his union busting firm had a dinner where they invited prospective clients from the nursing home industry and played a pro-union film about the 1199 Local to get them all fired-up about hiring the firm to crush further unionization drives.
In the film (Levitt writes) there is one scene with a close-up of a Black nursing home woman's face and she says "Just give me 11-9-9." Levitt says that the whole room erupted into racist jeers and muttering.
That chapter was pretty eye-opening. I remember hearing in the 1990's that unions were putting resources into organizing new members. The Washington State showed one cynical way of getting this done. Washington State's politicians are fairly sympathetic to unions. (Relatively speaking.) The SEIU convinced employers to let them organize the workers, give them an extra dollar an hour, and in return for a no-strike pledge (promised by the organizers with no input from the workers), taking lots of workplace issues off the table, and successfully lobbying the state legislature to subsidize the wage increase, the SEIU would get more dues-paying members.
Suffice to say, Local 1199 behaved completely different and subsequently gets MUCH better wages and working conditions.
To conclude, I pretty much agree with everything McAlevey says. People need to be "organized" instead of "mobilized." (By which I mean the specific useages of the words as intended by McAlevey.) All my ignored political campagins were dependent upon citizen activism and individual responsibilities. My personal long-term project, "Workers as Citizens" simply acknowledged the importance of a sympathetic political-legal system for successful unionization drives. At one time, unions were illegal, with the class-war reason being obscured by the legal justification that they were conspiracies in restraint of trade. It was "price-fixing" by labour.
It wasn't so much a successful common-law legal challenge that got unions recognized, so much as decades of brutal fighting and the concommitant political pressure that led to victories in Britain, the USA (especially under FDR) and in Canada. I believe that conditions for working class organization are still incredibly difficult today and that we need all the help that we can get. Workplace democracy is another form of individual worker agency that McAlevey says is so important.
I usually don't enjoy stories about worker struggles because, being a pessimist in my own head, I don't need to read about the defeats and sufferings of ordinary people. But McAlevey's book is a clearly written book mainly about victories and how they were achieved.
On pages 61 and 62 McAlevey talks about "settlement costs." What is it going to cost your enemy to concede something? If it costs very little, you might get it without much of a struggle. If it's going to cost them a lot, prepare for a fight. This obvious truth sadly escapes many on the left. As she writes on page 62:
An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street. Others might think that the good frames used for or derived from these occupations will marshal enough emotion to suddenly overwhelm lawmakers with the revelation that the system is unfair and the lawmakers then will institute a set of fair regulations to govern corporate capital.
In her last chapter, "Pretend Power vs. Actual Power" McAlevey talks about narrative frames and how working class organizations have to speak to workers in ways that they understand. And given the oligarchy's massive control of the hegemonic narrative and the resources they pour into sustaining and intensifying it, this means that socialist counter-narratives have an uphill struggle just to survive. I have said this over and over. "Democracy" should be our watchword. It costs us nothing to employ it. We believe in it after all. We don't have to reject words like "socialism" as the NDP stupidly did before incoherently trying to reclaim it a short while later.
This is an important book and a very worthwhile use of your time if you care about justice and an end to oligarchic insanity.
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