Power in Coalition

Strategies for strong unions and social change

Amanda Tattersall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367718961
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000246810
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can we change things in an age in which governments are fixated on the bottom line and conventional protest rallies have lost their punch?

Coalitions can be important tools for social change and union revitalisation. What makes them successful? What causes them to fail? Community organiser Amanda Tattersall examines successful coalitions between unions and community organisations in three countries: the public education coalition in Sydney, Toronto's Ontario Health Coalition fighting to save universal health care, and Chicago's living wage campaign run by the Grassroots Collaborative. She explores when and how coalitions can be a powerful strategy for social change, organisational development and union renewal.

Power in Coalition is essential reading for unionists, community activists, and anyone passionate about social change.

'A fascinating insight into the potential for coalitions to restore the balance of power between governments and the communities they are supposed to serve.' - Julian Burnside AO QC

'Amanda Tattersall shows that coalitions, though hard work at times, are the best means we have to rebalance power, beat poverty and injustice, and build a future that includes all of us, especially the weakest.' - Tim Costello AO, CEO, World Vision Australia

'If unions are to maximise their influence in the 21st century they must build alliances with other organisations around economic, social and ecological concerns affecting humanity. This book shows it is possible to build the necessary coalitions to achieve this end.' - Jack Mundey AO, instigator of the 1970s Green Bans movement in Sydney

Chapter 1
The Elements of Coalition Unionism

Many people in the labor movement see coalitions as an important tool for social change and union revitalization. Yet few analytical devices exist to help us understand what makes coalitions successful and what makes them fail. Instead, union renewal scholars have invoked terms like “labor-community coalitions” and “community unionism” to describe coalition practice. These terms have been unclearly defined, clouding our understanding of how to build strong coalitions (cf. Fine 2005a; McBride and Greenwood 2009).

The term “community unionism” has frequently been used to describe coalitions, as well as to identify strategies beyond coalitions. It was coined by James O’Connor in 1964, and that summer it was appropriated by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to describe its organizing strategy of building local community unions as interracial organizations of poor urban workers based in the neighborhoods where workers lived, rather than their workplace (O’Connor 1964a, 1964b; Frost 2001, 46). In 1965 the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers also began to pioneer community unions. Several of these projects were in the same cities as the SDS projects (such as Chicago and Newark) but were established in different locations and were sponsored directly by organized labor (Bok and Dunlop 1970). These projects organized the marginalized urban poor around their common interests in improved housing and schooling and used existing union members as an organizational base while their leaders attempted to organize non-union workers (Fine 2003, 308; Tait 2005). Emerging identity-based union organizing projects in the 1960s paralleled the strategy of community unions. These included Cesar Chavez’s farm worker unionism and the civil rights unionism of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (Flug 1990, 328).

In 1992 the term “community unionism” reemerged in the United States to describe coalitions between unions and community organizations, at a time when unions were in decline (Banks 1992). Defining community unionism as coalitions also spread to Canada and Australia (Tufts 1998; Lipsig-Mumme 2003; Cutcher 2004; Tattersall 2004, 2006; Muir 2008).

Labor geographers appropriated the term “community unionism” to bring an understanding of labor geography to the literature on alliances. They presented a place-based approach that argued alliances at a local scale can rebuild union power (Wills 2001; Ellem 2003).

In the late 1990s, the term “community unionism” was again used to describe community-based organizing strategies focused on common ethnic and gender identities located in specific neighborhoods (Fine 2003, 2005a). In Canada and Japan, the term was used to describe organizations of marginalized, migrant workers (Cranford and Ladd 2003; Urano and Stewart 2005).

I believe that these contested interpretations of community unionism have remained unresolved largely because of uncertainty about the meaning of “community.” Union practitioners frequently used the term “community” to describe coalitions. Not only is the term community unionism used to describe coalitions, but coalitions have been labeled labor community coalitions.

At one level the term “community” has been colloquial and vague. It is not, however, meaningless. In union revitalization literature, “community” repeatedly conveys specific descriptions that could provide a deeper foundation for understanding coalitions and defining related terms like “community unionism” (Tattersall 2009). To me, the term “community” conveys three different meanings:

• Community as organization
• Community as common interest or common identity
• Community as place

Most commonly, the term “community” refers to organization. Coalitions are frequently described as labor-community coalitions, where “community” refers to community organization. Community also describes people who have a set of common interests or identities, such as a religious community or a community of women. Fine and Cranford use the term “community” to underscore the importance of common identities, such as race and gender, as forms of solidarity (Cranford and Ladd 2003; Fine 2005a, 154). The word has also been used to describe the common interests of workers beyond the workplace, including concerns such as transport, health care, and education (Cornfield and Hodson 1993; Gindin 1995; Eisenscher 1999). Finally, community describes a place, such as local neighborhood or village. Labor geographers use the term to emphasize the important role of geography for understanding union practice inside contested social and economic relations (Massey 1984; Herod 1998a; Ellem 2005).

Figure 1.1 Three interpretations of community

The three definitions of community shown in figure 1.1 are not mutually exclusive; they are reinforcing and connected. For instance, the Federation of Parents and Citizens (P&C) is a community organization in New South Wales, Australia, whose membership consists of a group of parents with a common interest in improving public schools, and the organization is statewide, operating as a federation of place -based organizations in local schools. I use this three-part definition to provide a new way of approaching contingent terms like “community unionism” and “coalition unionism.”

Figure 1.2 Defining community unionism

If you accept this approach, “community unionism” becomes a descriptive term that refers to the broad set of strategies that emerge from these three aspects of community. Community unionism involves the interconnection of unions with organizations, common interest/identity, and place (Tattersall 2008). This captures and organizes the three concurrent uses of community unionism I described above. Thus, as outlined in figure 1.2, I see community unionism as the expression of three types of union (and community organization) strategies:

• Coalitions between unions and community organizations (coalition unionism)
• Organizing workers on the basis of common identity or interests rather than the workplace
• Place-based union Organizing strategies

Accordingly, community unionism describes the strategy I explore in this book, where unions work with community organizations in coalition, what I call coalition unionism. Additionally, community unionism refers to an organizing strategy, where unions or community organizations seek to organize workers on the basis of their identity or interests rather than their common workplace. This may include organizing women or migrants or union campaigns on issues beyond the workplace. Finally, the term community unionism encompasses place-based organizing strategies, such as the desire for unions to act globally or locally (Ellem 2003). This may be local or city-scaled strategies, such as the AFL-CIO’s Union Cities program, which sought to improve how the union movement shaped the local political environment, or the desire for unions to act across the global community (Tattersall 2007a).

Figure 1.3 The elements of coalitions

Within this broad definition of community unionism sits the specific strategy of building coalitions between unions and community organizations. And since coalition unionism is a kind of community unionism, we can use the three-part definition of community and community unionism to define coalition unionism. Applying this approach to coalitions reveals that they have three attributes or elements (see figure 1.3):

• Organizational relationships and structure
• Common concern
• Scale

If you take a look at figure 1.3, you will notice that the elements of coalitions directly correlate to the three interpretations of community—organization, common interest/identity, and place. Consequently, not only are coalitions rightly called a community strategy, but the term community helps us see how this strategy works: coalitions exist when two or more organizations (such as unions or community organizations) build relationships in order to forge a shared common interest agenda to achieve social change in a specific place.

Yet coalitions act out this strategy in dramatically different ways. By bringing order to these terms I hope to move beyond debates about what coalition or community unionism is (Black 2005), to examine when these strategies become powerful. My intention is to zero in on coalition unionism as one example of community unionism and focus on how coalitions are successful. To do this, I examine the objectives of coalition unionism and what I call coalition success.

Coalition Success and the Coalition Elements

To understand what makes coalitions successful, we need to design a new approach because union renewal scholarship has rarely focused explicitly on coalition success. In the 1990s, scholars concentrated on describing coalition best practice (Brecher and Costello 1990; Eisenscher 1999; Reynolds 2002). While this usefully confirmed that coalition practice had become more widespread, it provided only limited guidance as to the circumstances that led coalitions to produce successful outcomes. They also tended to underplay the obstacles and challenges that coalitions experience (Lopez 2004, 12). Similarly, multidisciplinary approaches, whether from labor geography or social movement theory, emphasized how these theories could be applied to coalition practice, but they did not establish how those theories helped us understand coalition success (Kelly 1998; Herod 1998a).

By contrast, my primary interest is coalition success, and I focus on the different outcomes that coalitions produce. I identify four measures of success. First, success refers to winning a specific external outcome—for instance, the extent to which a coalition influences the decision of a politician or employer. This could include winning a living wage ordinance or stopping the development of a public-private partnership hospital. Second, a coalition is successful to the extent to which it shapes the broader political climate and the environment within which future campaigns can be fought. This could include creating a political environment more receptive to campaigns like public education by changing the elected politicians or by shifting popular opinion in support of that agenda. Third, success refers to the coalition itself and whether it operates in a way that creates sustainable relationships between the organizations. Finally, coalition success relates to the organizations in the coalition and whether the coalition works in a way that increases their internal capacity by developing new member leaders and by strengthening the campaigning skills and political vision of the organization’s leaders, organizers, stewards, or members. The first measures are social-change outcomes, and the latter two are forms of organizational strength. These four kinds of success are outlined in Table 1.1.

My approach to coalition success focuses on how coalitions can work to build their own strength, and it is derived from a combination of sociological and community organizing approaches to the concept of power. I understand power in relatively neutral terms, as the ability to act, consistent with the interpretation used in community organizing (Chambers 2003). Seeing coalition success as winning outcomes reflects a pluralist (one-dimensional) view of power, where power is evidenced by who prevails in decision making (Dahl 1957; Gaventa 1980, 14), and coalitions are successful if they influence the decisions of politicians or employers. Seeing success as shaping the political climate echoes Lukes’s idea (2005) that power is exercised through influencing the kinds of issues, people, and agendas that are considered relevant and legitimate (Gaventa 1980). Coalitions are therefore successful if they work in a way that allows them to draw attention to their own issues and redefine those issues as central to social debate and political reform (Fine 2005b, 250). Seeing success as organizational strength borrows from community organizing, where power is about building social and community resources to act in the future (Sen 2003). A core principle of community organizing is developing leadership and relationships between individuals and organizations as a strategy to enhance a group’s ability to take public action (Warren 2001; Fine 2005b, 255). Coalitions are therefore successful if they provide organizations with greater resources to take future action by enabling them to draw on a network of sustained relationships with other organizations, and if they enhance an organization’s internal capacity to act.

TABLE 1.1 Coalition success

Social change		Organizational strength
Winning a specific outcome	Shaping the broader political climate	Sustaining relationships	Increasing the capacity of member organization

Coalitions, like other forms of trade union action, embody possibilities and limits (Anderson 1967). I use this multifaceted definition of coalition success to explore the various (and often contradictory) goals of coalitio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Elements of Coalition Unionism
• 2. The Public Education Coalition in New South Wales
• 3. Living Wages and the Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago
• 4. The Ontario Health Coalition
• 5. Power in Coalition
• Conclusion: The Possibilities of Successful Coalitions
• References
• Index