Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)

My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement

Jane McAlevey, Bob Ostertag

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781781683156
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781684504
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1995, in the first contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency of the nation's largest labor federation, promising renewal and resurgence. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers belong to a union, the lowest percentage since the beginning of the twentieth century, and public employee collective bargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What happened?

Jane McAlevey is famous-and notorious-in the American labor movement as the hard-charging organizer who racked up a string of victories at a time when union leaders said winning wasn't possible. Then she was bounced from the movement, a victim of the high-level internecine warfare that has torn apart organized labor. In this engrossing and funny narrative-that reflects the personality of its charismatic, wisecracking author-McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories, and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them.
Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) argues that labor can be revived, but only if the movement acknowledges its mistakes and fully commits to deep organizing, participatory education, militancy, and an approach to workers and their communities that more resembles the campaigns of the 1930s-in short, social movement unionism that involves raising workers' expectations (while raising hell).

CHAPTER ONE

Whole-Worker Organizing
in Connecticut

A political earthquake hit the American labor movement in 1995, when the AFL-CIO held the first democratically contested election in its history. An entrenched old guard lost to a new generation who promised a radical break from the union leadership of the preceding decades. Suddenly, a different kind of movement seemed possible, one that might draw on the militant traditions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to expand the shrinking ranks of organized labor. A little historical context is required to put this earthquake in perspective.

The American Federation of Labor was formed all the way back in 1886. Many Americans then worked in small, independent shops employing skilled craftspeople. These craftspeople formed a multitude of professional associations, known collectively as craft unions, whose membership was limited to the skilled workers of a single trade. The AFL was formed as a national federation of these craft unions, and it looked out for their interests alone. The strike was a powerful tool in the hands of these workers, since their skills were not widely available in the general population. When they refused to work, it was hard to find anyone to take their place. In the terminology of the labor movement, this is shop floor power, and the craft unions of the AFL were so effective in wielding it, through strikes, slowdowns and more, that they had little incentive to become involved in the “politics” of elections, governance, and law. Less-skilled workers, more easily replaced and lacking shop floor power, became the support base for the emerging working-class radicalism of the day, most prominently expressed in the growing Socialist Party. The AFL saw this radicalism as a real threat to the good money their members made in the crafts and was soon explicitly presenting itself to employers as “the conservative alternative to working-class radicalism,” an alternative that came to be known as business unionism.

By the 1930s, the US economy had been profoundly transformed by the advent of huge industrial factories, sprawling mega-complexes employing thousands of people on assembly lines. The assembly line took the work formerly done by a skilled craftsperson and broke it down into a series of discrete tasks, each of which required little or no skill to complete. And if the assembly line could be automated, its speed could actually dictate the pace of work. The few tasks that could not be broken down into unskilled steps remained the domain of craftspeople, who constituted a shrinking percentage of the industrial work force and who fought to maintain their hard-won privileges in the craft unions of the AFL.

These giant factories were a social world in themselves, of a kind the nation had never seen. A small island of skilled workers was surrounded by a sea of unskilled workers; blacks and whites went to work in the same building; and recent immigrants bumped up against US-born citizens.

These developments led to a profound debate within the AFL, between those leaders and unions who wanted to stick to the craft union model and represent only the interests of the skilled few, and those who argued for an “industrial union” approach in which all the workers—skilled and unskilled alike—from a single factory, and eventually from an entire industry, would form “one big union.” The crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression gave this debate a fierce urgency. The labor movement split, and in 1935 the Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed. The following year the United Auto Workers staged massive strikes throughout the auto industry, which had pioneered the assembly line and now had the highest concentration of semiskilled workers. In the greatest organizing moment in US history, more than 100,000 workers a month formed new unions for six straight months. Instead of walking off the job, striking auto workers occupied their factories to ensure that no replacement workers, or “scabs,” could be brought in by the boss, and the term sit-down strike was born. Militancy and disregard for the law were the norm. Workers (then mostly men) and their wives and families took to the rooftop of their plant with guns, rocks, and whatever other weapons they could find to fight off the well-armed company goons attempting to take the factories back.

When the US entered World War II in 1941, many of these factory workers were sent to fight abroad in an army that replicated the class and racial proportions of the factories. Women entered the labor force in record numbers to keep industrial production humming back home. The unions made a “no-strike pledge” in support of the war effort, in return for which the government offered arbitration as an alternative method for setting wages and other terms of new contracts.

When the war ended in 1945 and the soldiers came home, the CIO took up just where it had left off at the outset of the war: a new wave of militant strikes immediately broke out. But so did the Cold War with the Soviets, and on the home front, the immediate target singled out by the cold warriors of American capitalism was the CIO. Many CIO leaders, organizers and members had also joined the Communist Party. When Joe McCarthy was elected to the US Senate in 1947, the great American witch hunt was on. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed the same year, penalizing unions whose officers refused to sign statements that they were not members of the Communist Party. The CIO buckled. The momentum of the organization was shattered, and eventually most of its communist leaders—who were often the best and the brightest—were purged. In 1955, the empty shell that had been the CIO merged with the more conservative AFL to form the AFL-CIO.

The post-1955 labor movement was a much different animal. In the anticommunist hysteria of the day, unions turned away from any sort of working-class radicalism to a narrow focus on “bread-and-butter” issues like wages. And there was plenty of bread and butter to go around, as the Great Depression and Second World War yielded to an economic boom that saw wages climb to record highs first in the United States and then in other parts of the world. A postwar pact between American labor and capital was eventually codified into a series of institutions and laws that regulated industrial relations.^* Workers got high wages, and benefits ranging from pensions to vacation time to the formal right to grieve. In return, capitalists got labor peace at home and support for American foreign policy abroad. By the 1980s, this latter had gone so far that the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the international arm of the AFL-CIO, was implicated in supporting death squads in Central America that killed real labor organizers. I was then a young adult working on environmental justice issues in Central America, and the fact that the unionists I was working with, who were already deeply engaged in a battle with a capitalist class of the most brutal and violent nature, now also had to deal with killer thugs funded by the unions of my country, made a deep impression on me.

Meanwhile, the postwar economic boom that had greased the pact between American capital and labor had come to an abrupt end, in 1973, when a sudden rise in the price of oil, the cost of fighting the war in Vietnam, and increased global competition sent the US economy into a recession. American workers once again needed militant unions, this time to defend the gains they had made during the boom. But the militant unions of earlier times were nowhere to be found. Any real attempt to bring unorganized workers into the ranks of unions had stopped when the communists were purged from the labor movement. At the height of labor’s power in the 1950s, roughly one in every three American workers was union member. In 1973, that number began its long decline. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, that number had fallen and only 23 percent of workers were in unions. By the time Reagan had left office in 1988, the number had dropped to 16.4 percent.^† The decline in union membership went hand in hand with the export of industry and industry’s union jobs to countries with lower labor costs. From their peak, in 1974, weekly real wages of American workers had fallen 11.5 percent by 1984 and a whopping 17.5 percent by 1994.^‡

The historic AFL-CIO convention took place the very next year. Representatives from a small handful of progressive foundations were outside the convention hall being briefed on the events inside and their implications for the future of labor. I was among them. As soon as we walked into the hotel, you could feel the tension. The outcome of the election was very much up in the air, and that outcome would be historic. Peter Olney, who worked with immigrant drywallers in Los Angeles, was there, and Ken Paff of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.^§ They talked about social and economic justice and teaching workers to build their own power. What they were describing were the kind of unions I had long wished for. They made sense and they were exciting. Then the slate calling itself New Voices swept to victory inside the convention hall, and suddenly it seemed that the unions envisioned by Olney and Paff might actually come to be. The election made the national president of the Service Employees International Union, John Sweeney, the new president of the AFL-CIO. As the industrial unions declined, SEIU, representing service sector workers such as janitors, health care workers, civil service employees, and others, had become the fastest-growing union in the nation.

I was then working as a program officer for the Veatch Program. Veatch was among a small core of foundations that had been promoting New Labor.^¶ We argued that foundations that funded programs for “poverty eradication” (in the stilted vernacular of progressive philanthropy) should take a look at New Labor, because good unions were the best antipoverty strategy money could buy. But the more we pushed this line, the more I wanted to get out of the foundation world and actually work in the new labor movement. My job at Veatch had given me a unique view of the progressive landscape, and it was clear that the American left was in big trouble. It simply did not have enough resources, and had even less people than money. There were precious few progressive organizations that could be said to have a mass base in any meaningful sense. Unions, meanwhile, had a lot of people and a lot of money.

In 1997, Veatch helped organize a briefing at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, so foundation people could meet the leaders of the New Labor movement. After John Sweeney and other top leaders were introduced, with much pomp and circumstance, Richard Bensinger was presented as the man who would lead New Labor’s drive to bring the great mass of unorganized American workers into the ranks of unions. For five years prior, Bensinger had been director of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute and had recently been given a new position as the AFL-CIO’s national organizing director. He was an inspiring guy. No one had to convince Richard Bensinger that American labor needed shaking up. On the contrary, he was ready to do the shaking. Bensinger was among the strategic thinkers who had introduced density into the labor lexicon. By density, Bensinger did not mean the number of workers you had talked to or even the number you had organized. The density that interested him was the percentage of workers in any given industry who were in unions. Density was the crucial metric. Bensinger was on a mission to wake labor up to the simple fact that if the percentage of organized workers is shrinking, then unions are losing. I know that seems obvious, but it was something many unions had a hard time hearing back then. Their leaders were still boasting about their absolute numbers, which sounded impressive until people like Bensinger came along and pointed out that those numbers might have been impressive in the 1970s, but the economy had grown, the population had grown, and a membership figure that might have represented 35 percent of the workers in a given industry back then could represent less than 10 percent now.

At the meeting, Bensinger talked about how ferocious corporations had become in their efforts to bust unions. The tools that they had begun using in the Reagan era were different. By the late 1980s there was a cottage industry of union busters who specialized in these new tactics; by the late 1990s there were close to 100 law firms that included union avoidance as an area of expertise. As he described workers being fired for the simple act of putting on a union button, my internal sense of right versus wrong and instinct for fight versus flight were raging. How could it be that in this country we had gone so far backward that workers had lost their right to freedom of speech and assembly? When I talked with him after the event, he challenged me to stop organizing meetings of funders and join up with the New Labor team.

Early in 1998, I was hired into the new national organizing department and put to work on the new Geographic Organizing Projects, or Geo Projects for short. This was an experimental program intended to develop new ways to increase union organizing drive win rates and then to accelerate first contract wins for the new unions. These two crucial metrics require a little explanation for those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of labor organizing.

Efforts to organize new unions generally begin in one of two ways. Sometimes an employer does something really outrageous, like cut everyone’s wages or health care benefits, or worse, and the workers contact a union and ask for help in forming a union of their own. The term for this is hot shop organizing. Alternatively, a union can launch an organizing campaign based on some sort of strategic analysis of a given industry or market, such as which plants are the most profitable or where the bottlenecks in the supply chain are, and then use that analysis to focus the organizing campaign to get the most bang for its buck. In the decades before New Labor’s victory in the AFL-CIO elections, American unions had all but stopped doing strategic campaigns and were just hot shopping.

What was worse, even the hot shopping wasn’t working. Once union leaders or organizers are confident that a solid majority of workers support forming a new union in the shop, they petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)^** to hold an election, so the workers can vote on whether to form a union or not. By the time the New Labor leaders came to power, unions were losing two thirds of these elections.^†† What had happened?

What had happened was all of those law firms that do nothing but bust unions, that’s what. Before they showed up, an organizer might have been able to file for an election knowing that 30 percent of the workers supported the union and assume that this would grow to a majority as the election date approached. Now, when an organizer filed for an election, the boss brought in a team of professional thugs who had studied the process and really had it down. The tactics used by employers included firing key workers, changing everyone’s schedule for the worse, withholding vacations, one-on-one intimidation interviews that resembled an FBI interrogation more than a meeting, tearing buttons off of workers, manufacturing bad write-ups on workers with an otherwise stellar record, and much, much more (discussed in detail as this book unfolds). This had completely changed the terms of successful organizing, and the unions had yet to find their way in the new landscape.

The numbers got even grimmer when you took into account those few organizing drives that did result in a union victory but then ground to a halt without the workers ever winning a union contract. Due to the complex legal structure that hems workers in on every side in this country, even when workers vote to form a union that’s just round one of the battle. Round two is winning the first contract, because the law states that workers don’t actually become members of a union until they have won their first contract. If there is no contract, there is no union. So the boss gets two chances to stop the workers from forming a union.

Specifically, the law says that if there is no contract within twelve months of certifying the new union, the workers can vote to “decertify” it. Let’s say you are a worker who campaigned really hard in the face of fierce employer intimidation and won your union election. You thought that the war in the workplace was over and you could get back to practicing your trade and living your life. Suddenly you realize that the war has just begun, and now you watch the boss fight like crazy to stop you from getting a contract, threatening and harassing you even more ferociously for another twelve months to stall the negotiation process. And through it all the employer subtly suggests that if the whole union thing just goes away, everything will be easier at work. Hell, you might even get a raise. You just might give that idea serious consideration. Or you might just throw up your hands and back away from the whole confrontation. Either way, the boss wins.

The top priority for the New Labor leadership of the AFL-CIO was to throw this whole ongoing train wreck into reverse. The Geo Projects were designed to be a laboratory for testing ideas for how to do just that. The one I was to lead was called the Stamford Organizing Project. Political power in Connecticut had gradually shifted to the city of Stamford and the surrounding county, Fairfield, where the labor movement had no base to speak of. This hobbled the power of labor in the state legislature. Fairfield County had the highest number of unorganized workers in the state; in some sectors, the highest in all of New England. The Stamford Organizing Project, or simply the Organizing Project, as it came to be known, was supposed to turn this around—to win some union elections and then some first contracts, and to get it done fast.

The Organizing Project was conceived as a multiunion, multisector^‡‡ project in which member unions were to pool resources, share lists, and adhere to collectively made decisions. This might seem unremarkable to someone outside the labor movement—union solidarity and all that— but given the history of interunion competition and turf wars in this country, the sort of collaboration envisioned by the Organizing Project was anything but the norm.

The Organizing Project was launched with four local unions: United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9a, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 371, Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 217, and SEIU District 1199 New England. Right from the get-go, our attempt to get these unions working together in Stamford opened up a can of worms that seemed to have no bottom. In fact, just weeks after I came on salary, three national unions tried to shut down the whole endeavor at a meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Their objections to the Organizing Project were varied. The one that had some substance was that the project did not fit into their sectoral approach to organizing.^§§ Another was that Connecticut in general, and Stamford in particular, was not a priority spot, a criticism which might have seemed valid if you were looking at thing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Florida, November 2000
• Introduction: Organizing Is About Raising Expectations
• Chapter One: Whole-Worker Organizing in Connecticut
• Chapter Two: The Yo-yo: Into and Out of the National SEIU
• Chapter Three: Bumpy Landing in Las Vegas
• Chapter Four: Round One: Reorganizing Desert Springs and Valley Hospitals, and Why Labor Should Care More about Primaries than about General Elections
• Chapter Five: Laying the Foundation: At Catholic Healthcare West, an Enlightened CEO; at SEIU, an Unenlightened President
• Chapter Six: Government Workers Get Militant: Big, Representative Bargaining Versus Bad Laws and Bullies
• Chapter Seven: Launching the 2006 Las Vegas Labor Offensive
• Chapter Eight: The Gloves Come Off: Union Busters, the NLRB, and a Purple RV
• Chapter Nine: The Gold Standard: What a Good Contract Looks Like, and How It Relates to Patient Care
• Chapter Ten: The CEO, the Union Buster, and the Gunrunner
• Chapter Eleven: Full Court Press
• Chapter Twelve: Strike! Victory at Universal Health Services, Victory in the Public Sector
• Chapter Thirteen: Things Fall Apart: How National and Local Labor Leaders Undermined the Workers of Nevada
• Epilogue: New York, May 2012
• Acknowledgments
• Index