Five Things You Need to Know About Labor Unions

September 20, 2019 Episode.png

Five Things You Need to Know About Labor Unions:

1. The American labor movement sprang to life with industrialization and resulted in many of the workplace protections we enjoy today. (02:02)

2. Union membership peaked in the mid-20th century but struggled with racist and sexist policies as well as corruption within the leadership and anti-union government policies. (11:10)

3. As private union membership began to decrease, public service unions began to grow. (17:57)

4. We are also seeing the rise of organized action beyond the public sector as well. (20:04)

5. There is also a rise of collective action inside tech about both worker issues and societal issues. (21:46)

Pantsuit Politics in the Wild:

Sponsors:

Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do what we do without you. To become a tangible supporter of the show, please visit our Patreon page, purchase a copy of our book, I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), or share the word about our work in your own circles. 

Episode Resources:

TRANSCRIPT

Dylan [00:00:00] Hey, this is Dylan from Studio D Podcast Production. Sarah and Beth will be back in your feet on Wednesday. But in observance of the Labor Day holiday, we wanted to share one of our favorite episodes. Five Things You Need to Know About Labor Unions. Enjoy. 

Sarah [00:00:23] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:25] And this is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:26] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:42] Today, we're going to dive right in to five things you need to know about modern labor unions. And there is so much history to cover here.  

Sarah [00:00:52] So much. So let's start with number one. The American Labor Movement sprang to life with industrialization and resulted in many of the workplace protections we enjoy today. For almost the first 100 years of the country's history, you see very little union activity because the organization of Labor was more closely akin to European art guilds, because most Americans still fed themselves directly through their own labor on farms, not by selling their labor in cities. So labor in cities was still highly skilled. It was performed by artisans who would form these small organizations. Now, English common law at the time outlawed striking to raise wages. So when these small guilds would organize maybe to protest wage reductions, the U.S. courts leaned heavily on English common law. In 1806, there was the criminal prosecution of the Philadelphia Cordwainers, which is basically shoemakers, in the Commonwealth v. Pullis, a three day trial that led the jury to convict the accused unionists of a criminal conspiracy to fix prices. Then in 1842, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in an influential decision, Commonwealth v. Hunt ruled the Boot Makers Union a lawful association with a lawful right to organize and collectively withhold labor aka strike.  

Beth [00:02:11] This court decision came as we started to see increasing industrialization. But first came a civil war. And you can't tell the history of the labor movement or really any other period of history without including the anti-racist and often labor-specific uprisings of black Americans. W.E.B. Dubois described the revolt of enslaved people during the Civil War as the first general strike and a major turning point in the war because the North was experiencing riots over conscription and the South needed the labor. To see how enslaved people were able to coordinate a general strike, Errol A. Henderson looks at the conditions in the southern economy in the years before the war. He notes that many enslaved workers were not isolated on plantations but employed in growing industrial operations. Some particularly skilled artisans were hired out, working in a manner similar to wage workers but without pay. Henderson writes that this practice radicalized workers by making it obvious how much value they were creating without compensation. It also gave enslaved artisans a chance to meet and discuss their grievances together. These artisans, along with preachers and other enslaved workers who traveled as part of their jobs, formed a connection for mobilization. So after the Civil War, with the increasing rise of industrialization, you see the dramatic shift to cities where Americans are selling their labor. And you see the rise of factory labor, which was unskilled in the sense that you didn't need to complete years of apprenticeships to do the job and were therefore more easily replaced.  

Sarah [00:03:52] You also see a shift away from these trade unions, these artisan guilds, to more industrialized unions. The Knights of Labor form in 1869, and attract a huge number of workers. They held strikes and organized across industries. They were really about the tenets of democracy and Republicanism, public education, elimination of debt or prisons, banking reform. So there were two strands. You start to see the trade unions that were about the immediate worker needs and these more industrialized movements that were about a bigger societal vision. And these strands were really kept separate operationally. The industrialized movement was making progress, particularly with regards to an eight hour workday. But this was often a result of very violent, disruptive actions and strikes. Between 1877 and 1900 american President sent the U.S. Army into 11 strikes. Governors mobilized the National Guard in somewhere between 118 and 160 labor disputes, and mayors called out the police on numerous occasions to maintain public order. Then on May 4th, 1886, you have a huge event. A labor protest rally near Chicago's Haymarket Square turned into a riot after someone threw a bomb at police. At least eight people died as a result of the violence that day. And despite lack of evidence against them, eight radical labor activists were convicted in connection with the bombing.  

Beth [00:05:21] Really dramatic reaction after Haymarket. The nights rapidly began to fail and trade unions took on a more modern businesslike approach. In December 1886, the national craft unions joined together to form the American Federation of Labor-- and that's the AFL that you've probably heard of-- under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. The AFL's basic premise is that self-organization along occupational lines with a concentration on job conscious goals, would give workers the necessary tools for greater freedom. As a formal policy, the AFL decided that it represented all workers of every skill, demographic and background. But national unions really only consisted of skilled workers. The AFL also believed limiting new Labor was the best way to control the labor market and keep wages high. So they depended on anti-immigrant, racist and sexist means to do that. The AFL chartered a whites only International Association of Machinist. In 1902 only about 3% of union members were black. Asian workers were wholly excluded. Western and Eastern European immigrants were welcome in theory, but they were excluded in practice. And this is why John Lewis and the United Mine Workers broke away from the AFL in 1935 to form the Committee for Industrial Organization, which is the CIO. They embraced workers across race and gender lines.  

Sarah [00:06:57] But before that, we see World War One, and there is a real dramatic growth in union membership and power during that time because the government really stepped in. The flow of labor from Europe had stopped and the war effort was dependent on American workers in ways that it hadn't been in the past. It's during this time that you see the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, previously under the Sherman Antitrust Act, workers who were classified as cartels if they tried to organize in this new law allowed employees to strike and boycott. The National War Labor Board was formed in 1918 to mediate corporate and union conflicts. However, these gains are largely stalled or erased during the Gilded Age. As you also see, the growth in corporation and big corporations gain a lot of political power. Of course, that dramatic growth of wealth led to the Great Depression as well, a series of violent strikes that broke out in April and May of 1934 in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis. Then in late 1936 and early 1937 you have another huge event in the labor movement, which is the great sit in at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. It lasted 44 days and saw workers using hinges and bolts to fend off armed police who were trying to seize the factory. There's also a great story about the wives of the strikers would break the windows to allow the tear gas to escape as the police were trying to force the people sitting in and out of the factory. The governor of Michigan refused to call in troops to break up the strike and it forced General Motors, then the world's largest corporation, to recognize the union. Following this success, there was a great deal of New Deal reforms from laws limiting child labor laws to laws setting a minimum wage. I read a really fascinating thing I have to insert here Beth, did you know that the child labor laws is how we got birth certificates?  

Beth [00:08:46] Oh, interesting.  

Sarah [00:08:47] Yeah, right. They didn't know how old they were. They'd be like, no, well, you can't work somebody under 14. Well, how old are you? I don't know, 13 ish. And so that's how we got the birth certificate, which I thought was really interesting. But the most important and foundational labor law was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guarantees the right of private sector employees to organize and to trade unions to engage in collective bargaining and take collective action such as strikes. It also establishes the National Labor Relations Board as an independent agency of the federal government of the United States with responsibilities for enforcing U.S. labor law in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. A century of demand was also finally met. After that, the demands for the eight hour workweek stalled after the Haymarket riot, when Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to limit the federal workweek to 40 hours.  

Beth [00:09:38] So that was all just thing number one. Just to give you a little bit of a picture of how the concept of striking was illegal under English common law. And we got from there to this really intricate dance between government regulation and the way that unions operate. The second thing we want you to know is that union membership peaked in the mid-twentieth century, but unions continued to struggle with racist and sexist policies, as well as corruption within the leadership and anti-union government policies. Union power waned a little bit during World War Two because the government wouldn't allow some unions to strike if it harmed wartime production. You also have the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act amending the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which prohibited unions from engaging in several unfair labor practices, including jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The NLRA also allowed states to pass right to work laws banning union shops. But after the war, unions and labor movements were still very strong. Unions became a controlling economic powerhouse during the late forties and fifties. The AFL-CIO formed in 1955, combining organized labor and increasing the power of collective bargaining.  

[00:11:08] So remember you had the AFL and the CIO kind of separately pursuing those strands of like broader social policy making and day to day job concerns. And now you have all of that coming together under one big umbrella. Unions more than tripled weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970. Union workers received enhanced benefits and protections against old age illness and unemployment. They received protections to ensure that they were treated fairly at work. But still, only about one third of American employees were part of organized labor. Although the 1960s brought women and racial minorities flooding into unions, the leadership structure in unions and the skilled jobs remained mostly foreclosed to everyone but white men. Which is really interesting because if you look back at the movement, some of the most important work was done by black Americans and by Frances Perkins, who was the first cabinet level woman appointed in the United States as a secretary of labor. So when Sarah talked about those child labor laws and a lot of the safety issues, those all came from Frances Perkins. But still, the AFL-CIO struggled with racial and gender issues. And at the same time played a really important role in advancing civil rights legislation. It's complicated.  

Sarah [00:12:23] So union membership reached its historical peak in 1954, with 35% of the nation's labor force unionized. The nation's unions had almost 15 million members. In the 1970s, huge changes in culture, technology and global competition weakened unions economically and politically. Many industries were deregulated and restructured. Foreign goods started pouring into the U.S.. Nonunion competition for jobs increased in the nation. National Labor Relations Act started to hamstring unions. The Reagan administration in particular was anti-union, with the most famous incident involving PATCO, the Air Traffic Controllers Union, which had supported Reagan for the presidency after years of relative failure under Democratic presidents. The air traffic controllers threatened to violate federal law by going on strike. And although Reagan initially tried to arrange a very generous settlement with the union, its adamant and frustrated leaders demanded even more. The president then felt he had no other recourse but to fire them. And the legend of his determination to set an example by breaking the unions began to develop. Membership fell by 5 million between 1975 and 1985. Union's successes in lobbying for legislation things like outlawing child labor, mandating equal pay for equal work, made unions less relevant because federal law protected workers and unions had become so strong in the fifties and sixties that many union leaders descended into corruption and complacency. We also saw the rise of anti-union legislation at the state and local levels with concentrated efforts to pass the right to work legislation, a government ban on contractual agreements between employers and union employees requiring workers to pay for the cost of union representation. Currently, 26 states have right to work legislation, although interestingly, Missouri had right to work legislation but in 2018 it was rejected by the voters by a two thirds majority.  

Beth [00:14:15] So thing number three we want you to know, is that as private union membership began to decrease, for all the reasons Sarah just described, public service unions began to grow. In 1962, President Kennedy signed an executive order that gave public employees the right to organize. It emphasized that federal employees need not join a union. It ruled out strikes. It included few of the procedures the AFL-CIO requested and was soon made even more restrictive through interpretations by the Civil Service Commission. These unions continued to grow throughout the end of the 20th century and until today, despite Supreme Court rulings aimed at decreasing their power, such as the Janus opinion, which you can hear a deep dive of on the Nightly Nuance on Patreon, where the court ruled that states can no longer require public employees who are represented by a union but have chosen not to formally become members to contribute to the costs of collective bargaining. Today, the nation's largest unions are public service unions, including the National Education Association, which is the largest, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The public sector is about 30% unionized, and they fight for the entire public sector, not just employees. Often the demands go far beyond worker needs, like raises and health insurance, and speak to societal issues like poverty, immigration and the push for charter schools. The uprising in Puerto Rico is largely credited to have began with organized action from teachers. In 2018, we saw more Americans striking than in any year since 1986, and these were led by public sector employees, often semi wildcat strikes, meaning they didn't originate with leadership but with membership, including teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and our home state of Kentucky. You also saw strikes in the Los Angeles Unified School Districts. So this is not just happening in red states.  

Sarah [00:16:15] So number four, we are also seeing the rise of organized action beyond the public sector as well. From Kentucky coal miners blocking a shipment of coal over bad checks issued to them for back pay to Somali workers. And Amazon warehouse in Minnesota striking for religious breaks. The successful strike by 7,700 hotel workers against Marriott with the slogan One Job Should be Enough. There has been a growing movement of collective action. Much of this collective action has been taking place in New York, including the fight for 15, which began in 2012, when 200 fast food workers walked off the job to demand $15 an hour and union rights in New York City. And as of May 28, 2019, the movement has seen successes on state and local levels. California, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut have passed laws that gradually raise their state minimum wages to at least $15 per hour. There's also been reporting just last week that yoga teachers in New York City have begun unionizing. Even in traditional private sector unions we are seeing more action. This week, the UAW went on strike for the first time in 12 years and 80,000 Kaiser Permanente workers said their members will participate in a week long strike starting October 14th to protest the company's labor practices. Still today, about 1/10 of the workforce is in union compared to about a third in the fifties. And there are interesting conversations happening about whether collective action is going to be more powerful inside or outside of unions. Some complaints from teachers, for example, about how rushed the process has been from unions to review proposed contracts. Like in Los Angeles, you have clashes between Uber and Lyft drivers and the SEIU about driver input in the bill negotiation process and unions holding back support of collective action until workers decide to become members.  

Beth [00:18:08] The last thing we want to tell you today is that there is a rise of collective action inside the tech industry about both worker issues and societal issues. In the past several years, we've seen walkouts at Google because of sexual harassment policies and at Microsoft to protest involvement in the military industrial complex. Game Workers United is a group that fills voids where there aren't traditional unions. A group of workers at video game maker Riot Games staged a three hour walkout in May over the handling of sex discrimination accusations. And we see, in addition to this kind of informal ad hoc collective action, a growing trend toward unionization in the tech sector. Kickstarter staff is unionizing because they want to "Promote our collective values, inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability, a seat at the table," the organizers wrote. Noting that in the decades that Kickstarter has been around, it's democratized crowdfunding and brought more than 150,000 projects to life. They say Kickstarter's efforts are incomplete and these values have failed to manifest in our workplace. We can do better together for ourselves and our industry. Kickstarter staffers say they chose the OPEIU, which is the Office and Professional Employees International Union, because of its approach to organizing, its experience domestically and internationally and its diversity of members. There has been a wave of unionization at online publications getting its start at Gawker in 2015.  

[00:19:39] BuzzFeed agreed to voluntarily recognize an employee union, although I heard one interview talking about how voluntary is like a strange word to use about companies that go along with unions. Because so many of these tech companies are so public that the bad press associated with fighting a union makes it a coerced decision, even if it's "voluntary". But BuzzFeed's agreement ended a standoff that included a walkout and months of negotiations. As one employee put it, they need to demonstrate that being socially conscious isn't just a brand. Outlets that have followed Gawker's lead include original online magazine, Slate and Salon destination sites like Vice Media, HuffPost, Refinery29, The Dodo and Vox, the humor site The Onion, the podcasting company Gimlet Media, the music site Pitchfork and New York Magazine's online verticals The Cut, Vulture and Intelligencer. The ranks have swelled recently at two unions representing writers and editors. The News Guild, which represents the staff at the New York Times, among other media organizations and the Writers Guild of America First, perhaps best known for its work with television and film writers. Organizers at the two unions estimated that the digital wave has brought them 2000 new members, and that has effects outside of the digital space as well. The L.A. Times newsroom has unionized, which is something that people thought would never, ever happen. Not all of these efforts end in unionization. DNAinfo and Gothamist shattered after their staff decided to unionize. And so there are multiple outcomes when workers take collective action. And we're going to get into the pros and cons of that, the way the law impacts unions and where we see trends in labor going on Tuesday's episode.  

Sarah [00:21:27] Yeah, I can't wait and I'm so excited. We hope that you have learned a lot about unions during this episode. We'll be on social media with any questions or to hear what you learned over the weekend. And we'll be back on Tuesday. Until then, keep it nuanced, y'all.  

Beth [00:21:49] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.  

Sarah [00:21:55] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.  

Beth [00:22:01] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.  

Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:22:05] Martha Bronitisksy. Linda Daniel. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zugenalis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs.  

[00:22:24] The Kriebs. Laurie LaDow. Lilly McClure. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tawni  Peterson. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stiggers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Valleli. Katherine Vollmer. Amy Whited.  

Beth [00:22:41] Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Ashley Thompson. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Morgan McHugh. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.  

Primers, Domestic policyBeth Silverslabor unionsComment