There’s an interesting comment thread brewing over on my feature about the state of union organizing in Washington State—in which I wrote about my own time on the picket line and looked at the long, bloody, and rapidly-receding history of labor activism in this region:
It’s a history that includes just about every single line of bodily labor that our region has ever seen: the cigar makers, the brewers, the maltsters, the newsboys, the cooks, the barbers, the waiters, the waitresses, the meatpackers, the X-ray technicians, the nurses, the truck drivers, the airplane makers. That history has grown increasingly remote, though. In recent decades, the businesses that defined the new Seattle economy—Starbucks, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, Microsoft, the biotech companies of South Lake Union, the Google branches in Fremont and Kirkland—have been able to grow huge sums of money out of the labor of nonunionized workforces. In addition to non-union-produced lattes and non-union-produced web browsers, a major product of this new Seattle is an increased number of citizens who have only an abstract awareness that this is, or used to be, a union town.
Here’s a sampling of some of the long and thoughtful comments, beginning with one from Liz Brown, administrator of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, the union that I was on strike with from November of 2000 to January of 2001:
If you overlay a graph of the decline in American wages, it tracks exactly with the decline in union density. But it’s not like the corporate agenda is any secret. You’re soaking in it…and may even be voting for it.
I think what it comes to is the stakes were higher back then (1916). Loosing a limb, dying because of work conditions are a hell of a lot higher [stakes] than adding benefits. True outrage will inspire, [as will] actually seeing results—not like most of the useless strikes in resent years. [This will also give the] power and hope that the young working people (my people, I’m 24) lack.
The decline in union membership and the lack of participation by members who don’t really understand why they’re in a union to begin with come from the same source… We, as producers of labor, just aren’t upset enough about being robbed. We work through our breaks and don’t think of it as the company stealing from us. We give up privileges or put up with substandard conditions because the annoyance is better than being out of work and it’s not bad enough to kill or maim us . . . yet.
Labor unions as they were will have no place in the economy we are heading into. Solidarity is something that used to happen but now class consciousness is overwhelmed by the fact that everyone can sip lattes. Not to mention unions that are no longer “down here with us” but instead we have bureaucrats who make way more money than the people they represent make.
Having been in and around unions for 30 years I agree with some of the critiques made here, but let’s acknowledge some of the realities addressed in the story: community structures that enhanced solidarity in earlier times are weak; people are spending a huge amount of time just surviving; individualized distractions have multiplied; enormous numbers of workers have no personal or family experience with what unionism means or could mean; and frankly the role models out there of union activism may not be all that appealing (e.g. burning out young organizers, union staff jobs being incompatible with having a family). There is a serious discussion to be had about what form labor organizations will need to take to address current challenges- it’s unlikely to look just like the CIO- but let’s not make believe it’s just a matter being more pro-union and organizing harder. There’s some material reality out there that we have to come to grips with.
Not a union town? I love you, Seattle.
This is one of the first Stranger articles I’ve read that could be reprinted in Chamber of Commerce literature. Sanders might even be able to get a nice kickback for reporting on his successes as a “solo bargainer” among like-minded capitalists.
