T he saying around Everett in 1916 was that you could tell shingle
weavers by their missing fingers, lost regularly to the unguarded saws
of the town’s mills. You might also have been able to tell them by
their “cedar asthma,” contracted from the dust that blew upward from those same saws and into countless lungs, some of which stopped working as a result.
The shingle
weavers were on strike that year, a consequence of both their difficult
situation and a larger boom in organizing in the state’s early
industries. Though they had mixed feelings about it, they were supported by the
Industrial Workers of the World—known commonly as the Wobblies,
committed to overthrowing the employing class—who had taken up
the shingle weavers’ cause in part as a means of promoting their own,
more radical agenda. Throughout the summer and fall, teams of Wobblies
came to Everett to engage in free-speech demonstrations and were
arrested and beaten by the local police—once with clubs and
whips. By November, incensed at the rough treatment of their union
brothers, some 300 Wobblies decided to board boats in Seattle and head
for Everett. They are said to have sung a battle cry called “Hold the
Fort” along the way: “We meet today in freedom’s cause and raise our
voices high/We’ll join our hands in union strong to battle or to
die/Hold the fort, for we are coming, union us be strong/Side by side
we’ll battle onward, victory will come.”
The Verona, the first boat of Wobblies to arrive, was met at
the Everett waterfront by the Snohomish County sheriff and a couple
hundred deputized citizens. “Who is your leader?” the sheriff shouted,
according to historical accounts. “We are all leaders!” the Wobblies
shouted back. Someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire. When
it was all over, two sheriff’s deputies and at least five
Wobblies—the official number, though the actual number might have
been as high as a dozen—were dead. Several union bodies floated
in Port Gardner Bay, other union bodies (74 of them) were taken to
jail, and the Everett Massacre, as it was called, entered into state
union lore, alongside numerous other clashes and strikes and organizing
drives that make up Washington State’s deep union history.
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.
I n January of 2000, I returned to Seattle from college and walked
straight into a union. That year, union membership in Washington State
stood at 18.5 percent of the workforce, way down from the 44.5 percent
of the workforce that was unionized in the mid-1960s. The drop is in
keeping with a long, nationwide decline in union membership—a
trend that now has union leaders lobbying intensely for the
labor-friendly Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress
to pass legislation that would make it easier for American workers to
form unions. I had been hired on at the Seattle Times as a
“three-year resident,” essentially a long-term paid intern. Like most
of the newspaper’s staff then and now, residents at the Times were members of the local branch of the Communications Workers of
America, a group that traces back to a federation formed by telephone
operators in 1947.
Theoretically, I had the option of declining a union membership at
the Times. But I had no problem with being in the union. Part of
my job would be working with older reporters and copy editors, almost
all of them proud union veterans. To not join their project of
bargaining collectively for better wages and benefits would be a slap
in the face to them. Plus, I liked the union-negotiated salary I’d be
earning: about $25,000 the first year if all went well.
Ideology, in other words, had little to do with my becoming a
Communications Worker of America. Joining was in line with my politics,
sure, but the greater motivator was that it just seemed to be what was
done in the place where I had landed. Over the course of that year, I
paid $320.32 in dues to my local branch, the Pacific Northwest
Newspaper Guild. This money was deducted straight from my paychecks,
just like federal income tax and Social Security payments. By November,
the dot-com bubble had burst, and this union membership that I’d
figured would probably be of neutral-to-no consequence led me into
tense meetings at the Seattle Labor Temple on First Avenue (a place I’d
previously never known existed), a raucous strike vote (I voted in
favor), and then, finally, a 49-day stint on the picket line.
The issues were standard and somewhat timeless, the same basic
complaints that have motivated union workers in Seattle ever since the
Seattle General Strike of 1919—the first mass civic work stoppage
in U.S. history—idled the streetcars, raised the ire of
vigilantes who went out looking to round up “reds,” and caused
then-mayor Ole Hanson to pronounce a defining contest between
“Americanism” and “bolshevism” (the former, it turned out, won). In
2000, we at the Times wanted essentially what the shipyard
workers who triggered the general strike wanted back in 1919: better
wages and benefits, a larger share in the profits our employers were
earning. By the time we began passing out picket signs, I’d come to
value my labor—and the notion of solidarity—a bit more
highly than when I signed on, and agreed with the union’s demands: a
$3- to $4-an-hour wage increase over a three-year period, plus an end
to a two-tier pay system in which suburban reporters received less
money than downtown reporters. There were some additional demands
concerning health-care and retirement plans, but as a young and healthy
person I paid virtually no attention to this.
I was 23. In the back of my car, I carried a red, white, and black
“On Strike” sign affixed to a wooden stake. I drove it around far more
than I held it aloft. Part of me didn’t like being involved in a large,
top-down, slogan-chanting group—a common reaction among
reporters, who tend to be suspicious, cynical, hard-to-herd types. But
another part of me was excited about being involved in something bigger
than myself. It felt dangerous and powerful and table-turning. One day
the rumor mill reported that a striker had shouted “scab!” at
Times publisher Frank Blethen—and maybe even spit on
him—as he was crossing the picket line. Polite Seattle types were
aghast; union-forever types felt emboldened. The staff of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, also part of the newspaper guild,
was on strike with us, making parallel demands of their newspaper’s
owner, the Hearst Corporation. All told, we were more than 800 people
passing around union placards, temporary-job tips,
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and bargaining-session gossip.
What we had launched was, as the New York Times noted, “the
first newspaper strike in this heavily unionized town in 47 years.”
What none of us realized then was that the industry we were demanding
more from was on the verge of a huge change that would make our strike
look, in retrospect, poorly timed and even more poorly executed.
Neither did we have a clear-eyed view of the long change that Seattle
itself was undergoing. True, relative to the rest of the country, this
region is still heavily unionized; a 2008 report by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics placed Washington State fourth in the nation in terms of
union density. But it’s nothing like it used to be. Today’s nonunion
programmers, espresso makers, and lab-coated gene manipulators
didn’t—and would never—shut down the city in solidarity
with striking newspaper workers (or striking Boeing employees, for that
matter) in the way that Seattle’s trade unions collectively shut down a
far less high-tech version of this city in 1919 out of solidarity with
striking shipyard workers.
T here’s no way I came out ahead financially on the Seattle newspaper
strike. Over those 49 days, I lost about a month and a half’s worth of
wages from the Times: roughly $3,000. During the same period, I
received $2,000 in strike pay from the newspaper guild and roughly $500
from other odd jobs. Net loss: $500.
Plus, when the strike was settled, the wage increase we’d “won” was
exactly the same as what the Seattle Times Company had been offering us
before the strike: $3.30 an hour over six years (instead of our
demanded $3 to $4 an hour over three years). A lot of pain for the
same, slow gain. The two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of
the strike, and the amount the company paid toward
health-
insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75
percent—outcomes the union described as a “victory.” But for a
healthy young city resident like me, those gains were of little
consequence. I was certainly happy for those helped by what we’d all
“won,” and I was grateful for the time I’d spent standing around the
burn barrel and arguing in the union hall with people I’d previously
known only in an on-the-job context. But the atmosphere at the
Times after the strike was strained and unpleasant; I’d lost a
work environment that I hadn’t realized was exceptionally nice. Over
the next year and a half, I paid $671.46 in union dues (further
increasing my net financial loss from striking), and after a series of
discouraging events that have since been explained to me as a
consequence of my enthusiastic work for the strike paper, the
Seattle Union Record, I decided to try a different way of
doing journalism, and I quit.
A union, I learned on the picket line, can be a powerful thing. But
it is not an inherently good thing, as some of the standard rhetoric on
the left often suggests, and a union strike must be understood as a
radical proposition—as radical as the idea of confronting an
armed sheriff’s posse on the Everett waterfront or shutting down the
entire city of Seattle or picketing the Boeing plant after World War
II. To launch a successful strike, workers must cede their
individualism and commit to a radical form of collective disruption,
the act of shutting down their employer’s means of production. They
must also have broad support. They cannot expect to win otherwise. The
Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild had among its striking members the
white-collar journalists, advertising salespeople, page designers, and
circulation workers of the Times and P-I. It did not,
however, have the blue-collar printers and delivery people. Those
delivery drivers were Teamsters, and most of them declined to strike
with the newspaper guild. Hence the papers got printed and delivered,
and their increased wire copy and decreased original content and
nonunion temporary staffing didn’t matter one bit. Word was that people
actually called the Times newsroom during the strike to say they
appreciated having thinner papers and fewer stories; it made them feel
less overwhelmed.
This was humbling. And it taught me that we had not only overvalued
our labor as journalists but had also overestimated the depth of
pro-union feeling in this supposedly pro-union town. We’d missed the
actual change beneath the window dressing of standard Seattle
sentiment. Sure, certain city officials declined to give interviews to
nonunion reporters during the strike, and some people canceled their
subscriptions (including my parents, who dropped the Times in
protest of Blethen’s adversarial posture toward his strikers). But one
would assume that in “heavily unionized” Seattle, newspapers with
picketing employees wouldn’t have been able to find a person in town
who wanted their product anymore—even if most of the Teamsters
were still willing to drive it around—and that this would have
forced management to make concessions. Not so. The union was reluctant
to even suggest people cancel delivery, and the vast majority of
subscribers stayed.
Seattle’s dailies went almost straight from the strike into the
downward spiral of lost revenue and increased internet competition that
last month claimed the 146-year-old print edition of the P-I.
This same spiral currently threatens bankruptcy (or worse) for the
drastically downsized Times, now staffed at a fraction of its
prestrike levels. Along the way, the pages of the two shrinking
newspapers chronicled the changing union landscape. In 2001, Boeing
moved its headquarters out of town, saying it was looking for a
“business-friendly environment.” Production plants remain in the area,
and so does the tradition of aerospace-worker strikes, but things are
different. A Boeing machinist strike in the fall of 2008, which ended
up coinciding with the Wall Street collapse and widespread recognition
of the current recession, had mixed results and took 52 days to
resolve. About a third of the Weyerhaeuser workforce is unionized, but
the timber workers don’t fight management like they used to.
Public-employees unions—from teachers to Metro bus
drivers—have lately been stymied in their attempts to raise their
pay because of severe budget cuts related to the economic slump. While
Washington’s shrunken union density has been on the rise since the
1980s—due in part to the success of the Service Employees
International Union in organizing workers in the health-care and
public-service sectors—in the long view, it’s still way down.
Between 2007 and 2008, union density in this state reversed course and
dipped slightly because of the recession, from 20.2 percent to 19.8
percent.
Unions are paid tremendous lip service as a positive social force.
They can be and are rightly lionized as a huge, helpful presence in
this city’s industrial and blue-collar past. They are idealized by
certain members of the left who still believe that unquestioning
pro-union sentiment is the sine qua non for liberal identification. But
they are not quite the feisty power brokers that they used to be. Even
stalwart union defenders, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s
Joel Connelly, have largely abandoned the all-encompassing commitment
to solidarity. Connelly took a cut in benefits to join the new,
union-free online P-I and says he is “torn” about whether he’d
prefer the operation be unionized. “Deeply believe in unions as agents
of social justice and defenders of the middle class,” Connelly wrote in
a recent e-mail. “But the 2000–2001 strike was horribly
organized. We were denied vital information at the time of the strike
vote, i.e., whether Teamsters would back strike. It had a destructive
impact on journalism in Seattle.”
“Things have changed,” admitted Rick Bender, president of the
Washington State Labor Council. “Tactics are changing. You don’t see
the strikes being used as much as they were in the early days of the
labor movement.” Still, he said, if Congress passes the Employee Free
Choice Act of 2009, the legislation that labor leaders are pushing for
to rebuild union strength and numbers, “you’re going to see some
changes.” Today there are 60 million people in the U.S. who would join
a union if they could, Bender claims, citing recent union polling.
An open question, however, is whether unions make sense anymore in
certain industries where they have long had footholds. Newspapers are a
prime example. The Times is now the only union publication in
town (except for the Daily Journal of Commerce, which has two
union employees), and lately the main role of the Times‘ union
is to help its members decide how to absorb the 12-percent cut in
employee-related expenses that the Times management said it
needs to make in order to keep the paper solvent. (On April 9, guild
journalists at the Times voted to do this through furloughs and
a halt to wage increases.) A case could be made that the
P-I—now in the midst of a painful, rapid
reorganization due to the internet—would have been more nimble
and successful at adapting if not for the presence of a union, which
can prolong major decisions, reward seniority over merit, protect
useless employees, and even thwart desperately needed changes. Of
course, to make that case one would have to show that the newspaper’s
executives had long ago hatched brilliant plans for meeting the
challenges of this era, only to have those plans foiled by a
recalcitrant union. There is no evidence for this. Newspaper executives
in general share as much of the blame for the current state of their
businesses as anyone else, and so it’s not surprising that their union
workers are currently grateful for the clauses in their union contracts
relating to seniority, severance pay, and buyouts.
In the seven years since I left the Seattle Times, I’ve done
all right as a solo bargainer.
This isn’t proof that individual
workers
everywhere are capable of representing themselves without
the help of a union, but it’s a strong counterbalance to my strike
experience. Meanwhile, I’ve watched with sympathy as the collective
bargainers who remain at the Times suffer through group pay
freezes, group layoffs, and other cutbacks.
On April 10, city hall hosted a sparsely attended forum on the
future of news publishing in this city. A number of unemployed former
P-I journalists were there, and two of them spoke about the new
online-news ventures they hope to launch. “There are important voices
that the community has lost that I think it is important for us to
keep,” said Kery Murakami, a former columnist and newspaper-
guild
shop steward at the P-I. He was talking about the voices of his
former coworkers, now out of work—and out of the guild. He did
not once mention the idea of unionizing his new venture, nor did anyone
else with a bright idea for the industry’s future. 
Unions exist now for the same reason that have always existed: collective bargaining. The answer doesn’t lie in abandoning unions, it is in reforming unions, making them more democratic and having more participation from rank-and-file members. The conclusion that you come to in this article is odd, since real wages have declined for American workers over the past 40 years while unions have declined, while the cost of living has increased tremendously. Why not dicuss the need to reform the union movement as a way of reigniting it?
Yeah, I think this article shares some interesting history, but would have been more helpful if it gone into some more depth about the reasons why unions have lost so much of their collective bargaining power–what the national-level narratives have been that have chipped away at the public’s respect for unions.
I’m not so sure that looking at the newspaper industry is all that handy for discussing the future of organized labor. Sure, it was a bastion of unionization, but it wasn’t lame unions that killed it; technological change and an increasingly illiterate (or post-literate if you feel charitable) citizenry did that.
I don’t know if organized labor can make a comeback or not, but I do know that the death of organized labor has not been accompanied by grand successes for the lower and middle classes.
The article portrays unions the way most of Americans seem to think of them: as dinosaurs that were once great, but that don’t work enough to risk fighting for. That in itself is self-fulfilling prophesy.
As for all those new little entrepreneurial newspaper start-ups, the lack of unionization isn’t going to help them much. Letting a million blogs bloom is not a recipe for success of either high-quality journalism or well-paid newspaper workers.
Nice article, if a bit overly personalized mix of history and anecdote. Usually the Stranger is more amusing and less thoughtful. Perhaps a few ex-union refuges from more serious defunct papers will add a further layer of complexity to “Seattle’s only newspaper.”
“refugees”… crap.
Recognizing that a strike was poorly managed or executed doesn’t mean that the labor movement or organized labor today doesn’t still have a vital role to play in our social struggle for justice. Strikes are not to be taken lightly, nor entered into without serious preparation. But to thus conclude that unions have no place or power in our current work world just doesn’t make sense to me.
In 1919 union members knew that the right to unionize, to strike, and to be met at the table just like any other supplier to large companies was worth dying for. Five of them, as you mention, did exactly this. 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. It’s the same reason the Teamsters didn’t strike with you. 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.
Unions are what the membership votes to make them. Show up to your monthly meetings, do your own research on the issues, speak out . . . but for the sake of all that’s holy, stop feeding the “post-union” rhetoric. Instead of taking away the union from the journalists, we need to be organizing one for the IT workers.
While it was nice to hear about Eli’s personal experiences, he didn’t say much about another important issue (i.e. in addition to wages/hours/etc.) that unions have been involved with for a long time – workplace safety.
The article begins with reference to shingle weavers’ characteristic injuries and illnesses. While employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are less likely to be at risk of these types of disabiling conditions, that does not mean that injuries, illnesses and deaths (largely preventable) do not still occur on the job. They do occur – often among immigrants who don’t speak English and who have little political sway, if any. Preventable injuries and deaths occur, in part, due to the decline in union participation rates and the subsequent decline in unions’ political influence.
I agree with the original Some Guy, that the union movement needs some reform. Bringing workplace health and safety back into the national focus should be part of this effort.
Blaming unions for poor wages and lost jobs erases the wider context – that unions exist to counteract corporations’ moves to take away workers’ rights and bargaining power. If unions weren’t around, corporations would be free to make decisions at workers’ worst interests for corporate profit. There would be worse wages and working conditions all around.
That doesn’t mean unionizing is always successful in this struggle. As Sanders points out, solidarity movements need to be extremely well organized to make gains contra extremely well organized corporations. Participants also need to recognize that those gains will likely be small. This is better, however, than an alternative of having no voice or collective bargaining position against one’s employer.
How unfortunate that Sanders did not learn about these wider contexts and facts during his union activity, or chose not to include this information in his article.
Those interested in union activity regarding our big corporations, check out Starbucks workers’ unionizing activities here: http://www.starbucksunion.org/
And Boeing’s IAM District 751 here: http://www.iam751.org/
First of all, I have to commend Eli for voting for the strike, because it showed an enormous amount of courage. People are more likely to slap the kid, abuse the spouse and kick the dog before they say shit to their employer, even if they have a mouthful of it. Steven Greenberg of the NY Times recently wrote a story about the contrast between the response of American and European workers to the economic collapse and the unbridled greed, coupled with the success of the corporate agenda (deregulate, privatize, deunionize and enact “free” trade agreements), that created it. 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 feel compelled to come to Eli’s defense. He wrote an honest, balanced, and union-sympathetic account of the current state of labor, and what he mostly got back was that we just have to try harder, be more solidaristic, recognize our oppression more acutely and fight back, reform unions to make them more democratic, more strongly endorse unions, etc. 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.
The idea that the newspapers would be better off now if they didn’t have a big bad union to deal with is BS..
Why is a companies success the work of a CEO and when a company is in trouble it is because there is a Union ? A Union is the Workers that make all companies work.
Not a union town? I love you, Seattle.
I think what it comes to is the stakes were higher back then (1916). Loosing a limb, dieing because of work conditions are a hell of a lot higher then adding benefits. True outrage will inspire, and actually seeing results, not like most of the useless strikes in resent years, gives power and hope that the young working people (my people i’m 24) lack.
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. It might have been at one time (before my time) that the union was the workers going against the employers. Now it’s the employers negotiating with the unions while the workers stand by and watch. Also, unions are too big for any average worker to affect, see ufcw21 a union of 30,000, and thus unions become more of an insurance group than a vessel for solidarity and respect.
I like seeing articles about labor in our papers. thanks.
Before voting for the strike in 2000, did any of the journalists investigate any recent strikes at newspapers? For instance, did any journalist investigate the strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999? Did the Calgary Herald come up at all in that context?
Because of relatively high union density in Washington state, working conditions and wages are higher for everyone, union and non union. Just look at the right to work states in the country, and you’ll see how unions, however imperfect they may be, benefit us all. Unions were behind the initiative that gave minimum wage workers in Washington state a cost of living adjustment every year. Unions lobby the legislature on unemployment and workplace safety issues. Sure, unions aren’t perfect, but no democratic institution is. As union members, we need to participate in our meetings and take pride in our work. One thing I’d like to say about low union density in our nation is that the Taft-Hartley Act put up obstacles to union organizing that make it hard to form unions in the workplace. With the Employee Free Choice Act, some of those obstacles will be removed.
I’ve always believed Eli Sanders writing to be interesting and insightful and I’ve never had any complaints about his views, but I have several major issues with this piece that I feel really need to be discussed. Not only is Eli projecting from his own, limited experience in one niche to the entire labor movement, but he also has several historical facts totally wrong. This leads him to make some rather broad and dangerous conclusions about the future of organized labor, ironically coming at a time when an honest and creative analysis of the problem could really improve labor’s overall lot.
First off, Eli is using his own experience to make major projections about an entire social movement. This is always problematic, and I think several people’s comments have already covered it pretty well. The news industry is a highly specialized case. The last 40 of massive news consolidation, de-regulation and changes in technology have had a much bigger impact on employment than have unions or strikes. I guarantee it. More importantly, his criticism of the Teamsters and other Seattle citizens not supporting the strike is probably off-base and poorly researched. If he dug deeper, he would find that the Taft-Hartley act of 1947 makes it illegal for separate unions representing different bargaining units to go on strike in support of one-another. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was low Teamster support for your action because it was ILLEGAL. Furthermore, city officials not giving interviews and a large cancellation of subscriptions makes it sound like there was actually pretty broad community support.
One area where Sanders is right on the money is his criticism of union leadership. They probably made a huge mistake by not mobilizing broad support or getting people to cancel subscriptions. But this is a political problem stemming from the union itself and not an issue with the idea of organized labor in general. In fact, I would bet that most of the issues in your article are in fact political. The union had corrupt or inefficient leadership that didn’t want to rock the boat (political problem). The Teamsters didn’t strike because it was illegal (political problem). Certain labor journalists aren’t as committed to solidarity as they once were (political problem). In fact, it ALL comes down to politics. The law matters. Democracy matters. Who’s in power and who supports them matters.
This brings me to my most important issue. Sanders has neglected to mention labor’s overall political trajectory. History has seen several dramatic changes in union density crossing decades at a time. The 1919 Everett Massacre was NOT the first major example of union collective action in US history. In fact, it was far from it. The Knights of Labor was an industrial union operating in the 1870s-80s. They had branches in every state and convinced hundreds of thousands of members to join numerous national-level railroad and longshore strikes. The KOL collapsed in just a few short years though, largely owing to political problems. The Wobblies featured so heavily in Sanders’ article were a massive, national-level industrial union that collapsed specifically because of government repression. There was a multi-decade gap between the KOL and the Wobblies and another one between them and the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. When the KOL and the Wobblies collapsed, thousands of US journalists saw it as the death knell for organized labor.
Finally, Sanders only selected cases that support his points. It’s true that labor has been on the decline since the mid 1960s. It’s also true that membership is down in numerous Washington unions. But Sanders’ left out powerful unions like the teachers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and he barely discussed the SEIU. They are arguable the three most important and powerful unions in our state and all of them have been doing quite well in recent years. They have used new organizing strategies, improved democratic practices (with some exceptions in the SEIU) and militant action to increase their membership and political voice. A well-rounded and “balanced” view of Washington labor would include them.
2009 is an incredibly important year for labor in Washington state. It is the 90th anniversary of the Everett Massacre and the Seattle General Strike, the 100th anniversary of the Spokane Free Speech Movement, The 75th Anniversary of the 1934 strike creating the ILWU and the 10 year anniversary of the WTO protests. Washington unions are working hard to make this a powerful year for labor. It is also a time of “political opportunity structures”. The massive recession, election of a relatively pro-labor President and congress and creation of the Employee Free Choice Act all may provide interesting and dynamic opportunities for labor unions to improve their membership and political powers. Mr. Sanders article doesn’t seem to understand any of this. Instead of following the direction of most labor journalism (which is increasingly admitting that a return to labor power is overdetermined), it instead sounds like Bush era apologist screed placing the blame on workers and unions and letting employers off the hook. What? Is someone trying to organize the Stranger or something?
Thanks for listening.
Unions are not necessary now. They exist only to elect Democrats and bankrupt companies. The public-service, “government” also exist to increase government deficits and increase taxes. This was the most balanced article ever in the Stranger. Has reason overtaken idealogy? (Doubt it.)
superamerican
Part of this problem is that unions have forgotten that we are all in this together. Companies need motivated workers to do their best and most efficient. Companies try to pay the most they can while keeping profits adequate for growth. Most liberals don’t know much about the free enterprise system, but without it…there’d be no workers, no companies and ergo no government. And, don’t forget the stockholders own the companies, made the investments and take the rewards as well as the losses. Workers choose to work at his or her particular company. Many union leaders simply want their money, power and perks. Do they care if Boeing stays here? Doesn’t seem like it. How is union-monopoly education doing lately. 50% Seattle graduation rates, anyone? Union monopolies should be busted.
I’m guessing that “superamerican” watches Fox News every night when he comes home to his mother’s house from his job at the 7/11.
Or he’s George W. Bush waking up after a three day bender.
It’s only people like that, after the last six months of mass layoffs, that could seriously say “unions are not necessary now”.
The rest of us know who’s on our side, and we know it ain’t the boss.
Yes, unions have a lot of problems(I’m in the IBU, the maritime wing of the Longshoremen)but if you want to know what life is like without them, try coming in five minutes’ late after you’ve been up all night with a sick kid when you live in a NONUNION state. Or try getting sick.
If you work for a living, unions are no longer necessary like LUNGS are no longer necessary.
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.
For the most part, I’m impressed with the thoughtful comments here. I want to add one more. When people complain about union leadership, I, as a union leader, want to remind them that unions are democracies. For the most part, with some unfortunate and notable exceptions, it is possible for dissatisfied members to take over their local union and run it the way they want to see it run. It would be ridiculously easy to take over my union, the Guild, the one Eli belonged to, and replace the entire Executive Board and me as the hired business agent. There certainly are local examples of internationals throwing their weight around when rank-and-file members rise up to relaim their local union, but those aberrations tend to be few. Anybody with even a smattering of organizing skill can mobilize a campaign to take power within a democratic union.
Liz, what about the Calgary Herald question?
The dude on the right looks really, really hot!
Enquiring, I can assure you that reporters researched other newspaper strikes. I don’t remember for sure about the Calgary one, but there were several that were researched. We knew what we were doing, knew it was risky, but as Liz put it so well, we felt we had to stand up to management.
The strike was a mistake for a lot of reasons. But it should be pointed out that the Guild was led into the strike by leaders brought in from outside the state, not Liz, who has done a remarkable job putting a fractured union back together following a divisive strike and a decaying industry. I don’t envy her, but she’s doing everything she possibly can to keep unions representing newspaper workers.
I have no idea why places like Starbucks aren’t unionized, frankly that’s a huge reason I haven’t had their coffee in years and actually go out of my way to make fun of friends who spend money there. I work for a small LLC and a union would actually do more harm than good (I’d rather have the bonuses and parties over a union), and for jobs at places like Microsoft many are either highly untrained and feel lucky the have a job or overqualified and living on cloud nine. Unions seem to have been started because working conditions were horrible, now we have fire codes and breaks, we’ve become docile. Considering minimum wage union dues take a large portion of your paycheck too, and the only thing the union can do for you is help you get a raise after a year of working, some real reform needs to happen before I can think to join a union. I mean I plan to be in a high paying job, I have no need for a union if I’m making enough money to do whatever I want.
Eli,
Could you remind me — which union does the Stranger’s staff belong to? And the rest of the employees, such as drivers?
Joe Hill
I work in an industry in Seattle where an accident on the job no longer means a bad back, a broken leg, or a torn finger ligament. Now, because of the industrial machinery and mechanization, people are more likely to be killed in relation to the amount of accidents that do occur. So, yes, I am glad to have a union that allows us to look after ourselves, because the employer is always seeing us as a number on a profit and loss statement. Where I work, there is no such thing as a “minor injury”. As for wages and benefits, since we have maintained what is considered “middle class” but seems to be so much more, because over the years the conditions have deteriorated so much–having worked in the service industry I know too well.
The labor movement–an institution that sometimes works within unions, sometimes without, lacks a modern critique of power in the workplace, and in many cases, such has led to many unions as a labor relations mud-flap for human resources. While future union leaders learn about the surplus value of labor, and internationals recruit college kids–rather then rank and filers–to be officials and organizers, managers are learning about organizational behavior and refining “team” concepts, which trumps anything the economist Marx had to say in the modern workplace.
Forget TV, the “media”, and the “corporations” that “keep us down”. The REAL propaganda is in the design and structure of the workplace, controlled, designed and administered by management, psychologists, and HR respectively, where unions are merely one of many “outside” risks to be managed. This last bit is the real reason for the decline of unionism. It happening in your workplace, union or non-union.
My problem with this article is that while it was well-intentioned, I thought it was too self-absorbed. What we need now is a full analysis of how the right to organize a union and engage in collective bargaining barely exists in this country anymore. Federal and state laws are not enforced, and many have been whittled away by courts and by administrative decisions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washin…
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/feature…
THAT is the story we need to hear, because it explains why the labor movement cares so much about things the public generally doesn’t understand, ie the Employee Free Choice Act and the Worker Privacy Act. The Stranger has done next to nothing to explain or support either of these bills. It could do much, much more.
Eli says:
Which is bullshit on several counts, and Eli should know better than to post it where those of us who walked the line might read it.
In the first place, the printers — except for a couple of scabs — all were CWA members. They honored the strike throughout. How in hell could you not have remembered that, Eli?
The members of Teamsters Local 763, which did not honor the strike, were strongarmed, mostly against their will, into staying in by their now-thankfully former Secretary-Treasurer, Jon Rabine, who was in Blethen’s pocket. Rabine paid for this with his job. He was ousted in the regularly scheduled election, which occurred during the strike.
Teamsters Local 174, which represented the “big truck” delivery drivers, honored the strike and walked the picket lines with the Guild. Even after their Secretary-Treasurer Bob Hasegawa (now state Representative in the 11th District) was ousted in 174’s election, his successor, Scott Sullivan, who had been considered a Rabine ally, kept his members on the lines.
The poster above who suggested that some Teamsters might have stayed in because to support the Guild would have been illegal is just plain mistaken. That provision of Taft-Hartley would not have applied here.
Guild solidarity fell short of what it might have been because for years Times management had been buying off the higher-paid, higher-prestige bylined reporters with preferential treatment in their “star system.” A goodly number of them scabbed or otherwise undermined their co-workers during the strike and thereafter.
Many of these spineless bastards are still around and still think their shit doesn’t stink, but we haven’t forgotten them.
And by the way Eli, had you stuck around till the end of your three-year internship and stayed with the Times, you would have gone to work immediately at fourth-year scale because a certain Newspaper Guild shop steward in the newsroom hounded management across the table to be fair to the interns. Otherwise you know where you would have started? First-year scale, that’s where.
Unions at their best stand up to bullies in management and do not back off. Unions are a reflection of the society at large and should not be held to any higher or lower standards.
This article disappoints me, Eli. I thought more highly of your abilities before I read this. Try to improve, will you?
Workers often belong to unions now days because they are required to join. Not because they have any association with the struggle that went before them to gain the wages and working conditions they inherit by virtue of going to work for a unionized company. Labor history is not really taught in school because the curriculum is often controlled by those who don’t want the story told or reject its telling because it represents a call to rebellion against the status quo.
Many workers in such situations, especially white collar unions, fail to fully realize that unions are democratic organizations. They fail to participate in the process beyond paying dues and complaining. Their union often is run by a “good old boy” entrenched power base which, more often then not, is not interested in progress or reform but in maintaining their power. Entrenched union leaders do this by making participation in process of removing them from office as difficult as possible by having a small number of union members, who do participate, conspire with them to manipulate the by laws and union rules in such a way as to favor them in maintaining their power.
Having said that, I do believe the concept of negotiating for better working conditions by using a bargaining agent union is still as valid today as every. Workers must see it though, and be willing to throw off their chains. They must be ready to fight not only corporate power but stagnated outdated union leaders to reform and remake the labor movement. Comments about the decline of unions and the growth of corporate power running parallel to the decline in wages and working conditions and the middle class are evidence of the need for unions and things like the employee free choice act.
I think that a number of large well established unions are mostly bureaucratic organizations with leaders protecting their self interests first rather then fighting for workers. This is one of the main reasons unions have become ineffective for the mass of workers in modern society. Workers see through the sham and cannot for various reasons gather the motivation necessary to clean house. Meanwhile labor leaders continue to say all the right things.
This combined with suppression of union activities by a series of corporate controlled governments have severely weakened protection of union activities and rendered the labor movement somewhat impotent when it comes to attracting or organizing workers.
The final nail in the coffin maybe the self-centered nature of workers in today’s society. They seldom see themselves as having anything in common with their fellow workers. They often are more interested in climbing on the backs of other workers in order to reach a management position. It is often too late before they comprehend that the company uses this type of ambition to divide and conquer rather then reward. In the end they may understand that working at a company where your a member of a democratic and well run union should be a destination not just a stop along the way. I think that one lesson I learned in life is that happiness is possible simply by becoming a worker amongst other workers, and NEVER thinking you should ever accept poor wages or working conditions if you are willing to fight back.
“…a different way of doing journalism” = making shit up
Seems like the owners of newspapers are heartless SOBs and they treat the employees like slaves. Hard to put a happy face on the relationship.
That strike at the Seattle Times was caused by the owners and managers. Too bad they wasted so much money for nothing.
When will the Weekly and Stranger employees join the CWA union?
Unions are weak in Seattle, and America in general, because the people have been weak. The current Seattle stereotype of the limp-wristed wimp is the polar opposite of a century ago, and both have some basis in reality.The usually forgotten dirty secret is big money employers have always acted together as ‘unions’ to defraud investors and cheat employees, via ‘Employers Associations’ trade groups, cartels, Chambers of Commerce, and ultimately through the levers of government, including police and military where violence was deemed necessary to protect profits and the executive class.
Nobody ever got any ‘gifts’ of 8 hour days, decent wages, safer conditions by meekly accepting what the bosses offered. The meek shall inherit the dearth.
Problems arose as the vast majority sucked down the ‘free-market’ Kool-Aid, and now all have been poisoned. The truth is, it’s the same poison the greedy market scammers were peddling a century ago. Anyone who pointed out the huge holes in the Golden Fleece got labeled a heretic, or worse.
Of course the greediest, scummiest, most unscrupulous always benefit most under a winner-takes all deal. Hearst and Rupert Murdoch are prime examples: once entrenched with an empire of propaganda machines, they are nearly impossible to dislodge, as they wield disproportionate influence in all debates, including any attempt in the U.S. Congress seeking to regulate commerce and prevent dangerous monopolies.
The phoniness of the resulting rigged “free market” is becoming clear to even the most brain-dead Kool-Aid guzzlers now.
The writer was remiss in failing to mention the reason Seattle journalists had a union in the first place, the P-I strike of 1936.
That strike succeeded because Dave Beck and his Teamster goon squads decided to back it all the way. They shoved William Randolph Hearst’s union-busting past right up his ass…couldn’t have happened to a nicer Nazi sympathizer.
I remember working a union shop during negotiations and having a manager smile and say “We’ll never pay you what you’re worth because we have to pay the HR staff a lot.”
Thanks to the person who corrected me on the Taft-Hartley issue. It’s sad to hear that the problem resulted more from strong-arming and corruption, but it’s good to know there was a basis of support among the big truck drivers and that this is simply another place where Eli got his facts wrong.
“I have no idea why places like Starbucks aren’t unionized, frankly that’s a huge reason I haven’t had their coffee in years and actually go out of my way to make fun of friends who spend money there.”
The good ol’ IWW are trying to organize Starbucks. They’re doing it in NYC, it needs to go national.
Here’s a link(Yeah, I know, Wobblies using the Web, ha ha funny, but this is life and death shit, folks):
http://www.starbucksunion.org/taxonomy/t…
So get yer latte at a LOCALLY-owned shop and stay the hell away from Big Mermaid!
“an injury to one is an injury to all”.
Howard the Coward Schultz sure is one SCABBY little bastard! He LIED about the Sonics just like he LIES about his concern for his own workers.
These corporate scumbags think they can get away with limitless greed scams by giving workers a phony speech and calling them “partners” while paying starvation wages, demanding unreasonable schedules, and unsafe working conditions. Americans need to know the ugly truth behind all the PR spin BS that rich hypocrite employers pump out 24/7…
Those determined Starbucks workers and IWW organizers showed grit and courage in kicking Schulz/Starbucks ass in court and the NLRB…these workers set a fine example that should be emulated nationwide. People like them are the main reason there is still hope that fairness can someday be restored in the American economy.
At some point in the early 70s, the workers (bottom 90%) of income earners decided that they were largely content with their economic situation. This was shortly after the great society programs were implemented. So naturally organized labor started to die out. People decided that government regulation of labor issues would be sufficient. Regardless to how many people claim they would like to be unionized today, this early 70s attitude continues to outweigh all other aggregates combined.
A far better method for increasing wages across the board would be through government mandated minimum wage regulation.