(Re)Organising the Private Sector: A Revitalised Labour Movement?

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—This conversation took place in January 2023. 

Salvage: We were hoping that you could set the scene a little by talking about the recent breakthroughs and ongoing organising campaigns in the American labour movement that you’ve been following and why you think they’re so significant.

Eric Blanc: Sure. It’s a contradictory situation because on the one hand, this is the most exciting time for new union organising that I’ve seen in my lifetime, and there’s a tremendous amount of interest and momentum from below. On the other hand, the actual number of workers who have unionised and gone on strike – and, even more so, won new contracts – is actually still at a relative historic low. It’s higher than in previous years, but that’s because things really bottomed out.

So the dynamic on the positive side is that there’s been a tremendous increase in new union organising at some key corporations that have long been considered really unorganisable (at least under the current anti-union legal conditions in the US).

The biggest wins for workers in the US over the last year have been at Starbucks, where over 300 stores have voted and won a union, and at Amazon where workers in Staten Island in New York successfully voted to unionise. Those two drives in particular really captured a lot of attention. One of the key dynamics that we’ve seen this past year is the way that working people over social media, through their personal connections, see these wins and then try to replicate them at their own workplaces. I think that’s an exciting dynamic, and one of the most novel aspects of what’s going on.

You have this contagion, this attempt to really replicate successes by workers from below taking the initiative on their own to unite their workplaces. We’ve seen workers at Chipotle, Apple, Google, Home Depot, Trader Joes, REI, and in a variety of different significant corporations take these initiatives to unionise – and most of the time these were workers initiating things on their own, young workers, supporters of Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter, who have been pushed out of economic opportunities and who have frequently taken the lead with little or minimal union support.

There are other drives as well that reflect more longstanding dynamics. We’ve seen a lot of unionisation efforts in higher education and publishing, for instance. There’s been a continued fight back amongst nurses. But I think the newest thing is this worker-to-worker organising, in which you have either independent unions – like at Amazon – or hybrid efforts, where there is some union support and where unions are providing resources, but the day to day work is mostly worker-to-worker, rather than staff-to-worker. This is what’s most emblematic at Starbucks, but also in the really tremendous increase in unionisation in journalism and the work of the NewsGuild, which parallels Starbucks in its worker-to-worker, but union supported, efforts.

Can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic where these things are not initiated by the existing unions? Specifically, can you speak to where these worker-leaders have been drawing their inspiration and experience from? You mentioned the Sanders campaign in passing and we’d love to hear what you think about the role that played in shaping the current upsurge, and also whether you think earlier upticks in strike activity – like the Red State rebellions among teachers you have written about – have played a role in the confidence on display in the past year.

The way I look at it is that there are some conjunctural factors that have led to this dynamic and then there are some more long-term factors that are likely to continue, irrespective of what happens to this current uptick in labour.

Some of the conjunction of factors are obviously the pandemic, a tight labour market, and also a favourable National Labor Relations Board, which has played a significant role in allowing some of these drives to spread and scale up. The deeper, more long-term factors I see are – on the basis of outrageous levels of economic inequality – first, the crystallisation of a young layer of radical workers over the last few years. In the interviews I’ve done these people point to a variety of experiences from Black Lives Matter to gun control to Roe v Wade, but the thing that pops up most frequently is the Bernie Sanders campaign. In part because that campaign, I think, articulated a sense of class struggle and an overall frame of ‘the enemy are the billionaires and the solution is the collective action of working people’.

It was easy for people who got excited about Bernie and then maybe got their first volunteer experience there to transition to thinking, ‘well, you know, we lost in the electoral arena, but the fight continues, I’m going to try to take on Jeff Bezos, or to take on Howard Schultz [the CEOs of Amazon and Starbucks, respectively], I’m going to take them on at work’.

And one of the moving aspects of the uptick that I’ve seen is a sense that all hope is not lost. There’s a prevailing doomerism these days, having to do with the rise of climate disaster and the incipient authoritarianism from the Republicans, and these labour struggles have been a real source of hope.

One of the nice things about the workplace is that it’s a place where you can organise without having to wait for anybody from above. It feels like – and this is something that workers told me over and over – ‘I saw they can do it’, in reference to Starbucks or Amazon, people feel: ‘I saw they could do it and I realised I could do that too’. That is the most unique and I think potentially explosive dynamics in play right now. This copycat factor in which young, radicalised workers have taken the initiative and seen other workers taking initiative. We saw the same dynamics in 2018, when illegal teachers’ strikes spread. 

There’s a second, underlying, deeper cause to the very unique dynamics of these worker-initiated, worker-to-worker efforts, which is the rise of digital technologies. It’s very hard to imagine the specific forms that this unionisation uptick has taken without digital technologies which have really dramatically lowered the cost of communication and organisation. So, you have things that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago, like having nationwide trainings where workers share their experiences at Starbucks with other workers. And digital tools made it possible for the Amazon Labor Union – an independent union with little outside backing – to make viral videos, that then in turn raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through GoFundMe to finance their efforts to organise locally.

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of digital technologies, to assume they somehow change everything. In many ways organising methods themselves have remained largely the same best practices of good labour organising that have existed for years. Emphasising worker-to-worker outreach while making a list of your co-workers, building strong organising committees, inoculation, and all the rest of the basics. But digital tools have allowed workers to take the initiative and to coordinate without having to rely as much on established unions or union staffers, and it has made it easier for struggles to diffuse. 

But the limitations of this drive also point to the need for combining this kind of worker-initiated organising with significant resources, particularly: funds, experienced organisers, and lawyers. These recent unionisation efforts have also come up against ruthless corporate opposition; mass firings, which we can talk about more, point to the need for combining the bottom up approach they enable with the resources of the established unions.

Can you give us some more detail on the point you’re making about how these initiatives get generalised? On the one hand, it absolutely seems true, as you’re saying, that a big part is workers seeing what’s happening and trying things out themselves. But is there also a conscious attempt, even if modest, to do organising trainings or the like? If so, where is that happening, and are those old school means of building confidence and capacities having a measurable impact? Or is it largely this mimetic process you’ve pointed to?

Well, it really depends on which drive you’re talking about. If we look at Starbucks, which has really been the most successful effort this last year, they didn’t expect their win in Buffalo in late 2021 to spark a national campaign.

That being said, they were hoping to scale up in their region, and they had an ethos of orienting to young radical workers and from the beginning intended to spread the organising, to not just have it be a one off. Fortunately, they reacted in a way a lot of unions don’t: when they saw there was a lot of interest immediately following the win in Buffalo they said ‘let’s do it’.

And they let workers run with it, instead of spending a year to hire more staff and map out a whole campaign – by which time the momentum could have been lost. Workers from Buffalo began replying to and coaching the other workers across the country who reached out online. That allowed for a very rapid spread of the movement within weeks of the initial success.

So it’s both this unexpected interest from workers across the country and, in the Starbucks case at least, a conscious effort to build digitally enabled structures to help it spread as quickly as possible.

The dynamic in the journalism world is very similar. The NewsGuild similarly has built worker-to-worker structures through which big wins can then translate into excitement, which in turn translates into mass national trainings. Their member organising program lets union members take over what used to be almost exclusively staff responsibilities for training and mentoring new shops, and lean into using digital technologies to help make this a nationwide movement.

The unfortunate aspect is that these examples are still the exceptions.

I think that it’s possible to imagine things having gone further in a lot of different industries – and even at Starbucks and Amazon – if the big national unions (which in the US are confusingly called international unions) with their enormous national structures and significant resources had really risen to the occasion.

There’s a confluence of factors that have created a historic opening: support for unions is the highest it’s been since the 1960s; the pandemic; the tight labour market; increasingly radicalised young workers; the momentum from a string of exciting victories. Unions for the most part have not seized the moment. They haven’t dedicated the type of resources that would be needed to help the large number of workers who are looking to organise their workplaces right now.

One of the few exceptions has been Workers United, which has supported the Starbucks campaign. Another major exception is the United Electrical Workers union (UE), which at the start of the pandemic, along with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a network of folks who had been involved in the labour organising side of the Bernie Sanders campaign, co-founded the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). EWOC was explicitly founded to support the type of worker-initiated efforts I’ve been emphasising in this interview.

It’s a structure intended to connect any worker in the country who wants help organising with an experienced labour organiser using the distributed organising tools that the Bernie campaign established – they just fill out a short form online, and within forty-eight hours an organiser will get in touch with them. As a whole, EWOC has proven much more successful than we dreamed.

One of the things that has made me particularly hopeful about EWOC becoming a model, and not just a one-off, is seeing that it has spread to the UK through Organise Now!, which is doing essentially the same type of organising work to support new workers organising. This gives me hope that there is now the possibility of finding new ways to support worker-initiated efforts that may not have been possible in the past. Particularly when you have unions and radicals working together on these types of initiatives.

And you can imagine how the overall course of this movement would change if every union, for instance, was putting real resources towards scaling up today’s new organising efforts. But that’s not the situation we’re currently in.

Your point about the lack of interest in committing resources to these new drives seems like it’s worth exploring a little. As you’ve mentioned in a recent article, this isn’t a matter of the money not being there. US unions are sitting on something like $35 billion. Why do you think they’re not interested in investing it in the way you’re describing? Why are they so stuck in their ways?

There’s a rational core to this, which is that organising a union in the United States under the current legal setup is extremely risky and very, very difficult. The reality is that there are very few penalties for employers breaking the law, and for firing workers, and for doing all sorts of things that make union organising difficult. A lot of unions believe that, until there is labour law reform, it’s going to be next to impossible to make serious organising inroads.

 And so that explains in large part the defensive focus of a lot of unions. There are unions doing good organising locally, but it’s nothing at scale, and nothing that would approximate what’s appropriate for this moment.

So, in part, I’d say they’re misreading the way forward. Saying that labour law reform is necessary is accurate, but it begs the question of what it would take to generate the momentum and power sufficient to make that change feasible?

I think there’s a reciprocal dynamic between bottom up struggle and legal changes. The problem with most unions is that they’re only looking at it from the top down. Top down initiatives can be helpful. I think we’ve seen this, for example, with the recent changes in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

It’s hard to imagine the Starbucks campaign getting off the ground in the first place if the NLRB had not sided with the workers in Buffalo, by allowing them to have their votes on a store-by-store basis. In the past, companies, including Starbucks, have insisted that union elections be held on a citywide basis, which would have made it almost impossible for the Buffalo campaign to win in the first place.

So the changes from above are significant and shouldn’t be minimised. But there’s just no way you’re going to pass major labour law reform in the United States, where corporations hold so much political power and where the Supreme Court will ultimately get to decide on its ‘legality’, unless you have millions of workers in motion and unless you have mass disruption from below. It won’t happen unless we create a situation where the costs of the status quo continuing are higher than those of making significant concessions to working people.

The prevailing union strategy is unrealistic in that it doesn’t provide answers for how to build that sort of bottom-up struggle. 

And they’ve seen an endless amount of evidence that their strategy isn’t working. The injunctions against the railway workers being just the most recent.

This reflects not just a misreading of the legal situation, but a longstanding subservience to the Democratic Party establishment. And, again, there’s a rational core to their approach. The Republicans are awful, and I don’t begrudge unions for trying to defeat the Republicans at the polls. But what has labour gotten for the support it consistently gives to the Democrats? With a few notable exceptions, like the recent NLRB victory, on the whole labour’s gotten way less than it’s given – and way less than it could get if it took a more independent approach towards top Democratic leaders.

 For example, we’ve seen a huge union busting wave this past year with hundreds of worker organisers being illegally fired by Starbucks. These corporations are doing what they always do, trampling over the nominal rights that workers have, and Joe Biden, for the most part, has remained silent. To me that’s even worse than what he did with the rail strike, which was terrible. Blatant union busting at Starbucks and Amazon affects all working people because it resolidifies the fear factor, inhibiting organising everywhere and undercutting the movement’s momentum. But instead of organising a pressure campaign to demand that Biden take a public stand and serious action to stop this union busting, most unions have refused to confront the Biden administration in even the most limited of ways. Without that pressure from below, we shouldn’t expect establishment Democrats to do the right thing  – let alone for them to pass major labour reform. 

Let’s shift a little bit to talk about socialist strategies for the current moment. Socialists who think that rebuilding the American labour movement should be a major priority have opened up a renewed discussion around the rank-and-file strategy and have argued to use it as a guiding approach for current efforts. What does a rank-and-file-based approach look like in the present moment – in contrast to the period in which it was first articulated – given that there isn’t an upsurge in rank-and-file self-organisation being consciously built up as an alternative, or counterweight, to a sclerotic union officialdom?

I think the short version is that the last year has vindicated those who argue that the transformation and rebirth of the labour movement is going to come from below rather than from the top. You need resources and experienced staff organisers, but it’s clear that where the energy is, and where you can imagine a path forward, comes from workers taking the lead. And that this could result not only in expanding the labour movement, but in dramatically transforming it.

 I’ve mostly been researching and involved in supporting new union organising, but part of the effort at revitalising the movement from below also takes the form of what we see in the Teamsters union, where a long standing opposition caucus (Teamsters for a Democratic Union) was able, in coalition with others, to win leadership and to begin a transformation process that’s likely to culminate in a strike this year at UPS. And we’ve seen the biggest attendance numbers ever at conferences like Labor Notes, which brings together existing union activists to talk about building caucuses and transforming their unions.

But what’s new, and what I think caught even some of our union reform forces a little bit by surprise, is the extent of efforts from young workers on their own to build new unions. Figuring out, as radicals, how we orient towards this new uptick, and how we help it scale up as much as possible, is the $64,000 question.

Recent experience doesn’t confirm the assumption which undergirded the thinking of some earlier radicals, that first we’ll transform the unions and only then, through those transformed unions, we’d be able to organise the rest of the class.

If anything, the worker-initiated efforts at Starbucks, Amazon, and elsewhere have been an inspiration to existing union members and have put a fire under the butts of existing unions, making it easier for members to push their unions forward and to help overcome the longstanding risk aversion and conservatism that continues to plague the established union movement.

Workplace radicals have been at the fore of these efforts – including through salting.

For readers who don’t know, salting is when you consciously get a job in certain industries as part of a strategy of organising those shops. Young leftist salts, for instance, played an important role in the Amazon and early Starbucks victories. At Amazon, the win was really an alliance of young Black and Latino workers with communist and socialist salts. And that is a very promising dynamic.

Until recently, the vast majority of efforts by radicals were aimed at transforming existing unions through things like caucuses  – culminating in important actions like the 2012 Chicago teachers strike and the 2019 Los Angeles teachers strike. This current wave of organising over the past year has posed new possibilities. The inspiration generated by these campaigns – by taking on some of the biggest corporations in the world – creates an energy that can hopefully sustain itself and that in turn could feed back into existing unions.

 In the short term, the most crucial thing for radicals is to figure out ways to do everything possible to help the campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, and all of these new efforts, to do everything possible to help them win good first contracts – which is even harder than winning a union election.

I think that is the number one priority. This could look like radicals getting jobs in some of these companies. And wherever you work, you can contribute by helping to organise your workplace.

And for everyone else, it’s important to organise solidarity locally for any ongoing unionisation efforts. When workers are on strike, or if they’re facing retaliation, that solidarity aspect is crucial. It’s all hands on deck whenever any of these workers are in struggle. That should be the first priority for radicals.

At the same time, these DIY efforts can only go so far until the existing union movement is prepared to put real resources behind these efforts. This is where radicals and allied progressives who are correctly reading the moment can play a big role in trying to push from within the existing unions to pivot toward new organising in the way that many unions talked about doing twenty years ago, but haven’t for the most part done in practice.

The AFL-CIO, at its last convention in 2022, set a goal of organising one million new workers over ten years. That goal would actually represent an overall decline in union density. The main obstacle here – the reason that the organising targets are so low – is the leadership of these national unions, which for the most part are still stuck in decades-old routines; very few of them have really risen to the occasion. Though on a local level almost all of these national unions have locals doing good work, very few of them have seized this moment in a way analogous to how John L. Lewis in the 1930s threw the treasury of the United Mine Workers into supporting the new unionisation efforts of that period. And the UMW didn’t just organise people in coal, but also in steel, and other industries.

One of the things that radicals, in particular, bring to the table is an understanding that the fate of existing unions depends on helping working people win as a whole – the fate of an individual union is inseparable from the fortunes of the rest of the class. Solidarity isn’t just good morally, it’s essential strategically.

Another one of the bigger picture things we should talk about is the fact that it’s become increasingly clear the Federal Reserve in the US – supported by the business press – are really concerned about the tight labour market, and see low unemployment figures as the cause of recent upticks in inflation. Some of the more unvarnished perspectives coming from those quarters even argue in favour of provoking a recession to raise unemployment and supposedly combat inflation. What impact will these efforts and scare-mongering have on the current wave of militancy and new organising? And how should radicals in the labour movement respond?

I think you’re exactly right that the Federal Reserve and the key players within the capitalist class understand the dangers of a tight labour market, and that they are pushing to move away from it as quickly as possible.

So, the length of the window for this particular labour uptick is unclear to me.

It’s entirely possible that ruthless, employer-supported, union-busting that demoralises and scares people, combined with the continued growth of unemployment, could put an end to the current momentum. If anything, this is even more reason to try to seize the moment while it lasts, rather than doing what it seems like a lot of unions are doing: waiting for things to die down. Then they can say, ‘see this is why we didn’t want to throw everything into new organising. As you can see, it was just a flash in the pan’.

Part of the reason why such a claim is really short-sighted is that whatever organising happens right now will plant the seeds for years and decades to come. If we look at the thirties as an example again, really the thirties were preceded by decades of attempts to organise, which created new layers of organisers in workplaces, who accumulated experience and built relationships, setting the stage for subsequent struggles. I think we’re in that type of situation. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect we’re going to unionise, across the board, a lot of these major corporations in the span of the next year or two, but we can certainly start that process now. And we need union help to do that at scale.

And there’s an additional factor. Even if we were to accept the labour law reform focus of most unions – even if you think we need to pass something like the PRO Act before we can possibly see any major breakthroughs in new organising – it’s so short-sighted to not realise that the best way to get those sorts of policy changes on the agenda is by doing everything possible to back current organising efforts, regardless of their immediate results in terms of winning first contracts. Big national unions should be taking advantage of this moment to expose the actions of these corporations, to expose the broken nature of existing labour law, and to make a national scandal about companies like Starbucks and Amazon brazenly breaking the law and terrorising tens of thousands of low-wage workers.

These corporations are attempting to double down on just ignoring existing law – not just by firing workers and intimidating them, but by denying benefits and wage increases to unionised workers. Starbucks is doing this now – it’s literally against laws already on the books, yet they’re doing it anyway.

This is awful, but it’s also a huge potential political opportunity. We should have union leaders getting arrested at the White House, demanding that the Biden administration use its bully pulpit and federal contracts against illegal union busting. To its credit, the new Biden-appointed NLRB is playing a very positive role, unlike the rest of the Biden administration, in supporting these new organising efforts. But on its own the NLRB just doesn’t have the power to enforce the law quickly or strongly enough to force companies like Starbucks to comply.

The only way to change this is to create a national political scandal about the fact that CEOs like Schultz and Bezos are trampling on the constitutionally protected rights of workers. To win big, we need ‘the labour question’ to return to the centre of political life – and that requires that unions start acting very differently.

Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso, 2019) and Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) (Brill, 2021).