Cover: Australian Council of Trade Unions President Sally ‘Smash the CFMEU” McManus and Australian Prime Minister Anthony “Exterminate the Brutes” Albanese
Fire with Fire || A recent report on unions in the US decried their lack of investment in organizing despite immense and growing assets. Unions have nearly doubled their net assets from $15 billion in 2010 to $29 billion as of 2020 but have also cut their staff by 19% and lost 3.2% of their membership over that period. The report calls for a massive investment of union resources in organizing, including hiring 20,000 more union organizers at an annual cost of $1.4 billion.
Why aren’t unions aggressively organizing if doing so would increase their membership numbers and dues income? Would hiring 20,000 more staff super-charge organizing and lead to a resurgence in labor militancy and victories?
Many union members reading this probably belong to unions that are considering raising dues to pay for more staff. This is a constant conversation among leadership in my mainstream union, and the justification for higher dues and more staff is usually that they are needed to organize for the next big contract campaign or to launch some political initiative.
You can probably sense my lack of enthusiasm for such plans, though I don’t want to reduce the issue to a knee-jerk reaction against paying more dues. How much unions collect in dues, how they spend those dues, and how they use staff raises much more fundamental questions about the union movement.
Is the union movement fundamentally sound as it is? Will adding more staff finally solve all of its problems? What about unions and their 109,000 existing employees have led to such a dramatic decline in membership and power over the last 50 years? Are there alternative ways of building union power that don’t lead to the endlessly self-justifying but dubious logic of the need for more staff to run bigger campaigns to get more members to then hire more staff to run even bigger campaigns, etc…?
It all boils down to the question of where worker power comes from. I argue that power comes from the ability of workers to take collective action in the workplace, and that this is grounded in the relationships workers have with each other. Staff are a contradictory part of the mainstream unions and are better left behind if we want to build a bottom-up and socialist labor movement.
Personal Experiences with Staff
As a worker-organizer myself, i.e., not someone paid to organize for a union but a worker who organizes with coworkers, in a workplace represented by a union, I’ve mostly avoided union staff. I feel confident in my skills and knowledge to not feel the need to call on one of the paid organizers in my union to come in and give us advice. There have been times I have interacted with union staff related directly to organizing in my workplace. It’s gone well when they’ve mostly supported and encouraged what my coworkers and I were already doing, which was organizing with each other to improve working conditions.
It’s gone kind of sideways when the staff came in and got in the way of what we were doing. For example, sometimes staff respond to worker grievances by telling us that we should vote for so-and-so politician or call and email our elected officials to plead that they fix our problems for us (for example, around Covid-19 policies in the pre-vaccine days). This would invariably direct attention away from more creative and immediate solutions being discussed. Even for those coworkers really invested in electoral politics, it’s not difficult for them to see that politicians are not going to be very helpful in fixing the often immediate problems in the workplace. The record of my union’s failures to fix problems by appealing to politicians is tragically rather extensive.
For workers who are newer to organizing and not yet as self-confident with union concepts, are staff more helpful to them? They definitely can be in empowering workers to build power with their coworkers to take collective action and win demands. They can also teach workers to become dependent on union staff, lawyers, or politicians for expertise, knowledge, and directives.
I’ve seen examples of friends and other workers who felt very supported in their union organizing by staff. For example, when a worker is trying to get a union at their workplace, a helpful staff will meet up with the worker periodically to provide support, to answer questions, and to build a generally healthy relationship based on solidarity and trust.
I’ve heard at least as many stories where a staff member was unhelpful or even harmful. A few examples include when a staff urged workers to hold a public meeting about unionizing their workplace, after which the leading workers were then fired; when after having won a unionization vote, the staff tried to get all the workers to spend months drafting bylaws instead of continuing to fight the boss for a first contract and all the momentum for the union subsequently died; where staff told workers that they couldn’t take action because it was illegal, or staff told workers there was nothing the union could do to resolve a grievance because the law said it was ok.
This contradiction, where sometimes staff are helpful and sometimes not, reveals the tensions within the workers movement as a whole. Let’s briefly review the relationship-based organizing theory of where worker power comes from and then investigate why unions and their staff seem to act in such contradictory ways.
Where Does Worker Power Come From?
Worker power comes from workers having relationships with each other that enable them to take collective action to win demands and get their needs met. The workplace is the central location of worker power. First, the workplace is where coworker relationships are formed. Second, it is also where collective action is directed by either withholding labor or directly implementing desirable workplace practices.
One particularly hollow form of unionism has staff create media campaigns, where union power is based entirely on staff’s savvy media tactics or legal wizardry to pressure employers instead of empowering workers to take action themselves. But even for those who believe that the strength of a union rests with its workers, the question remains whether staff can empower workers or inevitably inhibit them.
Contradictions in Mainstream Unions
To break this down, we need to understand the wider context from which unions internalize their contradictions. Under capitalism, people’s participation in the economy is split into two main parts. There are those who earn a living by actively producing goods and services (workers) and those who earn a living by passively owning the capital that is used to produce the goods and services (capitalists). There is an opposition of material interests between workers wanting higher wages, better benefits, and more control over their jobs and capitalists wanting to pay lower wages, provide fewer benefits, and maintain their own control over how jobs are done. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
Most workers initially create and join unions to empower themselves, but soon the union becomes separate from the workers themselves, through the creation of full-time and paid elected leadership who then hire full-time and paid organizers, administrators, lobbyists, and lawyers. The union then becomes split into two parts, those who pay dues and those who live off of those dues, and these two parts come to have diverging interests. The co-development of labor law and mainstream union practices have exacerbated these divergences as a means to deradicalize and tame the labor movement.
Paid unionists, employers, and rank-and-file workers all derive their income from the value that the rank-and-file workers create at their jobs, but capitalism affects these parties differently. Rank-and-file workers derive much of their leverage in conflict with employers from being able withhold their labor to stop production. This is at the material expense of the capitalists. However, when workers walk out of the workplace and aren’t collecting wages, paid unionists aren’t collecting dues from workers either. Employers and paid unionists at least have some shared interest then in keeping workers working. Workers on the other hand often have an interest in using their leverage of stopping work to improve their conditions and wages. While this doesn’t mean that all union staff and leadership always side with employers against workers, it does apply a pressure in that direction.
Union Staff and Labor Law
Union staff also internalize the contradictions of capitalism by becoming the enforcers of labor law designed to strengthen capitalism. Labor law has been written in such a way as to minimize disruption and weaken the leverage workers have by heavily regulating how, when, where, and why workers can exercise the power of withholding their labor to stop production.
The Wagner Act of 1935, which remains today the cornerstone of US labor law, has as its stated chief purpose “to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred.” The logic is that when workers have some union rights, such as the freedom to choose a union and to collectively bargain with employers, they’ll be less likely to erupt in mass strikes that are bad for business and often good for workers. The existing structures that legalize and protect mainstream unions were explicitly created to stabilize capitalism.
Within this legal framework, the primary way that unions mitigate labor disruption is through the no-strike clauses that are ubiquitous in collective bargaining agreements, which deny workers the ability to exercise their leverage except after a contract has expired. No-strike clauses are paired with grievance procedures that direct workers to file written complaints to have their voice heard instead of permitting them the power to exercise their leverage directly with their coworkers through collective action. As union leadership and staff are legally bound to follow labor law and enforce contracts, they are tasked with telling workers that they can’t take disruptive action and they have to do what the boss tells them to do.
Union Staff and Working Conditions
Another way the interests of paid unionists and rank-and-file workers can diverge is over working conditions. Whether working conditions at a company are good or bad doesn’t directly affect capitalists or the paid unionists, but has a large effect on the emotional and physical well-being of workers. Of course, companies often prefer less ideal working conditions for workers because they are often more profitable. Paid unionists also have far less direct incentive to prioritize rank-and-file working conditions than the workers themselves because the paid unionists aren’t directly affected by the working conditions. Through the standardization of management rights clauses in union contracts which cede to bosses near-total control over business operations and labor processes, mainstream unionism has largely deprioritized working conditions and instead focused more narrowly on wages and benefits.
This narrow focus was consolidated most dramatically and influentially with the Treaty of Detroit negotiated in 1950 between the big auto manufacturers and the United Auto Workers, where UAW workers received pension and wage gains in return for dropping demands around working conditions in the factories, especially the speed of the assembly lines. In part, the improved wages were tied directly to the speed-up, as it was called a “productivity pay increase” which Fortune magazine called “the most resounding declaration yet by any big union that the U.S. can grow more prosperous only by producing more.” Fortune concluded that General Motors had “got a bargain” through these contracts. When 100,000 workers conducted wildcat strikes against both GM and the UAW at the signing of the next contract in 1955, it became clear what workers themselves thought of the bargain made between GM and UAW. Their employer and union appeared to be acting in their own shared interests and against their workers. The Treaty of Detroit became the model contract which employers and unions in other industries sought to replicate.
Union Staff and Bosses
Especially for those higher in the union hierarchy and who hold positions in regional and national unions, paid unionists can come to have working conditions and wages much closer to the bosses than to their rank-and-file members. The report on unions referenced above notes how of the 125,000 or so people employed by organized labor, 10,000 earn a net salary over $125,000 as management positions within unions have grown 28% since 2010. Such top unionists come to see capitalism as really not that bad at all and absorb the class consciousness of the bosses they are supposed to be fighting against. In 1955 when the two main union federations, the AFL and CIO, merged after two decades apart, its president George Meany declared, “I believe in the free enterprise system completely” and “I believe in management’s right to manage.”
Working conditions separate the interests of rank-and-file and paid unionists in another way. The job of paid unionists is much easier when they can just follow the status quo way of doing business. The status quo of paid unionists is showing up to the union office and working 9-5 in an office sending emails, holding meetings with workers and employers, and doing light administrative work. This kind of status quo unionism, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do much to actually advance worker power. If staff want to actually empower workers, they have to do a lot more work of building relationships with workers, strategizing, taking risks, and engaging in conflict with employers. Going on strike, for example, never works when staff and leadership are doing the 9-5, and rather the kind of organizing from staff necessary to carry out a successful strike requires tons of extra hours and stress.
This is why many paid unionists are pro-worker in rhetoric only and in their actual lives find it much easier to follow their material interests and just clock out at 5 pm like any other self-interested worker wants to do. Some staff and leaders are willing and even eager to do the extra work, but the divergence of material interests here is undeniable and unavoidable. As long as staff are seen as an important part of union power, the workers want the staff to work more and the staff want to work less.
Union Staff and Dues
Another way this contradiction is realized is by staff wanting workers to pay more dues and workers wanting to pay less dues. The argument goes that having staff enables unions to run contract campaigns that result in higher wages. This benefits worker interests and enables workers to pay enough dues to benefit staff interests simultaneously. But this resolution breaks down when the union is ineffective in getting wage gains in contracts or when wage gains are undemocratically prioritized over other worker needs like better working conditions.
More subtly this resolution excludes outright the possibility of workers designing and running their own unions from the bottom-up without being dependent on a separate layer of paid unionists to run the union for them. Staff have a material interest in justifying and fortifying the form of staff-dependent, capitalist mainstream unionism from which they derive their income. Whatever balance is reached between worker and staff needs, an inherent part of it is the compromise between opposing material interests.
How Union Staff Exacerbate these Contradictions
The point of this editorial is not to claim that union staff are monolithic, but rather to illuminate the role they play within the specific structure of the mainstream union. In the ideal world where unions are perfectly democratic vehicles, staff embody the will of the rank-and-file and their job is to carry out that will. But in light of the contradictions noted above, their freedom to act is not unbounded. No matter their own motivations and guile, their range of behavior is restricted and the actions they take are incentivized in certain directions. There is often a significant discrepancy between the rosy image of union staff as the champions of the workers and the experience of union staff obstructing rank-and-file efforts and sometimes even siding with the bosses.
I’ll draw out examples I’ve seen personally of how staff have navigated and fit themselves and their politics into the role of union staff. On the most status quo side of the spectrum are those more centrist liberal staff who follow the rules of unions and contracts so closely that they never really do anything to help foster worker power. If a staffer spends all their time just explaining contract clauses to workers, they might be of some use in checking employer power when that employer steps too far out of line. But most of the time, these contract drones operate entirely within the status quo of capitalist unionism, trying to find technical, legal, or contractual solutions to problems and compromising with employers as the first choice of action in order to preempt workers from getting mad enough to take action on their own. These kinds of staff channel worker agitation away from collective action into channels of contract grievance procedures, Unfair Labor Practice filings with local labor boards, and individual action. Such staffers are most aggressive in policing union members when they dare to step outside of the bounds of traditional unionism by taking collection action in defiance of no-strike clauses or refusing a boss’ directive in defiance of management rights clauses.
A little further to the left, the most common staff approach to their role is the “progressive” staffer who fits squarely within the ideology common of most unions. They still believe in the efficiency of capitalism but just want workers to be treated fairly and they see unions as the vehicle for achieving this fairness. They talk a good talk and occasionally make a good fight, but only if it comports with the rules of unions and labor law which, to them, are the foundation from which fairness springs. The problem, as they see it, is that employers are always breaking the rules. So the way to make things better for workers is to aggressively push for the legitimacy of the rules and force the employers and workers alike to follow the rules. All kinds of actions, like petitions, rallies, and so on can be applied, and when it’s legal, strikes as well. They’ll push the envelope as far as they can while taking no risks of moving beyond it. The progressive believes entirely in the system and the role they play within it, but in contrast to the previously articulated liberal stance, the progressives will actually put up a fight and try to use the rules to their advantage instead of just passively following the rules.
Union Staff as Strikebreakers
Rank-and-file don’t experience the rules codified in labor law and contract clauses as the iron fist of the capitalist state. Rather, the familiar faces of the union leaders and staff are themselves tasked with enforcing these laws and clauses. Mainstream unions say that these laws and clauses are good and necessary, even when their effect is to disempower workers. Workers most often experience these restrictive laws and clauses through phrases spoken by staff, such as “we don’t do things that way” or “it’s more effective/practical if we do things this other way.” When pushed far enough, the union will bring the lawyer in who will gently explain that “we can’t do that because it’s against the law, but you can do xyz instead.” When workers want to fight the boss outside of the prescribed and often futile channels available to them, the progressive staffer will plead with them to follow the rules, do a petition instead of an unsanctioned work stoppage, and contain their anger until the next contract campaign comes up.
Even if it’s in the kindly voice of the union staff and leaders instead of the blunt edge of a police baton, the effect is mostly the same. Workers are led away from taking action on their own when they have grievances and are told to find nondisruptive ways to try to solve their problems. When, in spite of all the coaxing, workers take action beyond the confines of rule-bound progressive unionism, staffers are all too happy to fold their arms and say “I told you so” if the employer is able to defeat the worker efforts and then more directly and coercively punish workers for their defiance. This is the unfortunate but actual class consciousness of the progressive staffer trapped between wanting to empower workers on the one hand and feeling obliged to follow all the rules of capitalist unionism on the other hand.
The radical staff, the kind who holds socialist beliefs of one kind or another, has to find ways of reconciling their own belief in the illegitimacy of capitalism with their allegiance to capitalist unions and labor laws. Of course, some socialist staffers are socialist in rhetoric only and are in actual behavior as useless and counterproductive as any liberal. But some radical staff genuinely believe that they can overcome the limits placed on them or at least push the limits further than the progressive staffer because of their willingness to go outside of the traditional and legal playbook. Many genuinely radical and intelligent union staffers become oblivious to the compromises they have to make to operate within the system.
For example, I think radical staff underestimate how much of their time trying to create radical change through organizing workers gets wasted instead by getting involved in internal fights among union staff and leaders. When union leaders constantly redirect union energy to ineffective and incompetent strategies, radical staff often are forced to take sides in internal union fights and trying to win over leadership. It’s not that this energy is entirely wasted, but instead of talking with workers directly about how they can build power concretely through action, union staff often spend their energy just arguing with their union bosses and playing politics.
I knew a guy who was a union staffer for the cafeteria workers at the college I attended, and occasionally student activists and union workers collaborated to push for the rights of the workers. The union this staffer worked for had a lot of socialists on staff, and talking to them was kind of surreal for me, as they all believed that this union was how they were going to advance revolutionary politics. Sure, they were fighting the good fight in helping workers get as much as they could, but it’s not like they were pushing the envelope that hard and rather it seemed like a radical gloss applied to some pretty standard mainstream union politics.
Even then I saw these self-ascribed radical staffers compromise their principles to the demands of their union. When the university was putting together a billion-dollar development in the surrounding community to build high scale retail and student housing, a large movement of neighbors and allies mobilized to stop what would certainly be an intense escalation of gentrification. This staffer went to the city council and translated for the cafeteria workers who testified in favor of the development because it would create union jobs. Clearly that was not a radical stance in any way, and played into the age-old boss strategy of turning workers against each other. This wasn’t something that the cafeteria workers themselves thought up on their own, but the union leadership’s narrow self-interest, no matter how destructive their those interests were to the working class community living in the neighborhood around the university, lead them to require their staffers get workers to testify in favor of the university’s plans.
This staffer, despite all the compromises they were willing to make to maintain their position in the union, was fired for raising questions and not enthusiastically backing the leadership’s agenda. I heard they went into a deep depression after that. Years later I learned that they subsequently got a job as a staffer at a different mainstream union and had worked their way up the union career ladder and had become a union staff director. Maybe they figured out a more stable arrangement to balance their political beliefs with the requirements of capitalist unionism, or maybe they were successfully disciplined into abandoning their more radical inclinations.
On a historical level, this dynamic played out most dramatically in the life of the CIO. Born in the militant upsurge of labor action in the 1930s, many of the rank-and-file, leaders, and staff involved in this upsurge were also members of the Communist Party. CIO president John Lewis knew this and was willing to let the best organizers in the movement help him build the unions that he had immense authoritarian control over. But when the tide turned hard against Communists after WWII, the CIO enthusiastically went along with the prevailing winds and purged the union movement of Communist staff and consolidated bureaucratic power in the hands of the most conservative union leaders. No matter how much power you have as a radical staffer within capitalist unionism, you’ll be forced to compromise your political principles in big and small ways or risk being fired.
Conclusion
Union staff are an institutional extension of the mainstream union movement, and its many contradictions, that we have today. Just as a nice boss with radical politics doesn’t undermine capitalism at work, so the radical politics of an individual union staffer doesn’t undermine capitalism either. The structural relationships between capitalist labor law, the separation of unions into those who are paid by dues and those who pay dues, and contract clauses that constrain worker action and workplace democracy necessarily inhibit staffs’ ability to effect radical change.
Part II: Staff Organizers vs. Worker Organizers
How staff organizers navigate the contradictions of capitalist unionism, as detailed in Part I, informs how they differ from and interact with worker organizers.
When staff members are sincerely trying to nurture worker power, they build relationships with workers and support them as they navigate organizing in the workplace. However, the relationship between the worker and staffer is inherently supplemental and not the source itself of worker power, as the relationship between the staff and worker isn’t based in the workplace itself. The staff and the worker don’t together take action by withholding their labor or implementing workplace policy through their own control of their collective labor in the workplace. The staff stands outside of the workplace, while workers build and exercise power with each other in the workplace.
Only unions with relatively large memberships can afford paid organizing staff, and thus staff members tend to have a fairly large number of members that they are tasked with organizing. The relationship between staff and workers is one united around shared political goals of what they think is best for the union, but rarely do staff have the capacity to form meaningful relationships with rank-and-file outside of their political relationship. In contrast, worker-organizers spend thousands of hours each year with their coworkers and can come to know them more as whole people. The stronger relationships worker-organizers have with their coworkers makes for a stronger foundation from which to take collective action.
Staff organizers and worker organizers develop different skill sets based on their economic position and daily tasks. While I don’t want to draw out too sharp a line between the two different skill sets, some generalization is informative.
Staff often spend more time around union leadership and other staff with specialized knowledge, like union lawyers, researchers, or lobbyists. Such specialized knowledge often deals with contract language, labor law, social media strategy, industry trends and patterns, and the dynamics of local politics. However, if your vision of worker power is based more in workplace relationships than specialized knowledge, not having such knowledge isn’t much of a disadvantage for worker organizers. Worker organizers tend to have much more experience of and knowledge of actual working conditions in the workplace, which better informs their organizing in the workplace with coworkers.
Staff organizers and worker organizers often do similar kinds of tasks, like having one-on-one conversations or facilitating meetings, but their position inflects how they relate to these tasks. Staff organizers often are more skilled in those areas that relate to common tasks of staff. Such skills include managing large membership lists, leading teams of people to call and survey members or canvass for politicians, rattling off press releases, creating rap sheets, and so on. Worker organizers on the other hand are more adept at relating to coworkers on the job and getting to know them as whole people. They navigate power dynamics in the workplace, and leverage those dynamics to create and execute direct action on the shop floor.
Most of the best organizers I know are worker organizers, and they’re certainly the ones whose instincts I trust more and whose politics I’m closer to. If your theory of worker power is based in coworker relationships, the typical skill sets of worker organizers are more effective in building strong unions.
How Worker Organizers Relate to Staff
Being that the mainstream unions we have are dependent on staff, worker organizers have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it’s helpful to interact with them or not. Even if you agree with the arguments in this post about how staff-based unions aren’t ideal, sometimes a staff will have knowledge or experience or will be able to provide support in a way that helps you organize. So in the short-term, I find myself relating to staff in this way, taking what is helpful but otherwise going my own way.
In the long term, I relate to my coworkers and organizer friends in such a way that we build the networks of experience, skills, and knowledge we need amongst ourselves instead of externalizing those resources in paid staff. For those with a grassroots theory of worker power, there’s no skills or special position that organizing staff have that worker organizers can’t develop on their own. When groups of worker organizers come together and start building their skills, developing knowledge, and gaining experience, they directly manifest worker power instead of indirectly supporting it the way staff organizers do.
If you and your coworkers are successful at building your own base of organizing experience and workplace power, your union leadership and staff will try to integrate you within the structures and staff set-up of the mainstream union. They’ll try to persuade you that you have the same overall objectives and can work together. They’ll try to recruit you for formal and informal union positions. And some of these might be worth doing, but on the whole, I think you’ll be better served by continuing to direct your organizing towards your coworkers in the workplace than being subsumed within staff-led structures.
Unions without Organizing Staff
Capitalism is full of its own internal contradictions (workers vs. bosses and capitalists), which unavoidably bleed into the labor movement (rank-and-file vs. union staff and leaders). Trying to organize against capitalism means you will have to face these contradictions and challenges in one way or another, but unionists have real options as to how to relate to these contradictions. Working within capitalist unions as staff is full of all the problems noted above. But being a worker organizer outside of capitalist unions and trying to build your own anti-capitalist unions within the larger capitalist economy means just choosing a different set of challenges and contradictions. Workers are full of all sorts of contradictions, including the fact that some workers find it easier to just submit to capitalism and try to get as much as they can within the system rather than to try to organize through unions to change it.
But on the whole, I find the long-term path of building worker power outside of capitalist unions and without organizing staff preferable. I am much more comfortable with and hopeful about the capacity of my coworkers to overcome the contradictions of capitalism through their own agency than I am about the capacity of paid staff to overcome their own contradictions and meaningfully aid the growth of radical unionism.
One thing about staff that seems appealing is that they’re just kind of there anyway, so why not make use of them? Every time you talk to staff, it may feel free, but in reality you’re paying some chunk of change out of your paycheck in the form of union dues. For those who see worker organizing as preferable to staff organizing, money that currently goes to staff could instead just go into workers’ pockets and thus give them more resources with which to support their own organizing.
Conversely, on the economics of paid staff from the staff side, staff are only directed to those organizing activities that advance the interests of and maintain the economic priorities of the union. Unions have to care as much about their income and expenses as any other organization, and their economic reality shapes how they use their resources and how they direct their staff. One of the reasons low-wage workers have such low unionization rates is because they don’t make enough money to be able to support the dues necessary to pay for mainstream unions that are dependent on staff. Even though low-wage workers are among those who would benefit most from unions, many unions make the economically prudent decision not to organize low-wage workers because they know it will strain or even break their finances.
Most of my arguments against union staff are directed at full-time and permanent staff organizers. However, I’m more sympathetic to other kinds of staff in unions. I think paying for administrators to do the purely technical work of managing membership lists and bank accounts can often be more desirable than members doing that work themselves. I think paying workers to take leave for temporary assignments in assisting organizing drives can be worthwhile, especially when they return to the workplace after the assignment and don’t become institutionalized as a layer of union professionals permanently separated from the rank-and-file.
Historical Examples of Grassroots Unionism
One reason that the idea of staff is so normalized is because the history of unions we know is the sanitized, mainstream history. In actuality, many of the most militant worker struggles were won with little or no direction or involvement from professional union staff.
As Toni Gilpin notes in her book The Long Deep Grudge, as workers organized towards what became the Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) in the late 1930s and early 40s they placed their “reliance in the organizing campaign on volunteer organizers from within the plants, rather than on salaried organizers.” The corporation they organized against, International Harvester, was at the time one of the largest and most anti-union in the country, but worker organizers were ultimately successful in laying the foundation that unionized most of the company.
Them and Us, by James Matles and James Higgins, is about the building of the United Electrical Workers (UE). It notes how early on in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when organizing conditions were most hostile and before any encouraging labor legislation had been passed, “volunteer organizers” had “established skeleton crews [i.e., organizing committees] in dozens of shops in the machine, metal working, and electrical industry.” As organizing conditions improved in the next couple years, the organizing presence bloomed into “a leadership corps [of worker organizers] in hundreds of shops…. They were on the inside.”
The early days of what became the United Auto Workers (UAW) was built up by rank-and-file radicals, mostly members of the Communist Party (CP), as narrated in Roger Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions. In 1928 the CP had “fifteen nuclei [i.e. organizing committees] containing 210 members operat[ing] in the ‘most important automobile plants in Detroit.’” The number of rank-and-file Communists involved in organizing in the plants would fluctuate wildly with the layoffs of the Great Depression and the subsequent upsurges in militancy and strikes, but they remained the central players in the primary episodes of organizing activity.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that all of these militant and radical unions of the 1930s were built only through the efforts of worker organizers and entirely without staff. However, especially early in these particular unions’ histories before they had the resources to pay for staff but also when the organizing was most difficult, they relied mostly on rank-and-file organizers. After resources for staff were forthcoming in the mid- and late-1930s, many worker organizers got staff jobs to continue organizing.
However, I would question whether the later addition of staff to these campaigns and unions strengthened the movement overall or just changed it. If instead of coming to rely increasingly on staff to organize campaigns they had instead built out union structures based on replicating and expanding the use of worker organizers who mostly stayed on the job, I think the movement would have been no less powerful. As mentioned above, the purging of leftists from the staff and elected positions of unions in the late 1940s and 1950s certainly revealed one glaring weakness of depending on radical staff for long-term power.
Other examples illuminate that it’s not just the early stages of a union drive or campaign that can be carried out successfully without staff. The International Longshoremen’s Association on the West Coast in the mid-1930s was another of the strongest unions of the era. Look carefully at this account, in Bruce Nelson’s Workers on the Waterfront, of the union’s power and control in the workplace for the role staff played:
The key link between the leadership group around Bridges and the militant rank and file was the tightly organized system of gang and dock stewards who coordinated the activity of the men. According to employers, this brought about a virtual revolution in the locus of effective power on the waterfront. Gregory Harrison complained that because of the steward system, ‘authority to direct work upon the docks passed from the hands of the foremen into the hands of dock and gang stewards. The dock and gang stewards are appointed by the Union. They have an organization of their own. They meet regularly; they adopt rules; they establish the manner in which, and the speed at which, work is to be performed on the waterfronts of the Pacific Coast.’
The role of staff is conspicuously absent, and rather the network of stewards and their direct connection to their elected leadership provides the base of power that the workers exercised.
In many rank-and-file-oriented unions, steward systems are used as an organizational structure in place of what many more mainstream unions depend on staff to do. Stewards remain in their role as workers on the job and occasionally have some paid time each week to attend to union duties. At their best, the stewards maintain their identity and function as worker organizers, and rank-and-file unions then create structures that facilitate much of the running of the union through these roles. This is in contrast to more mainstream and staff-driven unions where the steward role often becomes merely an extension of a more bureaucratic and top-down style of unionism.
Another instance of such a grassroots steward system is given by Coordinadora, a 13,000-member union of dockworkers in Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, which began as a more informal network of radicals in the decades before Spain’s Fascist leader Francisco Franco died in 1975. Once it established itself more formally, the union was run entirely from the bottom up by a dense network of stewards. American dock worker and worker organizer Stan Weir documented how Coordinadora stewards “must work on the waterfront at least three-quarter time. Twenty-five percent of time off, with pay, is allowed them, providing there are complaints to handle.” Coordinadora had no full-time paid staff and was operated entirely by workers and stewards who remained in the workplace.
I previously noted the role of labor law and no-strike and management rights clauses in binding staff to capitalist unionism. In each of these historical examples where staff were deprioritized in organizing, mainstream labor law and restrictive contract clauses also played marginal roles. The contracts of the UAW, ILA, FE, and UE in this period all contained clauses that enabled workers to strike during the life of the contract itself to contest management policies, and this is in stark contrast to the expansive no-strike clauses that are nearly universal today. Throughout most of its history, the anti-capitalist union the Industrial Workers of the World has prohibited signing contracts with no-strike clauses and has been much less dependent on permanent full-time organizing staff.
It is not surprising that these unions were built and maintained by radical workers and I think this should lead radical unionists of today to think less about channeling their politics into mainstream union staff jobs and more into figuring out what organizational principles and structures would best build a radical workers movement. We’re not the first generation of labor organizers to confront the question of staff, and rather our predecessors help expand our imagination for what rank-and-file-driven unions are capable of and what’s possible today.
Conclusion
Leftists and liberals alike are told all their lives that unions are good. I’d read insightful critiques of unions and their limitations and contradictions, but those were generally drowned out by all the positive and uncritical news coverage of unions that I’d become accustomed to. Then I saw these contradictions up close and stopped implicitly making excuses for and lazily justifying the way staff-driven mainstream unions operate. I started to realize how inherently bound up they are in the capitalist system, and how while in this or that episode they may be helpful or not, on the whole they will act in their own interests and maintain the status quo.
So, as that recent union report recommended, are 20,000 more staff organizers the answer? Hardly. Such an infusion of staffing would probably lead to some immediate wins and growth in unions, but over the long-term I think any number of less desirable outcomes are likely. A growth in union membership without any fundamental change in unions themselves will just mean a strengthening of the capitalist orientation of unions. The more unions use staff, the more dependent unions become on them, and the less agency is built up at the grassroots level of workers themselves. The less agency workers have, the more unions become tools to advance the interests of the layer of staff and leaders who are paid by dues rather than those who pay dues themselves.
I think there’s a reason popular leftist slogans emphasize the masses instead of a vanguard or a professionalized layer of self-described revolutionaries, vis-à-vis “self-emancipation of the working class,” “power to the people,” or “you are the union.” The wording of these phrases aren’t meant to be merely shorthand or naive utopian idealism or wistful metaphor but express the literal meaning of a revolutionary politics that believes in the capacity of masses of people to confront and transform their reality.
Part III: How I was offered a staff organizer job and discuss why I turned it down.
A few years ago I was solicited to apply for a staff job in the union I’m a member of and was told that if I applied I’d likely get it. On the one hand, this was a bit of an ego boost to know that I was respected enough for my organizing to get this kind of invitation. Without the job title and the status of being a “professional” organizer that comes with being paid for it, society views your efforts as less serious and merely recreational.
I also knew that if I got the organizer job that my annual income would nearly double. That certainly was appealing in some ways, but it’s not what my politics and beliefs suggested was the best way to build the union movement and create the wider social change that I sought. Being in a position where I didn’t have large financial obligations like lots of debt or needing to be a breadwinner for a family, I could turn down such a salary and stay true to my vision of change.
I don’t want to frame my decision as any kind of “self-sacrifice” on the part of the movement, and rather I feel like I’d have to make much costlier sacrifices if I took the staff job. I organize the way I do because it’s what feels natural and good, it results in material wins for myself and my coworkers, and it’s in line with my political beliefs of what it takes to build a strong and radical labor movement.
I’ve known staff with radical politics who view their organizer jobs as just jobs, who have a sober assessment of the potential and limits of what they can accomplish as staff. It’s a job to them like any other, and even though their job is to help workers improve their working conditions and maybe their political commitments enable them to bend the stick a bit more in favor of worker power than more liberal staff, they also acknowledge that they can’t overcome the constraints of capitalist unionism.
I’m definitely not against people having jobs as staff and treating those jobs as jobs, making the most of it, and getting an income to survive on and support a family with. All of my critiques against staff-based unions are not meant as any kind of moral critique of individuals merely for having staff jobs. Rather, I’m against those who implicitly see staff jobs as where the “real” and effective and radical organizing comes from and, in doing so, implicitly direct energy and legitimacy away from organizing by the rank-and-file who alone hold the power to make fundamental change by taking collective action.
As flattering as it is to be offered a labor organizing job, the qualifying skills are entirely learned. I think it’s a job anyone can get if they put the time and effort into honing their skills as an organizer. Someone who, over a couple of years, organizes with coworkers at their workplace, goes to trainings and has a community of other organizers and mentors to learn from, and reads up on some of the main ideas and history of union organizing would be qualified for such organizer jobs (many staff organizers get jobs with much less of a resume than this). Staff don’t possess unique talents or inspired wisdom that everyone else has to defer to.
As a worker organizer you sometimes don’t have as immediate access to official union resources as a staff does, such as contact lists, meeting space, training materials, and legal advice. But if your method of organizing is based more on relationships with coworkers and your collective ability to take action together, you’ll find that official union resources are not as valuable for organizing as they are often assumed to be.
Other advantages of organizing as a worker instead of as a staff include not having a boss telling you how and what to organize, as sometimes union leadership will have different priorities than you do (for example, a lot of union staff are ordered to door-knock for Democrats each election cycle); not being bound psychologically or legally to no-strike clauses in the same way that staff are; not having to self-censor your political views for fear of not representing the official union messaging; and ultimately having more freedom to organize when, how, why, and what you want to.
One of my goals in articulating these critiques is to embolden radical workers to avoid the staff route if the aim is to build the socialist movement. If you put serious energy into your organizing, at some point in your life you’ll probably be offered a staff job (or you’ll know if you apply for a staff job you have a good chance of getting one). I want people in such spots to have the confidence to say “no thanks” if they want to. I’ve known radicals who had staff jobs and left them once they came to the conclusion that they’d be more effective organizing as workers themselves. I acquired the confidence to say “no thanks” from being around a community of organizers and learning from them and constantly rubbing up against the world of paid organizers and seeing for myself the limits of such efforts in creating deeper change. I hope radical organizers can keep growing the tradition of socialist organizing that keeps its roots in the workplace, in the relationships between workers, and in the capacity of workers to take action with each other.
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