Why did I get this book?
Social media friends were recommending it, and I’m interested in understanding the decline of unionization in the US since 1980.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes—it’s passionate advocacy for unions and unionization, a detailed roadmap of the forces and structures arrayed against unions and unionization, and a convincing argument about the need for a new public consensus on behalf of unions.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It would be a good book to read with friends and a good book to recommend to anyone skeptical about the value and importance of actual unionization or to anyone unaware of the numerous ways that employers and federal officials are able to impede or inhibit unionization.
It’s especially good in its detailed account of a nurses’ strike in Philadelphia and the granular tactics used by management and their consultants to subvert and divert open deliberations between the workers.
Quotes
“Nothing can rebuild a progressive, ground-up electoral base like a strike-ready union. The Koch Brothers know this. The Democrats don’t.”
“To build a supermajority base that’s rock solid for 2020—and that builds governing power—liberals and progressive must use other elements that are the norm among successful union organizers, too: defeating futility and deploying inoculation.”
“The L.A. teachers delivered a master class in how to rebuild a union, how to united very different kinds of individuals from Latinx in the heart of Los Angeles to African Americans to white members from the San Fernando Valley, how to effectively hold Democratic politicians accountable to their historic base, and how to fight against a stacked deck and win big.”
“Though big tech claims to be ‘disrupting’ the status quo and innovating ways to make our lives better, ‘disruption’—like its predecessors globalization and automation—is essentially synonymous with the downward harmonization of the quality of life of all workers.”
“Workers have just one choice: to reconcile differences of race, ethnicity, and gender, and create effective, unbreakable class solidarity through building the best kind of unions: democratic, bottom-up, with the power to force the billionaire class to share.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
So since I’ve given myself permission to make unfair complaints, let me say that even while this book completely convinces me of its major arguments, I still have some hang-ups about unions that I’m not sure this book rid me of. That may be my problem, not McAlevey’s, but let me try to articulate what gnaws at me.
The problem at the heart of my own ambivalence is the same question that McAlevey tackles head on in Chapter 2: “what killed the unions?” McAlevey’s answer is the one that many union organizers offer: union-busting consultants and law firms who take advantage of an already disadvantageous legal and procedural infrastructure to target unionization efforts and impede already-existing unions and who provide management with expensive advice about policies and practices that will keep their workplaces continuously hostile to unionization. The history she offers to get the reader to that point is also a familiar one: the triumphant accomplishment of the National Labor Relations Act and the New Deal reframing of capital-labor relations and then a steady tide of deliberate, programmatic attacks on the NLRA framework by corporate leaders and their political allies between the 1940s and the present.
So far so good: McAlevey provides a convincing reprise of these ideas. I learned more about specifics that I’m sure labor historians already know well—for example, the role of behavioral psychology in honing human resources departments into “a laboratory that developed cutting-edge union avoidance strategies that remain central to the industry even now”. As she observes, the firms and consultants that continue to train people in these strategies are operating outside of the workplaces they’re focused on and they’re wholly unaccountable and non-transparent, whereas unions have extensive legal requirements to document all of their activities at all times. It is, as she says, “a stacked deck” that became vastly more stacked still with the advent of the Koch Brothers and their funding of right-wing legislative constraints on unionization in state after state.
In her third chapter, McAlevey sets out to disabuse liberal readers of various mythic and inaccurate views they have of unions that make them leery—that unions are inefficient, that they oppose innovation, that they were and are complicit in racism, that they’re only for blue-collar workers, that they’re sexist, that they are against environmental protection, or that they’re corrupt. Here’s where my hang-ups begin, because McAlevey more or less starts off from the premise that if you think any of these things, you’re just a victim of decades of anti-union propaganda. But on many of these points, she’s forced into a “no true Scotsman” posture—that if you’re aware of specific examples of unions having any of these issues, then the example you’re thinking of is not a real, true union doing the union thing the right way. If, for example, you’re thinking about a union that has a corrupt leadership that is basically involved in a quid-pro-quo arrangement with management where the leaders get a cut of the action in return for undercutting their membership, then that’s because corporations prefer to have a corrupt union if they can’t avoid having a union in the first place. “The kind of union that can accept bribes and sign contracts that are bad for workers, their families and communities are by definition unions that don’t engage in broad, democratic making that involves transparent and open processes. In a highly democratic organization, getting away with corruption would be hard.”
Well, no shit, but that’s like me saying “If you’ve heard about corrupt governments, well, it’s not because government per se is corrupt, it’s just that governments that aren’t highly democratic and open and governing in the public interest tend to be corrupt.” McAlevey goes on this point to say that most of the unions accused of corruption really aren’t corrupt, just “morally or ethically bankrupt”, and that corporations are always worse in that respect. Governance, she says, is difficult. But the book more or less treats “successful unionizing” as “normal unionizing” in a tautologically definitional way rather than an empirical one. Any critique you have of unions is of failed unions, you see. How common is failure? Sometimes it seems very common in McAlevey’s rendering, sometimes rare. I suppose that’s warding off futility and deploying inoculation, which she later describes as necessary for successful organizing, but sometimes it just seems like garden-variety evasion.
Elsewhere, she argues that union organizers and union members learn that to act effectively in concert, whether in calling strikes or otherwise, means doing the deep work of solidarity—listening to members carefully, genuinely understanding how they live and think, not badgering or bullying anyone, not slinging ideology at people, being humble, looking for the grounds of collective interest and shared goals. I can’t disagree with that but I don’t know that she seems prepared to say: maybe, quite aside from the ridiculously unfair obstacles placed in the way of unions and union organizers, all Americans are just not very good at thinking and being that way, and maybe the waning of the union movement is not just because it’s specifically under attack but also because the deeper fabric of solidarity has frayed so badly in the US. (Or, in terms of race and gender, because we never had it in the first place, really.) I suppose in this sense I wanted McAlevey to do something a bit more like Thomas Geoghegan did in his 1991 book Whose Side Are You On?, which is to make the biggest priority in the analysis to probe seriously whether unions need to do something different even within the tight and unfair constraints hemming them in on all sides.
She starts, after all, by agreeing that big unions can feel like bureaucracies. In a country where many people—especially those who really need unions most—feel disdain (however fairly or unfairly) towards “big government”, maybe unions need to feel very different as political experiences, to have minimal hierarchies, to feel more like churches or community centers. Some unions plainly are exactly like that; some are not. As McAlevey notes, “unions that are clueless about building worker unity in a tough campaign are a dime a dozen…building unity quickly when a boss does something bad is very different from sustaining a supermajority of workers who are united”. When I think about higher ed, some of the strongest advocates of faculty unionization and confrontational bargaining strategies that I’ve encountered in public forums are clueless and divisive in precisely this fashion—short-tempered, hectoring, quick to dismiss the beliefs or life circumstances of a large proportion of the workforce they’d need to organize, indiscriminately belligerent about almost everything administrative leadership does or says—with no proportionate focus on the most serious issues or the most probable avenues of collective action. They’re not empathetic people (at least not in their public voices), they’re not curious about the people they’re talking with, they don’t have a lot of patience for listening, they’re prone to treat skeptical questions or doubts as always being a sign of treachery.
McAlevey’s detailed accounts of how any worker comes by those negative perceptions of union organizers center on the influence of union-busters and their insidious tactics, or because that person has bought too much into the “dogma of individualism”. (McAlevey would probably regard me as someone who was gotten to earlier on via growing up in a household with a labor lawyer who represented management.) But that almost feels like slight gaslighting—I mean, I’m not gonna name names, but I’m pretty confident that my perceptions of some of the people I’m thinking of across higher education are based on something real. If cluelessness is “a dime a dozen”, it feels that McAlevey needs to think more seriously about whether building solidarity is even harder than she thinks and whether maybe in some cases the wrong people are involved in trying to do it. (To be clear: I would be one of the wrong people: I’m kind of a loner, I’m way too fond of my own voice, I like debating shit for the hell of it and I tend towards distractedness and interest in side issues.) The goal of the book is to convince readers that it’s possible to do it right, and the chapter on the Los Angeles teachers’ union is an analysis of how to rebuild from having done it wrong.
Maybe it’s punching down to expect too much focus on the agency of unionizers in an account that accurately identifies just how ridiculously unfair and pervasive anti-union tactics have been—that it sets one more unfair hurdle down on a brutal racetrack. But in that sense unionization in the present dispensation is like any form of social action or movement work: all of it calls upon people to work together in a historical moment that is spectacularly hostile to that work in every way imaginable. (McAlevey notes exactly this: “as go unions, so goes the republic”.) But if that’s the racetrack we have to run, then we have to run it—the people who want to encourage others to join any movement or any cause just have to be better at listening to everybody, including everybody, understanding the horizons of aspiration and desire within every individual, understanding the limits and boundaries that people have, understanding the failures and grievances of past movements and organizations. As McAlevey says, “this generally means spending long days finding people who aren’t participating in the structure tests at all, who aren’t attending any of your meetings, and who don’t want to talk to you.” These are the “hard conversations”. I guess I just felt that this book was itself not always willing to have the hard conversation.
Thanks for this. I also loved "Which Side Are You On?" and have appreciated the interviews I've read with Jane McAlevy, and feel like I always come away knowing more, but also not sure that it answers all of my questions.
Side note, I also enjoyed Labor's Troubedour (Joe Glazer) as a great labor memoir, but it left me feeling like something shifted by the 70s -- the very successes of the labor union made it harder to maintain the same solidarity as everyone became better off and there were more competing interests.