No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey (this is a book for workers but there is a lot we can draw from it)
My interest, borne out by the empirical cases that follow, is in understanding the power structures of ordinary people and how they themselves can come to better understand their own power. There’s plenty of evidence…that Mills’ power elites still rule. The level of raw privilege that a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon presently possesses isn’t much different from that which Bertrand Russell described in his 1938 book Power as “priestly” and “kingly.” That helps explain why multinational CEOs were included and indistinguishable from the kings and presidents in the many photos taken at the December 2015 climate talks. It doesn’t seem all that difficult to understand how today’s priestly-kingly-corporate class rules. But for people attempting to change this or that policy, especially if the change desired is meaningful (i.e., will change society), it is essential to first dissect and chart their targets’ numerous ties and networks. Even understanding whom to target—who the primary and secondary people and institutions are that will determine whether the campaign will succeed (or society will change)—often requires a highly detailed power-structure analysis. This step is often skipped or is done poorly, which is partly why groups so often fail. Domhoff’s website, combined with a dozen other more recent similar websites—such as LittleSis, CorpWatch, and Subsidy Tracker—can help groups in the United States sharpen their analysis of precisely who needs to be defeated, overcome, or persuaded to achieve success. Understanding who the correct targets are and the forms of power they exercise should be only one step in a power-structure analysis,6 but often when that step is taken, it only plots the current power holders in relationship to one another. Good start, but keep going.
What is almost never attempted is the absolutely essential corollary: a parallel careful, methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power structures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the fight. Unions that still execute supermajority strikes have an excellent approach to better understanding how to analyze these power structures: to pull off a huge strike and win (as did the Chicago teachers in the new millennium) requires a detailed analysis of exactly which workers are likely to stand together, decide to defy their employer’s threats of termination, and walk out in a high-risk collective action. Which key individual worker can sway exactly whom else—by name—and why? How strong is the support he or she has among exactly how many coworkers, and how do the organizers know this to be true? The ability to correctly answer these and many other related questions—Who does each worker know outside work? Why? How? How well? How can the worker reach and influence them?—will be the lifeblood of successful strikes in the new millennium.
Liberals and most progressives don’t do a full power-structure analysis because, consciously or not, they accept the kind of elite theory of power that Mills popularized. They assume elites will always rule. At best, they debate how to replace a very naughty elite with a “better” elite, one they “can work with,” who wants workers to have enough money to shop the CEOs out of each crisis they create, who will give them a raise that they will spend on consuming goods they probably don’t need.
The search for these more friendly elites frames the imagination of liberals and progressives. An elite theory of power for well-intentioned liberals leads to the advocacy model; an elite theory of power for people further left than liberals—progressives—leads to the mobilizing model, because progressives set more substantive goals that require a display of potential power, or at least a threat of it.167
(As with Vatican II, this) theory of power (is) different because it assumes that the very idea of who holds power is itself contestable, and that elites can be dislodged from priestly-kingly-corporate rule. Though almost extinct nationally, there are still powerful unions operating at the local and regional level. These unions’ democratic, open negotiations—in which tens of thousands of workers unite to stop bad employers from doing horrible things and then create enough power to pull up to the negotiations table as equals and determine something better—provide evidence that ordinary people can exercise both absolute power (power over) and creative power (power to). A focus of this book is on why and how to analyze this still vast potential power of ordinary people. Marshall Ganz simplified the concept of strategy by explaining it as “turning what you have into what you need to get what you want.”7 The word you is crucial—and variable. How do people come to understand the first part of this sentence, “what you have”? And which people get to understand?
Only those who understand what they have can meaningfully plot the “what you need”: create the steps that comprise the plan, plot and direct the course of action, and then get “what you want.” And because “what you want” is generally in proportion to what you think you can get, demands rise or fall based on what people believe they might reasonably achieve.
Who is the actual you in “what you want”? To better understand outcomes—winning or losing, a little or a lot—requires breaking down each subclause in Ganz’s excellent definition of strategy. First, Ganz rightly suggests that the specific “biographies” of those on “leadership teams” can directly affect strategy because “diverse teams” bring a range of “salient knowledge” and varied and relevant networks to the strategy war room. It follows, then, that the bigger the war room, the better. I expand who should be in the strategy war room from people with recognizable decision-making authority or a position or title—such as lead organizer, vice president, researcher, director, steward, and executive board member—to specific individuals who have no titles but who are the organic leaders on whom the masses rely: parishioner or congregant, nurse, teacher, anesthesia tech, school bus driver, and voter.
I urge a deeper dive into the specific backgrounds, networks, and salient knowledge of the masses involved, rather than only those of the leadership team—the rank and file matter just as much to outcomes, if not more, than the more formal leaders. Why? Large numbers of people transition from unthinking “masses” or “the grassroots” or “the workers” to serious and highly invested actors exercising agency when they come to see, to understand, and to value the power of their own salient knowledge and networks. The chief way to help ordinary people go from object to subject is to teach them about their potential power by involving them as central actors in the process of developing the power-structure analysis in their own campaigns—so they come to better understand their own power and that of their opponents. When they see that three of their own ministers and two of their city council members and the head of the PTA for their children’s schools serve on commissions and boards with their CEOs, they themselves can begin to imagine and plot strategy.
People participate to the degree they understand—but they also understand to the degree they participate. It’s dialectical. Power-structure analysis is the mechanism that enables ordinary people to understand their potential power and participate meaningfully in making strategy. When people understand the strategy because they helped make it, they will be invested for the long haul, sustained and propelled to achieve more meaningful wins. Three key variables are crucial to analyzing the potential for success in the change process: power, strategy, and engagement. Three questions must be asked: Is there a clear and comprehensive power-structure analysis?…190
…Global and regional trade accords also give multinational corporations the right to buy land anywhere in almost any country, and new corporate landlords have forcibly evicted or cheaply bought off millions of people from self-sustaining plots of land, directly contributing to a huge rise in immigration into the United States and Europe.8246
The Importance of Ordinary People
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The main difference between these two most powerful movements half a century ago and today is that during the former period of their great successes they relied primarily on—and were led by—what Frances Fox Piven has eloquently termed ordinary people. They had a theory of power: It came from their own ability to sustain massive disruptions to the existing order.
Today, as Theda Skocpol documents in Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, attempts to generate movements are directed by professional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top-down theory of power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active participants in, their own liberation: Aiming to speak for—and influence—masses of citizens, droves of new national advocacy groups have set up shop, with the media amplifying debates among their professional spokespersons.263
The chief factor in whether or not organizational efforts grow organically into local and national movements capable of effecting major change is where and with whom the agency for change rests. It is not merely if ordinary people—so often referred to as “the grassroots”—are engaged, but how, why, and where they are engaged.274
Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing
Here is the major difference among the three approaches discussed in the book. Advocacy doesn’t involve ordinary people in any real way; lawyers, pollsters, researchers, and communications firms are engaged to wage the battle. Though effective for forcing car companies to install seatbelts or banishing toys with components that infants might choke on, this strategy severely limits serious challenges to elite power. Advocacy fails to use the only concrete advantage ordinary people have over elites: large numbers.277
The 1 percent have a vast armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 percent have an army. Over the past forty years, a newer mechanism for change seekers has proliferated: the mobilizing approach. Mobilizing is a substantial improvement over advocacy, because it brings large numbers of people to the fight. However, too often they are the same people: dedicated activists who show up over and over at every meeting and rally for all good causes, but without the full mass of their coworkers or community behind them.
This is because a professional staff directs, manipulates, and controls the mobilization; the staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear—enough for a photo good enough to tweet and maybe generate earned media. The committed activists in the photo have had no part in developing a power analysis; they aren’t informed about that or the resulting strategy, but they dutifully show up at protests that rarely matter to power holders.
The third approach, organizing, places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all—that’s the point of organizing. In the organizing approach, specific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent.
Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved. The organizing approach relies on mass negotiations to win, rather than the closed-door deal making typical of both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.282
In unions and SMOs in the United States today, advocacy and, especially, mobilizing prevail. This is the main reason why modern movements have not replicated the kinds of gains achieved by the earlier labor and civil rights movements. Table 1.1 compares the three models by their distinct approach to power, strategy, and people. Hahrie Han has a somewhat similar chart in her excellent book How Organizations Develop Activists.11 However, Han focuses on what I call self-selecting groups that do not make class a central issue.296
Options for Change302 Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Structure-based304 – Parish Based Organizing
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The labor and civil rights movements were located in the landscape of what I call structure-based organizing. The structures were, respectively, the workplace and the black church under Jim Crow. Both movements chose organizing as their primary strategy. Mobilizing and advocacy also played a role, but the lifeblood of these movements was mass participation by ordinary people, whose engagement was inspired by a cohesive community bound by a sense of place: the working community on the shop floor, in the labor movement, and the faith community in the church, in the fight for civil rights. The empirical research that follows and the voluminous literature examining the outcomes of the 1930s through 1960s are fair grounds for arguing that structure-based organizing still offers the best chance to rebuild a powerful progressive movement. Unorganized workplaces and houses of faith remain a target-rich environment, and there are plenty of them.306
Since organizing’s primary purpose is to change the power structure away from the 1 percent to more like the 90 percent, majorities are always the goal: the more people, the more power. But not just any people. And the word majority isn’t a throwaway word on a flip chart, it is a specific objective that must be met. In structure-based organizing, in the workplace and in faith-based settings, it is easy to assess whether or not you have won over a majority of the participants in the given structure to a cause or an issue. A workplace or church will have, say, 500 workers or parishioners, and to reach a majority, or even a supermajority, the quantifiable nature of the bounded constituency allows you to assess your success in achieving your numbers.
An organizer intending to build a movement to maximum power who is approaching a structured or bounded constituency must target and plan to reach each and every person, regardless of whether or not each and every person has any preexisting interest in the union or community organization. Beyond understanding concretely when a majority has been gained, the organizer can gauge the commitment levels of the majority by the nature, frequency, and riskiness of actions they are willing to take. The process of building a majority and testing its commitment level also allows a far more systematic method of assessing which ordinary people have preexisting leadership within the various structures, a method called leadership identification. These informal leaders, whom I will call organic leaders, seldom self-identify as leaders and rarely have any official titles, but they are identifiable by their natural influence with their peers. Knowing how to recognize them makes decisions about whom to prioritize for leadership development far more effective. Developing their leadership skill set is more fruitful than training random volunteers, because these organic leaders start with a base of followers. They are the key to scale.314
In self-selecting work, most people show up at meetings because they have a preexisting interest in or a serious commitment to the cause. As Skocpol says, “[M]any of the key groups were not membership associations at all. They were small combinations of nimble, fresh thinking, and passionate advocates of new causes.”14
In self-selecting work, movement groups spend most of their time talking to people already on their side, whereas in structure-based work, because the goal is building majorities of a bounded constituency, organizers are constantly forced to engage people who may begin with little or no initial interest in being a part of any group.
In fact, in the beginning of a unionization campaign, many workers see themselves as opposed to the very idea of forming a union, just as many parishioners may be opposed to a more collective-action orientation in their church when first approached about joining or helping to build a new faith-based group. Consequently, organizers and the organic leaders they first identify and then develop devote most of their time to winning over people who do not self-identify as being “with progressives.” Structure-based organizing deliberately and methodically expands the base of people whom mobilizers can tap in their never-ending single-issue campaigns. Han’s book reinforces my argument that self-selecting groups develop an activist-based approach, whereas structure-based groups develop a strong, more scalable grassroots base, because they focus on developing organic leaders who themselves can mobilize to reach majorities.330
Most faith- and broad-based organizations are known as O of Os, that is, “organizations of organizations.” The O of Os more often than not are religious entities—individual churches, synagogues, and mosques—and the initial recruitment happens between an organizer and the leader, who in this model is an official, generally full-time position holder, typically a person with a title that confers a more formal style of leadership: priest, minister, rabbi, imam. Once that more formal leader has been won over to the project of building a broad, faith-based organization, he or she gives the organizer full access to the congregation.346… Top of Form
Collective agreements themselves expire, triggering another round of deadlines. Faith-based organizing has no such exigencies, and faith-based organizers and organizations often take several years to build to something like an initial majority or to take a first action.18 For all of these reasons, union organizers, much more than faith-based organizers, must hone their skills in identifying organic leaders, persuading constituents, and developing what union organizers call structure tests. Of course, since the McCarthy era, most unions haven’t even attempted to organize unorganized workers, run strikes, or win high-participation contract-ratification votes.19 This book’s purpose is to draw lessons for power building from the best examples of success under the most difficult conditions.366
A new army of college-educated professional union staff bypass the strike and devise other tactics to attack the employer’s bottom line. New Labor’s overreliance on corporate campaigns has resulted in a war waged between labor professionals and business elites. Workers are no longer essential to their own liberation. New Labor’s leaders, many of whom self-identify and are seen as progressives outside the union sector itself, have rationalized “carrots” and accords reached with big business that have stripped workers and their communities of the tools to defend themselves against their employers.26 Moreover, New Labor’s adoption and fetishizing of corporate tactics stands in contrast to the organizing style at the root of many of labor’s great victories, won during an even more hostile period of industrial relations than that of the past four decades: the 1930s,428 Strikes are essential to restoring the power of the working class, not just for the better standards strikes can produce, but also because they reveal high-participation organizing.460
In all of the cases, losing and winning a little or a lot can be correlated with one common factor: the beliefs and motivations, or purposefulness, of the leadership team.29 Table 1.2 provides a summary of the cases. TABLE 1.2 Cases in the New Millennium, 2000 to 2014*479 more systematic way to merge workplace and non-workplace issues. There is enormous value to this approach, starting with the political education it offers.598
A Seamless, Unified, Values-Based Approach (Dignity for All, Human Needs) – Go for Grassroots Agency
Workers who understand how corporate power is wielded both in the workplace and outside it can strengthen themselves in both spheres and carry the fight into both, tapping their social and community networks, including key people with access and influence, such as religious leaders. To rebuild a base powerful enough to seriously push back against the economic and political crises strangling most workers today, unions will have to practice the best organizing methods both inside and outside the workplace, simultaneously, in a seamless, unified approach.601
Women have long understood that issues such as child care, good housing, quality schools, clean drinking water, safe streets, and an end to mass incarceration and police violence are every bit as important as higher wages to the well-being of workers and their families. Understanding how to frame a more integrated approach that covers these needs requires further clarity about, and a little history of, the differences between mobilizing and organizing.608
Most CIO organizing was based on a mass collective action, high-participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and cooperative engagement in class struggle. Strikes, the kind that could shut down production—strikes in which most if not all workers walk off the job in a high-risk collective action—were routine, and were evidence that workers themselves were the primary agents of their own liberation. “Left” organizers, those associated with various socialist and radical factions, flocked to the CIO because of the principal of inclusion, of uniting all workers across ethnicity, gender, race, skill level, and every other working-class division.
The AFL had had a long, complicated history not just of excluding semi- and unskilled workers, and Black workers, but also of having taken positions against European and then Asian immigration, and very narrowly limiting the union struggle to wages and working conditions.5 The CIO’s left organizers were intensely committed to recruiting and building power across the many “isms” and other divisions among the working class, and they had to develop special methods to do so.619
This work cannot be done by organizers alone… Very effective are small delegations of steel workers from one town or district to another and large mass delegations of workers from organized mills to unorganized mills. Other methods of drawing in new members included music, and “social affairs674 involving family.14 The radicals in the CIO understood that workers were embedded in an array of important workplace and non-workplace networks, all of which could be best accessed—and, for organizing on a mass scale, only accessed—by the workers themselves. Foster describes the “list” and “chain” systems,15 1930s terms for methods of building a network of the most respected workers inside and outside the workplace who could then mobilize their own networks. Unions that still677 master the old CIO craft of learning who the organic worker leaders are and persuading them to support the union.
These organic leaders in turn can use their influence and are the best people to persuade their coworkers to join the struggle. The legal context of the private sector forces 100 percent worker agency: In these settings, the workers themselves are the only ones who can lead an “inside” campaign, which almost always must be waged in an extremely hostile climate. To connect to rank-and-file dynamics in the workplace, union organizers use a mechanism called organic leader identification, in which they analyze the workers’ preexisting social groups. This is done among the workers and in conversation with them, not apart from them. Workers themselves identify their organic leaders, who become the primary focus for full-time organizers. If these leaders are successfully recruited, they are taught the organizers’ techniques, so that they can recruit their supporters on the shop floor, where outside organizers cannot go. Rarely, if ever, does a worker accurately announce himself or herself as a leader. Kristin Warner, a contemporary organizer in the CIO tradition, notes: [Organic leaders are] almost never the workers who most want to talk with us. More often than not, [they’re] the workers who don’t want to talk to us and remain in the background. They have a sense of their value and won’t easily step forward, not unless and until there’s a credible reason. That’s part of the character that makes them organic leaders.16685 These are the leaders needed for a serious struggle,697
A structure test is the culmination of a series of tests that begin by measuring and assessing individual workers’ power, and end by testing the power and collective organization of the workers worksite by worksite.700 If the worker-leader given the assignment can turn this kind of action around in only one or two shifts, the organizer has correctly identified an organic leader. On the other hand, if a prospective worker-leader, even one personally enthusiastic about the union, cannot get a majority of coworkers in his or her shift and unit to do anything quickly—let alone engage in high-risk actions—it is clear that the leadership identification was incorrect, and again the organizer must start with talking with all the workers to better assess which coworkers they most respect and will most willingly follow. The worker who fails at the test is likely a pro-union activist, not an organic leader, and leaders, not activists, win the campaign and have the capacity to build strong worksite structures. The process is not easy; even a true organic leader sometimes fails to get a majority of signatures, often because of either weak personal commitment to the union, or even active hostility toward it.712
If an organic leader remains undecided, the recruiting organizer, because of the urgency that always exists in high-risk union fights where the employer’s war is either imminent or already in motion, takes the next step: “framing the hard choice.” The process begins with understanding an individual organic leader’s self-interest and helping the leader come to his or her own understanding, through face-to-face discussions, that this self-interest can only be realized through collective—not individual—action;719 A good organizer understands this, and at this point will say something like, “So, Sally, I want to be clear about what I am hearing. You are good with the boss continuing731…Top of Form
the best organizers in the CIO tradition call the moment that follows “the long uncomfortable silence,” because the organizer is trained to say nothing until the worker responds—and that can take several long minutes of dead silence between two people sitting face-to-face. The organizer respects that silence and waits it out, because the decision Sally is being asked to make is huge, and must be treated that way. Sally is not being lied to, she is not being promised anything, she is not being manipulated, and she is being advised that the employer will take swift and direct action against her and her coworkers. She is having a discussion about going on strike. This is worker agency. An axiom of organizers is that every good organizing conversation makes everyone at least a little uncomfortable. And it’s a conversation that must be had. All other actions come from this one.734
Public activities, socializing workers to take a risk together; they are solidarity- and confidence-building, showing workers the strength of their numbers; and they are part of an endless series of assessments of the strength of each organic leader.741
Only true organic leaders can lead their coworkers in high-risk actions. Pro-union activists without organic leaders are not effective enough, and professional staff organizers certainly cannot do it; they aren’t even allowed into the workplace. The organic leader is essential to the organizing model.744
Marshall Ganz, in Why David Sometimes Wins,20 says the purpose or motivation of leadership teams is central to outcomes. The early CIO did use some full-time left-wing organizers; this was the Depression era, and many were either donating their time or being paid considerably less than today’s full-time professionals. More importantly, the old CIO’s full-time organizers were co-leaders with rank-and-file organizers, the organic leaders among the workers.759 In CIO’s (model), the role of the paid organizer is to identify the organic leaders, recruit them, and coach them how to most effectively lead their coworkers against the inevitable employer war.766
Cultivating human agency, for system change
As in Kimeldorf’s case, smarter demands—for more autonomy and control of the production process rather than for more money—lead to a smarter strategy, in which worker agency is primary to building the power needed to win. Ganz’s and Kimeldorf’s in-depth studies reinforce a core argument in this book: What sociologists and academics have long labeled structure is actually human agency.771
The left-wing organizers in the CIO who developed human structures powerful enough to defeat staggering inequalities, and who were committed to genuine worker agency, were replaced after World War II by a massive bureaucracy. Kim Moody and Nelson Lichtenstein document the expansion of professional union staff in the 1950s, an expansion that was later mimicked in social movements after the advent of the New Left at the end of the 1960s.21
In her book Diminished Democracy,22 Skocpol focuses on what she calls the “extraordinary reorganization of U.S. civic life after the 1960s, seeking to make sense of the abrupt shift from membership-based voluntary associations to managerially directed advocacy groups.” That shift was precipitated by the abrupt and massive shifts in unions. During every period Skocpol methodically analyzes, U.S. unions represented the largest sector of what she calls “cross-class voluntary federations.” The U.S. corporate class succeeded in taming unions by pushing for labor laws and regulations that encouraged or forced the replacement of workers and worker agency with a huge union bureaucracy, which they promised would promote the workers’ interests better than could the workers themselves. Skocpol’s “abrupt shift” emerged in part because the corporate class realized they could institute the same weakening mechanisms to quiet the unruly left wing growing outside the unions. A vast new philanthropic focus in the 1970s shifted from naming buildings to professionalizing protest; social activism was legalized to death. Skocpol’s exacting analysis of why democracy diminished when professionals replaced ordinary people can be applied in every respect to why democracy diminished in unions, though democracy decimated might be a more accurate way of putting it. One underexplored aspect of this effort to rationalize and contain agency781
Alinsky compromised the CIO organizing model in three significant ways that have weakened labor and nonlabor movements alike. First, he delinked the method he observed from the mission or motivation of the left-wing organizers—organizers who were committed not only to winning campaigns but also to radically altering the power structure itself.806
This is one reason why Gary Delgado, founder of the Center for Third World Organizing, and his successor and protégé Rinku Sen have each written solid, constructive, nonsectarian critiques of Saul Alinsky.40 Delgado locates his in the limitations of the politics of place and race in segregated America. Sen, in her book Stir it Up, argues that Alinsky’s obsession with pragmatism and nondivisive issues resulted in decades of well-meant efforts that often undermined the very people who need good organizing the most—the poor, the working class, and people of color, whose issues could hardly be characterized as nondivisive.
She points out that Alinskyist groups focused locally and on winnable fights have often reacted to the infusion of drugs into their communities by calling for more police and more prisons. Enter #blacklivesmatter. Similarly problematic, some Alinskyist groups working on education reform today have embraced charter schools, which undermine teachers’ unions and siphon public tax dollars out of the publicly controlled school system.41 In Chicago, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) has yet to stand with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), teachers, and parents who are struggling to keep schools open in black communities, a situation examined in Chapter Four. A further weakness in the Alinskyist model for community organizing is his discussion of and framework for organizers and leaders, an aspect of his legacy that has deeply penetrated and negatively impacted major union segments, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (UNITE-HERE). In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky obscured the issue of organizer strategy. He declared that there are leaders and there are organizers, and that the two are different. The organizer is a behind-the-scenes individual who is not a leader, has nothing to do with decisions or decision-making, and must come from outside the community. (They also had to be men: Alinsky didn’t believe women were tough enough, even during the era of the feminist movement.) The leader, on the other hand, must come from the base constituency and “make all the decisions.” This is a good narrative, but disingenuous: The organizers in the Alinsky model make many key decisions.895
Only the rank and file can strike against the employers. Majority strikes are one strong indicator that workers themselves are determining their fate, rather than leaving it to a professional staff.928
In community organizing and some social movement groups the obsession with leadership development and not leader identification prevents all members of a movement from gaining the collective power they need and deserve. Leadership development without previous leadership identification is a bicycle without wheels. It severely limits how far that movement can go—the success it can and should achieve.947
Social-movement organizations (SMOs) are typically the self-selecting type that Han’s book describes. They, along with most community-based organizations and now, unfortunately, unions as well, label as a leader just about anyone who enthusiastically shows up at two successive meetings (even one sometimes), making the words activist and leader interchangeable. It’s an egalitarian impulse, as is the aversion to power. The Occupy movement has muddied this discussion even more with its talk of “leaderless movements” and “horizontalism.” But in any strategy for building power, all people are not the same.952
After 1995, following New Labor’s ascent to positions of power in the national AFL-CIO, justified by the Alinsky assertion “Organizers take orders—leaders lead,” professional staffing ballooned, with many new positions added—researchers, political campaigners, and communicators. People in these positions have at least as much real power as the organizers, if not more, further diminishing the importance and voice of the real “leaders.”975 The corporate campaign model directs and trains unions to see the employer from the employer’s point of view rather than the worker’s.998 (Do we likewise intentionally or unintentionally encourage looking at things from the hierarchy’s or existing system view?)
In annual meetings about the state of organizing, and the discussion would be that workers often got in the way of union growth deals.54 It would be difficult to find a clearer statement of how workers are viewed by key staff and leaders in the New Labor model. There are many flow charts and organograms in circulation that outline the corporate campaign’s focus on the employer,1004
(Those in the pews or on the front lines) are seen as a largely undifferentiated mass, and the chief criteria for engaging them is whether or not they initially favor a union. From among workers who do, staff select the most telegenic and likely to appeal to an elite audience such as the media, and use them as the public face of the campaign. They will then be called “leaders.” Professional communicators write press and legislative statements for them and prepare them to present these well in public. In this model, union staff need not engage more than a minority of the workforce in the fight, since victory is pursued through one or more of the corporate campaign’s other eleven points of leverage. This sidelining of the majority of a workforce, engaging only those already predisposed to support the union—union activists—would be impossible in a CIO-style campaign, because the CIO approach is contingent on winning a majority of the workers in a workplace to the cause of the union: class struggle. Majorities are also practically necessary, because CIO-model unions run not symbolic but real strikes, in which a supermajority of workers participate.571034
A maximum mobilization of the membership is our only real source of strength. To get this requires genuine participation.1125 Worker agency (of those on the frontlines) is a prerequisite for organizing and for building powerful structures.1142
The working class does need more power to win. That is irrefutable. William Foster devotes an entire chapter of Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry to what he calls Special Organizational Work. The chapter is divided into four sections: “Unemployed—WPA”; “Fraternal Organizations”; “Churches”; and “Other Organizations.” Under “Churches,” Foster says, “In many instances, strongly favorable sentiment to the organization campaign will be found among the churches in the steel towns. This should be carefully systematized and utilized.” Under “Fraternal Organizations”: “There should be committees set up in the local organizations of these fraternal bodies in order to systematically recruit their steel worker members into the A.A. [Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers].”59 The CIO organizing methods incorporated an appreciation of power inside and outside the workplace. They used a systematic approach to recruiting support not only from the shop floor but also from the broader community in which the workers lived. Yet today, most good unions that organize inside the shop mobilize outside it: deep inside, shallow outside. It’s as if they can’t see the full extent of the battlefield or the vastness of their army. A (limited or) one-dimensional view of (the grassroots, parishioners, front line, workers) as (just one thing) rather than as whole people limits good organizing and constrains good worker organizers from more effectively building real power in and among the workers’ communities.
Since the early 1970s—the period of focus for Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, a period dominated by Alinsky’s teachings—community power, like workplace power, has decreased. Most groups in the broader community now have little to no power. Yet even unions that organize effectively at the local level have usually contracted their “community support work” out to these relatively weak groups—mobilizing rather than organizing. When the groups then fail to bring serious power to back the workers in a tough private-sector fight, the organizers who enlisted them conclude, incorrectly, “The community stuff doesn’t work.” They miss that the problem with “the community stuff” is their own reliance on the weak approach of advocacy or mobilizing, an approach they would never use for the fight inside the workplace. For the inside fight, these unions have a theory of power; they understand how to identify the most influential workers among the total workforce; they pay attention to semantics; and they create structure tests to assess precisely how much power they are building step by step. Sadly, they check all this intelligence at the door when they step outside the shop and shift their horizon line to the community, for which they have no concomitant theory of power, no concomitant theory of leader identification. If they see the community’s potential contribution as weak, it is because they don’t apply the same standards to recruiting and building it, with the workers themselves doing their own community outreach among their own preexisting social networks.1144
CIO-model union organizers today frequently take the shortcut of engaging an already pro-union or progressive priest or minister, the equivalent of the staunchly pro-union worker activists inside the shop (who can’t win), to stand with them at a press conference—a practice they know wouldn’t be effective in the workplace. And just as the most enthusiastic worker activists are often not capable of leading their coworkers, so, too, the most committed activist religious leaders often can’t lead their colleagues. To build power in the community, the good organizer must apply the same intelligence, skills, and techniques—beginning with painstakingly identifying organic community leaders—as he or she does to building power and organic leadership in the workplace. True organizing in the workplace plus true organizing in the community can and does win; organizing in the workplace plus mobilizing in the community does not.1170
…is not a life-altering change, and the process develops few real worker leaders, or none. Equally significant, such a fight rarely develops new organic community leaders—those involved are generally already involved, already pro-union priests and pro-union self-selecting activist types. They have not been recruited or trained systematically, and, so, this approach is not an organizing approach in the community, it is a mobilizing approach in and outside the workplace and isn’t expanding the army. With the exception of the Chicago Teachers Union, today even most organizing unions rarely systematize their brilliant approach with workers on the inside by using an equally brilliant approach to the workers’ own organic community on the outside.1265
The CTU learned from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers that to win a massive and illegal strike, it had to have staunch support—active support, tested and well prepared—from parents, students, and key community institutions. The Chicago teachers voted in a new leadership in 2010 that already met the first criteria for the organizing model; they believed the purpose of the union is to enable workers to radically change their lives in all aspects, that the union is a tool for class struggle. They knew that this condition could only be met if ordinary workers, not staff, were the primary agents of change. The teachers had built strong ties to key community- and neighborhood-based groups throughout Chicago. The leadership saw the relationship with parents, students, and the broader community as something more than an alliance: If they called a strike, parents would be key, either with decisive support, or potentially decisive hostility (in which case they’d be advancing the agenda of the mayor, not that of the teachers). They were right, and they had just enough of a direct rapport with parents directly through their students and indirectly through their many community allies to beat Mayor Rahm Emanuel and save their union by rebuilding it through a strike. The most profound success of the Chicago teachers’ strike was the building of powerful solidarities among teachers and between teachers and the whole of Chicago’s working class. That their leader, Karen Lewis, an African-American high school teacher, would go on to poll consistently as the most popular person in the city to challenge the incumbent in the mayoral race would have been utterly unimaginable before the strike.1270
If we devoted the time and energy to understanding and engaging each and every relationship that workers organically possess in their community, rather than focusing on the boardroom of the employer, the kind and level of power of built would yield far greater success. TABLE 2.3 Power Available (Disruption Costs) To blunt the employers’ edge, rank-and-file workers need these strong ties; with them, they will be able to do the organizing and unionizing work themselves that today is mostly being done by paid staff—and do it far more effectively. When this model was followed in Chicago, the results were stunning. Jake Rosenfeld, in his book What Unions No Longer Do,65 published in 2014, argues that there are only two forces in U.S. society that have an equal (and high) rate of influence on how ordinary people vote: unions and religious institutions. He describes how well the right has applied this, making an intentional power move to build an evangelical base of voters, a base that grew steadily while leftists in good CIO-style organizing unions said, “I don’t like religion, I do class, that’s why I am not building relationships with them.” That’s an actual quote from this author’s interview with an extremely successful organizer. Yet this is in direct contradiction to the belief system of good organizers, the kind that believe in worker agency. If a community or other tie matters to the workers, that should be enough for good union organizers. If faith matters to workers, I argue it has to matter to unions. Otherwise, the union remains a third party in the church—not of the membership, but apart from it.1285
Take a Whole Life, Whole People and Community Approach
The pressing concerns that bear down on most (people and) workers today are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which need be of concern to the union, while the other is divided up among a dozen single-issue interest groups, none of which has the union’s collective strength. To effectively challenge neoliberal capitalism in the present moment, to successfully challenge the excessive corporate power that defines our era, (we) must create a whole-worker organizing model that helps—rather than hinders—large numbers of Americans to see the connections between corporate domination of their work lives, their home lives, and their country’s political structures. Figure 2.4 offers an illustration of how Chicago’s teachers behaved after 2010, of how the workers at Smithfield won the third round of their fight, and what Connecticut looks like when the whole union brings the whole community into the fight.1314
The resolution won approval, and Stern essentially replicated the explosive growth in nationally administered resources and national staff that the UAW and others had achieved in the 1950s. From the 2000 convention to 2012, the union’s income from per capita payments almost tripled, from $101 million to just under $300 million.7 Membership did increase in this period, by about 37 percent, but not enough to account for the huge increase in per capita revenue. Likewise, there were 416 union employees listed in the union’s financial reports in 2000, and 863 in 2012. And these staff numbers do not include another significant layer of senior staff Stern brought on as full-time consultants, an addition that would increase the total substantially over 863. These consultants functioned as staff, but their salaries were often so large it was politically impossible to call them so; by calling them consultants, Stern could avoid reporting how many there were and how much they were paid, because consultants are handled differently in federal reporting. The union also began to spend lavishly on consultants who actually remained consultants, working out of their own firms, but in near total service to the union. There were and are hundreds of them. SEIU had never previously been a big player in national politics, but the union’s new resources allowed Stern to start lunching with governors and party leaders—and hand over million-dollar checks. With the shift to a massive national union staff and concurrent national budgets, Stern’s profile and ambition began to grow. The vast majority of these new funds were not spent on existing union members, but rather on launching a high-level and top-down program to “grow” the national membership. Assisting existing members with services/direct support—or paying them much attention of any kind—was not on the to-do list. Stern’s top chief strategist for “growing” the membership was Tom Woodruff, one of his executive vice presidents, who also held the title of organizing director. Woodruff found dealing with existing members not only a distraction but also a drag on the strategy he and Stern were pushing with missionary zeal: working with corporations, so that those corporations would stop opposing unionization. Woodruff summed up a key aspect of this strategy: “The organizing model points us in the most narrow way … the better job you do with 15 percent of the market, the more the boss wants to wipe you out. We have to direct our energy outside.”8 That is, if SEIU insisted on being really good at representing the members when they had only a minority of employers in any particular industry, it would incentivize the employers against unions. The chief problem with their strategy is that most workers form unions precisely to get protections from their bad bosses. Stern and Woodruff weren’t going to be sidetracked by this fact; instead, they focused on devising strategies, like the rest of the New Labor–era unions, to cut deals in corporate boardrooms, making actual workers’ votes (and needs and opinions) less important to the “growth” process itself. The union leadership went from using CIO language about organizing to using Wall Street language about growth metrics. Semantics matter.1406
Seth Borgos, long associated with ACORN, progressive philanthropy (where he frequently collaborated with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development), and now the Center for Community Change, said in an interview: Alinsky’s critique of the discipline [social work] was that it was insensible to power dynamics, dedicated to adjusting people to structural conditions rather than figuring out how to change the conditions. His obsession with power was a defining moment in the separation of community organizing from its social work origins, but the result is that Alinsky often seems far closer to Machiavelli than to a King, Reuther, or Marx.10 Stern himself was frequently accused of being hostile to the idea of democracy. So was Alinsky, and so is David Rolf. Rolf’s Rise as Stern’s Protégé David Rolf was and is a protégé of Andrew Stern; he may be the closest adherent to Sternism in the union today. He and Stern sound indistinguishable when they speak of their shared belief that unions are a twentieth-century concept (and you hardly ever hear either of them talk about actual workers).1442
Rolf studied how Silicon Valley incubated start-ups. With Stern, he paid a call on former Intel CEO Andy Grove, that rare Silicon Valley guru who’d written critically about American business’s abandonment of American workers. ‘Grove told us he didn’t know enough about the subject to offer specific advice,’ Rolf says. ‘But he did say to think about outcomes and treat everything else—laws, strategies, structures—as secondary. That made me understand the death of collective bargaining isn’t something we should be sentimental about.1453
Three widely respected books about the post-McCarthy labor movement, describing bottom-up grassroots organizing within unions—in which dignity, not wages, was the front-and-center issue, and the workers themselves were the primary lever of power—all focus in whole or in part on the same union: 1199. All three books celebrate the ingenuity of the working class and are routinely found on labor sociology syllabi: Rick Fantasia’s Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers,24 Steven Lopez’s Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement,25 and Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg’s Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199.26 The very fact that 1199’s story is ongoing, that this chapter picks up where these earlier authors left off, and that this union continues to enable workers to be the primary lever of power, including in militant actions and majority strikes, is evidence that Robert Michels was wrong: Oligarchy does not always win.1569
Believed that organizers, paid and volunteer, learn through struggle.1588 Our position was, we couldn’t sell that which we didn’t own, and we didn’t own the workers’ right to make their own decisions in the future. Kieffer and Rolf were selling something they didn’t own. We refused to do that.”1596 constantly engaging in strikes and by practicing what is called open collective bargaining negotiations, 1199NE is constantly engaging in the hardest of structure tests—that is, tests that measure both union democracy and the participation levels of the rank and file.1616 Key question in 1199 for generations has been “Are there two sides or three in a workplace fight?” Upon learning of a union drive, an employer will usually begin an anti-union campaign by declaring, “We don’t need a third party in here”—by “third party” the boss means a union as a third party, with the boss being one party, and the workers being a second party. In good organizing and in the 1199NE approach, a key to victory (and to a successful strike vote and strike)—is that the workers see themselves as the union—in which case there are only two sides, a crushing answer to the employer’s message. Below are two examples from the opening of two separate new-millennium training workshops in a CIO-style organizing approach. Both are titled “Semantics,” and they reveal the centrality of language and its meaning to the fight, and to the craft of organizing.1653 The 1199 nursing home campaign in 2014 that Baril was describing above was a textbook implementation of the Advice to Rookie Organizers (see below), including postulate #20, “We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.”1682
The list below represents the key postulates taken from the characteristic 1199 organizing “manual”—a handwritten, dated, single sheet of paper that hangs on the door or is pinned on the bulletin board of most 1199 organizers’ offices. It is often covered with coffee stains and marking-pen notes and is called, simply,
“Advice for Rookie Organizers.”34
Get close to the workers, stay close to the workers.
Tell workers it’s their movement/union and then behave that way.
Don’t do for workers what they can do.
The union is not a fee for service; it is the collective experience of workers in struggle.
The union’s function is to assist workers in making a positive change in their lives.
Workers are made of clay, not glass.
Don’t be afraid to ask workers to build their own union.
Don’t be afraid to confront them when they don’t.
Don’t spend your time organizing workers who are already organizing themselves, go to the biggest worst.
The working class builds cells for its own defense, identify them and recruit their leaders.
Anger is there before you are—channel it, don’t defuse it.
Channeled anger builds a fighting organization.
Workers know the risks, don’t lie to them.
Every worker is showtime—communicate energy, excitement, urgency and confidence.
There is enough oppression in workers’ lives not to be oppressed by organizers.
Organizers talk too much. Most of what you say is forgotten.
Communicate to workers that there is no salvation beyond their own power.
Workers united can beat the boss. You have to believe that and so do they.
Don’t underestimate the workers.
We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.1686
Each postulate expresses a core value and reflects 1199’s roots in the CIO