Bargaining kills the workers movement

We often hear several reasons for the decline of the labor movement. Complex labor law, bosses’ union avoidance tactics and the lack of organizing all share the blame. What we don’t hear about is the failed strategy of relying on bargaining to get what we want.  

Recent strikes in auto, Hollywood, hotels, health care and education led by new militant caucuses have shown the limits of bargaining. These unions no longer expect that being polite at the table will win the changes they demand.  

They instead used strategic disruption to extract gains that cannot be won at the bargaining table alone. 

Relying on bargaining alone ignores the irreconcilable differences between capital and workers. Labor law is designed to channel that struggle into polite negotiations in which two warring sides find common ground, make compromises and then return to business as usual. We have sat nicely at the table for so long that many unions share the boss’ interests.  

The bargaining process is designed to be opaque and undemocratic. Bargaining team members are often appointed by the leadership and not directly elected by the members.  

Because bargaining takes place behind closed doors, the members have no idea what is happening. After long months of bargaining, settlements are then hurried to a ratification vote with the mantra “this is the best deal we could get.”  

Although members are surveyed about what they want to achieve in bargaining, most members never get to see those results.  

Unions that report back to the members about the proposed settlement use the meetings to sell a “yes” vote, not debate it.   

The big picture is that most unions keep bargaining secret instead of opening it up to the members. They also see bargaining as the end goal, not as a tactic to build worker power.  

Bargaining “ground rules” that keep bargaining closed empowers officers and staff lawyers while excluding the rank and file. These staff often dress and talk like the boss and sometimes even jump ship to work for the boss.   

The more unions rely on bargaining to make tiny incremental gains, the less they focus on organizing workers to take disruptive action. Some unions no longer have staff organizers but have replaced them with reps whose job is primarily to enforce the contract with the boss and the members. 

This is why relying only on bargaining to get what we want is destroying the workers movement. 

One useful reform is to open up bargaining to all the members. But many officers and staff refuse to do that because they fear losing their authority, union release time and jobs. They know that the members would quickly realize that their strategy is class collaboration, not class struggle. 

I learned this when our planned five-day strike at the California State University system ended after less than 24 hours with an agreement my union already had in hand before the walkout began. Although we managed to get open bargaining, we didn’t get any say over ending the strike. Open bargaining is meaningless if the members cannot debate and vote on the settlement and on whether to end the strike. 

The problems with bargaining cannot be reformed away because they are strategic. Bargaining presumes that both sides will compromise to get to an agreement. Integrative or interest-based bargaining, what lawyers call “getting to yes,” assumes that both parties will make concessions that are mutually satisfying. It requires both sides to give up something to get something. 

Interest-based bargaining works only when nobody is happy with the outcome. But this is toxic to internal union solidarity because the interests of some workers are almost always sacrificed for the interests of others. The boss has only one set of interests while unions have many.  

We have failed to understand that democracies cannot bargain with authoritarian regimes. 

Bargaining has come a long way since the first proto-bargaining process began during World War I with President Wilson’s 1918 War Labor Board.   

As I wrote about in my first book, “When Workers Shot Back,” workers organized numerous wartime strikes in the war industries first and bargained second.  

They learned this from the IWW which “struck on the job” first and then talked. Organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn used the much misunderstood French word “sabotage” of production to describe “the conscious withdrawal of the workers’ industrial efficiency.” IWW unions didn’t break anything but instead went slow, downed tools or sat down until the bosses negotiated and conceded to their demands to get them to go back to work.  

The IWW didn’t negotiate contracts because they preferred to get what they wanted by organizing regular, disruptive direct actions at work. The union was so threatening to the bosses that it was the central target of the Red Scare. 

These workers taught us that a union that stands up to the boss doesn’t need to sit down with them. Today, sitting down at the table with the boss has put us on the menu.  

Relying on bargaining alone will become dangerous if Donald Trump returns to office to be a dictator on day one, as he has promised.  

We need to recruit and organize millions more workers to take on the fight against the boss and creeping fascism. Workers will flock to the fight once we leave the failed strategy of bargaining behind and focus on organizing workers to use our disruptive power to force the boss to do what we want. 

Robert Ovetz is author of the forthcoming book “Rebels for the System: Nonprofits, Capitalism and the Workers Movement” (Haymarket Press 2025). He is also the author of “When Workers Shot Back” and “We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few” and editor of two other books. Follow him at @OvetzRobert .

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