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New Year’s wishes for the workers movement

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One of the nice things about being born on January 8th, besides sharing the day with David Bowie and Elvis, is that I get to celebrate several holidays at this time of year. My mother used to say I only got one gift for both Hanukkah and my birthday because they were so close together. As a working-class family, the truth was they couldn’t afford two.


To celebrate I would like to share my wishes for the labor movement in this new year.


Let’s begin with campaign donations. Since we get paid after we give away our work, let’s also give campaign donations to politicians, if we give any, after they work for us, not before. Every election cycle, hundreds of millions of union dollars, and millions of hours of free work by union members, go to politicians who repeatedly betray working-class interests. They should prove they work for us before we give them campaign donations.


The 125,000 members of the 12 railroad unions, 48,000 members of three University of California UAW student unions, 14,000 union nurses at mostly nonprofit NYC hospitals, and the new United Airlines Union Coalition which represents 78,000 workers at United Airlines, all have a great idea — let all our contracts expire together. This allows us to take collective action and bargain in unity rather than being picked off one by one.


Better yet, where multiple unions exist in a single workplace or employer they should merge so that workers have the greatest leverage against the boss.


Forget about labor law. Since we only get what we are powerful enough to extract from the boss, it makes little difference whether we take collective action before, during or after bargaining. As the old PATCO saying goes, “There are no illegal strikes, just unsuccessful ones.”


Let’s all make at least one shared demand this year: we want to work less. No matter how we do it, we need to shorten the workday, workweek and our work lives. We can start by demanding more staff to share the work, which would reduce how much work we are doing. On this, the nurses union’s demands for lower nurse-to-patient ratios lead the way.


It’s long past time to organize. Our unions need to stop pocketing billions of surplus dues and laying off staff and plow that money into organizing members and yet to be members. Since many union members have not learned to organize, we should instead spend these resources to teach them how. As we know, nearly 9 of 10 workers have no union, so it’s time to put trained rank-and-file organizers into key workplaces of powerful companies to organize workers there.


These organizers can be trained at summer organizing programs offering crash courses in organizing skills and theories of organizing and history of unions and workers movements. Community colleges and universities with labor studies programs are ideal locations for these programs and they can house the students in unused dorms. Graduates can be placed around the country to help set up new unions and organize members of unions they already belong to.


When we start organizing, more members will want to take action. We need to protect union funds from legal retaliation to “illegal” strikes such as the huge fines and jail sentences inflicted on NYC’s TWU Local 100 for its three-day subway strike in December 2005. We can do this by setting up an inter-union nonprofit that will handle strike pay and legal expenses for workers who are ready to break unjust labor law.


Workers want democratic unions where we have a real say. Members who belong to unions that do not have “one member, one vote” rights in their charters can organize their own parallel democratic vote for new leadership, amend their bylaws and vote on proposed collective actions.


Organizing should be strategically focused on key choke points where the boss is vulnerable to disruption. That means researching, identifying and targeting local, national and international choke points where our collective action will amplify our impact.


This will require genuine solidarity actions with unions in other countries to take global joint action to achieve our shared goals. The bosses have always collaborated across borders. It’s time for us to do the same.


Open up our ghostly quiet and underused union halls. As young people flock to join and form unions we need to be using our centrally located halls for organizing meetings and to build community. We can set up day-care co-ops for workers who want to organize, collective kitchens to feed one another, and local newspapers, websites, social media feeds and radio stations to cover our struggles. 


Union halls can host worker schools, concerts, film screenings and even provide short-term housing for visiting rank-and-file organizers. Imagine how many more people who come for the events will get involved in organizing when we open up our halls.


Let’s make the new year so much different than the last. The old approach has failed terribly. It’s time to try new ideas if we are going to continue reinvigorating the workers movement.


Robert Ovetz is  editor of “Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle,” the author of “When Workers Shot Back” and of the new book, “We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few.” Follow him at @OvetzRobert.

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