Unions Sometime?… Or Union Now!

In the early 1930s, the American labor movement was in desperate shape.

Union membership, as a percentage of the workforce, had fallen from just about 20 percent at the end of World War I in 1919 to about half of that. Despite the ambitions of workers in expanding sectors like auto, steel, rubber and electrical goods to unionize, the American Federation of Labor had – to be kind – a self-defeating strategy to deal with this potential upsurge.

Rather than organize massive “industrial” unions that grouped all workers in General Electric or Ford assembly plants into one union capable of taking on these corporate giants, the AFL twiddled its thumbs. It created what it called “federal” unions.

Workers were placed into a single unit only temporarily, until they could be parceled out among its dozens of craft unions. The officers of these short-term unions were appointed by the head of the AFL, and when workers tried to elect their own representatives, they were often summarily removed by those leaders.

Nor was there any militant motion to force companies to recognize the unions and bargain with them. Workers “voted with their feet” by abandoning these do-nothing union shells in droves, afraid they would be fired for showing support for unionization. 

Matters came to a head at the 1935 AFL convention. A handful of unions that were more “industrial” in nature – among them, the Mine Workers, the Ladies Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers – pressed for a better strategy, in vain.

With frustrations rising, Mine Workers president John Lewis came to blows with William Hutcheson, head of the Carpenters union, who was belittling efforts to organize the rubber industry. Shortly afterwards, seven unions formed what soon became the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which provided the organizational and economic support for the great union organizing drives of the late 1930s. 

This year feels like a similar moment – certainly as to the inability of today’s AFL-CIO to meet a moment of unrest in the American working class. This weekend, though, I saw glimmer of a possible brighter future.

When the leaders of the 61 AFL-CIO affiliated unions gather in June for their every-four-years lovefest, they’ll congratulate themselves on holding on to the bare 10 percent of working people who are still in unions, although once 30 percen of all American workers were unionized. The majority who have vowed to never say the word “Trump” will nod sagely to each other at their wisdom in keeping silent. They’ll applaud speeches that talk about great opportunities ahead, while privately resolving to do nothing new to tackle them.

Meanwhile, in New York City this weekend, a thousand people – a mix of union activists and Mamdani/Sanders supporters (“looking for some semblance of hope, some semblance of power, to be with like-minded people” one told me) – who filled Terminal 5 in Hell's Kitchen saw a more vigorous face of labor.

They heard from a parade of (mostly younger) workers talking about their campaigns to form unions, or sign first contracts, or their plans to strike, or the results of recent strikes. Those included better-known campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, but also at Whole Foods, NYU, the Transit Museum, the New York Times, World of Warcraft, Wells Fargo, REI and Delta.

They heard from a NYC paraprofessional seeking a raise from penury wages, a 32BJ member reporting on the strike vote his union will take this week, a teacher seeking Tier 6 pension equity. They heard from union leaders at the Writers Guild East and the American Federation of Teachers who are apparently not so content with the AFL’s status quo and timidity.

They heard shout-outs for the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, airport security workers whose paychecks have been linked to ICE funding, postal workers fighting privatization and NYC hotel workers whose contract expires this summer.

And although the headliners of the afternoon were Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, the main attraction was the announcement by Flight Attendants’ leader Sara Nelson of the creation of Union Now, a nonprofit which will raise money from donors, foundations and regular concerned people and then disburse it to help with new organizing campaigns and strike support – much as Mine Worker resources helped auto workers unionize.

Its website pledges that it “will build a network of unions to support one another financially, strategically and on the ground [and] deploy resources in a coordinated way.”

So, besides funding, it ambitions to be a sort of organizing center.

 One possible insight into Union Now’s potential role comes from the late 1950s. A tiny communist-led union of pharmacists and drug store workers began trying to unionize the thousands of blue-collar workers, mostly women and mostly people of color, working in some of the pieces of today’s Sinai and Northwell hospital systems.

The organizing drive greatly exceeded the resources of the union. Moreover, labor law said these workers had no right to union recognition elections. The only way to win that recognition was by a strike, and in 1959, they took on the hospitals for 46 days.

What allowed these dietary workers, nurses’ aides, laundry workers and others to hold out as long as they did was the economic and political support mobilized for this seemingly impractical effort by Harry van Arsdale, then head of NY’s Central Labor Council. As recounted in Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers Union 1199, that support was vital in allowing workers to march back to work with an internal structure of shop stewards, delegates and activists that soon forced the hospitals to bargain with them – and in building one of the most militant unions of that era.   

Now, in a normal labor movement, the AFL-CIO itself would take on this task. In a normal labor movement, it would be trying to emulate the labor-community coalition that showed such energy and fortitude in Minneapolis.

In a normal labor movement, it would embrace the concept of “No Work-No School-No Shopping” and find ways to build that capacity, much as those new CIO unions were unafraid to employ “illegal” mass picketing and sit-down strikes. Unfortunately, we have a labor movement in shambles which needs a new beginning, a fresh start.

It seems that a handful of unions hope that the establishment of Union Now will mark the start of a break from the past decades of caution and lethargy. If we are fortunate, perhaps this effort will one day be seen as timely as Lewis’s punch to Hutcheson’s nose, a sort of opening bell to a more vital and militant labor movement.