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Title: Revisiting the Model
Author: Kim Moody
Language: en
Topics: Labor Union, trade unions, syndicalism, labor notes
Source: spectrejournal.com

Kim Moody

Revisiting the Model

(https://spectrejournal.com)

Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (and Raising

Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (London: Verso, 2014),

329 pages.

Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 253 pages.

Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight

for Democracy (New York: Ecco, 2020), 288 pages.

November 8, 2020

1. “WHO KILLED THE UNIONS?”

2. IMPORTS, OUTSOURCING, AND “THE OTHER” 3. THE CASE OF STEEL

4. CIO “MODEL”?

5. REVERSING THE “MODEL”



When Jane McAlevey talks about organizing, people listen. In the fall of

2019, McAlevey delivered an organizing training session via Zoom with

translation gear to some 1,400 people in forty-four countries. When she

broadcast more weekly sessions under Covid-19 isolation conditions, over

3,000 people logged in. 1 With organized labor in decline and crisis

around the world, it’s no wonder so many victory-starved leaders,

activists, and sympathizers tuned in to hear this experienced union

organizer explain her remedy for labor’s long-standing ills. McAlevey, a

community organizer turned labor organizer, turned academic, turned

union consultant has a lot to say about the

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ills of labor and the craft of organizing. If you missed the Zoom

series, you can read it in great detail in the three books she has

written in the last several years. Rather than reviewing them separately

or trying to grapple with over 800 pages of narrative, I’ll attempt to

summarize and critically analyze McAlevey’s basic themes, methods, and

analyses, though not necessarily in the order in which they appear in

the three books.

First is McAlevey’s useful distinction between organizations that engage

in advocacy, mobilization, and actual organizing. Advocacy is the sorts

of thing NGOs (non-government organizations) do that don’t really

involve their typically poor clients except in walk-on parts.

Mobilization is the practice of many unions in which the members are

occasionally activated for a campaign or even a strike and then sent

back in silence to the workplace. United Auto Workers organizer and

dissident Jerry Tucker used to call this the spigot approach— turning

the ow of worker action on and o by command. McAlevey pretty much

dismisses these approaches to social change and insists that organizing

is meant to produce permanent sustainable worker organization and power.

This, of course, is one reason why people pay attention when she speaks

or writes.

Central to all three books and to her approach to revitalizing the labor

movement is her model of organizing. This model, and she insists it is a

model, can be found in schematic form in No Shortcuts (54–55), but is

presented throughout these works in the context of gripping stories of

her experiences as a union organizer, ocial, and consultant that bring

the model to life. It has to be said, as well, that the organizing

drives, contract negotiations, and campaigns she leads across these many

pages, unlike many in recent decades, end up winning.

The model she advocates does not exist in a vacuum. It is explicitly

counterposed to the narrower approach she attributes to legendary

community organizer Saul Alinsky and employed by many US unions,

according to McAlevey. This is particularly the case in the years since

John Sweeney became head of the AFL-CIO in the mid- 1990s in an attempt

to revive a slumping labor movement. Since it is painfully obvious that

neither the top-down reforms implemented by Sweeney’s “New Labor,” as

she calls it, nor the limited innovations in organizing tactics that

have succeeded in turning things around for the labor movement as a

whole actually work, McAlevey’s counterposed organizing model has a lot

of credibility.

The purpose of the model, McAlevey insists, is to activate workers so

they can express and use the power they have in both the workplace and

the community. It is not simply to increase union numbers at any cost,

as her former employer, the Service Employees International Union

(SEIU), often prioritizes, but to increase worker power. The initiative

in her examples comes from the organizer whose job is to identify and

develop the organic leaders in the workplace. This is not a simple task.

Organic leaders are not necessarily the rst persons to step forward

during an organizing drive, much less the “loudmouth” who sometimes

stands up to the boss. Rather it is the person in the work group to whom

others look for advice or help in various aspects of life as well as on

the job. Such natural leaders may be anti-union, as some of her

experiences reveal, but it is the job of the organizer to win them over

if possible. Identifying such leaders is only the rst step. She cites

William Z. Foster, former syndicalist and Communist Party leader in the

1930s, to the eect that “Organizers do not know how to organize by

instinct, but must be carefully taught” (No Shortcuts, 33). The next

task is to train new leaders in organizing methods.

Part of the training of organic leaders and, more generally, the

rank-and-le, is the continuous charting or mapping of the workplace to

locate the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and campaign.

This becomes the basis for further actions. Along with this are what she

calls “structure tests.” These are essentially escalating collective

actions that create condence, demonstrate and test power, and build a

solid majority of about 80 percent in order to win a representation

election or eventually 90 percent to carry out a winning strike. Along

with this goes “inoculation,” preparing workers for the lies and

barriers management or their hired union- busting guns will throw up to

thwart the union drive. So far, all of this is pretty well known at

least to the best union and workplace organizers. These ideas, without

the ocial organizers’ “lingo”—to use McAlevey’s own term—can be found in

Secrets of a Successful Organizer published by the worker education

center Labor Notes, which draws on the experience of rank-and-le

workplace organizers, activists, and leaders as well as union sta

organizers. 2

What is more original is McAlevey’s approach to the post-representation

phase of union organizing: the negotiation and campaign to win a rst

contract. As she points out, winning the rst contract is a major

stumbling block and almost half of new unions fail to gain a rst

agreement. Most unions separate the representation phase from that of

negotiating the contract. Once the union has won recognition, the

organizers are pulled and sent elsewhere, and a new crew of professional

negotiators along with lawyers is brought in. After all, negotiating a

contract these days is complex. McAlevey argues convincingly that the

two phases need to be continuous and connected in terms of personnel—for

one thing because the organizers have presumably developed the trust of

the workers. For another, the employers and their unscrupulous hired

guns don’t stop ghting, lying, and throwing up barriers once

negotiations start. Quite the opposite.

Not only does McAlevey insist that the organizers must still lead the

ght, but that negotiations should be open to any and all members. Many

unions have rank-and-le “negotiating committees,” but these famously sit

in the hall or the next room forced to thrive on pizzas while the ocials

and lawyers do the real negotiating. McAlevey brings the workers and

their leaders into the negotiating session. Some are trained to present

demands; many come and go at lunch or break time. The horried faces of

management that she describes and their ineective protests at such

unconventional interventions build the solidarity of the workers. For

readers who haven’t experienced anything quite like this, her

descriptions make terric reading.

All of these organizing techniques, McAlevey argues, need to be

developed in a strategic context. Simply responding to random “hot

shops” where workers contact a union for help will not expand labor’s

power suciently to make a dierence (No Shortcuts, 202–3). Union

campaigns should be “industrial or geographic” in nature. In particular,

she emphasizes service industries that can’t be moved abroad, notably

education and healthcare, which also have the advantage of close

community connections. Her own experience in healthcare organizing is a

clear example of an industrial orientation. In such strategic campaigns,

for example, experienced organizers can draw “on workers in the same

union but in a dierent unionized facility, who have experience winning

hard-to-win NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] elections and big

strikes...” (A Collective Bargain, 158–9). This strategic emphasis seems

sensible but certainly leaves a lot of unorganized workers, who don’t t

the strategy de jour, out of the picture.

Despite the vivid narrative and the positive ideas, as I read through

these three books, I became more aware of McAlevey’s emphasis on the

initiative of the professional organizer (or ocer or consultant) in

virtually every phase of union life. Although I had been on a panel with

McAlevey and heard her speak a few years ago, I hadn’t picked up this

consistent, at times overarching, emphasis on domination by sta

organizers in representation elections, contract campaigns, and even

strikes. Despite my own long-time emphasis on rank-and-le initiative and

power, like most people concerned with the future of unions, I recognize

that organizers are an important part of the labor movement. I even did

a stint as one back in the day. They are often thrust onto the front

lines of combat with capital, make personal sacrices, and do, indeed,

help workers get organized to gain representation, win an initial

contract, conduct a victorious strike, and sometimes build workplace

organization. To be fair, in No Short Cuts McAlevey attacks the notion

put forward by some organizing directors “that the workers often get in

the way of union growth deals” (51). Nevertheless, throughout the three

books, it is professional organizer initiative that recurs again and

again and plays the central and dominant role in all the campaigns she

is directly involved in, and even in some cases where this emphasis is

misplaced, such as her discussions of the teachers’ unions in Chicago

(No Shortcuts, 101–42) and Los Angeles (A Collective Bargain, 199–231).

The initiative of countless “untrained” workplace organizers and the

part played by experience in their development is by and large absent.

“Simple numbers and common sense dictate that unions cannot possibly be

revitalized, democratized, and massively expanded through the initiative

of professional organizers and other staffers alone.

Simple numbers and common sense dictate that unions cannot possibly be

revitalized, democratized, and massively expanded through the initiative

of professional organizers and other staers alone. They simply cannot do

everything and be everywhere during every day in a movement of millions

trying to organize tens of millions. Failures aside, their successes at

best produce incremental growth that cannot even keep up with membership

attrition. Even the multiplication of such organizers several times

over, though it would help matters, could not possibly produce the sort

of exponential growth in both numbers and power needed to shift the

balance of class forces that McAlevey and the rest of us desperately

seek.

Without grassroots initiative, day in and day out, of countless

unidentied workplace organizers—be they organic leaders, activists, or

interested members with titles no grander than shop steward or local

union ocer— unions cannot function, let alone grow. McAlevey’s idea of

using unionized workers to approach the unorganized in the same industry

is obviously a good one. But if this is left only to the initiative of

labor’s too few, overworked organizers, it won’t be nearly enough. Worse

yet, if this sort of worker- to-worker organizing occurs only with the

permission of top leaders, which is typically the case, it will never be

enough, or display the sort of initiative that can impress the

unorganized and give them a sense of ownership in the union. Clearly, it

will take much more of the sort of worker self-activity and initiative

we saw among industrial workers in the 1930s, or among public employees

in the 1960s and 1970s, and that we have seen recently in the 2018–19

strikes of education workers, as well as the rst signs of action by

workers at Amazon, Instacart, Uber, and other corners of the

digitalizing economy in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. I will look

in greater detail at this question below. To investigate the problem

further, however, we need to look at what McAlevey sees as the roots of

union decline over the last half century.

This is the title of a key chapter in McAlevey’s most recent book, A

Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, the

most “big picture” of her three books. The bulk of her answer to this

question is straightforward: Taft-Hartley and subsequent court

decisions, professional union-busters, and globalization. Each of these

has played an important role in throwing up barriers to organizing—at

least in those all too few cases where workers or a union even attempt

to seek representation. Taft-Hartley gives the boss a legal advantage,

the union-busters provide the muscle and intimidation, while

globalization allows employers to threaten to move abroad and close up

shop. The record shows that these are, indeed, frequently eective in

derailing organizing drives and rst-contract campaigns. This story is

true as far as it goes, although it downplays the far more persistent

role of management in ghting and demoralizing unions and workers, day in

and day out. It is also the ocial union leadership’s explanation for the

decline, retreat, and crisis of the organizations they lead. The problem

with this story is that it lets the top leadership, the union hierarchy,

o the hook for its own role in the crisis of organized labor, certainly

in the US.

This is not a question of good or bad people. All union leaders are not

the same. Some are clearly much better than others, and that can make a

dierence. The problem lies in the whole practice of bureaucratic

business unionism that emerged in the US most clearly during and after

World War II. Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism played a role in this to be

sure, but business unionism as a philosophy and practice had its roots

way back in the era of Samuel Gompers and his “pure and simple”

unionism. The post-World War II expansion and modernization of this old

view, however, was based primarily in the simultaneous abandonment of

ghting over control of the workplace and labor process in favor of

focussing on wages and benets—America’s “private welfare state.” This,

in turn, led to an increased insulation of the leadership,

administration, and conduct of bargaining from the membership. Along

with this came the unions’ turn from a broader social agenda, their

political defeat, and Taft-Hartley. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein

has controversially, but correctly, called this turn away from eorts to

win broad social gains politically toward the private welfare state a

“product of defeat, not victory.” 3

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By the early 1950s, this defeat included productivity bargaining that

linked wages and benets to worker productivity increases (and hence

speed-up) and, more recently, lean production, extreme work

standardization, digitally driven tasks, surveillance, and so forth.

Even before this, the inclusion in most contracts of “managements’

rights” (to control the workplace) and “no-strike” clauses (during the

life of the contract) became a feature of bargaining that surrendered

the unions’ ability to ght over working conditions and their members’

ability to resist through direct action.

Instead, union members got the multilayered grievance procedure that

postponed settlement and stripped workers of a major source of power.

McAlevey is justiably critical of such grievance procedures but doesn’t

recognize their roots in this fundamental compromise with management.

The surrender of shop-oor power to management also involved the

side-stepping of labor’s own racial problems in its organized work

sites, which, among other things, led to the failure of “Operation

Dixie,” the CIO’s attempt to organize the South in the late 1940s, thus

further undermining labor’s growth and bargaining power.

“With few exceptions union leadership did everything possible to crush

the rebellion.

All of this led to a decade or so of worker rebellion in the 1960s and

1970s by Black and white workers—often inspired by the civil rights

movement and characterized by rank-and-le caucuses, Black caucuses,

wildcat strikes, contract rejections, and the energizing of a new

generation of industrial workers. With few exceptions union leadership

did everything possible to crush the rebellion, helping to diminish

rather than harness the energy of this social upsurge. 4 Such growth as

labor experienced in that period came largely from the self- initiative

of public sector workers, a process I participated in twice as a

rank-and-le volunteer activist and leader, and once as a sta organizer.

The decline of the unions in terms of numbers, organizing eorts,

victories, and the use of the strike accelerated in the aftermath of

this failed rebellion as union leaders turned to wage and benet

concessions, labor- management cooperation schemes, two-tier wage

systems, and an increased reliance on rightward moving Democratic

politicians and pressure tactics that did not depend on worker

self-activity. This disarmed the labor movement as a whole without in

any way blunting capital’s oensive against the unions and workers in

general. In 1979, United Auto Workers’ president Doug Fraser referred to

capital’s oensive as “one-sided class war.” 5

Among the shocks that introduced labor’s retreat and the entire

neoliberal era were the 1980–82 double-dip recession that destroyed

millions of unionized manufacturing and other jobs, the Chrysler bailout

and associated union concessions that ended pattern bargaining in auto,

setting the precedent for other industries, and US president Ronald

Reagan’s ring of the striking air trac controllers. But it was the

subsequent behavior and practices of the union leadership of the major

unions, with few exceptions, that further institutionalized long

existing inclinations toward class collaboration. This, in turn, has

made it even more dicult to organize the unorganized, a side of the

story missing in McAlevey’s analysis of union decline.

Unions are contradictory organizations. They are both institutions and

social movements meant to combat the pressures of capital on wages and

conditions. 6 The tendency toward bureaucratization in unions is not an

example of Robert Michel’s “iron law of oligarchy,” nor an inevitable

“Weberian” cure for large organizations. The problem stems from the

leadership’s position as negotiators caught between the demands of

capital not only for lower immediate costs, but for the long-term

protability and survival of the business in the vortex of real

capitalist competition, on the one hand, and the needs of the

membership, on the other. To deal with this contradictory situation the

elected leadership tends to insulate itself and its institutional

resources from membership pressure, while nonetheless occasionally

calling on that membership to give it the power it needs in negotiations

to resist management’s pressure—up to and including a strike. It is this

dilemma that gives the “union,” that is the top leadership in

particular, the appearance of being a “third party” as McAlevey

describes it in No Shortcuts (96).

McAlevey, of course, is right that the union is not a “third party”, as

some management experts would have it, but a working class institution.

Nevertheless, it is one that necessarily attempts to mediate the

contradictions inherent in the capital-labor relationship. This is one

reason why almost all the “reforms” and “new” tactics of the

1990s and beyond implemented by the ocialdom have emphasized forms of

pressure that bypassed the self- activity of the membership: corporate

and “leverage” campaigns; the fake counter position of “organizing” and

“service” models; union mergers that give the appearance of growth while

increasing bureaucracy; the conglomerate nature and fragmented

departmentalism of most unions resulting from mergers; the recruitment

of former student radicals rather than members as organizers;

“neutrality,” or as McAlevey calls them “election procedure agreements”

with management to facilitate organizing; the election of Democrats of

any sort at all levels, and the insane split in the movement with the

formation of the Change-to-Win federation in 2005.

It is also a fact that in most unions organizers are accountable to the

union ocialdom that hired them, not to the membership or those they are

organizing. Some organizers maintain a good deal of autonomy and

initiative, as McAlevey did in her time with the SEIU in Las Vegas

vividly described in Raising Expectations. Nevertheless, organizers are

responsible to those who pay their wages, send them where they want

them, and supply or deny them resources to carry out their assignment.

There is, of course, no law that organizers cannot be chosen by the

union membership just as the leaders are, but that would rub against the

grain of business unionism even at its best.

“Most unions’ organizers are accountable to the union officialdom that

hired them, not to the membership or those they are organizing.

There is an alternative, or at least a strong countertendency, to this

long-standing trend toward bureaucratization of the unions and the

routinization of collective bargaining away from the inuence of the

membership. It lies in union democracy stemming rst of all from direct

democracy and worker-initiative in the workplace, most commonly in the

form of elected and collective workplace organization—not just isolated

stewards buried in case work. The “representative democracy”

characteristic of most unions is insucient to create leadership and sta

accountability. This is because it involves only the occasional exercise

of selection within a structure in which incumbent leaders have control

of union resources and lines of communication. More often than not, the

ocialdom is capable of constructing a machine or loyal network strong

enough to prevent the erosion of its power even if the individuals at

the top change from time to time. It is for this reason that simply

running slates against incumbent leaders seldom changes things

signicantly. 7

This is where the idea of rank-and-le movements based in strong

workplace organization, caucuses, and networks that connect the various

worksites comes into the picture. I will discuss this below in the

context of McAlevey’s discussion of the reform movements in the Chicago

and Los Angeles teachers’ unions as well as the 2018–19 upsurge in

teacher strikes. But rst, let’s look at the nal point in her explanation

of “who killed the unions?” It’s one of the top leadership’s most

eective alibis—globalization.

One of the most common explanations for labor’s decline and retreat in

the United States coming from union organizers, leaders, and sometimes

friendly think tanks and academics is the loss of American jobs to

overseas outsourcing and/or imports. To be sure, ngers are pointed at

the employers who do this outsourcing and importing, but the focus is

inevitably on the foreign “other.” The foreign perpetrators have changed

somewhat over time from the Japanese steel and automakers of the 1970s

and 1980s, to the Mexican maquiladoras of the 1990s and 2000s, and most

recently, of course, the Chinese who seem to make everything and be

everywhere even though they account for just one-fth of US imports. The

story has just enough truth to be credible. Jobs in

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some industries such as textiles and garment have been all but wiped out

by imports, while inputs to other goods production have gone overseas.

One of the unions that routinely points to imports as the major source

of lost jobs is the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Steelworker

employment has, indeed, plunged in the last four decades or more, as has

the membership of the USWA. Imports are one factor in this job loss, but

by no means the only or even the most important cause. Another is

productivity. To put it simply, the workforce in US steel production

fell by about 6 percent between the early 1980s and 2017 while the

“man-hours” required to produce a ton of steel fell by 85 percent. The

major reason for this was the rises of electric arc (AR) “mini-mills”

that require far less labor per ton than traditional basic oxygen

furnace (BOF) mills.

Imports rose to about a quarter of US steel consumption by the 1980s and

to an average of 30 percent between 2012 and 2018, after which they fell

back to 25 percent. Mini-mills, on the other hand, have risen from 31

percent of domestic production in the 1980s to around 60 to 65 percent

in the last two decades. This is about 50 percent of total consumption,

a far larger share than imports. Employment in BOF mills, where almost

all union members work, of course fell over the years. What seems clear

is that more of these lost union jobs fell to productivity, on the one

hand, and the shift of domestic production to non-union mini-mills, on

the other, than to imports. The USWA did little to resist job

reorganization or to organize the mini-mills. 8

One of the problems with citing imports, including outsourced

intermediate inputs, as an explanation for the loss of union jobs,

however, is that US manufacturing output as measured by the Federal

Reserve grew by about 130 percent, or a fairly healthy 3.5 percent

average a year, over the neoliberal period from 1982 to 2019. 9 Even if

imports took a signicant bite out of US production, growth on this scale

should have created jobs. That is, imports could explain why domestic

production grew somewhat more slowly than in the “golden” pre-global era

of the 1950s and 1960s, but they cannot account for such a massive loss

of manufacturing jobs within this level of growing domestic output. The

reason for this scale of job loss lay primarily in the double whammy of

recurrent recessions resulting from capitalist turbulence and

productivity gains from management’s application of lean production and

work-pacing technology. That is, the contradictory course of capital

accumulation, on the one hand, and management-led class struggle, on the

other, drastically reduced employment in manufacturing despite signicant

growth in output. Table I shows the loss in manufacturing production

jobs during the four major recessions of the neoliberal era.

[]

If repeated recessions eliminated jobs on a monumental scale, signicant

productivity growth between recessions prevented the recovery of the

vast majority of these jobs once growth resumed. Between 1990 and 2000

productivity in manufacturing rose annually by 4.1 percent, while from

2000 to 2007, just before the Great Recession, it increased by an

average of 4.7 percent a year. 10 This was sucient to hold down job

growth despite a signicant increase in manufacturing output per year

from recession trough to recovery highpoint in the 1980s (4.1 percent)

and 1990s (6.4 percent). From 2001 to 2007 output grew by an annual

average of only 2.8 percent, compared to 4.1 percent for productivity

costing some two million jobs even before the next recession. From 2009

to 2019 output grew by 2.4 percent a year, and productivity increased by

about 2.5 percent so that manufacturing employment grew only slowly by

about 1 percent a year, mostly in lower-productivity jobs. 11 The

embrace of labor-management cooperation by union leaders and the

acceptance of lean production and work- intensifying technology that

enabled these levels of productivity cost millions of jobs.

Pinning all this job loss on “globalization” lets the labor ocialdom o

the hook in two damaging ways. First it reinforces the sort of labor

nationalism that sees the foreign “other,” rather than the home-based

boss as the culprit. At its worst this has been expressed in the “Buy

American” slogan of the 1970s and 1980s, a lingering sentiment that

Trump has played eectively. Even at its most liberal where, for example,

concerns for the negative impact of NAFTA on Mexican workers in the

maquiladora plants are sometimes expressed, this approach still

encourages nationalist sentiments and takes the ght for secure and

decent employment out of the hands of workers and into those of the

lobbyists and legislators who are supposed to stem this tide of foreign

goods with “fair trade.”

Second, while even the strongest of unions with the best of leaders

could do little in the context of collective bargaining about

capitalism’s tendency toward recurrent crises, they could certainly have

done a good deal about labor intensication resulting from lean

production, and the work-pacing and surveillance technology that

prevented the recovery of jobs between recessions. Instead, for nearly

four decades most union top-level leaderships have engaged in joint

“problem solving” and cooperation with management, wage and benet

concessions, strike-avoidance tactics, one-sided political dependency,

appeals to nationalism, and their own form of “social distancing” from

the membership. Throughout these books, McAlevey’s criticism of this

type of union leaders— the norm for decades—focused primarily on Andy

Stern and his associates at the national level of SEIU. For all her

contempt for some other top leader and “clueless” unions, McAlevey lets

the majority of the contemporary labor ocialdom o the hook on all these

counts.

McAlevey sees her method of organizing as rooted in the CIO’s

“high-participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and

cooperative engagement in class struggle” (No Shortcuts, 30). Though

high-participation and solidarity were certainly central to the birth of

the new industrial unions of the 1930s that eventually formed the

Congress of Industrial Organizations, (CIO), to call the events that led

to this a “model” is a stretch to say the least. This turbulent upsurge

bore little resemblance to a well organized and conducted NLRB or

“election procedure agreement” (neutrality) representation election,

collective bargaining campaign, or even the “model” strikes that

McAlevey describes. Rather it arose from a mass grassroots-initiated

strike movement that began in 1933 when the number of strikes more than

doubled and that of strikers grew by over three-and-a-half times, most

without any ocial union leadership. This disorderly strike wave would

continue through to its highpoint in 1937 when the victory of General

Motors workers’ unconventional and illegal sit-down strikes turned the

tide in favor of the new unions. 12

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The course of events that led to that victory doesn’t resemble

McAlevey’s model or that of most representation campaigns in recent

decades. As I wrote in the introduction for the republication of Sidney

Fine’s classic Sit- Down:

The order of events in Flint in 1936-37 were the opposite: build the

union in the workplace among those willing to join, take action

according to plan even with a minority membership, demonstrate the power

of the union, win recognition and bargaining, and recruit a majority. 13

I am not suggesting this will necessarily work in today’s circumstances,

but that as circumstances change so might the way and the sequence in

which workers organize themselves. Like those of automobiles, organizing

“models” can get out of date.

During the rst three or so years of the upsurge of the early 1930s, the

as-yet unidentied or developed “organic leaders” and activists in

hundreds of mines, mills, and factories led their fellow workers into

action and organization without waiting for the professional organizers

to arrive. This was the case even when in 1933 John L. Lewis sent his

(often leftist) organizers into the coalelds in anticipation of the

passage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Section 7(a) of the National

Industrial Relations Act (NIRA) which was supposed to grant the right to

organize. As recent research by historians Michael Goldeld and Cody

Melcher has shown, his organizers reported in 1933 that “the miners had

been organizing on their own.” These authors concluded that, “rank-and-

le miners, often led by radicals and unassisted by the UMWA itself,

organized virtually every mine before the passage of the NIRA” in 1933.

14 The same was true of steelworkers, 150,000 of whom ooded the old

Amalgamated Iron and Steelworkers on their own for a time in 1933, and

37,000 went on strike three years before Lewis set up the Steel Workers

Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936. 15 This was even more the case in

other industries like auto, rubber, and electrical goods without any

pre-existing national union—at best there were Federal Locals of the AFL

which rapidly proved ineective and were abandoned by the workers. 16

When the upsurge in auto began in 1933–35, the Communist organizers Bob

Travis and Wyndam Mortimer, whom McAlevey cites, and the socialist

activists and organizers she doesn’t—Kermit Johnson (in Chevy 4) and Roy

Reuther (Travis’s assistant in 1936–37)—were rank-and-lers in various

plants around the Midwest. While already leaders and organizers in their

workplaces, Travis in Toledo, Mortimer in Cleveland, and Reuther in

Detroit, they became staers in Flint only after autoworkers across the

Midwest had been in motion for almost three years. In other words, that

era’s “organic leaders” and activists stepped forward on their own as

rank-and- le organizers (sometimes as part of worker-based political

tendencies) well before there were any full-time organizers. Along with

the key role played by radical rank-and-le workplace leaders, the birth

of the CIO was a classic example of collective worker self-activity.

More particularly, McAlevey credits her organizing techniques to

Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199 before the merger of a majority of

its local unions with the SEIU in 1998. Though her direct experience was

with 1199 New England, which covers Connecticut and Rhode Island, she

attributes the organizing model to the union’s founding Local 1199 in

New York under the leadership of Leon Davis. Local 1199 is famous for

its militancy, atypical social unionism, “Bread and Roses” cultural

program, embrace of the civil rights movement, and endorsement by Martin

Luther King, Jr., among other things. Local 1199’s founding leaders,

Leon Davis and Elliott Godo, were Communists who had originally formed a

union of pharmacists in the 1930s. Their Communist-led union then

organized hospital workers in New York City beginning in the late 1950s

before the on-air trials of McCarthyism and the House Un-American

Activities Committee had been fully swept away by the winds of a new era

of revolt—quite an achievement.

The subsequent history of 1199, however, does not reveal a democratic

union adept at training grassroots leaders, at least above the workplace

delegate (shop steward) level. When Davis retired in 1982, the union

fell into a decade of leadership crisis as rst Davis’ handpicked

successor, Doris Turner, and then her replacement, Georgiana Johnson,

proved unprepared and incapable of leading or uniting the union. This

was primarily because they had been given little leadership experience

or responsibility, which remained in the hands of Davis and other top

leaders. This story has been told in detail in Upheaval in the Quiet

Zone, a history of 1199 by Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg that, oddly

enough, McAlevey recommends (No Shortcuts, 84). 17 What it revealed was

that, despite its elected system of one delegate per twenty-ve workers,

1199 was not a particularly democratic union, nor did it attempt to

bargain over the nature of hospital work, or as Fink and Greenberg put

it, 1199 “pressed no claims for work reorganization” and limited its

bargaining to wages and benets. 18 In both regards, it was, despite its

militancy and social movement characteristics, fairly conventional in

its organizational and bargaining practices. It was, in fact, a union

with a highly centralized leadership in the person of Leon Davis, who

said:

The membership can only be a sounding board, even the delegates...they

can’t make decisions...The idea of wisdom emanating from the bottom is

full of shit, not because they are stupid but because they have a job

which is not running the union and knowing all the intricate business

about it. Consequently, their inability to come up with initiatives is

limited. 19

This, of course, is the more frequently unspoken assumption of

business-union leaders throughout the American labor movement. It is the

central reason that genuine leadership development is not a part of most

union cultures above routine stewards’ training, and why leadership

transitions are mostly managed aairs even though there is an election.

In the case of 1199 it led not only to a decade of internal chaos and

racial conict, but to this union’s eventual subordination to the even

more bureaucratic structure and bizarre leadership of the SEIU under

Andy Stern. Ironically, this kind of all too typical top-down leadership

also means that all those “organic leaders” back in the workplace never

really have the opportunity to take initiative beyond grievance ling, or

to learn of the “complexities” that are the monopoly of the inner

sanctum.

This doesn’t mean that the organizing “model” proposed by McAlevey is

wrong per se in today’s limited context. What it does mean is that it is

by itself insucient to produce the kind of democratic, workplace-based,

member- led unions, like those of the early CIO, needed to take on

capital, expand, and lay the basis for bigger political changes. It

should be obvious that most of today’s unions in the US have failed to

grow and win because they are bureaucratically incapable of deploying

the collective power of the members beyond the framework of conventional

bargaining and equally conventional strike strategies and tactics. There

are exceptions in a number of the eective strikes of the last few years

or even a longer period, but they are just that—exceptions. There is

much more to winning a strike these days than just getting the 90

percent participation McAlevey proposes. The question then arises, one

that McAlevey does not address despite her discussion of West Virginia,

Chicago, and Los Angeles teachers’ strikes: How we are to make our

unions suitable for class struggle in an era in which the forces arrayed

against workers are more massive than ever?

In other words, how are we to transform most of today’s bureaucratic

unions into democratic organizations with genuinely accountable ocials

and sta? How are we to gain collective membership power beyond

occasional “participation?” How are we to get unions in which workplace

leaders are allowed to lead, there is a culture of debate and dissent

rather than conformity in the name of “unity,” and an atmosphere in

which rank-and-le initiative in the ght with capital is encouraged?

There are plenty of examples of eorts to democratize unions and improve

their ability to ght the boss. These range from large-scale ones like

the Teamsters’ reform movement that nearly toppled the Hoa bureaucracy

in 2017 to scores of local rank-and-le caucuses and movements, the best

known example of which is, of course, the Coalition of Rank-and-File

Educators (CORE) that toppled the old guard of the Chicago Teachers

Union in 2010. What then does McAlevey say about this and other aspects

of the democratic upsurge of teacher militancy and organization of the

past several years?

It would be unthinkable these days to write a book on US unions without

covering the great teachers’ rebellion of 2018-2020. While McAlevey

doesn’t present this as the industry-wide upsurge it has become, she

does include accounts of the West Virginia education workers strike and

the reform movements in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the United

Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). To my mind, these important struggles

have more in common with the real CIO upsurge from 1933 to 1937 and that

of public sector workers and rank-and-le rebels in the 1960s and 1970s

than most union struggles these days. These were struggles initiated,

organized,

”LEDOM“ EHT GNISREVER

and led in the rst instance, not by professional organizers, but by

workers who had “a job which is not running the union,” as Leon Davis so

indelicately put it, but were nonetheless organizers in the full sense

of that word. Only after winning election to top positions and

initiating the process of transforming the union did they hire full-time

organizers to help rm up the union and prepare for the subsequent

strikes.

Despite all the stressful hours teachers put in both in and out of

school these days, these self-selected leaders and activists managed to

organize grassroots caucuses, community alliances, stronger workplace

organizations, and mass strikes that have rippled through America’s

education system. Grassroots leaders from West Virginia and half a dozen

other “red” states along with the successful caucus-based union

takeovers in Chicago (CORE), Los Angeles (UTLA), and partially in

Massachusetts have changed the picture of teacher unionism dramatically

in a few short years.

It is worth noting, therefore, that in the case of the Chicago and Los

Angeles examples McAlevey discusses, the order of her “model” is

reversed. First, the untrained rank-and-le workers organize, lead a

series of ghts, and take over. Only then are the full-time organizers

hired, most of whom come from the ranks and have no formal training (No

Shortcuts, 120–1; and A Collective Bargain, 199) but a good deal of

experience. In these examples and many others, it was in fact “wisdom

emanating from the bottom” that made the elevation of struggle and the

transformation and democratization of the union possible. McAlevey, of

course, knows that workers can develop leadership skills in the course

of struggle, but for her this seems to be something exceptional and

“extraordinary.” She writes of the workers at the Smitheld packing plant

in North Carolina with a tone of surprise, “as the story of this ght

will show, the intensity of the previous ght made some of the workers’

leaders extraordinarily skilled, because of their experience in

struggle” (No Shortcuts, 154–5). That struggle involved two mass wildcat

strikes in 2006 led by the immigrant Latino workers in the plant before

the UFCW organizer arrived.

The “model” McAlevey proposes is less a replica of the early CIO’s rise

than an eort to stretch the essentially restraining and routinized

Wagner Act/Taft-Hartley framework of industrial relations to its limits.

For decades, however, rank-and-le initiative in this context has been

muted by a combination of the monopolization of real decision-making at

the top, the routinization of bargaining and shop-oor grievance

handling, the ceremonial and boring nature of most union meetings and

conventions, and it has been further paralyzed by the fear generated by

the economic insecurity of the neoliberal era. Substituting greater and

more skilled organizer initiative cannot undo this routinized

institutional framework by itself.

In this context, the attempt to nd more eective ways to organize and ght

can be traced to the debate over organizing that began in the 1990s

inspired by victories like the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors campaign

in 1990 and the ascent of John Sweeny’s “New Voice” team in 1995. It was

carried further in the works of Kate Bronfenbrenner, Tom Juravich, Ruth

Needleman, Bruce Nissen, Bill Fletcher, Jr., and many others, as well as

in the pages of Labor Notes and the books it has published. At least two

conclusions followed from that research and debate in terms of

unionization drives: membership involvement in organizing produced more

representation wins, and community support can make a dierence; 20 that

is, when these practices themselves do not just become more routinized

rituals or temporary “mobilizations” in a top-down “strategy,” as often

happens.

The ideas McAlevey is proposing add to the best of these conclusions

whatever their actual origins. They have been and will be used to

extract victories from time to time. Nevertheless, even taken together

all these innovations in organizing have not turned things around. On

the contrary, they have at best contributed to the rearguard resistance

to American labor’s continued retreat in the face of relentless employer

aggression. We have to ask if they are sucient for both the conditions

and the possibilities that have emerged in recent years and are now

taking shape. If not, what can we point to that might make a real

dierence?

Much has changed in the US labor movement and the context in which it

has struggled to survive over the past three or four decades. The

working class and union membership are more racially diverse, and women

play a much larger role in both. Most unions after the mid-1980s

reversed the anti-immigrant positions often held prior to the

acceleration of immigration. At the same time, the very nature of work

and the labor process has morphed yet again from simple, lean production

to its digitally driven reign of super-standardization (eat your heart

out Frederick Taylor), surveillance, and work intensication. This

transformation of work now embraces virtually all

types of labor. The increasing tendency of educated “millennials” to be

pushed down into the working class brings a new source of energy but

also uncertainty about one’s social or class identity. The multiple

connections of the production of goods and services have been tightened

by the development of a global, information-driven logistics

infrastructure that didn’t exist even at the dawn of the twenty-rst

century.

All of this can seem overwhelming, yet some of these changes also

present new opportunities for working class organization and action. The

tightening of work and the connections between workplaces, between goods

producers and service producers, and their key points of convergence in

major urban and metropolitan areas has rendered employers more

vulnerable. 21 McAlevey makes note of this briey, but it is an aspect of

contemporary capitalism that needs analytical development as a strategic

framework. 22 The downward mobility of so many “millennials” brings some

new energy to the digitalized, sometimes irregular or platformed

workforce from younger workers who are not that dierent from today’s

teacher insurgents. At the same time, increased racial diversity and the

growing role of women often give today’s struggles a more

representative, universal, and solidaristic character than many of those

in previous eras.

What may prove to be the most important development in creating a

renewed labor movement, however, is the increase in worker self-

activity. As David McNally has shown, this has increasingly taken the

form of mass strikes across the world by many dierent groups of workers

and others, a major sign of changing times. 23 In the US, the teachers’

movement is the most obvious example of this, but it is evident in the

rise of nurse militancy and unionism as well. Direct actions by

immigrant workers go back to the 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” and

Smitheld strikes McAlevey discusses. But they arise almost continuously

in unexpected corners of the economy, such as small actions at Amazon as

well as larger ones in the traditional “pastures of plenty,” like

Washington state’s apple orchards.

“While it may seem remote from union activity, even the mass widespread

protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis

represent a form of self-activity that is likely to influence events

beyond even its immediate focus on the depth of racism and police

brutality in the US.

Perhaps most unexpected, of course, are the many signs of worker

self-activity that have arisen amidst the twin crises of renewed

recession-cum-depression and the Covid-19 pandemic that accelerated it.

There have been strikes demanding protective gear, paid time o, and

other safety measures. Union bus drivers in Detroit and workers at

Briggs and Stratton in Milwaukee struck for protection. Nonunion workers

struck at Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and Fed Ex. Workers

at Amazon, for example, have gone where traditional unions feared to

tread. Countless lesser actions have also demonstrated worker

self-activity. The worker-initiated Amazonians United has engaged in

“deep organizing,” as they call it, forming locals across the country,

contacts around the world, and building on small actions with an

approach in which there are no professional organizers, which again

mixes up McAlevey’s order of things. 24

While it may seem remote from union activity, even the mass widespread

protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis

represent a form of self-activity that is likely to inuence events

beyond even its immediate focus on the depth of racism and police

brutality in the US. Urban upheavals, protests, and riots were an

integral part of the rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s. Black workers who

rebelled in the streets of Detroit in 1967 were among those who struck

and formed Black or integrated caucuses in the auto plants in the

following years. My own experience in both public sector organizing in

the 1960s and rank-and-le activity, and in a very

long strike of telephone workers in the early 1970s, convinced me of the

impact Black militancy had on the thinking and actions of both Black and

white workers in that period.

Furthermore, the protests and rioting in response to George Floyd’s

murder have been more visibly multiracial

,pgpgyy

than those in the 1960s or even Ferguson. To a greater degree than in

previous protests and riots over police murders of Black people, those

over George Floyd’s death have had more union support, including union

bus drivers who refused to carry prisoners for the police in New York

and elsewhere. On the other hand, many top leaders including Rich Trumka

of the AFL-CIO stopped short of criticizing the police “unions” for

their complicity in defending killer cops. 25 Given the intensity of

these mass demonstrations, there’s no doubt that today’s protesters and

rioters will return to their jobs cleaning the oces of the rich,

assisting the sick in hospitals, stacking shelves in a supermarket, or

picking and packing in a warehouse with “attitude.” Protest and

militancy are contagious. Just as the upsurge that began in Ferguson

created a new wave of activists and gave birth to Black Lives Matter, so

this latest rebellion in the streets by working class people may create

unknown workplace leaders and activists who will be disinclined to take

the boss’s shit anymore.

Crisis, of course, is the midwife of change, something the

powers-that-be understand all too well. The economic crisis of the 1930s

produced the great labor upheaval of that period as well as the New

Deal, while that of the 1970s and early 1980s gave rise to the

neoliberal era, as capital and its political acolytes turned against

virtually all the supporting elements of working class life. The

Covid-19 pandemic and depression have laid bare many of capitalism’s

fault lines, while making countless workers aware of their central place

in the entire reproduction of life and the boss’s prots. Simultaneously,

it has exposed how little employers and politicians care about the daily

plight of working class people and driven some of these people to direct

action under very dicult circumstances. It is perhaps premature to say:

It’s our turn. But the increase in working class self-activity is surely

a sign of something new.

More than that, it is an invitation for unions to adjust and act. If

there is a continued surge of collective self- organizing and actions,

it may be neither a simple series of “hot shops” nor a neat industry- or

sector-wide movement. The distinction between the two is likely to be

blurred—in part because interactions of “industries” and the supply

chains and digital ows of nance that connect workplaces are complex and

will no doubt change as a result of the pandemic and depression. Today’s

supply chains and logistics clusters don’t just connect factories to

warehouses to stores; they also link to services, and services to

factories, warehouses, and so on. They are all about motion within and

between worksites. Actions at one can bring down the other. Workers in

this context are not likely to wait for organizers to bring a neat

“industry” focus. In this context, a static view of strategy can become

a barrier.

A similarly static view of working class attitudes can also be a

hindrance in responding to a changing situation. In 2019 Gallup took two

polls that indicate important changes in the way many Americans view

society. The 2019 poll on whether or not Americans approve of labor

unions found that 64 percent did, up from an all-time (since 1947) low

of 48 percent in 2009. 26 A poll on political attitudes that same year

found that 43 percent of those who responded thought socialism would be

a “good thing” for the country. When Gallup asked a similar question in

1942 only 25 percent thought socialism would be a good thing. In 2019,

58 percent of those between eighteen and thirty-four years approved of

socialism. It wasn’t just those college-educated millennials who thought

socialism was okay. Among all ages, those with a college degree liked it

by 45 percent, while those without one thought it good for the country

by 46 percent. “Non-whites” approved by 57 percent. 27

That is, more US residents as of 2019, including many working class

people, not only like labor unions, they even think socialism is a good

thing. Some, of course, were introduced to the idea of socialism via

Bernie Sanders’s two runs for president and were even willing to vote

for a self-proclaimed democratic socialist in 2016 and 2020. But the

approval of socialism was already on the rise as indicated by an earlier

Gallup poll in 2010 when 36 percent approved of socialism. 28 Just what

they meant by socialism remains to be seen. But the fact is, there were

precious few socialist organizers or agitators among the millions who

answered in favour of socialism. Capitalism pushed them in this

direction, and they drew their own conclusions.

The Gallup organization didn’t speculate on how these two sets of

opinions might relate to one another and to the rst green shoots of

worker self-organization, but we should. We probably won’t see red ags

waving in the streets of America any time soon, but minds are opening

just as more people are acting. As Gramsci said, “the

rststepinemancipatingoneselffrompoliticalandsocialslaveryisthatoffreeingthemind”29

Thelong-

rst step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is

that of freeing the mind. The long- festering problems and now almost

1930s-type underlying conditions are producing these changes, but it is

the convergence of new thinking on organization and politics, on the one

hand, and increased action, on the other, that are the major ingredients

in a potential social explosion on a scale not seen for decades.

The rise of collective worker self-activity and therefore, of natural

workplace organizers will be the biggest “structure test” of America’s

unions and labor leaders in generations. The advice McAlevey oers in her

“model” is mostly good and useful. But it addresses institutional

arrangements that have decayed without suggesting how to change them. At

the same time, the “model” preserves or even enhances a dominant place

for the professional organizer that can miss or even discourage the most

fundamental ingredient of power—collective worker initiative from below.

Perhaps the time has come to reverse the “model.”

Liza Featherstone, “The Left in Lockdown” Jacobin, May 17, 2020.

Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, and Jane Slaughter, Secrets of a

Successful Organizer

(Brooklyn: A Labor Notes Book, 2016).

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

(Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2002), 99–100.

For multiple examples of this see Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and

Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel

Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long

1970s (London: Verso, 2010); Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?

Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2001).

Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform

from Above, the Promise of Renewal from Below (London: Verso, 2007),

104.

See, for example, Sheila Cohen, Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers

Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back (London: Pluto Press, 2006),

149–73.

For the best detailed discussion of building union democracy see Mike

Parker and Martha Gruelle, Democracy is Power: Rebuilding Unions from

the Bottom Up (Detroit: A Labor Notes Book, 1999). . International Trade

Administration, “Steel Imports Report: United States,” May 2020, Global

Steel

Trade Monitor,

https://Legacy.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/imports-us.pdf; Bruce A.

Blonigen, Benjamin H. Liebman, and Welsey W. Wilson, “Trade Policy and

Market Power: The Case of the US Steel Industry,” NBER Working Paper

Series, Working Paper 13671, December 2007,

https://www.researchgate.net/publications/5188626_Trade_Policy_and_Market_Power_The_Case_of

) the US Steel Industry/gures?lo=1; Frank Giarratani, Ravi Madhavan, and

Gene Gruver, “Steel

Industry Restructuring and Location,” (Pittsburgh: Center for Industry

Studies, University of Pittsburgh), May 7, 2012; Nicholas Tolomeo,

Michael Fitzgerald, and Joe Eckelman, “US Steel Sector Thrives as Mills

Move Up Quality Ladder,” Insight, S&P Global Platts, May 9, 2019;

Associated Press, “A Trump Weighs Taris, US Steelmakers Enjoy Rising

Prots”, March 13, 2018.

Federal Reserve Statistical Release, Industrial Production and

Capacity Utilization, G.17 (419), December 17, 2019,

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/20191217/g17.pdf.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Productivity and Costs,”

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-

bin/print.pl/1pc/prodybar.htm; Conference Board, International

Comparisons of Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labor Costs Trends,

2012 (New York: Conference Board, 2013), 7.

Bureau of Labor Statistics “Production and Nonsupervisory Employees ”

2019; The FRED* Blog SECNEREFER & SETON

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Production and Nonsupervisory Employees,

2019; The FRED Blog,

“How’s Manufacturing”; for a more detailed analyses of why imports are

not the major culprit and productivity matters, see Kim Moody, On New

Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War

(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 8–13, 191–5; Kim Moody, “Productivity,

Crises and Imports in the Loss of Manufacturing Jobs,” Capital & Class,

44, no. 1 (2020): 47–61.

See, for example, Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the

American Workers, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Miin Company, 1969); and

Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).

Kim Moody, “Introduction”, Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors

Strike of 1936–1937, new edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2020, in press).

Michael Goldeld and Cody R. Melcher, “The Myth of 7(a): Worker

Militancy, Progressive Legislation, and the Coal Miners” Labor: Studies

in Working-Class History 16, no. 14 (December 2019): 49–65. The UMWA is

the United Mine Workers of America.

David Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism: The SWOC Era,” in

Paul F. Clark, Peter Gottlieb and Donald Kennedy, eds., Forging a Union

of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC, & the United Steelworkers (Ithaca: ILR

Press, 1987), 15–16.

Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 440–3, 604–7.

Leon Fink and Bryan Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History

of Hospital Workers’ Union

Local 1199 (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 181–243.

Fink and Greenberg, Upheaval, 202.

Fink and Greenberg, Upheaval, 203–4.

For some of the works in this research and debate see: Kate

Bronfenbrenner et al, eds., Organizing to Win: New Research on Union

Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998; Lowell Turner, Harry

Katz, and Richard W. Hurd, eds., Rekindling the Movement: Labor’s Quest

for Relevance in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

2001); and Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss, eds., Rebuilding Labor: Organizing

and Organizers in the New Union Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 2004).

Kim Moody, “Labour and the contradictory logic of logistics” Work

Organization, Labour & Globalisation 13, no. 1, 13(1) (Spring 2019):

79–95

For some more works on this see Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of

Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2014); Jake Alimahomid-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds.,

Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain

(London: Pluto Press, 2018); and Moody, On New Terrain, 59–69.

David McNally, “The Return of the Mass Strike: Teachers, Students,

Feminists, and the New Wave of Popular Upheavals,” Spectre 1: no. 1

(2020), 18–33.

For this and a summary of such actions up to June 2020 see Jane

Slaughter “In a Pandemic, Finding Ways to Fight New and Old Foes” Labor

Notes 495, June 2020, 1, 3–4; Bridget Read, “Every Food and Delivery

Strike Happening Over Coronavirus” The Cut, May 27, 2020; Celine

McNicholas and Margaret Poydock, “Workers are Striking During the

Coronovirus: Labor Law must be Reformed to Strengthen this Fundamental

Right,” Working Economics Blog, Economic Policy Institute, June 22,

2020; Chance Zombor, “Why Is It Never “Class Struggle” When Black

Workers Fight Back?,” Portside, July 5, 2020.

Saurav Sarkar, “Twin Cities Labor Mobilizes Against George Floyd Murder”

Labor Notes, May 29, 2020;

https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2020/05/twin-cities-labor-mobilizes-against-george-oyd-murder;

Alexia Fernandez Campbell “As Protests Grow Big Labor Sides with Police

Unions”

oyd murder; Alexia Fernandez Campbell, As Protests Grow, Big Labor

Sides with Police Unions Center for Public Integrity, June 5, 2020.

Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes in the US and the author of

several books on labour and politics, including On New Terrain: How

Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books,

2017). He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of

Westminster in London, and a member of the University and College Union

and the National Union of Journalists.