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Title: Ehrenreich on Unions
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: August 1, 2005
Language: en
Topics: unions
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/08/ehrenreich-on-unions.html

Kevin Carson

Ehrenreich on Unions

Barbara Ehrenreich has an interesting piece of analysis at The

Progressive.

In the fifty years of the AFL-CIO’s existence, Big Labor has shrunk to a

third of its former size, but it’s been clinging to its outsized clothes

and outmoded habits. While membership dwindles, the AFL-CIO has

continued to act like a big shot—doling out tens of millions to the

Democratic Party and occupying a palatial spread located within

kiss-blowing distance of the White House.

Nor has it budged from the style of “business unionism” developed by

Samuel Gompers in the early twentieth century, in which unions act much

like big insurance companies, offering their “consumers” the prospect of

better wages and job security. It’s Tiny Labor today, and—split or

not—the challenge is to make it also lean, mean, and scrappy as a

starving terrier.

She has a list of recommendations for doing just that. Some of them, she

says, come second-hand from labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, author of the

excellent Whose Side Are You On? Among my favorites:

Organize, don’t subsidize. The amount spent on organizing is one of the

key issues separating Change to Win from the rest of the AFL-CIO. Stern

and the other dissidents want to boost the federation’s organizing to

$72 million; Sweeney would increase it to $30 million out of a total

budget of $125 million. Where does the rest of that money go now? Well,

a lot goes to subsidize the Democratic Party....

Open up membership to every pro-union American. If I want to support the

women’s movement, all I have to do is send in my dues to NOW. But to

join a union, most people have to go through the trial-by-fire of a

union organizing drive in their workplace. This isn’t so in Germany, for

example, where individuals can join a union whether their workplace is

organized or not. Here, the Steelworkers have started opening up their

union to unorganized individuals, but for most Americans the unions

remain a distant, inaccessible fortress. Individual members wouldn’t be

just dues-payers and supporters; they could be the seeds of organizing

drives in their workplaces.

That sounds a lot like Alexis Buss’s “minority unionism,” in which

people interested in forming a union in their workplace just do it,

without bothering to get a majority local certified by the NLRB.

I strongly agree with the main point of Ehrenreich’s next

recommendation--”Advance the class, not just the membership”--but

strongly disagree with the particulars of her class war agenda. As you

might expect, she pushes a lot of corporate liberal/socdem goo-gooism

about national health care, subsidized housing, and the like. But it

really would be nice to see union lobbyists fighting corporate welfare

and other aspects of state capitalism, as well as pushing for green

tax-shifting from labor to the access rights to natural resources,

cutting the bottom tax rungs, shifting local sales taxes and property

taxes on buildings to taxes on land value alone, etc. Instead of new

income redistributions and new state interventions, why not just stop

the state-subsidized transfer of income from poor to rich that’s already

taking place, and translate the savings into bottom-up tax cuts?

Shee-it, if the Roman Empire has survived into the present day, there’d

probably be Social Security and workplace safety regulations for slaves.

Instead of assuming a system based on absentee ownership and wage labor,

and then regulating the position of labor to make it more humanly

tolerable, why not just let the laborer keep his full product in the

first place, instead of working to feed capitalists, landlords, and

bureaucrats in addition to himself? Ehrenreich, like the kindly farmer

in Tolstoy’s parable, doesn’t want to set the cattle free--she just

wants the capitalists to treat them better so they’ll be easier to milk.

And further down the list....

Lose those buildings. Big Labor might have been able to afford them, but

it’s unseemly for Tiny Labor to be sitting on hundreds of millions of

dollars worth of elegant real estate in D.C., and I mean the Teamsters’

building as well as the AFL-CIO headquarters. Sell off the buildings

right now, at the height of the real estate bubble, and fan out into

storefronts and church basements around the country.

And what’s this with holding this summer’s AFL-CIO convention in a hotel

that charges at least $186 a night? Ever heard of Motel 6?

Hmmm.... I wonder if the I.W.W.‘s former headquarters at Wobbly Hall in

Chicago is still around.