Little Rock Exhausted after a long day, I fell asleep on children’s time, which wasn’t terrible, since my watch gave me my highest sleep score ever at 70. I can remember one weird dream before waking. I got a call, bizarrely, from the EPI, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, telling me to click on a link in the Times with an article by an economist that had a new strategy for unions. I couldn’t find it on the front page, but mi companera, showed me it was just a picture of the guy, a rumpled, professorial type with a half-knotted tie and sportscoat. I clicked on it and saw an old-timey handle-bar and mutton-chopped worker in profile surrounded by a picture of his tools. You can only do this in a dream, but for some reason, I put my spoon in the picture, and it was pudding. If the message was that workers’ power lies in the ability to use their tools to win, well, maybe, but I can’t be sure, since it was just a dream, even though it clearly reveals what was on my mind for lots of reasons.
A week ago, I was bringing donuts and walking the picket line with nurse members of NNU, National Nurses United, who have been trying to get a contract with University Medical Center in New Orleans for a year. Fifty of us broke the dawn with good spirit on Canal Street with cars and trucks honking their support. We were in front of a high fence, the Super Bowl was on the city’s minds, and the newspaper was claiming the issue was that the nurses wanted California wages, when patient care and simply decent pay were the real disagreements. The nurses have the tools, but since the patients come first, they are constrained from using them. In fact, their two-day strike was answered by the nonprofit hospital company imposing a three-day lockout, because their contract for scabs wouldn’t deliver without a five-day guarantee. Workers are fighting with their feet hobbled, and their hands tied behind their backs, despite the community on their side and justice their simple goal.
On my mind was also a strike by ACORN’s affiliate, STRASCAS, led by 500 sugarcane workers in the plantations outside Yaoundé, Cameroon. Police, acting for the company, killed two of our strikers. Protests over the tragedy prompted complaints by the European Commission, among others. The company made numerous concessions to end the strike, which might seem a win, despite the tragedy, but they still refused to recognize the union.
A week or so before ACORN’s gig workers union in India called the first gig workers strike in the Indian state of Bihar. 10,000 gig workers, mostly delivery and Uber-type drivers, joined the one-day strike and literally shut the state capitol down. The strike was hugely successful. The companies made numerous concessions, but they still refused to recognize the union.
Headlines last night highlighted the ruling by a Massachusetts-based federal judge that the forced resignation program for federal employees pushed by Trump and Musk, can now go forward, because the workers’ unions, AFGE and NTEU, did “not have standing” to bring the suit. The judge ignored the issue of the illegality of the plan itself, essentially because he refused to recognize the unions.
Are you sharing my worrisome dream now?
Among other reasons, I’m in Little Rock to meet with leaders of Local 100’s city workers union that is preparing for negotiations on their first contract next month. A vast majority of workers signed up with Local 100 to demand recognition and a contract. The city agrees we have the majority, and the mayor assures us that we are recognized. Nonetheless, we only won commitments to schedule the bargaining because, first, the city panicked, when one of our leaders in an early meeting expressed fear that if the city found itself covered in snow and ice, if the workers weren’t happy, what would happen, which prompted quick assurances, but no dates. Secondly, when workers planned to swarm the council meeting last week, a last-minute call from the mayor finally forced the March schedule.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that companies, governments, and politicians know they need the workers, but like Trump, are willing to offer some promises and small victories, but absolutely resist at all costs allowing workers to build power by forming their own unions. The threat is frequently more powerful than the action, but in these cases, too many are forcing the strikes and still avoiding the unions.
This is no dream, but a nightmare.