Pearl River Amazon continues to specialize in stalling the bargaining in the one large warehouse win in Staten Island. The worker-led independent union has now switched leadership and affiliated with the Teamsters. This is a global union interest, but increasingly out of focus for lack of forward motion. Starbucks baristas continue to record organizing success at the five-year mark since the first victory in Buffalo. More than 700 stores with an estimated 15,000 workers have unionized with less than 200 losses, yet it has been months since there was any report of bargaining progress. The headline labor national organizing campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks have been inspiring, but struck.
Talking to Professor Abe Walker of Fayetteville State in North Carolina about the long campaign by the UAW to organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which he studied and shared in a new book, Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South and an excerpt in Social Policy, raised some interesting points, but also some questions about all of these campaigns. The UAW has been serious about organizing transplants or foreign automakers for decades, but the organizing drive in Chattanooga was unquestionably epic.
The union endured two election losses, before a victory two years ago. Walker charts the losses and the win closely. He credits the win to a change of leadership in the national union, a rank-and-file workers movement, and alterations in strategy and tactics there, as well as to the excitement generated by the creative had waged against the Big Three automakers in a significant contract victory before the election. Moving from the rolling strike at carmakers and suppliers and the VW victory, the union tried to quickly move several other plants to elections on the momentum, feeling that they had the wind at their back and could ride the wave to wins, but they lost badly in these efforts.
On one hand, building momentum in organizing campaigns is the holy grail for organizers that we try to build into all of our work as a key ingredient in moving workers and winning. If we have it, we can win bigger and faster, sweeping the targets away in the wake of the pressure and force of the members. On the other hand, momentum is crack for organizers. It’s catching lightning in a bottle. It’s something we seek, but can’t conjure or control. As much as we make it part of our strategy, those of us who do the work understand that it’s not a tactic that we can employ so much as something in the wind that can catch fire and propel us like magic, if everything comes together, and we get lucky.
Momentum is at the core of a movement. It’s not an organization, but it can help build an organization and a movement. A movement pushes away everything in its way. Everyone has to be in or out. At ACORN we always said we were not a movement, but if a movement emerged, we wanted to be part of it for the power it could build and change it could make. But, just as in the Chattanooga UAW case, it is built on hard work in the vineyards. There are no shortcuts. The question in Chattanooga is not just whether the changes within the UAW created the victory, but whether a decade of organizing and two losses weren’t equally critical in preparing the ground for new seeds to grow.
In all of our organizing and campaigns, we try to create the conditions that could create momentum and would exploit momentum, if everything comes together. Then there’s the crack problem. I can remember a campaign in New Orleans where our union was organizing workers in all seven central business district parking lots. Some were larger and smaller, stronger and weaker than others. I thought if we could build some momentum in the early contests, we could win them all. I sequenced the filings before NLRB so that my strongest came first in order for the wins to create the momentum to carry the rest. These were different times under different rules in the late 80s and early 90s. The lawyers for the parking lot companies forced us to a hearing on our first filing, delaying the vote, but agreed to a stipulation for a quick election on one of the smaller, weaker ones, that we couldn’t avoid. We lost that one narrowly, couldn’t recover on the second, and ended up pulling the petitions for the rest. Just as experienced organizers can feel the momentum, you can also catch the smell of death as the momentum breaks the other way.
There have to be some lessons here somewhere. Amazon organizers thought they had the momentum from one victory and then lost in two subsequent organizing drives. The UAW tried to sign cards with social media on the internet, with weaker committees, while eschewing hitting the doors and lost subsequent elections. While Starbucks workers continue to organize in one place or another in stores spread throughout the country burning a lot of kindling, few areas seem to be able to set a bonfire sufficient to tear down the company’s walls.
Momentum is a critical organizing ingredient, but it is not a successful organizing strategy. We have a lot of questions that we still need to answer.