Marble Falls These days should be the best of days for workers to organize unions, even as they may be among the worst of days in terms US labor law and the NLRB under Trump that is administering the law for private sector workers.
Polling indicates support in the general public for unions is a near record levels of over 70%. All of this should provide opportunity for new organizing, and some unions are taking advantage within their existing jurisdictions, as well spreading their wings to offer a home to new categories of workers. At the same time, there are gaps. Institutional labor doesn’t have the resources and membership that it has enjoyed in the past after a generation of falling membership and declining density in the general workforce. Many segments of the unorganized are informal and lower-waged, which challenges expanded organizing drives within institutional labor, because the payoff will be less, if at all. An organizing drive like the long-running effort at Starbucks has been successful at notching election victories, but converting to a contract with regularized dues payments has been illusive, despite the size and strength of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Even they can only afford so many drives like this.
Some of these gaps are being filled by workers organizing independently outside of usual union jurisdictions within the AFL-CIO or big unions. On Wade’s World recently, Tyler Daguerre described one such collaboration, the Independent Organizing Network, which has tried to respond to workers’ demands for representation. This scrappy, volunteer led and operated alliance of largely small independents began in Massachusetts organizing coffee houses, some with Starbucks and some local chains. They were supported by the National Lawyers Guild, as part of the statewide chapter. The Guild has long been the home for progressive lawyers both sympathetic and supportive of unions, civil rights, and other underrepresented and often unpopular groups.
A visit to ION’s website features some of their campaigns where they have supported unionization. There’s a nonprofit, Art + Feminism United, Attaboy Local 134, a popular bar in New York City, the Blue Bottle Independent Union shops in Boston and the East Bay in California, where Blue Bottle is a popular specialty coffeehouse, as well as the Think Coffee Independent Union. Filling another niche, they assisted some Teamsters union staff in organizing independently and 400 resident assistants at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
None of these efforts have been huge, and collectively they hardly move the needle within the ranks of organized labor, but these are early days for a young upstart alliance. They may be onto something. There are more independent unions that some might realize. Certainly, some are huge like the National Education Association (NEA). Others are historic like the UE, United Electrical Workers that is home not only to old General Electric plants in Massachusetts but a collection of other shops in Chicago and elsewhere. Tyler himself recently signed on as an organizer with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which was originally a breakoff of SEIU’s big California hospital and nursing home union, but now has 19,000 members in its own right. Recently, there was news of 50,000 gig workers having organized independently in California and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders organizing as well. Our own Local 100 began as an independent union, affiliated with SEIU for 25 years, and is once again independent with a handful of exciting new organizing drives now in the process of adding municipal workers in various cities and counties in Arkansas. Many independents fueled the growth of big unions like SEIU and AFSCME through mergers for reasons both good and bad, and there are still others out there, so there might be role for solidarity among them, even though by definition, independents are fiercely independent.
The important thing is that workers need unions and when they can’t find one, there is ample evidence that workers themselves can build their own union. The Independent Organizing Network and other efforts can help them find a home or build one.