BM

My reading of history is that militancy, on its own, has been insufficient to grow the labor movement and to make it a powerful force in American society. The moments when the labor movement really gained economic as well as social and political power were moments when it addressed fundamental political and even moral issues that existed in society.

There was a huge amount of workplace militancy from the 1870s all the way through the early 1920s. For the most part, those uprisings were defeated at the hands of the armed forces of the state — whether it was the local, state, or federal government. In the ’30s, you have an economic crisis that demands that the so-called “labor question” and the issue of mass consumption be addressed on a societal basis. So you have shifts among elite opinion, and you have a shift in the posture of government, so that, for example, the National Guard and federal troops are not available to evict the sit-down strikers in Flint because the New Deal is going in a different direction.

This creates the conditions in which the labor movement can really expand on an explosive scale.

There’s no question that economic uprisings like what took place in the early years of the Depression — especially the movements of the unemployed, the textile strike of 1934, and the general strikes that occurred in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco that same year — create the conditions that force the passage of the Wagner Act. But without the Act and without the political and ideological changes engendered to some extent by Roosevelt’s second presidential campaign, it’s not clear that we arrive at the exact conditions that were necessary to build the CIO.

My point is that people on the Left need to be attuned to both sides of the equation: to organizing workers to fight the boss, which is the foundation, but also to position the labor movement to be the vehicle through which the broad needs of the working class are expressed, and help to create the kind of ideological, political, even moral conditions that demand a new labor movement.

It’s at least arguable that we are on the verge of a period where that might be happening. The intense focus on economic inequality in the eight years since Occupy, and the success of the Sanders campaign three years ago — and its translation now into the elections of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and so on — has created a sense that only an organized working class can truly address the rampant inequality that has characterized the neoliberal era.

I also think this is why the efforts of unions like the Chicago Teachers Union and the United Teachers of Los Angeles to frame their bargaining demands as being not just about the needs of their members, but about the interests of students and parents, is so critical. The whole project of “bargaining for the common good” is about attempting to align the labor movement with the interests of the working class as a whole, rather than just negotiating over the short-term interests of dues-paying members.