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It has been nearly two decades since “The Rank and File Strategy” was written. Since that time, much has changed in the world and in the US labor movement. We have seen the Great Recession, the eurozone crisis, resistance to the austerity these have brought on in Mediterranean Europe and elsewhere, and the Arab Spring and the disappointing retreats that often followed, to mention some of these changes. The US labor movement has continued to shrink, with most of its efforts to grow failing. Partly in response to this failure, six unions, led by the SEIU, split from the AFL-CIO in 2005, creating the Change to Win Federation. Some unions fell into a virtual civil war. Public sector unions have seen an unprecedented attack not only on wages and conditions, but on the very right to bargain and, perhaps, exist. On the other hand, the role of immigrant workers has grown and with it new organizations and resistance. At the same time, moments of high-profile resistance, like the 2011 Wisconsin upsurge or the September 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, display labor’s potential power. The question naturally arises: How does all of this affect the idea of a rank- and-file approach to furthering effective class action? How do they impact the hopes for building a working class-based socialist movement in the United States? The fundamental dilemma that brought forth a rank-and-file approach to the work of socialists in the unions remains the same: the disconnect between revolutionary socialism and the vast majority of organized workers — and the means to end it. No attempt will be made here to rewrite the original article, to update every trend, or to pick out all the big and little mistakes and poor formulations. For the most part, I believe, the historical analysis stands up to scrutiny.¹ In terms of the rank-and-file perspective itself, the basic choice between permeation of the labor bureaucracy and a rank-and-file approach remains unavoidable, as all the social realities and economic pressures that conservatize the upper layers of unions remain, and in many cases, are even stronger under today’s economic conditions. On the other hand, the pressures on the mass of workers, organized and unorganized, are if anything even greater today than a decade ago. It is precisely the clash of these contradictory pressures that from time to time gives rise to rebellion in the ranks. There are, to be sure, some hopeful signs. Efforts at mobilization and new tactics have been adopted at least partially by a few unions. Furthermore, rank-and-file rebellions have arisen in a number of unions, mostly at the local level, as old leaders prove unable or unwilling to enlist the members in resistance or even to resist at all. More generally, there appears to be a new generation of local activists and leaders, in and out of office, who want to fight the intolerable conditions being imposed by employers both public and private. In this emerging layer there is a strong understanding of the importance of workplace organization as a power base for resistance and growth. It is in these developments, still very much minority trends to be sure, that socialists can find hope and a place to begin — again.

Old Strategies Confront Intensified Trends It cannot be said that many of America’s labor leaders haven’t tried various things to halt or reverse declining union fortunes. As is their custom, however, most of these have been top-down efforts that bypass the membership or those they hope to organize. The formation of Change to Win, for example, was supposed to put new life and energy into organizing; it didn’t. It was a nonstarter that led to more top-level internal conflict than new organizing.² Indeed, the grand troika of “new”union tactics of the 1990s and 2000s — mergers, neutrality / card check, and “leverage” — have all failed to produce the expected or intended results. Mergers, which accelerated in the 1990s and were supposed to produce the resources needed to organize, have failed to do so. Instead, they have produced a number of giant, multi-jurisdictional conglomerate unions that render union democracy even more difficult, without significant organizing breakthroughs or financial well-being. As Steve Early reported in 2012, neutrality / card-check schemes, often known as “Bargaining to Organize,” have “stalled.” “In the last several years,” he writes, “few AFL-CIO or Change to Win affiliates have made any large-scale ‘Bargaining to Organize’ breakthroughs.” Leverage, the application of outside, often indirect pressure of various kinds on the targeted company, while effective in some circumstances, has also failed to redress the deteriorating balance of class power. At best it is often an additional pressure during a hard-fought strike. At worst, it becomes a substitute for member mobilization and real direct action, as it is mostly deployed and administered by union professionals. Below, I will address how a rank-and-file approach relates to the question of organizing. First, I will look briefly at two major trends confronting unions and their members as well as the unorganized majority. In the wake of the failure to organize even enough new workers to prevent continued decline, union membership has fallen further, with the Great Recession wiping out such gains as were made in 2007 and 2008. Altogether, union membership shrank from 16.3 million, or 13.5 percent of eligible workers, in 2000 to 14.8 million, or 11.8 percent, in 2011. Unlike in previous years when most losses were in the private sector, in 2011 it was the public sector unions that lost more than sixty thousand members, reflecting the first signs of the accelerated attack on public workers and their bargaining rights. The only bright spot in the 2011 figures was the unexpected gain of 110,000 union members in the private sector — almost all of them in health care. Along with hotels, this is one of the few areas of union growth and one in which rank and file-based mobilization tactics are frequently employed, albeit sometimes along with card check and leverage.

Employer Resistance Two indicators of increased employer resistance to unions in the private sector were the rise in the ratio of 8a Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs) to NLRB elections filed by unions against employers and the increased use of permanent replacement workers in the face of strikes. An 8a ULP indicates that the union sees an illegal practice by management, such as firing a union activist, during a representation election. The ratio of 8a ULPs to NLRB elections had been rising throughout most of the post–World War II period. But even as the number of NLRB election pursued by unions fell from 2000 to 2009, this ratio rose from 6.3 per election to 9.7. The second indication of resistance to unions is the rise in the use of permanent replacement workers during strikes. Three surveys conducted from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s show that employers not only were willing to threaten the use of scabs more in 2003 than in 1996, but increased the ratio of the actual deployment of permanent replacements during strikes from one in eight to three in four. In the public sector, the campaign to destroy or limit collective bargaining has mainly taken a legislative form. Yet there has been resistance in several states and it appears here, as elsewhere, that mass direct action is the key. The point is that tactics like mergers, leverage, or Bargaining to Organize (or mere pressure politics) are not sufficient. They cannot be effective in and of themselves in the face of intensified employer efforts to extract a higher rate of surplus value in which opposition to new unionization and efforts to roll back unionism are key. It isn’t simply a matter of the age- old hatred of unions American capital has harbored since the dawn of industrialization. Rather, it is the realization by capital and its political representatives that profitability has come to depend on increased wage compression and workplace intensification. The increased rate of surplus value resulting from these helped create the period of growth, with its ups and downs, from 1982 through 2007. Any hopes of a general capitalist recovery since the crash of 2008 are, if anything, even more dependent on the ability to restrain wages and increase productivity through work intensification. Unions, even conservative ones, in this context, represent a real or potential barrier to the achievement of an increased rate of exploitation and hence a return to profitability. This brings us to the matter of work reorganization and intensification.

Work Intensification and the Wage-Productivity Gap The most visible statistical result of work reorganization and intensification is the wage-productivity gap that has characterized the last three decades. According to the Economic Policy Institute, while productivity rose 37.8 percent from 1995 through 2011, median real wages rose only 9.6 percent. Those for a college graduate rose 12.6 percent and those for a high-school graduate a mere 6.2 percent.¹² It is obvious from these figures that the rate of surplus value must have increased significantly as the value of labor power decreased. Despite continued sluggish growth, profits per unit of real gross value added rose by 14 percent from the beginning of 2010 through mid-2012, while unit labor costs rose less than 1 percent.¹³ In other words, wage restraint and work intensification were working for capital. Much of this is the product of lean production methods, although it appears that US capital has gone beyond the softer sides of those production methods to cruder methods of control and compulsion. These two grim trends, union decline and work intensification, are of course linked. Bargaining power over wages, benefits, and working conditions in a majority of unionized workplaces continued to diminish. One indicator of declining union power (or possibly the willingness to use it) was that bargained wage increases have fallen from more than 3 percent a year from 2002 to 2008 to 1.7 percent in the first half of 2012, despite rising productivity and profits. Furthermore, the percentage of new contracts with no wage increase had risen to a third by 2012. Things are even worse in the area of benefits and pensions. Clearly, this contributed to the continued wage-productivity gap and profitability. How does this relate to the rank-and-file strategy?

The Missing Tasks The Rank-and-File Strategy ended with six tasks for socialist work in the unions. This list more or less stands as a general guide. However, in light of these accelerated trends, it now seems to me there are two glaring omissions: a socialist role in organizing the unorganized and the centrality of workplace organization in a socialist approach to union work. But is there a particularly socialist approach to union or workplace organizing? I would answer yes. We proceed from the proposition argued by Marx that consciousness grows from struggle and self-activity and that unions, despite their limitations, can be, as Engels put it, “schools of war” in which the workers prepare themselves for larger fights to come and become “fit for administrative and political work.” This is only true, however, if unions are in fact willing and able to struggle effectively, to mobilize the workers to engage in that struggle, and for the members to have access to the union’s administration and politics (i.e., union democracy). While more unions today employ mobilization tactics, there is still often a tendency to keep things under bureaucratic control. Since most organizing as it is currently done is administered by the international unions, bureaucratic business unionism, still the norm, is a barrier to effective struggle. Of course, the socialist task is to organize against this and for basic changes in union leadership, policy, and structure. Within that longer-range task, however, are some specifics. We have long known that unions are most likely to win representation when, as Kate Bronfenbrenner once put it, “they run aggressive and creative campaigns utilizing a rank-and-file, grassroots intensive strategy, building a union and acting like a union from the very beginning of the campaign.” Campaigns like UNITE-HERE’s Hotel Workers Rising or those by the new National Union of Healthcare Workers and National Nurses United appear to have taken this advice more than most. Nevertheless, socialists with potential influence in organizing campaigns should fight for and help organize for this “rank-and-file, grassroots intensive” approach. Another important path to increased organizing lies through the local union. Here, in what is likely to be a more democratic setting, stewards and members can be mobilized to organize workers in nearby and related industries or occupations and up and down the supply chain. Some locals, like CWA Local 1037, a public sector union in New Jersey, use members and an extensive stewards organization to recruit new members. Another example, at least when it was under Teamsters for a Democratic Union leadership, was Teamsters Local 174. In addition to involvement in more traditional organizing efforts, socialists can push for opening union membership beyond workplaces that win formal majority recognition, by whatever means. Prior to World War II, workers did not wait to win recognition before “acting like a union.” Indeed, the CIO union would not have triumphed in the 1930s if they had. Non-majority or “open-source” unionism could bring huge numbers into the labor movement. There are already a number of experiments with this approach. None of these approaches are panaceas, but they do point to ways to increase union power, a key goal for socialists. What is needed and what we would work for is to turn these practical approaches into is a broad working-class movement, incorporating new and old unions, immigrant organizations, workers centers, and worker-resource projects, powerful enough to push the employers back and shift the center of class relations.

Power on the Job The late historian Giovanni Arrighi observed that as industry became more capital intensive, craft workers and their unions tended to lose their “marketplace bargaining power,” but as the division of labor and dependence on vast amounts of capital grew, production became more vulnerable to strikes and the workers’ “workplace bargaining power” at the point of production increased. Today, with endless outsourcing, subcontracting, privatizing, and so on, the picture is more complicated. Union organizing, for example, often requires both a marketplace and a workplace approach. The strategy that led to the victory of Justice for Janitors in 1990, for example, relied on a marketplace approach to organize these contract workers. That is, they had to bring all the janitors in the Los Angeles area into the union in order to reduce competition among them. In other cases, more than one layer of employers has to be fought. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had to fight and bargain with two sets of employers. The question arises: Does this fragmentation of the workforce mean not only that marketplace approaches may be needed in some cases, but, more seriously, that the workplace power that characterized the era of industrial unionism has evaporated? On the contrary: the whole structure of the contemporary production of goods and services, frequently linked by just-in-time or “logistics” systems, is highly vulnerable to strikes and other direct actions. While some workers have more workplace bargaining power than others, many possess the ability to disrupt production to the degree to which they are well organized on the job. This, in turn, opens the possibility and opportunity for solidarity actions and for the extension of unionization along the supply chain. If Marx and Engels thought of trade unions as “schools” of war or sites where workers become “fit for administrative and political work,” socialists today should understand that building workplace organization capable of disrupting the labor process is also a training ground for the wielding of greater, more extensive power down the (revolutionary) road. It is, to some degree, a transitional form of organization and power. To oversimplify, today’s shop-steward organization may be tomorrow’s factory council — even if that is well down that road. At the moment, workplace shop-stewards’ organization is the key to effective resistance and to the greater disruptions required to shift the balance of class forces. For socialists, then, building this kind of directly elected workplace organization is both a practical and an educational task. It is the most effective base from which to hold the official accountable to the members. It is the basis of rank-and-file power on the job and in the union, as well as a base from which to extend union organizing in which the stronger help the weaker achieve organization and gain power.