a proposal to american labor

8/3/2019 A Proposal to American Labor

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In The Nation 274 (June 24, 2002):18-24. With R.B. Freeman.

LET'S CREATE 'OPEN-pURCE UNIONS,' AND WELCOME MILLIONS INTO THE MOVEMENT.A Proposal to Am erican LaborI R IC H A R D B . F R E E M A N A N D J O E L R o C E R S I i

1 he first constitution of the American Federa- both "direct affiliation" and "mi-nority-union"tion of Labor, adopted at its founding in 1886, ism" as common practices. Over the past half-declared the new organization open to the century, union membership has come to meanmembership of any "seven wage workers membership in an organization that has demon-of good character, and favorable to Trade strated majority support among workers at apar-Unions, and not members of any body affiliated ticular worksite, recognized by an employer aswith this Federation." Tens of thousands of such the exclusiverepresentative of workers for pur-groups applied for and received direct affiliation poses of collective bargaining. Labor is not as

! : ; ' o ' "with the national federation-s-afterward, though p open in its membership, in admitting differentsometimes long afterward, typically migrating to g configurations of workers, 'as it was in the past.one or another international union. '-- ---'1) We believe this self-imposed limit on the

The tactic was particularly prevalent during peak periods of meaning of membership today poses an unnecessary barrier tounion organization, such as the turn of the twentieth century and union influence and growth, and it should be reconsidered. Thereagain in the 1930s, when workers who did not fit well into their are tens of millions of nonunion workers-many times the size. established forms sought to join unions, During these periods . of the existinglabor movement-who want better representationanother union formation was also widespread: ','minority" or at work or betterrepresentation of workers , interests politically,"members only" unions, which offered representation to workers but who remain cut off from the benefits of union membership.without a demonstrated pro-union majority at. their worksite. Unions can and should seek to change this byreforming labor lawSuch nonmaj ority unions were critical to organizing new sectors or by increasing their organizing efforts. In addition, however, or-of American industry; providing a : union presence in the work- ganized labor should open itselfto a wider range of members.place well before an employer recognized a collective-bargaining Pro-union workers who do not make up a majority at theirUnit. Most of the early organizing of the industrial trades, for workplace are not irrelevant to building a labor movement.Theyexample, and of early industrial unions like the mineworkers and have simply not yet achieved one particular measure of unionsteelworkers, was achieved through such minority unions. strength-not even necessarily the most important one. These. After World War II, however, unions effectively abandoned workers have much to offer labor.and much to gain from labor.

Today as in the past, nontraditional members innonmajority set-tings can give labor an immense boost in its reach, leverage andaccess to strategic information on employer behavior. Addingnonmajority or otherwise nontraditional workers to union mem-bership need not, moreover.conflict with the goal of traditionalmajorities-only organizing. To the contrary, such new memberswould provide natural ballast for the legal and policy reforms

Richard B. Freeman, the director of the National Bureau ofEconomicResearch s labor studies program, teaches at Harvard University andworks at the London School of Economics. Joel Rogers, a Nation con-tributing editor, teaches at the University of Wisconsin. They are theauthors of What Workers Want (ILR Press). An earlier version of thisarticle appeared inWorking USA.


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The Nation. June 24, 2002

The case for open-source unionism begins byrecognizing that traditional unionism and

str;ategies for ad va ncing it a re n ot su cceedin g.

nd organizing committees that unions need to succeed in suchOpening up to these new members would entail some admin-

strative challenges. Many unionists will worry about the costf servicing workers outside union security clauses and regularues collection by employers. But the economics of the Internetave changed this cost equation in fundamental ways. At essen-ally zero marginal cost, unions can communicate with an ever-xpanding number of new members, and they can deliver allnner of services to them through the Internet.A labor movement that embraced this vision-taking its ownstorical lessons with diversified membership seriously and re-ying more heavily on the Internet in membership communicationand servicing-would be practicing what we call "open-sourceionism" (OSU).he case for OSU begins by recognizing that traditionalunionism and strategies for adva,n"ing it are not succeeding.Seven years after John Sweeney's "new voices" team tookover at the AFL-CIO, only 9 peent of private-sector work-ers belong to unions-a lower prpportion than when he took

over, indeed lower than a century ago. Unions look healthierin the public sector, but public-sector unionization has naturalboundaries on its importance. Public employment is only 15per-cent of total employment, and public-sector wage and worknorms cannot be maintainedindefinitely at sharp oddswith the private economy.To give workers greater sayin the American economy,unions must increase theirpower vis-a-vis private employers. This they have failed to do.

The failure is by no means'because workers reject unionism.American unions operate under a labor law that is the least favor-able to collective worker action in the developed world: They arepummeled daily by a powerful business community uniquely hos-tile to unions. And for all their PAC giving and get-out-the-votedrives on behalf ofDemocrats, labor suffers from aparty that getsmore excited about fighting for free-trade agreements and theinterests of high-tech companies than fighting for worker rights.

Admitting all this, however, tells us little about what laborshould do. Should it lobby once again for a labor law reform .that Congress failed to deliver when unions had a larger shareof the work force? Persuade business that labor can be its friend?Reinvent the Democratic Party? Not likely, at least not anytimesoon, and almost certainly not without first growing the member-ship base that could create movement on these fronts. A declin-ing union movement falls into a vicious downward -spiral, aslower density reduces resources and ability to reverse the fall.To break the spiral, unions need more bodies and more broadpublic support.

It seems very unlikely that unions can achieve the necessaryscale and recognition through traditional majorities-based organ-izing alone. Because of work-force growth and steady churningin the job base, unions must organize hundreds of thousands ofworkers annually merely to maintain their present private-sectordensity-far more than they currently do. To increase density apercentage point, they need to organize about 1million per year.

To get back to the position they were in when Ronald Reagan tookoffice, they would need to do that for about twelve years running.

A useful rule of thumb puts the cost of acquiring a new unionmember at $1,000; some estimates are as high as $2,000-$3,000per new member. So a million new members would cost at least$1 billion; or about 20 percent of unions' annual income. It wason this reckoning that Sweeney, upon taking office, challengedAFL-CIO affiliates to dedicate at least that share of their budgetsto organizing. But nobody has seen organizing on the scale ofmillions of workers since the 1930s, and only a handful ofunionshave come even close to meeting Sweeney's benchmark. If currenttrends hold, then, density will continue to decline.

What is needed is a larger transformation in strategy that wouldchange the broader balance of forces in the organizing equation bygetting a lot more workers into the labor movement, and spreadinglabor's influence more widely in society. Labor needs to open itselfup. OSU would accomplish that, while complementing the tradi-tional powers that labor still retains.

1 0 clarify the direction we believe labor should go, let's contrastthe proposed open-source union model more explicitly withthe existing one. Under the current model, workers typicallybecome union members only when unions gain majoritysupport at a particular workplace. This makes the union theexclusive representative of those workers for purposes of col-lective bargaining. Getting tomajority status~in the trade,"50 percent + 1"_:_is a strug-gle. The law barely punishesemployers who violate it, andthe success of the union drive

is typically determined by the level of employer resistance. Unionsusually abandon workers who are unsuccessful in their fight toachieve majority status, and they are uninterested in workerswho have no plausible near-term chance of such success.

Under open-source unionism, by contrast, unions would wel-come members even before they achieved majority status, andstick with them as they fought for it-maybe for a very long time.These "pre-majority" workers would presumably pay reduceddues in the absence of the benefits of collective bargaining, butwould otherwise be normal union members. They would gainsome of the bread-and-butter benefits of traditional unionism->advice and support on their legal rights, bargaining over wages.and working conditions iffeasible, protection of pension holdings,political representation, career guidance, access to training and soon. And even in minority positions, they might gain a collectivecontract for union members, or grow to the point of being ableto force a wall-to-wall agreement for all workers in the unit. Butunder OSU, such an agreement, which is traditionally the singulargoal of organizing, would not be the defining criterion for achiev-ing or losing membership. Joining the labor movement would besomething you did for a long time, not just an organizational re-lationship you entered into with a third party upon taking someparticular job, to expire when that job expired or changed.

OSU would engage a range of workers in different states oforganization rather thandiscrete majorities of workers in collec-tive-bargaining agreements. There would be traditional employer-specific unions, 'but there would likely be more cross-employer


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The Nation. June 24, 2002ofessional sorts of union formations and more geographicallyfined ones. Within any of these boundaries, the goal ofOSUould not be collective bargainingper se but broader worker in-uence over the tenus and conditions of work and working life.cause OSU unions would typically have less clout inside firmsr with particular employers, they would probably be more con-rned than traditional unionism with the political and policy en-ronment surrounding their employers and employment settings.

Unions on the Net

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nions are gradually making fuller use of the Internet's'capacities to improve communication with their ownstaffs or members. But increasingly they are also usingthe web to recruit new members or to establish "virtualcommunities" of union supporters in arenas not yet

amenable to the standard collective-bargaining model.Alliance@IBM (www.allianc


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June 24, 2002 The Nation.nothing in the law that prevents or even discourages exploringwhat minority unionism might look like today.The Technology

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longstanding objection to more open-ended and diverse unionmembership is that with relatively low density in any givenplace, the members would be too costly to service: The eco-nomics of servicing require a collective-bargaining agreementand the accompanying dues and union security. But here we

think the Internet is changing the economics of membership serv-icing in fundamental ways [see sidebar opposite].

The Internet reduces to near-zero the marginal cost of pro-viding information, advice and some direct services to members.And Net usage in America is approaching 80 percent of house-holds or workplaces. What this means is that unions 'can becontinuously communicating with even a vast membership, ata cost that is basically independent of the number of members.Servicing and coordination of a mass labor movement, drawingonmembership more varied and dispersed.than present member-ship, is economically feasible today in a way it was not just afew years ago.

Of course, most workers will want human contact and directexchange in addition to advice and guidance through the web.These relationships require some shared physical space, whichis one reason open-source unionism would have a strong geo-graphic component. But it does not gainsay the degree to whichthe Net can support alternative organizing, especially from a mi-nority position of strength. The best evidence of this is what work-ers are already doing along these lines. As the examples in thesidebar indicate, whether job-based, occupation-based, geographi-cally based or international/local-union-based, workers can bemobilized and organized through the Net, which can also connectlabor with broader communities at a speed and cost unimaginableeven a few years ago.

The Opportunity.

Ifunions 'were to combine open membership, minority repre-.sentation and low-cost, Net-based servicing and coordina-tion-perhaps including more "direct affiliation" of new workerorganizations to the national AFL-Cm, or regional bodies,or existing internationals-we believe that over the long runthey would expand membership substantially. They would alsoenjoy immediate gains in labor's public image and politicaleffectiveness ..The AFL-CIO takes great pride in its recent political program,

claimingthat it has dramatically increased the union householdshare ofthe active electorate even as its share of the working pop-ulation has declined. Upon closer inspection, this claim provesexaggerated, an artifact of exit-poll procedures and inconsis-tency in question wording. But what is cleat from the polls isthat the number of nonmembers now in the electorate who ex-press great support for unions is vastly greater than the numberof union members who express such support-three to fourtimes greater. A political program centered on labor's interests,with manifest general benefit, would find an audience amongthese voters. Especially when coupled with human contact and

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24 The Nation. June 24, 2002presence locally-provided, for example, by a well-organizedcentral labor councilor state federation-this sort of diffuse po-litical support could greatly affect state and local as well asnational elections.

Of course, admitting new sorts of members to its ranks-orbetter coordinating with outsiders on politics-would disruptestablished laborroutines. New unions would form,jurisdictionalboundaries would be crossed and union alliances with nonunioncommunity and advocacy groups would give rise to a differentlabor politics disturbing to the status quo. For some within labor,that may be enough reason not to try it.

But the open-source idea is eminently scalable. It can startsmall. And it can start in part of the movement. Labor, like otherprogressive organizations, sometimes acts as ifit cannot coordi-nate on anything until it agrees on everything, That is not neces-sary here. A single state federation, or central labor council, orinternational could initiate it-anywhere there is a consensus toallow for experimentation.

Some traditionalists in labor ma~ argue that the new workersbrought in through OSU will not 100) ( like or have the same con-cerns or organize themselves the sallie way as "traditional" unionmembers. And they would be right. How could new membersrom-throughout the American economy and society, drawn to-gether largely by different means, be replicas of current members?All great surges in organizing have been preceded by fears thatthe new members will be different from the old, and confusion

about the right form of union-craft versus industrial, generalversus narrow jurisdictions, public-sector associations versus "realunions." What we know from this history is that forms mustadjust to workers and the broader economy, and nobody knowsin advance which new forms will tum out to be enduring.

Labor currently has more support for its values in Americansociety than it is harnessing and mobilizing, either through itspolitical program or organizing. Workers want a connection tounions far greater than they have now. Present organizing is notkeeping pace with economic changes and a nearly lethal employerand policy environment. Turning labor around will require morethan simply doing more of what unions have been doing overthe past decade. It will require a broader-if also, at least in part,shallower-membership base and stronger alliance betweenlabor and those outside itself. That will not be achieved throughrhetoric. It necessitates changes in membership, and the routinesfor servicing and mobilizing those members. What we need inAmerica today is a labor movement that workers can join easily,without going to war with their employers; a labor movement thatwelcomes support anywhere it finds it, and is able to crystallizewhat is now diffuse support into real membership and sharedaction; and a movement that will offer support anywhere workersare struggling to build power. "Open-source unionism" describesthe structure and ambitions of a labor movement that seeks to dothese things-"The new union movement, we come from every-where." Ithas a nice ring, doesn't it?

New York City As co-directorsof an organizationof theeco-nomicleft,we secondKathaPollitt'sadmonitionthatDennisKucinichcannotclaimthemantleofan economicprogressivewhilebeingvirulentlyanti-choice.Reproductivefreedom is notjust amatter of personalmorality,it is a fundamentalelement of economicjustice. No woman candetermine her own economic destinywithoutthe freedom to choosewhether to bear achild,Progressiveslooking for championscannotbeso desperatea s to overlooksuch a fundamentalright. There are numerous other members ofCongress--of course, we'd like a lot more-whounderstandthat reproductiverightsarepartof the fight for economicjustice.RICHARD KIRsCH, KAREN SCHARFFCitizen Action ofNew York

(ContinuedFrom Page 2)havepushed forweaponsof lowertonnage.Oth-ers'arguethat fivekilotonsis roughlyoptimal.C. paul Robinson, director.of Sandia Na-tional Laboratories, demonstrates the 'debate:"I'm not talking about sub-kilotonweapons...as somehaveadvocated,but devicesin the low-kiloton range, in order to contemplate the de-struction of hard or hiddentargets,whilebeingmindful of the need to minimize collateraldamage." In April, Benjamin Friedman, ananalyst at the Centerfor Defense Information,wrote: "What is revolutionary about currentproposals is the idea of reducing the yield oftactical nuclear weapons to levelsapproachingthoseof conventionalexplosives,to aroundone-tenth of a kiloton, whichwould theoreticallybridge the gap betweena conventional and anuclear weapon."TheUnited Stateshas developed"sub-kilo-ton" atomicweaponsbefore. Onesuchweapon,the Davy Crockett,'containedwarheadsweigh-ing onlyfifty-onepounds,with explosiveyieldsnearO.Olkilotons(roughly10tonsofTNT). Wemade 2,100 of thosebetween 1956and 1963..Whenmy articlewaswritten, itwasunclearwhat size the BushAdministration's defenseteam envisionedfor its nuclear bunker buster.To a degreeit still isn't;although some nowsuggest it could be above five kilotons. How-ever, this .doesn'tchangewhat's being contem-plated: a weaponthat appears to avoidthe kindof casualtiesthat put current nukes outsidethe

boundaryofpolitical acceptability.I regretif] seemedto suggestthat a five-kilo-tonnuclearwarhead,could be smaller in explo-sivepowerthan theworld's largest conventionalweapon.That is inaccurate.I attemptedto illus-trate that on the continuum of weaponry, a gapthat appeared inconceivablywide not so longago is now being pushed closer. As the recentNuclear PostureReviewdemonstrates,narrow-ing,j:llatclistaoce~asmuch a matter ofideas asamatterof tons. RA .FF I KHATCHADOUR IANNOT THE G RE AT WHITE H OP E?Brooklyn, NY KathaPollittisright onabout greatwhitehopeDennis Kucinich ["Subjectto Debate,"May27andJune 10].Theboyswhodisparage abortionrights as a foolish.single-issue orthodoxydon'thavea clue.Here's a hint for you guys. "Abor-tion"is aboutequitablereproductivehealthserv-ices forwomen,obviouslyincluding theabilityto end a pregnancy,but it's also about how wethink of women, and how we treat them. Arewomenvalued as the sumof their reproductiveparts, or.ashuman beings?Weknowwhere the fundamentalists stand:Protestant,Catholic,Hindu, Islamic andJewishfundamentalisms, as well as secular dictator-ships,areunitedon theneed to controlwomen'sbodies. And now, thanks to Pollitt, we knowwhereKucinichstands.He moves or he loses.'

MATTHEw WILLS

BLOW-DRIED NAT ION?Media.Pa. Myweeklyritual ofreading theNation coverto cover on Monday was stymied last weekwhen mypostman left mymailbox door openona soaker of a day.I got home eager for theweek's insights only to find a soggy Nationlimp in the box. Eek! I ran upstairsand spasti-cally looked for options. My girlfriend withastonishment:"What theheck areyou doing?"when shesawme usirigthehair dryerto dryIP Ycovetedpages one by one.Did you everknowhowimportant yourwork is! CHRlS DIMA

a proposal to american labor

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