It Could Happen Here - May Day Special: Labor Notes and the Future of Labor

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

This May Day Mia talks about the recent Labor Notes conference, divisions in the labor movement over Palestine, and the future union organizers are building.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. CallZone Media. Welcome to a special Mayday episode of It Could Happen Here. Call Zone Media towards the single digits, the unions that survived, battered and broken shells of the mighty behemoths that shook the world for a hundred years, embraced so-called business unionism, which set out not to conquer the world in the name of labor like its great predecessors, or even, really, to bargain for higher wages, but to make companies profitable in order to keep their jobs. They took pay cuts and job losses

without a fight, forcing their membership into line and effortlessly crushing the endless slates of reform caucuses that sought to put the fight back into the working class. Even the cutting edge of Marxist theory held the time of unions was over. Workers were too atomized, too divided, too far from the immediate processes of production, from the discipline of the factory, and from the massification of the city to assemble the working class in its old fighting form. There would be riots, to be sure, barricades, blockades, blockades, occupations, but not strikes. Whatever the working class did next, the age of the union was over. For much of the 2010s, that prediction was a smart bet. The bold proclamation of Wisconsin trade unionists that organized labor would turn back the tide of the Tea Party fell to ruin under the failure of their attempt to recall Wisconsin's hated union-busting Governor Scott Walker.

The Tea Party's march continued unimpeded, radicalizing even further in the wake of the 2014-2015 uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, to produce not the victory of the working class, but Donald Trump. Even success stories like the rejuvenation of the mighty Chicago Teachers Union, AFT Local 1, by a bold reform caucus called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, who waged a pair of unexpectedly wildly popular strikes, was tainted by the reality of limited winds and labor conditions in Chicago schools that remained appalling. Even as the left returned in the wake of Occupy Ferguson and the election of Trump, union membership continued to plunge,

and capitalists and Marxists alike continued to herald the union's demise. They were wrong. History, it seems, delights in irony. It was the dead-enders fighting hopeless battles and reform caucuses losing union election after union election. It was the wobblies fighting losing campaign after losing campaign, desperately trying to organize the unorganizable fast food and retail workers. It was rank-and-file Marxist trade unionists waiting 60 long years, their comrades dead and gone, for somebody, anybody, to hear their plans for shutting down capital's logistics

networks. It was labor notes, 16 staffers compiling endless analyses of labor struggles for a crowd that couldn't have filled a baseball stadium. Who was right? Unions are back. wave of massively popular strikes waged by unions from the massive behemoths like the uaw and the writers guild to tiny independent coffee unions whose members larger existing unions are rather spit on than spend a single cent attempting to organize only the direct intervention of the president to break a rail worker strike before it could start and the last second portrayal of teamsters leadership stopped 2023 from being this largest strike wave of the modern era. Basking in his triumphs and conspiring to win more was Labor Notes. Labor Notes is a curious beast. It is simultaneously a journal that publishes

news about labor struggles, a network that brings together a group of disparate rank-and-file union reform movements, largely but not exclusively from the U.S., maintaining a strong emphasis on solidarity and organizing with workers in Mexico, and a labor conference that runs every two years. It is a relic of another time, whose time, it seems, has come again. Labor Notes was founded in 1979 as a way to coordinate and expand the inter-union connections formed in the United Mine Workers of America's 1979 bituminous coal strike. It's one of the last direct connections to the era where labor was strong. It's one of the last direct connections to the era where labor was strong. Unwittingly tasked with keeping the flame of labor alive during the neoliberal downpour.

Two weeks ago, they held their largest conference ever. 4,500 people crammed into the Wyatt Regency next to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. At least 1,000 people who tried to register were turned down. I personally watched interested workers turned away at the door, because the venue's conference halls had already reached the max capacity for fire safety. Labor, we can safely say, is back. It is returning to the South, the great rock unions have shattered upon for a hundred years. It's moving in new directions, towards service workers previously thought impossible to organize. Most of all, it's moving towards something we'd almost forgotten was possible.

It's moving towards victory. The first thing you notice about Labor Notes is its staggering diversity. Young punks in battle jackets sat on benches next to old anti-war protesters from the 60s. Independent trade unionists and feminist activists from Mexico rubbed shoulders with battle-hardened American Union nurses. White middle-aged longshoremen and women plotted with young queer Amazon warehouse workers to maximize the power of logistics strikes. You saw old industrial organizers from the 60s passing down lessons and tactics and stories of strikes that

otherwise would have vanished into the mists of history. Media workers fighting for their first contract. The lowliest rank-and-file workers chatting in breakout groups with union presidents. For all the talk I've done in this show about how many union organizers are trans, even I didn't expect to see this many trans people. It's a cross-section of the American working class come to fight. And that, above all, is what this Labor Notes conference was about. Fighting. The most direct conflict came on the first day of the conference,

when Palestinian Union activists called for a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the hotel. The cops arrested three people in an attempt to clear the street. This, rather predictably, was a terrible idea. Instead of backing down, the crowd of several hundred union activists almost immediately surrounded the lone car and demanded they let their prisoner go. What happened next, to use a technical term,

fucking ripped. A bunch of kids had a rave to the changing police sirens a 50 year old white dude from the electrical worker stood next to me a chinese trans woman from a podcast union a bunch of longshoremen teamsters staffers from unions you wouldn't believe even if i told you palestinian trade union activists nurses punks from independent unions no one else in the crowd could have named. An entire mass of unionists stood their ground and refused to let the cops take one of ours. A tradeswoman with drums marched around the police car and we all sang, Which Side Are You On?

After two hours, the police gave up to a crowd screaming union power at the top of our lungs. It was an incredible display of solidarity that set the tone for the rest of the event. We were going to fight the bosses together, and fuck them if they came for us. This is not to say there weren't divisions. A group of protesters broke away from the cop car to demand that chicago mayor brandon johnson the darling of the chicago teachers union come tell the cops to let our people go now whether or not this would have worked is up to some debate these cops were not chicago police departments they were the cops of rosemont, which is, technically, a separate entity from the city of Chicago. However, Labor Notes staffers and securities tried to stop the protesters from reaching Brandon Johnson and ended up throwing punches at the protesters as,

to quote one observer, Union Brother fought Union Brother. This fight reveals one of the important tensions in the movement. Should unions continue to back imperfect center-left politicians in exchange for some political benefits, or should they take a hard line against politicians who betray their fundamental political principles? Brandon Johnson is a microcosm of the debate. On the one hand, he was elected with enormous resource expenditure from the Chicago teachers' unions. On the other hand, he's been locking immigrants in tuberculosis-ridden camps as the city lurches from crisis to crisis. Even many of Chicago's other unionists were never

happy with him in the first place, as he failed to use his previous position to come to the aid of striking nurses. When the two points of view collide, there is a fight. On a national level, the conflict is the question of Joe Biden and Palestine. At Labor Notes itself, there's strong support for Palestine. Palestinian solidarity panels were packed to the rafters with workers from every sector imaginable and activists from across the world. I saw UAW workers deeply unhappy with the union leadership's decision to endorse Biden, a decision made by maybe five members of an executive committee without a vote from the union. But therein lies the issue.

As much as Labor Notes represents the bleeding edge of the labour movement, UAW President Sean Fain, fresh off the UAW's astounding 73% victory at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, gave the conference's closing address, there remains massive bastions of conservatism in the labour movement who have actively fought against even statements on Palestine, much less concrete actions. Unions are still weak, and the positions of activists within them are still tenuous. Even more favorable shops have yet to turn broader popular support among rank-and-file workers for Palestine into substantive strike actions, and it's deeply unclear to me if any such action is possible at all. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

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The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture. Música, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators

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el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

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enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. A pessimism reinforced by watching the rapid spread of student campus occupations while labor remains silent, or perhaps more precisely, dormant, is broadly in tension with my optimism at effectively everything else that I saw there. There is incredible organizing going on at Labor Notes. People are coordinating rank-and-file links between unions whose staffers and leaderships hate each other for grudges whose origins have passed into the mists of time. There was quite serious talk about plans to line up contracts to expire in 2028 to effectively create a miniature general strike.

Or, perhaps more precisely, to create a version of what's called the Spring Offensive in Japan. Spring and offensive are the same word in Japanese. And so labor unions decided to have their contracts expire in the spring, thus maximizing the power of their strikes. This effort to have contracts aligned in 2028 is, broadly speaking, a larger version of the Spring Offensive. We will cover this more in a later episode. For now, I think it's enough to say that discussions and organization were quite serious, and there was significant enthusiasm as well as discussions of the potential difficulties of getting people's contracts to actually align. People are organizing to bring their unions together on a sectoral base to share resources, coordinate, set standards for contracts, and generally help each other more effectively oppose the bosses

and unions that rule them all. Labor Notes has also, from the beginning, been an incubator for reform movements inside of unions attempting to wrest control from corporate administrative caucuses. These reform movements almost always lose. The last 50 years is littered with defeats in union election after union election with sub-10% turnout. And yet, little by little, these groups are starting to win we heard from a number of smaller rank and file efforts that had successfully taken control of their unions the first major victory was a rank and file slate taking over the management of notoriously corrupt and cliquish teamsters. Now, I have my issues

with the new Teamsters leadership too. There are something like two entire hours of this show dedicated to how angry rank-and-file Teamsters were over the fact that UPS workers didn't go on strike last year due to their leadership cutting a deal with management. But on a broader level, the victory of the Teamsters' reform slates and the defeat of one of the oldest union...

I don't know if administrative caucus is really a... That's a bit of a euphemism for the UPS sort of corrupt leadership dictatorship, but their victory on a broader level was a sea change in American unionism. Their victory was followed by the victory of Sean Fain in the UAW, a man who, as much as he's angered members

by endorsing Joe Biden, walked into labor notes and gave a speech about the class war and the authoritarianism of corporate greed certainly there was much to annoy trade activists concerned with palestine in the sense that his central metaphor labor is the arsenal of democracy was in bad taste as he described the unions that he leads as the successors of liberator b-52 bombers which not you know not precisely the metaphor i'd choose as your own members are protesting the bombs falling over gaza but on the other hand if a giant speech about the class war and the need to organize across borders is now the conservative

wing of progressive trade unionism. The future is bright. The kind of militant union actions we've seen over the past year have coalesced into a sort of strategy of fight as you build. It is based on a very basic strategy that you would think unions would have already been doing, however, comma, see everything I've ever said about administrative caucuses and business unionism and corporate unionism. The strategy is, if you win things for people, more of them will join unions. If you win things for people, more of them will join unions. This strategy is already bearing fruit in Chattanooga, and has international implications as well. We heard from organizers that workers in Mexico and China were keenly watching the UAW strikes. And for good reason.

These strikes are ultimately their fight too. And slowly but surely, workers across the world are starting to realize it. The degree of internationalism at this labor dance was remarkable. I came into an early China panel fully expecting the same kinds of praise for the CCP that I've seen in other leftist events held in the city of chicago most recently the sort of fiasco china panel held at socialism conference that degraded into an argument about whether or not brazil russia india china and south africa are socialist here there was none of that for sure there were some slightly weird German Maoists defending the Cultural Revolution, but on the other hand, there wasn't any defense of Chinese capitalism or their failed bankrupt model of corporate unionism. the conference has a deep and ingrained pro-immigrant position.

Sean Fain is probably the most high-profile political figure I've seen actually discussing the horrific treatment of migrants at the border right now, and taking time to remind everyone that immigrants are just workers trying to find a better life. This, however, makes his support for Joe Biden, the butcher of Yakumba, even more questionable. for Joe Biden, the butcher of Yakumba, even more questionable. Still, you can see the wheels of history turning. You can see it there, in the muffled buzz of conversations drifting through hallways, in the roar of the cheering crowd, in the bright laughs of co-conspirators who moments before were strangers, in the drowsy chatter of abortion workers who let a trans woman sleep on their floor to hide from the police,

in the chants of a hundred workers refusing to let the cops take one of their own, you can see the outline of the great leviathan the ruling class thought buried stone dead in the 1980s. You can see the working class waking from its day's slumber, shaking the sleep from its eyes and the dirt from its back. You can, for the first time in decades, hear the clatter and the roar as it tests its chains. The great behemoth is beginning, just beginning, to assemble the iron will and terrible power necessary to turn its dreams into reality, to break its chains and shatter its cage and reclaim the world it built with its blood and sweat and tears. That day is not today. It's not tomorrow.

But for the first time in my life, it could be the day after that. This has been It Could Happen Here. Happy May Day, everyone. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals.

You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.