The Mythic Image -
One of the most beautifully presented books on mythology around.
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Monday, 3 September 2018
quote [ The growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts by workers all over the country. ]
Reveal In the past year, the American labor movement was dominated by two things. First, the Janus decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the public sector was essentially “right to work” — meaning, workers covered by union contracts no longer had to pay the costs of their representation. And second, the “Red for Ed” movement, the wave of teacher strikes, mostly in conservative states with few union protections. The teachers’ uprisings, from West Virginia onward across the country, garnered weeks of front-page news and are no doubt helping to fuel the strikes already happening or pending this fall: Thousands of Washington State teachers are walking the picket lines, and Seattle and Los Angeles teachers voted to authorize their own potential strikes. But the underlying story of 2018 is that the growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts made in recent years by workers constantly denigrated by both major political parties and even written off by much of organized labor itself. Workers are putting in the effort over weeks, months and years to build new unions and to strengthen and reclaim moribund ones, and even to begin to chip away at the wall of new “right to work” laws passed since 2012. Their work has meant a slight uptick in union membership numbers, and a larger one in public approval for unions — suggesting that the more Americans see unions fight, and strike, for what they believe in, the more we want to join them. In Missouri, a statewide movement put a referendum on a state right-to-work law on the Primary Day ballot. Not only did voters overwhelmingly overturn the law, but the referendum drew more votes than were cast in the party primaries. Missouri’s unions and labor organizations such as Jobs With Justice led the fight, but in a state where only about 9 percent of the work force is represented by a union, labor had to mobilize plenty of nonunion workers to reject the right to work law. The coalition relied heavily on black and Latino voters, almost certainly benefiting from organizing efforts in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. It’s too early to tell whether the Missouri vote is a turning point for labor. But perhaps it’s time to look back at the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests as such a point. Though waves of attacks in state after state on public- and private-sector union organizing followed Gov. Scott Walker’s successful anti-union Act 10, Wisconsin unions have begun to show their power again. This spring’s Red for Ed protests recalled the occupied Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011, and if the Wisconsin public sector has been the bellwether for labor under Janus, there is cause for optimism, if not also a cleareyed assessment of just how hard the work will be. Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, said that the union has had to win fights — despite being legally barred from bargaining over anything other than cost-of-living raises — by organizing alongside parents and winning the community over to its side on everything from smaller class sizes to more recess for students. “Even though Act 10 in many ways felt like and was an ending,” Ms. Mizialko said, “it’s a chapter in the book, and there are lots more chapters that come after it. That’s what members have been saying and feeling for seven and a half years — we’re writing the fight-or-die survival chapter, but we’re not just interested in surviving. We want it all back.” Barbara Madeloni, a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association who now works for Labor Notes, a media and organizing project for union activists, said that teachers’ organizing under unfriendly legal regimes has inspired organizing across sectors: “Workers are showing each other how to access and use their power — and I expect to see more job actions and strikes as they teach each other.” Those workers are changing the way union leaders have thought about political power. “It is a real challenge to labor leaders to recognize that our strength is in working people — in withholding our labor — and not in the statehouse,” Ms. Madeloni said. In New York, retail workers at Verizon Wireless took part in a 2016 companywide strike but have had to fight to keep their union — in late August, they defeated a decertification vote. To Colin Hull, a worker in the four-year campaign for the union in a mostly nonunion sector, more than money, it was about taking some of the power back from the company. With a newly hostile labor board and courts packed with President Trump’s appointees, union members and workers fights will continue to be long and grueling, but they have realized that it is this or giving in to the erosion of their lives. They are often winning fights against Republicans in power, and their struggles are garnering at least lip service from Democrats considering a presidential run in 2020. But they know that the shift in class power they seek will still, largely, be won in the workplace. Sarah Jaffe is the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.” 
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steele said @ 9:23pm GMT on 3rd Sep
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