by Plotnikov
A Council of All the Workers
Out of all the conversations I’ve had at work, the one that always sticks with me, was on spring while I working as a deckhand on a river towboat. It was a hard job- 12 hour shifts with no overtime pay, seven days in a row, switching from days to nights every month. It was very dangerous. For all of that, in the 2010s, we had a starting wage of $12.50, and capped our wages at around $23.00 for lead men- the deckhands who were the head of their crew.
For few years, some of us deckhands had carefully testing the waters, seeing if any of our crewmates would be interested in organizing a union. There was no union in the workplace, an no official union was backing up our effort, either- and so no one would be able to back us up if we faced retaliation for organizing. So, we organized very carefully- sussing out who could be trusted and who couldn’t, what each crew member thought of one another, and what issues fired people up. They say the boss is your best organizer. The boss is always liable, when an organizing campaign is going slow, to pull something that gets everyone mad again and breathe life back into your efforts. That’s what had happened one spring morning when I reported for crew change at the wharf, and heard my lead man and his opposite on the night shift working each other up.
“It’s bullshit!”, my lead man said. “Every year we ask them for just something- anything. A cost of living raise. The green guys’ wages go up a little bit every couple years and ours stays the same. So, they give us a raise, finally, last year. A quarter an hour. Now they take it away!”
“A bonus!”, said the lead man on the night shift. “They say it wasn’t a raise, just an end of year bonus. So now, they claw it back.”
“What we need to do”, said my lead man, “Is get all the leads together when we’re all here at the dock, and go march up to the office and tell them we want our raise back.”
“More than that”, said the other, “We need to form a council of all the workers in the port, and we need to shut down everything until we get what we want”
I was shocked to hear it. Finally, these guys were seeing what I saw! So, I chimed in- “Yeah, and we need to form a union!”
The lead man laughed. “A union? What good can they do? Some contract they ignore and a slap on the wrist when they break it? No. What we need is a council of all the workers to shut down the river until we get what we want!”
Some time later, I had the opportunity to meet Noel Ignatiev, a veteran organizer and theorist who had once been a steel mill organizer and part of the Sojourner Truth Organization. We became friends on social media, and one day I told him the story.
“He was right”, said Noel. “What a union is in America, to the average worker, and what he was describing, are two different things. There’s a difference between being unionized, and being organized”
Two Souls of Unionism
What my coworker was digging at, is the difference between two “souls” of unionism: Solidarity Unionism and Business Unionism. While there have been many different organizing strategies and ways to structure unions throughout our movement’s history, it is easy to think of these two tendencies running through that whole history, pulling our movement to either pole. Both of these tendencies can- and often do- exist within a given union, in tension with each other.
Business Unionism is the type of union that American workers have gotten used to, especially in industries that organized decades ago and have passed the union on as a legacy since then. In a business union, the role of the union is to negotiate the price and conditions under which we sell our labor to capital. The capitalist system is assumed to be the only viable system, and the union as an institution does not aim to change that system in any fundamental way. Instead, it aims to provide a set of services to workers in exchange for our membership dues: training, hiring opportunities, health insurance and a pension for those of us who get our benefits through the union, and representation during grievances.
When a grievance in a business union comes up, it is handled by the steward or the business agent, through the channels laid out in the contract and labor law- not by the worker themselves. Often, the worker is not even informed of how many grievances or Unfair Labor Practices are filed, over what, and what the status of them is. While grievances are being filed on your behalf, you as a worker are advised to keep your head down, be a model employee, and give the boss no excuse for disciplinary action against you. This grievance process is legalistic, and takes conflict off of the shop floor and away from the workers.
This way of handling conflicts with the boss, means that few workers in a business union have the experience of ever taking direct action with their coworkers around a problem at work. A worker can be a union member for their whole working life, and possibly never directly take part in any struggle over power in the workplace with their boss.
Solidarity unionism, on the other hand, is the living tradition of struggle that resurfaces, over and over, as the time tested grassroots method for workers who need to rely on our own power to fight the boss. Solidarity unionism is driven directly by the workers, who make the day-to-day decisions about how to fight the boss on the job site, and about how to keep the union running. Grievances at work are usually handled by collective, direct action.
All of these practices that make up solidarity unionism have existed for as long as wage workers have been struggling against industrial capitalism. In the 1880s, a revolutionary vision for labor was called the “Chicago Idea”, and was advocated by the anarchists who would become the Haymarket Martyrs. Similar ideas in other parts of the world would become known as Anarcho-Syndicalism. Militancy and union democracy were hallmarks of the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, and present throughout the struggles of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.
The term “Solidarity Unionism” itself was coined by Staughton Lynd in his book, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer, published in 1978, after the tumultuous rank and file rebellions of the early 1970s which saw workers organizing a wave of militancy not seen since the Great Depression, with contract rejections, collective insubordination, sabotage, slowdowns, wildcat strikes, and union reform caucuses across multiple industries. By the late 1970s, however, the era of globalization saw manufacturing increasingly moving overseas, combined with a general counter-offensive by industry against labor. The business unions in many cases had just finished defeating their own fighting rank and file membership, and could not resist. By 2023, just 10% of American workers belong to a union. It’s in this context that the author Joe Burns has released his book, Class Struggle Unionism, in which he lays out a very similar vision- that “class struggle unionists believe in militancy, shop floor struggle, union democracy, fighting the system, and prioritizing anti-racist struggle”. While Lynd and Burns don’t specify that solidarity unionism or class struggle unionism are specifically revolutionary or anarchist in their politics, these same principles have been the core of the anarchist approach to labor struggle since the days of “The Chicago Idea”.
Direct action, in the workplace, means dealing with our problems through disrupting the normal flow of the business. Normally, we as workers sell the hours of our lives to a company, obey the company while we are on the job, and produce the goods and services the company sells. Our work, and our obedience, is what keeps the company running and profitable. Direct action interrupts that. It can look like dock workers slowing down the rate they unload ships, to protest not getting a pay raise. Or, if it could be bus drivers refusing to accept the fares of their passengers, keeping the buses running but denying their company or city the money from the fares. Direct action can look like theater extras refusing to move during a crucial part of a performance until a pay cut is reversed. Anything that we as workers can do, without relying on the courts or lawmakers, to stop production and hit the boss in the pocket book, is direct action.
In our campaign on the Mississippi river towboats, we never got an official union recognized in the workplace- the committee was exposed by a snitch to the boss just as it was finally taking off. Even without one, though, we were able to win grievances through creative tactics. For example, on one of the boats, the tank that the toilet flushed into had a crack in the side, which allowed the raw sewage to leak out right into the engine room. There, it steadily dripped onto a piping hot diesel engine all day and all night. The smell of burning sewage made the galley unlivable, and even on rainy nights we would huddle around the head deck with our cigarettes, hoping the fresh river air or the tobacco would save us from the stench. The company insisted they wouldn’t repair it until the end of the season, because they didn’t want to take this workhorse of a boat off the water for even a watch or two. The man in charge of repairs for the boats was a “manager of maintenance”, so titled because the company was allowing all the mechanics represented by the Operating Engineers retire, replacing them with “managers”, so they could crush the last foothold any union had in the company. This manager had a system set up, where any problem reported through the computer in the galley would send a message to his phone. The highest-priority emergency problems would set off an alarm strong enough to wake him up in the middle of the night. So, we simply took turns, every night at around 1 AM, sending the highest-priority emergency alert out: “THE TANK IS LEAKING. THE BOAT SMELLS LIKE POOP.”
After two weeks of this, a maintenance crew was sent onto the boat and welded a patch onto the tank. It was just in time for us to spend the cold autumn nights in the warmth of our galley, now free from the stench.
Direct action can work in a union that does have an official union, as well. In 2010s there was a solidarity union committee among the rank and file Teamsters, who were also affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, in UPS hubs in a few cities around the country. Package handlers found that direct action got results for them quicker, and more reliably, than relying on the grievance process. When managers started coming onto the line and putting their hands on union work, the committee handed out whistles and workers started literally blowing the whistle whenever they saw it happening. When someone didn’t get their holiday bonus, the committee would call on supporters from all over to call the office of the manager who could approve the bonus, day in and day out, never letting them get a moment’s peace until it was approved. When the committee found out, during the uprising in Ferguson, that supplies for the cops were passing through the hub, they removed the packages from the conveyor belt and refused to handle them, then declared the action, “Hands Up! Don’t Ship!”. The supplies had to be re-routed to other hubs.
Because direct action is so central to solidarity unionism, this kind of organizing requires that workers be highly involved in the union- but it also provides an easy way for workers to build that kind of involvement. Direct action done by just one or two workers, usually ends in those workers getting retaliated against. It’s much safer for every worker involved, when more of us join in- both because the disruption caused in much greater, and because most bosses know that they can’t just punish or even fire their entire workforce. So, using direct action to solve problems at work mean that we have to carefully build relationships of trust with our coworkers. At the same time, taking direct action together is one of the surest ways to cement the trust between coworkers. This creates a reinforcing cycle that can operate in either direction. In a workplace where the practice of solidarity is on the rise, each action grows our confidence in ourselves, our knowledge of our own power, and our ability to tell who is reliable and who is not in a confrontation with management.
An IWW organizer, Nate Hawthorne, put it this way in the Industrial Worker, in 2007: “Workers’ power is like a muscle. My muscles have (pretty flabby) limits. By using my muscles within their limits, I get stronger. Solidarity unionism means exercising our power. We figure out what power we have and we increase it by exercising it. We exercise our power to build an organized shop--and eventually an organized industry and an organized working class--which increases the power we have to exercise. The point isn't just to lift this weight (improving the job in the short term, a fair day's wages for a fair day's work), the point is also how the weights get lifted and by who.”
This growth in trust and in our analysis of power, doesn’t have to end at the job site. When workers are involved in fighting for ourselves, it also grows a broader culture of solidarity, and forces us to think through the ways that our society is structured. Those involved in solidarity unionism may see its role as more than negotiating a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work under capitalism. We may see the role of the solidarity union as one front in a class struggle against the capitalist system itself, or as one area of struggle that intersects with others. Because of this, solidarity unionists will often take action not only around issues on the job site, but also around issues that affect working class people outside of work.
For example, IWW dock workers in Seattle during the Russian Civil War blocked the shipment of guns to the army of the Tsarist (anti-revolutionary) White Army under Admiral Kolchak, refusing to be complicit in the murder of Russian workers- one of many such political actions by dock workers over the decades. In the 1970s, the Building Laborers Federation in Australia and especially its New South Wales branch, led a series of actions called Green Bans, preventing building projects that would harm parks and nature, low income housing, or buildings of historic significance, in direct contrast to the usual “Yes, In My Back Yard! (YIMBY)” pro-building-everything stance that Building Trades unions take. The BLF, led by rank and file construction workers, even enacted a “pink ban” in solidarity with a gay student expelled from the dormitories of Macquarie University. More recently and close to home, the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been reinvigorated by a rank and file movement, adopted the concept of “bargaining for the public good”, and demanded- though failed so far to win- rent control as one of its demands in its 2019 strike.
All of these are in sharp contrast to the mainstream labor movement’s rejection of action around non-workplace issues. The large unions of the AFL-CIO have been committed to bargaining around bread and butter issues exclusively, in model laid down since the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther signed the “Treaty of Detroit” with the Big 3 car manufacturers in 1950. The treaty set the framework for the broader post-War bargain between organized labor and capital in the USA. Workers got job security, higher wages, and benefits, while management got the “right to manage”- a workplace free of disruptive direct action, of demands for worker control, and of political demands being made from the shop floor. Instead, organized labor would pursue its political agenda in the electoral arena- a strategy that has delivered us over half a century of the lesser-evil politics of the Democratic Party, which takes the labor vote and labor’s campaign donations for granted even as both have been slipping away. While solidarity unionism builds class power and consciousness, business unionism lets it wither, like a muscle that never lifts.
The Committee: The Seed of Working Class Power
So, how do we start lifting? If the living practice of solidarity in the workplace feeds on, and reinforces itself, how do we build it up when we are starting from the low place that labor in the US has been at, for decades of defeat and retreat? Naturally, we start at work.
One of the biggest differences between solidarity unionism and business unionism, is the role of the workers’ committee. As anyone who’s been through an organizing campaign knows, the committee is the heart of the campaign. Starting with just a few people, a committee maps out the social layout of the workplace. Committee members start building relationships, having one-on-one conversations, seeing where each of our coworkers stands in relation to the union. We invite them into the committee, taking smaller actions and then bigger actions to grow the confidence of our coworkers.
Then, in business unionism, we file for an election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Whether this elections is won or lost, the worker committee’s time is drawing to a close. The committee is formed only for the initial organizing drive. When that drive is won, the committee is usually allowed to wither away- often, before the first contract is even signed. When the election is won, or the company voluntarily recognizes the union, or the contractor becomes a signatory to the union, and the contract in place, then the new normalized relationships are set up. The worker committee is discarded.
In solidarity unionism, the committee stays. It is the union, or at very least is the real presence of the union on the job site. It may grow or shrink over the months and years as struggles arise and are resolved. It may even fade away in slow times, only to re-appear so long as workers are around who have the relationships of trust and the memories of previous struggles. But, unless the embers of struggle have been cold for a very, very long time, they can be breathed back into a blaze again, and that blaze can catch like wildfire. That, then, is our job as workers today- to kindle the fire of solidarity back into the workplace.
You can start building the committee in your own workplace, whether you have no union at work, or are a rank-and-file member of a union. We want to help you.
In upcoming issues of The Wildcat!, we will be publishing tips and guides on how to go about creating a worker committee in your own workplace, whether you belong to an official union or not. If you pick up an issue of WildCat! each month, you will find advice that will help you and your coworkers struggle against the boss, whether you’re a class war veteran or just starting to fight back for the first time. You’ll learn about mapping out the social relationship at your job and finding ways to bridge the gaps between different groups of workers. You’ll read about the common tricks bosses use to try to break worker power. You’ll get tips on how to build good relationships with your coworkers, and how to have purpose-driven, effective organizing conversations. We’ll be publishing advice on strategies for strikes, and tactics for picketing, as well.
We will also be offering trainings in the months ahead. We are working to bring forward a basic organizing training, on how to form a committee and practice solidarity unionism in your workplace. We will also be offering a picket and direct action training, which will teach your and your coworkers how to plan and carry out effective strikes, protests, and other forms of resistance. Keep reading The Wildcat! in the coming months for more on how to sign up for these trainings.
Finally, if you like what you’re reading here and you want to get more involved in workers struggles, consider linking up with the Workers Solidarity Circle (WSC), which we at Black Cat Workers Collective are proud to be part of. The WSC is a coalition with the Democratic Socialists of America and other local organizers and activists, dedicated to building up the self-organization of our class in the Twin Cities and beyond, and resisting the ongoing attacks on workers by the incoming Trump administration and the long-standing political establishment here in Minnesota and our metro. We recently held a well-attended Worker’s Assembly at the United Labor Center, with rank and file members of over 15 unions represented, and we plan to hold another one this spring. Keep reading The Wildcat! for information on an upcoming fundraiser for reproductive rights in states that have infringed on them.
A Council of All the Workers
Out of all the conversations I’ve had at work, the one that always sticks with me, was on spring while I working as a deckhand on a river towboat. It was a hard job- 12 hour shifts with no overtime pay, seven days in a row, switching from days to nights every month. It was very dangerous. For all of that, in the 2010s, we had a starting wage of $12.50, and capped our wages at around $23.00 for lead men- the deckhands who were the head of their crew.
For few years, some of us deckhands had carefully testing the waters, seeing if any of our crewmates would be interested in organizing a union. There was no union in the workplace, an no official union was backing up our effort, either- and so no one would be able to back us up if we faced retaliation for organizing. So, we organized very carefully- sussing out who could be trusted and who couldn’t, what each crew member thought of one another, and what issues fired people up. They say the boss is your best organizer. The boss is always liable, when an organizing campaign is going slow, to pull something that gets everyone mad again and breathe life back into your efforts. That’s what had happened one spring morning when I reported for crew change at the wharf, and heard my lead man and his opposite on the night shift working each other up.
“It’s bullshit!”, my lead man said. “Every year we ask them for just something- anything. A cost of living raise. The green guys’ wages go up a little bit every couple years and ours stays the same. So, they give us a raise, finally, last year. A quarter an hour. Now they take it away!”
“A bonus!”, said the lead man on the night shift. “They say it wasn’t a raise, just an end of year bonus. So now, they claw it back.”
“What we need to do”, said my lead man, “Is get all the leads together when we’re all here at the dock, and go march up to the office and tell them we want our raise back.”
“More than that”, said the other, “We need to form a council of all the workers in the port, and we need to shut down everything until we get what we want”
I was shocked to hear it. Finally, these guys were seeing what I saw! So, I chimed in- “Yeah, and we need to form a union!”
The lead man laughed. “A union? What good can they do? Some contract they ignore and a slap on the wrist when they break it? No. What we need is a council of all the workers to shut down the river until we get what we want!”
Some time later, I had the opportunity to meet Noel Ignatiev, a veteran organizer and theorist who had once been a steel mill organizer and part of the Sojourner Truth Organization. We became friends on social media, and one day I told him the story.
“He was right”, said Noel. “What a union is in America, to the average worker, and what he was describing, are two different things. There’s a difference between being unionized, and being organized”
Two Souls of Unionism
What my coworker was digging at, is the difference between two “souls” of unionism: Solidarity Unionism and Business Unionism. While there have been many different organizing strategies and ways to structure unions throughout our movement’s history, it is easy to think of these two tendencies running through that whole history, pulling our movement to either pole. Both of these tendencies can- and often do- exist within a given union, in tension with each other.
Business Unionism is the type of union that American workers have gotten used to, especially in industries that organized decades ago and have passed the union on as a legacy since then. In a business union, the role of the union is to negotiate the price and conditions under which we sell our labor to capital. The capitalist system is assumed to be the only viable system, and the union as an institution does not aim to change that system in any fundamental way. Instead, it aims to provide a set of services to workers in exchange for our membership dues: training, hiring opportunities, health insurance and a pension for those of us who get our benefits through the union, and representation during grievances.
When a grievance in a business union comes up, it is handled by the steward or the business agent, through the channels laid out in the contract and labor law- not by the worker themselves. Often, the worker is not even informed of how many grievances or Unfair Labor Practices are filed, over what, and what the status of them is. While grievances are being filed on your behalf, you as a worker are advised to keep your head down, be a model employee, and give the boss no excuse for disciplinary action against you. This grievance process is legalistic, and takes conflict off of the shop floor and away from the workers.
This way of handling conflicts with the boss, means that few workers in a business union have the experience of ever taking direct action with their coworkers around a problem at work. A worker can be a union member for their whole working life, and possibly never directly take part in any struggle over power in the workplace with their boss.
Solidarity unionism, on the other hand, is the living tradition of struggle that resurfaces, over and over, as the time tested grassroots method for workers who need to rely on our own power to fight the boss. Solidarity unionism is driven directly by the workers, who make the day-to-day decisions about how to fight the boss on the job site, and about how to keep the union running. Grievances at work are usually handled by collective, direct action.
All of these practices that make up solidarity unionism have existed for as long as wage workers have been struggling against industrial capitalism. In the 1880s, a revolutionary vision for labor was called the “Chicago Idea”, and was advocated by the anarchists who would become the Haymarket Martyrs. Similar ideas in other parts of the world would become known as Anarcho-Syndicalism. Militancy and union democracy were hallmarks of the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, and present throughout the struggles of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.
The term “Solidarity Unionism” itself was coined by Staughton Lynd in his book, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer, published in 1978, after the tumultuous rank and file rebellions of the early 1970s which saw workers organizing a wave of militancy not seen since the Great Depression, with contract rejections, collective insubordination, sabotage, slowdowns, wildcat strikes, and union reform caucuses across multiple industries. By the late 1970s, however, the era of globalization saw manufacturing increasingly moving overseas, combined with a general counter-offensive by industry against labor. The business unions in many cases had just finished defeating their own fighting rank and file membership, and could not resist. By 2023, just 10% of American workers belong to a union. It’s in this context that the author Joe Burns has released his book, Class Struggle Unionism, in which he lays out a very similar vision- that “class struggle unionists believe in militancy, shop floor struggle, union democracy, fighting the system, and prioritizing anti-racist struggle”. While Lynd and Burns don’t specify that solidarity unionism or class struggle unionism are specifically revolutionary or anarchist in their politics, these same principles have been the core of the anarchist approach to labor struggle since the days of “The Chicago Idea”.
Direct action, in the workplace, means dealing with our problems through disrupting the normal flow of the business. Normally, we as workers sell the hours of our lives to a company, obey the company while we are on the job, and produce the goods and services the company sells. Our work, and our obedience, is what keeps the company running and profitable. Direct action interrupts that. It can look like dock workers slowing down the rate they unload ships, to protest not getting a pay raise. Or, if it could be bus drivers refusing to accept the fares of their passengers, keeping the buses running but denying their company or city the money from the fares. Direct action can look like theater extras refusing to move during a crucial part of a performance until a pay cut is reversed. Anything that we as workers can do, without relying on the courts or lawmakers, to stop production and hit the boss in the pocket book, is direct action.
In our campaign on the Mississippi river towboats, we never got an official union recognized in the workplace- the committee was exposed by a snitch to the boss just as it was finally taking off. Even without one, though, we were able to win grievances through creative tactics. For example, on one of the boats, the tank that the toilet flushed into had a crack in the side, which allowed the raw sewage to leak out right into the engine room. There, it steadily dripped onto a piping hot diesel engine all day and all night. The smell of burning sewage made the galley unlivable, and even on rainy nights we would huddle around the head deck with our cigarettes, hoping the fresh river air or the tobacco would save us from the stench. The company insisted they wouldn’t repair it until the end of the season, because they didn’t want to take this workhorse of a boat off the water for even a watch or two. The man in charge of repairs for the boats was a “manager of maintenance”, so titled because the company was allowing all the mechanics represented by the Operating Engineers retire, replacing them with “managers”, so they could crush the last foothold any union had in the company. This manager had a system set up, where any problem reported through the computer in the galley would send a message to his phone. The highest-priority emergency problems would set off an alarm strong enough to wake him up in the middle of the night. So, we simply took turns, every night at around 1 AM, sending the highest-priority emergency alert out: “THE TANK IS LEAKING. THE BOAT SMELLS LIKE POOP.”
After two weeks of this, a maintenance crew was sent onto the boat and welded a patch onto the tank. It was just in time for us to spend the cold autumn nights in the warmth of our galley, now free from the stench.
Direct action can work in a union that does have an official union, as well. In 2010s there was a solidarity union committee among the rank and file Teamsters, who were also affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, in UPS hubs in a few cities around the country. Package handlers found that direct action got results for them quicker, and more reliably, than relying on the grievance process. When managers started coming onto the line and putting their hands on union work, the committee handed out whistles and workers started literally blowing the whistle whenever they saw it happening. When someone didn’t get their holiday bonus, the committee would call on supporters from all over to call the office of the manager who could approve the bonus, day in and day out, never letting them get a moment’s peace until it was approved. When the committee found out, during the uprising in Ferguson, that supplies for the cops were passing through the hub, they removed the packages from the conveyor belt and refused to handle them, then declared the action, “Hands Up! Don’t Ship!”. The supplies had to be re-routed to other hubs.
Because direct action is so central to solidarity unionism, this kind of organizing requires that workers be highly involved in the union- but it also provides an easy way for workers to build that kind of involvement. Direct action done by just one or two workers, usually ends in those workers getting retaliated against. It’s much safer for every worker involved, when more of us join in- both because the disruption caused in much greater, and because most bosses know that they can’t just punish or even fire their entire workforce. So, using direct action to solve problems at work mean that we have to carefully build relationships of trust with our coworkers. At the same time, taking direct action together is one of the surest ways to cement the trust between coworkers. This creates a reinforcing cycle that can operate in either direction. In a workplace where the practice of solidarity is on the rise, each action grows our confidence in ourselves, our knowledge of our own power, and our ability to tell who is reliable and who is not in a confrontation with management.
An IWW organizer, Nate Hawthorne, put it this way in the Industrial Worker, in 2007: “Workers’ power is like a muscle. My muscles have (pretty flabby) limits. By using my muscles within their limits, I get stronger. Solidarity unionism means exercising our power. We figure out what power we have and we increase it by exercising it. We exercise our power to build an organized shop--and eventually an organized industry and an organized working class--which increases the power we have to exercise. The point isn't just to lift this weight (improving the job in the short term, a fair day's wages for a fair day's work), the point is also how the weights get lifted and by who.”
This growth in trust and in our analysis of power, doesn’t have to end at the job site. When workers are involved in fighting for ourselves, it also grows a broader culture of solidarity, and forces us to think through the ways that our society is structured. Those involved in solidarity unionism may see its role as more than negotiating a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work under capitalism. We may see the role of the solidarity union as one front in a class struggle against the capitalist system itself, or as one area of struggle that intersects with others. Because of this, solidarity unionists will often take action not only around issues on the job site, but also around issues that affect working class people outside of work.
For example, IWW dock workers in Seattle during the Russian Civil War blocked the shipment of guns to the army of the Tsarist (anti-revolutionary) White Army under Admiral Kolchak, refusing to be complicit in the murder of Russian workers- one of many such political actions by dock workers over the decades. In the 1970s, the Building Laborers Federation in Australia and especially its New South Wales branch, led a series of actions called Green Bans, preventing building projects that would harm parks and nature, low income housing, or buildings of historic significance, in direct contrast to the usual “Yes, In My Back Yard! (YIMBY)” pro-building-everything stance that Building Trades unions take. The BLF, led by rank and file construction workers, even enacted a “pink ban” in solidarity with a gay student expelled from the dormitories of Macquarie University. More recently and close to home, the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been reinvigorated by a rank and file movement, adopted the concept of “bargaining for the public good”, and demanded- though failed so far to win- rent control as one of its demands in its 2019 strike.
All of these are in sharp contrast to the mainstream labor movement’s rejection of action around non-workplace issues. The large unions of the AFL-CIO have been committed to bargaining around bread and butter issues exclusively, in model laid down since the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther signed the “Treaty of Detroit” with the Big 3 car manufacturers in 1950. The treaty set the framework for the broader post-War bargain between organized labor and capital in the USA. Workers got job security, higher wages, and benefits, while management got the “right to manage”- a workplace free of disruptive direct action, of demands for worker control, and of political demands being made from the shop floor. Instead, organized labor would pursue its political agenda in the electoral arena- a strategy that has delivered us over half a century of the lesser-evil politics of the Democratic Party, which takes the labor vote and labor’s campaign donations for granted even as both have been slipping away. While solidarity unionism builds class power and consciousness, business unionism lets it wither, like a muscle that never lifts.
The Committee: The Seed of Working Class Power
So, how do we start lifting? If the living practice of solidarity in the workplace feeds on, and reinforces itself, how do we build it up when we are starting from the low place that labor in the US has been at, for decades of defeat and retreat? Naturally, we start at work.
One of the biggest differences between solidarity unionism and business unionism, is the role of the workers’ committee. As anyone who’s been through an organizing campaign knows, the committee is the heart of the campaign. Starting with just a few people, a committee maps out the social layout of the workplace. Committee members start building relationships, having one-on-one conversations, seeing where each of our coworkers stands in relation to the union. We invite them into the committee, taking smaller actions and then bigger actions to grow the confidence of our coworkers.
Then, in business unionism, we file for an election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Whether this elections is won or lost, the worker committee’s time is drawing to a close. The committee is formed only for the initial organizing drive. When that drive is won, the committee is usually allowed to wither away- often, before the first contract is even signed. When the election is won, or the company voluntarily recognizes the union, or the contractor becomes a signatory to the union, and the contract in place, then the new normalized relationships are set up. The worker committee is discarded.
In solidarity unionism, the committee stays. It is the union, or at very least is the real presence of the union on the job site. It may grow or shrink over the months and years as struggles arise and are resolved. It may even fade away in slow times, only to re-appear so long as workers are around who have the relationships of trust and the memories of previous struggles. But, unless the embers of struggle have been cold for a very, very long time, they can be breathed back into a blaze again, and that blaze can catch like wildfire. That, then, is our job as workers today- to kindle the fire of solidarity back into the workplace.
You can start building the committee in your own workplace, whether you have no union at work, or are a rank-and-file member of a union. We want to help you.
In upcoming issues of The Wildcat!, we will be publishing tips and guides on how to go about creating a worker committee in your own workplace, whether you belong to an official union or not. If you pick up an issue of WildCat! each month, you will find advice that will help you and your coworkers struggle against the boss, whether you’re a class war veteran or just starting to fight back for the first time. You’ll learn about mapping out the social relationship at your job and finding ways to bridge the gaps between different groups of workers. You’ll read about the common tricks bosses use to try to break worker power. You’ll get tips on how to build good relationships with your coworkers, and how to have purpose-driven, effective organizing conversations. We’ll be publishing advice on strategies for strikes, and tactics for picketing, as well.
We will also be offering trainings in the months ahead. We are working to bring forward a basic organizing training, on how to form a committee and practice solidarity unionism in your workplace. We will also be offering a picket and direct action training, which will teach your and your coworkers how to plan and carry out effective strikes, protests, and other forms of resistance. Keep reading The Wildcat! in the coming months for more on how to sign up for these trainings.
Finally, if you like what you’re reading here and you want to get more involved in workers struggles, consider linking up with the Workers Solidarity Circle (WSC), which we at Black Cat Workers Collective are proud to be part of. The WSC is a coalition with the Democratic Socialists of America and other local organizers and activists, dedicated to building up the self-organization of our class in the Twin Cities and beyond, and resisting the ongoing attacks on workers by the incoming Trump administration and the long-standing political establishment here in Minnesota and our metro. We recently held a well-attended Worker’s Assembly at the United Labor Center, with rank and file members of over 15 unions represented, and we plan to hold another one this spring. Keep reading The Wildcat! for information on an upcoming fundraiser for reproductive rights in states that have infringed on them.
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