Leftist Unionbusting

There’s a long history of leftists believing their workers should have no union rights because their job is to exploit themselves for the cause of revolution. This goes back to the kind of self-sacrifice required by the Communist Party. Communism may be pretty much dead in the United States (say what you will about the modern socialist movement, but it’s basically left-liberalism defining itself against Third Way Clintonism in both policy and vision, with the police abolition movement the only really radical demand today), but this kind of belief about organizers remains very strong. The weakest unions in organized labor are the staff unions and it’s based precisely on this idea that you should be willing and happy to work 16 hour days for The Cause, no matter how horrible your boss is. Anyone involved in the labor movement has stories about union leadership hating the staff union or not wanting to hire staffers who would be actively involved in worker rights for themselves. My one union job was under the worst, most awful, despicable creature I have ever worked for and he created a truly miserable set of working conditions at SEIU Local 205 in Nashville 21 years ago this summer. He’s long gone mercifully and the current head of that local is a genuinely excellent human being, from my time working with him in Knoxville in the late 90s.

Anyway, I digress. One of the places of energy in the labor movement over the last 5 years has been among campaign staff. It’s necessary. This is another workplace where people are supposed to self-sacrifice among ridiculously bad working conditions for The Cause. The issue here isn’t just about wages and hours (though it’s very much about the latter). It’s that these working conditions open the door for tremendously abusive bosses. And as anyone who has worked on campaigns can tell you, there’s a lot of yelling and bad behavior under stressful situations. There needs to be a way to adjudicate these situations. We also need to nurture young activists and not burn through them. Yelling at people is horrible management and it makes people never want to volunteer again. My own union experience ensured that I would become a labor academic and not an organizer because I’m never going through that again.

However, the campaign staff unionization has also led to a backlash. Hilariously, this now includes in Jacobin with articles that unionizing the Bernie campaign would be disastrous because it would undermine The Cause.

In the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses in 2020, Bernie Sanders staffers hired for the final push started complaining about the long hours, modest wages, and — crucially — the lack of days off during the all-out effort to convince every possible Bernie supporter to caucus for him. Grim reports that open letters by the staffers were written to campaign management but not sent, plans were discussed to stop entering door-knocking data into databases as a pressure tactic, and a work stoppage was nearly called. Organizers within the campaign argued that they needed to take advantage of their moment of “maximum leverage” by diverting time from organizing Iowans to caucus to organizing campaign staffers to demand days off.

“Fortunately for the Sanders campaign, they already had a union. It had been formed early in the campaign, so there was a process set up to handle these disputes. A bargaining unit call was scheduled for a week before the caucus to hash out their strategy. The state’s regional field directors were also part of the union, and so they knew about the brewing uprising. They got organized, too, and came to the call prepared with all of the arguments against a work stoppage and against a public statement denouncing the campaign. A vote was held, and a majority sided with backing down and not making the fight public. A week later, in a scandal-plagued caucus, Sanders won slightly more votes than Buttigieg, but Pete Buttigieg was deemed to have won slightly more delegates. Had a few more people shown up in a few more precincts, even with all the shenanigans, Sanders would have won both the popular vote and the delegate race.”

There’s a larger point in Grim’s example. Being a campaign staffer on an insurgent leftist campaign just isn’t an ordinary job. The purpose of the campaigning isn’t to make more money for a corporate overlord — it’s to elect someone like Bernie Sanders who has pledged to fight those corporate overlords.

Most such jobs are over in months or even weeks. When insurgent electoral campaigns and other forms of social movement organizing have the potential to improve the conditions of the working class as a whole, it’s hard to justify a political calculus that subordinates these efforts’ success to staff making demands of the campaign like any group of workers would against a capitalist boss.

None of this to deny that campaign workers have bills to pay or that they deserve protection from abusive bosses, of course. Every worker deserves that. And it’s worth remembering that the Sanders campaign was able to avoid disaster in Iowa because the staffers were unionized, so there was a structure for democratic deliberation about whether to blow up the campaign with a strike. Thankfully, the staffers chose not to after having their complaints heard and addressed.

Oh, OK, because Bernie has my politics, you should accept being exploited.

But dilemmas are created when militant efforts to advance those limited interests could have real costs for broader working-class interests. If the fig leaf of Mayor Pete’s lead in “state delegate equivalents” hadn’t been available to the media as a way of declaring him the winner of the caucus, would this extra bit of momentum have made a difference later in the campaign? Maybe not. Perhaps Sanders would have been decisively defeated in South Carolina no matter what happened in the earlier states, and in this alternate timeline, Joe Biden still would have won. We’ll never know.

What we can be almost certain of is that, if there had been a strike in Iowa, or if the staffers had even made the contemplated public denunciation a week before the caucus, the Sanders campaign would have ended long before it did in our timeline. That would have also meant an earlier and more decisive end to any prospect for a Sanders presidency, and hence the best possible short-term boost for the movements for Medicare for All, a national living wage, a Green New Deal that would have created many millions of good union jobs, and more pro-worker labor laws throughout American society.

To those leftists who were angered by Grim’s commentary, the calculation seems to be very simple. As democratic socialists, we support militant worker organizing. In fact, we see that as the primary engine for positive social change. Therefore, the application of these tactics in every situation is a good thing, full stop.

The premise is right. But the conclusion is flawed.

And what is the conclusion? That the equivalent to organizing Bernie’s campaign is either police unions or the unions that supported Augusto Pinochet!

I don’t believe unionism is instrumentally valuable if and only if it happens to serve other progressive goals. Working people gaining more power at the workplace is innately progressive. But it doesn’t follow that every conceivable use of militant labor tactics serves the goal of increasing working-class power throughout society.

Police unions are an obvious example. If police brutality sends a striking coal miner to the hospital, do we want it to be easier or harder to fire the cops who did it? Which outcome better serves broader working-class interests?

Similar points could be made about the twenty-six-day trucking strike in 1972 Chile. Cop unions are one thing, you might think, but what would ever justify not supporting a strike by truck drivers? Well, as Seymour Hersh reported two years later in the New York Times, the CIA “heavily subsidized” the organizers of the strike as part of an effort to destabilize Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government.

See, here’s the thing about unions. There is no union movement if unions have to have your precise political aims in order to exist. You either support the right to organize and for collective bargaining or you don’t. This doesn’t mean you have to support the actions of a union. It doesn’t mean you can’t fight against a union that has bad politics. It does mean that unionbusting is an unacceptable political position to take. This is why I reject the required gymnastics to say that police unions shouldn’t exist–even if I think police unions are the enemy and that the police itself should be abolished in its present form. We as the public are a bargaining agent that should demand takebacks from those unions under the guise of the public interest. That’s what public sector bargaining is. But this also goes the other way. Not only would an organized Bernie campaign staff not destroy the Bernie campaign (unless the workers are treated so badly that they strike and at that point the campaign deserves it), but the argument itself is farcical. Unions don’t exist to support your politics. They exist to provide workers with a voice on the job. If you don’t think workers should have a voice on the job when that job is supporting your preferred candidate (or in the case of Jacobin, serving as a propaganda rag for said candidate), then you don’t actually support unions at all.

Frankly, this might be the most embarrassing piece Jacobin has ever published, and that includes the Merle Haggard slander.