The union on our own terms - Alexis Buss

Fellow Workers,

This pamphlet is a compilation of the writings of Alexis Buss, who served as General Secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World from 2000 until 2005. These columns concerning minority unionism were originally written as articles for the IWW’s newspaper, the Industrial Worker. Fellow Worker Joe Berry, an instructor at the University of Illinois in the Chicago Labor Education Program, put together the list of supplemental references.

This pamphlet shows that a small group of workers, even a union of two, can effectively and unofficially keep the boss from putting his hand into our back pockets. Known as minority unionism, this method of winning better conditions is not about assuming strength in numbers or legal recognition, but in the solidarity of workers willing to act on their own behalf to gain controls over their jobs. Workers who recognize that their interests are distinct from those they work for will find this an historical, insightful, and most useful of all, a practical pamphlet to help them get around the more conventional methods of unionism that favor the bosses.

Jason KrpanX356510
Chicago GMB, Education Department
Summer 2006

Alexis Buss was the General Secretary-Treasurer of the IWW from 2000 till 2005. As a printing press operator, she organized with her fellow workers to occupy the small shop after months of unsafe conditions and bounced paychecks. Alexis has been a piecard of the IWW since 2000, but has since returned to a life of wage slavery. She writes the occasional “Solidarity Unionism” column for the Industrial Worker.

Unionism before “The Act’

One hundred years ago, unions had no legal status (indeed, courts often ruled that unions were an illegal conspiracy and strikes a form of extortion) – they gained legal recognition through raw industrial power. Workers came together and began agitating over conditions.

Sometimes they persuaded their fellow workers to approach the boss and demand that some problems be corrected. Sometimes they refused to work under unsafe conditions or in unsafe ways, and persuaded their coworkers to do likewise. Sometimes they acted on the individual job, sometimes they held citywide demonstrations over issues of common concern, such as working hours or unsafe-work.

The important thing is that they acted. They identified key issues of concern; they met together, they decided upon a course of action, and they acted upon it. That is unionism in action. It does not require official recognition; it does not require a contract. It requires workers to come together and act collectively.

When the IWW fought for the 8-hour day in the timber and wheat fields, they didn’t decide to prove their majority to the boss through elections. Workers instead held meetings to decide what their demands were, elected shop committees to present those demands, and used tactics such as walking off the job at the end of an 8-hour shift to persuade recalcitrant bosses to agree to those demands.

The wave of sit-down strikes that established the CIO in auto and steel, for example, was undertaken by minority unions that had a substantial presence in the workplaces with a history of agitating around grievances. The unions then drew upon that minority presence to undertake direct actions that galvanized the larger workforce in their plants – and inspired workers across the continent.

Unionism was built through direct action and through organization on the job. But in the 1930s, the bosses found it increasingly difficult to keep unions out with hired thugs, mass firings and friendly judges.

Recognizing that there was no way to crush unions altogether, and tired of continual strife, the bosses offered a deal: If unions would agree to give up their industrial power and instead work through proper channels – the National Labor Relations Board in the United States, various provincial boards in Canada – the government would act as an “impartial” arbiter to determine whether or not the union was the bona fide representative of the workers.

“Labor Peace” was a desirable concept for the bosses, the government and entrenched unions bureaucracies. The bosses were tired of dealing with rising labor militancy -factory takeovers, strikes, walk-outs, sit-ins, etc. Government officials had to deal with helping their pals in big business recover from the effects of this kind of organizing. And the labor bureaucracies were worried by workers who were getting too uppity and demanding the same kind of respect from them that they were demanding from the bosses.

So a system was created for bosses to be given a legal mandate to bargain with the unions, and a set of laws and rules were created so that bargaining became a gentleman’s game.

The Law and Trade-offs

In the short term, unions were able to short-circuit the need to sign workers up one by one and collect dues directly. The bosses traded union busters in suits for the gun thugs they had previously employed.

After a short burst in membership, unions (particularly in the United States) began a long-term downward spiral. Under this exclusive bargaining model, unions do not attempt to function on the job until they gain legal certification. The legal process affords bosses almost unlimited opportunity to threaten and intimidate workers, and to drag proceedings out for years. It is a system designed to interfere with workers’ right to organize – and the IWW pointed this out when the National Labor Relations Act was passed.

U.S. and Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context. This is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.

Business unions made a decision to abandon minority unionism in 1935 when they advocated for the Wagner Act.

The Wagner Act – while it allows for protections for workers engaged in minority unionism through its provisions protecting concerted activity – was welcomed by officers of business unions because, among other things, the law guaranteed exclusive bargaining rights to unions that won representation and facilitated maintenance of membership provisions like dues check-off.

The AFL-CIO takes this even further in its structure with anti-raiding and jurisdictional language, which has protected the worst of the affiliate unions by blocking workers who cannot hope to imbue democracy and militancy in a union representing them, and instead wish to throw the bums out and get a new union.

The IWW opposed the Wagner Act when the thinkers who brought it into existence first thunk it up. That’s because we saw the danger of asking laws to do our organizing for us, and we wanted nothing of the stifling bureaucracy, limited vision and anti-solidarity methods of the business unions.

We can’t just accept “more organizing.” Because even if we had more organizing of the kind we have now, we would still have to address the issue of unions not helping workers to pursue job control. We would still have to deal with concessionary bargaining.

How are we going to get off this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition the point of our organizing. We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.

Agreements for Bosses

Because most unions accept that workers are on earth to be managed, and bosses should run the world as they see fit, it isn’t a surprise that most union contracts allow management to have total control over a workplace. The union most usually comes to the table from a very weak position, because it has been built not to fight or enforce its demands, but rather to ask the boss to give it legitimacy.

I criticize elements of contracts that I think are best left out of the picture if we are to build a strong movement. Some of these elements are desired by the entrenched union bureaucracies, some are desirable for management, and some serve both interests, forsaking the workers.

These include management prerogatives, dues check-off, the no strike clause and others.

During the term of a contract, when the union is entitled to collect dues from workers through dues check-off, limiting the ability of workers to strike is also desirable for many unions to make sure that their main revenue streams are not cut off. Let alone the added benefit of avoiding the hassle of “managing” uppity workers.

If bargaining becomes an exercise in what rights we will give up, and deciding that bosses should in fact have total managerial control over our working lives, we’re going about it the wrong way.

Agreements for Workers

Typically, I talk about agreements in terms action to gain power over specific situations and negotiating to memorialize the outcome. But there are elements in present-day contracts that are very useful.

What kinds of agreements would solidarity unionists make with a boss? After all, we aim to secure better conditions and build upon them – part of that means being able to negotiate with management and guarantee the agreements we reach.

To my mind, when setting out to negotiate, workers should seek to get:

1) an end to employee-at-will status
2) a grievance procedure
3) whatever economic and working condition
improvements they may want and;
4) a past practice clause.

Contracts should include a “progressive discipline” or “firing for cause” clause, which effectively ends employee-at-will status.

Grievance procedures are the systematic way that issues that arise in a shop are handled. Many clauses limit the definition of a grievance to issues covered by the contract, effectively cutting off workers’ ability to grieve issues not anticipated by the contract. One could argue that issues that aren’t covered by the contract are free from the confines of the resolutions proscribed in the contract, so perhaps this isn’t the worst thing that could happen. But having a procedure management has agreed to follow when any kind of conflict comes up can be advantageous to workers.

Too often I’ve seen the wind taken out of the sails of organizing campaigns with promises from management that are never delivered. A clear process shows everyone when they’re just being blown off, and workers can more quickly decide how to up the ante.

It’s my preference for the last step in a grievance procedure to effectively be ‘all bets are off.’

Yes, have steps beforehand – meetings to discuss the issue, put it in writing, bring in a mediator, whatever makes sense in the structure of your workplace. But letting a third party who does not have to work under the agreement he’s binding you to make the ultimate decision is not ideal.

Past practice clauses effectively say, “Unless we reach an agreement, the workplace stays as it is now.” What this does is put the burden of changing the workplace on the shoulders of the employer. They must come to the union to talk about changes, and the union can agree or not, or negotiate.

When the workers decide that a situation needs to be fixed, the grievance procedure can be used to put discussion on a timeline. These clauses have largely disappeared from present-day contracts, but I think it’s time for a revival.

What remains to be seen is if a more encompassing contract that truly protects and expands the rights of working people can be negotiated in the present climate.

Organizing Basics

If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained.

We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file-on-the-job agitating that won the 8 hour day and built unionism as a vital force. One way to do this is what has become known now as “minority unionism.” We need to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.

An organized group of workers has legal rights, though it would be a mistake to expect the labor boards to enforce them any more vigorously than they do for unions that have been certified. And an organized group of workers, even if it is a small minority, has much more potential power than unorganized individual workers.

For the most part you have as many legal rights as a minority union as a majority union does – with the single exception of being certified as the exclusive bargaining agent with the sole authority to negotiate a contract. As long as workers are acting in concert, they enjoy the same basic legal rights – such as those are – whether or not they are in an officially certified union. A minority union has the right to:

1) present grievances (though there may not be a formal grievance procedure in place)
2) engage in concerted activity
3) to make demands upon the boss
4) to seek meetings
5) and even to strike (though this isn’t a great idea if you don’t have majority support).

Indeed, in certain cases they enjoy greater rights, as the courts have ruled that most union contracts implicitly surrender the right to strike. It is illegal to fire members of a minority union for their activity, to discriminate against them, to fire them for striking, to refuse to allow union representatives to participate in disciplinary hearings, etc.

Our unions and networks of solidarity must be able to deal with the issues that inspire most campaigns – wages, benefits, working conditions. But just as necessary is to have a way for us to organize to address the respect (or lack of respect) workers feel on the job, our ability to control how we work, how our workplace is going to interact with our community and our world.

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition. It is not about settling for creating a tiny clique of professional malcontents. It should aspire to grow, but in the short term gives an example of what kinds of organization is possible when we decide that our unions are going to exist because we need them to. It is a process, a process that offers hope for transforming our greatest weakness – the fact that our members are scattered in many, largely disorganized workplaces – into a strength.

The point of unionism as the IWW sees it is to organize workers in ways that our power cannot be ignored or coopted. Minority unionism is one way to do this, because we can organize around demands without worrying about if we have a contract or legal standing. As much as possible, we should seek to avoid situations where our power is replaced by laws and contracts.

Militancy, Openness and Democracy

A major advantage the IWW has over business unions specifically concerns our practice that any worker can join and find meaning in his or her membership through organizing regardless of whether or not a majority of workers on the job have declared in some fashion that they want to bargain with the boss: Minority Unionism.

There are other advantages to the IWW – we abide by the principle of one member, one vote. Every officer and representative in this union is elected, and the folks sitting in these seats rotate frequently. Every change in the structure of our union is voted on, including dues rates and constitutional amendments: Democracy.

Our membership also tends to be very eager to engage in struggle to win better conditions. Wobblies are often the first to arrive on the picket line and the last to leave, even when the picket doesn’t benefit them directly: Militancy.

These elements shouldn’t make us unique, but sadly often they do.

Increasing militancy and democracy can only benefit any workers’ organization, especially business unions, and there are people who work quite hard for that kind of reform. But these are very limited reforms for unions that stay tamely within the limits of the labor law regime.

The IWW is open to all workers, and our system of industrial unions is made in order to enhance our power. The only reason to worry about which industrial union one should be in is to give ourselves the most bargaining power and job control possible – not to protect jurisdictions. Orienting ourselves towards building our movement this way makes us different in a very profound way. We are choosing to experiment with new methods of organizing, methods that have potential not only to succeed in winning small
grievances, but in building a movement capable of making a real difference.

Additional Readings
Compiled by Joe Berry

The Blue Eagle at Work: democratic rights in the American workplace, Charles J. Morris, ILR Press, 2005
Inspired by Clyde Summers 1990 seminal essay on the legal rights of minority unions, (see separate listing below) this is a book- length defense of Summers’ position, with historical, legal, moral and practical arguments. May be the classic work for some time to come.

The Great Flint Strike of 1936-37: How Industrial Unionism Was Won, by Walter Linder
Originally a Progressive Labor Party pamphlet, (republished by many others since and available at many web sites, including PL’s) 1965 Perhaps the best account of the most important single labor action of the 1930’s, and done by a very minority union which became the United Auto Workers.

Industrial Valley, Ruth McKenney, ILR Press, (1937) 1992
The book length story of the Akron rubber workers movement that included the sit-down strikes that inspired the Flint autoworkers just months later. Also led by the minority union that gave birth to the United Rubber Workers.

“Open Source Unionism: Beyond Exclusive Collective Bargaining,” Joel Rogers and Richard B. Freeman, Working USA, Vol5, #2, 2002
Proposal from two labor scholars for a non-radical version of minority unionism.

Poor Workers Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below, by Vanessa Tait, South End Press, 2005
Historical and present examples of poor workers unions,

Transcribed by Juan Conatz