Thoughts on labor revitalization and UCSC

I've had to PELP and move to the East Coast to crash on my mom's couch, I only recently found a job which I start tomorrow, so dissertating is far from my mind these days

But after a comradely exchange with a friend about the relationship of members and formal organizations I have decided to write down some of what I've been thinking about in regards to my dissertation's theoretical perspective (minus all the citations and such) and how it relates to my orientation toward the recent events at UCSC.

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Sociologically speaking a social movement is "a specific form of collective social action in which excluded or marginalized groups with a shared sense of purpose and solidarity mobilize themselves to affect social change and achieve specific goals through extra-institutional channels.”

So before the New Deal structured the legal relationship of labor and the next couple of decades saw the emergence of business unionism as the dominant model through the development of organizational bureaucracy, workers took direct action - strikes, work stoppages, slow downs, etc. because there were no institutional channels set up to displace or mediate this conflict.

However, the web of relationships workers find themselves in today can only be described as institutionalized - labor law structures the relationship between workers and bosses, which unions get recognized and which don't, which employers have to negotiate and which don't, how those negotiations take place and who is involved. It tells workers when and how they can strike or picket, and gives workers less 1st amendment rights than any other group (formally, obviously some groups have less in practice).

Then on top of that structured relationship we get the contract to further structure the relationship between workers and bosses. The contract spells out workers pay and benefits and working conditions. Nearly all union contracts have "No Strikes" clauses - this emerges around WWII. Nearly all have "management's rights" clauses which waive the rights of workers to negotiate over nearly all decisions made by management that don't violate the contract.

And then there is the grievance procedure. The grievance procedure usually entails filling out a form and dropping it off at HR, then there is usually a meeting involved or multiple steps of meetings, and a ruling by HR about whether or not the boss violated the contract. Of course HR works *for* the boss, so their only motivation to rule against the boss is the risk of pissing workers off and escalating the conflict or the liability of losing arbitration - as arbitration is the final step in the grievance process if the union and the boss don't agree then they either go to an agreed upon third party who will rule on the grievance or a state labor board. This whole process can take weeks, months, even years if it goes to arbitration. Meanwhile the problem continues. And this is what the grievance process has done, it has also institutionalized conflict. It has disciplined the workers, making them patiently wait for the matter to be discussed and settled by experts at another time and place. Whereas before the conflict happened on the "shop floor" - the problem arose there and the action was taken there. Workers own agency was the key to solving the problem, now a union rep, and HR consultant, and a retired judge acting as arbitrator decide in an office far away on a much later date.

If your union leadership is selling you out in negotiations, not taking grievances seriously, or even taking kickbacks from the employer your only recourse is through the channels formally laid out in your union constitution/bylaws. If that means members don't get a vote on a contract - as we saw with professors in NYC who only could vote by electing delegates to vote on the contract then that is your only channel. If you haven't gotten to vote for your union president for over 10 years because the constitution says your local doesn't hold an election if more units are brought in to the local and your leadership pursues a strategy of gobbling up smaller locals into its local than you have no recourse but to wait until the next election to fix that, whenever that may be, in the case of a certain UFCW local.

Tilly et al distinguish between two types of collective action, contained contention and transgressive contention. Contained contention is when two parties have essentially ritualized their conflict, as it is so structured the behavior is patterned and predictable, whereas transgressive contention is conflict that brings in new actors, new tactics, and doesn't fall into a pattern or habit.

Contained contention I would argue is the product of institutionalization - when the relationship of conflict has become buffered through structures and organizations have developed a symbiotic (if not contradictory) relationship through organizational changes - like theemergence of union bureaucracy whose financial and professional existence relies more on the continued perpetuation of capitalism and its growth than the destruction of capitalism, as we saw with win-win negotiations in the auto industry where the UAW saw its future tied to the success of the Big 5.

Transgressive contention on the other hand is when collective action turns away from institutionalization and back to social movement activity - engaging in new tactics, drawing in new parties, and centering the power and agency of the rank-and-file. We see this with Red for Ed, where the fight against neoliberal school reforms and austerity has spilled outside of the structures of the Democratic Party and the union leadership which supported No Child Left Behind and into the streets where teachers, students, and communities see themsleves as the change makers, where their actions not the actions of others acting in a bureaucratic space through formal channels were what was going to change our education system.

What does this all mean for union activists? Firstly that "organized labor" and the "labor movement" aren't necessarily the same. Labor has become more of a 501c3, it resembles the nonprofit industrial complex more than the Haymarket martyrs. That this change has been contradictory, that while working people have benefited from the institutionalization of labor as they could depend on these structures to provide some check to employer power, that it has been a dual-edged sword, that it has also led to the stagnation and decline of the actual movement aspect of the labor movement, and probably also to the actual decline of union membership and power. Secondly this implies that the revitalization of the labor movement requires a shift from contained contention to transgressive contention that can likely only come about through struggle against existing union structures and leadership, as current organizational forms and relationships developed as part of the containing/disciplining of rank-and-file militancy and democracy.

Lastly, that the wildcat strike, an act against labor law and against union leadership is the ultimate act of anti-discipline, anti-institutionalization, and it is an expression of the purest form of social movement activity that labor can engage in.