Planting Liberally

Last Friday night at YearlyKos, the Change to Win labor federation hosted a dinner for myself and about twenty other bloggers who discuss labor issues, in some form or another. I had a chance to speak with staff from the policy development and strategic organizing groups within CtW, and I'll give you a summary of some of those conversations here, as well as my brief thoughts about how the progressive movement can work together with CtW to help strengthen the labor movement. First, a bit of background: Change to Win is a federation of six labor unions, which was formed in 2005 after some of them broke away from the AFL-CIO federation. While some folks refer to Change to Win as "the other labor federation", our hosts were quick to rebut that characterization. CtW is a labor federation, they say, but it's not just an alternative to AFL-CIO; it's fundamentally different, and its approach to organizing is fundamentally different. (AFL-CIO and CtW do collaborate on legislative and electoral work, however.) I spoke in some detail about legislative priorities with Deborah Chalfie, the Deputy Director of Issue Campaigns. For a little while now, I've been concerned that the labor movement's recent singular focus on the Employee Free Choice Act would blind the movement to other low-hanging fruit - opportunities like expanding NLRB's budget for enforcement, and things like that. Fortunately, I was wrong. Chalfie tells me that CtW worked diligently to add teeth to NLRB through the budgeting process, although we didn't have a chance to talk specifics. There is a reasonable chance the reforms will survive the Senate, but of course, Bush has promised a veto. Chalfie's highest priority at the moment is reforming the tax code to make abuse of independent contractors more difficult. Miscategorization of employees as independent contractors is a huge problem for the labor movement, because independent contractors cannot form unions (indeed, if independent contractors work together to fix the price of their labor, they are violating anti-trust law). The Teamsters are running up against this problem in their drive to organize FedEx workers, for example - FedEx drivers are categorized as independent contractors, each of them technically running their own small business (despite the fact that the trucks are owned by FedEx and branded as such.) There are similar practices at play in the construction industry. Apparently, there are loopholes in the tax code which makes this kind of abuse much easier than it should be, and CtW is working to close those loopholes. Incidentally, the fact that independent contractors cannot unionize is a big issue in organizing the creative class, many of whom are correctly classified as independent contractors when they sell their services to other companies. We discussed this issue a bit, and the related question of how bloggers can organize in order to ensure that ad rates don't fall too low. I'm sorry to say I had to miss the YearlyKos panel on forming a blogger's union; if anyone cares to chime in below with a summary of the panel, I'd love to hear more. I'm really curious to learn more about how unions can organize independent contractors, because it's a fairly big problem that is only going to get bigger in the next decade or so. The best that anyone's done so far (that I know of) is to put together a voluntary association capable of bargaining for health care and other benefits, notably the Freelancer's Union in New York City. This organization is great, but I worry that this approach undermines, to some degree, the ethos of solidarity that is the core of the labor movement. From what I understand, SEIU's new organization, Qvisory, is preparing to provide services similar to the Freelancer's Union, but on a national scale, so I guess we will soon see whether I'm worrying needlessly or not. I also spoke, a bit too briefly, with Joseph Geevarghese, who works in CtW's strategic organizing center. He gave me a very broad overview of the new thinking within strategic organizaing, which is that it's no longer sufficient to use a strike or other work disturbance to pressure a company to do the right thing. Increasingly, it's necessary to pressure a company by causing a crisis of confidence among its customers, shareholders, directors, or other constituents. I actually find this very interesting, because doing that kind of work is, or can be, very similar to the work that bloggers do. Bloggers are keenly capable of reaching niche audiences like these, and are further capable of causing just enough of a micro-disturbance among these niche audiences to pressure companies to act. We didn't get a chance to really talk nuts and bolts about actual collaborations, unfortunately, but hopefully I'll have a chance to do that soon, and will be able to post a follow-up here. The one topic I couldn't get a really straight answer on was the topic of industry-wide organizing. Organizing whole industries at a time was the main promise of CtW when it formed, and there has been precious little of that kind of organizing in the intervening years - or so it seems to me. (One exception, I think, was the Hotel Workers Rising campaign, which planned to organize large swaths of the hotel industry through synchronized contract expirations in major cities around the country; it was mildly successful, but it didn't quite organize the whole industry.) No one from CtW seemed to have a really good answer for what industry-wide organizing looks like in the early 21st century, except to say that they are using neutrality and card check agreements in order to bypass the broken NLRB election process. This might have been an actual answer that got lost in conversation. Andy Stern discusses the role of neutrality agreements in industry-wide organizing in A Country that Works: SEIU, in the late 90's, pioneered an approach whereby it locked up neutrality agreements with trigger clauses among major players in a given industry. Each agreement stated that the company would agree to a card-check organizing campaign, given that other players in the industry were willing to do the same. That's a fairly sophisticated and drawn-out model, and it could be that similar efforts are underway within other CtW unions; but it's difficult to see if that's actually happening. Jason Lefkowitz, CtW's blogger, has since forwarded me a press release from UFCW, discussing their approach to organizing grocery workers as an industry. Their approach is basically this: when a single UFCW grocery workers local is approaching a contract fight (or, I'd imagine, when a group of unorganized grocery workers is in the midst of an organizing campaign), the local enlists the help of both community members, and other UFCW locals throughout the country, to put nationwide pressure on the grocery chain. This is a noteworthy, and it's similar in many ways to SEIU's campaign for Houston Janitors a couple years ago. Is it scalable, i.e. capable of organizing a significant chunk of grocery workers in the entire country? Is it transferable, i.e. applicable to workers in other, less consumer-facing industries, where community support might be harder to gather? I don't know, but I'm glad to see it working well for UFCW. I'd certainly like to learn more about those aspects of the strategy. This post is, in a way, an elaboration on last week's more abstract piece, about how the labor and progressive movements can collaborate in much deeper ways than simply sharing electoral and legislative goals. I think it's important for progressive bloggers to support the issues that are crucial to the labor movement - living wage, universal health care, pension reform, labor law reform in the form of EFCA, etc. But I also think it's important for progressive bloggers to use our skills and smarts to help labor with its organizing campaigns - whether it's micro-targeting to pressure a company's clients, or evaluation of various industry-wide organizing strategies. I'm looking forward to collaboration along these lines in the future.