non-majority unions

["Sherry & Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

[The non-majority union has been a stand-by of Black Workers for Justice for
quite some time now.  Glad to see it's been "re-discovered" by the
Nation. -SG]

A Proposal to American Labor

'Open source unionism' could reinvigorate American labor in the age of the
Internet.

by Richard B. Freeman & Joel Rogers
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020624&s=rogers>

The first constitution of the American Federation of Labor, adopted at its
founding in 1886, declared the new organization open to the membership of
any "seven wage workers of good character, and favorable to Trade Unions,
and not members of any body affiliated with this Federation." Tens of
thousands of such groups applied for and received direct affiliation with
the national federation afterward, though sometimes long afterward,
typically migrating to one or another international union.

The tactic was particularly prevalent during peak periods of union
organization, such as the turn of the twentieth century and again in the
1930s, when workers who did not fit well into their established forms sought
to join unions. During these periods another union formation was also
widespread: "minority" or "members only" unions, which offered
representation to workers without a demonstrated pro-union majority at their
worksite. Such nonmajority unions were critical to organizing new sectors of
American industry, providing a union presence in the workplace well before
an employer recognized a collective-bargaining unit. Most of the early
organizing of the industrial trades, for example, and of early industrial
unions like the mineworkers and steelworkers, was achieved through such
minority unions.

After World War II, however, unions effectively abandoned both "direct
affiliation" and "minority unionism" as common practices. Over the past
half- century, union membership has come to mean membership in an
organization that has demonstrated majority support among workers at a
particular worksite, recognized by an employer as the exclusive
representative of workers for purposes of collective bargaining. Labor is
not as open in its membership, in admitting different configurations of
workers, as it was in the past.

We believe this self-imposed limit on the meaning of membership today poses
an unnecessary barrier to union influence and growth, and it should be
reconsidered. There are tens of millions of nonunion workers many times the
size of the existing labor movement who want better representation at work
or better representation of workers' interests politically, but who remain
cut off from the benefits of union membership. Unions can and should seek to
change this by reforming labor law or by increasing their organizing
efforts. In addition, however, organized labor should open itself to a wider
range of members.

Pro-union workers who do not make up a majority at their workplace are not
irrelevant to building a labor movement. They have simply not yet achieved
one particular measure of union strength not even necessarily the most
important one. These workers have much to offer labor and much to gain from
labor. Today as in the past, nontraditional members in nonmajority settings
can give labor an immense boost in its reach, leverage and access to
strategic information on employer behavior. Adding nonmajority or otherwise
nontraditional workers to union membership need not, moreover, conflict with
the goal of traditional majorities-only organizing. To the contrary, such
new members would provide natural ballast for the legal and policy reforms
and organizing committees that unions need to succeed in such organizing.

Opening up to these new members would entail some administrative challenges.
Many unionists will worry about the cost of servicing workers outside union
security clauses and regular dues collection by employers. But the economics
of the Internet have changed this cost equation in fundamental ways. At
essentially zero marginal cost, unions can communicate with an
ever-expanding number of new members, and they can deliver all manner of
services to them through the Internet.

A labor movement that embraced this vision taking its own historical lessons
with diversified membership seriously and relying more heavily on the
Internet in membership communication and servicing would be practicing what
we call "open-source unionism" (OSU).

The case for OSU begins by recognizing that traditional unionism and
strategies for advancing it are not succeeding. Seven years after John
Sweeney's "new voices" team took over at the AFL-CIO, only 9 percent of
private-sector workers belong to unions a lower proportion than when he took
over, indeed lower than a century ago. Unions look healthier in the public
sector, but public-sector unionization has natural boundaries on its
importance. Public employment is only 15 percent of total employment, and
public-sector wage and work norms cannot be maintained indefinitely at sharp
odds with the private economy. To give workers greater say in the American
economy, unions must increase their power vis-à-vis private employers. This
they have failed to do.

The failure is by no means because workers reject unionism. American unions
operate under a labor law that is the least favorable to collective worker
action in the developed world. They are pummeled daily by a powerful
business community uniquely hostile to unions. And for all their PAC giving
and get-out-the-vote drives on behalf of Democrats, labor suffers from a
party that gets more excited about fighting for free-trade agreements and
the interests of high-tech companies than fighting for worker rights.

Admitting all this, however, tells us little about what labor should do.
Should it lobby once again for a labor law reform that Congress failed to
deliver when unions had a larger share of the work force? Persuade business
that labor can be its friend? Reinvent the Democratic Party? Not likely, at
least not anytime soon, and almost certainly not without first growing the
membership base that could create movement on these fronts. A declining
union movement falls into a vicious downward spiral, as lower density
reduces resources and ability to reverse the fall. To break the spiral,
unions need more bodies and more broad public support.

It seems very unlikely that unions can achieve the necessary scale and
recognition through traditional majorities-based organizing alone. Because
of work- force growth and steady churning in the job base, unions must
organize hundreds of thousands of workers annually merely to maintain their
present private- sector density far more than they currently do. To increase
density a percentage point, they need to organize about 1 million per year.
To get back to the position they were in when Ronald Reagan took office,
they would need to do that for about twelve years running.

A useful rule of thumb puts the cost of acquiring a new union member at
$1,000; some estimates are as high as $2,000-$3,000 per new member. So a
million new members would cost at least $1 billion, or about 20 percent of
unions' annual income. It was on this reckoning that Sweeney, upon taking
office, challenged AFL-CIO affiliates to dedicate at least that share of
their budgets to organizing. But nobody has seen organizing on the scale of
millions of workers since the 1930s, and only a handful of unions have come
even close to meeting Sweeney's benchmark. If current trends hold, then,
density will continue to decline.

What is needed is a larger transformation in strategy that would change the
broader balance of forces in the organizing equation by getting a lot more
workers into the labor movement, and spreading labor's influence more widely
in society. Labor needs to open itself up. OSU would accomplish that, while
complementing the traditional powers that labor still retains.

To clarify the direction we believe labor should go, let's contrast the
proposed open-source union model more explicitly with the existing one.
Under the current model, workers typically become union members only when
unions gain majority support at a particular workplace. This makes the union
the exclusive representative of those workers for purposes of collective
bargaining. Getting to majority status in the trade, "50 percent + 1"is a
struggle. The law barely punishes employers who violate it, and the success
of the union drive is typically determined by the level of employer
resistance. Unions usually abandon workers who are unsuccessful in their
fight to achieve majority status, and they are uninterested in workers who
have no plausible near-term chance of such success.

Under open-source unionism, by contrast, unions would welcome members even
before they achieved majority status, and stick with them as they fought for
it maybe for a very long time. These "pre-majority" workers would presumably
pay reduced dues in the absence of the benefits of collective bargaining,
but would otherwise be normal union members. They would gain some of the
bread-and-butter benefits of traditional unionism advice and support on
their legal rights, bargaining over wages and working conditions if
feasible, protection of pension holdings, political representation, career
guidance, access to training and so on. And even in minority positions, they
might gain a collective contract for union members, or grow to the point of
being able to force a wall-to-wall agreement for all workers in the unit.
But under OSU, such an agreement, which is traditionally the singular goal
of organizing, would not be the defining criterion for achieving or losing
membership. Joining the labor
movement would be something you did for a long time, not just an
organizational relationship you entered into with a third party upon taking
some particular job, to expire when that job expired or changed.

OSU would engage a range of workers in different states of organization
rather than discrete majorities of workers in collective-bargaining
agreements. There would be traditional employer-specific unions, but there
would likely be more cross-employer professional sorts of union formations
and more geographically defined ones. Within any of these boundaries, the
goal of OSU would not be collective bargaining per se but broader worker
influence over the terms and conditions of work and working life. Because
OSU unions would typically have less clout inside firms or with particular
employers, they would probably be more concerned than traditional unionism
with the political and policy environment surrounding their employers and
employment settings. They would be more open to alliance with nonlabor
forces community forces of various kinds, constituencies organized around
interests not best expressed through work or even class (here think
environmental, feminist, diversity or work/family
concerns)--that might support them in this work. As a result, labor as a
whole would likely have a more pronounced "social" face with OSU than it has
today.

How realistic is this vision? Nobody knows for sure. But there is evidence
to suggest that it is feasible evidence of unmet demand for unionism among
workers, evidence of legal support for minority unionism and evidence that
the Internet can be a vehicle for low- cost provision of information,
communication and work- related services.

The Market

Approximately 100 million private-sector American workers including 91
percent of the total have no collective representation at work. Our
mid-1990s survey of worker attitudes found that most workers want some
organization ranging from unions to workplace committees of various forms
speaking to their everyday concerns at work: wages and benefits, statutory
rights, technology and training, safety, work/family scheduling conflicts,
etc. Applying our results to today's work force, about 42 million workers
want an organization with elected representatives and arbitration of
disputes with management. Another 42 million or so want an organization more
focused on information, career assistance or consultation with management,
but still operating independent of management. Together these roughly 85
million workers a group twelve times the size of present private union membe
rship are the market for open-source unionism. Capturing even a small share
of this market could massively expand the
American labor movement and vastly extend its reach.

The Law

Many union and business leaders believe that pro-union workers without a
workplace majority have no collective rights that they exist in a sort of
legal black hole devoid of the protections our national labor laws afford
concerted activity. That is not the case. In fact, all the basic rights and
protections of that law apply to workers acting together in nonmajority
situations: protection from discrimination against union activity, the right
to strike without being discharged, the right to present demands and request
negotiations with management, the right to designate union stewards and the
right to bargain and make a collective agreement for members, among others.
Not only does minority unionism have historical antecedents in the private
sector, but it has strong roots in the public sector, which accounts for an
ever larger share of the union movement. Most public-sector unions in the
1960s and '70s first developed from minority representation. Teachers'
unions, for example, emerged
through agreements negotiated only with members of non- majority
associations.

To be sure, getting robust minority union presence in the private sector
will not be easy, as employers may react with the same opposition to
minority unions as to traditional ones. But there is nothing in the law that
prevents or even discourages exploring what minority unionism might look
like today.

The Technology

A longstanding objection to more open-ended and diverse union membership is
that with relatively low density in any given place, the members would be
too costly to service: The economics of servicing require a
collective-bargaining agreement and the accompanying dues and union
security. But here we think the Internet is changing the economics of
membership servicing in fundamental ways.

The Internet reduces to near-zero the marginal cost of providing
information, advice and some direct services to members. And Net usage in
America is approaching 80 percent of households or workplaces. What this
means is that unions can be continuously communicating with even a vast
membership, at a cost that is basically independent of the number of
members. Servicing and coordination of a mass labor movement, drawing on
membership more varied and dispersed than present membership, is
economically feasible today in a way it was not just a few years ago.

Of course, most workers will want human contact and direct exchange in
addition to advice and guidance through the web. These relationships require
some shared physical space, which is one reason open-source unionism would
have a strong geographic component. But it does not gainsay the degree to
which the Net can support alternative organizing, especially from a minority
position of strength. The best evidence of this is what workers are already
doing along these lines. As the examples in the sidebar indicate, whether
job-based, occupation-based, geographically based or
international/local-union-based, workers can be mobilized and organized
through the Net, which can also connect labor with broader communities at a
speed and cost unimaginable even a few years ago.

The Opportunity

If unions were to combine open membership, minority representation and
low-cost, Net-based servicing and coordination perhaps including more
"direct affiliation" of new worker organizations to the national AFL-CIO, or
regional bodies, or existing internationals we believe that over the long
run they would expand membership substantially. They would also enjoy
immediate gains in labor's public image and political effectiveness.

The AFL-CIO takes great pride in its recent political program, claiming that
it has dramatically increased the union household share of the active
electorate even as its share of the working population has declined. Upon
closer inspection, this claim proves exaggerated, an artifact of exit-poll
procedures and inconsistency in question wording. But what is clear from the
polls is that the number of nonmembers now in the electorate who express
great support for unions is vastly greater than the number of union members
who express such support three to four times greater. A political program
centered on labor's interests, with manifest general benefit, would find an
audience among these voters. Especially when coupled with human contact and
presence locally provided, for example, by a well- organized central labor
council or state federation this sort of diffuse political support could
greatly affect state and local as well as national elections.

Of course, admitting new sorts of members to its ranks or better
coordinating with outsiders on politics would disrupt established labor
routines. New unions would form, jurisdictional boundaries would be crossed
and union alliances with nonunion community and advocacy groups would give
rise to a different labor politics disturbing to the status quo. For some
within labor, that may be enough reason not to try it.

But the open-source idea is eminently scalable. It can start small. And it
can start in part of the movement. Labor, like other progressive
organizations, sometimes acts as if it cannot coordinate on anything until
it agrees on everything. That is not necessary here. A single state
federation, or central labor council, or international could initiate it
anywhere there is a consensus to allow for experimentation.

Some traditionalists in labor may argue that the new workers brought in
through OSU will not look like or have the same concerns or organize
themselves the same way as "traditional" union members. And they would be
right. How could new members from throughout the American economy and
society, drawn together largely by different means, be replicas of current
members? All great surges in organizing have been preceded by fears that the
new members will be different from the old, and confusion about the right
form of union craft versus industrial, general versus narrow jurisdictions,
public-sector associations versus "real unions." What we know from this
history is that forms must adjust to workers and the broader economy, and
nobody knows in advance which new forms will turn out to be enduring.

Labor currently has more support for its values in American society than it
is harnessing and mobilizing, either through its political program or
organizing. Workers want a connection to unions far greater than they have
now. Present organizing is not keeping pace with economic changes and a
nearly lethal employer and policy environment. Turning labor around will
require more than simply doing more of what unions have been doing over the
past decade. It will require a broader if also, at least in part, shallower
membership base and stronger alliance between labor and those outside
itself. That will not be achieved through rhetoric. It necessitates changes
in membership, and the routines for servicing and mobilizing those members.
What we need in America today is a labor movement that workers can join
easily, without going to war with their employers; a labor movement that
welcomes support anywhere it finds it, and is able to crystallize what is
now diffuse support into real membership
and shared action; and a movement that will offer support anywhere workers
are struggling to build power. "Open-source unionism" describes the
structure and ambitions of a labor movement that seeks to do these
things"The new union movement, we come from everywhere." It has a nice ring,
doesn't it?

>From The Nation, June 24th




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