BY HANK REICHMAN

Lacking any special insights or ideas that I wish to share in recognition of this first Labor Day since the infamous Janus decision, I thought I would instead call attention to some useful analyses of labor’s state published elsewhere today.  So what follows are excerpts from a number of different pieces from a variety of sources.

First up is Sarah Jaffe’s op-ed in today’s New York Times, “Writing the Unions’ ‘Fight-or-Die Survival Chapter‘.”  Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, itself a worthwhile read.  I might note parenthetically that I do wish the Times would cease its more than annoying practice of referring to union officers as “labor bosses” while simultaneously calling the real bosses “executives,” “entrepreneurs” or “business leaders.”  Style sheets have political biases too.

In the past year, the American labor movement was dominated by two things. First, the Janus decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the public sector was essentially “right to work” — meaning, workers covered by union contracts no longer had to pay the costs of their representation. And second, the “Red for Ed” movement, the wave of teacher strikes, mostly in conservative states with few union protections.

The teachers’ uprisings, from West Virginia onward across the country, garnered weeks of front-page news and are no doubt helping to fuel the strikes already happening or pending this fall: Thousands of Washington State teachers are walking the picket lines, and Seattle and Los Angeles teachers voted to authorize their own potential strikes.

But the underlying story of 2018 is that the growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts made in recent years by workers constantly denigrated by both major political parties and even written off by much of organized labor itself. Workers are putting in the effort over weeks, months and years to build new unions and to strengthen and reclaim moribund ones, and even to begin to chip away at the wall of new “right to work” laws passed since 2012. Their work has meant a slight uptick in union membership numbers, and a larger one in public approval for unions — suggesting that the more Americans see unions fight, and strike, for what they believe in, the more we want to join them. . . .

Barbara Madeloni, a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association who now works for Labor Notes, a media and organizing project for union activists, said that teachers’ organizing under unfriendly legal regimes has inspired organizing across sectors: “Workers are showing each other how to access and use their power — and I expect to see more job actions and strikes as they teach each other.”

Those workers are changing the way union leaders have thought about political power. “It is a real challenge to labor leaders to recognize that our strength is in working people — in withholding our labor — and not in the statehouse,” Ms. Madeloni said.. . .

With a newly hostile labor board and courts packed with President Trump’s appointees, union members and workers fights will continue to be long and grueling, but they have realized that it is this or giving in to the erosion of their lives.

They are often winning fights against Republicans in power, and their struggles are garnering at least lip service from Democrats considering a presidential run in 2020. But they know that the shift in class power they seek will still, largely, be won in the workplace.

Next up is a post from the Working Class Perspectives blog, in which ACORN founder Wade Rathke poses the question, “Labor’s Day, More or Less?”

It’s hard for most of us to recall any period in the last fifty years that we could call the “good times” for labor in the U.S.  Membership density in American unions has been on a steady decline.  The National Labor Relations Board has certified few new unions, and mergers have become common.  Almost none of the major corporate enterprises founded over the last thirty years are unionized.

Legal reversals have followed these declines, and the beatings have been painful. Few were surprised that the Supreme Court ruled that unions could not require members of public sector unions to pay agency fees for bargaining and servicing, though the Janus ruling stung some unions badly.  New York State and Pennsylvania already report 80,000 workers whose payments have ceased, depleting union coffers by tens of millions annually.  The elimination of union security in Wisconsin has been cataclysmic.  Texas will soon eliminate any payroll deductions for any public workers in any jurisdiction. . . .

Workers and their unions have risen phoenix-like over and over.  In the last thirty years, more than a half-million informal workers in home health care and home child care have won coverage under union agreements in some of the largest organizing victories since the 30’s and 40’s. In the same period of decline, we have seen a historic victory at JP Stevens Mills, the grape boycott of the United Farm Workers, and the remarkable growth of all public sector unions.  The living wage movement and the Fight for Fifteen have moved workers forward despite extreme opposition at the highest levels of government and amid rising inequality.  Earlier this year, teachers in the deep red states of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and North Carolina broke out of their classrooms and into the streets, inspiring millions over wages but also, importantly, over classroom conditions and school funding.

As these cases demonstrate, it isn’t the law that empowers workers and their unions. It’s workers themselves. When labor grows, the law tends to support it. When unions are in retreat, the law also weakens, because it can — sometimes faster than we might wish. Action follows reaction, back and forth, but the combustion and boiling heat of struggle by workers is indomitable. If unions are going to survive Janus intact, they must have a base of engaged members. What was passive, must become active. Unions that are unable – or unwilling – to activate their membership will either wither or merge. But the ones that persist will be stronger and more able to face the future. . . .

If our unions are to survive the legal and political attacks ahead of us, we have to build labor-community coalitions like this everywhere. This can’t be tactical and transactional. It has to be permanently strategic and transformative. The times will never be good for us, but our own work can bend the times in a better direction for our success. We cannot win on the battlefield laid out for us by corporations and employers. We have to create our own field where we can even the odds. That requires the full engagement of workers and the public in our fights.

This Labor Day all of us need to think about how to support workers moving forward and unions embracing the future. No sense in whining, when we could be winning. Our first order of business has to be to get to work and make the work matter to workers, their communities, and the larger world where the public is willing to support us — if we are just willing to take the risks and do the work to take our fights to them and ask for their support.

Let’s turn now to an essay by Garrett Keizer, “Labor’s Last Stand,” in the September 2018 Harpers.  This is a long but fascinating and informative article well worth reading in its entirety (well, that’s true of all these essays, but this one is the longest). It includes quite a few concrete examples and discussions of current union strategies for which I did not have room (or copyright authorization!) to include here.  Keizer is a contributing editor at Harpers.  His essay “Labor’s Schoolhouse” appeared in the July 2017 issue and received the Debra E. Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award.

Having already determined in Citizens United that corporations are people, the Supreme Court decided in May that people, at least working people of vulnerable status, can be prevented from acting as corporations. In three consolidated cases involving disputed wage claims, the Court ruled that employers can force workers to accept individual arbitration instead of joining together in class-action lawsuits. Writing for the majority, Trump-appointed justice Neil Gorsuch maintained that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act was more pertinent to the cases at hand than the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which asserts that workers have a right to “concerted activities” for the purpose of “mutual aid or protection.”

In actuality, as this ruling and others before and since have made abundantly clear, workers don’t have any rights at all except those they wrest through disciplined organization and militant struggle. Although the Supreme Court’s decision does not affect workers in unions, it does amount to an ominous, ideologically motivated attack on the principle of collective action from which unions derive. . . .

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I have been talking to people in and around the labor movement, going on the premise that American workers may soon be engaged in a virtual Armageddon with capital. While the working class has hardly lost all ground, it has seen enough of its victories reversed to warrant such a prediction. As for Trump himself, he is at best a catalyst for the fight, at worst a distraction from what may already have been the opening salvos of labor’s last stand.

In June came Janus.. . .

The Janus decision is likely to set a devastating precedent. With so-called right-to-work laws on the books in twenty-eight states (including every state south of the Mason–Dixon Line except Maryland), unions are understandably apprehensive over what the ruling will mean for their membership and finances should “agency fees” in public-sector unions become a thing of the past. Yet some in the labor movement wonder whether the disadvantages of Janus might be offset by potential gains.

Rand Wilson, now chief of staff for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 888 and formerly a strategist for the Teamsters during the successful United Parcel Service strike of 1997, sees danger and promise both. “The people who drop out of the union lose the right to vote. So you’re losing the most middle-of-the-road members, and certainly the most conservative members, who object to collective power. You’re left with hotheads—people like me—running the show.”

For Wilson, “the beauty of labor organizations right now is that they’re inclusive of so many people.” It’s a beauty too seldom appreciated, not least of all among those whose favorite watchword is “diversity.” Since unions do not hire for the industries in which their members work, they can’t preordain consensus; they can achieve it only through struggle and debate.

Wilson says the Janus decision may have the ultimate effect of moving unions toward “a more activist base.” The same may be true even of workers outside of unions or whose unions are weak. Notice how the recent wave of teacher strikes and protests has taken place mainly in “red states” (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona) with right-to-work laws on the books. . . .

Public-sector unions make convenient targets for whipped-up envy, cast as parasites “living off the rest of us,” a role once filled by “welfare cheats.” That most of their members are women and many are women of color probably makes the transference easier. Of course, unions have been under attack in this country for as long as they’ve existed, and for self-evident reasons. “Historically, organized labor is the only movement that attempts to participate in virtually every type of collective action, from hiring lobbyists to shutting down cities,” writes labor scholar Gabriel Winant, a distinction better understood by the Koch brothers and the Trump White House than by many to their left. . . .

“I grew up with the assumption that there was labor and there was management,” I tell [Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) who helped coordinate Labor for Bernie and now chairs the board of Our Revolution], “and they’d always be locked in this struggle, and sometimes labor would win, and sometimes, probably most of the time, management would win, but they’d be wrestling back and forth, and that’s how it would go on, and in some ways that would be how society progressed. And now I’ve started to wonder whether that’s the right way of thinking about it, whether it isn’t a wrestling match but a fight to the death, and that there are only two possible outcomes. One is that labor, not by itself but in coalition with other groups, prevails to the extent of being able to restructure society in some basic ways. Or management, or whatever you want to call it—the One Percent—will destroy all unions and basically there will be masters and helots. What’s wrong with that construction? What am I missing?”

“Nothing,” he says.. . . .

Obviously, I like banging the gong of “left-wing unionism,” but I have come to appreciate the reductive limitations of the term. . . .  In the broadest sense, all labor unions are leftist in their implicit acknowledgment of two basic principles: that capital exploits labor and that labor’s only hope lies in collective action informed by class consciousness. A union can move “right” only by fighting exclusively for its own interests or by not fighting at all. . . .

In public discussions of labor, capital, and the laws that govern both, what inevitably slips from view is the work itself. What work means and what it might mean. The dignity of it and the degradation of it. We may think we know, but most of what we know is what we’ve been conditioned to think. Capital doesn’t just exploit labor; it defines labor. It uses the law to re-create labor in its own image. When the Taft-Hartley Act stipulates that unions can bargain only over “terms and conditions of employment” (and not, say, over the uses of technology or the control of pollution), it is saying in effect that workers are motivated by the same aims that motivate capitalists. This in turn authorizes the slander that unions care about nothing but money. When the same law prohibits “secondary boycotts” undertaken by one union in solidarity with another union’s struggles, it authorizes the slander that unions care only about themselves.

Even the pro-union National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), by excluding supervisors, farmworkers, and domestic workers from its protections, all but defined who does and doesn’t belong to the working class—in imagination no less than in law. Say “working class” and people still picture a white guy with a lunch box heading toward a manufacturing plant. As for those workers authorized under the law to form federally recognized unions, more than 90 percent currently work under contracts with “no-strike clauses” that remain in effect for the duration of the contract. Imagine a truce in which one side is required not only to lay down its arms but to throw them away. This, too, is a matter of identity and definition: the combatant in this case hasn’t just agreed to cease hostilities; he’s agreed to cease being a soldier. . . .

Even in the case of workers legally authorized to form unions, employers own the debate. A “free speech clause” in Taft-Hartley allows employers to hold meetings at which workers are required to listen to lectures by paid union-busting consultants. Employers are also allowed to summon individual workers for private discussions on their union views. Captive-audience meetings occur in 85 percent of union campaigns; in 57 percent, plant closings are “predicted” as a likely result of unionization. (Employers are legally prohibited from threatening to close.) . . .

Almost as bad as dismissing the labor movement is idealizing it. If the labor movement were such a shining beacon, fewer of its top brass would have turned their backs on Bernie Sanders, and none of its rank and file would have voted for Donald Trump.

Fortunately, organized labor is subject to conditions that prevent it from idealizing itself. Not the least of these is the necessity of engaging issues at the level of production, the level at which politics and livelihood meet. Though labor has at least the latent ability to stop the wheels of production in a good cause—as when the ILWU shut down all the ports on the West Coast in support of 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization, or more recently when German pilots refused to fly planes filled with deported asylum seekers—it has also been known to oppose a good cause in order to keep the wheels of production turning. It’s one thing for a movie actor to speak out against the Keystone XL pipeline, quite another for a pipe fitter to say, “I don’t want the job.”

Like climate change and pollution, issues of social justice compel unions to act at the gritty level of the workplace. Their frequent failure to do so was underscored by the Trump victory, though labor people differ on how best to interpret the upset. Bill Fletcher Jr., a leading African-American scholar on the labor left, rejects the analysis that the election of Donald Trump was a white-working-class revolt against economic hardship and sees it rather as a result of the way whites “perceive economic issues through the prism of race.” He contends that “if economic issues and the revolt against neoliberalism were the main drivers, then blacks and Latinos ought to have been warming up to Trump. And that sure as hell didn’t happen.” . . .

Next, two editors of the left-wing journal Jacobin, Alex Press and Micah Uetricht, report on the NBC News website on “Labor Day weekend 2018: Unions are dying and American workers are in trouble — but they’re also fighting back.”

In recent years, no Labor Day reflection on the state of the American working class could avoid one conclusion: Things are bad. Really bad. Unions are dying, strikes are nearly nonexistent, inequality is massive and widening by the day — all of these were true for Labor Days gone by, and all are true for Labor Day 2018.

But there is one thing of note this year, and it’s big: Some parts of the labor movement, particularly at the rank-and-file level, seem to have reached their breaking point. Because this year, they’ve started fighting back.

First, the bad news. After decades of decline, only 10.7 percent of U.S. workers are unionized. While 34.4 percent of public-sector workers are union, only 6.5 percent of their private sector counterparts are. The latter is an almost negligible number, and one on the verge of being decimated by anti-union forces anyway. At the same time, strikes, workers’ most powerful weapon, have become vanishingly rare. Making matters worse, some unions continue to avoid confronting crucial issues like racism head-on, failing to counter the President Donald Trump administration’s toxic, hollow xenophobic appeals to workers. . . .

Then, there’s Janus. . . .

U.S. labor law is so skewed in favor of bosses today that scholar Elizabeth Anderson calls the workplaces of America “arbitrary, unaccountable dictatorships” in which workers have few rights. In the wake of Janus, things will become even worse. . . .

That weakness of organized labor is reflected in the miseries of the U.S. working class as a whole. Most workers haven’t seen a raise in 40 years. With low wages and crushing student loan debt, many millennials will live worse lives than their parents, a reality reflected in their decision not to have children. Meanwhile, the costs of basic necessities — housing, health care, childcare — are rising. Inequality keeps increasing, as the few at the top pocket an ever-larger proportion of U.S. wealth. Add mass, cruel deportations, the erosion of reproductive rights and the steady persistence of police brutality, and it’s hard to deny that, especially for the poor and vulnerable, the foundations of a right to a free life are under attack. . . .

But this year, the mood of the U.S. working class seems to have shifted. After years of talking about how the rich have been the undisputed victors of the class struggle, many American workers have had enough.

This frustration is best illustrated by the teachers strikes that spread like wildfire early in the year — and haven’t stopped spreading. . . .

Summer break is over, but teachers are still striking. Teachers in one California town have already gone out on strike this school year. Seattle teachers recently threatened to walk off the job, passing a strike authorization vote on Aug. 28 before reaching a deal with their school district. They would have joined teachers in southwest Washington, some of whom have been on strike since mid-August. In Los Angeles, teachers just overwhelmingly passed a strike authorization vote, a response to deadlocked negotiations over raises, class size, over-testing of students and charter-school accountability.

Even in the private sector, there are signs that rank-and-file workers aren’t willing to sit by as their working conditions erode. In West Virginia, 1,400 communications workers struck while the state’s teachers’ strike was ongoing. . . .

Further, some prisoners throughout the country are currently on strike. Calling for an end to “modern day slavery,” they’re highlighting the 13th Amendment, which otherwise banned slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Prisoners laboring for little or no wages is common practice, and those on strike are demanding an end to it, along with nine other demands, such as rescinding the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the restoration of voting rights for incarcerated people and greater funding for rehabilitation services. While it’s hard to get exact details about what’s going on inside prisons, strike activity has been confirmed in multiple states, even as prison officials continue to issue denials. . . .

And public opinion is moving in favor of both organized labor and pro-worker policies generally. Gallup poll results released on Aug. 30 found that despite the GOP’s efforts, 62 percent of Americans support unions, a 15-year high. . . .

All of this shouldn’t distract from many dire problems facing of the working class right now. U.S. workers are hurting badly. But as long as bosses treat workers like garbage, there will be pushback. And from West Virginia teachers to UPS delivery drivers, that pushback is catching on.

A few decades from now, maybe the flare-ups of 2018 will be a blip on the radar of the continued decimation of the U.S. working class. Or maybe we’ll look back on it as the year workers decided they wouldn’t take the beatings any more.

In the Los Angeles Times veteran labor journalist Steven Greenhouse writes that “Teachers have been walking out all year. Now they’re walking straight to the ballot box.”

What unfolded in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona last spring was not supposed to happen. Tens of thousands of teachers went on strike in bright red states where government-employee unions are weak.

They were boiling over, angry at low pay and lawmakers who kept cutting taxes while letting school funding sink to woeful levels. The teachers in those states won raises, and so did the ones who walked out in Kentucky and Colorado.

On the eve of Labor Day, many teachers are still boiling over. More than 30,000 teachers in Los Angeles voted Thursday to authorize a strike if their union and school district fail to agree on a contract. Earlier in the week, teachers in Seattle voted to strike in September if their union and school district don’t reach a deal. And North Carolina’s teachers are inching closer toward a statewide walkout.

Whether or not the strike wave continues, it’s clear that teachers and their unions have been galvanized into focusing on the November elections. They are seeking to elect lawmakers who will support public education, not starve it. Some teachers are trying to become lawmakers themselves. . . .

As teachers flex their political muscle, their unions are facing a coordinated attack. The Supreme Court’s June decision in Janus vs. AFSCME means that government employees can’t be required to pay any fees to the unions that negotiate for them. Public-sector unions are expected to lose 10% to 30% of their revenues as a result. . . .

But in state after state, teachers remain convinced that tax-cut mania has sapped education budgets, depressing teacher salaries and increasing class sizes.. . .

Although tax cuts might be politically wise, they will prove educationally foolish. What hurts children’s education hurts the country’s future. Yes, teachers want higher pay. But they also want to put school funding back on track. All lawmakers, whether Republican or Democrat, should want the same.

And another labor journalist, Mike Elk of Payday Report, suggests in the Houston Chronicle that “On Labor Day, let’s rebuild the working-class media.”

Last year, more than 80,000 people in the state of Texas joined unions. As national unions pump tens of million of dollars into organizing teachers, nurses and construction workers in Texas, most of the public remains uninformed of the progress being made.

This is a failure of not just the media but of the labor movement for failing to support a unionized press able to tell the story of workers rising up all over the South.

In the 1930s, when the modern labor movement was established, unions employed hundreds of reporters all over the country. Their task was to inspire workers with the tales of their co-workers rising up. . . .

Today’s labor movement has no modern equivalent of the labor press of the 1930s. In my opinion as a veteran labor reporter, unions won’t achieve significant new gains until we rebuild that media infrastructure.

When workers read about people like themselves earning unlikely successes against their bosses and corporate owners, it makes them feel like they can too. . . .

While many labor leaders complain about how the media portrays workers, few offer a concrete solution to build the labor press in order to tell their own stories.

It’s not as if they lack the resources. Unions spend hundred of millions every year to fund politicians, who then use that money to purchase campaign ads and, ironically, subsidize the profits of corporate media.

It’s time for the labor movement start talking seriously about rebuilding our own press and start covering the incredible organizing in places like Texas — because the stories are out there, waiting to be told. . . .

A mass effort to engage in union members rebuilding the labor press could help reestablish media outlets as community-trusted publications — the kind of publications that speak in the voice of workers.

For far too long, the labor movement has relied on others to tell our story. It’s time we took back our ability to tell our own story. It’s time we rebuild the labor press.

And, finally, I’ll conclude with a labor day wish from the Twitter account of Barbara Ehrenreich:

Labor Day wish: Please, no more talk of companies “giving” people jobs. In reality, the gift relationship goes in the opposite direction. Workers give their blood, sweat and tears, sometimes their lives, and in return companies pay them the minimum they can get away with.

— Barbara Ehrenreich (@B_Ehrenreich) September 2, 2018