This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1411625
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1411625
The amazing thing about unionization is that–all at once–(young) people are “ignorant” about the “little-known” concept of unionization.
And totally familiar with the highly paid athletes in pro sports…who arrived at their stratospheric salaries through a form of unionization.
…in the 1950s, even well known pro athleles had to sometimes work during the off-season
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I love “Unconventional Organizing”.
My educated wife hates it.
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An interesting article overall, but I’m going to question this:
Meaningful labor law reform is unlikely to happen unless people are engaged with the issues, understand them and believe they have a stake in the outcome.
But media interest in the campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon suggests the American public may finally be paying attention.
I think it far more likely that any media interest is more around the sheer novelty in recent memory of a successful unionization effort. I fear it is much more “man bites dog” with a bit of David v. Goliath thrown in. Unless these successes include analysis that includes the history of labor, the things we take for granted as workers that came about because of unions (5 day work week, 8 hour days, etc) to make the importance obvious to media consumers, this will be a novelty story for the media with a few we said, they said quotes thrown in to provide a “balanced picture.”
More’s the pity…
ps: I hate being so cynical, but there it is…
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Cynicism sucks just like everything else.
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I understand and am willing to entertain your point of view. After all, this is the workers’ problem. In today’s click-bait culture one would think that these workers are performative artists, like most everything else in the click-bait world.
They themselves will have to write the book of their success, not the real cynics: The Click-Bait-World.
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Though that primarily applies only to a certain class of worker. Service sector workers and those in some medical fields don’t get the stability of reliable hours and days off. They of course do get some of the less talked about (though still important) benefits, like worker’s compensation and workplace safety regulations that were formalized due to union organizing, but the “regular” workweek is not applicable to people working multiple jobs or those who have shift schedules (the night nurse/custodian).
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I’m educated. I love it. It’s about time that it went back to what it was meant to be - workers organizing, not professional organizers. And obviously they didn’t need the media to tell them to do it or show them how so who cares if the media stays interested and the public gets all excited? They can get excited if they are workers who want to organize or are being organized.
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Particularly if it can remove an arrow from the business side’s quiver of talking points. They often don’t have any valid criticisms, so they fall back on the tropes and if the tropes aren’t even remotely connected to reality, they can backfire.
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I think Frances Perkins had more to do with ameliorating unsafe working conditions, limitation of mandatory working hours, allowing unions to attempt to organize, and such like, than all the famous union leaders put together. [Also more to do with the New Deal than FDR and the rest of his cabinet, but that’s another story, or rather another part of the same one.]
Betcha she’s have loved this turn of events, too.
She was highly educated, and I’m sure she would have loved this turn of events.
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“Instead, the campaigns have involved a significant degree of “self-organization” – that is, workers “talking union” to each other in the warehouse and coffee shops and reaching out to colleagues in other shops in the same city and across the nation. This marks a sea change from the way the labor movement has traditionally operated, which has tended to be more centralized and led by seasoned union officials.”
Umm. I am not a labor historian, but I think the earliest days of labor organization in this country, pre Samuel Gompers and others of his ilk, consisted of exactly this kind of organic organizing of workers trying their damnedest to improve their lot. So the old is new again. Surprise, surprise. The top-down unions of the mid-twentieth century were the result of movements that started a hundred years prior.
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LOL
I used to say
“I used to be a cynic until I realized cynicism is a crock of shit just like everything else”
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Surreptitious. You left out the part where trying to organize would get you fired, and could get you killed. That didn’t change until a certain Secretary of Labor made a crusade of it.
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No question labor organizing ain’t beanbag. A house mate of mine some forty-odd years ago had been involved in an effort to organize workers in an oil refinery in Texas. An effort from which they decided to withdraw when a couple of shotgun loads found their way into the front of their rented digs. Early 70’s.
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Very much my thoughts. I’m now retired, but played a leading role in organizing my workplace (hospital) and went on to be a leader in our union at a higher level. This new wave is very much a return to the roots of organized labor - bubbling up from the bottom, self-organizing. Our nurses union is one of the most progressive and most member driven in the labor movement, but still, by comparison to this new wave, pretty bureaucratic and somewhat top-down.
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How can you talk about unconventional organizing without mentioning Jorts the Cat? 
Jorts the cat gained 15 minutes of fame for being part of a workplace disagreement that included a human coworker buttering him…
The owner of the account set up @JortsTheCat on Twitter, which now alternates between cat stories and pro-union activities including advice on grass-roots steps towards forming your own unionized workplace.
[the images in the AITA Tweet & follow-on tweet help to explain the Jorts workplace dispute.]
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I explain who Jorts is further down on this thread. But the embedded tweet gives you a feeling for current interest in unionizing.
And here’s a recent Gallop Poll:
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This marks a sea change from the way the labor movement has traditionally operated, which has tended to be more centralized and led by seasoned union officials.
I love unions, and have a pro-union family going back to my grandfather. But the centralized union organization has far too often been co-opted by power hungry apparatchiks, and worse, by organized crime.
A decentralized organization will eventually show its weaknesses, but if it can eliminate the harmful actors --particularly the crime elements-- it will go a long way to strengthening the union movement. Good on you people!
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YUP, once the money starts rolling in. via ‘dues’…union ‘leaders’ will be no better than the ‘rich guys’ who own the comapnies involved…it s always about the money…and i wouldn’t trust Bernie Sanders as i could throw him…i know, i know…Bernie is a saint… shame on me…
My father was a Republican as a young man (Eisenhower-era), but it was the GOP’s opposition to unions (that rapidly accelerated when Reagan was elected) that made him true-blue.
The GOP’s other policies that followed - pro-gun, anti-immigrants, etc, just served to prove to him he made the right decision.
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