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LABOR PAINS: INSIDE AMERICA’S NEW UNION MOVEMENT by Suzan Erem All material copyright © 2001 by Monthly Review Press |
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September 2001 |
INTRODUCTION The 1990s offered such incredible opportunity for building a movement of American workers. While market reports and drive-by shootings made the headlines, a long-hoped for sea change was occurring in the top leadership of American unions. From the first hint of it, those of us on the front lines asked if it would make any difference in our lives, if we’d become more effective union staff and leaders, if we could truly improve the life of union members and turn this country around. At the time, unions only represented about 1 in 10 workers; we considered this our last gasp. A new generation of labor leaders, weaned on Reagan and Bush’s strikebreaking and union busting, forced the ouster of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President Lane Kirkland who had led the national umbrella group of unions into oblivion for 16 years. John Sweeney, then president of the little-known Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was about to bring it back again. The victor of the AFL-CIO’s first contested election in its history, Sweeney promised to end the old ways of the monolith. The AFL-CIO would become proactive, resourceful and relevant to its member unions. Sweeney would throw the political weight of working people behind candidates who would remember us not only at election time, but on the picket line as well. He would organize in a new way for a new century. We were on the verge of possibility. We faced a rapidly changing social and economic landscape, described to us by newspapers and the nightly news. Newspapers reported that Microsoft’s Bill Gates was worth more than the gross national product of some small nations. The business pages boasted that Disney’s Michael Eisner set a record by exercising $570 million in stock options in one year. The front pages and tabloids shoveled Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky at us endlessly and in sports Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods provided the African-American role models of the decade. O.J. no longer led the nightly newscast as angry white men shot down Jews and Asians on the streets of Chicago and opened fired on Baptist kids in Texas. Children were shooting children in classrooms, and the seven corporations, (one of them Disney), which owned all of the country’s media, faithfully broadcast the bloody film footage between stock market reports and movie reviews. What we never saw in the news were Latino janitors scraping the grime off hospital floors, struggling with two languages and little hope, or clerical workers with carpal tunnel who didn’t dare ask for sick leave they didn’t have for surgery they couldn’t afford. For the media, there was no story here to tell. The public housing tenant who struggled through years of school wasn’t worth a nightly report as she juggled daycare and city transit only to discover “the industry” had reclassified her work and she was out of job prospects. There was no audience for a story about an African American who has raised two kids on minimum wage, then loses his job because he finally talked back to some white college grad who’d berated him like a schoolboy one last time. Workers weren’t “news,” or were they? By the middle of the decade, as Sweeney took office, unions were taking risks they hadn’t in more than a generation. From 1993-1995, Firestone, Staley and Caterpillar faced off against almost three-fourths of the population of Decatur, Illinois in strikes and lockouts, dividing and destroying a once-unified and union-proud town. In 1997, 185,000 Teamsters shut down United Parcel Service (UPS) and won the sympathy of a nation with their demand that “A part-time America just won’t work.” From the solidarity and success of that strike came a new energy, a new boldness. In Detroit, 2,500 newspaper workers struck Gannett’s Detroit News and Knight-Ridder’s Free Press and published their own successful newspaper for the term of the strike. In San Francisco, 2,500 transit workers struck, infuriating commuters and shutting down the city for more than two weeks. Across the Midwest, a General Motors proposal to outsource 125 jobs at one facility had the domino effect of idling 80,000 workers and paralyzing the company until it settled. For the first time since Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, unions could feel the momentum shifting in their favor. But the resistance from the other side only intensified. Any effort to organize new workers met with an increasingly well-financed and sophisticated anti-union campaign, run by invisible advisors called “management consultants.” When the AFL-CIO announced it would dump an unprecedented $35 million into the 1996 elections, Big Business countered by outspending it 17 to 1. In the meantime, major corporations continued to announce massive layoffs—AT&T, 40,000 jobs, Boeing, 48,000 jobs, International Paper, 9,000 jobs. As the decade continued, other corporations followed: Xerox, Motorola, Texas Instruments, RJR Nabisco, Ameritech. While the media spouted the strongest peacetime economy in decades, working America was at war.
The stories I tell here are about workers, union leaders and family. My experience in the labor movement began in the 1980’s when I was fresh out of college, just married and childless. For most of the 1990’s I worked for SEIU Local 73 in Chicago, my longest continuous work with one local. The distinct demands of members, leaders and home life increasingly pulled me in three directions. I held a privileged position as a senior staff member of a relatively wealthy union in the third largest city in the country. We among the staff and leadership had a vision, but we had no means to attain it. The union members we served didn’t want vision, they wanted a good contract, and they wanted it now. And when I’d cut my workday short to race home, get my daughter from daycare and sit at the dinner table alone with her, I’d wonder where the energy for tomorrow would come from. These are the stories I witnessed at the work sites, where I had the opportunity to work with some of the most invisible people in our country. They became a part of my life when Laron bear-hugged me at the strike as she yelled, “I told you we could do it!” or Della mischievously giggled as she spied the hidden video camera, or Michael trusted me to support his leadership in organizing the union. Our members waxed hospital floors at 2 a.m., typed letters at state universities, collected money for the tollway and guarded downtown high-rises. They didn’t have time to debate politics, write to their legislators or strategize over the future of the country. They made their close-to-minimum wages, took the bus home, picked up their kids from their mother’s house, made supper, grumbled about their day, did chores and went to bed. In the morning they did it all over again, and if they could raise their kids to survive the streets, the drugs and their peers, they had succeeded. These are the stories I witnessed at the union office as well. There I shook hands with Jesse Jackson Sr. and other powerful people from across Illinois and the country. I made phone calls to monsignors and appointments with the cardinal. I organized rallies and demonstrations with living legends. All the while I juggled the personalities and egos of my co-workers, a feat I was ill equipped to perform. And while being around the famous and powerful gave me a certain rush, I knew all along they weren’t at the center of what drove me every day; they weren’t even on the edge of my motivation. And finally, these are the stories of family. Though it didn’t always ring true, we in the labor movement still called each other “brother” and “sister.” It was the way a family works that we all had in common. My own history, one shaped by my parents’ prolonged and violent divorce and its associated cruelties, colored everything I experienced and affected how I approached my work in this movement, this microcosm of society that reminded me so much of those people who’d raised me. By the time I was five I knew the injustice of a heavy hand across my face, and I knew the betrayal of my older siblings. I was never surprised to see reminders of the old familiar characters of my life in the managers and supervisors I faced almost daily; they were what had enticed me into this movement in the first place. But here they were among the union staff, if not the membership, as well. We had the manipulators, the liars, the alcoholics and the workaholics, the pleasers, the silent-but-deadlies, the good children, the bullies, the brains and the brawn. With them I experienced upheaval, loyalty, chaos, deceit, friendship, confusion, disappointment, hope, shared dreams and scattered intentions. The similarities between what I witnessed at work and what I experienced at home were too intense to ignore. My colleagues were as haunted and as driven as I was. They were my family. When I left them in the evenings, I went home, where I walked the parenting high wire without a net and usually alone. There I faced off more demons from my past—the absent father, the sick mother, the abusive siblings, the childhood violence, and the immense sense of worthlessness that settles deep inside a survivor of such fortune. So woven into these stories of our work family are my stories from home, the inevitable next link in the chain of my personal legacy and that of many activists in this movement. In the dysfunctional family we talk about the psychology of abandonment, rejection, fear and anger. In the dysfunctional world we talk about power, politics, race relations, injustice and hypocrisy. It’s all here, with no solutions, a lot of grit and a little hope.
I have written this book out of respect for everyone struggling every day against the greatest odds—odds that multiply with each passing year, each WTO meeting, each eager leap toward globalization. I also write it from a sense of bewilderment at how in our movement, race can still overpower class with a single word because no one trusts anyone enough. I write it out of futility, when I watch the oppressed, when given the opportunity, become no better than their oppressors. I write it out of anger for a world where the most vulnerable—from children to battered women to low-wage workers—are still not entitled to a voice. I write it from a passion borne of violation, because there is no greater crime of the powerful against the powerless. In America, the Constitution stops at the plant gate and the office door. Union staff and activists know that better than anyone. Still they stay and still they fight, until their spouses leave them, their guts dissolve from alcohol, and their hearts burst from stress. After one decade, or two, or five, I only hope they be able to look back and see the measurable difference they made. The great radical writer of the 1930s, Meridel LeSueur, drummed this demand into me many times during phone calls and letters we enjoyed late in her life: write the story of the people. They cannot and will not tell it themselves. These workers deserve this much: to have their stories told. If you have any technical comments or suggestions, about this web site, please send e-mail to Our Webmaster at mrwebmaster@monthlyreview.org.  |
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