Episode 97 – Solidarity with Joe Burns

Macro N Cheese – Episode 97
Solidarity with Joe Burns
December 4, 2020

[00:00:03.230] – Joe Burns [intro/music]

Solidarity is not something that just pre-exists naturally in the working class. It’s something that’s built through struggle and it’s something that, the more people get in motion, then they discover who their friends are and who their enemies are.

Workers go to work and produce goods and services, but in exchange, that’s what creates value in society, but they only get a handful of what they produce back and the rest of it flows upward in a great sucking sound to the billionaire class.

[00:01:26.670] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:34.590] – Steve Grumbine

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, we’re going into the labor movement today. I’ve got a guy here. This guy is fantastic. He is the author of the books “Reviving the Strike” and “Strike Back,” a veteran union negotiator, and a labor lawyer. He has negotiated contracts in the airline and health care industries. His third book, “Class Struggle Unionism,” will be scheduled next year by Haymarket Books. And with that, I’m bringing on Joe Burns. Joe, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:08.340] – Joe Burns

Oh, thanks for having me on.

[00:02:10.200] – Grumbine

So we’re looking at some pretty crazy times right now. We’ve got a pandemic. We’ve got basically a global depression, at least definitely a U.S. artificial depression where we had to put the economy on hold. And you’re seeing the airline industries and others completely rocked by this. It isn’t just the poor folk anymore. Now we’re starting to creep into professional class, union-negotiated jobs. Things are getting pretty bad.

And I felt like it was important to frame our current events with the backdrop of labor. I think that we had a rather massive movement to try and push Bernie Sanders to the Democratic nomination, and it fell flat on its face once Obama got involved. And here we are with Biden and Kamala Harris and I’m not sure that anybody really thought that was going to be the way this worked out. And you say to yourself, well, where’s my strength, where’s my power in electoral politics?

And I’m kind of of the mind that electoral politics is really not where our power lies. It’s got to be in the labor movement. We need a working-class party, a working-class movement that can help us overcome what is largely an oligarchy. And I’m just curious, can you set the stage for what you see today and where we are today? And maybe we can take a look backwards at what the origins of the labor movement even were?

[00:03:39.160] – Burns

Yeah. So, look, I think one of the key problems or weaknesses of the progressive movement is we lack a powerful labor movement today. Right now in the United States, only six out of a hundred private-sector workers belong to unions. That’s the lowest level of unionization that we’ve seen in over one hundred years. Even before the 1930s, it was even higher than that. And public sector workers are a little bit better organized, but they’re under attack.

So we really, since the 1980s, we’ve had this stagnant and declining labor movement. And looking back at labor history – I’m a union negotiator and attorney, I’ve been bargaining contracts for three decades, but I wrote my two books because I really thought that we needed to look back at labor history to kind of come up with some answers for today’s problem. And what we found is that from the 1930s and beyond, we were able to build a very powerful labor movement that transformed the way of life for millions of working Americans, folks of my parents’ generation.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in north Minneapolis. Our neighbors were truck drivers or warehouse workers, but they could afford a good way of life. They had a pension that they could retire on. They could buy a cabin up north, as we call it, in Minnesota. And all of that was due to the labor movement. And essentially, beginning in the 1930s, we had hundreds of thousands of workers going on strike.

Four hundred thousand workers participated in sit-down strikes in 1937 alone, where they basically took over their places of work until the companies agreed to follow the law and respect their union and negotiate a contract. And through that, you see unions winning things like health care and pensions, striking repeatedly throughout the 1950s and ’60s. And that translated into political power as well.

A lot of the progressive, social legislation of the period came because we had a strong labor movement. But I think if you fast forward over the decades, employers were able to use their power in Congress and the courts to basically gut labor law. So we came to the 1980s and we’ve seen the decimation of the labor movement. So all we’re experiencing today is the aftermath of that process.

[00:06:22.960] – Grumbine

I hear that Donald Trump is an incredibly harsh president as it pertains to labor and that he has attacked the National Labor Relations Board, but then I have no real understanding of what he’s done. But I guess the question is, is he unique in terms of his angle with labor or is he just sort of status quo? Is he just sort of doing what all of them have done from Reagan on up?

[00:06:52.340] – Burns

I think he’s clearly antilabor. And I would characterize it that labor law contains very few protections for workers nowadays and lots of restrictions. So, I’ve actually talked about how the National Labor Relations Act was supposed to provide protection to workers, but over the years, it’s been transformed into a sort of web of prohibitions against effective activity, so it’s become more of a system of labor control than a law that protects workers.

And that has happened with corporate liberal justices and conservative justices. It’s been a process that’s happened over the years. So now I think there’s very little left of the protections there and he’s making it a bit worse. But I would characterize it as things around the margin, meaning if Joe Biden wins, which hopefully he will, we’ll see somewhat of a change, but it’s going to be around the edges, right? It’s going to be about things like can you access the employer’s email system and so forth and what are the rules on some of the elections. But none of it is going to fundamentally change the power relations in society or lead to a rebirth of the labor movement.  That would require a lot more fundamental changes, like getting rid of these restrictions on effective strike activity that are decades and decades old.

[00:08:20.090] – Grumbine

I used to be in the CWA local 2222 out in Northern Virginia working for C&P Telephone Company and I remember when we would go to strike. I was a strike captain one time and I was never a union steward, but I thought about it. But I always felt like if you looked at what was given to you before the strike happened and then you looked at what you got after the strike, I was always amazed that I always felt like we got less than what we were originally offered.

And it never made sense to me. And I kept talking to my friends in the union: how is it even possible? We’re in a union, we’re paying dues, we’re fighting tooth and nail, and yet the company gets more and more and more strict. In the real world that I inhabit, that doesn’t make sense. You’re watching a union creating picket lines, bringing great public attention to the labor movement, and yet at the same time, the best you got was not forced overtime or something to that effect.

Is this just more of the same erosion of those protections that allowed unions to have so much clout in the past? That feels a bit like a shell game now. And I guess you kind of expressed that labor is a shell of itself today. What would it take to get it to where labor actually has power again? Yaffectou clearly said it’s going to be around the edges with Biden. You clearly said that Trump is no friend of labor. So where does the relief come from? Do we just take it? How do we affect change in the current environment, given the lack of power?

[00:09:59.810] – Burns

So when I wrote my first book, Reviving the Strike, that was published in 2011, at that time, no one in the labor movement was really talking about the strike as a necessary tactic, which was odd to me, right? Because if you look back through labor history, the strike was considered essential to collective bargaining and to unionization, because otherwise, how do you pressure an employer to agree to your demands?

I’ve spent decades at the bargaining table and I can tell you I can make the best arguments in the world, use logic, appeal to emotion, use whatever verbal tactics you can use. But at the end of the day, the employers are motivated by the bottom line and their desire to control the workplace and the work process. And talking alone doesn’t do it. It’s about power. So what I did was I looked back at the question about how was it and why is it that from the 1930s well into the 1970s, the strike was a powerful weapon? It was something that employers feared.

It was something that you could threaten or carry out and win gains at the bargaining table. It’s not that it was always easy, but it made collective bargaining work and improve the lives of millions of workers. So, what I discovered is that over the years, the rules of the game changed. One of the things I did was I went to the university library and I dusted off these old labor relations textbooks from the 1950s and ’60s because I wanted to see what were professors saying about it back then. And what you saw was that, universally, the professors would say that in order for a strike to be effective, it had to stop production, meaning that putting up a picket line in and of itself didn’t work.

You had to be able to basically shut down the workplace so that the employer could not continue to make profits. And in that way the workers would be losing wages, the employers would be losing profits, and everyone would start coming to the middle and you wouldn’t get all you wanted, but you’d get some improvements, presumably. But what happened over the years is there’s a whole set of tactics that unions used to use.

One of them was mass picketing, where hundreds of folks would picket the employer and basically prevent goods from leaving the plant, or supplies to go in, or replacement workers who we called scabs to go in to take the worker’s job. And then the other thing that unions had was – the law refers to these tactics in a very dry term – talks about secondary activity and secondary picketing. But I refer to it as the tactics of solidarity. And the employers hate solidarity and they have worked to outlaw it, and they’ve done that in a couple of ways.

One is, in the late 1940s over President Truman’s veto, they passed the Taft Hartley Act, which outlawed a lot of the tactics that had built the trucking and other unions where unions would go after not just the employer if they were out on strike, but they would go out after the business allies of the employer. So an example would be if we were striking at a brewery, we wouldn’t just put up a picket line at the brewery, we would go out to the bars and start picketing bars who were selling that beer.

And that was a very, very powerful tactic because you didn’t have to convince millions of consumers not to buy the beer. All you had to do is convince the bar owner that, hey, why put up with pickets when you can just switch the tap out, put a different beer on and you’ll remove yourself from the dispute. So you basically use solidarity to destroy employer solidarity. So all of these tactics start slowly – some of it happened quicker with legislation – but over the years, the courts intervened, whereas strikes used to be of entire industries.

Think about it, in 1959 over a half-million steel workers go on strike. They’re out for six months. They basically shut down the economy and President Eisenhower has to intervene to force a settlement. And that was over work rules. But the steelworkers struck. Jack Metzgar wrote this book about growing up as a steelworker’s son, and he’s a professor now, but he wrote a book about how many times the steelworkers struck – I think it was like six or eight times over the decade before 1960 – and that’s how they won all their improvements.

So anyway, I think to me that’s a fundamental question, that the legal regime changed and because it changed, it makes it very difficult to engage in successful strike activity. So to go back to your question, the courts aren’t going to change their rulings. There’s zero chance that the Congress is going to amend labor law to fix these problems. They can’t even do way lesser legislation.

So that’s really where you have to get into a discussion about what kind of labor movement would it take to be able to successfully violate the labor laws, to engage in civil disobedience, and so forth. And I think we have a lot of examples, especially from public employees, about how unions were able to do that and how they could do that, and what that would look like in the future.

[00:15:31.590] – Grumbine

One of the things that I was concerned with today is the vast majority of people have no ability to even unionize. They’re in gig economy jobs. They have been Silicon Valley-ed into these gig roles. They have no bargaining power at all and definitely no collective bargaining power. The average person doesn’t have a chance of being in a regular union right now, or at least it would be an incredibly challenging task to unionize gig work.

What would you say is a way that the average person who is maybe not in the airline union or the Culinary Union, how would a regular person maybe be able to unionize? Because the political parties clearly are not serving the needs of the people. So how might that work?

[00:16:23.590] – Burns

So I guess I’d say a couple of things. One is, I think that even though certainly there’s a lot of attention to the gig economy and so forth, the vast majority of workers still have an employment relationship, for one. And then, two, I think it’s instructive to look at history, because if you look at – let’s take auto work in the early 1930s – it was very casual, meaning that the work was very temporary. There was a lot of turnover.

A lot of the industries, like trucking, didn’t have the sort of stable labor relations, employment relations. And what I think that tells you is that all of these labor relations are fictitious in a sense. Employers are able to create these barriers to unionization. But if you look at the actual work people do and what they’re doing, they’re working together. They’re working for employers. So what the labor movement traditionally did to respond to this was labor laws set up for you to fail.

So if you follow labor law, you’re going to be in a situation where you’re not working for the real employer, you’re working for subcontractors. So if you unionize – let’s say you are janitors and you unionized your janitorial firm and you try and go on strike. Well the building owner may just say, forget it, we’ll just bring in a different janitorial firm who is non-union and we’ll employ those, and we’ll separate us from the dispute.

And furthermore, you’re not even legally allowed to picket us because we’ll be considered a secondary employer. Right? So what the labor movement did, and has to do, is basically disregard this and organize on an industry basis like we used to and have an ability to be able to strike. Now, every industry is different. Some are going to be harder than others. But I think until we get to a place where we can look at what would successful tactics look like, what sort of labor movement would it take to employ those? I think that’s really how we’re going to start moving forward.

[00:18:31.920] – Grumbine

OK, so I’m an Uber driver, and we’ve seen Amy Coney Barrett have a hand to play in this, but it seems like unionization of those Uber drivers is completely up against a really hardcore legal battle. How might that area of the economy take on the employers? Do they have a chance or is it really not Uber so much as it is all drivers? Maybe they join the taxi union? I’m trying to understand how that even comes to be, how they can even organize. Without some legal intervention, how do they create that environment?

[00:19:12.950] – Burns

I think one of the problems that we have nowadays is union organizing is not strategic and it’s not really based on what are the core sectors of the economy, what’s going to be easier or more difficult to organize. And I think if you look at it, it’s always been the case that some industries are easier to organize than others. For example, I’m not sure that I would start with Uber drivers if I was going to have a major push to reorganize the economy.

[00:19:43.640] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:19:44.450] – Burns

Trucking used to be the mainstay of the labor movement, but it’s essentially non-union. By the late 1960s – I don’t know if you saw the movie Hoffa – despite all his failings, by the late 1960s, they had five hundred thousand truckers covered by one contract, the National Master Freight Agreement, which was a multiemployer contract involving hundreds of employers. And it basically standardizes wages and benefits across entire industries. You know?

And that’s what you saw in most industries. Mining had two main master agreements.  And in doing that, they took a very complicated situation where firms were competing against each other and they basically were able to take wages out of competition. But in order to do that, they employed a lot of the secondary tactics that I talked about, which are now illegal. So I guess what I’m saying is, it’s not going to be easy, but I think the labor movement . . .

There’s still the big auto industry, even with all of the offshoring. There’s still millions of workers who work in auto and auto parts and related industries. So if we were going to really revive the labor movement, I think we need to think about what are the key sectors of the economy and how do we go after them, and then have a powerful base and then use that to figure out, OK, well, what would tactics look like to organize Uber, which is a lot more of a difficult project.

[00:21:15.640] – Grumbine

Sure. With globalization and these trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and the TPP – the fear of TPP coming back from the dead seems to be very real with Joe Biden – the question I have for you is what is the impact of globalization on labor? Obviously, we’ve been offshoring jobs like crazy. I’m not really sure it’s the jobs as much as it is just the bargaining power for people, for labor. What has happened? How much of an impact has that had on the labor movement?

[00:21:48.160] – Burns

Yeah, so I think the labor movement has always had to contend with shifting or expanding product and labor markets. One of my favorite books on labor, it’s very, very dry, but it was this guy named Lloyd Ulman in the 1950s. It’s called “The Rise of the National Trade Union.” And what he looked at was how come unions even developed on a national level in the United States? Because when they first started out, they were local unions to deal with particular employers or maybe labor markets.

But what happened was with the expansion of the railroads and the creation of national markets, the unions discovered that they had to become national in scope because if you have a national product market, it doesn’t do good just to organize in your local economy. You have to organize on a nationwide scale, whether it’s construction – because construction journeypersons would move from area to area. So you had to organize the entire national labor market.

And I think if we fast forward to today, we’re really in a similar situation where labor and product markets are global in nature. So it doesn’t match the employers’ structure and scale if we’re still organized only on a national basis. Right? So we need a global labor movement that’s able to confront global capital. Now, that’s not an easy task. And frankly, the labor movement over the years has done a horrible job at it. For decades, the labor movement basically operated as an arm of the United States State Department and did a lot more in terms of harming global solidarity than it helped.

That would be back when Lane Kirkland and George Meany and the predecessors, back in the 1980s, who were the former AFL heads. But nowadays, I think things are a little bit better, but I think we still have a long ways to go. So one more point – globalization is a problem, but I don’t think it completely explains the weakness of our labor movement now because there are a lot of industries that aren’t really subject to foreign competition, or at least to the same degree as manufacturing, like trucking, meatpacking, all of these landlocked industries that used to be very powerful have seen a similar decline.

[00:24:56.780] – Intermission

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[00:25:22.180] – Grumbine

 I watch people that say that they are “X issue or bust,” and that would have been the same way we were when we went on strike against the phone company. We had a lot of solidarity. I don’t see solidarity. I see a lot of individualism in society today. I think part of that is based in austerity and based on how lean they’ve made life and how you really do have to hunker down just to survive. It has become a bit of a dog eat dog world. There is no more “great frontier,” so to speak.

So you can’t just strike out into the woods and homestead or anything like that. You’re kind of trapped in this machine and this machine is dependent on labor and they’ve got you. At least that’s the way it feels. So I see people willing to cave in and not remain in solidarity. I’m just curious, what do you think it would take to bring about a more collective society, more of a collective view of power, the concept of leave no man or no woman behind? I wonder, what do you think it would take just to make society think just a little differently?

[00:26:35.280] – Burns

So, Rick Fantasia wrote this book, “Cultures of Solidarity,” and I talk about it in “Reviving the Strike.” And he was trying to answer this very question – what happened to solidarity? How does it develop and so forth? And he looked at actual case studies of strikes in particular workplaces. That was kind of interesting. And what he says is that solidarity is not something that just pre-exists naturally in the working class. It’s something that’s built through struggle.

And it’s something that, the more people get in motion, then they discover who their friends are and who their enemies are. And I’ve really found that in my union career where I’ve gone into tons of different workplaces, that people are beaten down and demoralized and might be arguing with each other more than with the employer about petty issues. But I think once you crystallize the issues, bring things to a head, have folks have confidence in the plan, that people do incredible things and that a strike and a strike vote is really a transformative event and it really brings people a sense of their power and they come together as a group and really the lines develop.

And it’s not like a slow process. It’s really a developing of collective activity. So when you think about it in terms of how that can transform people, if we start to see more of that, then that just expands upon itself. I think a good example, not even going back into labor history is what we call the red state teacher revolt. Folks will recall – I guess it’s a couple of years now, right? – back in 2018, teachers in all of these unlikely conservative red states like West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, went out on these massive statewide strikes that were largely started by handfuls of teachers on Facebook.

[00:28:37.080] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:28:37.830] – Burns

In that process – and I’ve read some of the accounts of how this started – they had these Facebook groups, and they were complaining about the legislature and the degradation of the teacher career and the lack of funding. And someone throws out there, well, why don’t we strike? At first, everyone thought they were crazy, but then people started talking about it more and more. And then all of a sudden, West Virginia, you got a state-wide strike.

Every county goes out. And even though it’s illegal, they’re so powerful that the Republican Attorney General and the Governor can’t take repressive measures against them and ends up granting concessions. So I think that shows how you can build solidarity. What happens then? Teachers in Arizona see that happening and they say, hey, what’s going on? And they decide to go out on strike, and then Oklahoma. And then it expands even more.

Some of the blue states, you start seeing a strike wave in Washington state and teachers going out in L.A. and then Chicago who kind of started it all going back on strike and all of those striking against neoliberal Democrats. So I’m really thinking that’s really the subject of my second book, Strike Back, which is about public employee strikes in the 1960s. That’s what happens. People strike in waves because they see other people doing it and it’s contagious.

[00:29:55.860] – Grumbine

Let’s talk about that for a minute. So public-sector unions, what is the state of a public-sector union these days? Do we have many? What is their health?

[00:30:05.290] – Burns

Yeah. So, before I talked about private sectors being only six out of one hundred belonging to unions, the state of the public sector unions – folks who are employed by the federal government, the state governments, and municipalities – they’re roughly about one out of three. So instead of six out of a hundred, they’re 33 out of a hundred, which is a lot better.

And if it wasn’t for that and because of that, that drives up the overall unionization from six percent to about 11 percent. So it’s a very important part of the labor movement, but it’s a part of the labor movement that’s increasingly under attack by anti-labor conservatives. You might have recently seen President Trump, in one of his hopefully final acts as president, issued orders weakening federal protections for a whole class of federal employees. He’s basically gone to war with the federal unions.

Other state governors have gone to war with the public employee unions. But on the other hand, I think relatively speaking, we’re seeing more signs of life among public workers, especially teachers who are at the grassroots level rebelling against decades of austerity, and blaming teachers, and attempts to gut public education. So now we’ve seen strikes in a lot of cities around the country, and it’s really one of the bright spots for the labor movement.

[00:31:33.440] – Grumbine

Very good. You talked about the role of capital a little bit ago, and clearly, Marx had a lot to say about the class struggle. So much of labor history is not really taught in schools the way it should be. Our kids are taught to be good automatons in the workplace and not for collective well-being. What impact do you think socialism and Marx and other struggles going back to Eugene Debs – what lessons can we glean from them today? Are they completely inapplicable because of time and place and industry, or are there some really good lessons that we can pull from Marx and Debs and others like that?

[00:32:13.740] – Burns

Yeah, I think that’s a very interesting question, and actually, my third book, which comes out next year, is called Class Struggle Unionism. And what I do is I look back just like I did with my first two books where I looked at the strike. Here I look back to labor history to uncover some ideas that we can employ today. And when you look back historically within the labor movement and look at how professors talked about it and how folks talked about it, there were really two major schools of thought with unionism.  

There was what were the class unionism or class struggle unions, and then there was what’s called the business unions. And the business unions were typified by Samuel Gompers, who was the head of the American Federation of Labor back in the early 1900s, and they had a relatively narrow focus. The slogan was a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. And they didn’t really challenge the relations in society. But there was another trend in the labor movement.

Within the AFL there was a substantial number of socialist-minded trade unionists, and outside of it, a lot of them were in the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s, which preached abolition of capitalism as one of their tenants of unionism. They didn’t agree with signing contracts because that was peace with the employers and promoted a class-wide approach. That carried over, if you look in the 1920s and 30s, a lot of folks affiliated with the Communist Party – but also the Socialist Party and various socialist groups  – were instrumental in building the modern labor movement.

And underlying their unionism was this idea that just negotiating with individual employers to get a little bit more wasn’t enough because you have to take a deeper look. What is the source of power in society? And we live in a society where three billionaires own more than half the people in the country – more wealth. Wealth is incredibly concentrated and wealth equals power. And how do they get their power?

Well, they get their power out of the work process and the fact that workers go to work and produce goods and services, but in exchange, that’s what creates value in society. But they only get a handful of what they produce back and the rest of it flows upward and upward and upward in a great sucking sound to the billionaire class. And if we have a unionism – and this is one of the problems we had from the 1930s through the 1960s – is there was this grand bargain where, ok, they gave us a little bit and we actually did good for a lot of the workers.

But at the same time, we didn’t really contest this control over the workplace and society, and employers got more and more powerful because they accumulated more and more profits. And then eventually they turn it against the workers. Right? And against our movement. So if we’re going to revive the labor movement, we really have to look to socialist union theory. It’s hard to envision a labor movement that doesn’t actively contest the power of capital in the workplace and society succeeding. I think the two are going to go hand in hand.

[00:35:41.600] – Grumbine

This program is largely focused on the advancement of Modern Monetary Theory. Stephanie Kelton, who was Bernie Sanders’ economic adviser,  is one of the lead proponents of it, and I know that Sarah Nelson is good friends with them. I know that there’s a large movement right now advancing an understanding of macroeconomics. And one of the core principles of that is what we call a federal job guarantee.

And we know FDR had his WPA and some other great programs back in the day that were probably too effective, too successful in terms of taking away some power from capital. And the idea of the federal job guarantee is: federally funded, as in public money – not taxpayer money, but public money – and also locally administered, so the local communities, have control over the what and the how. And by setting the wage floor at, say, fifteen dollars an hour plus benefits, it provides great resilience for labor unions to be able to go on strike. For example, I used to have to deliver pizzas when we were on strike. You had to find something to fill in the gap from the money that the union was able to give us during those periods.

And I’m just curious, what, if any, work have you done within the space of the federal job guarantee? It’s been a core part of the Green New Deal, which would be part of a just transition away from these jobs in the fossil fuel industry where clearly we’re destroying the world with that, and in providing what they call a just transition as well, to give those people jobs that would transition to a new type of industry that is not harmful to the environment. What is your take on the concept of a federal job guarantee that allows people to literally walk away from a bad job and start working at a living wage? How do you see that relationship?

[00:37:36.640] – Burns

No, I think any social programs or legislation which is going to provide a higher floor for workers is going to benefit both the labor movement in particular and the working class as a whole. And my main focus is on workers’ self-activity in terms of rebuilding a militant, powerful labor movement. I definitely believe that programs such as that have a role. I think it’s interesting and it brings to mind, I’m sure you may have followed it. Seems, so long ago but during the campaign when Bernie was running in Nevada and there was a whole debate about single-payer health care with the labor movement.

[00:38:21.640] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:38:22.270] – Burns

And I think that kind of touches on a similar theme here. There were some unions, which is typically one of the better unions, Unite Here, but the local who represents the workers in the casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, which is a relatively strong union, they essentially came out against Bernie on the issue of single-payer health care.

And they were worried that that was going to take away their health plan, which is one of the better health care plans around. But it kind of highlighted this whole debate and a lot of other trade unionists were like, well, what happens if folks lose their jobs and so forth? And I think, I would imagine a lot of folks are probably questioning that now. Right? Because with the pandemic.

[00:39:12.800] – Grumbine

Oh, yes.

[00:39:13.530] – Burns

The Las Vegas workers have been particularly hard hit with the decline in tourism. And I’m sure a lot of people are, by this point, getting close to running out of health care. A lot of us in the labor movement had the same point that you’re making. If we had health care, then you wouldn’t have to worry about going out on strike – of employers being able to take away your health care.

[00:39:35.190] – Grumbine

Amen. Yeah.

[00:39:37.080] – Burns

And I think one final thing is – if you read accounts of the early 1970s, there was a wildcat strike wave where a lot of the younger folks were rebellious, a lot of hippies in the workplace. But during the period, unemployment was pretty low. So you could go on strike and if you lost your job, you go down to the auto plant down the street and get another job, you know? So I think that’s similar to having this comfort level that even if you lost your unionized job, you’re going to be able to get another job that at least pays somewhat decent.

[00:40:10.120] – Grumbine

Yeah. One of the things that I’ve talked with various people that are heavily union oriented, Mr. Reisberg being one of them. He made mention that sometimes there’s a difference between the actual labor unions and the labor bosses, so to speak, the union bosses. And you see this in political endorsements. Leadership not necessarily representing the people. And I’m just curious, can you explain that dynamic to me? Because it’s always fascinated me that a union is supposed to be there for the people and represent the people. And yet in modern times, it seems like that hasn’t necessarily been aligned.

[00:40:52.650] – Burns

Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of books about strikes over the years from way back in the day, back through the 1980s, and pretty much every book that you read about a strike has a fair bit about the conflict between the rank-and-file activists and the higher-ups in the union. So it’s kind of a constant. And I think union staff and officers have a different material reality than the workers who they represent. Whereas folks in an auto plant may be struggling because they only get three seconds down time out of a minute, and they’re working forced overtime, and they’re worried about their health care and so forth.

Someone who rises up in a union like the United Auto Workers can be making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year at the top of the union. They’re not going into a hellhole for work and they have institutional concerns about a militant strike may jeopardize the future of the union and thus their work. So that’s kind of a constant. Plus a lot of them end up swimming in different circles.

They may spend more time with politicians than workers, especially unions that are based in DC, and they come to adopt the mindset of a class of people whose interests may be hostile to those that they represent. So I think that’s another key element. When I looked at it, I was trying to write my book and I was like, well, what is the essence of class struggle unionism?

I was asking because I was trying to put it down on paper. And I was thinking in my mind that it’s militancy and all the picket line stuff. But I asked one of my friends who I respect a lot, Mark Meinster, who works for the UE [United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America] and he said, no, it’s that cluster of the unionists believe in the self-emancipation of the working class. They believe that workers need to be in control of their own struggles.

And when I thought about it, that made a lot of sense, because when I think about a lot of the people who I most admire in the labor movement, they had a real commitment to union democracy and process and that decisions need to be made by the workers involved and not by people who think that they know better or are further removed from the workplace.

And it’s kind of interesting that if you read some of the classic socialist literature and the first program of the Internationale, which is one of the first international federations, started in large part by Karl Marx, the first sentence of it reads something to the effect that whereas workers must be in charge of their own emancipation and not middle-class reformers. So I think that’s kind of interesting that that theme permeates labor history and socialist theory.

[00:43:37.550] – Grumbine

Absolutely. One of the other things that jumps out at me, I spend an inordinate amount of time lately really focusing on the struggle within the African-American community, minorities at large. And one of the things that they talked about with me in many of the interviews that I’ve done, and in a lot of the reading I’ve done, including of Malcolm X and others, is that class is a great thing but black people are always left behind, even in class struggle.

I bring this up frequently because Michelle Alexander brings it up in “The New Jim Crow.” Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen bring it up in “From Here to Equality” – the concept of Bacon’s rebellion and how you had a class struggle. You had serfs, you had slaves, you had indentured servants, and you had other people that were impoverished that had banded together, color be damned, and they were fighting back. And it ends up being a wedge issue, once again.

You offer the poor white guys a little bit more, they break away from the poor black guys and they’ve destroyed class struggle once again. I’m just curious, what is your take on race in terms of the labor movement and how it can become inclusive? Part two of that question is when you think about what labor even is, I’ve spoken with people that say, hey, it’s the poor, that’s class. And I’m saying, well, I believe anybody that is working for a paycheck is labor.

I think anybody that is not in an ownership class is labor. I’d like to define what labor is in terms of this class struggle we’re talking about and also the impact on minorities and how we can create a truly intersectional, class-based struggle that unites and solidifies all of our needs in one movement.

[00:45:28.760] – Burns

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. The first part of it is I think there’s long been a debate and different views in the labor movement about what is the proper strategy towards class and race. And in the 1930s and beyond, the unions – we call them the left-led unions, that were ones that had significant influence from the Communist Party, even coming out of the 1930s into the 1940s and beyond. And they develop what was called a form of civil rights unionism.

Whereas a lot of union organizers wanted to suppress discussion of race because they wanted to just talk about unity and workers uniting against the bosses. And they would try and organize in the South on that basis. The problem is that didn’t work because it basically ignored the special circumstances and oppression of black workers. In contrast, the left-led unions embraced it, and the CP did the whole national campaign about the Scottsboro Boys, who were put on trial for an alleged rape of a white woman in a racist attack against them.

And they made that into a national campaign and that really fused into their labor work. And they had this militant struggle against racism and they built these powerful interracial locals. And there’s quite a few books about it recounting their struggles. There has been another trend, and I think in the 1970s among the left Marxist groups who were doing labor work took the exact opposite approach.

And some of them even went so far as to be on the wrong side of the busing questions and supporting the white supremacists in the name of working-class unity, as opposed to others who saw that if you’re going to build a strong union, you have to put race and anti-racism at the core of what you do.

[00:47:30.210] – Grumbine

I want to just interject this, if you don’t mind. Hillary Clinton came out and called Trump’s supporters deplorables, and a lot of these people are white, working-class individuals. Yes, there are massive amounts of racists in there, but a lot of them are just poor white people as well that are uneducated, don’t have a lot going for them, and are feeling the pinchers of neoliberalism and austerity crushing them as well.

No dental care, no health care, very rough living. And you look at Appalachia and other areas in flyover states where people are just not leading their best life and their opportunities are very slim. And of course, they’re fearful of immigrants and of anyone that might jeopardize their slight position in society. Within this space, unionization is not a political issue necessarily, although it does require power, which does take us back to politics.

But I guess I’m wondering, you have very conservative right-wing labor out there that would need to be unified with, to some degree, to really bring this about. I’m curious as to how you see that playing into what we’re talking about here within the spectrum of racism.

[00:48:44.670] – Burns

Yeah. Living in a segregated society, in many ways, the workplace is one of the places where people of different races and nationalities come together. And people may live in different neighborhoods, schools are increasingly re-segregated again, so where is the place where people come together? And that’s really the workplace. I think that unionization and union struggles, from when I’ve been involved, is an area where you’re able to pull people together and fight a common enemy.

I think the problem with these corporate neoliberals like Hillary Clinton is they look down on the working class and I think people can tell that. And that’s one of the reasons why a large number reject that approach. So I think it’s not just enough to do union work, but I think unions can play an essential role in fighting racism in society because that’s where people come together, where you can address the issues.

[00:49:50.170] – Grumbine

No, I absolutely agree. I think you can see it in our lives, people are desperate for someone to fight for them. And we looked to Bernie Sanders and we thought, here’s a guy that’s going to fight for us. And then the rug got pulled out from under us. I am curious, who do we look to right now for strength? Who are some of the leaders that you might recommend people look to, to read and dig into? And where do we find our strength?

[00:50:19.720] – Burns

Look, I’m no fan of Biden or neoliberal Democrats in general, but it looks hopeful that Trump will be defeated. But if he is, I think there’s going to be a rude awakening for a lot of people. Because I think Biden rejects the Sanders wing of the party, which is a lot of viewpoints that are shared by a majority of people, that we should have national health care. 

So I think we’re going to have to be prepared to develop a strong fighting labor movement and that’s really going to have to come from the grassroots, because, frankly, I don’t really see much impetus at the top levels of the AFL-CIO or the national unions to build the type of labor movement that we need. I happen to work for one of the better unions around.

Sara Nelson’s our president, and she’s one of the handful of national leaders who I think can provide the vision. But I’ve long believed that groups in the labor movement at the rank and file level – there’s this magazine called Labor Notes. It’s been around for 40 years.

[00:51:29.920] – Grumbine

Yeah, absolutely. I know what you’re talking about.

[00:51:32.230] – Burns

So I think that’s really where it’s going to come from. We’re going to have to develop a grassroots fighting wing of the labor movement to transform it. And that’s really what’s happened in the teachers’ unions. It’s really come from the bottom up.

[00:51:45.480] – Grumbine

I’m really looking forward to getting some of your books. When your name was brought up, I was just very excited to have you on and you have not disappointed in any way. For our listeners, if you wouldn’t mind, just let us know where we can find you and just read off your books one more time and let us know when we can get your new one.

[00:52:03.630] – Burns

OK, I have a Facebook page called Reviving the Strike, where I post a lot of the articles and thoughts. My first book is “Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.” And that came out in 2011. It’s still available online. And then my second book was called “Strike Back: Rediscovering the Tactics of Public Employee Unionism.” [laughs]

Some of these titles are kind of long, so it’s hard to remember them. That was, I think, published in 2013. And then the second edition came out a couple of years ago. And then my final book of the trilogy will be “Class Struggle Unionism,” it’s tentatively titled. And that is going to be published by Haymarket Books and you can look for that probably sometime next summer or fall. I also do a lot of writing from time to time in Labor Notes and Jacobin and some of the other progressive outlets.

[00:52:59.960] – Grumbine

Well, I got to tell you, this has been a pleasure for me, and now that I’ve got the connection with you, I really do hope I can bring you back on because I’ve got so much more I want to ask you. And I really want to thank you so much for taking the time with me today. This was incredible. I really appreciate it, Joe.

[00:53:15.260] – Burns

Thanks. It’s been a good discussion. I enjoyed it.

[00:53:17.540] – Grumbine

Absolutely. All right. This is Steve Grumbine and Joe Burns from Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[00:53:28.660] – End Credits [music]

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/real progressives.