UNION EXPERTS DISCUSS UNIONS AFTER JANUS

Unless you have been hibernating in a cave the last year, you know that the Supreme Court is about to make their decision in the Janus v AFSCME case so that union dues will soon more than likely be optional in the public sector throughout the country. In 23 states unions collect fair share (or agency) fees from non-members because those non-members benefit from the wages and benefits that the unions negotiate. How should unions and union activists respond to a very different world after Janus when the fair share fees become optional and right wing media machine tells workers to give themselves a raise by opting out of their unions? The right hopes this can weaken the labor movement considerably.

I think there is a consensus that the unions will try to maintain as much of the status quo as they can by convincing members to stay with the union. However, what if the workers for whatever reason choose a different course in large numbers?

Michael Fiorillo sent me this long discussion from In These Times with three labor experts. Some thought provoking ideas for me came from Shaun Richman, a former AFT organizer. 

Here is an excerpt:

Shaun Richman: I had an article published in The Washington Post and I admit it was too cute by half partly because I was trying to amplify what I think was actually the strongest argument that AFSCME is making in the case itself, which is that the agency fee has historically been traded for the no strike clause and if you strike that there is the potential for quite a bit of chaos. So I wanted to put a little bit of fear to whoever might potentially have the ear of Chief Justice Roberts, as crazy as that may sound. But I also wanted to plant the seed of thinking for a few union rebels out there. If the Janus decision comes down as many of us fear then the proper response is to create chaos.

If the entire public sector goes right to work, unions will never look the same. So, then, the project of the left should be “what do we want them to look like?” and “what will drive the bosses craziest?” I've written about this before and Chris (Brooks from Labor Notes) has responded at In These Times. There are three things that I am suggesting will happen—two of which, and I think Chris agrees, are sort of inevitable and not particularly desirable. The third part is not inevitable and depends a lot on what we do as activists.

If we lose the agency fee, some unions will seek to go members-only in order to avoid the free rider problem, and that's a lousy motivation. I'm not encouraging that, but I think it's also inevitable. Once you have unions representing these workers over here but not those workers over there, it's also inevitable that you wind up with competitor unions vying for the unrepresented. And the first competitor unions are going to be conservative. These already exist. They're all over the South and they compete against the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) in many districts and they offer bare bones benefits and they promote themselves on “we're not going to support candidates who are in favor of abortions and we'll represent you if you have tenure issues.” That's also bad but also inevitable.

The third step, which is not inevitable but we need to consider in this moment, is at what point do new opposition groups break away from the existing formal union?  When do we just break the exclusive model and compete for members and workplace leadership? Can we get to a point where on the shop floor level you've got organizations vying for workers' dues money and loyalty based on who can take on the boss in a better fight or who can win a better deal on the basis of we're going to be less confrontational (which, I think, there are a lot of workers whom that appeals to as much as I don't like that idea)? But the chaos of the employer not being able to make one deal with one union that settles everything for three or five years—that's just the sort of chaos that the boss class deserves for having pursued this whole Friedrichs and now Janus strategy.

I very much doubt the competing unions arrangement is coming soon to NYC but what about the schools? Let's look a little closer at our situation.

We have a membership that has a fairly decent salary along with good benefits but in many schools those members have virtually no rights at work and not much union recourse either from the United Federation of Teachers. Too many teachers feel frustrated and completely powerless.

The conversation from the three experts moves on to a bit of a history lesson from Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University, that I think is kind of relevant to our situation in NYC. Read what she says about why people vote to dump their union:

...there is a long history in the public sector of independent unions, of company unions, acting as if exclusive representation didn't exist, where there would only be one member and employers would recognize the “union” establishing a contract bar so no other union could come in.

In the 1980s and 1990s, public sector unions assumed that they were winning decertification elections rather than the independent unions and discovered that they weren't. Soon enough they realized that the problem was that they weren't doing a good enough job of representing their members. Workers were not voting for the company unions, which were little more than law firms or insurance companies. They were voting against the poor representation.

Hey UFT Leadership:  I believe this is a big part of the message members are trying to get out to the world in the comments on this blog and elsewhere. People here respect the idea of a union but want one that has their back and represents them with everything they have. You have to do more than say that people are lucky they have a job. 

Richman again:

Humpty Dumpty is sitting on the wall and if Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts kick him off I am not particularly interested in being one of the king's horses and men trying to put him together again. At that point the system is fundamentally broken and we need new demands about what kind of system we want and new strategies about how we exploit the brokenness of the system to make them regret what they have done.

Exclusive representation—combined with agency fee and DFR (Duty to Fair Representation) —worked for a long time. But if you knock one piece out, it all falls apart. We shouldn't be pining for bygone days. We need to be thinking forward about what opportunities this creates. 

I still say to teachers and other educators in NYC that I would rather repair the UFT from within than start a all over but one never knows what the post Janus union world will bring.