MARIA ELENA DURAZO believes that “there is a transformation in workers when they organize and fight that is far more important than the increase in wages or health care, all of which is very important. The soul feels great—fulfilled and powerful. The workers know they’ve changed. They’ve become more powerful, not just as a group but individually. And that matters.”1
“I’m talking about social movement unionism,” Durazo says, a broad vision of change. “We are not just trying to protect institutions. We are a movement—with all that entails.” Durazo is no stranger to institution-building. She was president of her union local for seventeen years and led the Los Angeles Federation of Labor for eight, representing three hundred unions and eight hundred thousand workers. She has been a vice president of the Democratic National Committee and is running for the California Senate in 2018. But face-to-face organizing is what she loves best. “It is how workers’ lives are transformed, how they learn, how they get power.”
Rusty Hicks, the young Afghanistan war veteran elected in 2014 to lead the Los Angeles Federation, believes that social movement unionism empowers workers economically and psychologically. It’s about more than wage negotiations. It is about social justice.
In many countries, social movement unionism has sought fundamental transformations. COSATU, the South African trade union federation, brought labor into the struggle to end apartheid. Brazil’s MST, Landless Workers’ Movement, occupies vacant land and builds new communities. For Josua Mata and his Philippine Alliance of Progressive Labor, it’s about unions making workers’ whole lives better by organizing inside and outside the workplace, in communities and schools as well as factories, offices, and hotels. And, he says, in an era with ever-fewer formal sector jobs, the definitions of worker and union have changed. He sees students, street vendors, and squatters as workers and believes unions must reach out to them.
In the US, social movement unionism has brought workers together with a range of progressive groups: seeking environmental and racial justice, LGBT rights and women’s rights. Cleve Jones, the creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, went on to organize for UNITE HERE, building strong alliances between union hotel workers and gay rights activists. North Carolina minister William Barber and other progressive clergy have linked racial justice to the living-wage campaign. Barber and other clergy fasted with Denise Barlage and Tyfani Faulkner in front of Alice Walton’s building. CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice) have energetically supported Walmart workers’ organizing. Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter have been thoroughly intertwined. These broad coalitions are a hallmark of twenty-first-century worker justice struggles, distinguishing them from what Durazo calls “institutional unionism.”2
Some argue that social movement unionism is a product of Asian, African, and Latin American labor struggles, but US activists believe that the idea is just as strongly rooted in American labor history. Durazo, who grew up as the seventh of eleven children in a family of farmworkers, says her politics were honed in the farmworkers’ struggle. She sees the UFW as a paradigmatic social movement union.
“Farmworkers were the original contract workers,” she says. “No job security, negotiating for pennies. To the bosses, those pennies were business. To my family, it was food on the table.” Bert Corona, known to farmworkers as “El Viejo,” taught her that organizers need to grasp workers’ whole lives: hunger, homelessness, immigration status. Corona and UFW cofounder Dolores Huerta schooled her in movement-building, Durazo says.
“There’s no doubt of the impact that the farmworkers’ movement had, because the UFW was not a traditional union,” says Durazo. “It was much broader in its vision. It had its problems for sure, but it never was the kind of stale institution that so many old-line unions became.” Not surprisingly, veterans of the United Farm Workers are key strategists both in UNITE HERE and SEIU—prime drivers of the low-wage workers’ struggle in the US. The UFW was always a racial and immigrant justice movement as much as a workers’ struggle, Durazo says. It had to be.
Durazo believes this was also true of the other union where she learned about social movement unionism—the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (now part of UNITE HERE), which she joined in 1983. Its roots in the labor socialism of early twentieth-century Jewish and Italian immigrant communities mattered, she says. The ILGWU was the “one union in Los Angeles in the 1970s that was aggressively organizing immigrant garment workers” into a multicultural labor movement. They didn’t “look at immigrants as union busters, but rather as union leaders.”
Even so, many male ILGWU leaders were myopic about the political potential of women and immigrant workers, Durazo says, especially Latinas. In 1987, Durazo led a drive to change that. There was resistance from old-timers, and in 1989 she unseated them, becoming president of her local—a post she held for seventeen years. “If we want to tap this vast unorganized immigrant workforce, we’ve got to be bold,” she believes. “We’ve got to be creative. It’s not just that immigrants need a labor movement. If we want to grow as a labor movement, we need immigrants and women.”
Many different political streams came together to create the twenty-first-century low-wage workers’ movement, Durazo says. “It lent itself to a convergence. Women’s rights, LGBT issues became part of labor’s struggle.” You can’t separate identity and redistributive politics, Bleu Rainer argues. “All these issues are about who we are. They affect our lives. We can’t ignore any of them.”
Tyfani Faulkner thinks that this fusion makes the new labor movement difficult to categorize. “I am interested to see how this activism will be labeled,” she says, “because the Walmart workers’ movement is a women’s movement and a labor movement. But it’s also a racial thing. Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, and the Walmart movement are different but also not. It’s all the same idea—more equality.”3
In the age of ALEC and an ascendant right wing, unions have engaged in broad coalition-building as a survival strategy. How could low-wage workers build momentum and gain political power? Labor leaders tried different approaches. Durazo and her late husband (former LA Federation of Labor head Miguel Contreras) organized immigrant workers to vote and run for office. Mary Kay Henry, the gifted and controversial organizer who became president of SEIU in 2010, sought ways to organize low-wage workers who were not, and might never be, union members, in order to build a national consensus that wages must rise. Both of these strategies have brought real change.
The germ of what would become Fight for $15 was planted in the winter of 2011. Newly elected Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pushed the state to cut salaries and benefits. An ALEC bill was introduced to take away collective bargaining rights from public employees. Protests erupted at the state capitol in Madison.
In a surprisingly strong response, eighty thousand people participated. Members of conservative police and firefighters’ unions joined more traditionally progressive nurses’ and teachers’ unions. Social media spread images of the protests worldwide. Arab Spring protesters sent pizza. European unions sent messages of support. In the end, Wisconsin’s unions lost. The bill passed. But, unexpectedly, they had sparked a much larger uprising. A few months later, Occupy Wall Street began. Fight for $15 soon followed.4
Labor leaders knew that this was a turning point. Walker, Governor John Kasich of Ohio, and other rising Republican stars were commanding the media spotlight as anti-union warriors. Unless they could channel the kind of energy manifest in the Wisconsin protests, unions in America might actually disappear. Hoping to shift the national conversation as the country geared up for the 2012 elections, SEIU launched Fight for a Fair Economy. Instead of focusing on calls for austerity and budget cuts, they wanted people to start talking about rising inequality and wage stagnation. Their tactic worked.
Despite devoting millions to Obama’s campaign and to Senate Democrats in 2008, organized labor had been unable to pass its top priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would have made it easier for unions to organize. It was time for a new strategy, a new kind of labor movement, Mary Kay Henry announced. “We’re taking risks in building a movement that’s going to birth the next form of worker power.”5
In the lead-up to the 2012 election, fifteen hundred SEIU staffers knocked on more than three million doors in seventeen cities. A majority were not union members. It would be a drawn-out struggle, they knew, to win union elections in retail or fast food, with its millions of workers. So SEIU began organizing workers to wage legislative and public relations battles. Fight for $15 was born, and was more successful than anyone expected.
“This is our John L. Lewis moment,” says Seattle SEIU officer David Rolf, comparing Fight for $15 to the 1935 decision by the United Mine Workers leader to leave the American Federation of Labor and create the Congress of Industrial Organizations. With a mass-organizing ethos and a vision that embraced skilled and unskilled workers, men and women, whites and people of color, the CIO catalyzed an era of mass strikes nationwide. Workers of all kinds flooded into unions. Rolf believes that Fight for $15 is the biggest success that labor has had in a generation and its best hope for building power in the future.6
Low-wage workers across the globe share that optimism. Philippine labor activist Joanna Coronacion believes that, in a workforce that is increasingly young and contingent, “social movement unionism is catching on like fire,” and changing the meanings of worker and workplace. “We don’t organize just in factories,” she says. “We organize in communities and schools. We organize young people, even children. We believe that children are the future of workers’ movements. And we know that many children are already workers. They need unions.”
Josua Mata, cofounder of the progressive Philippine union federation SENTRO, says that social movement unionism is also defined by its global reach. “Right at the beginning of the neoliberal era—globalization, the forces that started the collapse for workers—we had a protest and we raised this huge banner. It said ‘Down with Privatization. No to Liberalization.’ We were just starting to grasp what was happening, that global organizing was essential.”
Mata, then a hotel worker, says global union federations educated him. The Geneva-based IUF was crucial. Its longtime general secretary, Dan Gallin, was one of the first to realize how important it was, as capital globalized, to build a truly global labor movement. “Globalization wasn’t yet a buzzword in the labor movement,” Mata says. “But the IUF was talking about globalization. It captured our imaginations.”
Democratic socialists began to think about how trade unionism could be simultaneously global in its vision and grassroots in its practice, Mata says. “We began educating, cultivating, and mobilizing people and popularizing the idea of social movement unionism. The strategy was to teach workers to organize and educate other workers. That’s real trade union work.” And it is the only way, he says, to bring a paradigm shift toward a world in which workers govern their workplaces, their schools, and their lives. That will take nothing less than a global uprising.7