By Tom Smucker
Good News From Chattanooga, April 29
It’s even better than you think.
I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago, April 19-21. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years ago, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.
As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south. Suspicious auto workers at not just Volkswagen and next up Mercedes Benz, but at Hyundai, Honda, and Rivian had been watching the big three auto strike for signs of life and got it with that big win and those creative strategies. Tennessee, the Autoworkers at Labor Notes were saying, is just the beginning, and that just might mark the end of the low-wage, no-union, gerrymandered south.
I consider myself a pretty good judge of (and participant in) union whistling past the graveyard and next-year-will-be-betterism. And I don’t think Amazon will be easy to crack, but I do believe it’s cracking. For the first time ever, the Labor Notes Conference maxed out at 4,500 participants, most of them young and energetic. There was talk on the panels of unionizing the south, from Waffle House to call centers. A rep from the Volkswagen union in Germany promoted the 33 hour workweek and a convention in India. I caught a premiere of an inspiring movie featuring trans union organizers at Starbucks.
An era is ending, something is changing, and not just in the Republican Party.
May Day 2024
Sure, Trump could get elected or installed, and further shrink the NLRB, and impose a national right-to-work law. The Supreme Court majority could invent an interpretation of the Constitution that eliminates Social Security and Medicare, maybe even labor unions. Congress could find more ways to top load our already finance-heavy economic pyramid and push more people from the bottom out onto the streets.
But this May Day, I’m feeling this is not the time to feel discouraged. The labor movement is on the move.
It’s not just the UAW big win at The Big Three, or the follow-up victory at VW in Chattanooga, or now the contract victory at Daimler Truck. It’s the fact that all this is part of a plan to organize the auto plants across the south, along with the Amazon warehouses, schools, auto parts plants, and whatever other dominos begin to fall. And if that happens, it sucks the oxygen out of politicians from Nicki Haley to Ted Cruz and their low-wage, anti-union, job stealing, new Jim Crow, defective-airplane-building, former Confederacy, paradise. And if that happens, and the unions continue to spring back to life across the country while growing public support beyond their membership—maybe we can get back to winning permanent jobs, health care, and a decent retirement for all, pick up from where LBJ and the Democrats dropped the ball when they got tangled up in Viet Nam.
What’s different this time around, from all the other attempts in my lifetime to revive organized labor—Ed Sadlowski and the Steelworkers, Ron Carey and the Teamsters, Richard Trumka and the Miners, Jerry Tucker and the Autoworkers—is not only the broad vision of a modest genius like the UAW’s Shawn Fain, but how that broad vision is shared by other unions and the wider public. Neo-liberalism and hyper-individualism spread suffering across the last forty plus years but that suffering birthed a miracle. It’s a new world where baristas, teachers, auto workers, waiters, grad students, actors, warehouse workers, public employees, and journalists all want and need smart, active, fighting unions. The upward mobility machine of a college education is grinding out graduates looking at a lifetime of debt, working without security. Much of our manufacturing infrastructure and the jobs that go with it have been shipped overseas. The magic of the marketplace has magically produced the possibility of a new solidarity across an inclusive, interracial, multicultural, multilayered, dare I say it, working class.
It took the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Sanders presidential campaign, and Covid to focus this anxiety and pain. Then bursts of mass frustration and indignation from BLM to Me Too pointed towards the need for permanent organization and historical perspective. All of it making unions popular with the majority of the public for the first time in my memory.
So I worry that the spotlight has swung away from the economy and the unions to the free speech fights at universities. And that Gaza could be Biden’s Viet Nam. From my vantage point, Trump offers his demonic solutions because he is aware of, and working to exploit, the same real problems, global and domestic, that Shawn Fain and the UAW are working to identify and fix. Mislabeled middle of the road or moderate or bipartisan politics fail to acknowledge, in fact paper over, how fragile access to the good life has become. That camouflage can confuse a public trying to feel its way through anxious times, and drive some to settle on a candidate who at least acts angry.
I was thrilled to see Biden give a shout out at his State of the Union address to Shawn Fain up in the balcony, and thrilled to see Biden actually join a UAW picket line—the first time for a president—and thrilled to see his recognition and approval of the contract victory at Daimler Truck. Trump will bluster, but steer clear of picket lines and unions. Biden may yet stumble over the disaster in the Middle East and leave that opening for Trump, a new disaster.
There are union plans to get Biden re-elected in November, and I’m all in. And there are union plans that extend well beyond the election, as there must be. No matter what ends up happening in November, mark May 1, 2028 on your calendar. The UAW is working to align as many contract expirations in as many industries from as many unions as possible to expire that year on May Day, setting up a nationwide general strike.
Good news from Chattanooga was originally posted in First of the Month, April 29, 2024
https://www.firstofthemonth.org/operation-dixie-21st-c/
May Day 2024 was originally posted in First of the Month, May 1, 2024
https://www.firstofthemonth.org/mayday-2024/#more-18215