On the right, Uncle Sam and a boss hide behind a tree with a baited trap set. The bait is a labor union contract and the box to capture the worker is labeled "NLRA National Labor Relations Act." On the side it says "Prevent Labor Revolt and secure the flow of commerce." On the right, a worker approaches two paths. The path to the trap says "class collaboration." The path to a sunlit vista with the sun labeled "Workers control" is led by a small black cat, and the path is labeled "class war."
art by x364181.

At first glance, public interest in labor unions appears to have grown exponentially over the past few years. This has been a welcome development; however, despite the constant exhortations of the progressive media and some notable wins on the part of large established unions, rates of union membership and activity continue to stagnate or decline. Simultaneously, working, living, and economic conditions have steadily worsened – especially in the lower ends of the wage scale. How is it that workers’ supposed increased support for unions has not translated to either a stronger labor movement or improved conditions? Why are rates of union membership and economic inequality worse than those of the Gilded Age? Why has no mass labor movement emerged out of the tumultuous economic and social conditions of the 2010s and early 2020s to challenge this?

Many make the superficial assumption that rank-and-file North American workers are irredeemably racist, too demure, or otherwise conservative. Some argue that the labor movement needs stronger leadership of the correct leanings toward socialism or communism. Even others argue that unions are obsolete and could never deliver on widespread social transformation without connection to an external political party that leads them.

Some of these cynical arguments may hold grains of truth; however, none offer good answers as to why workers’ struggles and union activity – from small confrontations with the boss to large strikes – have fallen to such low levels. To answer this question more fully, we have to examine the fundamental basis of most unions today – namely, labor law. At its very basic level, almost all legal acts by the capitalist state exist to suppress grievances that could disrupt business-as-usual. These include the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act of 1935), the Railroad Labor Act, and others.

These laws explicitly lay out their purposes and goals in the opening clauses. For example, the NLRA, which forms the legal basis for most union organizing today, is officially titled,

An act to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and for other purposes.”

The title clearly states the interests of capital and its clients in the government: to reduce labor conflicts that impact commerce. In other words, to use bureaucratic and legal methods to keep the class struggle and workers activity from boiling over into widespread strike waves, concerted class struggle, and mass working class consciousness and organization. Or, more glibly, to effectively neutralize workers’ most powerful leverage. Engaging in this system is a lose-lose strategy for all workers and unions, but particularly for those of us who aim to build One Big Union of the whole working class to abolish wage slavery and seize control of the economy.

Labor Relations Law: Strangling Labor, Empowering Capital

In the Wagner Act model, a union files for a representation election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. The employer is immediately notified of the petition, after which a two-step election is triggered. The first step, called a “Card Check” or “Authorization Card Check,” requires the union to collect “authorization cards” from a majority of the workers in the proposed bargaining unit. These cards essentially say, “I, the undersigned worker, authorize the union to bargain on my behalf” — they are not union membership cards nor do they involve or imply union membership. 

If this hurdle is passed, a second election is scheduled. This is the “election” proper, where there is a NLRB-overseen vote yes/no vote of the bargaining unit of whether they want the union to represent them. At both stages of this process, the employer can pull all kinds of dirty tricks – legal and otherwise – to head off the election. These include intimidation, propaganda, surveillance, increased discipline of known union supporters, expanding or shrinking the bargaining unit to include unaffected workers or exclude known supporters, and so on. One core strategy is to prevent as many workers from showing up to vote as possible, usually achieved by the previously mentioned tactics. 

Presuming that those workers who show up on the NLRB election day vote in support of the union’s representation, the employer is legally bound to begin bargaining a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the union’s lawyers. Contract bargaining can take years and often takes place behind closed doors, with details usually only sparingly shared with the workers if at all. Only then do most workers become full members of the union, with the option of opting out of membership in some states. Dues are deducted from members’ paychecks automatically, not by voluntary contribution or initiative on the workers part. 

More “progressive” unions may hold actions including strikes to engage the workers in support of the negotiation team. They may include membership card drives to withstand union busting. However, most unions do not actively seek to use economic disruption as a bargaining strategy. Nor do they seek to build the willingness and capability of workers themselves to collectively take action or confront management directly to address grievances; everything flows through the lawyers and through the contract.   

The most important effect of this model is to take the power and agency of improving working conditions – and society – out of the hands of workers and put it into the hands of union bosses, lawyers, negotiators, and legislators. In a sense, the Labor Relations (LR) system epitomized by the Wagner Act takes the idea of “collective bargaining” of masses of workers on the shopfloor stopping work to negotiate as one with management, to some logically tortured concept of every worker being represented by the same lawyer in a boardroom somewhere. Don’t confront management on the shop floor. Don’t strike or disrupt the economy. Work now, grieve later, and let the lawyers handle it for you. All while the profits flow to capital. 

In some cases, such as for railroad workers in the US (covered under the Railway Labor Act) and most Canadian labor law, there is a superficially different system that results in similar outcomes. In these jurisdictions, contract bargaining goes through several stages and strikes are only legally allowed after several rounds of negotiations and “cooling off periods” designed to prevent labor disputes from stopping commerce. Even then, as we will see, the US President or Canadian Parliament can simply declare a strike illegal and order workers back to work with threat of severe legal sanctions or other forms of breaking the union. 

In all cases, the labor relations system acts to substitute mediation, arbitration, and legislation in place of strikes, boycotts, and other economic disruption. The ruling class, liberals, conservatives, and others who benefit from the status quo have different moral or philosophical arguments for why workers and unions should engage with it. But in the end, the effect is the same and should be clear to any Wobbly: the labor relations system is to keep workers from doing class struggle. 

This dynamic is clear from observing or participating in almost any labor struggle today, but here I’ll focus on three examples: the 2021 – present day Starbucks Workers Union, the aborted 2022 US Railway Strike, and the recent 2024 Canadian Railway Strike. 

Case 1: Coffee Gets Heated

The Starbucks Workers Union (SBWU) first emerged into the public consciousness around 2021 when workers at a Buffalo, NY cafe filed and won a NLRB certification election. A steady flow of certification elections followed after this first cafe; at the time of this writing in late 2024, SBWU claims almost 500 union cafes and over 10,000 union members across the United States. While SBWU is not the first effort to organize Starbucks cafes, it has been one of the most enduring and successful at growing its ranks.

Working conditions in the foodservice industry are notoriously bad. Wages are low and workers rely on customer generosity (i.e. tipping) for survival; healthcare benefits are poor or nonexistent; hours are long and schedules change at the whim of management; time off is generally few and far between; sexual harassment is rampant; and so on. While these issues have been endemic to the industry, the COVID pandemic brought many of these issues to a head as cafe workers stood on the front lines of the lockdowns and the social disintegration that followed, helping spur greater interest in organizing among this section of the workforce.

SBWU organizers have certainly done an excellent job at quickly winning NLRB certification elections, building a collective identity through branding and propaganda, and bringing unionism to a younger generation of workers (including a large proportion of women, LGBTQ workers, and workers of color) in an industry that have largely been overlooked by mainstream labor unions. Difficulties that have long pervaded organizing the foodservice sector – large numbers of small, independently-owned shops, geographically dispersed locations, high turnover, etc. – are less present at Starbucks. As a multinational corporation with high-density clusters of locations and a centralized ownership and management model, Starbucks presents a good target and a nice anchor point for union activity in the sector.

SBWU has also done a decent job of regularly taking action to engage the workforce and keep the union campaign front and center. These actions include “Red Cup Days,” one-day strikes, informational pickets, etc. Their website is full of photos of stylish young workers holding picket signs and Labor Notes features their activities regularly in their events and media output. The progressive liberal media, from The Nation to Labor Notes to Jacobin, hails SBWU as the vanguard of a newly militant and confrontational labor movement that can appeal to the alienated young workers of today.

However, despite the radical appearances, what is actually happening is not very different from the same status quo business unionism that has dominated for decades. 

Let’s start with the organizing strategy. SBWU is a project of Workers United (WU) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which are both deeply entrenched in the mainstream labor movement. As such, SBWU approaches each shop as its own mini-union or bargaining unit; the workers at each cafe file for an NLRB election. This allows the organizers to avoid an all-or-nothing election campaign, instead trying to steadily grow the number of members and shops under its aegis more sustainably. On the flip side, most SBWU bargaining units are only a handful of workers, which limits the universe of actions each unit can take.

SBWU will often hold visible events such as “Red Cup Days”, “Red For Bread Days”, and occasional one-day strikes at isolated locations. This gives an air of militancy and willingness to engage in confrontational action with the employer; however, true militancy, meaning disciplined, widespread actions such as a truly economically disruptive strike, a union-wide sit-in, etc. have never been attempted or hinted at by SBWU. 

SBWU actions are almost always superficial, symbolic, and tied to ongoing contract bargaining, whether it’s to just get Starbucks to the bargaining table, or to advance stalled negotiations. They often rely on outside supporters and members of the public instead of the internal strength and militancy of the shop workers. The weakness of this strategy is on display by reading through the demands and looking at the overall SBWU timeline:

Summer 2021: First shop files for election and wins; several more follow

March 2022: SBWU enters contract bargaining and “wins” tipping for workers

2022 – 2024: Steady stream of elections

March 2024: SBWU announces an agreement with SBX for a “framework for bargaining and organizing”

Demands (as of March 2024) include:

  • More lax dress code
  • Easier tips
  • Slightly more sick time
  • 5% wage increases applied since 2022

In other words, over the past 4+ years of organizing, countless Red Cup Days and other “solidarity actions” involving customers, and so on, SBWU has not won anything meaningful beyond tips (which, it should be said, costs the employer nothing). Contract bargaining has endlessly dragged on to no effect; it has taken 2 years to agree to a “framework for bargaining,” to allow workers to wear jeggings, and to allow workers to wear fun pins. Contrast this with the strike wave of the 1930s, where the Autoworkers had the automakers and the federal government on their knees, caving to demands within 3 months of the Flint sit-down strike. Notably, the wins that SBWU has chalked have only come from disruptive collective action (though those actions typically aim simply to bring management to the table).

This is the logical outcome of organizing for a legal contract through the LR system, where the contract is king and labor peace is the price: endless negotiations, millions of dollars in lawyers fees, years of wasted time, a neutered labor movement, and despondent workers desperate for meaningful improvements to their lives finding none. Class struggle, class conflict, outright economic disruption, and ultimately worker’s power, are deliberately sidelined in order to win “formal recognition” from the government and make pathetic demands on the employer such as 5% raises and the right to wear jeggings. Employers will not bargain in good faith, ever; the government will act in capital’s favor, always; and the LR system will never win a world for workers. It is high time to bring back real, disruptive worker militancy – not the same old business-as-usual with a coat of black and red paint.

Case 2: American Rails

In 2022, the 12 main unions that represent most of the railroad workers in the US were posed to walk out on strike. Contract negotiations between these unions and the Class 1 railroads broke down repeatedly throughout the course of the year. 

Support for a strike had been building for years, largely through the efforts of the cross-trade labor network Railroad Workers United (RWU). Working conditions on America’s railroads have rapidly declined since the late 1990s; railroad managers have implemented a litany of policies designed to extract maximum profits out of an increasingly squeezed labor force. These policies include “precision scheduled railroading,” one-man train crews, increasingly long double-decker trains, in-cab operator monitoring, last-minute crew scheduling, and so on. Railroad engineers reported at the time that due to being on-call almost continuously, they effectively worked with less than 10 days off per year. Operators reported having to skip major life events such as births, funerals, weddings, and graduations in order to work a shift last minute. Of course, freight accidents, derailments, on-the-job deaths and injuries, and other workplace safety incidents skyrocketed. These include such rail disasters as oil and coal train derailments in the Columbia River Gorge, chemical spills around the Midwest, and so on. 

Railroad workers are not covered under the Wagner Act; the Railroad Labor Act is the governing law here, which is superficially different from the Wagner Act but affects the same outcome. This is partially due to the older, longer history of unionism among the railroad workforce in the US than other sectors, and partially due to the critical place railroads occupy in the economy. Several crippling rail strikes paralyzed the US economy from the 1870s through the early 1900s, prompting the government to intervene in the 1920s and 1930s, placing hurdles to rail strikes.

Under the Railway Labor Act (which, like the Wagner Act, has the stated purpose of preventing economic disruption and also covers airline workers), rail operators and their unions are required to bargain contracts every few years. Industrial action is theoretically allowed, but any strike action can only be taken after a 60-day “cooling off period.” After repeated rounds of failed negotiations, the office of the US President can simply step in and dictate a deal. 

And this is exactly what happened during the 2022 US Railroad contract negotiations. The talks broke down repeatedly over the course of almost a year; RWU and other supporters built up widespread support for strike action among the workforce. Union memberships voted down poor contracts in several of the trades. Union leaderships issued notifications of strike action. Ultimately, in the midnight hours before workers would have walked off the job, President Biden and the US Congress stepped in on December 2 and imposed a contract in line with the railroad trust’s “last, best, final offer.” The “yes” vote in Congress included self-described socialist politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar.

Thus, despite the workforce’s willingness to fight and probably win against the railroad trust, the legal system stepped in to prevent class conflict from breaking out, leaving workers a raw deal. And, for what it’s worth, the president’s deal did not include any meaningful improvements to working conditions or quality of life issues; simply a small pay bump and a single paid day off per year.

Shortly after the deal went into force, the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio occurred, spilling large amounts of carcinogenic chemicals into the soil & water of the working-class town. The massive plume of thick black smoke circulated for a few weeks of the media cycle, with liberals calling for tighter regulations on the rail industry that never came. The train was operated by a one-man crew.

Case 3: Canadian Rails

In August 2024, Canadian rail workers threatened a strike over broken down contract negotiations with the Canadian rail majors, Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National. For a few days, the US media was alight with doomsday predictions on what this would mean for the US economy and “global supply chain issues.”

Labor relations in Canada differ slightly from that of the US and restrict strike activity even more. During the lifespan of a contract, the union is legally forbidden from industrial action under any circumstances, unlike the US, where they are theoretically legal but difficult to achieve in practice while under contract, or if the contract contains an all-too-common “no strike clause.” Strikes can only occur in the window of opportunity between contracts and under highly circumscribed conditions; thus the employer always knows when a strike may happen. And, like under the US Railway Labor Act, any striking union may simply be “legislated” back to work by an Act of Parliament. 

And, again, this is precisely what happened in August 2024 during the Canadian Railway Strike. After barely one day of picketing, Parliament declared the strike illegal and ordered workers back to the job. Instead of defying the order and engaging in outright class conflict, the unions ordered workers back onto the job and lodged legal complaints in early September. Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway had annual profits in 2023 of 9.8 billion CAD and 1.4 billion CAD; they can easily afford a few nuisance legal cases.

Class Struggle and the Contract Trap

It may be helpful here to elaborate on what I mean by “class struggle,” because the term has suffered an unfortunate meaning creep since the mid-20th Century. Class struggle is the conscious effort by workers to organize ourselves and directly, collectively, confront management and capital on the job over control over our work, our working conditions, and who gets the fruits of our labor.

Class struggle can be done on the small scale and the large scale. Most minds probably jump quickly to the titanic struggles of the early 20th Century labor movement, such as the big strikes of the 1930s. These are the actions that go down in the history books and are rightly commemorated by future generations of workers. 

But for every big strike involving tens of thousands of workers, there were countless struggles carried on by smaller teams of workers over everyday grievances. These day-to-day grievances over safety, poor treatment, and quality of life issues were where previous generations of militant workers honed their skills and developed the culture of fighting together. 

As these grievances – and the workers willingness to fight – accumulated, they eventually boiled over into larger conflicts. In the ultimate practice of democracy, fighting the class struggle from the smallest scale and upward required cultivating thousands of leaders, engaging tens of thousands of rank-and-file unionists, having millions of one-on-one conversations, and taking on countless grievances that, while small, materially improved workers’ lives. Stan Weir, a legendary Wobbly in the maritime industry, shares an anecdote describing the individual experience on the red-hot San Francisco waterfront in his classic Class War Lessons, which chronicles a shop action on a merchant marine vessel.

These practices and culture were passed onto younger generations of workers as they came up through the workforce, naturalizing the reality of class conflict while also denaturalizing the alienating nature of labor under capitalism. Cultivating this militant culture and engaging in the endless smaller struggles built the solid foundation that the legendary class struggle could build on. 

And it is exactly this foundation that contracts and legalism aim to destroy.

In most contracts, the “grievance procedure” strips away the militant’s access to immediately fight for better conditions. Small grievances are pushed toward a long process of arbitration, mediation, and other management-friendly venues. This takes the focus off the work floor and out of the hands of workers, shunts grievances towards professionals and union staff, and effectively creates long “cooling off periods” where workers interest and emotions evaporate before any resolution is reached. Thus, workers are left frustrated and stymied by their lived reality that nothing ever changes. 

The grievance process removes the everyday presence of the union as a fighting force on the floor. The requisite shunt towards professional staff and lawyers also acts against the democratic nature of widespread shared struggle. It takes no professional skills or knowledge to be a rebellious worker; in fact, workers don’t even need to know how to read to be radicals. They just need to have a job and an understanding that their employer’s interests directly contradict their own. By abandoning the commitment to workers’ self-activity and becoming a vehicle for professional staff and careerism, the union is left as a shell of itself, evolving into little more than the “third party” that union busters so often trot out. 

Only focused organization and willingness to turn away from contractualism’s grievance process toward day-to-day class conscious struggle will reverse this trend in the labor movement. The IWW is the only union in North America with the aim to build organization on the job and cultivate everyday class struggle to confront the boss; virtually all others are slaves to the contract.

Class Struggle Versus the Law

From the very beginning, labor law was written in order to destroy workers’ most powerful weapon, economic disruption. The idea that the law exists to protect workers and “protect the right to organize a union” is a comforting fiction told by mid-20th Century liberals and exemplified by the New Deal compromise between capital and labor that was brokered by the state. This compromise itself was a reaction to decades of protracted, sometimes violent, class struggle and revolutionary action on the part of workers around the world that threatened the fundamental structures of capitalism.

All labor law in North America is anti-union, anti-class struggle law if we measure it purely by the outcomes of union activity and economic disruption. This is because class struggle, in the materialist sense of class conscious, militant workers’ struggle over control of the means of production and surplus value is a fundamental threat to the existence of a ruling capitalist class. They will never “let” us have class struggle – we can only do it ourselves, whether it is legal or not. 

Previous generations of workers understood this, and their dedication to the struggle often meant kangaroo courts, prison time, and more. They understood the risks and costs, and they knew that the ruling class could never abide class conscious workers. But they fought struggles, led strikes, and went to prison either way; for some, that is the price of emancipation. 

With today’s legal structure, that energy and effort that previously went towards building class organization and bailing strike leaders out of jail now goes toward paying lawyers and arbitrators to settle minor grievances. Unions that buy into this system shoot themselves in the foot and in the chest; they cut themselves off from the struggle’s fuel and opt to take struggles into venues that are designed for them to lose on all levels. A long time Wobbly who now works for mainstream union has told me (and I’m paraphrasing):

“The cost of arbitrating a single grievance through the courts can reach $100,000 and almost never ‘gets the goods’. Legal fines for breaking the law to go on strike and bailing a union leader out of jail can cost the same, but if you have a successful strike, your members win gains, you’ve built a ton of solidarity and organization among the workers, and you have battle hardened class warriors out of it who can carry the struggle forward.” 

I know which alternative I would rather have. Capitalists understand that paying fines – for breaking labor law, environmental health & safety regulations, etc. – are the cost of doing business. We must begin approaching class struggle with a similar view. 

Unionists need to embrace this reality and start choosing the correct path. Industrial action and class struggle are what build unions. Direct conflict with employers and industrial trusts has been sidelined and punished by the state precisely because it works. Today’s abysmal working conditions, political degeneration, and fractious social conditions are simply the result of the absence of the uniting, uplifting influence of class struggle activity across North America. It will not be easy, but confronted with continuing immiseration of growing swathes of the workforce, compounding wars, economic and environmental crises, it is the only option that will work.  

The sooner we recognize these facts, the sooner we can start fighting back meaningfully. Everything else, from legal cases, to legally enforceable contracts and the like, is a distraction at best and a trap at worst. It is time to abandon these failed strategies and embrace class struggle not just in the abstract, but in practice. Our children and grandchildren will thank us.

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