PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW CAN WORKERS ORGANIZE AGAINST CAPITAL TODAY?  
[[link removed]]


 

Benjamin Y. Fong
December 20, 2023
Catalyst
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ John Womack’s labor strategy is about workers finding the
capacity to "wound capital to make it yield anything.” But the
massive challenge in today’s deindustrialized economy is locating
where that leverage actually lies. _

John Womack's thought continues to challenge the usual ways we think
about labor organizing. (David Paul Morris / Bloomberg // Catalyyst),

 

_Labor Power and Strategy_, the new book edited by Peter Olney and
Glenn Perušek, officially aims to provide “rational, radical,
experience-based perspectives that help target and run smart,
strategic, effective campaigns in the working class.” But by the end
of it, it is difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Olney and
Perušek have a different goal: to make clear just how far organized
labor is from having a strategic conversation about its present
impasse.
 

Labor Power and Strategy
[[link removed]]
John Womack Jr. • Edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek
PM Press; 208 pages
Paperback:  $16.95
January 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781629639741

The book is organized around an interview with economist and historian
John Womack about the twin needs for an analysis of the weak points
(or “choke points”) in contemporary industrial technologies and
for the labor movement to exploit that analysis to cause disruption
and gain leverage. Womack supports the struggles of _all_ workers to
organize for better conditions, but he also believes the labor
movement should focus not on raising the floor for the “most
oppressed” groups of workers but rather on workers and industries
where it is possible to gain the kind of leverage to bring the
capitalist class to heel. In his words, labor “needs to know where
the crucial industrial and technical connections are, the junctions,
the intersections in space and time, to see how much workers in supply
or transformation can interrupt, disrupt, where and when in their
struggles they can stop the most capitalist expropriation of surplus
value.” To do this effectively, he urges continual network analysis,
or “grubbing,” to reveal the vulnerable seams in the fabric of
modern supply chains — the places where ports and rail and
warehouses meet, and thus where production and distribution can be
effectively blocked.

Union power before the 1930s was drawn mainly from skill, or certain
groups of workers’ specific position within the economy and the
leverage it offered. The American Federation of Labor was thus a
self-limiting organization at the time, and it took the challenge of
the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to overcome its
commitment to that limitation. In the common understanding, instead of
leverage through skill, the CIO sought and gained leverage at the
“point of production.” For Womack, this idea was “a mistake
then, but now ignorantly, thoughtlessly used.”

At large in a nationally defined economy, in any industry, in any
plant where there are technical divisions of labor there’s not one
point of production, but several, multiple points, connected,
coordinated in place and time to make production, not a point, but as
Dunlop [John Dunlop, whose _Industrial Relations Systems_ heavily
influenced Womack’s views] called it a “web,” or as we had
better call it now for the sake of analysis, a network.

For Womack, key CIO organizers like Wyndham Mortimer understood well
that there was no single “point” at which power could be gained.
The CIO knew it had to figure out where things connect, “where
they’re materially weakest, maybe politically, legally,
commercially, culturally strong, protected, defended, but technically
weakest,” and the challenge today is to do the same for a
deindustrialized, logistical economy.

Womack is engaging and nimble in conversation, which makes the
interview a fun read, but his basic points are often ones that the
labor left of previous generations would have found straightforward
and uncontroversial. Here’s Womack discussing leverage:

No matter what workers are mad about, unhappy about, indignant about,
feel abused about, it doesn’t matter until they can actually get
real leverage over production, the leverage to make their struggle
effective. You don’t get this leverage just by feelings. You get it
by holding the power to cut off the capitalists’ revenue. And
without that material power your struggle won’t get you very far for
long.

To which I imagine leaders of the CIO responding, “Yeah,
obviously.”

The interview is then followed by ten responses from leading lights of
the labor movement that make Womack’s claims seem anything but
obvious. Rather than think alongside Womack or extend his claims in
various directions, most of the responses take issue with the priority
he accords to “technically strategic power” and the kinds of
workers who are in a position to wield it.

Katy Fox-Hodess, Jack Metzgar, Joel Ochoa, and Melissa Shetler all
take exception in different ways to Womack’s prioritization of
strategic power over the “forms of power that accrue to workers as a
result of their collective organization in trade unions, works
councils, and the like” — in sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s
terms, his emphasis on “structural power” over “associational
power.” Fox-Hodess asserts that “strategic power (or structural
power) is deeply rooted in associational power”; Metzgar that Womack
misses “the impracticality of focusing strictly on strategic
positions that can upend capitalist power relations.” All four agree
that the labor movement cannot in any way deprioritize the cultivation
of associational power.

Bill Fletcher Jr and Jane McAlevey lodge a related but slightly
different complaint: that Womack’s focus on strategic industries
does a disservice to workers in supposedly nonstrategic industries.
Fletcher, in a contribution tellingly titled “Should Spartacus Have
Organized the Roman Citizenry Rather Than the Slaves?,” believes
those sectors of society that are already in struggle must be
supported, rather than the ones that are ostensibly more strategic.
McAlevey meanwhile asserts that only “the gendered bias that power
is exercised by mostly men in the dated conception of the
male-dominant private sector” keeps us focused on logistics, when it
is in fact “women, often if not mostly women of color” in health
care and education who have shown themselves most capable of
“exercising strategic power that deftly harnesses economic and
social power that can’t easily be pulled apart.”

Regarding the first criticism, that Womack unjustly prioritizes
structural over associational power, it should be said first that he
in no way _practically_ deprioritizes associational power. Without
collective organization and the exercise of associational power at the
necessary moments, he asserts, workers simply are not going to be able
to take advantage of any disruptive position they hold. Metzgar points
to the example of the failed 1919 steel strike, where workers “had
insufficient associational power to take advantage of their structural
power,” to show that you cannot have one without the other, but here
he’s knocking on an open door. Womack is clear that workers cannot
effectively use strategic power without associational power.

The latter should nonetheless be considered secondary, in Womack’s
view, because true solidarity flows from an understanding of strategic
power. Most workers, most of the time, are not going to put their own
material interest on the line just to be good comrades. A culture of
solidarity can and should be built within any union, but that culture
is only going to attract so many; if they don’t think they
can _win_ by seizing the necessary leverage over the company, most
workers are not going to engage in the requisite struggle, and if they
don’t see their technical and industrial dependence on other
workers, they are not going to be convinced of the urgent need for
solidarity. As Womack says,

You can’t count on ding-dong lectures or jingles or pamphlets,
“I’m my brother’s, I’m my sister’s keeper.” Sweet idea,
but within hours at work you’ve got dirty jokes about it. But once
you see the technical connections of one job with another, who can
foul or ruin or stop whose work, who can in fact endanger whom, high
and low, back and forth, like a team sport, a firefighter company, the
armed forces, I think you get real attention to how much mutual
dependence means, technical interdependence, the practice value and
real advantage of comradeship at work.

The bigger objection raised by Womack’s critics, however, is that
his technical emphasis privileges some groups of workers over others.
Indeed, underlying the objection to his prioritization of structural
over associational power is a worry that workers without the former
are just being written off. Thus Metzgar’s claim that workers
“cannot be counseled to simply give up because they are not
strategic” and Ochoa’s hope that “organized labor can create
momentum by organizing in nonstrategic sectors.”

Once again, the critics are tackling a straw man: at no point does
Womack say that “nonstrategic” workers simply shouldn’t
organize. When he asserts that the focus should not be on the “most
oppressed” workers but rather on workers’ ability to disrupt
production and distribution, his point is twofold.

First, in any economic situation, there are always going to be
industries that, if left unorganized, will hurt organized labor as a
whole. John L. Lewis did not start the CIO because he privileged
rubber workers over carpenters; he did it because he understood that
organized labor would never exert any influence in society until
General Motors, Goodyear, U.S. Steel, and the other major corporations
of the period came to the table. The situation is similar today with
Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.: until these companies are organized,
labor _as a whole_ is going to suffer.

Second, it is less that Womack urges the narrow organization of
strategic workers than that he wants workers’ power as a whole to be
more strategically exercised. Sometimes this means seeing some workers
as more proximate to the nodes of disruption than others, but mainly
it means viewing _all_ workers’ power through the lens of their
capacity for that disruption. This is where his central challenge to
the labor movement lies, and what I want to focus on for the remainder
of this review. Curiously, the challenge is relatively unexplored by
his interlocutors.

Dan DiMaggio, Carey Dall, Rand Wilson, and Gene Bruskin provide more
sympathetic reads of Womack than the other six respondents, but it is
not clear that even these readers really want to go where he is
pointing. DiMaggio sees “the bigger context for thinking about
Womack’s points [to be] that any revival of the US labor movement
will require the revival of the strike,” though withholding labor
per se is hardly Womack’s focus. Wilson thinks “workers are almost
always the most knowledgeable source of information about who is in
the best position to disrupt the production processes or services and
where management’s weaknesses lie,” though Womack is at pains to
show that the highly complex distributional flows of the present
require something like a labor institute of industrial technology to
understand them.

In many ways, the essential reticence to accept Womack’s basic
orientation is a function of the fact that labor and the Left are
still both focused on the need, in Wilson’s words, “to realize
labor’s potential power in the workplace.” This is a fine position
to hold if power really flows through the workplace, as it did when
there were tremendous amounts of fixed capital invested in gigantic
factories. But today, points of leverage are very often outside
workplaces, at those distributional nodes far from the shop
floor, _between_ companies, workers, and union jurisdictions.

One might say then that, for the labor left, Womack offends the basic
imperative to descend into the hidden abode of production. For him, it
is not the workplace as such that is important but the kinds of
connections that the workplace makes possible. Some of those
connections will be in the workplace, but many will not.

Wherever you put things together, there’s a seam or a zipper or a
hub or a joint or a node or a link, the more technologies together,
the more links, the places where it’s not integral. It is parts put
together, and where the parts go together, like at a dock, at a
warehouse, between the trucks and the inside, between transformers and
servers and coolers, there can be a bottleneck, a choke point.

Womack challenges jurisdictional boundaries (he even suggests at one
point the creation of a “US Transport and General Workers’
Union” combining the ILWU, ILA, IBT, and IAM), but more generally he
questions the very basics of unions’ organizing orientation (insofar
as they still organize). To be very simple about it, we might see
Womack as wanting to replace the model of the _strike_ with that of
the _blockade_. Unions, of course, are not unpracticed in the latter,
but it is not the organizing fulcrum that the former is typically made
out to be.

Once we get here, a whole set of fascinating questions emerge: first
and foremost, if many (though not all) of the strategic disruption
points have moved outside of the workplace, is it possible to mobilize
workers not simply to band together and withhold their labor but to
seize these choke points in coordinated action? This would mean, for
instance, turning one’s attention away from organizing particular
stores to getting smaller cadres of employees to occupy key
distributional nodes and getting masses of other workers to support
them. Right off the bat, we can see that the distinction between
supposedly strategic and nonstrategic workers begins to fade:
longshoremen and rail engineers are not necessarily the only ones with
access to the seams in industrial technologies.

Still, they’d need to be supported by research departments that have
up-to-date and sophisticated analyses of particular supply chains. Is
the labor movement up for such a task? What would it need to
approximate something like Womack’s proposed labor institute of
industrial technology? Somehow the “Freedom Convoy” found the one
bridge where 25 percent of all trade
[[link removed]] between
the United States and Canada is conducted. Why wasn’t it the labor
movement that took advantage of this situation?

Then there’s the question of how to support workers at such critical
junctures, when historically company and state violence have been
exerted. If smartphones are recording every second of a blockade, will
that prevent bloodshed? What does community support look like at
warehousing sites far from any affected community? Consumer boycotts?
Can they be timed effectively? Would such occupations only work if
multiple nodes in a supply chain were seized?

There are also further questions around internal organizing that Dall
raises in his helpful response. For Dall, activating already unionized
workers at ports and in rail can help set the conditions for
organizing other workers: “To organize Amazon workers, we must first
internally organize union transportation workers whose labor on the
seams enables Amazon to get cargo of Asian origin to their hellish
warehouses and finally to the consumer’s door.” In the case of
rail and airline workers, there is a particular law, the Railway Labor
Act, that protects these transportation workers in some ways but
heavily incentivizes them not to disrupt things in others. What are
those ways? How can these unions be won over to the idea that they
might need to break the law, or how can particular workers be
convinced not to follow their unions’ dictates?

Finally, the basics of breaking the law — how, when, where, and why
to do it — must be foregrounded in any execution of a Womackian
vision. From roughly the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act until the 1947
Taft-Hartley Act, labor had access to tools that are now off limits:
recognition strikes, sit-downs, secondary boycotts. The postwar
compromise was predicated on tolerating collective bargaining,
provided those tools were put down for good. Experimenting with
disruptive tactics again is likely to bring about forms of repression
the likes of which we have not seen for a few generations. The
possible benefits are enormous, but any action for which people might
be put under the jail must obviously be undertaken with extreme
caution.

At present, the Left is rent between those who emphasize the
importance of disruption, rioting, sabotage, etc., and those who
encourage us to stay the democratic course
[[link removed]].
The more anarchistic emphasis on dramatic disruption can often be
fantastical, but given the constraints of modern labor law, where many
ways of gaining leverage are straightforwardly illegal, it does seem
necessary to start some conversation about the forms of _strategic
illegality_ that labor activists might want to take up. Womack allows
us to begin to broach this question in ways that move beyond the
dichotomy of blowing it all up versus working within the present
institutions.

These questions, difficult and speculative as they can be, all follow
from Womack’s analysis, and it’s notable they receive such little
discussion in the responses. I have tried to get at the substantive
reason for avoidance — that Womack moves us away from thinking about
workplace organizing in the typical ways — but perhaps there are
more personal and institutional reasons there as well. Some of what
Womack articulates bears a resemblance to the vision behind SEIU’s
“comprehensive campaigns,” which produced some impressive wins but
fell far short of their stated goals. Some on the labor left still
bristle at the “smart” strategizing of SEIU luminaries, and maybe
Womack’s speculative hipshots are too reminiscent of former
president Andy Stern’s thought.

But the stakes for labor today are too high for past grudges to lead
to a dismissal of the need for broad strategic reconsiderations. At
root, Womack’s labor philosophy is quite basic: “You have to wound
capital to make it yield anything. And you wound it painfully,
grabbing its attention, when you take direct material action to stop
its production, cut its profit.” But how to make good on this idea,
with a stolid labor movement in a deindustrialized, logistical
economy, is a tremendously complicated matter. Operationalizing Womack
would take not just a set of short responses but a research team with
real resources. I cannot speak at present to the feasibility of many
of Womack’s proposals or the possibilities latent in his thinking,
but those proposals and possibilities should at least be recognized
for what they are: a massive challenge to the usual ways we think
about labor organizing.

What exactly would it take to wound capital today? Womack doesn’t
provide all the answers, but he should at the very least get us
thinking outside the typical boxes.

_[BENJAMIN Y. FONG teaches at the Honors College at Arizona State
University.]_

* Labor
[[link removed]]
* Labor strategy
[[link removed]]
* Left Labor Strategy
[[link removed]]
* Labor Organizing
[[link removed]]
* labor militancy
[[link removed]]
* Labor Unions
[[link removed]]
* Trade Unions
[[link removed]]
* deindustrialization
[[link removed]]
* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* US Capitalism
[[link removed]]
* Economy
[[link removed]]
* Labor Power
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 


########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]