The new labor solidarity: Uniting workers, but not forming a union
Just before 20,000 Google employees left their desks last fall to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment, a debate broke out among the hundreds of workers involved in formulating a list of demands.
Some workers argued that they could win fairer pay policies and a full accounting of harassment claims by filing lawsuits or seeking to unionize.
But the argument that gained the upper hand, especially as the debate escalated in the weeks after the walkout, held that those approaches would be futile, according to two people involved. Those who felt this way contended that only a less formal, worker-led organization could succeed, by waging mass resistance or implicitly threatening to do so.
This view, based on century-old ideas, did not emerge in a vacuum. It can be traced in part to a book called “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer,” which many Googlers had read and discussed.
Its authors are a longtime labor historian, Staughton Lynd, and an organizer, Daniel Gross. They identify with a strain of unionism popularized in the early 1900s by the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor group known as the Wobblies that defined itself in opposition to mainstream trade unions.
The book has been “incredibly helpful in thinking through options for action, ways of building collective power, and giving workers who often aren’t familiar with labor law some working knowledge that can guide decision making,” said Meredith Whittaker, a leader of the walkout who left Google in July after more than a dozen years at the company.
And Googlers aren’t the only ones who have drawn inspiration from the book. Workers at the crowdfunding company Kickstarter, the site of a recent union campaign, have studied it. Organizers with one of the largest Uber driver groups say the ideas have influenced them as well.
Ares Geovanos, a longtime volunteer for the Tech Workers Coalition, which seeks to organize workers across the industry, said the book’s key contention — that a dedicated group of employees can accomplish more through actions like strikes than by formal efforts to certify a union — had gained traction partly because it reflects reality: Most tech workers have been reluctant to organize.
“A lot of the struggles will necessarily be with a strong minority due to the narratives around working in the industry and ideological baggage of the workforce,” Geovanos said by email. He said he first stumbled across “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer” while searching online for a doit-yourself guide to organizing. His group later led training sessions based on the book that Google workers attended.
Lynd and Gross lay out a practical guide for staging a kind of workplace revolution that upends the balance of power between management and labor.
They explain, for example, when striking workers enjoy strong legal protections (in taking aim at unfair practices like retaliation) and when they are more exposed (in strikes focused strictly on economic demands). They discuss the circumstances under which workers can take their concerns to the media, such as a news conference in which coffee shop employees disclosed evidence of rat and insect infestations.
But more broadly, the book serves as a polemic contrasting mainstream “business unions” with what the Wobblies refer to as “solidarity unions” — that is, worker-led groups that are not typically certified as exclusive bargaining agents under federal law and therefore don’t need to win majority support to exist.
Lynd, who will turn 90 in November, is something of a Forrest Gump figure in progressive politics. He taught history at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s and served as director of the Freedom Schools program in Mississippi, which brought activists from around the country to help teach and organize African-American students. He joined the Yale faculty in 1964 but found himself without tenure prospects after making a trip to Hanoi with antiwar activist Tom Hayden during the Vietnam War.
He and his wife, Alice, moved to Chicago, but he struggled to land another faculty position. “I was kicked out of academia,” Lynd said. They took jobs with organizer Saul Alinsky, and Lynd later attended law school there. In the mid-1970s they moved to the Youngstown, Ohio, area, where Lynd represented workers and later prisoners, and have lived there ever since. Lynd’s first edition of “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer” was published in 1978.
In the early 2000s, met Gross, nearly 50 years his junior, during a trip to Brooklyn for a conference. They stayed in touch after Gross went to work at Starbucks, where he was fired in 2006 while helping to lead a solidarity union that he co-founded, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union.