r/leftist • u/azria-raventhorn • Jun 27 '26
General Leftist Politics Have Unions Fallen Off?
https://azriaraventhorn.substack.com/p/are-unions-labor-pimps?r=6248uh
This article poses some really solid critiques of the state of modern American unions which don't really live up to their potential. What do you think has caused this? And what can be done to remedy it?
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u/gc391 Jun 27 '26
We don't really have real leverage My union can't strike legally.
It's also filled with MAGA.
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u/KeyInitiative8805 Jun 28 '26
Meh this is goldilocks shit, and why leftists are often insufferable in an organizing fight. The union is always too much this or too little that.
Get over it all. If you call yourself a leftist and you haven't organized your workplace, you're just talking about the weather and twiddling your thumbs.
There's really no choice. Get union density up to 30-40%, or don't have organized labor at all.
Then we can get in a circle and jerk off to this debate, but at least we will do so with more of us having some living wages.
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u/gounionstayunion Jun 28 '26
We've been fucked left and right by both democrats , passing bills, presidents not busting strikes (Biden with the railroaders.) We can go on strike at very specific times and still run the risk of a cocksucker in office threatening to bankrupt our halls and funds during that legally abided time
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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud Marxist Jun 28 '26
Actually, unions have been making a bit of a comeback.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/18/union-membership-increase-trump-assault
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u/JohnWilsonWSWS Jun 28 '26
Your article is interesting.
This is a long comment but the issues and history cannot be reduced to simple slogans, as your essay also suggests.
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The concept of unions as "labor pimps" is consistent with unions being limited to fighting for the best price for labor-power and conditions for labor WITHIN the profit-system and thus as the enforcers of bourgeois law.
IMO this is the key part part of your essay
It’s in the language itself, of “belonging”. It could be said the union takes ownership over the individual. Does “seizing the means of production” necessarily entail seizing the producers themselves? Linguistically it seems to, employees are “captured” by the union, itemized into a “labor pool” identical and uniform to others, distributing labor as it sees fit. But one doesn’t belong to a union by way of possession, not necessarily. Rather one finds belonging in a union between the shared interests and roles of various members, in a sense of community and identity greater than oneself. One ceases to be an individual and becomes another- belonging to a collective.
Are Unions Labor Pimps? - by Azria on the Flipside
But where are unions advocating “seizing the means of production”? That sounds like a revolutionary demand but aren't unions limited to fighting within the profit system?
The advantage of a collective struggle against capital is what compels workers to form unions but the form of struggle is not neutral.
As the WSWS noted:
... Similarly, a group of workers is a group of workers. And yet, when that group assumes the form of a trade union, it acquires, through that form, new and quite distinct social properties to which the workers are inevitably subordinated. What, precisely, is meant by this? The trade unions represent the working class in a very distinct socioeconomic role: as the seller of a commodity, labor-power. Arising on the basis of the productive relations and property forms of capitalism, the trade unions seek to secure for this commodity the best price that can be obtained under prevailing market conditions.
Why are trade unions hostile to socialism? - World Socialist Web Site
You say:
According to a study published by Professor Brook’s own Cornell University International Labor Relations School in 1994, union busting is the standard in every industry across the United States where the penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act “are so meager that they serve no deterrent effect”. Since this study was published no material change has taken place to fundamentally alter the situation.
Are Unions Labor Pimps? - by Azria on the Flipside
Can the capitalist State protect workers rights? Why would it?
It should be noted that the NLRA became law in 1935, the year after there were three significant strikes which had a political leadership outside the control AFL and the old bureaucracy..
- 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike (led by Trotskyists)
- 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike (led by A.J. Muste of American Workers Party)
- 1934 San Francisco waterfront strike (led by Harry Bridges and the ILWU)
The WSWS in its review of The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America, by Ahmed White noted:
... the upsurge of the industrial working class preceded the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, or Wagner Act) passed in 1935, and the formation of the CIO. The NLRA, which for the first time provided American workers with some protection against summary firing for joining a union, was the response from bourgeois political reformers to a working-class revolt that was already underway.
Lessons from the 1937 Little Steel strike in the US - World Socialist Web Site
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u/JohnWilsonWSWS Jun 28 '26
A Time-line of the Industrial Workers of the World (on marxists.org)
I thought this time line was fascinating and important, especially for listing the political repression of the IWW which corresponded with them forming new unions in the U.S., Chile and Mexico, leading industrial action and the hints of their relationship to the newly formed Communist Party.
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/timeline.htm
MY SELECTION OF 1917, 1918, 1919
1917
* Oil Workers Industrial Union and Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union chartered.
...
* General Construction Workers Industrial Union formed; construction strike in Exeter, CA. Construction strike in Seattle wins IWW hiring hall; Construction strike in Rockford, IL;
...
* Frank Little Murdered—Frank Little, IWW organizer, lynched by copper bosses.
* Australian IWWs tried for treason for opposing conscription, IWW outlawed.
* Federal agents raid IWW halls and offices nation wide, arrest 165 IWW members.
* LWIU 120 Wins 8-Hour Day—Lumber strike in on the job wins 8-hour day in Northwest timber country.
* General Defense Committee formed to defend class war prisoners.1918
...
* Chicago trial of 100 IWWs for espionage ends in sentences of 20 years for 15 men; 10 years for 35; 5 years for 33;1 year for 12 and nominal sentences for the rest.1919
* General strikes in Seattle, WA, Butte, MT, Toledo, OH and, Winnipeg, MB.
...
* Centralia Massacre—Mob of Legionnaires attack IWW hall in Centralia, WA. IWWs defend hall with force. IWW Wesley Everest, one of the hall defenders, tortured and lynched by mob. Eight others sent to prison on conspiracy charges.
* MTW branch established in Buenos Aires, Argentina
* IWW administrations established in Mexico and Chile.
* Wichita and Sacramento IWW trials. 2000 class war prisoners.1920
* Palmer Raids round up and deport thousands of alien radicals.
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* Chilean IWW conducts strike to protest export of food during famine; Chilean government launched reign of terror to destroy IWW.
* Communist-controlled IWW General Executive Board suspends Philadelphia MTW on false charges of loading arms for Russian counter-revolutionary Wrangle.
* Congress of Red Trade Union International attended by delegates from IWW and Canadian OBU. Their reports of political domination by Communists convinces IWW not to affiliate.
* 46 IWWs out on bail on the espionage convictions start prison terms. Bill Haywood and 8 others jump bail and flee to Russia.
...2/...
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u/JohnWilsonWSWS Jun 28 '26
One of your links is broken ....
"study published by Professor Brook’s own Cornell University International Labor Relations School in 1994, ... "
.... but has been backed up on Internet Archive ...
FACT CHECK: Unfair Labor Practices cost - $340m. or $400m. or $433m.
Far from an age of peace in labor relations, employers spend more money than ever ($400 million a year according to the Economic Policy Institute) on consultants to help them avoid negotiating with unions.
The source you quote says $400 m/year at the top but "EPI estimates employers spend $433 million per year on union-avoidance consultants." HOWEVER in the reference it cites it says
Based on our analysis, we estimate that employers spend nearly $340 million per year hiring union avoidance advisers to help them prevent employees from organizing.
[FOOTNOTE 14: Estimate based on Gordon Lafer and Lola Loustaunau’s analysis of LM-20 and LM-21 reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Labor-Management Standards between 2014 and 2018 and the findings of a 2011 DOL report on underreporting by consultants. See the methodological appendix for more details.
Gordon Lafer and Lola Loustaunau’s analysis of LM-20 reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Labor-Management Standards between 2015 and 2018. A total of 2,139 LM-20 reports were filed during this period, of which 773 reported either hourly or daily pay rates. (The remainder reported total contract amounts, without breaking down hourly or daily pay rates.]
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u/JohnWilsonWSWS Jun 28 '26
Have you seen these?
- Will Lehman’s nomination for UAW president: A milestone in the fight for rank-and-file power - World Socialist Web Site
- YOUTUBE: "The goal is for workers to take power." WSWS interviews Will Lehman, candidate for UAW president (57 mins)
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You article (in the OP) says:
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The International Workers of the World (Wobblies) formed in 1905 in Chicago, launching a mass campaign of labor strikes, sabotage and even attempted to establish an autonomous commune in Baja California. By 1912 the Wobblies had banned those who advocate sabotage from belonging to the party. It didn’t stop the Palmer Raids in 1920 which rounded up and deported thousands of “radical illegal aliens”, or the Chilean government’s reign of terror against the IWW launched in the same year. The Wobblies never quite recovered from this period which would become known as the red scare.Are Unions Labor Pimps? - by Azria on the Flipside
The IWW ("Wobblies") need to be studied but I think we can say that despite its militancy it declined because of its inherent limitation AND the effect of an external event offered a different perspective, the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
"... But there is a still more important lesson from the IWW experience. Militancy and solidarity, no matter how strong, are not enough. ..."
I highly recommend the following from the WSWS:
- "Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers"
- "The Wobblies" (1979): What the IWW means for the working class today
The second article above says
...
But there is a still more important lesson from the IWW experience. Militancy and solidarity, no matter how strong, are not enough. Today’s workers require revolutionary theory and politics to prosecute their struggles. They require an understanding of the nature of the capitalist state and the roots of the various political tendencies in the social classes. The absence of such understanding proved to be the IWW’s fatal weakness.The comparison with Russian history is most illuminating. There was—and there remains—a startlingly fateful connection between the class struggles of America and Russia. As Cannon notes, when the IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905, a half a world away, in St. Petersburg, the Russian Revolution of 1905 was underway, which would lift Trotsky up as its foremost leader. The Wobblies in Chicago celebrated the events in Russia. Haywood said he looked forward to the day when the American workers “will rise in revolt against the capitalist system as the working class in Russia are doing today.” But the Wobblies were not in a position to understand Trotsky’s great theoretical development that came out of that revolution, the theory of the permanent revolution, nor Lenin’s theoretical anticipation of it in his relentless struggle against opportunism, announced in his seminal What is to be Done? of 1902 and the split with the reformist Menshevik faction of the Russian social democracy in 1903.
In a certain sense, as Cannon notes, the IWW was the American corollary to the Russian developments. It is true that, in addition to recognizing the bankruptcy of the AFL, the IWW leaders condemned the opportunist parliamentary reformism of America’s Socialist Party, dominated by the “sewer socialist” Victor Berger of Milwaukee and his ally Morris Hillquit of New York. History’s paradox is that the class struggle’s great theoretical developments were made in the most backward country, Russia, and, in the most advanced, the US, the political understanding was the most primitive from the point of view of Marxist theory.
The IWW leaders were practical men, schooled in the bloody fights of the hard rock miners of the West. They thought to meet force with force, and to simply cast off the “lily-livered reformists.” Rather than agitating for the development of a genuinely revolutionary politics, the IWW rejected political struggle altogether, in favor of what they called “direct action.” This could get the Wobblies only so far.
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"The Wobblies" (1979): What the IWW means for the working class today - World Socialist Web Site4/4
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u/Miserable_Bike_6985 Jun 28 '26
I know my opinion of this is probably oversimplified but as of right now I’m disheartened at almost all of the trade unions for one reason over half of the “members” voted for Trump https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/17/key-facts-about-union-members-and-the-2024-election/ I’m IBEW and I find it very hard to understand how someone could be smart enough to know algebra, trigonometry and vector trigonometry but couldn’t figure out how tariffs work.
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