[In the past year, we’ve seen large, militant strikes by
autoworkers, Hollywood writers, and others. It’s a promising sign
that, after decades of weakness, the US labor movement is ready to
take the fight to the boss. ]
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A CLASS STRUGGLE SPIRIT IS RETURNING TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT  
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Interview with Joe Burns by Sara Van Horn and Cal Turner
October 25, 2023
Jacobin
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_ In the past year, we’ve seen large, militant strikes by
autoworkers, Hollywood writers, and others. It’s a promising sign
that, after decades of weakness, the US labor movement is ready to
take the fight to the boss. _

Members of the Unite Here! Local 11 hotel workers union picket the
Four Points Sheraton after walking off the job on Monday, July 10,
2023, in Los Angeles, California., (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

 

Over the past six months, strikes and threatened strikes by
autoworkers, Hollywood writers and actors, United Parcel Service (UPS)
Teamsters, and LA hotel housekeepers have resulted in industry
shutdowns and major contract victories across the United States. This
wave of militancy represents a departure for the US labor movement,
which for the past several decades has seen both declining union
density and reluctance to use the strike weapon.

Joe Burns, a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer, sees this turn
to more militant organizing as informed by the long tradition of what
he calls “class struggle unionism
[[link removed]],”
a perspective and set of strategies that emphasizes the importance of
worker-led unions in making transformative change. In his most recent
book, _Class Struggle Unionism_, he makes the case that adopting such
an approach is necessary for significant workplace victories. Sara Van
Horn and Cal Turner spoke with Burns for _Jacobin _about divergent
visions of union strategy, the militant approach behind recent
victories, and why it’s important for labor to have a broader
political vision.

SARA VAN HORN

Can you give us a brief recent history of class struggle unionism? You
note in your book that union militancy dwindled toward the end of the
twentieth century, but that there have been promising movements in the
opposite direction. Where did this revival start?

JOE BURNS

I started doing labor work in the late 1980s. I caught the tail of a
class struggle trend, where thousands of radicalized students and
antiwar and civil rights activists entered the labor movement because
they saw that as a fundamental vehicle to make change in society.

Over time, a new trend that I call “labor liberalism” developed.
Labor liberalism tried to find alternatives to sharp class conflict.
It looked at other ways of fighting, such as corporate campaigns and
community coalitions. But it sacrificed the traditional elements of
class struggle unionism. In 2011, I wrote a book called _Reviving the
Strike_ [[link removed]] because I
realized that the strike had been virtually abandoned. I got a lot of
odd looks, even among labor activists.

Nowadays, everyone believes that the strike is an essential tool. UPS
Teamsters got their deal right before their strike deadline in August.
We’ve had teachers over the last decade striking in high numbers and
production workers at General Motors and Nabisco a couple years ago.
We’ve also seen a lot of reform efforts in recent years, which have
a view of unionism that breaks with what I call “business
unionism.”

 

CAL TURNER

Could you describe the hallmarks of business unionism and labor
liberalism? Why is the distinction between those approaches and class
struggle unionism so important?

JOE BURNS

Business unionism has traditionally been — and still is — the
predominant form of unionism. Business unionists see themselves as
having a fairly limited role, which can be summed up with the slogan
“A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”

They see their struggles as involving a narrow group of workers in a
particular factory or industry instead of as part of a larger class
struggle between labor and capital. This form of unionism tends to be
fairly bureaucratic, following rules and relying on lawyers or experts
in the field. They don’t go looking for trouble, but sometimes they
do get into sharp disputes because they need to.

Labor liberalism developed in the 1980s as a third way, a unionism
that positioned itself between business unionism and the sharp fights
of class struggle unions. Labor liberals did a lot of good: they broke
away from the racist and anti-immigrant stance of the AFL-CIO
[American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations] in the ’80s, which was also deeply anti-communist.

One of the problems of labor liberalism was that it situated itself
too much within middle-class staff activists and lost some of the
rank-and-file character, opposition to business unionism, and
democratic functioning that are core principles of class struggle
unionism. It also lost some of the class-versus-class struggle,
because even though the labor liberalists do a lot of picketing, when
you look closely at how much of it is worker-led, these intense
struggles are more like one-day publicity strikes. The goal is not so
much to take on an employer but to get legislation passed. I argue
that if we want to revive the labor movement, we have to look back to
the proven formula, which is class struggle unionism.

SARA VAN HORN

Besides the strike, what strategies differentiate these approaches?

JOE BURNS

Let’s look at the strikes that have been happening in recent years,
like those of the production workers at General Motors and Nabisco. If
you really drill into them, what you see is that the initiative to
strike came from the workers.

They repeatedly voted down tentative agreements. They made demands
that went beyond the narrow wage demands of the union and staff
bargainers. Their demands were bold and audacious: they wanted to end
two-tier schemes [in which one group of workers receives lower
compensation than another]. They wanted to take control of the work
schedules and weekend work. They wanted to take control of their lives
with breaks between shifts. Both in terms of where the strikes came
from and the demands the strikes made, they really were worker-led.

CAL TURNER

The strike threat, in addition to striking itself, seems to be
experiencing a revival this summer. Why is normalizing strikes as a
bargaining tool important? How should unions strategically use the
threat of strikes?

 

JOE BURNS

Traditional labor theory viewed the strike as the essence of
collective bargaining. It was hard to think about true bargaining
without the strike threat.

There was a long period where the strike threat was ignored, and you
ended up with backroom deals born out of weakness. But recently things
have been very exciting. For the Teamsters to be throwing down the
gauntlet with the largest employer in the United States a year in
advance of bargaining by saying, “We’re going out on strike unless
our demands have been met” — I’ve never seen that with a major
national employer that far in advance.

For Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to put forward the demands at
the beginning and then carry them through to the brink of a strike —
I think that’s amazing. And O’Brien didn’t just materialize out
of thin air: there was a forty-year reform effort within the
Teamsters, led by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, that supported
him.

We also have the United Auto Workers breaking from business unionism.
Instead of the behind-closed-doors negotiating of the last four
decades, where often only the national union president knew what was
going on, UAW president Shawn Fain gets into office and shakes hands
with the members at the plants, puts forward a list of members’
demands, and tells the automakers that either they’re going to have
a deal or the workers go out on strike. It’s a fundamentally
different kind of bargaining.

There’s been a big shift in our model. It stems not from different
organizing techniques — because those follow behind it — but from
the labor movement taking a different stance in how we relate to the
employer and how we relate to our members.

SARA VAN HORN

Where does “salting” — organizers seeking jobs at a specific
workplace with the goal of forming a union — fit into your analysis
of class struggle unionism?

JOE BURNS

Fifty years ago, student radicals getting involved in labor didn’t
talk about it as salting. They viewed themselves as joining a labor
movement not at the behest of the union officials, but with an
independent objective to help build the rank-and-file power that would
lead toward more strikes, more militancy, and a more effective labor
movement.

In recent years, that’s morphed into the idea of salting, which has
the flavor that you’re going in as agents of the union and working
for the union. Over time, that creates some tensions, because the
union’s goals or imperatives in organizing may not fit with what you
find on the shop floor.

I also think people should set their sights a bit higher, because we
need people not just to go in there and help established unions
organize, but to go in there and help get our unions on a class
struggle agenda. That takes a different relationship to the union
bureaucracy.

CAL TURNER

Where else do you see worker leadership in the high-profile organizing
this summer? What role has this played in the organizing efforts and
victories we’re seeing across industries?

JOE BURNS

Strikes and militancy are contagious. Strike waves happen because
workers see workers striking in other industries and realize that they
can do that as well. We certainly saw that with teachers in the wake
of the Chicago teachers’ strike; that eventually led to teachers all
over the country striking.

Some writers make it out like these workers just had different
organizing techniques or were reaching out to the community. But,
again, the key difference is that they had a class stance. The
teachers said, “We’re going to break with decades of the
teachers’ union cozying up to the Democratic political hacks who are
destroying public education in our cities.” The teachers’ union
had accommodated these hacks for years and tried to play nice with
people who wanted to destroy them.

SARA VAN HORN

Why is it important to pinpoint billionaires as the enemy? How does
this play out in recent high-profile labor struggles like the
SAG-AFTRA [Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists] and grad student union strikes, where there’s often a
public perception of prestige and proximity to power?

JOE BURNS

Class struggle unionism begins with a view of society and how it’s
organized. The reason we have billionaires is because workers create
all value in society, but during their work shifts, that value gets
siphoned up and trickles upward to a handful of billionaires.

Class struggle unionism has always viewed unionism as part of a larger
struggle against the employing class. The problem with business
unionism and some other forms of unionism is that they think they can
just plod along and bargain their contracts. Even if they get the best
contracts in the world, guess what? Their enemies are amassing more
and more capital. And what is capital? Capital is a social
relationship. Capital is power.

What are employers going to do with more and more power? They’re
going to use it against you. The Koch brothers are funding initiatives
to undermine labor rights. We can bargain the best contracts with our
employer, but we’re still bargaining the terms of our exploitation.
Not that it’s a bad thing to make improvements — that’s what I
do as a union negotiator. But we have to have a bigger vision too,
because our enemies do.

In that light, all these other distinctions that people try to draw
between different groups of workers become less material. Certainly,
there’s a special place for strategic workers and workers in
production in terms of creating value in society and actual things.
But unless you own enough that you don’t have to work, people are
working, and to the extent that they are, they’re suffering
exploitation. Public employees and grad students relate to this whole
system differently, but they’re very much part of the class
struggle.

_Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the
author of Strike Back [[link removed]] and Reviving
the Strike [[link removed]]. His latest book
is Class Struggle Unionism
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