What kind of workers deserve a union?

The standard of living for U.S. workers has been stagnating or in decline for the last four decades despite enormous leaps in productivity. Labor unions, organizing on the shop floor to shut down production to enforce workers’ demands, are a well-proven and direct method of closing the gap between what workers want and what they get from their bosses. Yet labor unions today count less than 8 percent of private sector workers and less than 40 percent of public sector workers in their membership. Furthermore, public opinion often turns against those workers who risk their jobs and reputations to try to start up unions in their workplaces, calling them “undeserving” and a host of other insults. Is there anything in the history of unionism that explains why we see these self-defeating and contradictory behaviors playing out at a time when workers need to come together more than ever to fight for common goals?

Looking back a century or more to the rise of labor unions as a major force in industrialized countries, we see that some of the biggest unions (the American Federation of Labor in particular in the United States) made no bones about setting their priorities on organizing and protecting highly trained and socially privileged workers (native-born white males in particular) not only from capitalist factory owners, but also against supposed threats “from below” in the form of immigrant workers, female workers, workers of ethnic, religious and racial minorities, and other relatively underprivileged workers. The arguable goal of these unions was to create a well-paid, elite class of “deserving workers” who were able, as a unified group, to put their needs ahead of other workers’ needs, sometimes aligning their interests with the employing class in the process. When it suited them, these unions would break each other’s strikes and generally do whatever it took to obtain, as they said, what they considered to be “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” even if it meant hurting other, supposedly less deserving workers along the way.

That is not what we in the IWW would call a broad spectrum working-class solidarity, but a perverse kind of unionism fueled by reaction, racism, sexism, nativism and other prejudices. Most of all, though, it is a unionism that does not get to the root of the problem facing all workers, whether or not we inhabit traditionally privileged racial, gender and other statuses. The root of the problem is that capitalism—in allowing a 1 to 10 percent of social members to control, own, and unduly influence industry, thereby directly or indirectly ruling over the other 90 to 99 percent—creates at a structural or institutional level a permanent underclass of people who have fewer opportunities and greater hardships no matter what they do.

By contrast, the IWW and our similarly radical forebears have fought—even when it was illegal, for instance, for black and white workers to belong to the same unions—to have a totally unified class of working people: skilled and unskilled, male and female, with no one left out. We did this not only because it is just in itself, but also because it is the only strategic or logical method of liberating workers from the capitalists’ domination of modern society. Either we all stand united and on equal footing in opposition to the controllers of industry on the basis of class alone, or we will be divided and conquered from within our ranks and defeated, as has happened over and over again. (The reaction from certain subsets of the white working class against racial equality and integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, was arguably an important part of how the capitalist class was able to regain a strengthened hand after decades of working-class organization and upsurges to bring us the overtly anti-worker, neoliberal regimes of former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on from the 1980s to today).

In 2014, more than 60 years after McCarthyism and the institutionalized purging of radicals from within mainstream labor unions, more than 50 years after the near-collapse of the IWW that followed, and more than 40 years after average U.S. wages reached their high point, labor radicals still struggle to overcome procapitalist union ideologies and reverse the class defeats which have plagued workers for far too long. In current IWW organizing campaigns, whether it is around the Sisters’ Camelot Canvass Union in Minnesota, the Insomnia Workers Union in Massachusetts, or any number of other active shop-floor struggles, we, Wobblies, still hear criticism regularly from people who consider themselves to be progressive or otherwise left-of-center in comments such as, “I support unions, but not for these people. They work part time and don’t have job skills!” Or they will tell us, “If you want better wages, get out of the fast food industry and go back to school!” We also hear these sorts of remarks around other contemporary struggles going on in the broader Fight For 15 movement at McDonald’s and other large, highly profitable franchise chains.

Comments like these betray almost superstitious beliefs not only in an upward social and economic mobility that always had a low ceiling for the majority and that no longer, in large measure, even exists, but also in a labor division and class system that is based on the notion that some workers deserve to be treated and paid poorly by their employers—and indeed that there should be two separate employing and working classes to begin with (rather than, say, a cooperative system of industry in which this dichotomy is transcended). To the IWW, all workers deserve a union, and we believe that until all workers do organize into One Big Union, we can expect to see continued inequalities between “undeserving” workers who are stuck with jobs comprised of 90 percent disempowering tasks and low compensation and “deserving” workers (or so it is rationalized) who get to do the better jobs that carry more prestige and never involve undervalued but necessary “dirty work” like picking up trash, flipping burgers, or changing diapers. But most of all, there will be a capitalist class above both types of workers, keeping most of the fruits of our labor as their own private property and letting us fight amongst ourselves for the leftovers. The IWW exists to end these injustices and form a democratic society in which industry is operated according to need as determined by workers ourselves. Are you with us?