This week’s piece comes to us from Erik Forman, a contributor to Recomposition. Forman cut his teeth organizing in the IWW at different fast food establishments before the recent push by SEIU and other unions. The text is a repost from from Counterpunch’s Monthly Digital Exclusive. In this piece, he gives a broad background of the industry, business union tactics, and draws out some directions that an autonomous movement of fast food workers could take to remedy the issues he identifies. Drawing from his experience both as a worker and a direct organizer in the field, the piece brings a closeness that is often missing in many discussions.

Fast food is America. First striking root in the economic hothouse of the long post-war boom, the industry took its place alongside freeways, suburbs, single-family homes, shopping malls, cars, and television as a thriving organism in the ecosystem of American consumer culture. From the dawn of the Cold War era to the dusk of the Great Recession, fast food was shaped by and in turn came to shape the core values of the United States.

Our lust for efficient instant gratification was satisfied with minuteman-like service with a (forced) smile at the drive-thru. A never-ending carousel of TV-advertised new-and-improved sandwiches and soft drinks fed and fed upon the American addiction to the latest- greatest- thing. Super-sized meals catered to our seemingly rational calculation that bigger is better. From Taylorized back-of-house operations to genetically-modified, pesticide-infused burgers and fries, corporate management garnished its product with a veneer of Science, titillating the American love affair with technologically-enabled predictability. Craving profits made possible by highly rationalized economies of scale, fast food executives colonized the landscape of the United States with the glowing emblems of their corporate empires from sea to shining sea. Nourishing and nourished by a culture that prefers representation to reality, appearance before substance, and short-term profit over long-term planning, Americans fall easy prey to the siren call of glossy burger porn advertising. US consumers will fatten the bottom lines of fast food corporations with a projected $191 billion in 2013. As the US fast food industry grew, so grew the dominance of its values in American society. We are what we eat. America is fast food.

In 1993, sociologist George Ritzer gave name to this “McDonaldization of Society” noting that, “the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.” Ritzer decried the gleichschaltung of an ever-widening swathe of institutions to four values foundational to fast food: the “efficient” speedup of human social activity, reduction of life to a “calculability” that conflates quality with quantity, the “predictability” of a standardized human experience, and a fixation on bureaucratic control through technology. Updating a diagnosis elaborated by Max Weber and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Ritzer sums up the malaise at the heart of our McDonaldized society as the “irrationality of rationality”– the subordination of all other concerns to one overriding goal: corporate profit. Of course, McDonaldization could be Disneyification, Walmartization, or Coca-colonization… the signifier is irrelevant, at work beneath any of these corporate logos is the unfolding of the logic of capitalism a world scale.

Saturating the US market by the 1970s, the US fast food industry turned profit-hungry eyes to foreign shores, soon seeking to turn all six billion human gastrointestinal tracts on planet earth into engines of profit. The Golden Arches became the battle flags of the vanguard of corporate globalization. By the 1990s, a liberal sprinkling of McDonaldses, KFCs, and Starbuckses had washed up across the globe, capturing the zeitgeist of the triumph of free market capitalism as the happy ending of history. By 1997, McDonald’s drew more revenue from overseas operations than those in the United States. Neoliberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman heralded the arrival of this McWorld as the dawn of a new world order with liberty and justice for all, claiming that no two countries with McDonalds would go to war with each other (he was wrong). But what symbolized freedom for the apologists of global capitalism, had always meant a hidden slavery for a burgeoning service class of workers.

The world of exploitation behind every hamburger and fries is hidden no longer. Over the past year, a wave of telegenic one-day fast food “strikes” has exposed an ugly reality. It’s a reality I know personally. From 2006-2012, I was active in two union campaigns with the Industrial Workers of the World as a fast food worker at Starbucks and Jimmy John’s. I saw first-hand that the industry’s enormous profits are premised on the original sins of US society– racism, sexism, and worker exploitation. The fast food industry employs a disproportionate number of women and people of color in dead-end jobs with wages hovering around minimum. To our bosses, my coworkers and I were commodities, just like coffee beans or cold cuts, to be supplied when business picked up, and then tossed aside when things slowed down. Our hours fluctuated wildly from week to week based on the dictates of the company’s computerized scheduling system, making budgeting and planning impossible. The job combined all the repetitive joy of a factory assembly line with all the charm of ritualized emotional abuse by customers. At Starbucks, chronic understaffing turned our shifts into a blur of ceaseless motion to produce lattes and Frappuccinos for a never-ending line out the door. Our boss showed his gratitude for our hard work by paying us around minimum wage. On busy days, he “asked” workers to stay past the end of their shifts, and then deleted the overtime hours from the payroll. Adding insult to injury, he made frequent sexually explicit remarks to my female coworkers. My boss at Jimmy John’s made a habit of peppering her dictates with death threats: “I’m gonna stab you” if you don’t spread the mayo more smoothly, or “Ima bring in a shotgun and shoot you” if the sandwich line was moving too slowly. But even though these were bad jobs, they were hard to keep. In a ludicrous Catch-22, one coworker at Starbucks lost her healthcare coverage because she was too ill to work enough hours to qualify to buy insurance. Unable to afford medical treatment, she missed a shift because she was immobilized with pain. She couldn’t afford go to the doctor’s office to get an excuse note and was fired. Two of my coworkers attempted suicide in the six years I worked at Starbucks, driven to wit’s end by the stress of demanding managers, disrespectful customers, and the agony of watching their dreams slip out of reach as they slid deeper into poverty.

Despite deplorable conditions for the industry’s 3.6 million workers, mainstream unions were until this past year uninterested in organizing fast food. The “Senior Vice President” of the Minneapolis UNITE-HERE union local told me in 2008, “It’s not like we’re going to just organize any group of McDonald’s workers who come to us.” He then declined to support our DIY organizing efforts at Starbucks. Former SEIU President Andy Stern even said he would “applaud Starbucks” for paying tens of thousands of workers a few cents over minimum wage. How did a labor movement that once led the starving masses into battle against the corporate autocrats who rule the United States come to turn its back on those hungriest for change?

Business Unionism

Over the course of the post-war era, just as churches became megachurches, and mom-and-pops gave way to megamalls, most American unions metamorphosed into business unions, adopting corporate structures that mimic those of their ostensible adversaries. Like corporations, business unions are run by small cliques of high-paid presidents, vice presidents and directors of this or that- union bosses, in short- who pass directives downward through a hierarchy of often exploited staffers to the rank-and-file. Rather than empower members through involvement in their own struggles, union bosses implant the toxic logic of careerism directly into the heart of the labor movement. SEIU and UNITE-HERE in particular (ironically, generally seen as the most “progressive” unions in the US) tend to hire a staff of idealistic fresh-out-of-college middle class kids to do their organizing. Lack roots in the communities they are tasked to organize, young staffers typically rapidly get burned out by the demands– and contradictions– of the job, and move along to grad school.

Staff-centrism is the tip of the iceberg. The rise of business unionism in the United States is one moment in the much longer evolution of a tension simmering below the surface of the labor movement. In the words of Solidarity Federation’s Fighting for Ourselves, it is “possible to identify two distinct meanings bound up in the term ‘union’. The first is simply that of an association of workers…” and the second is “that of the representation of workers vis-à-vis capital.” As an association of workers, unions have a theoretically limitless power to shut down or transform the economy. As an institution “representing” workers, unions behave like an “interest group” jockeying for influence using the same tools of lobbying, litigating, PR, and dealmaking as any other corporate entity.

Rather than relying on the associational power of their members expressed through production-halting strikes, business unions are often heavily dependent on the provisions of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which sets up a bureaucratized process for workers to vote a union in as their “representative.” The NLRA is imbricated with a politics, stated most clearly by its preamble: “It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining….” It bears repeating: the purpose of US labor law is to sustain the “free flow of commerce,” a goal wholeheartedly adopted by post-war union leaders who happily disarmed the rank-and-file, trading direct action for bureaucratic grievance procedures and no-strike clauses. C. Wright Mills dubbed them the “New Men of Power,” labor statesmen eager to act as the junior partners of capital in the Cold War against Communism. Taking a running start toward our own era’s “end of history,” these partisans of business unionism purged radicals from the labor movement, jettisoned visions of qualitative social change for a narrow focus on quantitative bread-and-butter issues, and lulled themselves to sleep with the Keynesian fairy tale of never-ending virtuous cycles of rising productivity linked to rising wages negotiated by unions as a permanent fixture of American political-economic life.

The union bureaucracy received a rude awakening in the late 1970s. Employers began intensifying resistance to union campaigns leading to declining win rates in NLRB elections. As veteran labor negotiator Joe Burns has noted in Reviving the Strike, unions have not responded effectively to the challenge laid down by employers, eschewing the kind of associational confrontations with bosses that established the political possibility of the New Deal in the 1930s. Instead, they attempt to secure employer “neutrality” through carrot-and-stick wheeling and dealing, all too often behind the backs of workers. The carrot: union bosses may offer political support for the company’s legislative agenda and pledge not to organize other units or bargain over certain issues, or even accept sub-par wages and restrictions on worker’s rights. The stick: the union will interfere with the company’s political agenda or growth plans until they agree to neutrality. Campaigns for neutrality tend to rely not primarily on the associational power of workers, but on smoke-and-mirrors media stunts, friends in high places, and clever lawyering, in short- manipulation of our society’s system of representation. The task of the ‘organizer’ becomes getting a worker to do something that a union boss has decided they should do, rather than bringing workers together for collective decision-making. More often than not, worker involvement in campaigns for neutrality is restricted to photo-op meetings with politicians, or at most, made-for-TV one-day strikes. Or worse, unions substitute “community supporters” engaging in faux direct actions for the activity of the workers themselves. Generally, union bosses seek out campaigns based on a very businesslike calculation of how much they will cost, and how much dues money the new bargaining unit will bring in. For most unions, the odds in fast food seemed too long to merit an investment of organizing resources.

Fast Food Strikes

Many on the left have expressed hope that the current SEIU-directed mobilization in fast food and other ‘alt-labor’ formations represent a break with the logic of business unionism, or at least an opening to go beyond fast food strikes and build a more transformative movement. It has been hard to assess how these hopes stack up against reality; SEIU bans staff from speaking with the media and leaves most rank-and-filers in the dark about the union’s plans. So I went around the official SEIU mouthpieces and spoke with workers and staff in the campaign to find out what’s really going on.

To hear top SEIU officials Mary Kay Henry and Scott Courtney tell it, fast food workers virtually organized themselves, beating down SEIU’s door asking for help organizing. In truth, the strikes for $15 are hardly a spontaneous upsurge. According to inside sources, the $15/hr demand itself was thought up not originally by workers, but by consultants at the Berlin Rosen PR firm working with the SEIU brass. SEIU’s plans for a fast food campaign have been in the works since at least 2009. According to another inside source, the initial cities for the strikes were selected based on areas where the union thought it could translate a splashy media hit into political capital to push through legislation. The one-day protests were conceived of not as an economic weapon to win gains, but as a juicy hook for a “march on the media,” as Adam Weaver has noted. Many activists have used the term “wildcat strike” to define these one-day protests. A wildcat is a strike organized by rank-and-filers against or without the bureaucracy. These were its exact opposite- mobilizations directed from above by bureaucrats inside the beltway. In a through-the-looking-glass twist, this means that SEIU planners knew that workers would be going on strike before the workers themselves did. Thus, the task of the organizer became to get workers to buy into the media-centric plan decided on by union bosses, often laboring under an unrealistic quota system that forces staff to instrumentalize their relationships with workers or fudge the numbers to keep their jobs. Likely reflecting this dynamic, I spoke with workers in three cities who stated that the actual number of strikers was substantially lower than SEIU claims. Given the inefficiencies of communication (aka lying to your boss so you don’t get fired) inherent in any corporate hierarchy, it’s entirely possible that SEIU itself doesn’t actually know how many workers participated in the strikes.

Taking a page from the corporate playbook, SEIU outsourced its fast food organizing to “community based organizations”- a Jobs with Justice chapter, a couple ex-ACORN affiliates, and others, partially in order to reduce expenditures on organizer salaries. One fast food worker in the campaign told me, “The organizers are working 12 hour days for weeks at a time. When you calculate their wage, it’s less than minimum.” One former staff organizer was ordered to abandon one group of fast food workers shortly before a strike, shifting focus to another site that union bosses thought would get more media coverage. The same organizer was fired shortly before the holidays based on an arbitrary decision by a high-level SEIU staffer, forcing them to scramble and scrape put food on the table for their young child. Unsurprisingly, in at least one city, organizers have moved to form their own staff union to combat the SEIU-inspired high-turnover model of labor union management.

The shabby treatment of hard-working organizers points to a deeper deficit of democracy in SEIU’s model. Speaking on condition of anonymity, workers in the campaign reported having their arms twisted into support for the strike strategy decided on by SEIU union bosses, with no room for discussion of more sustainable, transformative, long-term alternatives. One source close to SEIU informed me that some high-level staff on the campaign reject organizing for immediate gains in the workplace because they think victories would remove workers’ reasons for wanting a union. While some cities have adopted a more rank-and-file-oriented approach, the overall strategy has remained beyond question by the rank-and-file. SEIU packed a much-vaunted national meeting in Detroit with workers who had been convinced to vote “yes” on the August 29th National Day of Action, regardless of whether it would serve to build organization for the long term in their communities and workplaces. The risk of the quick-and-dirty organizing demanded by the SEIU international to stay in the headlines is that workers are pushed to risk their jobs to meet quotas decided by bureaucrats atop the command economy of business unionism, without regard for building the relationships that form the basis of any successful social movement.

Ryan Wyatt, a worker at a Potbelly’s in Chicago, was recently on strike. He says. “I believe that because of that my manager is starting to retaliate. Just recently, after the last strike, they told me to go home and not come back for the next five days because I was five minutes late from lunch.” Ryan’s manager did not return his calls after five days, a de facto firing.

The Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago is fighting the retaliation, but such stories are likely to multiply absent a strategy of involving more workers in the organizing before parading isolated workers from different shops before the cameras. Given the recent evisceration of OUR Walmart through the firing of over 60 worker-activists, one would think that the prospect of mass retaliation would have prompted SEIU to take more care in building up a base before going public. Corporate management hardly needs to train or tell managers to union-bust or blacklist. Every fast food manager knows how to tighten and selectively enforce rules in order to weed out a worker they want to get rid of and keep troublemakers out. Absent a shift in strategy to change the power relationships against fast food companies to stop firings in each city, subtle retaliation will eventually take a heavy toll on the organizing.

It could be that SEIU just doesn’t care. After all, the union already got its 15 minutes of fame from the campaign. An SEIU spokesperson voiced a disturbingly cavalier attitude to the price workers will pay for this strategy, telling me that workers could easily go across the street and get a job at the next fast food place after getting fired.

With all the major decisions in the hands of the SEIU international, the staff-driven nature of the campaign has taken on a troubling racial dynamic. I spoke with multiple participants who were dismayed by the recurring spectacle of mostly white staffers shouting marching orders through megaphones at mostly black and brown fast food workers during the strikes. In New York, a white SEIU marshall actually physically pushed several workers of color, seeking to prevent them from occupying a McDonald’s. All too often in the United States, hierarchies are color-coded. SEIU and its surrogates are no exception.

And the words that SEIU has put in workers’ mouths? While “$15 and a Union” makes for a good slogan, the problems plaguing our fast food nation will not be solved by a dollar increase in wages. In another capitulation to the needs of the campaign’s media narrative, the Fight for Fifteen has replicated the narrow economic focus of post-war business unionism. This is all the more unfortunate because the food industry stands at the crux of the complex of capitalist consumerism. Workers in fast food can speak and act directly against the horrors of industrial agriculture, the dehumanization of Taylorized production and absurd workplace hierarchies, corporate monoculture, the scourge of working class hunger amidst plenty, and myriad other ills that flow from their workplaces. Imagine if a fast food worker union advanced a vision not just of better-paying work in a fundamentally inhumane economy, but for a worker-controlled food system operated in the interests of all of humanity and the earth? Such a turn is unlikely while the campaign narrative is dictated by union bureaucrats who see themselves not as capitalism’s gravediggers, but its doctors.

An honest appraisal of the campaign thus far forces us to an unavoidable conclusion- the corporate logic of fast food is alive in the SEIU union effort itself. From the decision to prioritize quantity of strikers over quality of worker empowerment and democracy, privileging of flashy media events and legislative pushes over substantive organizing to build power, to the simulacra of cookie-cutter PR consultant-designed messaging, to the centralized command-and-control modus operandi of the SEIU International, to the ugly reality of institutional racism inside the campaign itself, to the reduction of campaign goals to a dollar number while accepting the fundamentals of class society, this is a true fast food unionism.

Neo-Business Unionism

Is there hope for the workers, staff, and supporters in the campaign to turn SEIU’s fast food unionism into a broader long-term movement for more substantial change, as several on the labor left have suggested?

SEIU is no monolith. There are competing visions inside SEIU about the direction of the Fight for Fifteen, and a certain level of autonomy (albeit under constant threat of trusteeship) in certain locals. There is a higher level of worker participation and democracy in some cities than others. There are hundreds of courageous workers and dozens of principled, hardworking staff active in the union, seeking to do the best they can to move from a transactional to a transformative organizing model within SEIU’s confines.

It may be possible for rank-and-filers and radicals on staff to articulate a strategy that breaks with the logic of fast food unionism, but it certainly won’t come from the SEIU International, and it won’t come without a fight with the bureaucracy. The union’s track record, the tendencies inherent in its brand of neo-business unionism, and frank off-the-record views from SEIU staff give us hints about what rank-and-filers and their allies can expect. A 2010 article in The Nation summed up SEIU’s modus operandi under former President Andy Stern, “As growth became his all-consuming passion, Stern came to rely heavily on back-room deals with employers and other shortcuts, perpetuating an illusion of robust growth that has obscured SEIU’s failure to devise a viable long-term strategy for reversing labor’s decline. Along the way, Stern’s go-it-alone leadership style alienated rank-and-file members and isolated the union from former allies.”

As the bills for the high-priced PR consultants and small army of staff on the Fight for Fifteen pile up, pressure will mount on SEIU’s union bosses to broker a deal that can be painted as a victory. As with any business transaction, it will involve a quid pro quo. Steve Early’s research on SEIU’s machinations in The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor offer a glimpse of what this typically looks like. Over the course of 339 pages, Early pulls a seemingly endless parade of skeletons out of SEIU’s closet, many marked by the fingerprints not just of Andy Stern, but also Mary Kay Henry and the current crop of SEIU bosses.

Driven by a growth-at-all costs rapacity on par with the corporations it faced across the bargaining table, SEIU turned to a strategy of “partnerships” with employers and raiding other unions to secure new dues streams, worker democracy be damned. In most cases, new organizing took the form of getting employers to sign on to “template agreements” that trade away workers’ rights to speak out or take action to resolve problems on the job, abandon control of the shopfloor to management by allowing for few or no shop stewards, and restrict the parameters of collective bargaining– all without any input from workers. Even worse, in order to get employers to agree with these “partnerships,” SEIU often backs legislation that benefits the employer at the expense of the broader working class. For example, in California and Washington, SEIU agreed to lobby for restrictions on patients’ ability to sue over medical malpractice at the hands of hospitals and home healthcare providers in exchange for an eased path to union recognition for healthcare workers.

Once the terms of the deal are negotiated by the labor and management professionals, organizers are tasked with getting workers to sign a card authorizing dues deduction from their paycheck. That might be the last time the workers see an organizer. Once unionized, SEIU keeps its overhead low by warehousing members in megalocals that span hundreds of miles. It becomes impossible for low-wage workers to attend a meeting where they would have a voice, let alone run for union office or get active on the job as a steward. That job is left for college-educated labor professionals. What do workers get instead? A 1-800 number to call if they have questions or concerns.

Early concludes that SEIU is a “deeply flawed, increasingly autocratic institution that doesn’t deliver as advertised, no matter who is in charge.” He seems to be right. While many hope that SEIU has made a new beginning under current President Mary Kay Henry, and that the Fight for Fifteen’s “strike first” tactic will be a real departure from business-unionism-as-usual, a look behind the media hype reveals the same old dynamics and patterns of behavior are already at play. An inside source reports that SEIU has already made overtures to the National Restaurant Association, offering to back tax cuts for corporate fast food chains in exchange for some kind of neutrality deal. This is likely the shape of things to come.

Beyond Fast Food Strikes

Aside from the principled critiques of SEIU’s neo-business unionism model, there is also the fact that it likely simply won’t work. We are now more than three decades in to US employers’ war of annihilation against the labor movement. As in the 1930s, employers will hold the line against any union incursion unless they are faced with an existential threat. The only lever long enough to move the mountain of resistance to workers power in the US fast food industry is mass direct action by workers on a scale of disruptiveness not seen since labor’s pre-WWII streetfighting years. The business unions aren’t likely to pull that lever. As former SEIU strategist Stephen Lerner has written, “Unions with hundreds of millions in assets and collective bargaining agreements covering millions of workers won’t risk their treasuries and contracts by engaging in large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.” We might add that even if they wanted to, the business unions have long gutted their membership base, alienating workers with high-handed top-down decision-making and years of stultifying doorknocking for Democrats. Unwilling and unable to take the road that could lead to a real victory, SEIU will begin watering down its “justice for all” slogan, bringing proposals for less justice, and for fewer workers (narrowing the focus to fewer cities, fewer companies, and demanding a smaller wage increase), to the bargaining table and the ballot. If this fails, SEIU will likely look for a way to walk away and save face. Ironically, that may mean giving workers more room to do their own organizing. More tragically, it may also mean leaving workers who have taken a risk to strike high and dry to face retaliation on their own.

Fortunately, SEIU’s fast food unionism is neither the first nor last word in class struggle in the industry. Fast food workers have battled the bosses who exploit them since the industry’s genesis. To give just a few examples, in the mid-1960s, McDonald’s was so concerned about the unionization of its Bay Area workforce that it forced potential employees to take a lie-detector test to weed out union sympathizers. The burger chain’s full-time anti-union specialist claims to have squashed “hundreds” of unionization drives in the early 1970s. In the early 1980s, ACORN launched a fast food workers union in Detroit that briefly won one of the only union contracts in franchised fast food in the US. In the UK, the enigmatic McDonald’s Workers Resistance waged a campaign of faceless guerrilla resistance to corporate bosses from 1998 into the early 2000s. While none of these efforts led to lasting organization, they all played a role in the long process of the growth of class consciousness in the global fast food industry.

In my time as an organizer at Jimmy John’s and Starbucks with the IWW, we learned from the experiences of those who had come before us and created an associational organizing model that works in fast food. Our model built on our own inherent strength as workers- our boss’ reliance on us to do the work. Instead of spending millions (which we didn’t have) on PR consultants and professional staff, we emphasized a long-term approach of training our own coworkers as organizers, empowering them to fight their own battles wherever they go, and making all decisions together democratically. And we won. We got the boss who was stealing our wages and sexually harassing coworkers fired, stopped unfair firings, got the company to install air conditioning and fix broken equipment, won improved staffing, won my reinstatement when I was fired by Starbucks for organizing, and even forced our District Manager to cut a personal check for a coworker who was owed back wages with a short strike. In another IWW campaign, we drafted a “Ten Point Program for Justice at Jimmy John’s” listing the ten most important demands identified by our coworkers, going beyond bread-and-butter issues to address fundamental questions of power on the shopfloor. Using escalating direct action, we won direct deposit pay, raises, holiday pay, the right to call in sick, a consistent discipline policy, and many other demands, detailed more extensively in the forthcoming New Forms of Worker Organization. Neither of these campaigns were perfect, and the labor movement still has a lot to learn about organizing the low-wage service sector, but our experience does make one thing clear: workers can declare independence from the business union bureaucracy, fight their own battles, and win.

In several cities, rank-and-filers in the Fight for Fifteen have already begun building their own organizations autonomous from the bureaucracy, connecting with community supporters who are free from the fetters of a paycheck signed by DC union bosses. Class struggle didn’t start with SEIU, and it won’t end once a contract is signed, a law is passed, the minimum wage increases, or the union bosses stop footing the bill for the campaign. The struggle will continue; fast food jobs are the jobs of the future– not just because 58% of jobs created in the post-2007 recovery are in low-wage occupations, but also more metaphorically- as George Ritzer noted, the corporate logic of fast food has come to permeate our society much more broadly. Whether we work at a McDonald’s, an office, a hospital, school, nonprofit, for the government, or in virtually any workplace, we have all seen our coworkers abused or unfairly fired, been forced to do more with less, been told to cut corners at the expense of the public, and been denied a voice on the job and in society. Millions of workers live lives of quiet desperation, watching their labor disappear into the machinery of the capitalist system, turned against them to perpetuate the very evils that they oppose: fast food workers watch the product they serve poison their communities, bank workers see their employer selling predatory loans to their neighbors, hospital workers bear witness to how profit is put before patient health, and teachers chafe under the dehumanization that standardized testing wreaks on their students. Collectively, workers produce all of the ills of our society; which means that collectively, we can strop producing them. And increasingly, we want to.

Ryan Wyatt, a striker at Potbelly’s in Chicago, says it best, “We’re asking not just for better working conditions for us. We’re asking to live in a better America.”

Fast food unionism cannot change a fast food nation, but it can be a step toward a movement that will.

Erik Forman is a labor organizer and writer. You can reach him at erik.forman (at) gmail.com. He tweets @_erikforman.

Originally appeared November 5, 2013 as a CounterPunch digital exclusive and reposted November 17, 2013 at Recomposition

I was recently pleasantly surprised to see that the local community college in Minneapolis was putting on Clifford Odets’ 1935 play, “Waiting for Lefty.” It turns out that it was also presented in London this year after a 30-year absence, so perhaps there is something in the play that speaks to the current moment. The Minneapolis production also took the admirable step of arranging contemporary union members or labor activists to speak after each performance. Normally, I don’t think that cultural review is the biggest priority for the Industrial Worker, but seeing the play live did start me thinking about some things that I think are important for our organization.

First, I’ll give a little background on “Waiting for Lefty.” It seems like it was a pretty famous play in its time (supposedly, the first performance sparked a riot in Manhattan), but it seems to have faded from public knowledge. I wouldn’t have known anything about it before the performance, except that FW John O’Reilly recommended I read it last year. Odets sets the play up as a meeting of a taxi drivers’ union in New York City, with only one item on the agenda: a strike. Although I thought some of the characters had the depth of sock puppets, Odets pulled off a stroke of technical-political genius by having the play occur within a union meeting. There is no fourth wall to break as some of the cast members sit within the audience and sing “Solidarity Forever,” shout disagreements with the union boss, or get roughed up by goons.

The plot is pretty simple. The union boss, Harry Fatt, addresses the talk of a strike and tries to reassure everyone that “now that we’ve got our boy in the White House, we can’t go out.” Of course, he would have supported a strike under the previous administration, but since “Roosevelt has our back, it’s our duty to have his.” With his armed goons behind him, he goes on to blast the “reds” in the union, saying that he’s coming for them.

Members start shouting out for Lefty, the head of the strike committee, but he’s not there. The four other members come up to speak one by one, and each of them has a vignette explaining why they are in favor of striking now. Of the four, one is a doctor who was fired for being Jewish and another was a chemist who did not want to make poison gas. Although his attempt to tie in other parts of society might have made political sense in some ways, this effort detracts from the idea that this is a struggle being led by workers. It’s unlikely that half of the taxi drivers were declassed intellectuals, so why write half of their leaders to be? However, Odets did say later that he’d “never been near a strike” and wanted to use the strike story to discuss many of the problems with capitalist society. After the flashbacks, a union member bursts in to announce that Lefty’s been found—behind the dispatcher’s office with a bullet in his head. The strike committee, with the unanimous support of everyone but Fatt, declares that the strike will begin. Odets uses Lefty’s death to argue that we can’t wait for militant and charismatic leaders to come save us; we have to run our struggles ourselves.

The play’s presentation as an actual union meeting proves to be its most interesting quality. As critics at the time pointed out, part of what was so engaging about the play for so many spectators was that it mirrored their experiences so well— coming to the union in search of a way to stand up to the bosses, seeing confrontations between entrenched bureaucrats and militant workers, and ending dynamically in either repression or some kind of victory.

How many union members today would recognize their experiences in this play? From my own experience in a business union, I would guess the percentage is probably close to zero. If anything, people who have never had any experience with unions would probably be more likely to recognize the scenes as similar to what unions look like in movies and on TV. This is an important change to be conscious of, because, although unions look the same externally, they have lost their meaning in the years between 1935 and 2013. At one moment, even the most problematic unions were a battleground between militant workers and “labor fakirs,” as bureaucrats used to be called. In 1935 maybe it was still possible to kick out all the bosses like Fatt, tell the president not to wait up for us, and turn the unions around. However, 70 years of government collaboration and workplace contractualism has made them such dusty upholders of the status quo that it would take a more creative mind than Odets’ to imagine them leading or inspiring a new workers movement. A local officer of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) spoke after the show and hammered the above point about the play home. While I was impressed that the cast reached out to labor and union activists, it quickly became clear that this one, at least, had more in common with boss Fatt than with Lefty. The resemblance began with the exhortations that our only weapon for stopping the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) was to “write our congressperson.” Some audience and cast members asked why APWU wasn’t preparing for a strike and the speaker said that “it’s illegal.” The speaker then let slip that the USPS has casual employees and a twotier system, and after another Wobbly (and dual carder) that I was with pushed on it she confirmed that their union contract made these concessions.

I’ve been an IWW for long enough that I thought I was pretty well inoculated against the business unions. However, hearing how anti-combative they are from their own representative is somehow much more powerful than hearing it from another Wobbly.

The business unions aren’t just good unions gone bad; they are literally zombies— shells that appear to still be alive but with all of their internal dynamic and thought process gone, destroyed by repeated doses of the poison known as the National Labor Relations Act. Finally, they have become incapable of acting out of the bounds that their poisoners have set. We can’t “recapture” or replace them (that is, not at administering the contract).

Our task has to be to show a different path, as a permanent fighting workers’ organization. We should also be visibly putting out our revolutionary message at events like this. Don’t get me wrong—between a branch that focuses on workplace organizing and one that focuses on outreach, I’ll take the organizing branch every day. However, as FW MK explains dialectics, there’s “what’s going on,” “what’s really going on,” and “what’s really, really going on,” which brings back the moment of truth from “what’s going on.” We can bring forward a powerful message as long as it’s rooted in experience of work and organizing, rather than pure ideology. We should become more intentional about bringing this message forward because we can’t become the organization we need to be if our only activity is organizing at our individual workplaces. The business unions don’t have any plan or desire to change the status quo, let alone rupture it. If we regain the confidence that our fellow workers had in the 1930s to proclaim publicly and loudly what we’re about and organize aggressively, then we can once again help to initiate a widespread fighting workers’ movement that brings the bosses—whether in the unions, government, or workplaces—to their knees.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (December 2013)

The legacy of the IWW is one without labor contracts. In the era before there was a legal structure for unions to win legal recognition against the employers’ wishes, unions either made sweetheart deals with the boss or maintained standards through their own organizational strength. The IWW chose to eschew collaboration with the boss and focus on organizing workers. It was a strategy that worked in some cases, allowing us to improve standards in mining and logging towns, but it also cost us in places like Lawrence, Mass., where, despite a large and militant strike, without a contract the work remained one of low wages and sweatshop conditions.

Many people believe that the IWW is ideologically opposed to contracts or does not have any. Actually, today the union has several contracts that cover workers at domestic violence call centers, a recycling plant, the staff at a United Auto Workers local, and retail locations.

I would like to argue that contracts, like other tactics such as strikes, pickets, boycotts, slow-downs, press conferences, teach-ins, etc., can be used as part of long-term campaigns to raise the standards of living for workers, raise the ability of workers to have a say and control in their workplace, and act as a publicity piece to promote the IWW’s brand of direct and democratic unionism. Contracts can be especially useful in high-turnover industries, where they can lock in basic pro-worker conditions regardless of turnover and make it easier for the union to talk to new workers and raise their class consciousness.

Many other unions treat contracts as an end. Their primary goal is to achieve a contract with a company where there was none before. This can lead them to agree to sweetheart deals with the company without engaging workers, or to organize workers with a limited and narrow goal of what they can achieve.

One of the IWW’s goals is worker control of the economy. When we get there, we won’t need business owners with whom to have contracts. However, we don’t have the strength or organizational capacity to completely do away with the capitalist class today. We have to wage battles that grow the working class’ understanding and acceptance of our ability to do more than just be cogs in someone else’s machine.

While other unions see the signing of a contact as something that guarantees labor peace for the employer, we must see the signing of a contract not as an end to struggle, but a beginning. We will still have to struggle to enforce the pro-worker provisions of the contract, we will have to work to undermine any provisions of the contract that give the boss power, and we will have to work to organize workers in the shop covered by the contract to continue to fight for better conditions and more worker control. We will also have to spread propaganda among workers in other shops to encourage them to organize for their own improvements in conditions and achieve worker control.

A contract fight can be a framework for discussing what workers want their jobs and workplace to be, starting with surveying workers and discussing what they do and do not like about their work conditions, and then bringing those demands to bargaining while mobilizing and flexing the workers’ strength until a contract is won. We can repeat the process, continuing to discuss what was achieved and codified in a contract and what needs to still be done.

Workers must own the contract campaign process: they must elect their bargaining representatives, receive and be engaged with negotiation updates, take action to pressure the boss on specific demands, and have the final vote on whether to accept the contract and for how long.

There may be some back and forth. The union can rank its issues for negotiating what is required to even consider the contract and what is completely unacceptable, but the union can also rank some of the less black-and-white issues to know better what can be negotiated and on what they need to stand firm. The union can break its issues into different categories to consider as well: wages, work conditions, training, benefits, grievance procedures, and organizing and mobilizing tactics.

While some have an all-or-nothing mentality, I think that it makes more sense for workers to take what they can get now and use those expanded resources to fight for even more.

A contract will not likely codify our absolute victory over the capitalist class, and at times it could be a distraction, but so can many other tactics when they are elevated to the level of strategy. Striking for the sake of going on strike won’t help us achieve our goals any more than will bargaining for the sake of a contract. The product of contract negotiations will essentially specify the current balance of forces between the boss and the union.

Some may say that by agreeing to a labor contract with an employer the union is collaborating with the boss, conceding defeat in the class struggle, or agreeing to a ceasefire between workers and the boss. I don’t think so, at least not any more so than is going on strike for a specific demand such as a pay raise or to pressure the boss to rehire illegally fired workers. Further, most union contracts have a variety of rules, such as grievance procedures, that boost workers’ ability to challenge the boss’s authority. Enforcement of these provisions is often an important way for unions to engage workers, keep them organizing, and to highlight the ways in which the boss is trying to rob workers of their rights and dignity.

Other opponents of labor contracts argue that a contract limits the union and the specific tactics it is allowed to use. Many unions, for example, agree to no-strike clauses in contracts for the duration of the contract. I don’t think that a contract necessarily has to give up any tactics that the union wants to hold on to. A contract will only limit the union to the extent that we allow it to or allow the boss to limit us. At the end of the day, we don’t have to agree to anything that we don’t want to.

If the employer violates a part of the agreement, we won’t necessarily be expected to not respond in kind. Further, contracts expire. A two- or three-yearlong contract can give us the opportunity to regroup our strength, gather our forces, outline a new battle strategy, organize around it, and prepare for a new contract fight with the intentions of expanding workers’ power. Also, it takes time to organize around issues and convince all the workers at a shop to take a particular action on a particular point. Sometimes it might make sense for the union, understanding that it may not be able to organize workers, to commit to “X,” “Y” or “Z” tactic within a certain period of time, and to agree to give up such a tactic in a contract, until such a time that the union is capable of deploying it.

Workers may not be able to win everything they want with the first contract, but they can use what they do get to provide some sense of stability. In many ways, if workplace conditions are a building, organizing is the scaffolding for that building and a labor contract is the blueprint. Once the building is up, we can always remodel it, and when the time comes, we can tear it down and build a new structure. But when we do, we’ll have had the experience of building before to learn from and go off of.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (December 2013)

The Termination

Arriving to work, I entered through the break room as usual. There, awaiting me was my manager who immediately said that we needed to talk. He told me not to put away my bag; I couldn’t get ready for my shift like I usually did. I asked him if this was a disciplinary meeting but he did not respond directly to the question. He just said, “We need to talk. This will just take a minute.” While walking through the production floor I greeted co-workers as I usually do and I followed my manager into his office. Seeing that no one else was in the office, I asked, “Is someone from HR [Human Resources] going to be here?” He barked back at me, “This is coming straight from HR.” I then asked him if I could have a co-worker in the meeting with me. He denied this request, responding, “Hmmm, no.”

Immediately after the door closed, my manager informed me “this” wasn’t working out, perhaps justifying this by stating I was “clearly unhappy” here. He went through a cursory explanation of paperwork and stated that I was terminated. I did not agree with the judgments and told him so; and when instructed to sign a termination form I refused.

I inquired if the termination was a result of my work performance. “No. You’re a great worker, but a bad employee,” he replied. While still in shock at what was happening, I had enough sense to ask some follow-up questions and see what he’d reveal. Foremost, I was curiously struck by that explicit worker/employee distinction he mentioned, and so I asked him about it. He elaborated that while I was a “leader” on the crew, I was nonetheless disrespectful to the owners. For example he cited the frustration I’ve expressed to other co-workers, including him, about how the owners leave their week-old dirty dishes from the office by the sink and neglect to wash them. With that I readily pointed out how he and everyone else complain to me about just that practice as well.

“They’re the owners, and it doesn’t matter,” he replied.

“Can I work my shift or am I fired?” I asked to clarify that firing was, in fact, underway.

I was told no, I could not work my shift. I inquired if the company would approve my unemployment, to which he responded affirmatively.

I’ve had many a nightmare about being fired from this job; and have thought at length about what I would do should that day arrive. Having seen how managers call unsuspecting co-workers to cover shifts for workers walking into termination, and how they wait for their target to arrive through the break room, I recognized what was happening to me. Previously, when my departmental co-workers and I were better-organized, we discussed what we’d do if one of us was fired for a collective action we’d taken.

First, we’d obviously ask for a witness, and wouldn’t sign anything presented to us. Next, the fired worker would do everything they legally could to stay on the premises and speak with as many co-workers as possible about what just happened. If organizers were on shift, they’d act immediately to stop work and call for an on-site meeting with management. Unfortunately, at the time of my firing our campaign was at a lull. We weren’t taking collective actions on the shared and specific issues (staffing levels, holiday bonuses, profit sharing, etc.) usually discussed on the floor. As a result, I was making the rookie organizer mistake of talking shit about working conditions but not taking any collective actions to back things up. Therefore, management was able to spin a narrative of me being detrimental to morale and to justify firing me accordingly.

The timing of my firing was a further disadvantage for us. My fellow organizer was on vacation and another ally worker had just voluntarily left the company a week earlier. This left me with little immediate support in my department, so there was no one to organize a work stoppage in direct response. In hindsight, after receiving the termination notice, I probably should have immediately walked out and gathered my co-workers, so we could read it together, and thereby avoid management’s typical trap of trying to get me to say something I’d regret within the emotionally charged closed-door meeting.

When I did walk out of the office, I immediately sought my departmental co-workers. As I tried to explain what just happened to one I’d worked alongside for three years, the anger, rage and disbelief inhabiting me turned to sadness and confusion. We hugged, made plans to call each other later and I then went on to have the same emotional conversation another dozen or so times with other co-worker friends onsite. During these conversations I could see the shock and fear in their faces. Having worked for the company for five years, all of them knew this wasn’t about work performance; but was another example of the company retaliating against workers who speak up and pushing out those who they didn’t like. But, without a planned response, or an organizer already prepared to lead one, solidarity had to assume the simpler forms of hugs and handshakes. Yet, to make sure that everyone knew why I was fired, I made a copy of my termination form (on the office copier in front of the boss who just fired me) and passed it off to my co-workers (who in turn shared it with the afternoon crew). In hindsight, those individual conversations and the generalized sharing of the termination form proved extremely agitational for my fellow co-workers, and it assisted the campaign which would eventually develop to reclaim my job.

When I left the premises, I immediately called a co-worker and fellow organizer to confide my termination.

“What’s the plan?” he asked.

Still reeling from it, I didn’t know what to say. We made plans to meet for breakfast. In between chain smoking cigarettes and transferring buses on my way to the diner, I called and texted every current and former co-worker I knew and relayed to them what had happened.

When I sign people up to the IWW and am asked why I’m a member, part of my reply is consistent: “I know that if I get fired for organizing, I know that the union will be there to have my back and fight tooth-and-nail for me to get my job back.” Now that day had come, and for the next four months my fellow workers fulfilled that commitment beyond what I could’ve hoped and imagined.

The Committee Responds

During the first three weeks following my termination I distracted myself from the realities of unemployment by assisting the committee’s organizers in their efforts to reestablish my employment. As I said earlier, the campaign was at a lull. Yet, prior to my termination we’d been preparing a timeline to reset the organizing campaign. The night I got fired, the committee met with two other fellow workers and we had a focused conversation about our options for response. We distinguished two immediate options: 1) take this firing on the chin and keep the organizing underground or 2) make our first cross-department and cross-store action that would fight to regain my job. Since I was an outspoken worker on conditions of employment, we were confronted with the question: How could we respond to future issues or firing if we didn’t take action on my egregious firing? With a quiet acknowledgement of the immense work ahead of them, the committee decided action was necessary, even if they couldn’t win my job back. We suspected that the company was clearing house and another outspoken organizer would likely be terminated soon, too. And if that happened our position to respond would be further diminished.

Rather than limiting the demand to my reinstatement, we decided to expand it to include addressing the broader issue of the company’s subjective and usually unjust disciplinary procedures. This strategy proved beneficial. Our demands were constructed into a petition letter, coupled with a personal letter I’d written to my co-workers, addressing the charges used to terminate me. The demand for my reinstatement proved motivational for workers I was acquainted with; yet, the broader demand succeeded in acquiring the support of a vaster range of co-workers— who had presumably witnessed and/or experienced the company’s abusive disciplinary practices in the past.

foodservworkThe committee understood that we needed to move fast on the petition, while the issue was still vivid in co-workers’ minds. The anger, immediate and fiery, that grievances can ignite in a worker just as often dissipate when there’s no timely path forward for action: paralyzed resignation often results. So the committee set a few immediate goals to pursue: first, to coordinate a delegation of four to six workers and compose and have 25 workers sign a petition, ready for delivery within a week. Also, more timely, at our Food & Retail Workers United (FRWU) Industrial Organizing Committee (IOC) meeting the next day, the committee presented its escalation plan to other fellow workers for feedback. We then created a “social map” of our workplace and assigned shop organizers to meet with a few dozen co-workers we assessed as potential supporters of the petition.

As the fired worker, my role within the organizing campaign was threefold: 1) Assist with one-on-ones, 2) act as a general task monkey for the campaign’s needs and 3) prepare my case for the Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), if we decided to file. The first role was the most important: setting up one-on-one meetings and assisting with two-on-one meetings with fellow organizers. My usual role in these conversations was to act as the agitational force while my fellow organizer would conduct the education, inoculation and organization tasks. These conversations were highly emotional as we uncovered other grievances, stories of discipline gone awry and the immense fear co-workers had of losing their jobs. Naturally, workers brought up unionizing frequently. For me personally, the hardest component of the one-on-ones was asking a worker to sign the petition knowing I couldn’t definitely assure them I’d be present if or when they faced retaliation.

As the general task monkey, I spent most of my days at the IWW’s office, addressing peripheral tasks of the petition drive. The paperwork— coordinating translation of documents, making copies and getting them to organizers—was to be expected. I feel my most beneficial role was checking in with organizers multiple times a day about their one-on-ones. In those first two weeks, our committee members were regularly at the office brainstorming escalation strategies, one-on-one conversations, and how to reach out to more workers.

Altogether, 34 workers signed onto the petition demanding a forum on the company’s disciplinary procedure and my reinstatement. A week after I was fired, four organizers interrupted a meeting of our bosses, read aloud the demand letter and gave testimonials. Though noticeably uncomfortable, the employers remained confident in their power.

“We will never rehire Emmett,” an owner defiantly stated.

Mistaking the letter delivery as the culmination of our efforts rather than the first public step in an escalation plan, the bosses would soon be proven wrong as internal and external direct actions created an environment which forced the company to accept the NLRB’s determination and settle in my favor.

How I Got My Job Back

Before I detail my role in preparing for the ULP, let me stress another thing: our committee’s direct action escalation campaign and our ULP strategy were largely informed by the experience of assisting and bearing witness to a fellow worker in our branch who was fired a year earlier from another campaign. In that previous campaign, our fellow worker lost what we believed was a solid ULP charge, so everyone questioned whether my fate would differ. The ULP process is a roll of the dice, the NLRB must let working people win a round every now and again in order to maintain worker confidence in the system.

While the ULP process would take over three months, the unimaginable was seemingly about to happen: I was going back to work. I was surprised to be awarded a back-to-work order and a “merit” ruling, which meant the NLRB believed there was compelling evidence that I was retaliated against. Even more surprising news was that rather than further appealing the NLRB’s judgment the company expressed its interest in a settlement—including agreeing to my reinstatement. Though they first inquired if I’d accept a payout settlement, I had already informed the organizing committee and my NLRB agent that I wouldn’t agree to any settlement that didn’t include me going back to work. While at first my position on returning to work was based on principle and a desire to keep the organizing going, reinstatement became very personal as a way to reciprocate the mutual aid given to me by my co-workers. Just as an injury to one is an injury to all, my victory was a victory for all my co-workers.

So, how was this rather unthinkable outcome made a reality? I attribute it to four factors: 1) internal and external direct actions, 2) a solid ULP strategy, 3) training and an experienced community of organizers, and 4) the company’s own naiveté.

First, while I’ll likely never know exactly why management agreed to reinstate me, instinct tells me that without direct action it would never have happened. One thing I am 100 percent positive of is that, without internal direct action, my reinstatement would never have meant so much to my co-workers. The march on the boss, petition signatures, pins and magnets, plus all the time workers took out of their day to meet, brainstorm and motivate each other to take action: all effectively invested my co-workers in the situation. They became active agents within the process from which management had tried to exclude them. Furthermore, I believe the reason the company buckled to the NLRB had more to do with the visible shop floor actions, support and discussion regarding my case than a sternly-worded letter from the NLRB. With the message that I “won” the ULP floating in the air, if the company had appealed the decision they would have run the risk of polarizing the workplace further away from them and closer towards the organizing committee. This was the move that shop organizers were anticipating and which organizers were readying an escalated response to.

Externally, Wobblies within the FRWU-IOC created a Friends of Emmett Committee, tasked to develop a two-month escalation plan to mobilize customers and the community behind my cause. We knew such support would be vital to our morale as organizers and hopefully serve as a lightning rod for further internal action by workers. For every step of the escalation plan, Wobblies in the organizing committee and the friends committee considered how the actions would polarize the workers on the inside.

Our external strategy was largely informed by participation in solidarity actions for fired Wobblies over the course of the past few years. Some of these actions involved just a Wobbly on the job without a campaign, while others contained an underground organizing committee. Often in these previous efforts, organizers applied an immediate and aggressive public approach to both scenarios: the union or solidarity group would escalate almost instantaneously to pickets, rallies, and media coverage and thereby create a new set of obstacles. Organizers found it difficult to increase the intensity of pressure, maintain the frequency of actions, or win unorganized workers over to the side of the cause. While applying this full-throttle emotional and economic leverage can be effective in circumstances of wage theft and when a single Wobbly on the job is seeking settlement of wrongful termination, the presence of an underground organizing committee requires organizers to consider their level of reach within the workplace.

In assessing our committee’s width and depth within the several worksites, we concluded that our committee was too small to conduct public pickets without encountering the same campaign-stalling results mentioned earlier that previous campaigns experienced. The Friends of Emmett Committee developed a measured escalation plan that sought to escalate slowly and provide the opportunity for the external and internal campaigns to synthesize. Simply, organizers envisioned the Friends of Emmett Committee as a tool not to win my job back but to provide public cover for the organizing within the shop and help initiate action.

The first step in the external escalation plan, which coincidentally occurred the day after the company received the NLRB merit notification, was a customer delegation. A group of customers, organized by Friends of Emmett and which included a Wobbly from the FRWU-IOC, delivered and read to an owner in front of my co-workers (and a few random customers) a demand for my reinstatement. We placed the rest of the escalation plan, which included neighborhood postering, canvassing, hand-billing and second delegation, on hold until we heard back regarding if the company was willing to settle.

The second component I credit for my return to work was the ULP strategy the organizing committee developed with the assistance of fellow workers both locally and from across the country. Rather than rushing to the NLRB, I made the direct action campaign of my co-workers a top priority and brainstormed how/if the ULP process could be used to our advantage. As referred to earlier, this was my final role as the fired organizer. During the weeks prior to filing a complaint, I read through previous NLRB affidavits and consulted numerous fellow workers and allied labor lawyers to make sure my case was solid.

For days I went back and forth on the decision to file as the IWW. While the campaign wasn’t public, my involvement within the union was public outside of work. Ultimately, I decided not to file as the IWW or an independent union. Hunches and assumptions aside, I could not prove management knew anything about me being union. Therefore, if I couldn’t demonstrate it and management wasn’t going to offer it, then the NLRB agent wouldn’t be able to prove it. Bringing in the union at this point would only expose organizers to an anti-union campaign they were not effectively positioned to counter. Besides, most relevant to the ULP was keeping the NLRB agent focused on my best piece of documentation: management’s clear violation of an employee’s Section 7 rights, as observable in my termination form.

My charge accepted, I walked into the meeting with the NLRB agent, my affidavit testimony appropriately outlined with all supporting evidence prepared. With such preparation at hand, I was well positioned to substantiate a narrative beginning with me being labeled the head agitator of a petition delivery, continuing through with documented instances of managerial hostility toward me (hello, work journals!), and concluding with a managerial personnel change intended to isolate and, finally, terminate me. Yes, the temptation to go off-topic into other unverifiables was certainly there, but I stuck to responding only to the accusations found in the termination form.

Timing was again very strategic with the ULP. The day after management held an all-company discussion forum which was demanded by workers and in which the ownership defended my termination and their disciplinary procedure, the company received its first ever letter from the NLRB informing them of the investigation. As my fellow organizer told me later, the department manager looked like he was going to vomit when the owner brought him the news.

Next, significant credit for this victory must go to the IWW’s Organizer Training and the community of Wobbly organizers with whom I’m fortunate to share a General Membership Branch. You know how we talk a lot about documentation and those workplace ournals? Well, those were integral in getting my job back. In those journals and my day planners where I recorded all my one-on-one meetings, some dating back years, I was able to piece together a narrative for both my co-workers and for the NLRB. Furthermore, the numerous organizers I learned from in my years within the IWW gave me the skills to know how to respond, while the Wobbly community present around me assisted in the campaign’s strategy (not to mention countless burritos and timely funding from our Organizer Hardship Fund).

Finally, management arrogantly believed that their power would allow them to quietly terminate me and justify it however they saw fit. In doing so, management did most of the heavy lifting, polarizing my co-workers in support of me and giving enough evidence for the NLRB to side with my charge. Among the long list of judgments written on my termination form included documented instances when I was talking to co-workers about staffing levels, profit sharing and our absent holiday bonus. Certainly, I was not the only one who discussed these matters on the shop floor; the surprise withholding of our holiday bonus that year became a consistent topic of frustration and contempt for co-workers throughout the company.

Furthermore, I had participated in several direct actions in the past. One particularly important action involving our entire department was done just beyond the NLRB timeline for a ULP charge. I learned that one could effectively argue how latter individual actions could be protected under the law if judged to be extensions of a previous collective action.

However, this naiveté and arrogance by management will likely not be repeated so carelessly again. Since my firing, the company hired an experienced HR manager and has held several meetings with lawyers to ensure they’re never caught liable for an unlawful termination or any other charge of violated labor or employment law.

Reclaiming My Job

Returning to work was surreal; I was back from the dead, as some of my fellow workers said. The return could not have been better. Rather than quietly walking back on the job as if nothing had happened, my fellow organizers and I decided that we’d use the moment to claim victory and set the tone with management about what to expect from now on. Three fellow organizers accompanied me as I walked back onto the floor. When I re-entered the break room I was greeted with “I Missed Emmett” magnets that covered the lockers and a few that held up copies of the NLRB notification. When I arrived, one worker was there reading the posting and shaking his head in disbelief. I added to my work cap the pins of support my co-workers were wearing in my absence to show their solidarity. My fellow organizers followed me as I set foot back on the shop floor where high-fives, hugs and handshakes awaited me from all my co-workers.

The greeting which I’ll never forget came from the morning dishwasher, an old-timer in the company and a man 25 years older than me. As co-workers separated by our different native languages and different departments, our interactions at work were often limited to a short exchange when he’d pour his daily coffee. The day I was fired, with tears welling up in my eyes and a shocked but all knowing look in his, we said goodbye and shook hands. The day I returned to work I approached him to shake his hand once again, he hurriedly threw down his mop and gave me a hug. Later, he sought me out to express how happy he was to have me back at work.

We then marched on the boss and an organizer presented a letter demanding that I have a witness in my pre-work meeting with management and HR. The HR manager agreed to our insistence that I be allowed a witness of my choice but stated that one could not be expected at future meetings. I felt so much more confident in this meeting because I had a fellow worker there who had my back and was taking notes the whole time.

Throughout my shift that first day back and for the next few days, co-workers stopped and congratulated me and told me how happy they were to see me back. My response to all of my co-workers was “Thank you for your support. I wouldn’t have my job back without it. Todos juntas!” Even some managers congratulated me on putting up a good fight! Regular customers who knew what happened likewise greeted me with hugs and handshakes. For those customers who didn’t know why I was gone, I laid it out that I was fired illegally and that the company was forced to give me my job back because of the support of my co-workers.

Where Do We Go From Here

Arriving to work these days, I’m constantly reminded of the struggle that took place to win my job back. I can’t miss seeing the “I Missed Emmett” magnets scattered across my co-workers’ lockers in the break room as I lace up my work shoes or sit down for a lunch break. In my locker are my NLRB back-to-work order, a welcome-back card given to me by a co-worker, and a picture drawn by the 5-year-old son of a regular who, accompanied by her two kids, delivered the customer letter to an owner requesting my reinstatement. When I walk back onto the shop floor, I’m greeted by the dozens of faces of co-workers who did so much to ensure that I returned to work. Much has changed since I was fired. To the credit of my co-workers and fellow organizers, the question of “just cause” disciplinary procedure was raised publicly. Additionally, workers are questioning our compensation and discussing the need for voice within our work.

While much has indeed changed, the power structure largely remains the same. Until my co-workers and I have the power to determine OUR conditions of employment, I believe it’s my responsibility to continue the fight. As things are now, the lessons and meaning of our victory to win my job back are largely internalized by the workers. We need to make our working conditions subject to the lessons of our victory and institutionalize the conditions we demand. Since I returned to work four months ago, three of my co-workers have quit and a new crew of workers is being introduced to the workplace without the experience of struggle the rest of us shared. So, we must share our stories, organize more aggressively than we have ever before and be ready to not only respond to management’s endless assaults collectively, but to initiate our own plan to win. Let’s keep fighting; there’s no alternative anymore.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (December 2013)