Nappalos, Scott Nikolas, ed. Lines of Work: Stories of Jobs and Resistance. Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2013. Paperback, 236 pages, $19.95.

“Lines of Work” aims to have workers tell their own stories, and it succeeds remarkably well. The book packs 32 stories by 24 workers into its pages. At least 10 contributors are former or active IWW members. The material first saw light on the Recomposition Blog, a project of worker radicals.

The book’s editor, Scott Nikolas Nappalos, conceived this book as a type of oral history to share stories. As contributor Nate Hawthorne wrote in his essay on how Occupy needs to expand its scope: “In my experience, a key part of people changing and people building relationships is hearing and telling stories. Our lives and our ideas of who we are and our relationships are largely made out of the stories we tell ourselves and each other.”

For anyone who has attended an IWW Organizer Training, the most memorable parts are usually the stories the trainers and other workers tell during the training or over beers at night. Many of these stories are like that. Some are just fragments of experience jotted down. Others are in-depth examinations of personal experiences on the job. It is oral history of a new generation of workers coming to grips with today’s capitalism and its many managers, including those culturally grafted into our heads.

The book is divided into three sections: “Resistance,” “Time,” and “Sleep and Dreams.” “Resistance” features essays by postal, warehouse, food service, non-profit, and financial services workers. Phinneas Gage recounts what a postie’s (postal worker’s) fellow workers did to protect him from a retaliation firing. Monica Kostas describes how she made contacts across her workplace by agitating for—surprisingly—the reinstatement of birthday cakes on the job. Juan Conatz, who has a great writing style, tells how he and his co-worker resisted speed-ups on the job until exhaustion got the better of him.

The “Time” section describes the many personal challenges facing workers, including the commonplace lack of boss support for worker safety. The essays by the Invisible Man on life as a bullet maker or a temporary agricultural worker are highlights simply for their beautiful writing.

The “Sleep and Dream” section chronicles the pervasive influence of work on the writers’ lives. The stories range from funny to tragic, from sleep-running naked thanks to work nightmares to the sleep deprivation of “clopening” (closing the shop at night then opening the next morning) at Starbucks.

Reading this book there is a sense of continuity and shared experience even as each story intimately reveals the individual’s own experience. The fatigue, the abuse, the work dreams, the restlessness, the desire to change the job before it consumes one—is this not our life, too?

These perspectives are what make this book worth reading. A few of the essays would be good discussion pieces for organizing round tables or training sessions, simply because they strip bare the stereotypes and comfort of organizing theory and reveal the ugly complexities and moral dilemmas of organizing. Fear, loss, pain, betrayal are all there as well as the courage, determination, endurance, and sense of humor of our class. Jomo’s piece on life as a nursing assistant is one such piece. Grace Parker’s article on her experiences with sexual harassment is another.

I see now why the Edmonton IWW General Membership Branch gave a copy of this book to each delegate at the 2013 IWW General Convention. It is worth reading, thinking and talking about. If these authors can be as honest as they are with us about their experiences, now it is our turn to reflect on, share and learn from our own experiences—and to organize from there.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (June 2014)

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike of 2012 is widely believed to be a major success, a big win for progressive, member-driven leadership. Indeed, there were big successes won by the strike preparation and from support for the strike among members, the wider public, and especially by parents during the strike. However, there were major problems both in strike strategy and the settlement itself. I write this to bring out some of both aspects for consideration and to learn from. The 2012 CTU strike had the potential to accomplish far more than it did. By choosing not to fight over school closings, the leadership undermined its stated goal: “Defend and improve our schools! Don’t close them!” What’s more, major concessions greatly enhanced management’s freedom to terminate teachers with satisfactory ratings.

This account discusses some features of the strike preparation and the settlement without going into the strike actions and how the contract was finally ratified. Educators, as part of the wider workingclass, face unending and increasing corporatization of America and capitalistinspired attacks. By sharing oft-hidden facts about the strike settlement, I hope to dispel rose-colored myths in order to assist in the pressing challenge of our days: help develop our capacity to effectively resist these corporate attacks.

Fifty years of left activism have taught me that facing hard facts is more useful than building on the sand of comforting myths. My hope is that this article contributes towards creating that resistance. And that growing, effective, working-class solidarity and resistance will itself lay the basis for the people-first, sustainable world that so many of us want.

Organizing for the Strike Vote

The CTU leadership, its staff, dedicated activists (especially in the progressive Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators [CORE]) and allies conducted a classic and creative campaign to win the strike authorization vote. They expressed long-held teacher resentment and frustration, with decades of deteriorating work conditions and no union resistance. Building on the promise of an effective fight, this leadership team developed active contract committees in hundreds of schools. Through these committees and individual efforts, they did outreach to parents, held local school-based rallies, and engaged many students around the theme “Improve our schools, don’t close them!” Facing a legal hurdle they had to win—75 percent of all members’ votes—the CTU members shocked everyone with a spectacular 92 percent (of all members) strike authorization vote in late spring of 2012.

Even before the strike began, this unprecedented and massive strike vote shocked the city’s elites and won major concessions from corporate-backed Mayor Rahm Emanuel: the CTU won 500 art and music jobs (if for only one year), forced the mayor to drop his proposal to replace teachers’ pay schedules with “merit pay,” and broke the mayor’s strategy of isolating the CTU as “just greedy and selfish teachers.”

This internal organizing campaign deserves close study; it set the stage for all the gains, including winning strong support for younger teachers—people who often see unions as conservative obstacles to educational innovation. The focus on “improve our schools” and “our kids deserve the best” set the terms of the fight, creating public support while energizing the members. The CTU leadership essentially defined the fight, taking it to the mayor by contrasting his kids’ education (in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools) with the sorely-lacking public schools. In effect, they made the fight appear to be over class privilege and fairness—a winning PR campaign that energized members and won parents’ crucial support.

Strike Contract Settlement: Hidden Defeats and Lessons

Following four days of a spectacularly supported strike with mass marches filling sections of Chicago’s downtown with striking teachers in red union t-shirts during working hours, CTU President Karen Lewis recommended that the union accept the negotiated settlement, which members eventually did. Make no mistake; there were real gains that were won before the strike, some improvements in contract language and a small raise. However, at the same time, most accounts have ignored several important concessions by the union (visit http://www.ctunet.net for contract provisions):

1) The CTU accepted student “achievement” as 25 percent of teachers’ evaluation, effective fall 2013. The contract began implementation two years before state law required it and before any state standards were set for student achievement.

2) The CTU contract stipulates that two consecutive years of acceptable evaluations shall constitute the basis for termination should management wish to do that. This further undermines what little job security remains and further opens members to school board and management bullying, intimidation and discrimination.

3) No limits were set on the mayor’s proposed closing of 50 neighborhood schools, perhaps the largest focus of the union’s outreach and public support (“Improve our schools! Don’t close them!”). This is legally a “permissible” subject of bargaining, meaning that management can and did refuse to bargain over that and the union could not legally strike over that issue. Being “permissible” also opens the door for other forces—such as parents, community groups, students, and religious and union organizations—to have intervened and pressured the school board to negotiate over the closings. The truth is that there was no CTU member education or mobilization to promote such pressure. Public relations rhetoric? Yes. Effective action? No.

“Save and improve local schools, don’t close them!” was the CTU’s theme before and during the strike. At the end of the day, there was no fight to stop the closings (49 of those schools were in fact closed in the spring of 2013 after a very weak response to the CTU-sponsored marches across the city in protest). This failure left the union and its members vulnerable to the charge that it was all about narrow selfinterest despite the successful PR rhetoric. The CTU’s refusal to prepare for this fight also left some teachers wondering if the CTU was serious about this fight.

In actuality, the mayor publicly gloated over winning his key corporate agenda in the contract: closing 49 local schools while increasing charter schools, winning the longer school day with no proportional pay raise, and tying teachers’ evaluation to student “achievement.” He was so visibly exuberant that the CTU leadership had to publicly ask him to stop gloating because that made it hard to “sell [the contract] to the members.”

“Yes, there is a class war, and my side is winning!” -Warren Buffett.

Our Alternative?

Was there another road to have taken? I think so, but that would have required a different vision and strategy. Forcing the school board and mayor to negotiate over the threatened closings would have meant facing down certain court injunctions with mass action. In fact, a local judge did issue an injunction against the strike even without such mass actions. It was withheld until the Monday following CTU President Lewis’s recommendation to accept the contract.

Preparing to actually force the closings issue would have meant preparing members for normal consequences facing unions and workers who refuse to obey court injunctions: leaders can get arrested and jailed; unions face huge fines; individual teachers can face charges, fines, and firings if they lose. Winning strikes erases these actions.

Forcing the fight to save the schools and turn the tide means serious consequences for which people must be prepared with cold facts and effective organizing to gather determined allies. Making this fight would have required winning parents, students, community groups, other unions, and wider working public support for mass direct actions like marches, strikes, and occupations to back it up and make it happen. These are examples of organizing our side in the really-existing if one-sided class war.

To make such a serious challenge to the corporate agenda and power requires, in essence, an approach that understands and acts on the common interest in quality education for the masses, not just the few. And the common threat posed by corporate agenda to working people’s jobs, pay, benefits, our environment, continuing racism and sexism, etc. In short, it requires organizing based on working-class solidarity around everyday, real-life issues.

This CTU leadership team had no such plan or vision. They never initiated discussion among the membership of what such a fight would take or the stakes and potential ramifications. With its choices, the CTU leadership rejected waging such a fight in the strike of 2012. Instead, it relied on deeply moving rhetoric, meticulous and even brilliant organizing, and carefully controlled militant tactics. Adopting a strategy of class-based organizing is no guarantee of success, but it does allow us to see how far we can go. Ultimately, we saw again the road-most-taken union strategy of limiting the fight while making and then masking major concessions. We must do better.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz

Lynd, Staughton. Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1992. Paperback, 64 pages, $15.00.

Staughton Lynd’s classic “Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below” was inspired in part by the actions of the historical IWW and has inspired a new generation of Wobblies since it was originally published in 1992. Although the attack on the labor movement had begun much earlier, by 1992 the situation was beginning to look hopeless, and Lynd, a veteran of many years of struggles, put together this short book to show that a different approach was needed if workers were to resist the onslaught of the bosses.

Lynd divides the book into four parts: two historical segments showing workerled unionism (what he calls “solidarity unionism”) in action and explaining how business unionism became the norm, and another two segments which explain his program for rebuilding the labor movement. The two primary examples he uses are about workers around Youngstown, Ohio, where workers across industries stuck together to fight wage and benefit cuts and the closing of the area’s major employers. He also looks at the origins of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, now the AFL-CIO, and how it began as a genuine expression of working-class selforganization. This was complete with a desire to implement independent labor politics as part of the political goals of these new unions, which operated with only the minimum of administration, because they were strongly based on relationships on the shop floor.

What Was Missing?

An alternative unionism is presented by Lynd—one that is not hierarchical but instead is based on representation of workers to the bosses. Instead, solidarity unionism is the essence of workers associating together to present their needs and demands to capitalists and to create communities of support and care to achieve them. Instead of being based on internationals and executive committees, the basic unit of the solidarity unionist model is the shop floor committee. These committees “may exist in a non-union shop or…may function alongside official union structure,” writes Lynd.

There are structural issues beyond how unions are organized in shops, according to Lynd. There lacks central labor bodies where workers across industries can come together to discuss their collective grievances and show solidarity for each other. While the AFL-CIO has bodies that supposedly fulfill this function, Lynd points to examples like IWW mixed locals (the precursor to our General Membership Branch) as more effective tools for promoting class-wide solidarity.

Finally, Staughton Lynd says that solidarity unionism presupposes a society beyond capitalism, a socialist society. For Lynd “socialism is the project of making economic institutions democratic.” The best way to do this is to create combative organizations with prefigured structures, ones that reject hierarchy and practice democracy. Furthermore, they go beyond the workplace and enter the everyday lives of workers and their kin.

Beyond Solidarity Unionism

“Solidarity Unionism” is an excellent place to start when thinking about what organizing workers should look like, but I believe there is a need to go beyond what Staughton Lynd has laid out. Luckily our union has a vibrant culture and some ideas on this have already come out. In particular, discussion pieces from experienced organizers like “Direct Unionism” and “Wobblyism: Revolutionary Unionism For Today” provides criticism and conversations on where we, as a union, might go with our organizing.

A strength I think that “Direct Unionism” and “Wobblyism” have in building off of the tradition of solidarity unionism is taking a position against the state and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process completely in our workplace organizing. Whereas solidarity unionism allows for use of capitalist structures like the NLRB, as long as it is not relied upon, in practice IWW campaigns that use these processes inherently become reliant on them. Something about the state is a magnet; once you are caught in its pull it is hard to get out. The much more difficult task of staying away, at the sacrifice of slower growth, may in the end be worth the wait.

The end of the book brings up another aspect where we need to broaden the conversation around how we organize, and Staughton Lynd has given us a good place to start. Lynd calls for a labor movement that fights for the working class to control society, a labor movement that specifically fights for socialism. He writes: “Socialism is the only practical alternative to capitalism. We should turn our attention to defining clearly what kind of socialism we want.” Unfortunately this often falls by the wayside due to a culture that says “don’t think, organize!” The IWW would do well to clarify what sort of socialism we are looking for, because so far, we only have the vague insinuation of “abolition of the wage system.” Where Lynd fails is in thinking of socialism as a prefigurative form of organization…that content and form are synonymous. A case study of an IWW organizing drive will show that they are not; we need to conduct political education rooted in the real experiences of working people. We need to meet people where they are, but not to the preclusion of our revolutionary aims.

By Way of Conclusion

Staughton Lynd’s “Solidarity Unionism” is an important book for the IWW and the lessons it contains should be well remembered by today’s Wobbly organizers. We should see the book as the beginning of a broader conversation about our organization, however, not as the end-allbe- all of organizing. There is a lot of work to be done to push IWW organizing into the direction of opposing mingling with the state and to take on a revolutionary political character. This process will take a lot of trial and error and hard, explicitly political conversations within our organization. The positive results of organizing the working class for the dismantlement of this society and the implementing of a new society will be worth the trouble.

PM Press will publish a second edition of “Solidarity Unionism” in the spring of 2015, with a foreword by Manny Ness to the effect that solidarity unionism is happening all over the world.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (June 2014)