Debate on 'direct unionism'

Thanks for posting these up (Juan, I presume).

Yeah, cheers.. I'm feeling a bit ill and just read it all. Really good stuff!

Cool stuff, might be worth adding the original paper up there too?

http://libcom.org/library/direct-unionism-discussion-paper-09052011

Just wanted to say thanks to Juan for getting the initial ball rolling of conversation in print about the direct unionism discussion paper and Chili for pushing folk to write letters on this. Aside from the contents of the debate, I've been pleased to see back and forth about vision and values in the Industrial Worker like this.

so i always found trying to follow this debate was very hard because how this was formatted, so i'm not sure if i ever read all of these pieces even. so here they all are in order:

https://libcom.org/blog/response-direct-unionism-discussion-paper-part-1-2-15052011
https://libcom.org/blog/response-direct-unionism-discussion-paper-part-2-2-20052011
https://libcom.org/library/response-%E2%80%9Cdirect-unionism-discussion-paper%E2%80%9D
https://libcom.org/library/counterpoint-response-juan-conatz%E2%80%99s-take-%E2%80%9Cdirect-unionism%E2%80%9D
https://libcom.org/library/response-critique-%E2%80%9Cdirect-unionism%E2%80%9D
https://libcom.org/library/contracts-iww
https://libcom.org/library/debate-collective-bargaining-iww
https://libcom.org/library/letter-staughton-lynd-concerning-direct-unionism
https://libcom.org/library/direct-unionism-practice-undermining-service-industry-barriers-worker-solidarity
https://libcom.org/blog/developing-iww%E2%80%99s-direct-unionism-politics-07032013
https://libcom.org/library/direct-unionism

Juan Conatz

Hmm. Actually I'm pretty sure the way this is organized is all in order. I'll check later.

EDIT: yeah, Klas, the order that it is in is the correct one and based off when each article was published or posted. Your order is incorrect as it changes the order of Lynd's reply (doesn't really make a difference either way) and puts my final reply before John O'Reilly's, even though I refer to his.

okay weird. i also think maybe not all the articles are actually linked. hmm. well good to know. :D

Juan Conatz

FYI, self-deleted a comment I made. Looks like a reply by syndicalist was deleted along with it. Sorry about that.

NP. It was only relative to the OP so no sweat.

Appreciate your thoughts Juan.

Personally I don't think there was ever a generalized adoption of the methods and program of "Direct Unionism".

There has prevailed either informalist solidarity unionism or this contractualism, as detailed in the "Wobblyism" piece (radical service unionism.)

Too many campaigns focus just on single shops and going public. It's an old rut. That was not the prescription of Direct Unionism or the Wobblyism model that clearly stated it wanted to focus on building capacity for direct action industrial networks with clear strategic targets around supply chains etc.

Do I think Direct Unionism and Wobblyism have faults? Certainly there is room for improvement. In my experience trying to practice them, I've realized we need a clearer preparation and administration of the model. There are lots of things to consider. What are the most typical issues common in workplaces we can be prepared as worker organizers to agitate around. What are the most successful examples of direct actions we can perform without going public? Do you have a strong institution in your local GMB or IUB backing your organizing? (This could mean different things to different people, but I'm not opposed to stipend organizing staff). Direct Unionism was released to the world remember as a half finished draft.

You have to remember that Direct Unionism and Wobblyism did not propose to go public or tackle bigger demands like wage increases, etc unless the full capacity of industrial networks had been achieved in a sustained way.

This hasn't really been adopted in a wide spread way. The worst light we can look at things is at the campaigns run by people who proposed these models. Did they themselves follow them? Did they take short cuts?

I'll add that there may be merit to your claim that the failure of the DUists to fulfill their model may have a half truth to it. As I say above the model I don't think was ever generalized, and the model could be developed and fleshed out further IMHO.

Juan,

A lot of that stuff is what I've been getting at the past few years and what inspired the IU caucus (though that was also partly inspired by a desire to form some counter weight to May 1st types, and people sympathetic to their outlook).

Direct Unionism doesn't work. Contractualism has pitfalls, but they aren't unavoidable. Employing outsiders can occur in line with democratic and wobbly principles. If what we want is an educated, militant, and action oriented labor movement, we can build it. But it requires a lot of resources to educate them; a lot of resources and labor to sustain the structure of the organization, and a lot of labor and resources to maintain gains wrenched from bosses.

We don't have to have union-bosses; but bureaucracy is a necessary evil. Crucially we have to install democratic rules and norms for checking any outsized influence of a bureaucracy; wages set at the median income of the membership; term limits; recallability and the like.

I do think the DU logic runs through the spirit of the contemporary IWW and the OT program. It's the IWWs contemporary 'common sense.' It precipitated the current slide toward ambulance chasing, the abandonment of anything like industrial programs, and the tendency toward activism.

Organizing campaigns are not planned by experienced people strategically to grow the union; they're pursued ad hoc by whatever some member in some branch is able to strongarm/convince locals is a good (often terrible) idea. Even if well intentioned. The OT promotes this because it spreads the basic skills for organizing while the union does nothing to try and control the activity done under it's name by some collective authority. It's irresponsible and unaccountable and a sad parody of actual democracy and collective decision making. The right word is local autonomy. Local autonomy is exactly the kind of think the IWW was founded to combat; the local autonomy of myriad different craft unions to scab and undermine eachother.

We need to look at other successful unions seriously (like the NNU, UE, ILWU) and less promoted campaigns in our own history that show the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives we haven't yet employed on a wide scale.

Any way, my 2 cents.

I call BS. Contractualism and just stealing the labor organizing playbooks that activists learned from flirting with the AFL-CIO, etc created ambulance chasing, lack of industrial organizing, etc. All of this predated the OTC and the DU type politics.

Honestly both Juan and Pennoid here are just speaking to their own personal / regional experiences of failure. Most of the campaigns never pursued vigorously the type of approach advocated by DU if you really look at how it was laid out. Just a lot of the same old same old we all know is bad in the IWW. Also Juan just quit, so take what he has with a grain of salt. He always writes a screed on here after leaving groups. Did this after leaving the WSA with his "liquidationism" hit piece on political organizations.

Y'all are entitled to your opinions of course, but I just think you miss the fact that the majority of the union never adopted direct unionism. Read enough accounts of campaigns like JJWU, Chicago Lake, SWU, etc and you see it again and again that they just go for legalistic route and flashy "direct actions" a la activism not actual direct action unionism. I say this fairly confidently as having spent the last month collecting organizing stories from the unions campaigns.

give examples of specific campaigns that fully adopted DU being a failure Juan, you just have a bone to pick.

what's your alternative?

This really just shows an internal IWW culture that's incapable of moving forward and developing better strategies because it isn't open to critique and has no way to gauge failure.

If Juan had any intention of showing some leadership he'd share what he thinks is a better set of methods and ideas. I don't always agree with Pennoid on everything but I still joined Industrial Unionists because at least it tried to put forward a political alternative.

It's really interesting to see all the Direct Unionism stuff come up after all these years.

So, I think there're a couple of things to keep in mind:

1) To echo Juan, at least for those of us who wrote it, Direct Unionism was never a program to be implemented. It was, as it says, a discussion paper. As far as its impact, it seems like it fed back into a wider solidarity unionist current within the union. I wouldn't say the release of the Direct Unionism was a particular watershed moment in the IWW - for good or for bad.

2) "Join the IWW, see the world, get fired".

Yeah, this is a problem in the IWW, but I'm not sure it's a problem specific to the IWW or to solidarity or direct unionist organizing model. I'd venture that, in 2018, just about all union campaigns have firings. The difference is that in the IWW throws up pickets, has public actions, and shouts about it online. Most other unions take up legal recourse in a much quieter way and are willing to settle in a way that the IWW isn't.

3) I think it's worth considering the Stardust Family United is this for a number of reasons.

One, this was a group of workers who consciously and explicitly adopted a solidarity unionist model - and they said as much. And, yeah, there were mass firings. Yeah, there was legal backup. But there were significant gains and all the fired workers were eventually reinstated. The shop has gone quiet for the moment (at least publicly), but if the goal of workplace organizing is to develop workplace militancy and establish long-term organizers, that campaign was a success.

Two, mistakes were made in that campaign. Mistakes will be made in any campaign. A lot of them - at least from my perspective - come from the fact that the IWW and the solidarity unionist model in particular seeks to ensure the workers on the ground always have the final say on decisions in terms of strategy.

I was involved in that campaign and when you're dealing with a people in the heat of the struggle - especially their first dispute and especially in a hot shop - they're going to act in a less deliberative way than those of us who are more experienced/who have an outside perspective might counsel, for example.

I don't think contracts/direct unionism/some other model can fix that. So I guess what I'm saying is that we do have to separate form from content and make sure that we don't conflate one with the other when we approach these conversations.

Not really my place to say anything here, but feel compelled to say one thing.

The question of firings during any workplace campaign is both real and serious. I have been in non-IWW where firings and suspensions have occurred. This can happen in any campaign or struggle. And happens even in weakly organized workplaces as well.

That said, if a campaign is run as a conscious suicide mission, then there's something wrong with the campaign.

DP

The problem as I see it Just, and I tried to lay it out in past writings, is that effective utilization of staff requires sinking a lot of money into it; more than a branch of even 100 members could afford. That means uniting the organization as a whole around a strategy and implementation. I haven't followed it closely and maybe I'm wrong, but I'm still getting emails about trying to approve a stipend for a campaign that amounted to less than 1/5 an annual salary at a living wage that the organizers are planning to distribute across three organizers.

So they want to pay organizers for.... 1 month? What union campaign only takes one month to organize?

I don't advocate a staff driven model. I've consistently argued against it. I've argued that the existing of staff isnt enough to define a campaign as staff-driven. The UAW campaign at Nissan was clearly staff driven, didn't develop Rand and file leaders, didn't engage in shop actions, and failed.

The point is that particular staff roles can act as a catalyst to help remove barriers to action for workers; can help us tackle tasks of considerable scale, can stabilize and routinize our bureaucracy (and help minimize it and keep it accountable).

The proof is in the pudding; check the NNU, check the UE, check the IWW in it's heyday, check the MESA or any of the cios left led unions in the past.

Oh I just saw your other post, I too think there is a mix of personalities and informalities that gets in the way. It makes it so that there is no sense of people forging agreement *formally* to go forward with a plan or project in a lot of cases, let alone trying to do one using resources from across the union.

Juan Conatz

I've said my piece on it. Take it or leave it. You seem pretty emotionally invested in this and are responding pretty angrily.

For what it's worth, I'm not the one with the answers, as I'm on my way out as far as spending personal time on leftist efforts. But I don't think any current grouping in the IWW is capable of resolving these issues. It's going to take new people, of which there are always plenty due to the high turnover rate in the organization, to really figure this stuff out without the dead weight and exhausted social capital of older members whose identity is intimately intertwined with specific organizing styles.

So really you just have nothing to offer the working class? Or is it don't organize? Calling a woman who disagrees with you emotional... Classy.

It's too bad that this discussion has become so acrimonious, because i have found it very interesting and neccessary.

I've had experiences with both DU-style campaigns and staff-driven campaigns. I think that the post-mortem of the recent IWW organizing campaigns is needed, and it is good to see the level of honesty present here. Whether the campaigns have or have not followed the model correctly isn't particularly relevant, compared to talking about what actually happened. A lot of what has been said about the DU-style campaigns resonates with my experiences - the unstrategic choice of targets, the effects of firings, and the problems of hot shops. Juan, it is tough to hear what you say about the cynical redefinition of goals, but I do think that you have a point, and I'm sure I've said those very things before.

I could certainly see how having staff could help with IWW campaigns. The material gains that were won through the campaign that I worked on are real, but after we got the contract, the shopfloor committee has slowly dissolved over time, and much less time has been spent cultivating stewards by the staff. The company is nibbling at the edges of the contract everyday - I just found out that my old job classification is going to be abolished, and the existing employees are going to be slotted into a new position, with a massive pay cut, like tens of thousands a year. The response from the union? There's not much to do, except organize new shops and build more power on the city level. That answer rings hollow, but that is position that the mainstream unions find themselves in, which is expand or die, and most aren't expanding. This DU vs staff-driven debate at times seems like it is missing deeper issues regarding organizing in the US than whether to pay someone to do housevisits or not.

I'm curious where the rosy perception of NNU has come from; they strike me as very similar to the otber new organzing style unions, and they aren't exactly batting 1.000. I know the least about what UE is up to, and I'm curious about what new organizing ILWU is engaging in.

I hesitate to get into this because it's heated and I like everyone involved and I'm inactive at this point so I don't feel entitled an opinion, but for whatever it's worth...

I think stuff is likely to go better in IWW organizing if it's not talked about in terms of discrete models of organizing and instead is just addressed as much as possible in terms of practical local needs and efforts to meet those needs. Can a campaign use a staff member and is that affordable? Cool, then go for it. I think the reality is going to be that the IWW's going to rely on massive amounts of volunteer time for the foreseeable future. It's also the reality that all unions in the US also do so, though other unions do have a lot more staff.

Sort of related I think one of the major defects of the original discussion paper is that it talks in terms of specific approaches to unionism ('direct' vs other) and worse in terms of specific identities of members ('direct unionists'). I started to notice this part way through the writing of it and don't remember if I ever raised it. I think that kind of spirit is a bad one that fosters divisions. I also think that kind of spirit tends to color assessments of campaign successes and failures. I think that's to some extent unavoidable - members care what other members think of them, resources are scarce, so people are hesitant to report when they used resources in ways that didn't succeed (like hiring staff and having it not work out) or when they did stuff that caused problems for other people (like when they got people fired etc). That's amplified when it becomes a thing like 'we need this effort to help in our conflict with the other kind of IWWs.'

Also, I think no one has any of this figured out. That's why union density in the US continues to decline. My hunch is that most stuff by most unions, and absolutely the IWW, will continue to fail in its short term objectives over when looked at over a period of, say, five years. I think for the time being the organization will be stuck with trying to see what are more and less preferable failures, and have to continue experimenting.

$14,000 a month? Hats off to that monthly hustle. I didn't realize that was possible.

I guess if we got those people to donate to an organizing campaign we'd be better off. Is that raised through a space committee? Monthly or annual canvassing? A wealthy donor or two? Or signing enough people up for a monthly payment that's automated?