Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan and union leader Sara Nelson spoke in Corvallis yesterday. Here's what I heard them say.

Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan  and Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO since 2014 spoke in Corvallis yesterday as part of a book tour publicizing Nolan's book "The Hammer." The book is described as "A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics today, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan." I attended the talks, but I have not read the book. The following notes contain some of my take-away thoughts. I want to encourage others with differing points of view to send in their comments or do some posting here or elsewhere with their take-aways.

I have often disagreed with Nolan and In These Times, the publication where I most often read what he is thinking. It's more difficult to disagree with Nelson because she gives inspirational speeches and she can draw on her considerable experience in union leadership. The Association of Flight Attendants is making great progress with her leadership, and just last week the AFA made headlines with once more leading a militant movement of flight attendants and other airline industry workers in protests in advance of union contract negotiations and increasing union organizing. In fact, both Nelson and Nolan have union organizing experience and this made their presentations especially important. At least half of the audience in Corvallis were union members. I imagine that more union members will attend their talks that are being given in Portland today.

Nolan and Nelson are syndicalists, but of a non-revolutionary sort. Syndicalism is a long-standng and difficult-to-define way of thinking about workers, unions and social change. I have intentionally provided a link to a liberal definition of the term because syndicalism is usually (and mistakenly) associated with anarchism in the United States. We have the conservative syndicalism of the building trades unions that uses forms of capitalist market-based mechanisms to build union stability and power, the traditional liberal syndicalism of the American Federation of Labor that has been focused on working-class mutual aid and integration, the industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the anarchist-revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World that is focused on overthrowing capitalism and establishing a kind of decentralized socialism. Syndicalism decenters politics in favor of formsof "workers' control," strong unions, working-class solidarity of different kinds, and forms of direct action in order to achieve goals that fall within and outside of mainstream union contract bargaining. I doubt that Nelson and Nolan think of themselves as syndicalists, but it seems to me that they land somewhere in that tradition.

Nolan was an early leader in the relatiely successful movement to unioinize workers employed in digital media. He learned some hard truths in that effort: unions are not always prepared to organize, there isn't one plan in place within organized labor to reverse union declines, and there is not always a desire among union members and leaders to organize non-union workers. He sees two choices available to unions as we think through how to reverse the years of decline and take on the widespread economic inequality that the decline of union membership has brought on. Either we work on reforming government and social policies or we rely on workers leading mass organizing campaigns. Nolan did not say this---and this may be covered in his book---but it seems that he's thinking of this as an either/or proposition while others, myself included, think that this is an "and" proposition. He' right when he says that "Unions have a great opportunity---we just need to seize it," but he's less clear when he talks about "giving workers their power back."

"The Hammer" apparently features Sara Nelson, although it sounds as if the book is also built around case studies of union organizing campaigns and activism. We cycle through prescriptions on how to rebuild unions every few years. Awhile back it was Andy Stern, a few years ago it was Jane McAlevey, and it's also been Joe Burns and a few others. Kim Kelly is an emerging voice. But some of the best voices have either been marginalized or have to fight for the mcrophone in order to be heard. I'm thinking of Frank Emspak and Bill Fletcher, Jr. here. In any case, the talks in Corvalis became a kind of Nolan-Nelson conversation or interview.

Photo from Getty Images and AFA-CWA.

Nelson knows how to move a room. She trained as an educator and she has been a guest lecturer in many universities and she never turns down an interview. She understands how workers think and what moves workers to act. I have never heard her speak without her going to her own and other's emotions. Corvallis is her home town and she had a friendly audience to work with.

Nelson has a story that most of us can identify with even if we did not experience what she did during 9/11 and in the period immediately following the terrorist attacks. She lost friends and union siblings when the towers in New York were hit, and airline industry greed and a helpful intervention by Senator Ted Kennedy helped push her to taking a more active role in her union. Nelson could build on growing up in a working-class family in Corvallis and having already achieved some level of social success as she constructed both her union leadership and her political consciousness. She pointed out that "There is not incredible inequality in Oregon as there is in other places," and she could rightly highlight the democratic advances that we have won here, as a way of talking about rising inequality and the need for union organizing.

Nelson referred to leadership in the airline industry as "crisis capitalists" and talked about how 9/11 was used by these industry leaders to redefine work in the airline industry. This was her "real schooling," she said, and she used that to point out the barbarity of capitalism and point to how high union density in the airline industry has forced the companies to appear as progressive entities and how this, in turn,  brought them into conflict with the Trump administration. Effective union leadership at any level needs to be able to tell such a story and give real-life examples. Where Nelson stumbles, I think, is when she says "The idea that we're a divided nation is utter baloney" after telling her story. It's precisely the barbarity of capitalism that she describes that divides us. 

From that Nelson argues that union leadership must be results-oriented. She goes on to say that union members want more money and better union contracts, but that we also want a voice at the table. It is at this point where some of the other limitations in her thinking become apparent, I think. She's correct in pointing out that the decline in union power and presence has meant a decline in participation by working-class people in politics, but she is so issue-oriented that she believes that greater union power will somehow "balance out" what happens in politics. Union organizing then becomes the means to check what she acknowledges is a barbaric system and not replace it with something else. 

For his part, Nolan claims tht ninety percent of people can't or won't talk union because what we're doing is not relevant to them. He wants to reframe what politics means, and he seems to want polititicized strikes that are not tied to political parties and yet somehow produce working-class political power. I see a contradiction in how Nolan thinks of strikes and possible strike outcomes, but I am more interested in how Nolan sees us moving from a situation in which masses of workers reject us to a situation in which those workers are willing to join strikes that become politicized in positive ways. He cites the Las Vegas culinary workers  as a model, but I'm not sure that this is a good example for him to use in making his case.

Image from In These Times.

   

Nelson and Nolan take on some other tough issues. They're opposed to unions endorsing Republicans, even those who claim to support union programs, and Nelson made at least one comment indicating that she supports President Biden and said that she thinks Representative Katie Porter is what a candidate should look like and be. They're taking on union leaders and members who can't visualize us organizing ten million new members and they're holding out for the kinds of sizeable investments that are needed to make this organizing possible. They reject American Compass and that attempt by the right-wing to pose as being pro-labor. Nelson well understands how the current popularity that unions have has to be joined to action, but not everyone on our side will agree on what "action" means or is willing to do what that entails. They support the call for a ceasefire in Palestine/Israel and see this as a labor issue. On the other hand, they're not really rooted in the traditional left-wing of the labor movement. They reject forming a labor party on the grounds that that is divisive and they're cautious about general strikes.

But where are Nolan and Nelson going here? They understand that a working-class movement can be built from common working-class interests and through action aimed at winning positive results. They get that using union power builds union power. Nelson gets the importance of building rank-and-file leadership and moving every valid working-class issue into the mainstream of the labor movement. She and Nolan do not seem to think that the AFL-CIO can build such a movement. They take the historic labor concept of "an injury to one is an injury to all" to its logical and broad conclusions. The AFA lives this out by actualizing women's union leadership, by requiring leadership to put in blocks of time working with others not in the AFA, and by engaging in organizing that may double the union's ranks if it is successful. Nelson accepts that new members mean changes in unions.   

Nelson and Nolan both highighted a need for non-profits to take the lead in organizing workers, and Nelson is engaged with Unioin Now. She spoke of this as a coalition of non-profits supporting one another in organizing, but it was not made clear where the large amounts of money needed for mass organizing will come from or what interests have to be negotiated in order to get and use that money. Nolan mentioned using college students and leveraging government funding in order to carry on organizing. All of that is intriguing, but it means that unions as we know them will disappear, it raises many questions about class interests (will wealthy people and government really pay for union organizing?), and it leaves alone the questions of how we convince our union siblings that new union organizing benefits all of us and how anyone---unions, non-profits or something else---can organize in industries or markets that they don't know. It's a fact, I think, that it takes unions about a decade to learn the dynamics of every new industry they seek to organize, so why would non-profits have an easier time of it? Missing from the talks were points about the special role of Black labor in organizing and leadership, a troubling omission. And what happens if Nolan and Nelson lead critical numbers towards non-profits and another kind of labor movement and we have a repeat of the Change to Win disaster?

I still disagree with Nolan on many things, and I found reason to disagree with some of what Nelson had to say, but I found it more difficult to articulate my disagreements as I listened to them. They're raising real issues.

Does anyone want to read "The Hammer" as part of a group?

Harlan County, Kentucky miners organizing in 1939.

   

The opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of the Marion-Polk-Yamhill Central Labor Chapter or the Oregon AFL-CIO.