Unionists in the United States have finally reached consensus on one thing:  the crucial importance of organizing the unorganized.  It has to be done; the future of not only the AFL-CIO but the entire working class is at stake.  The much more difficult question is, How is it to be done?  Journalists and scholars can theorize about perfect models of organizing and compile “best practices” studies of unions that win difficult campaigns.  But what does it mean for individuals and organizations on the ground?

A long-standing debate rages between those who advocate grassroots, rank-and-file-based union organizing methods—the bottom-up model—versus the centralized, staff-driven, top-down practices of most unions in the United States and in other parts of the world.   On the side of “union democracy” and against carpetbagger organizers and centralized staff-based efforts are Steve Early, Stanley Aronowitz, Kim Moody, and many other progressive writers and activists.  On the other side are most actual unions.   Although flying in outside agitators is costly, inefficient, and not always successful, most unions continue to rely on staff organizers rather than leaving campaigns to the rank and file.  So within the labor movement and among observers, strong disagreements continue to swirl around which model of organizing is best.

It is not enough to come up with a perfect theory or vision of organizing, if that vision does not translate into victories and power for working people in their factories, offices, and workplaces.   So in order to judge the dispute around organizing models, we looked at several models in practice, operating in real unions at the beginning of this millennium.  The evidence from these campaigns demonstrates that most of the debates are missing the real issues in organizing.  Among unions who are actively and successfully organizing, internally and externally, none uses a pure version of any model.  Rather, they use a combination of tactics including central staff, volunteer organizers (rank-and-file workers from that workplace and elsewhere), outsiders and insiders, part-time and full-time, young and old, in any combination that works. 

What is important, we argue, is not so much who the organizers are—their insider status, who pays their salary, or even their race and gender—but the strategies and goals that define their organizing.  Leaders who can cultivate leadership from within the rank and file, who can build workers’ confidence and challenge them to do what they have not done before and don’t feel quite comfortable doing, who can teach through action the skills that people need in order to wield collective power—these leaders are always the most effective and, ultimately, the most democratic organizers. 

In this essay, we examine several cases of on-the-ground organizing, focusing primarily on the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), in different regions of the United States.  These are two unions renowned for labor militance and rank-and-file activism.  By comparing the theory of grassroots democracy with real unions in real workplaces, we can assess what is most likely to make organizing effective.

UNITE in the South

When she was eighteen years old, Luvernel Clark went to work at AlliedSignal Inc., a huge multinational conglomerate with businesses in aerospace, automotive, and chemical products.  Over 3,000 people worked with her in the Knoxville plant in 1971, most of them earning $1.25 per hour, the minimum wage at the time.  “I thought that was big money,” she says.  

Both she and her husband had found their jobs through the Urban League, and she immediately felt the racism of managers and supervisors who called her names.  “They knew the reason I got the job anyway was ‘cause they had to hire so many blacks.”  Luvernel was not raised to be a troublemaker, and for many years she let it go.  “I would always sit back and be real quiet.  And I just let everybody walk all over the top of me.”  She worked hard for eleven years, believing the company would do what was best for her, until in 1982 she was temporarily laid off.  Suddenly, her perspective changed.  “I figured nobody’s gonna fight for me like me.  So that’s when I got involved with the union.” 

The union at Luvernel’s plant was the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), a predecessor of UNITE.  The Southern Regional Joint Board has been notorious for its aggressive organizing efforts in the South.  (Its longtime regional director, Bruce Raynor, became president of the International Union in 2001.)  In the 1980s and 1990s, most unions had abandoned the southeastern states as “unorganizable.” 

Under Raynor’s leadership, ACTWU and then UNITE took up the challenge.  Although the textile and apparel industry in the region was decimated during this time, the union was able to bring in thousands of new members.  During the first two years of John Sweeney’s presidency of the AFL-CIO, this region of UNITE won sixteen organizing drives, more than most unions won in the entire country.

 UNITE succeeded through a range of tactics and strategies.  Approximately 70 percent of its southern staff are ex-rank-and-file members, while 30 percent come from other backgrounds.  While the union is known for its efforts to involve rank-and-file members in organizing drives, it is also known as the union that perfected the “blitz,” in which a large group of organizers  (in UNITE’s case, a mixture of rank and filers and outside staff)  kick off the campaign with intensive house visits to sign up a majority of workers.  The union relies on members to work as volunteers, and it spends large sums of money every year to pay lost time to workers who take leaves to work on union business. 

But it also spends money on what Steve Early calls “mobile organizers”—ex-college students who, having been through the Organizing Institute or other training programs, “parachute in” to lead or colead campaigns all over the region.  Early warns that a union’s reliance on outsiders “goes hand-in-hand with underutilization of workers themselves, both organized and unorganized.  It avoids the hard, politically challenging work of creating a new organizing culture, rooted in local unions and their communities.  It also perpetuates the technocratic notion that the ‘leadership’ of union professionals is essential to reviving labor’s fortunes in organizing.”[1]  But UNITE’s experience in the South, and the experience of the ILWU below, contradict Early’s argument.  A group of mobile organizers worked closely with rank and filers to develop leadership, militance, and solidarity. 

In Luvernel Clark’s case, the union staff recognized in a tiny, quiet, African-American woman the potential to become an activist and a leader.  So within only a few months of joining the union, Luvernel found herself many miles away from home, working as a volunteer organizer at a nonunion plant called Tennessee Woolen Mills, in Lebanon, Tennessee.  She was gone from home for a month at first, and then she went back to the Lebanon factory for weeks on end.  Luvernel was nervous and skeptical that she would be any good in this new role, because she had always seen herself as a shy person.  But the union offered her a new role.  “And they kept me busy doing stuff that made a difference.  I tell them, I am grateful to them to this day.”

The workers she met at Tennessee Woolen Mills were very different from her friends at AlliedSignal.  The Allied plant was full of young people, working at minimum-wage jobs until they were ready to move on.  The much older workforce at the Woolen Mills “had been at this company forever.  And I mean, they really cared about keeping their jobs. . . .  They really could appreciate it.”  Unlike her friends in Knoxville, the workers Luvernel met in Lebanon, both white and African-American, wanted to fight for their company and their job security. 

It wasn’t easy to go into a new town and work long hours organizing strangers twice her age.  “I had to learn how to do something that I never knew I could do in my life.  And that’s going and knocking on a stranger’s door and just start yakking off at the mouth about the union.”  She was always coupled with a staff organizer. “When I started going on the first campaign, that was the first time I’d ever done anything like that.  I thought, I’m gonna be scared to death.  But I went out with this guy [from the International Union staff].  Well, once you got in the house and started talking to them, I mean, it just seemed like it just came.  Just talk.  They wanted to know what went on in my plant, how we do stuff like that, and that kind of stuff I was able to tell them.” 

To the workers she organized, Luvernel’s status as a rank-and-file member made a world of difference.  They were afraid and unfamiliar with unions, and she could provide reassurance.  At the same time, Luvernel relied on the staff for guidance, support, and direction.  “We never went by ourself.  It was a good thing, because in some cases they would get real nasty with you, so you would have to learn how to cope with it, and say thank you and go on.  It is rough.”  Now, she says, “I’m tough at it.” 

Luvernel made house visits in the evenings and on weekends, and she met with workers on off-shifts during the day, working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, to convince workers to join the union and to become part of the organizing committee.  She worked closely with union staff, following their strategies and instructions.  Years later, when she had become a shop steward, sergeant-at-arms, local vice president, and then local president, she still relied heavily on union staff. 

Was Luvernel Clark a rank-and-file activist or an outside carpetbagger?  She came to the campaign as a rank-and-file worker, as a volunteer organizer.  But while she was organizing Tennessee Woolen Mills, her salary was paid by the international union (or the regional joint board).  Moreover, she was clearly an outsider in Lebanon, Tennessee.  She was a young black woman from a Knoxville automotive factory, organizing older mill workers in a small town near Nashville.

Luvernel feels strongly that her identity is not a factor in organizing.  After the Tennessee Woolen Mills workers won their campaign, Luvernel learned that ACTWU had begun an organizing campaign at Lincoln Brass.  Lincoln was only thirty-five miles from Knoxville, and when Luvernel heard about the drive she wondered why the union had not asked her to be a volunteer organizer.  “They wouldn’t let me work on the campaign, because there was no blacks that worked in the plant,” she says.  Union staff felt she would not be effective with a rural, all-white workforce.  

Luvernel felt otherwise.  “I went on my own time, and I went and helped them.  And we all became the best of friends.  I mean, we had to prove a point to the union that they couldn’t keep us from doing this.  And we really did. . . .  I wasn’t even afraid to go to their house.  Because I had to make a point.”  Luvernel believed she had learned from her involvement with the union that she couldn’t let her race hold her back, and so she spent her free evenings and weekends organizing Lincoln Brass.  “I had to prove this to them.  I think that they were trying to protect me, but I didn’t need that protection.  I’m not afraid.” 

And the Lincoln Brass workers, victorious in their union drive, were not afraid of her.  Luvernel’s experience argues against the idea that the race, ethnicity, age, and gender of organizers has been a major barrier to successful organizing.

Luvernel’s role as a rank-and-file organizer, somewhere between grassroots organizer and parachuted-in outsider, was effective with unorganized workers.  Almost all the campaigns she worked on were successful, which is remarkable in the South or anywhere in the 1990s.  Her organizing experience also allowed her to transform her own local.  “I’d go back and I’d tell them.  They’d be fussing and I’d say, well, you ought to work at a plant where they don’t have a union.  I mean they need to go out and see.”  Her local’s experience, and UNITE’s in general, substantiates Bill Fletcher and Richard Hurd’s research findings that locals that commit time and resources to external organizing also show the strongest internal organization and sense of solidarity.[2] 

Luvernel’s story is more typical than extraordinary.  In all of its major organizing drives in the South, and most of the minor ones, UNITE uses a combination of mobile organizers and rank-and-file volunteers.  Its success has depended upon the hard work and accessibility of members, but equally upon the skills and energy of staff members. 

The ILWU in Hawaii

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is known throughout the world for its remarkable history of rank-and-file leadership and militance.  In Hawaii, the ILWU is something like the national union.  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, with dramatic strikes on the docks and in the fields, the ILWU broke the backs of the white oligarchy who had maintained a near-feudal labor system for one hundred years.  Hawaiian school children grow up learning how the "local" population of native Hawaiian and Asian-immigrant workers overthrew the white elite, through the ILWU. 

For fifty years, the ILWU has maintained one of the most politically progressive platforms of any international.  The union has also sustained a rare degree of internal democracy.  All leadership positions—local officers, executive board, all business

agents—are elected by the members. Democratic processes encourage the workers to take ownership of the union, and a system of regular elections prevents the worst kind of nepotism or political power plays. 

But measured against the rhetoric of union democracy advocates, the ILWU’s experience might be disappointing.  For it shows that democratic process, in and of itself, does not produce a mobilized membership.  By the end of the 1990s, Hawaiian unions were in a situation reminiscent of the Northeast and Midwest in the 1970s.  Union density was still high on the islands, relative to the mainland. 

In the tourism industry, the higher-priced hotels were heavily unionized in Hawaii.  But union leaders had grown accustomed to negotiating from a position of relative strength.  Decent wages and benefits were maintained without member militance or direct action, and, as a consequence, the membership had grown more and more demobilized.  The ILWU had not led a hotel strike in thirty years.  The union's ability to pressure employers waned, and so did the union's political clout. 

In the late 1990s, employers became more antagonistic, at last importing to Hawaii the aggressive antiunion tactics that prevailed on the mainland.  Hotels began to demand concessions in wages and benefits, and managers increased workloads.  Contract violations were rampant.  Democratic processes did not help.  Participation in union elections was below 25 percent.  Business agents were most often elected on the basis of name recognition or ethnic identification.  Compared to unions like the Carpenters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), or UNITE, which have pushed organizing through top-down mandate, “changing to organize” was more difficult in a democratic union.

Confronted with this situation, ILWU Local 142 President Bo Lapenia and other officers set out to benefit from mainland unions’ hard-won techniques for rebuilding member militance and identifying new sources of pressure on recalcitrant employers.  In order to implement new tactics, union leadership had to reach outside its own ranks, for several reasons.  First, the union simply lacked experience with large-scale comprehensive campaigns combining corporate strategies with aggressive member mobilization.  Wisely, local 142 leadership sought the benefit of others’ experience.  Internal political dynamics provided the second reason.  In a union where all leadership positions are elected, anyone undertaking mass mobilization may be suspected of trying to boost their own position within the union.  Finally, the whole campaign could turn out to be a failure.  The union leadership preferred to hire a dispensable outsider who could take the blame for disasters.

The leaders of this campaign, Gordon Lafer and Rachel Kirtner, were as “outside” as anyone could be.  Parachuted in from Eugene, Oregon, they were not from the union, or the industry, or Hawaii, or the right ethnicity.  Like all such organizers, in order to be effective, they had to learn a lot about the community, the workers, their jobs, and their culture. 

Management regularly criticized the role of outside organizers.  "Mainland agitators are here to cause trouble," they charged.  "They don't care about you—they'll force you into a destructive confrontation, and we [the family of management and workers] will be left behind to pick up the pieces."  This assertion has a long history in American labor relations, where organizers affiliated with national trade unions are characterized as outside agitators, even when they are rank-and-file activists.  Why do companies focus so much energy trying to divide workers from outside organizers?  For the same reasons that unions bring them in: because they provide new tools and resources for attacking the company and mobilizing members, and they generate more pressure on management.  Anything that antiunion lawyers attack so passionately—and outside organizers are a constant target—must be vital to the labor movement.

When they are effective, outside organizers help build a strong and inclusive rank-and-file leadership that remains long after the outsiders have gone.  Of course, there are plenty of examples of unproductive or arrogant outsiders who did not include workers, or offended members with their attitudes.  But insiders can be equally offensive, exclusive, and ineffective.  Tapping experienced leaders from other campaigns remains an important union strategy. 

In the ILWU campaign, the outside organizers hired four rank-and-file members as full-time organizers, with the dual goal of winning the campaign and developing future leaders.  Their training included a three-day Organizing Institute session on the mainland.  But classroom training was not sufficient.  As labor educators, we have taught many such classes to rank-and-file members.  After the course is over, these workers often go back to locals with no ongoing organizing program and no effective leadership for a campaign.

All organizers know that a beginner, on her own, faces a thousand different points at which the whole organizing effort can break down.  Even the best intentioned, talented workers run into questions they don't know how to answer, grievances they don't know how to organize around, aggressive and intimidating managers, apathetic members.  Without an effective lead organizer to guide them through these roadblocks, classes are useless.  Worse, rank-and-file organizers who try to make change on their own are most likely to burn out and become cynical and bitter, turning their disappointment toward their union, their co-workers, even their friends. 

Many of the skills we teach in organizing classes can't really sink in, except in practice.  We can explain how to map a workplace and build a committee, how to identify natural leaders and turn them from antiunion to pro, or how to take a grievance and build a minicampaign around it.  But most of this means nothing until people experience it themselves. 

This explains the recent shift, both in the Organizing Institute itself and in many affiliates’ leadership development programs, away from simple organizer training and toward an emphasis on mentoring.[3]  Unions place new organizers on campaigns to learn from mentors.  And effective locals are lending experienced staff to locals trying to shift to an organizing model, to help their staff learn what organizing means, on the ground.  Teaching people to act—teaching people while they act—is the job of leaders. 

Organizing essentials can only be learned authentically through experience, and this experience usually comes in the context of an intensive campaign.  In the ILWU, it took the best rank-and-file organizers at least six months on the job before some of the basics of organizing sank in:  what kind of organizing would be required to get twenty people to a meeting; who were the natural leaders to cultivate; how to build people's self-confidence; how to hold rank-and-file committees responsible for organizing goals without making them feel micromanaged; how to write a petition and leaflet; how to hold meetings with reporters and politicians; how to get workers to turn out for someone else's picket line. 

The outcome of the ILWU hotel campaign was largely successful on both counts.  After a year-long struggle, workers won an excellent contract with the most antiunion hotel in Maui.  They improved their working conditions and raised the floor of industry wage levels, setting the standard for future negotiations.  The fight at one hotel quelled the belligerence of other hotel owners.  And a large number of both elected and rank-and-file leaders exported militant tactics to other worksites.  Within the tourism industry and in other industries represented by the ILWU, the union worked toward member mobilization and corporate leverage.  While the tourism industry crash after the World Trade Center attack dampened bargaining opportunities, there is no question that the campaign worked, both to train a small number of rank-and-file staff and to disseminate support for new campaign strategies in other parts of the union.

The Role of Leadership

Effective and progressive trade unionists ultimately share the same goal.  They all want to bring forward rank-and-file leadership to run their own locals and future organizing campaigns.  But how do they do it?  How can successes be replicated in other unions? 

One thing missing from most debates over organizing models is the role of union leaders.  When John Wilhelm, now the president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), was the lead organizer among the clerical workers at Yale University in 1984, he created one of the most democratic union structures imaginable.  The union worked for almost two years “just talking,” building a rank-and-file organizing committee that consisted of 400 workers, before even distributing membership cards.  The committee included one organizer for every five workers, from every department and work group at Yale.  About 150 rank-and-file leaders assumed additional responsibility on the steering committee, and over 50 joined the union staff.  Every major decision was first discussed in small groups throughout the campus.  Molly Ladd-Taylor characterizes the union’s bottom-up, democratic strategy as feminist, arguing that it gave the women workers the collective strength to win their demands.[4]  Local 34’s strike and eventual contract victory are often used as a classic example of democratic union building, and John Wilhelm is one of the most pro-organizing, progressive union leaders nationally. 

But with Wilhelm, as with Luvernel Clark, it is hard to determine whether he is an insider or an outsider.  On one hand, he had been working with the blue-collar workers as their business agent for many years.  On the other hand, he was a white man and a Yale graduate, leading a group that was almost 90 percent women and people of color.  Although by the end of the campaign he was almost universally beloved, in the early phases he was a much more controversial figure.  The campaign featured many top-down decisions, some of which angered workers.  The decision to build a large organizing committee itself was an unpopular decision among the rank and filers, who were eager to distribute cards and start signing up workers early on.  Later decisions to accept a partial contract, to go “home for the holidays” (returning to work without a contract, after a ten-week strike), and even to form a close alliance with the blue-collar workers of Local 35, were initially very unpopular among the rank and file.  And yet Wilhelm’s strong leadership allowed the union to make difficult decisions for strategic reasons.  Eventually those top-down decisions led to victories and a stronger, more inclusive and participatory union. 

The cases of UNITE, the ILWU, and HERE show the false dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down organizing models.  It is often hard to tell if an organizer—or a union staff person—is an insider or outsider.  Someone who is rank and file in one workplace can be a carpetbagger in another environment.  Corporate campaigns can be top-down or they can be grassroots and participatory.  Moreover, the dichotomy in contemporary debates hides the fact that both models can succeed or they can fail.  The degree of democracy and the percentage of insiders don’t tell us very much in the end. 

The cases all demonstrate that, no matter who the organizers are, their ultimate goal should be to equip local activists to become strong leaders themselves.  Strategically, it is almost impossible to defeat an antiunion initiative unless the workers have a high degree of internal organization.  And in the long run, the goal of organizing is to transform power relations, to empower workers over their own working conditions. 

Union leaders empower rank-and-file activists in several crucial ways.  First, they expand workers’ vision of what the union can be and what collective power can mean.  They do this through examples of other campaigns, and even through the ideas that “ex-college students” bring to the union.  Putting a particular fight into a larger context of social justice was essential to the struggles of UNITE, ILWU, HERE, and most successful unions in the 1990s. 

Second, union professionals guide and support members when they hit a wall.  Workers new to campaigns before describe staff members as “lifelines” in tough times, full of empathy and new things to try. 

Third, leaders convince members that winning is possible.  In an antiunion environment, workers are easily discouraged.  No one can act if success seems impossible, and outside leaders can convince workers that they are on the right path. 

Fourth, many union victories in the 1990s and 2000s have depended on strong community support, interunion efforts, or grassroots coalitions.  While the rank and file have crucial connections to local organizations, outside staff have the time, resources, and national connections to build these networks. 

Finally, leaders must help workers pick up after failures and carry on.  In a climate of aggressive antiunionism, failure is inevitable.  The strongest leaders are able to help the rank and file understand a loss as a result of corporate power, and to instill in activists the will and desire to fight back again.  UNITE’s most important victories in the South were won after many successive failures in the same plant.  The infamous J. P. Stevens campaign, which inspired the movie Norma Rae, lasted over two decades.  At Tultex, the union was defeated three times before winning by a three-to-one margin in 1994.  At Fieldcrest Cannon, the union lost four elections over twenty-six years, before stunning everyone by winning in 1999, representing the largest victory ever for labor in the South.[5]  In each case, dozens of rank-and-file volunteers joined staff members—both parachuted-in and local—to fight aggressive campaigns and defeat hostile employers. 

The experience of failure, common to all long-term union organizers, illuminates a final point.  Union organizing is different from other types of organizing.  Some types of organizations, bowling leagues, neighborhood committees, even political organizations, can be created and maintained successfully by grassroots groups in a community.   But in the twenty-first century, unions are formed under immediate and intense pressure from the most powerful interests in American society.  To fight back, to devise tactics to sustain collective action in the face of intense divisive threats, to organize a strong participatory organization that both empowers workers and struggles against corporate power—this is a challenge that demands all the experience and leadership available, whatever the source.  The smartest workers embrace effective leadership.  June Hargis, a UNITE volunteer organizer and member for thirty-one years, sums up her experience on the ground:  “It’s hard, but it’s rejoicing at the end.”

Notes