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- Organized labor hasn't stepped up to fully support workers of color during the this year's Black Lives Matter protests.
- Many unions are also leaving workers out to dry and not supporting strikes and collective action.
- This isn't just a missed opportunity for unions, it could hurt their message of solidarity in the future.
- Mike Elk is a labor reporter and founder of the crowdfunded labor publication Payday Report.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Attica Scott is the only Black woman in the Kentucky State House. For the past six months, she has been a near-constant presence at Injustice Square in Louisville, protesting the police killing of paramedic Breonna Taylor. Last month, she was even charged with felony rioting for her role in organizing protests — charges which have since been dropped.
As the former coordinator of Kentucky Jobs with Justice, Scott has been outraged not to see most of the Louisville unions that typically she sees out at other protests.
Scott lamented that even the union of which Breonna Taylor was a member —Teamsters Local 783, a heavily Black union, which represents sanitation and municipal workers in Louisville — hasn't shown up to the protests in a show of solidarity.
"It's particularly heartbreaking and disappointing for me as a former coordinator of Kentucky Jobs with Justice, who always showed up on the frontlines with labor, and brought community folks with me as they were walking the picket lines or out on strike," Scott told me.
Many Black and brown union activists like Scott are finding themselves not just having to fight police but also combat racism within their own unions to get them more engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement.
"I still believe that there is still so much systemic racism within organized labor that far too many labor unions, their members, and their leadership cannot bring themselves to stand in solidarity with a movement that in 2020 is directly led by Black people," said Representative Scott.
"When it's us that are out on the frontlines, we are left to fight for ourselves and by ourselves without organized labor."
In the midst of a massive strike wave and huge protests following the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, unions have failed to live up to their promise of fighting for equality in the movement. Indeed, activists even targeted and burned the lobby of the AFL-CIO over the federation's support for reactionary cop unions.
While organized labor has been absence from the rising civil rights moment, Black and brown workers across the US have been leading a series of bold strikes without the support of organized labor.
According to my site Payday Report Strike Tracker, there were more than 260 strikes between March and June last year, primarily over COVID safety concerns. However, between June 1 and July 1, when George Floyd protests began, there were more than 600 strikes alone.
"We are seeing the militancy that used to be part of organized labor," said Scott. "What happened to that militancy? We need to get that back".
Organized labor has long had a long and complicated relationship with racial justice. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was shot while marching for striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis. The following month, teachers in New York City also went on strike to prevent the integration of schools; illustrating the complex relationship of organized labor to the civil rights movement.
Many fear that once again unions are missing an opportunity to galvanize workers behind racial justice.
"The people at the table aren't the people organizing these protests and that's part of the problem," Neidi Dominguez told me, who previously served as a Deputy Director for Community Engagement at the AFL-CIO and now serves as a senior advisor to the Latinx political action group Mijenete. "The movement doesn't look like what it used to and the people that are organizing these massive protests they aren't not at the table."
Bryan Woolston/Reuters
No longer are union leaders calling for strike votes with strict control of strike activity, often directed by union staff. Now workers, often in non-union workplaces, are coordinating online and merely walking out over concerns about COVID and in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Unlike traditional labor strikes, activists are often enlisting the support of Black and brown small business owners to close in solidarity with protesters' calls. The closures put pressure on other business owners to close during these protests as the wave of strikes throughout professional sports showed in late August.
(For an in-depth analysis, see my long-form "How Black & Brown Workers Are Redefining Strikes in the Digital COVID Age")
Despite the potential for these non-traditional Black Lives Matters inspired strikes to bring new energy into the labor movement, many top white labor activists and intellectuals are dismissing the non-traditional strikes.
"There's a significant difference in whose power is being deployed….With so many businesses joining in symbolic actions to proclaim their support for Black lives, conflating this with striking runs the risk of letting exploitative employers off the hook by giving them good PR without examining how they actually treat their Black workers," wrote the white Mobilization Director of the New York NewsGuild Chris Brooks in an article that was later shared and widely promoted on social media by the national AFL-CIO.
Cautioning the labor movement against celebrating the non-traditional work strike movement, the influential labor educator Brooks wrote: "What is most worrisome is that this kind of equivocating reinforces bad organizing."
As a result of the hesitancy of many leading labor leaders and voices, strikes have slowed with only 300 strikes in the past three months even though Black Lives Matter protests are continuing to pop up across the country.
Scared leadership
Black and brown labor leaders said that traditional labor leaders are missing an opportunity to bring new energy into the labor movement while growing the power of the Black Lives Matter.
After the NBA strikes in late August, which inspired a wave of strikes throughout all professional sports, many labor activists hoped these movements would inspire many workers to take action at their own workplaces.
However, labor leaders were hesitant to call strikes in solidarity with professional athletes striking for Black Lives Matter, and the strikes simply didn't materialize.
"There is just no real synergy within the traditional labor movement. It's been such a lost opportunity," Dominguez said.
She says that in a time that many unions are ravaged with layoffs that some labor leaders are scared of taking the risk of engaging in possibly illegally, risky wildcat strikes in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movements as players in professional sports did.
Ashley Landis/Pool Photo via USA TODAY Sports
With professional athletes using their platforms to strike, many labor activists feel that they could have given cover and protection for less famous workers to take strike action. However, the labor movement dithered, and no strike wave materialized outside of the world of professional sports.
"The labor movement knows better than other movements how to leverage that moment, and we are just seeing a real lack of leadership," says Dominguez.
The labor movement's leadership is still overwhelmingly white, despite the fact that the majority of workers in this country will be people of color by 2032. And many of these labor leaders are unwilling to do the work to educate their membership on the need to mobilize in bold ways to support Black Lives Matter.
"A lot of unions have significant membership that is from communities of color, and you look at the leadership, and it doesn't reflect that membership," says Dominguez. "And we are just in a moment where that alone is limiting the impact the labor movement could have in the United States."
More than a missed opportunity
Activists warn that if traditional union leaders don't step up soon, it could even hurt organized labor in more traditional actions focused on economic issues.
In 2018-2019, teachers across Kentucky helped organize a series of bold wildcat strikes that pressured Republican Gov. Matt Bevin — who would go on to lose his position in 2019.
Tia Edison, who serves as chair of the Black Caucus of Louisville-based Jefferson County Teachers Association, worries that it could be tough to organize support [among Black and brown teachers?] for wildcat strikes in the future without standing up for racial justice issues now.
"[Parents] aren't gonna be okay with another strike over a pension," says Edison. "I won't even be okay with another strike if it comes to just pensions or retirement."
The wildcat strikes organized by Kentucky teachers in 2018 and 2019 created significant disruptions for parents, particularly low-income parents in communities of color who were often struggling at the last second to juggle childcare responsibilities with their need to go to their jobs. Through community organizing, the union built support in these communities, sometimes even organizing childcare programs set up by supporters of teachers' unions.
Even with so much of Louisville mobilized behind the protests, Edison worries that without unions getting more involved in racial justice issues, they may lose support for wildcat strikes.
"When you are striking and striking on wildcats, it puts parents through real hardship," says Edison. "They gotta find childcare…When they were doing it over retirement, retirement, retirement, I was hearing from parents that this is enough."
However, people like Kentucky State Rep. Attica Scott think the labor movement has an opportunity to build enormous power by getting more forcefully behind militant actions by the Black Lives Matter protests.
"If we all stand together, we can hold these individuals accountable and make a true transformative change for our communities," says Scott. "The transformative change will undoubtedly change the labor movement."
Scott says that labor support for militant Black Lives Matter protests could lead to organizing at non-union retail strongholds like Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and Walgreens, primarily staffed by people of color.
"You will see more people that are looking to unions to say, "Ok, I want a union where I work"... I wanna do that work because I see that they are for me," says Scott. "Otherwise, I am not going to continuously keep showing up for people, who aren't showing up for me because those days are over."
Scott though tells labor leaders, it's not too late to turn things around and build something powerful.
"Come in your union colors and union shirts and show us your solidarity and power, we haven't seen yet in Injustice Square Park" says Scott. "There is still time, it's not too late, we are still in the midst of this movement seeking justice for Breonna Taylor. Labor unions come out right now! Show us your colors".
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/3edXQIO
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