Collective Conscious

Ezra, with for­mer SEIU boss Andy Stern:

EK: You men­tion col­lab­o­ra­tive processes. I’ve been ask­ing labor experts about the sharp decline of unions in Amer­ica ver­sus their rel­a­tive health in Europe and Canada, and one answer some have given is that the ani­mos­ity between unions and work­places — and, to some degree, the con­ser­v­a­tive party — in Amer­ica is unique. In other coun­tries, it’s not so bit­ter. It can even be friendly. Do you buy that?

AS: I think we grew up in that cul­ture. In the ‘30s, peo­ple didn’t want us to exist. We had to do sit-​​down strikes and var­i­ous other things. We had social­ist and com­mu­nist ten­den­cies. We grew up, to speak in Marx­ist terms, in a world with a lot more class strug­gle. And there still obvi­ously are dif­fer­ences between peo­ple, but it’s not viewed through that light any­more. There’s a dif­fer­ence between say­ing cor­po­ra­tions can be greedy and Cit­i­zens United is a bad deci­sion and real class strug­gle. We have this anti-​​employer, they’re going to kill us we need to kill them first, men­tal­ity. We’ve done a very bad job, for instance, mak­ing alliances with small businesses.

We need an ide­ol­ogy based around work­ing with employ­ers to build skills in our work­ers, to train them for suc­cess. That mes­sage and approach can attract dif­fer­ent peo­ple than the “we need to stand up for the work­ing class!” approach. That approach is about con­flict, and a lot of peo­ple don’t want more con­flict. I remem­ber that the first con­tract I ever nego­ti­ated with the state of Penn­syl­va­nia, I said, “no con­tract, no work.” That’s what I thought you did. And now I won­der, what was that about? I was just copy­ing an older cul­ture. But we’ve not mod­ern­ized our labor laws in this coun­try to sup­port a new approach. They don’t encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion. We’ve done noth­ing to incen­tivize a non-​​traditional col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rela­tion­ship. All these multi­na­tional com­pa­nies in Europe now have works councils.

EK: Let me inter­rupt you to plead igno­rance. What’s a “works council”?

AS: In Euro­pean sit­u­a­tions, every work­place has to have a works coun­cil. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily a union, but a col­lab­o­ra­tive group that meets about pro­duc­tion, qual­ity, and many other things. They’re elected, and the union often runs for elec­tion. But they don’t always win. And this is just in the cul­ture. Labor meets with man­age­ment to talk about things. We’ve never, as a union move­ment, pro­moted part­ner­ships with employ­ers where we talk about how to share in suc­cess and in skills and train­ing. You say those things in the labor move­ment and they go over well with work­ers and employ­ers and badly with activists. To the activists, this is sell-​​out lan­guage. So I think the labor move­ment is doing a great job stand­ing up and build­ing some­thing big in Wis­con­sin, but I think they seem like a legacy insti­tu­tion and not an insti­tu­tion of the future. And lega­cies get shed. The ques­tion is does any­thing replace them?