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Podcast 6 Ruth Milkman - Unions Workers and Worker Centers

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Interviewer: Hello, and welcome to the Sage podcast of Critical Sociology’s Labour Scholar series. I’m Graham Cassano culture and media editor for Critical Sociology. Ruth Milkman is professor of sociology at the [unintelligible 0:00:22 Kunhe] Graduate Centre and professor and academic director of the Joseph S Murphy Institute for Worker Education Labour Studies. Professor Milkman is the author of numerous works on the history and sociology of American labour. Recently we had the opportunity to talk about her policy report. Written with Laura Breszlow, the State of the Unions 2011, a Profile of Organised Labour in New York City, New York State and the United States.

What are the major difficulties facing American workers as they attempt to organise or preserve their unions and organisations?

Respondent: Well, one point we make in the report is that the gap between private sector and public sector unionism is not a historical [unintelligible 0:01:06] never been this wide. So in the US in [unintelligible 0:01:09] in the private sector unionism was below 7%, 6.9% I believe it’s even a little lower now. And the public sector it was 36.5%, that’s an enormous difference. And now there’s a new attack mounting as we’ve seen especially in Wisconsin but in a number of other states too on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers. And it’s because that’s the only thing left standing and so people who would like there not to be a strong [unintelligible 0:01:39] focus on that.

Interviewer: I liked also the way you broke down the numbers and I guess what I found revealing although I shouldn’t have been surprised by this was that in the United States the plurality of union members have four year college degrees now which I thought was really interesting.

Respondent: Well, that’s a direct reflection of what we were just talking about. And it’s because the public sector is the mostly highly organised sector and that is a sector that employs for example [unintelligible 0:02:08] teachers who are college educated almost by definition, as well as healthcare professionals, most of whom are college educated. People like that are among the highly unionised groups today. So the whole sort of very difficult image we all have in our heads as a kind of hard hat union member, white male, cigar chomping, whatever, is really obsolete. There are still people like that but they are less likely to be unionised than teachers, nurses and so on, and government clerical workers, administrative assistances and people like that.

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Interviewer: Has the change in union constituency changed the politics of unions?

Respondent: I don’t really think it’s the change in union constituency that’s changed it, it’s more the popular mistrust of government intervention which undermines any social democratic initiatives all by itself. It’s kind of anti-statist, anti-tax fervour that’s swept our country as a whole, less so here in New York but even here to some extent. The obsession with not having budget deficits which starves public sector social provision. All those things have really undermined – along with the deunionisation of the country, the old new deal kind of era culture that we had.

I mean, look, the big changes all happen at the same time, so it’s hard to know what’s causing what. So you have, I call them the three Ds, deunionisation, deindustrialisation and deregulation all sort of taking off big time in the late 1970s and continuing since then. And then on top of that and related to all those things, enormous growth in income inequality and erosion of the real earnings of non-college educated workers, especially men. So that’s a huge piece to what happened too. And one of the reasons for that erosion is deunionisation is not the only reason but it’s a big one. And you put that together with this now a tax on the whole idea of government making provision for human needs and you’ve got a recipe for enormous growth in inequality which is even understated in many of the official statistics that we see all the time, thanks to occupied Wall Street and so on because the inequalities are not just in income and they’re not even just in wealth although wealth inequality is even bigger than income inequality in scale. But allsorts of other things. Think about pensions, healthcare, affluent workers, professionals and managers still have a lot of those things. Well, pensions even they don’t have in the private sector. These are things that unions fought for of course. And low wage workers tend to have nothing.

And then there’s another factor which is that in households people tend to get together with people of a similar social class status, so professionals marry or live with professionals, working class people do the same, poor people do the same, and now that in almost all households if there’s two adults they both are in the labour force that already multiplies the inequality by a factor of two just by itself. And that wasn’t the case in the mid twentieth century when it was much less common for two people to be employed outside the home.

So there’s just been these enormous shifts. The [unintelligible 0:05:12] historically has been one of the few voices representing the disadvantaged part of society in a kind of serious way with a lot of resources and smarts behind it. And it’s still doing that to some extent but as unions get weaker and weaker the danger really is there now that that would just end. And that would be a real loss to democracy, to the voice of people who don’t have a lot of power and privilege in the political system and I feel like that is what we’re in the process of witnessing.

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Interviewer: So I was wondering if you could describe or explain the concept of the workers’ centre and describe some of your recent work with [unintelligible 0:05:50].

Respondent: Sure. Workers’ centres popped up starting in the 90s basically. There’s a few that are a little older than that, but the big numbers appear in the 90s [unintelligible 0:06:00]. And the numbers continue to grow. And they’re basically NGOs is what they’d be called in the rest of the world, non-governmental organisations, but that are focused on work and labour issues. Most of them in practice recruit and advocate on behalf of immigrant workers just because immigrants are so highly concentrated in the low wage labour market. But these are organisations that try to improve the situation of the very – the most disadvantaged workers. And this is important for several reasons. One is that rightly or wrongly, usually wrongly, the public often associates labour unions with relatively privileged workers. [unintelligible 0:06:44] higher wages for members and benefits and so on that a lot of workers don’t have today. So there’s a certain amount of hostility based on that that they think these people are fat cats or living off some kind of privilege or something. That’s wildly exaggerated [unintelligible 0:07:00] but it’s out there.

But no one can say that about immigrant workers who work as day labourers or domestic workers or taxi drivers or restaurant dishwashers and so on. These are people who earn, at best, the minimum wage in many cases and in fact are the main victims of what’s come to be called wage theft where people are paid less than the minimum wage illegally by their employers.

So insofar as these organisations succeed in shining a bright light on those kind of abuses they do get a lot of public sympathy. And so they’ve been fairly successful in doing that around the country. There’s a couple of hundred of them now around the country, mostly in big cities, but there are exceptions to that.

And the difference between them and labour unions though is that they don’t collect dues, they have very, very limited resources. Most of them survive on foundation grants or donations from individuals or some combination of that. A few do collect dues but in a very irregular way. Very few of them have any role in collective bargaining so they’re not really unions although they are workers’ organisations. They are very vibrant, very creative, they do really well in attracting media attention to workplace issues. They’re much more effective these days I think overall on that train than labour unions are.

And yet there are real limitations on what’s possible in terms of scale because they’re such tiny organisations. A typical labour worker centre has a handful of staff people and a tiny budget. So they’ve done an amazing amount considering those limitations but they’re not really the same animal as organised labour in that respect.

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Organised labour because of its ability to collectives and the millions of workers [unintelligible 0:08:46] represents has enormous resources by comparison. And therefore more influence at least in certain arenas.

There was some tension between the two in the beginning when the workers’ centres first emerged. A lot of them were kind of hostile to labour unions. They in fact came into being in part because some of the leaders felt that unions were not doing a good job of representing immigrant workers and other low wage workers who were not in traditional forms of employment but were in more precarious forms of work where they didn’t necessarily have a stable employer and so on. And at the same time the unions were sort of suspicious like who are these new kids on the block, what are they up to, they’re not really unions, they’re not serious, they don’t have any money. So there was a lot of tension between them and there’s a great article about that by Janice Fine. It’s called A Marriage Made in Heaven? About the tensions between the two.

That has really changed though I’d say in the last ten years or so where partly out of recognition of how desperate their own plight is, organised labour has really turned around and I think the marches of immigrant workers in 2006 made it obvious to anyone that didn’t understand this before that there was enormous potential in organising immigrant workers. And so for all those reasons organised labour has really embraced the movement, to the point where just a year or so ago they affiliated into the AFLCIL for the first time in like a century. They gave a charter to a new organisation which was not really a union which was the New York Taxi Workers’ Association.

And they have more informal partnerships with a couple of other labour centres as well. So domestic workers united have some support from the AFLCIL as well, and the labour union which represents relatively low skilled construction workers has a relationship with [unintelligible 0:10:31] the National Day Labourers’ Organising Network. So we’re beginning to see more and more of these partnerships. And the workers’ centres themselves have become much more interested in the possibility of collective bargaining through their own constituencies than was the case when they first started. So there’s a kind of convergence I think beginning to develop between the two and I see this as sort of the best hope for labour revitalisation which again isn’t saying a whole lot given how bleak things are overall. But this is where the dynamic activity is for the most part.

So I think the partnership is kind of exciting in potentially this marriage could be one where the AFLCIL and Change to Win the other big federation of unions kind of offers some help in the way of resources which despite everything the unions still have substantial resources to these very small organisations which have great ideas,

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wonderful campaigns, a lot of imagination and effectiveness in winning the hearts and minds of the public but very little in the way of staff or money. So insofar as they work together it could be a really good thing.

Interviewer: Thank you to Professor Ruth Milkman. Thanks to Roz Hardigan for engineering and production. This podcast series was made possible in part through a grant from Wayne State University. I’m Graham Cassano, culture and media editor for Critical Sociology. Critical Sociology is a quarterly journal published by Sage. For more information please visit our website crs.sagepub.com.

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