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No More Business As Usual: Shades of Social Justice Unionism Among Automobile Manufacturers and Service Industry Employees

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No More Business As Usual: Shades of Social Justice Unionism Among Automobile Manufacturers and Service Industry Employees NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL: SHADES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE UNIONISM AMONG AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURERS AND SERVICE INDUSTRY EMPLOYEES AN HONORS THESIS SUBMITTED ON THE SIXTH DAY OF MAY, 2020 TO THE DEPARTMENTS OF SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE HONORS PROGRAM OF NEWCOMB TULANE COLLEGE TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS WITH HONORS IN SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY BY _______________________ Clifford Soloway APPROVED: ____________________ Patrick Rafail Director of Thesis in Sociology ____________________ Eduardo Silva Director of Thesis in Political Economy ____________________ Jana Lipman Third Reader Clifford Soloway. No More Business as Usual: Shades of Social Justice Unionism Among Automobile Manufacturers and Service Industry Employees. (Dr. Patrick Rafail, Sociology; Dr. Eduardo Silva, Political Economy) This thesis analyzes how the U.S. labor movement is evolving in the context of neoliberal restructuring. It explores Social Justice Unionism (SJU) as an emergent phenomenon that combines democratic infrastructure with progressive community activism. The present study contrasts this tendency with business unionism, a more conservative form of advocacy that characterized the post-War era and continues to influence union leaders. The thesis tests two central hypotheses. First, it explores the idea that unions representing service industry workers are more easily able to implement SJU because they have not been as directly impacted by globalized production chains and outsourcing since the dawn of the neoliberal era. Manufacturing industries, on the other hand, are not well-positioned to transition away from business unionism. This notion is confirmed. Next, the present study analyzes whether SJU is more effective in responding to increasing precarity that workers face. It finds that this is indeed true in some cases, but existing literature has underestimated business unionism’s capacity to fight for rank- and-file members. To test these concepts, the thesis conducts case studies of the 2018 Marriott strike organized by UNITE HERE, the 2019 General Motors strike organized by the United Automobile Workers (UAW), and the campaign for union recognition at New York City museums led by UAW Local 2110. Chapter Three analyzes collective bargaining agreements to examine what strategies each organization employs and how effective these tactics were in confronting neoliberalism. Chapter Four elaborates a network analysis of Twitter data produced by all three cases to compare communication centralization patterns and embeddedness in non-labor advocacy networks. ii Acknowledgements This thesis would never have been possible without the generosity and wisdom of a number of scholars and activists. Professors Patrick Rafail, Eduardo Silva, and Jana Lipman worked with me for hours to develop my ideas and to transform them into research. Dr. Rafail’s guidance was essential for my network analysis in Chapter Three. He allowed me to use python code that he had developed to collect tweets, and he also helped me manage and explore my data. Professor Silva quite literally wrote the book on social movements in the context of neoliberalism, and his background in social theory shaped the lens through which I approached my work. Professor Lipman turned my understanding of labor history upside down from our first meeting. She challenged me to deepen my analysis and to ground it in a thorough understanding of labor’s historical progress. Outside of Tulane, I am deeply indebted to Manny Segura, Becca Waxman, and Greg Wilson. They welcomed me into the UNITE HERE ranks when I was a sophomore, and they taught me a great deal about why organizing matters. It was their immense dedication to their co-workers and their passion for building justice at their workplaces that first inspired me to study the union movement. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support of my parents and my sister. I am certain that they must have grown tired of hearing me read this aloud approximately 500 times, but they never complained or asked me to leave the house. I could never have graduated, let alone maintained honors, without them. iii Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter Two: Review of Literature…………………………………………………….....9 Unions in Decline: Where have all the organized workers gone?........................10 Introducing Union Agency Under the Banner of Social Justice............................14 SJU and Neoliberalism..........................................................................................16 SJU and the Service Industry.................................................................................24 The Research Question at Hand............................................................................27 Chapter Three: Methodology.............................................................................................29 Specifying Case Study Typologies.........................................................................29 Data Collection and Analysis................................................................................45 Chapter Three: Contract Analysis......................................................................................52 Shopfloor Issues.....................................................................................................54 Racial and Immigrant Justice................................................................................77 Confronting Neoliberal Globalization Directly.....................................................81 Conclusions............................................................................................................97 Chapter Four: Network Analysis of Twitter Data............................................................102 Communication Within the Three Case Studies...................................................105 External Communication in the Case Studies......................................................114 Conclusions..........................................................................................................116 Chapter Appendix: Graphs and Figures..............................................................117 Chapter Five: Conclusions...............................................................................................130 Bibliography....................................................................................................................134 iv Introduction If you were paid overtime this year, or if you received health benefits from your employer, or even if you were not fired for staying home on weekends, you exercised some of the rights that unions have won over the course of their history on U.S. soil. When the COVID-19 crisis began in the United States this year, organized labor leapt to the front lines of the struggle for adequate safety and employment protections. Since states began instituting mandatory quarantines and curfews, nurses’ unions have pushed for hospitals to provide necessary N-95 masks and airline workers’ unions have been instrumental in securing payment for their members through September 30th (Jones, 2020; Reed, 2020). Organized labor, through centuries of resistance in this country, has formatively shaped the livelihood of the entire American working class. All laborers, whether they are staunch union supporters or even if they have never worn a union button in their lives, have benefited from union solidarity. Since textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts first began to form informal interest groups in the second half of the 19th Century, unions have been at the forefront of progressive reform (Dray, 2010). They have struggled to improve the lives of their members both at the plant level through collective bargaining and on a more structural basis through advocacy for state- and national-level policies. Organized labor’s resistance has been dynamic; it has taken on different forms, objectives, and ideological iterations as the political economy of the U.S. has shifted and as workers have confronted (or failed to confront) xenophobia, racism, and misogyny within the labor movement. At nearly every turn, however, labor activists have reaffirmed their commitment to the idea that 1 workers deserve control over their economic and political lives as well as a just share of the wealth that they produce. Over the past four and a half decades, however, this idea has become increasingly difficult to actualize in this country; since 1973, union membership in the United States has faced a sharp decline. That year, more than 25% of workers in the U.S. were union members, whereas that proportion dropped to a historic low of 10.5% in 2018 (Mishel, 2012; BLS, 2019). For private sector employees, density is even lower. This is the case despite the fact that approximately 62% of U.S. citizens express approval for unions and their goals (Saad, 2018). This multi-decade freefall has had significant consequences for workers and their families, most notably a sharp increase in wage inequality (Farber et al, 2018). Western and Rosenfeld found that the decline in male unionization between 1973 and 2011 directly accounted for 20% of the total rise in income inequality among men over that time. When these authors compared union and non-union wages, they found that declining membership explained 33% of contemporary inequality among men, and around 20% of that among women (2011). Labor scholars have thoroughly interrogated
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