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

Home , Business unionism, Givebacks, New Unionism, Pattern bargaining, Precarity, Social movement unionism

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

______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.

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.

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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

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

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 the roots of the precipitous decline in density, and they have continuously reaffirmed that the trend is an integral component of the neoliberal turn that has characterized American political economy throughout recent decades.

Although density freefall is a national phenomenon, organized labor is not a monolith, and this tendency has thus manifested in divergent ways throughout various industries. Whereas former labor movement leaders like the United Mine Workers of

America (UMWA) have watched their numbers essentially disappear, service industry unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have actually grown in

recent years (Fox, 1990; Fitzpatrick-Behrens, 2010). These sharply contrasting realities within the labor movement have contributed to a diversity in union responses to overall decline. Since the 1990’s, service industry unions have pioneered a series of new organizing strategies and a reaffirmation of intersectional progressive values that have come to be known as Social Justice Unionism (SJU). They are generally more militant, increasingly democratic, and focused on developing union support within communities.

Even though several service industry unions have had significant success in organizing new workers through SJU tactics, organized workers in traditional manufacturing industries have been slow to follow in their footsteps. Rather, they have generally maintained a focus on “business unionism”, which is a less confrontational and more internally centralized form of labor organizing.

This emergent divide between SJU groups like the SEIU and UNITE HERE and business unions such as the UAW and the Steelworkers is crucial but by no means strict.

Although service industry unions have remained at the forefront of SJU development, individual organizations have not blazed this path uniformly. Rather, I will show that movement toward SJU has entailed divergent tactics for different unions and that this motion is tied up intimately with existing labor institutions and public policies.

Conversely, traditional manufacturing unions, while generally lagging behind service industry workers, have also taken steps toward more inclusive and militant organizing.

Thus, I contend that the space between SJU and business unionism is constituted by a spectrum of organizing strategies and leadership decisions that must be considered both individually and in the context of larger political economic factors. There is no singular formula that produces an SJU or a business union, but rather a set of decisions that

leaders and activists make throughout the course of campaigns. These decisions, in concert with existing legislative frameworks, produce distinctive forms of labor advocacy. This typology, which will guide the present study, is a heuristic that frames how labor activists interact with the structures around them, not a rigid taxonomy to be enforced analytically from the top down.

This thesis will expand existing knowledge of SJU in the United States by exploring differences in how the phenomenon has manifested within the service industry as opposed to traditional manufacturing. Specifically, I will be exploring how unions in these two areas prioritize collective bargaining objectives and how they build networks outside of the union hall and the shop floor. First, contract provisions dictate not only how a union interacts with an employer, but they also reflect the issues that a union prioritizes at the bargaining table. They are a snapshot of a labor organization’s values and self-conception. Second, union networks serve as an indicator of the grassroots organizational and policy spaces within which staff and executive officials are embedded.

Throughout the history of the labor movement, but particularly during the neoliberal era, unions have relied on coalitions of progressive supporters that organize within working- class communities. These allies do not always focus exclusively on workers’ rights: often they hail from feminist, anti-racist, or environmental movements among many others. By analyzing how unions build personal and professional relationships with these agents as well as the issues with which they engage, I will be able to provide a glimpse of what networks are most important for crucial union actors. I will show analyze how unions use non-labor advocacy groups to establish their public identities and centralize intersections with other movements.

My approach to the present study places a heavy emphasis on conceptualizing unions as actors with agency. I will not be investigating how macroeconomic conditions have impacted how the labor movement has had to maneuver, but rather I analyze how certain unions have responded to a long-term neoliberal attack. By recognizing this agency, I implicitly accept that each individual union constitutes a complex case operating in a specific environment. Accordingly, the present study operates through three core case studies. I will be presenting data pertaining to United Auto Workers

(UAW) Locals that represented General Motors (GM) employees who went on strike

from September 15th to October 25th of last year. I will counterbalance this case with an analysis of UNITE HERE Locals which went on strike against Marriott Hotels from

October to December of 2018. Finally, I will also be dissecting UAW Local 2110, which represents non-profits, university faculty and graduate students, and museum staff in New

York City.

I intend to show that UAW GM Locals that represent a unique business unionist case. The UAW certainly does not epitomize strict bureaucracy or conservative unionism, but rather it has a history of combining a broad progressive vision with limited militancy and more traditional organizing tactics. Crucially, these Locals also represent traditional manufacturing workers that have seen employment opportunities evaporate in the United

States. This places these groups at a unique juncture within the labor movement; they have been forced to grapple with the neoliberal era directly and personally. UNITE

HERE Marriott strike Locals, on the other hand, lean toward the SJU side of my heuristic, and they are uniquely self-conscious of this fact. This union has fashioned itself as an organization of immigrants and workers of color, and it promotes its alliances with

organizations that fight for migrants’ rights and racial justice. Moreover, UNITE HERE represents service industry employees who have seen a general increase in job opportunities during the era of contemporary globalization. This contrast with UAW GM

Locals frames my discussion of organizing strategies. Finally, UAW Local 2110 will serve as an intermediary point between these two cases. I will focus exclusively on contracts that this group signed with museums because, in terms of daily work conditions, the rank-and-file at these shops are service workers. Some museum staff, mostly workers at gift shops and front desks, share general working conditions and issues with UNITE HERE members. Both museum workers and hotel staff, for instance, campaigned through their respective unions to earn protections against guest sexual assault. However, Local 2110 exists within the UAW organizational infrastructure, which was built to support predominately manufacturing workers. It was not until the UAW was already decades old and well-established as a national leader in workers’ rights that it began to represent laborers outside of automobile assembly plants. As a result of these two factors, UAW Local 2110 will be a compelling case study that combines features of my other subjects.

To study these three cases, I analyze a set of contracts that were signed as conclusions to the 2019 GM strike, the 2018 Marriott strike, and various collective bargaining efforts at New York museums since the late 1990’s. In addition, I conduct a network analysis of Twitter data produced by all three of these cases over recent years. In the first section of my contract analysis, I confirm that UNITE HERE is a SJU organization that confrontationally engages with employers and prioritizes progressive stipulations for immigrants and workers of color. The UAW, on the other hand, generally

relies on a business unionist model of cooperation with management. The only notable exception to this tendency concerns health and safety issues. On these points, the UAW is much more confrontational. UAW Local 2110, meanwhile, adopts particular priorities from both unions, thus constituting a center point on the spectrum between SJU and business unionism. I argue that the UAW and UNITE HERE were approximately equally effective in winning protections for temporary laborers, but UNITE HERE failed to establish major gains for part-time workers. With respect to provisions related to technology, on the other hand, UNITE HERE won stipulations that were significantly stronger than those secured by the UAW.

Next, I dive into an analysis of Twitter data produced by the UAW, UNITE

HERE, and UAW Local 2110. I reaffirm UNITE HERE’s SJU identity by showing that the union is more embedded in activist networks related to racial justice, migrants’ rights, and environmental justice advocacy. UAW Local 2110 once again presents itself as a middle-point case, and the UAW lags behind these two entities in its failure to make inroads with non-union advocacy organizations.

The topic at hand is of central importance to the labor movement in the U.S.

Union decline in this country has certainly produced disastrous effects for the entire working class, but it has also created an opportunity for workers’ rights activists to improve their strategies and broaden their social vision. Although density was high and labor organizations developed a great deal of institutional weight during the post-War era, unions explicitly excluded huge swathes of working people from the gains for which it fought. Women, immigrants, and workers of color were not incorporated into the business unionist framework, and these laborers accordingly did not see the

improvements in wages and benefits that White men did. Despite the fact that organized labor is at its weakest point in decades, contemporary unions are beginning to recognize that this tendency is not only contrary to progressive values, but also a sincere impediment to building worker power. This study investigates this idea in order to analyze whether progressive and democratic unions may be paving the path forward for the American working class.

Review of Literature

Unions in Decline: Where have the organized workers gone?

For most academics interested in the contemporary union landscape, a central question has dominated most of the last 45 years of analysis: where have all the members gone? In order to contextualize the current dynamics that shape organized labor, it is essential to first understand, at least partially, why unions have been forced to contract so dramatically. Labor scholars and social movement theorists have addressed this question for decades, and they offer keen insight into the factors that have precipitated such a drastic drop in membership. Although several explanatory currents have risen that link diminishing union prominence with an array of diverse factors, recent scholarship has privileged changing political economic trends in the context of other social and political factors. In other words, the most recent explorations of falling union popularity have treated union decline as a core component in the matrix of neoliberal shifts that continue to characterize the political economic landscape of the United States. Like many individual elements in this complex network of changes, the roots of union decline, as well as its consequences, cannot be understood outside of a broad framework that incorporates policy reformulations, economic trends, and social currents. It is within this analytical tradition that the present study will locate itself.

The theoretical impetus for connecting neoliberalism and union decline is relatively intuitive. As commodity and finance markets have become increasingly globalized, the labor market has become an international one, with manufacturing employment seeking out the countries with the lowest wages and weakest collective bargaining infrastructure. This has created a “race to the bottom” that has crowded out

workers represented by labor unions in favor of unorganized and hyper-exploitable producers. Financialization, meanwhile, has concentrated employment in high-wage, high-skilled sectors. Unlike industrial workers or lower-level service employees, these groups generally do not seek out labor representation (Rodrik, 2011). Despite the straightforwardness of this logic, empirical studies have not supported such a clear-cut pathway to falling membership.

The first challenge that researchers have faced in understanding how neoliberalism has affected unions has been to operationalize the phenomenon itself.

Neoliberal “reform” is an encompassing concept that has impacted academic and social spheres from the philosophical to the political economic to the cultural (Harvey, 2005). In order to reduce this broad term to specific variables, scholars who focus on neoliberal change with respect to labor unions have often concentrated primarily on structural macroeconomic factors. Most commonly, past researchers have used percent of total

GDP occupied by foreign direct investment (FDI), percent of GDP occupied by imports

(trade openness), and percent of the civilian workforce occupied by the financial sector

(financialization) (Sano and Williamson, 2008; Oskarsson, 2003; Clawson and Clawson,

1999; Vachon et al., 2016). These measures quantify the two primary economic currents of neoliberal restructuring: increasing capital mobility and increasing prominence of financial institutions in the world economy. However, despite this specific operationalization, direct links between economic indicators of neoliberalism and declining union density are unclear if not fully elusive. Although Sano and Williamson found no correlation between FDI and union membership rates in 2008, Vachon et al., when using a similar measure, actually found that increasing FDI correlated with

increasing union density in a 2016 study. Moreover, while Sano and Williamson failed to identify a meaningful relationship between trade openness and unionization, Vachon et al. showed that higher dependence on imports was associated with lower union densities.

To make matters all the more confusing, these two studies analyzed the same 18 Western nations.

To clarify these contradictions, a number of investigations have sought to link structural analysis with explorations of the immediate environment in which unions and workers operate daily. In other words, they work backwards towards an understanding of macro-level political economic interactions with organized labor by taking organizations and the movements in which they participate as starting points. Studies in this vein have complexified the deceivingly simple connection between neoliberal globalization and declining union density by emphasizing the agency of unions in elaborating their own organizing tactics and by considering the evolving nature of the U.S. workforce. They rely heavily on the scholarly tradition of structural social movement analysis, and this theoretical basis in turn guides my present study (Klandersman and Roggeband, 2007).

Structural social movement analysis is grounded in interrogating how grassroots coalitions and organizations form, how they articulate their demands, and how these demands either achieve or fail to achieve their desired impact. In the context of opposition to neoliberal “reforms”, these investigations center on the concept of political opportunity structures (POS) (Marks and McAdam, 1996; McAdam, 2017). According to this idea, structural rearrangements cause social movement organizations to reformulate or expand their coalitional affinities based on common interests, conceptions of identity, and “openings” for change in existing power arrangements (Silva, 2009; McAdam,

Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001). This is particularly relevant to the neoliberal environment, which evolves through drastic shifts that manifest differently throughout the general population. The central loci of political and economic influence have relocated with the erosion of the Fordist state, leaving new social movement targets vulnerable. Moreover, groups that previously failed to find common cause are now forced by deepening inequality and precarity to look for allies in other progressive spaces.

Ulrich Brand makes clear the utility of applying a POS analysis to social movements impacted by neoliberal structures in his 2012 study of the Global Justice

Movements. These are broad and loosely defined grassroots pushes that seek to oppose international financial hegemony and global inequality by proposing progressive alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism. They build support from diverse bases that incorporate environmental justice, indigenous rights, and migrants’ rights activists. Brand finds that the success of Global Justice Movements in mobilizing international pressure derives from factors such as the accessibility of “political-institutional systems”, the capacity to frame issues through media, and the ability to connect local, national, and international critical analyses. Neoliberal political economy conditions all of these points.

For instance, neoliberalism reorients corporate actors as central in political-institutional matrices and blurs the lines between local and international issues. Thus, as neoliberal

“reform” overhauls the structures that social movements seek to challenge, it simultaneously creates new avenues for multi-polar resistance.

In his book, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America, Eduardo Silva also makes use of POS analysis to explain the potency of social movements (2009). He investigates case studies of mass mobilizations in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,

Venezuela, Peru, and Chile in order to discover the characteristics common to diverse forms of popular resistance, and he elaborates the roots of these commonalities. To different degrees in all of these nations, the imposition of free-market “reforms” was associated with drastic reductions in the power of the labor movement. Organizations that had traditionally relied a class-based struggle found themselves ill-equipped to resist sudden influxes of international capital and the rapid neoliberalization of political economic structures. Accordingly, over the course of a few decades, Leftist groups reoriented their mobilization strategies to incorporate non-class identities: indigenous groups pushed for ethnic solidarity that they contended was inherently opposed to neoliberal capitalism; feminist movements began to link the call for women’s rights with economic demands for security and equality. Through these case studies, Silva thus shows that as neoliberal capitalism disrupts existing constellations within social movements, it simultaneously creates the structural conditions for new associational spaces and alliances to form.

Few studies have applied the POS perspective to unions in the U.S., but I will show that it becomes more useful as organized labor integrates itself into the fold of social movements that oppose neoliberalism. Moreover, applying a structural social movement lens will permit me to mediate between the large structural shifts that have impacted union membership and the organizational decisions that direct social movement strategies. In order to clarify this mediation, however, two concepts that are intimately related to POS will be necessary: framing and resource mobilization.

Framing refers to the strategies and tactics that social movements use to communicate their analyses and to mobilize consciousness. It is intimately related to POS

since organizations will make decisions about how to frame particular issues depending on the “openings” they perceive in political channels and the existing opportunities for coalition-building (Tarrow, 1998). As I will show moving forward, unions in the United

States have used drastically different organizing methods to confront similar issues depending on the conditions that define their organizing environments. By focusing on these strategies, I will be able to draw important conclusions about the significance of broader structures.

Finally, “resource mobilization” will guide the present study. This refers to the organizational strategies that social movement groups use to maximize the impact of their supporters (Tarrow, 1998). In the context with which we are concerned, this pertains primarily to the prevalence of democratic representation in unions versus hierarchical structures, as well as reliance on member participation as opposed to relationships with state and company officials. For example, Bruce Nissen shows that the Florida

Healthcare Union of the SEIU has been able to enhance its impact on a legislative level by encouraging members to participate directly in political analysis and lobbying (2010).

As we will see, decisions like these are heavily influenced by the broader structural conditions in which unions operate.

In order to apply these concepts, we must first introduce U.S. labor unions as organizations with agency that can be accurately analyzed as leaders of a social movement.

Introducing Union Agency Under the Banner of Social Justice

In the 1990’s, a number of influential scholars began to explore nascent organizing strategies and institutional structures that were becoming increasingly popular

in the United States labor movement. These researchers came to characterize this “new unionism” as “Social Movement Unionism” (SMU) (Moody, 1997; Johnston, 1994).

Since the first use of this term in a U.S. context, labor scholars have employed a variety of methods and perspectives in order to more fully operationalize SMU and investigate its influence. In its most general form, SMU in the United States refers to union organizing that extends beyond the shop floor to draw on community and even international support as a means of pressuring employers. The term also implies a renewed emphasis on democratic structures within unions themselves (Nissen, 2003;

Milkman, 2006). Specifically, SMU is commonly operationalized as “(1) rank-and-file mobilization, (2) leadership, (3) community-based organizing, (4) worker centers, (5) corporate campaigns, and (6) transnational components” (Walsh, 2012). Although the present study will draw heavily on this research tradition, a semantic clarification is necessary. The term “Social Movement Unionism” was initially developed in the 1970’s in order to describe radical working-class resistance against authoritarian regimes in

South Africa, Brazil, and the Philippines (Barchiesi, 2007; Scipes, 1986; Sluyter-Beltrão,

2010). In this international context, SMU explicitly challenges existing industrial relations and political ideologies. Its emphasis on democracy relies on working class organizational contexts that are distinct from the institutionalized history of U.S. unions.

Although SMU shares its focus on democratization and coalition-building with U.S. union movement construction, it is categorically different and should not be used to describe the subject of this study. Instead, I will follow the example set by Kim Scipes, who employs the term “Social Justice Unionism” (SJU) in the domestic context with which we are concerned (2014).

SJU and Neoliberalism

Since its inception, SJU has been intimately linked with studies of neoliberalization. Researchers have proposed that neoliberal restructuring in the U.S. has served to encourage SJU by increasing worker militancy, eroding the institutional leverage that Fordist industrial unions once enjoyed, and necessitating the inclusion of

Black and immigrant workers (Robinson, 2000; Clawson, 2008). As income inequality has skyrocketed in the neoliberal U.S. and social programs have diminished, workers have been exposed to increasing precarity. Labor unions represent one means of resisting this economic disenfranchisement. Furthermore, the neoliberal environment has consistently denied the pathways toward favorable contracts that were previously open to traditional worker organizations. These groups won favorable wages and benefits for their members by trading militancy and rank-and-file engagement for relationships with management and bureaucratization. This trend is known academically as “business unionism”, and it is the ideal type that is both the polar opposite of SJU and, in the U.S., its historical predecessor. In order to accurately characterize and examine SJU in the

United States it is integral that I first elaborate the trajectory of this relatively conservative form of labor representation.

The History of Business Unionism

Business unions are defined by hierarchical union structures, dismissal of shopfloor representation in bargaining priorities, and minimal investment in organizing non- union workers (Moody, 1988; Cloud and Thomas, 2011; Mollona, 2009). These ideal type characteristics are the product of a historical process that has been central to the

American labor movement, helping to frame its goals, its methods, and its self-

perception.

The roots of business unionism lie in the contradictions between committed union autonomists and labor activists who conceived of their work as part of a broader effort to instill “industrial democracy” into the fabric of U.S. political economy and culture. This enduring conflict came to prominence during the first three decades of the 20th century.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL), representing skilled labor and led by Samuel

Gompers, sought to narrowly and sharply define the limits of trade unionism as completely distinct from the political sphere. On the other hand, progressive unions representing unskilled workers, particularly the Knights of Labor (KOL) followed by the

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), proposed that unions could and should work to build a social welfare state that would be institutionalized in the halls of government.

They consciously promoted a broad legislative vision at the same time that they fought for rights to recognition and bargaining. The dialectical exchange between these two veins encouraged the AFL to build bureaucratic structures and position itself as a conservative alternative to radical working class representatives, while the CIO organized influential strikes leading up to, and during, the 1920’s (Moody, 1988; Van Tine, 1973;

Eidlin, 2009; Lichtenstein, 2002). Thus, the organizational precedents for business unionism were established by the AFL early in the 1900s. As I will show, however, the

CIO would quickly come to operate as the center of U.S. industrial unionism, and it would be this group’s fate that would establish business unionism as a central trend in labor history.

With the election of President Frankilin D. Roosevelt in 1928 the CIO and unionists of similar ideological persuasions suddenly found themselves with a relatively

strong ally in the White House. Roosevelt and his cadre of New Deal officials recognized both the need to kickstart consumer demand in the U.S. economy and the central role that unions could play in achieving this goal. Moreover, Roosevelt’s administration shared with CIO union activists an ideological loyalty to the idea of “industrial democracy”. It challenged the pervading philosophy of fully “at-will” employment by proposing that workers deserved some semblance of agency and control in their workplaces. Thus the

National Recovery Act of 1933, which regulated wages and working hours, also included the first federal provision in U.S. history establishing the right to collective bargaining.

This fundamental union prerogative was reaffirmed in the 1935 Wagner Act, which established unions as a cornerstone of the New Deal program (Lichtenstein, 2002).

When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, industrial unions became further institutionalized into the ideology and power structures of New Deal liberalism. The CIO, freshly empowered following years of labor militancy and a particularly powerful 1937

UAW strike against General Motors, agreed to refrain from work stoppages during the war in exchange for more favorable bargaining conditions and political leverage (Moody,

1988; Lichtenstein, 2002). Roosevelt granted union leaders new influence over national policy and production priorities via seats on the National Defense Mediation Board

(NDMB) and the War Labor Board (WLB) (Moody, 1988). Perhaps emblematic of this novel state openness to union influence was the contemporaneous national debate over the “Reuther Plan”. The popular UAW leader and future CIO president Walter Reuther proposed that large automobile manufacturing firms should retool civilian vehicle manufacturing plants in order to pump up production of war planes. Although Reuther’s idea was never fully implemented, the attention it received from liberal politicians

represented a sea change in the relationship of worker representatives to the state

(Lichtenstein, 1995).

Thus, by the time World War II ended, industrial relations in the U.S. had begun to settle on a new normal that incorporated a seemingly stable place for unions in policy and production. During the 1940’s, the establishment of pattern bargaining, a final piece in the business unionism puzzle, solidified this arrangement. As the NDLB and the WLB were dissolved, the CIO continued to push for a progressive vision of an expansive welfare state as they re-ignited strike militancy that had been temporarily dampened during the war. During the years that immediately followed World War II, CIO unions confronted company executives with a wave of strikes that centered not only on wages and benefits, but on “shopfloor democracy”. Unions such as the UAW had developed extensive shop steward infrastructure that provided an avenue for workers to raise and address grievances quickly and democratically. This system was anathema to U.S. management styles, which placed a high priority on the ability to autonomously discipline workers and determine production rates. In response, capital mobilized its legislative allies and took advantage of a rightward political shift to support the passage of the Taft-Hartley act in 1947 (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002).

Taft-Hartley coalesced the business unionist tradition by siloing the labor movement at the bargaining table. The legislation outlawed solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts, infringing on labor’s ability to act as a social movement force. It functioned to limit “legitimate” strike demands to those directly related to wages and benefits, encouraging the construction of a grievance arbitration procedure that was thoroughly bureaucratic and anti-democratic. The Act also prohibited union donations to

political campaigns, closing off channels for the pursuit of labor’s broad progressive social vision. Finally, Taft-Hartley required that union leaders sign affidavits swearing off any affiliation with the Communist Party (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002; Moody, 1988;

Freeman, 2008).

All of these provisions, coupled with anti-union pressure and Red-baiting from

Republican and Dixiecrat lawmakers, effectively framed the entrenchment of business unionism. International union headquarters were empowered at the expense of local chapters at the same time that workers lost their reliable shop steward allies. This encouraged the emergence of industry-wide pattern bargaining in place of locally-focused efforts that promoted rank-and-file militancy. Moreover, in combination with the

“investigations” carried out by the House of Un-American Activities Committee

(HUAC), unions were now vulnerable to anti-communist purges that wrested power away from radical locals. Thus, in 1948 the UAW, which had been a leader in shopfloor militancy and social vision, signed a contract with GM that guaranteed five years of stability at the expense of rank-and-file democracy and political leverage (Lichtenstein,

1995; 2002; Moody, 1988). This contract came to be known as the “Treaty of Detroit”, and it became a model for pattern bargaining agreements that would be signed across several major U.S. industries.

As the 1950’s began, then, industrial relations had coalesced around a firm power arrangement that retained a place for unions in government (Democrats still relied on their support and provided seats on commissions), but stunted their capacity for structural change. Historians have asserted markedly different interpretations of this matrix that are, to a significant extent, shaped by their normative perceptions of business unionism.

Scholars such as Kim Moody are deeply critical of heavily institutionalized union activism, and most intellectuals in this vein are ideological champions of SJU. He contends that business unionism became solidified in this context because union leaders

“sold out” industrial democracy to capital in exchange for political power and racist protection for white workers. Moody points to union leaders’ failure to develop an independent labor party, their tendency to abandon union democracy under the banner of anti-communism, and their reluctance to organize new workers after the 1950’s as evidence of their complicity in a structural “capital-labor accord” (Moody, 1988; 1997).

He also notes that, in the middle of the 1950’s, the CIO abandoned its productive, albeit limited, alliance with the NAACP. Previously, the CIO had supported anti-lynching legislation and took minor steps toward reducing discrimination within its unions.

However, following the merger between the AFL and the CIO, this relationship fell apart

(Moody, 1988; Berg, 2007; Meier and Bracey, 1993). This highly visible process of diminished racial progressivism within the labor movement also manifested in other unions that incorporated themselves into the business unionist fold early on (Scipes,

2014; Street, 2000; Hill, 1996). Accordingly, critics of business unionism associate the phenomenon with a lower emphasis on racial equality.

Other historians point out, however, that labor was effectively pigeon-holed by right-wing managers and political constellations during the late 1940’s and 1950’s.

Nelson Lichtenstein, for instance, attributes moderate union stances on racial justice to the anti-labor, anti-Black alliance between Republicans and Dixiecrats that made the passage of progressive legislation nearly impossible during the 1950’s. Even as unions became willing partners in spreading anti-communist panic both domestically and

abroad, they were continuously attacked as anti-American interest groups divorced from national interest. Lichtenstein contends that pattern bargaining, although far from the expansive social welfare state that union leaders had once envisioned, did win significant wage and benefit stability for workers (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002).

Regardless of this debate, it is crucial for the purposes of my study that we understand business unionism, conceptualized here as the ideal type antithesis of SJU, within its historical context. The trade-off between progressive rank-and-file militancy and the security that came with corporate relationships and pattern bargaining helped to stabilize the labor movement throughout the post-War period. While individual locals that held tight to direct worker mobilization continued to come into conflict with employers (and often with their own national headquarters), labor and capital generally entered into a relatively peaceful few decades. Bargaining issues remained limited to wages and benefits, and many contracts were worked out by upper-level union officials long before members had a chance to express their input (Clawson, 2003 pgs. 27-50).

Labor in a Neoliberal World

With the dawn of the neoliberal era, however, this arrangement has quickly become untenable, and business unionism is not assumed to be a reliable means of securing an impactful membership. The State has adopted a neoliberal philosophy that is unfriendly to collective action, and upper-level union negotiators have lost what were once semi-constant government allies (Robinson, 2000). Internationalized production chains have spawned “human resource management” as a means of negotiating labor disputes, framing union confrontation as a relic of the past (Machin and Wood, 2005;

Fiorito, 2001; Green and Yanarella, 1996). Empowered corporate leadership has also

turned to a growing market of union-busting firms to erase whatever foothold formerly existed for institutionalized negotiators (Logan, 2006). Moreover, the shift of domestic production toward service industries has necessitated active organizing campaigns that business unions are unlikely to fund (Moody, 1997; Jones, 1992).

This expanding service industry is also a core contributing factor towards an equally influential industrial shift: the casualization of labor. Through this process, employment in the U.S. is increasingly part-time, which implies lower wages and the reduction if not wholesale elimination of employer-provided benefits. As a result, workers are exposed to increasing precarity. This tendency is, once again, a phenomenon that can be traced directly to structural political economic shifts that have manifested since the 1970’s. Large corporations, particularly transnationals, have responded to the neoliberal environment by relying heavily on subcontractors. These employers essentially specialize in selling temporary labor, and in doing so they reduce the number of full-time positions that producing companies need hire (Harvey, 2005). Moreover, modern corporations have begun to incorporate layoffs into their business plans, meaning that sudden firings can occur even when they are not prompted by business cycle changes

(Kalleberg, 2009; 2011). Finally, since decades of austerity measures have eroded the post-War safety net, it is much more difficult for workers to survive without working full-time. The immediate result of this combination of factors is a precarity that pervades working-class life. Workers take on multiple jobs for less pay and with less comprehensive healthcare. These conditions have a contradictory potential when it comes to the labor movement. On one hand, the shear pain of existing in a precarious world has become a rallying cry for workers across industries, pushing them towards union halls.

Simultaneously, however, workers spend more time at work, leaving them less opportunities to commit to organizing.

These explanatory factors do not replace, but rather complement and contextualize the structural political economic indicators of neoliberalism (FDI, trade openness, and financialization) that we mentioned above. All of them are inseparable from neoliberal globalization, but they manifest on the localized terrain upon which unions express agency. They have prompted workers and union leaders to look for other sources of support, drawing on coalitions of community organizations such as immigrant advocacy groups, churches, and worker centers. It is upon this foundation, which proposes inclusion and progressivism where business unionists relied on hierarchy and bureaucracy, that Social Justice Unionism is built.

SJU and the Service Industry

In order to fully conceptualize SJU as a response by organized labor to neoliberalism, it is crucial to begin with an understanding of how the domestic industrial environment has changed since the 1970’s. The growth of commodity and finance internationalism under neoliberal globalization has cut back employment in U.S. industrial sectors, while jobs in food, entertainment, and financial services have risen to partially fill this gap. These positions are often referred to as “non-tradable” employment, since they cannot be immediately outsourced outside the U.S. Between 1990 and 2008, new jobs in this sector constituted almost all national employment growth, and by 2009 they had risen to represent 80% of all private sector work (Spence and Hlatshwayo, 2011;

Humborstad, 2014). By 2016, there were six times as many service employees in the U.S. as there were goods-producing workers (Pietrykowski). Within this newly expansive

service industry, wages tend to be sharply unequal along a rigid hierarchy (Moller and

Rubin, 2008).

There is an intimate connection between this industry and SJU. Since the 1980’s, hospitality workers’ unions have both drawn on older techniques employed before World

War II and innovated new recruitment methods in their organizing. Specifically, organizations like UNITE HERE and the SEIU emphasize democratic structures and integration with local community organizations (Gray and DeFilippis, 2015). These unions form organizing committees within workplaces by recruiting dedicated rank-and- file workers who then take on the task of talking about the union to their coworkers and gradually increasing the density on the shop floor (Getman, 2012). This theoretically ensures that workers’ interests are directly represented in bargaining proposals and that laborers maintain a vested interest in their union after it is recognized. Although this organizational structure appears novel after decades of business unionism, it is actually a redeployment of pre-World War II union practice (Martin, 2006). UNITE HERE and

SEIU have also led campaigns in which they ask workers to list their contacts outside their workplaces, calling on them to enlist churches and community organizations to put pressure on employers. Accordingly, campaigns for recognition and for improved contracts have often become subjects of community and political action, moving beyond the traditional terrain of employers and union representatives (Parks and Warren, 2012;

Meyer, 2016). Both unions engage in explicit “corporate campaigns”, through which they look to form relationships with other progressive movements by publicizing disreputable company behavior, particularly with respect to human or environmental rights. These tactics, which are all indicators of SJU, have been shown to achieve significant results for

workers in various cities, both on the shop floor and on a broader policy level. Scholars have increasingly treated the tactic as a successful innovation that challenges inequality and union decline in a neoliberal context (Peck and Theodore, 2012).

Perhaps the most notable example of a major SJU campaign was the “Justice for

Janitors” national effort organized by the SEIU beginning in 1988. This long push for unionization among maintenance workers was not only embedded in several urban communities across the country, but it also challenged the centralized nature of the AFL-

CIO (Savage, 2006). Moreover, the links between this service industry unionization campaign and the neoliberal environment that precipitated it were abundantly clear in union strategies. The SEIU chose to target, almost exclusively, companies that subcontracted part-time labor as opposed to employers that maintained full janitorial staffs

(Moody, 1997). Moreover, the union sought out allies in immigrants’ rights and racial justice movements in order to universalize its cause. Instead of leaning on institutional leverage or state support, the SEIU constructed its own powerful coalition out of groups that were alienated by the neoliberal jolt to the right.

Studies and campaigns like these speak to a widely recognized but understudied trend: democratic and community-oriented unionism that fits within the SJU mold is not evenly distributed across U.S. industries. Service industry unions representing low- skilled, low-paid labor have led the charge toward more inclusive and militant union organizing, while manufacturing workers are seen to have been left behind. In fact, the election of former SEIU President John Sweeney to the Presidency of the AFL-CIO in

1995 was a major factor in the popularization of the incorrectly-termed SMU research tradition (Scipes, 2014). Moreover, almost all case studies that analyze inclusive

unionism approach movements or campaigns led by service industry workers and their representatives (Parks and Warren, 2012; Gray and DeFillips, 2015; Meyer, 2016; Yu,

Kyoung-Hee, 2014). Some studies have even taken the disproportionate predominance of

SJU in the service industry as a given (Frege and Kelly, 2004; Early, 2011). However, few researchers have investigated the depth of this distinction or the underlying causes that have precipitated it.

The Research Question at Hand

The present study seeks to deepen scholarly knowledge regarding both the link between neoliberal political economy and SJU as well as the differences in its expression

(or lack of expression) among service industry and manufacturing industries. The link between these questions is rather apparent. Manufacturing employment has declined sharply in the United States as a byproduct of neoliberal restructuring, whereas service jobs continue to expand (Thompson, 2017). Service industry unions like the SEIU and

UNITE HERE have grown over recent decades, while manufacturing unions have faltered. The SEIU claimed the largest percentage membership increase between 1996 and 2010 of any American union, while UNITE HERE’s base grew by 24% between

2014 and 2019 (Fraser, 2010; Gumpert, 2019). The UAW, meanwhile, one of the most influential manufacturing unions in U.S. history, saw its membership drop by around nine percent in 2018 (Lang and Thibodeau, 2019). Accordingly, with respect to SJU, neoliberal restructuring theoretically should have impacted representatives of manufacturing labor in markedly different ways than it has impacted service industry unionists. By analyzing the differences in contract priorities and union network structures

that have arisen in manufacturing versus service industries, I will achieve another angle through which to understand the relationship between neoliberalism and SJU.

Methodology

The present study will compare three case studies: (1) the 2018 strikes led by seven UNITE HERE Locals at Marriott hotels in eight U.S. cities; (2) the UAW national strike organized against GM in 2019; and (3) the ongoing UAW Local 2110 campaign to build and maintain union representation at museums and cultural centers in New York

City. In the first section of this chapter, Specifying Case Study Typologies, I will place each of these cases on the spectrum between SJU and business unionism by analyzing their respective histories and contemporary organizing tactics. I will show that, for my purposes, UNITE HERE represents an SJU union; UAW GM Locals constitute a business union with specific SJU characteristics; and Local 2110 occupies a middle point between these two cases. This typology will ground the data-based analysis that follows in subsequent chapters.

In the following section of this chapter, Data Collection and Analysis, I will outline the exact methodological steps that I will take to examine each case study. First, I will describe which local contracts I will analyze from each case. These contracts will be key to my ability to draw conclusions regarding bargaining priorities and treatment of shopfloor conditions. Second, I will describe my process of collecting Twitter data from each case, which will be the basis of my social network analysis.

Specifying Case Study Typologies

UNITE HERE: SJU Among Low-Wage Service Workers

In 2004, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) merged to create UNITE

HERE. From the outset, top-level union officials intended to use this merger in order to

create an organization that could effectively apply the SJU organizing framework. Andy

Stern, then-President of the SEIU and the successor of John Sweeney, encouraged

UNITE President Bruce Raynor and HERE President John Wilhelm to find a way to amalgamate their two organizations. Stern, at the time, shared with Sweeney the mantle of progressive unionism. The SEIU had just overseen a massive membership spike by investing in organizing Black and immigrant workers and by broadening their advocacy to community organizations. This rapid growth at a time when most unions were faltering propelled Sweeney to the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1994 on a platform that called for unprecedented spending on organizing. (Early, 2011; Chaison, 2010). Stern recognized that UNITE was fortunate enough to possess vast resources, including a union-owned bank, but its central organizing arena, textiles, was rapidly eroding. HERE, on the other hand, represented workers in a service sector that was expanding rapidly, but it had little funding to pursue new organizing campaigns (Chaison, 2010). The idea, then, was that a merger would allow the newly formed union to aggressively “organize the unorganized” in the hospitality industry, and with Stern as the overseer, SJU promised to be front-and-center.

The respective histories of UNITE and HERE, which stretched back to the end of the 19th Century, also predisposed the new union to a progressive model. Both HERE and

UNITE’s core predecessors struggled significantly with gender, race, and citizenship divisions within their ranks during the 1900’s, but by the end of the 20th century they had identified themselves as progressive activist groups with firm roots in immigrant communities. Moreover, by 2004 both HERE and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile

Workers’ Union (a predecessor of UNITE) had positive bargaining experiences with the

“corporate campaign” (Getman, 2010). This strategy, through which a labor organization targets shareholders, community organizations, and consumers as part of the push for a fair contract, is a hallmark of the SJU tradition in a neoliberal globalizing economy

(Holland and Pyman, 2012).

From the outset, UNITE HERE sought to self-consciously orient its organizing away from the business unionist tendencies that had come under scrutiny in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Perhaps no event serves as a better testament to the group’s dedication to reshaping union organizing than its 2005 split from the AFL-CIO. In a move that rebuffed John Sweeney for not investing enough resources in “organizing the unorganized,” UNITE HERE joined the SEIU, the Laborers’ International Union of

North America, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the International Brotherhood of

Teamsters, and later the Farm Workers in forming the Change To Win coalition (Getman,

2010). This ambitious collective would not stay independent for very long, and it was in fact an abject failure. Leaders at SEIU and UNITE HERE, in particular, engaged in aggressive in-fighting that has soured relations between the two unions even today

(Early, 2011). Still, UNITE HERE’s sojourn away from the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its commitment to challenging traditional leaders’ reluctance to organize new workers through grassroots campaigns and democratic structures.

In the most concrete and tactical terms, however, UNITE HERE separated itself from business unionism by emphasizing shop organizing committees and by implementing the Hotel Workers Rising program. During the earliest days of UNITE

HERE campaigns, lead organizers sought out dedicated rank-and-file laborers who would form an organizing committee of pro-union workers on the shop floor. In some cases,

UNITE HERE even had organizers take jobs at target shops to identify leaders from inside, a tactic known as “salting” (Getman, 2010). This ensured both the direct representation workers’ interests in bargaining proposals and that laborers maintained a vested interest in their union after recognition. This committee structure had been a core component of HERE campaigns for decades, but several upper-level UNITE staffers were at first opposed to the labor-intensive and somewhat expensive approach. They argued that the thorough relationship-building that pushed the internal organizing committee structure forward was too much to ask of organizers with little promise of success. Instead, UNITE officers called for more traditional campaigns in which union staff would focus on servicing grievances, not politicizing workers. Eventually, HERE

President John Wilhelm succeeded in democratizing UNITE HERE structures via shop committees and an expanding organizing staff (Getman, 2010). This organizational strategy became the linchpin of internal SJU. It removes as many barriers as possible that might intervene between rank-and-file priorities and the actions of elected leaders, but it is also time consuming, expensive, and at times, emotionally demanding.

Beginning in 2006, UNITE HERE leadership also coordinated its hotel bargaining timelines so that several contracts, in cities across the country, would lapse simultaneously. President John Wilhelm initially suggested this strategy, but he coordinated it through a decentralized pathway. The tactic, dubbed Hotel Workers Rising, was conducive to replacing shop-level struggle with city-wide or even national campaigns, in turn incorporating broader community outreach and state involvement

(Getman, 2010).

Since its initial merger in 2004, UNITE HERE has maintained its progressive focus and tactics. In cities such as Las Vegas and Chicago, where the union has a strong presence, it has made significant gains for Black and immigrant workers. Virginia Parks and Dorian Warren, as well as Mia Gray and James DeFilippis, have shown that national as well as local union leadership tends to prioritize the most marginalized laborers in the process of building campaigns. These workers have in turn benefited substantially from the union’s activism (2012; 2015). Given the pervasive shop committee structure that I mentioned above, UNITE HERE’s leadership is deeply democratic relative to other labor organizations. Staff organizers contact potential shopfloor leaders by conducting house visits, and they rely on these rank-and-file leaders throughout recognition and strike campaigns. Accordingly, the union places workers in a position to direct campaign priorities and devise activist strategies. Although the group is certainly not perfect, for the purposes of this study UNITE HERE will serve as a consciously SJU-focused union within the service sector.

The UAW: Not Your Average Business Union

Over the course of its 85-year history, the UAW has remained at the center of the

U.S. labor movement, and it has often played a leading role in national politics more broadly. UAW sit-down strikers inspired the CIO during their protests in the years before and following World War II, and UAW President Walter Reuther was at the center of

FDR’s war-time economic program (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002). Since then, the UAW has maintained a notable measure of influence over what has historically been one of the largest and most important industries in the U.S.: automobile manufacturing. This has placed the union in a unique position. Postwar growth in the United States was spurned

by both large-scale industrial expansion (which was powered in no small part by auto companies) and new consumer buying power (which derived directly from advances in pattern bargaining that spread throughout industry). In other words, UAW workers helped catapult the national economy forward on the production line as their union simultaneously ensured sustainable buying power at the bargaining table (Ward, 2016).

Even in the decades since the Big Three auto producers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) began to outsource production, the UAW has held tight to its influence over domestic output.

Accordingly, the union was an important player in the government auto bailouts of 1979 and 2008.

UAW organizing strategies and organizational arrangements have shifted according to the political economic environments that characterized each of these historical periods. The early UAW relied heavily on its ties to community organizations and outside political organizers. During the first decades that followed the union’s founding charter, striking workers, who were predominately male, looked to local women’s organizations to provide food and support on the picket line. When a UAW

Local called a strike, particularly in cities like Detroit, masses of non-auto workers arrived to lend a hand or even to tussle with a police officer or a company scab

(Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002). On a regional level, Leftist groups such as the Socialist Party and the Communist Party played a key role in agitating workers and extending union networks in the 1930s. These parties saw manufacturing workers as a crucial political base, and they mediated their influence through the UAW. Walter Reuther himself started out with strong ties to the Socialist Party, and he used his connections to expand his position in the UAW. This coordination was possible during the days of the Popular

Front, before Stalinism and red-baiting came to sow a bitter divisiveness between organizers of competing Leftist stripes. Before and during World War II, coordination between ideologues and workers created a sense of solidarity that stretched well beyond the shopfloor (Lichtenstein, 1995).

During the 1930’s and 40’s, the UAW not only won recognition for thousands of production workers at plants run by GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but it established at those plants an ethos of “shopfloor democracy”. UAW shop stewards pushed hard against management for a say in how workers were treated, how fast they had to work, and how they could influence factory life. Shopfloor issues and worker control remained central to almost all UAW strike campaigns throughout World War II. Even as President Roosevelt incorporated top union officials into his Keynesian “alphabet soup” via the WLB and the

NDMB, local leaders and rank-and-file workers pushed against management overreach through wildcat strikes that could paralyze production (Lipsitz, 1994). At this point, there was no formal grievance or arbitration system, so union representatives on the production line were able to bring to bear as much influence as they could mobilize from other workers and from local headquarters (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002). Conservative unionism essentially grew out of this ongoing tension. Business unionist leaders responded to management demands for order on the production line by negating the importance of rank-and-file grievances that did not relate to wages or healthcare. This transition away from “shopfloor democracy” became pivotal to the very definition of business unionism.

It is important to note that the UAW was initially firmly on the SJU side of the spectrum with respect to shopfloor issues.

But the UAW changed dramatically in the decades that followed the passage of the 1947 anti-communist Taft-Hartley Act. During the 1940s and 1950’s, executive union officials conducted an enthusiastic purge of “communist” Local leaders and organizers.

National executives conceived this internal Red Scare, in part, as a necessary effort to comply with the provision of Taft-Hartley that required all union officials to swear off any affiliation with the Communist Party. The House Un-American Activities Committee

(HUAC) made a public spectacle out of “subversive” union officials, and UAW leaders had few options to avoid this PR nightmare. However, the union’s Executive Board, led by Walter Reuther, simultaneously used anti-Soviet hysteria to expel dissident elements that were unhappy with the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” and with Liberal Keynesian leadership more broadly. The Taft-Hartley framework, which required that all Local contracts be approved by International headquarters and that executive union leaders take responsibility for all Local actions, again facilitated this push for centralization. The

Executive Board established pattern bargaining priorities, lobbied Democratic politicians extensively, and harshly disciplined uncooperative internal leaders. By the middle of the

1960’s, the UAW was still gaining significant healthcare and wage benefits for its members, but it had lost the democratic and community-oriented character that had defined its earlier successes (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002; Moody, 1988; 1997).

The most immediate consequence of this organizational shift was that the UAW abandoned its dedication to contesting employers over shopfloor issues. This was not entirely an internal decision, since Taft-Hartley, in coordination with the Warren

Supreme Court, sought to limit union activism to the purview of collective bargaining.

But with expanding executive control and increasing pressure to maintain industrial

peace, union leaders not only declined to strike over non-“bread and butter” matters, but they shot down organizers and workers who raised these concerns. In 1964, for instance, when a militant UAW Local called a wildcat strike over management disciplinary tactics and production rates, Reuther promised President Lyndon Johnson that he would step in before the stoppage could proceed, and he did just that (Lichtenstein, 1995; 2002).

As the 1960’s came to a close, evidence mounted that the UAW had nearly abandoned the social roots that had once underlay its successful campaigns of the 1930’s and 40’s. This observation rings particularly true with respect to community embeddedness and campaign democracy. During the 1970’s, the UAW’s most successful organizing push was the Orange County’s Organizing Committee, through which around

35 unions consistently coordinated their California campaigns. Although this was an impressive coordination effort led by UAW staff, it did not emphasize democratic structural development or community engagement (Windham, 2017). The 1980’s oversaw a similar tendency for the UAW’s individual efforts. Some organizers, particularly in the U.S. South, began to build internal organizing committees similar to those that UNITE HERE implements, but there was minimal investment in house visits or sustained contacts within the community. These failures became abundantly clear when the UAW lost a 1989 election at a Nissan plant in Tennessee that it had been organizing for around seven years (Minchin, 2017). Labor scholars have further identified a lack of community support as a key factor in two elections that the union lost in 2014 and 2017

(Minchin, 2018; Silvia, 2018). In one of these campaigns, which took place in

Chattanooga, TN, the UAW agreed in advance not to conduct any house visits as part of its organizing strategy, a tactic that is at the core of SJU (Silvia, 2018). This is in direct

contrast to UNITE HERE, which consistently relies on internal organizing committees, house visits, and community networks to organize new workers. Based on this historical sketch of UAW organizing, it is clear that the autoworkers’ union has moved decisively and consistently towards business unionism.

Race and the UAW

Perhaps no shift in the UAW’s politics more clearly reflects its transition to business unionism than its evolving stances on racial justice. The UAW’s approach to workers’ rights is defined by the union’s relationship to anti-racist movements. During the 1950’s and 60’s, the UAW faced a reckoning over racial justice that was brought on by the Civil Rights Movement. This pivotal moment would come to shape the union’s identity in an enduring way.

By 1960, following the Great Migration and the northern industrial expansion that accompanied WWII, around 20 percent of auto workers in the United States were Black

(Korstad and Lichtenstein, 1988). The relationship of these workers to the UAW was a complex and at times paradoxical one. On one hand, the union’s infrastructure and its institutional leverage provided a sense of popular legitimacy to the growing civil rights movement by elevating a platform for Black workers to articulate their demands. This was particularly crucial before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 recognized civil rights as an unavoidable national issue backed by a well-organized social movement. Moreover, in cities like Detroit where the UAW, the NAACP, and the Urban

League all had a foothold, unionization helped incorporate clearly defined class struggle into Black activism (Korstad and Lichtenstein, 1988). Thus, by the early 1950’s, Black

auto workers were often strong supporters of the UAW, and they constituted a key social force that moved the union forward.

However, in practice, the UAW had a far more limited commitment to anti- racism. Firstly, the UAW did not take major steps to challenge the racialized assignment of shopfloor roles that prevailed in most northern factories. Managers required Black workers to perform the most dangerous and most menial tasks, creating a firm system of segregation on the production line. White workers despised any suggestion of a disruption to this formulation, and their racist anxiety manifested in a series of “hate strikes” during the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. Union leadership never supported these actions, it almost always condemned them, but the UAW stopped short of taking any meaningful action that would have won more equal treatment (Hill, 1996; Korstad and Lichtenstein,

1988; Lichtenstein, 1995; Moody, 1997). Moreover, even as support for the union grew among Black workers, leadership positions remained occupied by White officials. Most

UAW Locals that had high proportions of Black membership included at least one Black official on election tickets to assuage their members, but Black executive representation was never equal to representation among the membership (Korstad and Lichtenstein,

1988). Thus, from the beginning of the civil rights era, the UAW did its best to establish for itself a progressive identity without offending its White members.

At the same time, UAW President Walter Reuther was a vocal ally to the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; he even marched alongside the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph. But this stance was notably distinct from the union’s internal racial politics, and it was always second to the UAW’s relationship to the Democratic Party. Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, the union’s

leadership remained mostly White and the facilities it represented remained mostly segregated. Even as UAW leaders spoke out publically against Jim Crow laws and racial violence, they did little to challenge similar practices within their own ranks (Hill, 1996;

Lichtenstein, 1995). Moreover, Reuther and the UAW were hesitant to challenge the

Democrats or their fragile alliance with the Dixiecrats. They feared that, if alienated from the only major progressive party, the New Deal framework would collapse around them.

As a result, in 1964, the UAW Executive Board worked closely with President Johnson to ensure that the integrationist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its staunchly progressive platform would not be officially recognized (Lichtenstein, 2002).

This UAW approach to civil rights was undeniably effective as the movement was gaining the traction that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The union gained a Liberal reputation that improved its standing in progressive circles and helped it to earn the lasting loyalty of a large segment of automobile workers. For a few years in the middle of the 1960’s, the UAW stood alongside leading civil rights advocacy organizations as the vanguard of political economic liberalism. But the contradictions of

UAW racial hypocrisy could not remain unaddressed. In the late 1960’s, as the Black

Power movement came to ally itself intimately with the international anti-imperialist

Left, the limits of the UAW’s racial liberalism, coupled with its (at best) tepid disapproval of the Vietnam War tore at the organization’s progressive credentials.

Internal dissidents such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in the late 1960’s and later the New Directions Movement of the 1980’s pushed the UAW to take a more clearly anti-racist stance (Georgakas and Surkin, 1998; Moody, 1997). Still, the UAW continues to exhibit a somewhat limited public position on racial justice. It

allied publically with the NAACP in 2013 during a recognition campaign, which eventually failed, at a Nissan plant in Mississippi, but it has not made known any position on the Black Lives Matter movement (Rogers and Boudette, 2013).

Any union’s position on racial justice is inseparable from its organizing tactics, its social vision, and ultimately its placement along the spectrum between business unionism and SJU. The UAW is no different. Its attempt to move in two directions at once derived from its alliance with the Democratic Party that held the corporatist Fordist state together during the post-war era. Union leaders felt that they could take no risks that Democratic officials would not take themselves, and they were left with an incomplete and contradictory ideology. Still, DRUM and the New Directions campaign show that there remains a place for progressive dissent within the UAW. Moreover, in the mid 1990’s, internal union activists pushed the organization to win significant protections for its

LGBTQ+ members in the 1999 Big Three contracts. This took place despite significant disapproval from certain members and executive officials. During this particular case, a small number of affected workers effectively used the union’s organizational infrastructure to enact lasting change from the bottom up (Bielski Boris, 2010). Given this analysis, it would be incorrect to characterize the UAW as an archetypal business union, but certainly untenable to associate its racial justice politics with SJU.

Democratic organizational infrastructure, community embeddedness, and racial justice. Each of these factors are undoubtedly influenced by the UAW’s complex history, but the union has leaned increasingly towards conservatism in recent decades. Executive officials do not emphasize internal communities or house visits; they do not invest heavily in building community connections; and the UAW continues to refrain from

taking a firm stance on racial justice issues. This leads me to conclude that the UAW will serve, for my purposes, as a business union with some vestigial SJU characteristics operating within the manufacturing sector.

The UAW also fits well for the present study because it is of comparable size to

UNITE HERE. UNITE HERE has around 300,000 active members across various service industry positions, while the UAW represented approximately 395,000 automobile workers in 2019 (UNITE HERE, 2020; Laing and Thibodeau, 2019). Union size has an important impact on organizational structures, since larger groups tend to lean more heavily on centralization. However, one crucial confounding variable for which I will not be able to control is membership and potential membership diversity in race and citizenship status. UNITE HERE represents more Black and Latinx workers, as well as more immigrant and undocumented workers than does the UAW. Moreover, automobile manufacturing plants are generally located in cities with low immigrant populations. I will outline steps to mediate these factors. Still, as I proceed with my analysis, the comparisons and contrasts I draw between UNITE HERE and the UAW will illuminate crucial tendencies within service, manufacturing, SJU, and business unions.

UAW Local 2110: A Halfway Point

Finally, UAW Local 2110 will factor into this study as a compelling and unique third case study. Although the UAW traditionally represents industrial manufacturing employees, it expanded its operations into the service sector as manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dipped. Local 2110, which operates in New York City, has pushed this expansion by organizing graduate students, museum employees, and non- profit workers. Although these workers are not directly linked to the service industry,

they are traditionally represented by the SEIU or UNITE HERE. Often, they share workplace issues and organizing tactics with the hospitality workers that make up the majority of memberships in those unions. Thus, UAW Local 2110 will allow me to roughly isolate “service” employment as a factor that affects the predominance of SJU.

Local 2110 members share the same union leadership, history, and organizational practices as UAW auto manufacturing Locals, so differences in organizing strategies should reflect the influence of their particular industry.

The UAW formed Local 2110 out of the Manhattan-based clerical workers’ union

District 65 in the early 1990’s (Casey, 2003). In 1933, Arthur Osman and Local 65 made an explicit call to organize between ethnic and racial lines on the Lower East Side of

Manhattan. Osman challenged the industrial unionist model of the Depression-era CIO by proposing that unions should be organized according to geography, as opposed to by trade. He hoped to develop more direct control over the means of production by ensnaring capital in cities that were under the influence of united labor blocs. This guiding philosophy gave birth to a diverse Local 65 that represented workers in all walks of life from across New York City. In essence, Local 65 organized the laborers that were left behind by larger, more established CIO unions in the city. Tactically, the union focused on building a mass of agitated and political workers that formed the infrastructure and backbone of the small Local. Shop stewards led organizing drives and community events, while staff organizers essentially played a supporting role (Phillips,

2012).

Although Local 65’s ambitious and community-based unionism was effective in expanding and mobilizing a significant membership throughout the Great Depression and

World War II, it came under fire during the Cold War. As the AFL-CIO sought to root out communist influences from within the U.S. labor movement, the New York Local’s

“catch-all” unionism came to be perceived as an unacceptable aberration. District 65 was cast out of the AFL-CIO, and then-UAW President Walter Reuther discouraged the

NAACP from partnering with the group’s campaigns (Phillips, 2012). Thus, with minimal institutional support and facing pressure to define its scope within the industrial unionist model, District 65 began to limit itself to clerical, retail, and administrative workers from the 1960’s to 1990’s.

Although the UAW became affiliated with District 65 in the early 1990’s, it was not until a few years later that the newly minted Local 2110 would be integrated fully into the UAW organizational matrix. UAW Region 9A leader Phil Muir, who encouraged community-based unionism and action at higher education institutions, folded District 65 into his organizational matrix. Thus, he formed Local 2110 and continued to narrow its focus to universities and museums. By 1996, the union had won recognition at the

Museum of Modern Art, and it made history at New York University in 2000 by winning the first contract in the U.S. between a university and graduate students (Casey, 2003).

The contract at NYU would prove to be of lasting significance, as college campuses have developed into yet another union battleground against increasingly precarious academic labor. With Local 2110 as a model, the UAW has joined the SEIU and the American

Federation of Teachers as leaders in this movement (Dayton and Batzell, 2017; Dobbie and Robinson, 2008).

Since 2003, Local 2110 has been led by former clerical worker and District 65 organizer Maida Rosenstein. Under her direction, the union has expanded into the New

York non-profit sector, and it has touted a focus on feminist organizing that centers non- male workers and organizers. According to an interview with Ms. Rosenstein, Local 2110 sought to “learn solidarity” between workers at various employment levels by addressing issues of sexual harassment and racial discrimination (Casey, 2003). It is clear that this union is a consciously progressive and community-oriented body embedded within the

UAW organizational infrastructure. I will show that the workers it represents, particularly low-level employees at New York City museums, share several grievances with UNITE

HERE’s base, and that these grievances derive in large part from common working conditions. Accordingly, UAW Local 2110 will serve as a unique case study to evaluate the impact of service employment on union activity and strategy.

Data Collection and Analysis

At this point, I have situated all of my case studies along the heuristic spectrum between SJU and business unionism based on their respective histories of organizational democracy, elevation of shopfloor issues, and focus on racial justice. UNITE HERE organized the 2018 Marriott strike in eight U.S. cities represented by seven locals: Maui,

HI (Local 5); Oahu, HI (Local 5); Boston, MA (Local 26); Oakland, CA (Local 2850);

San Jose, CA (Local 19); San Diego, CA (Local 30); San Francisco, CA (Local 2); and

Detroit, MI (Local 24). The 2019 UAW GM strike, on the other hand, took place in 31

U.S. cities represented by 32 UAW Locals. In order to standardize these two core case studies, I selected eight of these cities and Locals to include in my data collection:

Arlington, TX (Local 276); Bowling Green, KY (Local 2164); Fairfax, KA (Local 31);

Flint, MI (598); Detroit, MI (Local 22); Lansing Delta, MI (Local 602); Fort Wayne, IN

(2209); and Rochester, NY (Local 1097). I included Arlington, TX because it is home to

one of GM’s largest plants in the U.S., and because the city is much more diverse racially and with respect to immigration status than other relevant locations. This helps to address the confounding variable caused by the fact that UNITE HERE’s membership is generally much less White and more heavily immigrant than the UAW’s base. I included

Flint, Detroit, and Lansing Delta both because they are more diverse than other GM plant cities and because UNITE HERE also led a strike in the Michigan city of Detroit. This parity will allow for a more congruent comparison between the cases. I selected the other four cities because they are the four most diverse cities in which GM maintains UAW- represented plants. All told, my primary goal in selecting these particular cases was to partially address the confounding variables of racial demography and immigrant status among striking workers.

UAW Local 2110, on the other hand, represents 27 locations in New York City.

For the purposes of this study, I will limit my analysis to four museums that have contracts signed by Local 2110: the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of Modern

Art (MoMA), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the New York Historical

Society. These are the only museums that Local 2110 represents, and I included them because museum workers labor under conditions that are closest to UNITE HERE’s hotel workers. The majority of them interact directly with guests or serve as maintenance staff.

Thus, these locations provide the nearest approximation of service industry organizing that is comparable to UNITE HERE’s work at Marriott locations.

Contract Analysis

For my contract analysis of UNITE HERE, I collected the contracts that the union signed with various Marriott hotels in 2018. Unfortunately, I was only able to attain one

of eight relevant contracts. This agreement is between Local 24 in Detroit and the

Marriott-operated Westin Book Cadillac Hotel. With respect to my analysis of UAW GM

Locals, I was able to access contracts that Locals 31 (Fairfax, KA), 2164 (Bowling

Green, KY), and 2209 (Fort Wayne, IN) signed at the close of the 2019 strike, as well as the 2019 national agreement between UAW International and GM headquarters.

Regarding Local 2110, I collected all of the contracts that the group has signed with the four relevant museums since 1996. These documents include the provisions that resulted from bargaining campaigns over the past 24 years. Through comparison to past contracts,

I will be able to show what sections have progressed from the perspective of the union, as well as which chapters have been fraught with concessions. For all three case studies, my focus will center on specific sections that regulate conditions relevant to SJU and neoliberal political economy. These can be organized as shopfloor provisions, racial and immigrant justice, domestic investment versus outsourcing, conditions for part-time or temporary employees, and provisions regarding technological innovation that displaces workers.

The business unionist tradition both limits itself to “bread and butter” bargaining and operates within a legislative framework that reinforces those limits. Naturally, SJU labor organizations in the U.S. exist within the same legislative matrix as their business unionist counterparts, but I will show that they are able to push these limits to respond to membership concerns. Accordingly, my analysis of shopfloor conditions in contracts will center on all sections that deal with workplace safety and disciplinary procedures. I will estimate which union Locals were able to press their employers for more concrete language on worker democracy and guaranteed safety conditions.

The above Review of Literature elaborated the intimate relationship between part-time or precarious work and neoliberal political economic “reform”. Both UNITE

HERE Marriott campaigners and the UAW national organizers and negotiators made this connection as clear as possible throughout the 2018 and 2019 campaigns. UNITE HERE branded its campaign with the slogan “One Job Should Be Enough” in a clear rebuke of part-time work and poverty wages. The UAW, on the other hand, promised to prioritize temporary workers at the bargaining table by securing improved wages and a more clearly defined path to full-time employment. By investigating the extent to which each of these parties achieved these objectives, I will be able to analyze the effectiveness of

SJU relative to business unionism in the face of neoliberal regression.

The next relevant contract sections will be those that touch on justice for workers of color and immigrant laborers. Non-discrimination provisions that prevent racial- and gender-based oppressive behavior among both workers and managers have been included, in some form, in most labor accords for the past few decades. Certain unions, however, have extended and adapted these protections while others have lagged behind. I have shown that more intense dedication to racial and immigrant justice is generally associated with SJU-oriented organizations. To test this hypothesis, I intend to identify the specific protections that each organization ensures for its members and compare the strength of these stipulations.

First, I was only able to collect five contracts total from UNITE HERE and UAW

GM Locals. Local contracts tend to be very diverse in terms of the provisions that they include because workers and organizers at different workplaces naturally have different issues that they prioritize. Accordingly, it is likely that I failed to include all relevant

provisions in this study. Moreover, although contracts are an excellent means of operationalizing bargaining priorities, they are by no means comprehensive. Since negotiations involve a process of give-and-take from employers and unions, labor leaders almost certainly brought up demands over the course of these campaigns that employers rejected outright. My analysis will obviously lack consideration for this factor. In addition, labor contracts are not static documents. Their enforcement depends heavily on how employers, workers, and unions interact after they sign the agreement. Although I will be able to include this variable to a certain extent, I cannot fully operationalize it within my methods of content analysis.

Network Analysis

Following my contract analysis chapter, I will proceed to a social network analysis of the union officials involved in the campaigns based on data collected from the social media platform Twitter. This exploration will center on both “internal” and

“external” union communication. By “internal” communication, I refer to tweets in which one union official tags another official from the same union. These interactions are intriguing because they reflect how unions produce and distribute content. I will show what individuals and Locals are central to developing and publicizing pro-union material, as well as what entities tend to be disengaged or passive in this process. This will reflect centralization and decentralization patterns within each case study. By “external” communication, I refer to tweets in which one union official tags an account that is not associated with their organization. Union leaders often rely on personal connections to community organizers and groups to extend their activist networks outside the shopfloor.

This incorporates a valuable grassroots element to union strategies, and it is conducive to

the formation of labor-community alliances. Moreover, these interactions commonly take place via social media in general, and particularly over Twitter. It will be interesting to see the extent to which UNITE HERE Marriott officials, UAW GM officials, and UAW

Local 2110 officials engage in this tactic and to find out the organizations and individuals with whom they partner. Together, this combination of internal and external Twitter communication will allow me to draw conclusions regarding both organizational centralization and community embeddedness.

To gather Twitter data, I collected the names of select individuals who were active on the relevant campaigns from 2018 and 2019 LM-2 Labor Organization Annual

Reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). These forms, which the DOL administers for tax and oversight purposes, list all individuals paid by the union during a particular year, as well as their job titles. From UNITE HERE I included Hotel

Representatives, Organizing Directors, Vice-Presidents and Presidents. I limited my collection to these officials because UNITE HERE Locals tend to have much larger staffs than UAW Locals. Specifically, the union hires more organizers, reflecting its focus on expanding its base as opposed to servicing grievances. Accordingly, I chose not to include all staff from the relevant Locals, but rather those who were directly involved in the 2018 strike. Using this collection method, I collected 19 total names of relevant

UNITE HERE officials. From UAW GM Locals, on the other hand, I included all staff that were listed on the LM-2 forms. Given the UAW’s smaller staff and the fact that relevant Locals never service more than two workplaces, all of these officials were involved in the 2019 strike. Using this strategy, I collected 61 relevant official names.

From UAW Local 2110 I included all officials in order to analyze a similar number of accounts between all cases. This yielded nine names.

Once I collected these names, I conducted a simple Google search and a simple

Twitter search to identify the Twitter account associated with each identity. I also identified the Twitter accounts associated with all official Locals and International headquarters. Since not every individual has a Twitter, this left me with 32 UNITE HERE accounts, 8 UAW GM accounts, and 5 Local 2110 accounts. I proceeded to download the

3200 most recent tweets from each of these accounts that tag another account. In other words, these are the most recent interactions between each relevant account and another

Twitter user. This left me with a list of 50,797 tweets in total. Based on this list, I will be able to perform social network analysis that will elucidate and clarify any internal and external communication patterns.

Once again, although I am confident that this data collection procedure will yield a wealth of interesting results, it is certainly not perfect. As is already somewhat clear from the number of Twitter accounts I eventually included, the UAW is generally much less active on Twitter than UNITE HERE. Only two officials from UAW GM Locals have personal accounts, which means that my findings regarding community embeddedness will be severely limited. I will not be able to conduct a meaningful analysis of how officials interact personally with other activists and progressive organizations. However, since nearly all UAW GM Locals have official Twitter accounts,

I will still be able to draw important conclusions about internal communication patterns, and I will still be able to perceive distinctions from other case studies with respect to community embeddedness.

Contract Analysis

In this chapter, I will conduct a close reading of the provisions for which UAW

International, UAW GM Locals, UNITE HERE Local 24 (Detroit, MI), and UAW Local

2110 bargained and eventually won. I focus first on shopfloor issues, which include production organization, grievance arbitration, joint and shop committees, and health and safety. I then turn to racial and immigrant justice provisions. The first section of this chapter, which investigates these variables, will permit me to test my hypotheses that the

UAW represents a business union with SJU characteristics, that UNITE HERE is an SJU union, and that UAW Local 2110 is a midpoint case. Second, I will analyze how management’s practice of outsourcing influenced bargaining, and how unions responded by winning or failing to gain protections for displaced, temporary, and part-time workers.

This second section will permit me to evaluate the extent to which each union was successful in addressing obstacles that directly relate to neoliberal globalization. In doing so, I will test my hypothesis that SJU is better suited to the contemporary political environment than business unionism.

With respect to shopfloor issues such as disciplinary action or work rates, the evidence that I present suggests that the UAW and UNITE HERE diverge primarily on their tendencies to rely on coordination with employers versus confrontation. UAW GM

Local contracts include an extensive management-labor committee structure that signals the UAW’s emphasis on cooperation with GM. This has allowed the UAW to institutionalize a voice for itself in the transition to lean production. UNITE HERE, on the other hand, is a more confrontational union that devotes resources toward developing its members’ leadership potential in order to maximize pressure on employers. This

permits the union to develop a powerful alternative to grievance arbitration, and instead member delegations protest against management overreach directly. UAW Local 2110 implements elements of both of these strategies at various museums depending on how long it has been recognized at that location.

With respect to health and safety, the UAW is much more confrontational than it is on other issues, but it continues to seek institutionalized solutions to respond to member grievances. This combination of militancy and institutional leverage results in very solid protections for production workers. UNITE HERE, in 2018, directly challenged Marriott on two key health and safety issues: housekeeper overwork and sexual harassment. It pursued policy options independently of the collective bargaining process. As a result, UNITE HERE won major concessions from Marriott on both of these points. UAW Local 2110, meanwhile, falls in line with the UAW GM model. It is able to institutionalize health and safety protections once it has represented a museum for a long time, but initial contracts are considerably more sparse.

In terms of racial and immigrant justice, UNITE HERE is significantly more progressive than either UAW GM Locals or UAW Local 2110. UNITE HERE won more concrete language in 2018 than any other contract I analyzed. This phenomenon is linked both to the union’s SJU identity and to the fact that it organizes a much more diverse work force than either of the other case studies.

Together, these findings lead me to conclude that UNITE HERE indeed behaves according to a SJU model. UAW GM Locals, on the other hand, generally implement a business unionist framework, although they break from this tendency when it comes to

health and safety protections. Finally, UAW Local 2110 applies a combination of these two approaches, which justifies its placement at the center of my typological spectrum.

In the second section, I show that the UAW’s business unionist strategy is conditioned by GM’s credible and ongoing threat to reduce domestic investment. The corporation used outsourcing to force the union to choose between preserving existing employment but sacrificing benefits or abandoning U.S. plants to improve remaining jobs. Neither UNITE HERE nor UAW Local 2110 had to face a similar dilemma. Thus, the UAW made a major compromise on temporary workers’ rights, but it secured unprecedented clarity and protections as a result. UNITE HERE, meanwhile, won significant control over future decisions on hiring temporary labor. However, it was not able to make significant progress for its part-time members. Regarding control over technological innovation, both UNITE HERE and the UAW won influence over future technologies. UNITE HERE’s stipulation was significantly stronger, however, because it included concrete pathways for workers displaced by technology.

Shopfloor Issues

“Shopfloor issues,” for the purposes of this study, are those that relate to management autonomy in the workplace. More specifically, they are worker challenges against employer autocracy to discipline laborers as they see fit and to define health and safety standards. These sticking points derive directly from the concept of “industrial democracy” that guided early CIO unionists and New Deal liberals. Activists challenged the idea that U.S. workers should have to abandon their right to democratic representation at the factory door. They believed that labor should share a voice in everyday production matters, particularly when it came to the conditions under which it operated. After the

passage of Taft-Hartley, government officials, and eventually labor leaders themselves, deemphasized these provisions and the democratic ethos they engendered. The legislation made all International headquarters ultimately responsible for Local actions, which encouraged executive officials to take increasing control over Local offices and decreased the incentive to strike. Shopfloor issues are difficult to include in pattern bargaining (the UAW leaves these issues almost entirely to Local bargaining campaigns), and so union headquarters began to limit Local leaders’ capacity to strike over non- national issues. In addition, Locals affiliated with Communist and Trotskyist parties used shopfloor issues to agitate and politicize their members, so anti-Communist unionists reacted harshly against their wildcat strikes and direct employer confrontations (Moody,

1988). This continuous minimization characterized the business unionist era.

Social Justice Unionists, however, have consciously sought to recentralize these non-“bread and butter” issues. SJU emphasizes democratic organizational structures, so it can more easily incorporate grievances that are limited to specific workplaces. In order to determine the extent to which each union relevant to this study focused on shopfloor issues, I dissected the contracts that they signed during the most recent bargaining period.

Since systematic dampening of everyday rank-and-file issues operates primarily through grievance arbitration and internal organizational structure, I will devote significant attention to each of these fields.

Global Manufacturing System (GMS)

Before jumping into a comparison of shopfloor provisions, it is important to recognize a crucial difference in management structure at GM that sets the corporation apart from Marriott hotels or from museums in New York City. In 1984, General Motors

implemented a novel production system meant to improve efficiency and quality by reorganizing relationships on the shopfloor. The corporation formed a joint venture with

Toyota to build the NUUMI plant, which operated via Japanese lean production methods.

This set of management and assembly techniques, known as the Toyota Production

System (TPS), became the organizational basis for GM’s brand new plant in Silao,

Mexico (Rothstein, 2004; de Gier, 2010). Since these initial ventures, GM has implemented this arrangement, which it calls the “Global Manufacturing System” or

GMS, at nearly all of its manufacturing facilities worldwide. All of the plants I analyzed employed this structure.

GMS relies on the “Team” structure. In essence, management organizes workers into groups that consist of between five and ten people, and each group is responsible for production in a particular “zone” of the plant. All of the laborers in each Team are production workers, but they assume tasks that traditionally fall under management domain. For example, GM expects its production staff to make comprehensive quality checks before passing material on to the next Team, it requests that they make recommendations on efficiency, and it requires teams to be responsible for maintaining safe working practices. Moreover, within each team, one particular member assumes additional management responsibility without a manager title. Each group has a “Team

Leader” who is paid an additional dollar per hour to handle data management and quality reports to corporate (Local 31 p. 35-37). This GMS structure disrupts the traditional relationship between management and production staff by incorporating workers more directly into the leadership process. It also emphasizes relationship-building and horizontalism within each working group.

Several scholars have pointed out that lean production methods such as GMS are meant at least in part to co-opt workers in order to replace unionism in the auto industry with Human Resource management. As Big Three American automakers have joined manufacturers around the world in implementing lean production techniques, scholars and corporate leaders have promoted them as a form of worker empowerment. These proponents claim that modern auto plants should be organized to minimize divisions between workers and managers, allowing employees to perceive a common stake in efficiently producing high-quality vehicles (Vidal, 2007; Liker and Hoseus, 2010; Jones et al., 2012). Dissidents, however, point out that this encourages workers to internalize a profit motive and dedicate more time to production and quality checks without addressing the structurally exploitative dynamics that underlie capital-labor relations. Moreover, lean production can potentially minimize the role of labor unions by replacing grievance arbitration and collective bargaining with Team-mediated conflict settlement and Human

Resource management (Bruno and Jordan, 2002; Green and Yanarella, 1996; Moody,

1997). I will return to this question, in the specific context of the UAW, as part of my discussion of joint committees.

Grievance Arbitration

The most important, as well as the most ubiquitous, mechanism that prevents labor from adequately addressing shopfloor issues is grievance arbitration. Grievance arbitration clauses generally establish a hierarchy of representatives who are to mediate issues, and if no agreement can be reached in-house, the parties agree on a third-party arbitrator. This apparatus was inaugurated in the 1950 UAW-GM “Treaty of Detroit,” and it has since become a foundation for labor relations in the U.S. (Lichtenstein, 1995).

As a result of this procedure, in addition to the incorporation of certain shopfloor regulations into federal law, strikes over working conditions have exhibited an overall decline (Wallace, 2007).

Since 1950, grievance arbitration has become deeply entrenched in U. S. capital- labor relations, particularly in the largest and most monopolistic industries. Although there are obvious drawbacks associated with this institution from labor’s perspective, its universality has created a standard pathway to avoid strikes. Workers now know exactly what issues they can bring to arbitration, and they do not need to take the great personal and collective risks associated with work stoppages to achieve redress. Moreover, arbitration procedures create precedent that is independent of future management attitudes or worker organization. In other words, when a union and an employer reach an agreement through arbitration, that agreement is codified into labor-management relations until the end of the contract period. In the absence of this precedent, employers would be able to simply wait out militant and organized workers in order to resort to aggressive management tactics.

Given this standardization, grievance arbitration sections have also remained remarkably constant in terms of contract language and arbitration structure. The only major changes in UAW-bargained grievance provisions over the past decades have been the arbitrators tasked with handling disputes. These are usually academics that the UAW and employers agree to designate to resolve conflicts. The issues on which they are allowed to rule and the process of bringing grievances to their table, however, have not changed beyond minor modifications (Lichtenstein, 2002). The contracts analyzed in the present study confirm this formalized staying power.

UNITE HERE grievance procedures (included in Local contracts), UAW grievance pathways (included in the national agreement), and UAW Local 2110 procedures (included in Local contracts) are almost identical with respect to substance. If a worker disagrees with a manager’s disciplinary action or feels that a section of their contract has been violated, that employee is allowed to meet with management in the presence of a union representative. If this meeting does not yield a resolution, the union follows a chain of command within the employer’s organizational structure. The only discrepancy from this specific pathway can be found at UAW GM plants, and it is attributable to GMS. Local contracts stipulate that, before going to management, Team

Leaders should attempt to settle grievances themselves. The contract emphasizes this step as a preferred means of allowing Teams some autonomy in deciding their own working conditions. Apart from this point of differentiation, the only other difference between arbitration pathways concerns final mediators. At workplaces represented by UNITE

HERE, any outside arbitration is conducted either by an agreed-upon third-party or by the

FCMS. At UAW manufacturing plants and UAW Local 2110 museums, the union and the employer agree on three local scholars to form a panel that convenes to mediate any disputes that may arise.

These minor differences translate to very similar grievance arbitration processes at all three union bodies. However, there exists an important difference with respect to how this procedure is carried out. Grievance arbitration generally works to a union member’s benefit when the organization maintains an extensive shop steward network in the work place. These rank-and-file workers are the first to meet with management if there is an issue, and they generally function as the most direct worker representatives on

the shopfloor. Accordingly, more shop stewards per worker and more time reserved for them to address worker concerns generally translate to increasingly favorable worker outcomes.

At UAW-GM plants, shop stewards make up the Shop Committees that also conduct bargaining. Local 2209 (Fort Wayne, IN) maintains eight stewards for 4231 workers; Local 2164 (Bowling Green, KY) maintains nine stewards for 888 workers, and

Local 31 maintains eight stewards for 2400 workers (Fairfax, KA). Although UAW GM contracts listed all shop stewards, they did not inscribe these numbers as a requirement.

Rather, it is likely that the Local itself decides how many stewards are necessary. The contract that UNITE HERE signed at the Detroit Westin, meanwhile, permits one shop steward to take paid time off in order to service grievances. However, UNITE HERE

Local 24 is permitted to designate additional stewards who may not take paid time off.

These rank-and-file leaders service around 160 workers. The union also has the right to pull employees out of the hotel for up to six months over the course of a year to train as organizers or to handle internal hotel affairs. This section reads:

The Westin shall permit full leaves of absence for up to a total of six (6) months during any rolling twelve (12) month period for up to three (3) employees at any one time to accept full-time employment with the Union, with no more than one (1) employee from each department (as listed in article 4, section 4.3(b)) at one time, provided it does not interfere with the efficient operation of the Hotel.

This provision fits well with UNITE HERE’s focus on leadership development. The organization often sends rank-and-file workers on organizing assignments at other sites to improve their capacity for advocacy in their workplaces. As a result, although the Detroit

Westin only has one paid shop steward, it is likely that there are several rank-and-file leaders who are qualified to confront management. These provisions do not exist in UAW

GM contrasts, which suggests that UNITE HERE places a greater emphasis on developing rank-and-file activism. Overall, the union at the Detroit Westin goes out of its way to create an agitated work force that is equipped to confront management.

Joint and Shop Committees

Collective bargaining agreements almost always include joint committees made up of representatives from both management and the union. They draft recommendations and workplace policies on day-to-day operations that range from worker evaluation procedures to health and safety to cafeteria food quality. Committees incorporate rank- and-file workers directly into decisions about shopfloor conditions, and they also make contracts more dynamic in their expression. Committee members can interpret certain clauses and can identify difficulties as they arise. Accordingly, these committee structures are integral to the concrete manifestations of industrial democracy, and their implementation warrants a close inspection.

At GM plants represented by the UAW, joint committees have specific purposes that support union influence over job placement and employment security. Although they vary slightly between plants, most UAW auto locals generally designate representatives to serve on Labor, Manpower, Health and Safety, Cafeteria, and Team Leader

Selection/De-Selection Committees. Each plant department maintains a Labor Committee that is “responsible for the assignment of employees to team within the Department.”

(Local 31 p. 9). The Manpower committee conducts reassignments when necessary, and

Team Leader Selection/De-Selection committees mediate the process of promoting and replacing Team Leaders (Local 2209 p. 172; Local 2164 p. 32-38). The union’s voice in these decisions is a reflection of its influence over daily production. Local leaders can

advocate against the arbitrary demotion of Team Leaders, and they can help ensure that managers do not violate the provisions of the national agreement that dictate shift preference (Local 31 p. 29-31). This first point is particularly pivotal. Hiring and promotion constitute terrain that is traditionally a strict management prerogative. Some agreements, including a number signed by UAW Local 2110, create structured promotion tracks that guarantee workers will advance after a given period of time. Many contracts, however, do not even touch upon this subject, and thus implicitly grant corporate representatives unilateral influence over promotion. UAW Locals 2164 (Bowling Green,

KY) and 2209 (Fort Wayne, IN) on the other hand, negotiated a consequential voice for their members in promoting staff to the Team Leader position. To select a Team Leader at Local 2164,

Team Members who are interested in being considered for the position of Team Leader may complete a written 63-A application in the Human Resources Department. A Joint [union-management] Selection Committee will be established and will be responsible for determining the team member’s readiness for the position of Team Leader. Applicants will be required to participate in a mutually agreed upon selection/assessment process. This jointly agreed to selection/assessment process is designed to ensure candidates have the fundamental skills and abilities to be successful (Local 2164 p. 32).

Thus, the union has an equal say in which employee receives the promotion, and it can make its case based on seniority or productivity. At Local 2209, promotion decisions are based entirely on seniority once applicants have passed aptitude tests (Local 2209 p. 126-

128). No UNITE HERE or UAW Local 2110 contract that I reviewed included any provision of similar strength with respect to promotion and demotion.

These clauses are inseparable from GM’s preference for and decision to instate the Global Manufacturing System. For instance, Local 2209 (Fort Wayne, IN) negotiated for the most extensive set of committees at any workplace I analyzed. Its most recent

contract stipulates that twelve joint committees should constitute the “Team Support

Structure” (Local 2209 p. 108). These bodies run trainings, help handle personal problems that take place outside the workplace, monitor product quality, and encourage ground-up suggestions for improvement. Each committee consists of both rank-and-file workers and management who meet regularly and report to corporate and union executives. The contract elaborates these committees under the GMS section, and they are justified as support systems for the overall production arrangement.

A historical review of UAW committee provisions shows that in practice, they represent a compromise between the UAW and GM with respect to shopfloor grievances, rather than a straightforward expansion of union influence. For example, in September of

1964, when GM was recording unprecedented profits, around 260,000 workers went on strike primarily over working conditions in auto manufacturing plants. Although the national and local contracts that year addressed some of these grievances, they resurfaced brutally at GM’s newly-built Lordstown Assembly plant. Production workers there went on strike in 1970 and again in 1972 over management’s disciplinary overreach and aggressive speedups (de Gier, 2010). In response, the UAW worked with GM to develop the “Quality of Worklife” (QWL) program. According to Donald Ephlin, former UAW

Vice President and Director of the union’s GM Division, management and union representatives designed QWL to “address the issues of dignity in the workplace and how to achieve a greater measure of democracy on the shop floor… [I]t… fostered greater communication among many in management and the union and in some cases has served as a beginning point for a joint approach in many locations…. [T]he establishment of

Quality of Worklife programs laid an important foundation in the evolution of the

relationship between workers and managers” (Elphin, 1988 p. 64). This progression fits perfectly with the business unionist model. Rank-and-file GM workers pushed both the

UAW and the corporation to address shopfloor issues, despite reluctance on the part of the union to engage in bargaining that wasn’t centered on “bread-and-butter” concerns. In order to tame this militancy, UAW Executives proposed a thoroughly conciliatory response based on joint labor-management cooperation.

Local contracts first incorporated Team Committees during the 1987 bargaining period, just three years after GM began implementing an early version of GMS at its

NUUMI production plant. “Developing cooperative management-labor conditions” was a central impetus for this move (De Grier, 2010 p. 22). By the end of the 1980’s, General

Motors had apparently realized that employees who are not miserable at work tend to make higher quality cars more efficiently. Human resource management scholars began to tout cooperation through committees as a breakthrough in overcoming union opposition and employee dissatisfaction (Solberg, 1985; Callahan, 1989). Based on this brief history, it is clear that the UAW has prioritized maintaining cooperation with auto manufacturers when it comes to shopfloor control. The UAW’s influence over Team

Leader selection and de-selection, as well as its significant power under the committee structure, are products of the organization’s business unionist approach. Executive officials institutionalized them beginning in 1964, at the peak of United States’ Fordist industrial arrangement, and continued to rely on them during recent decades. However, since the 1970’s, GM, and the Big Three in general, have shown a reluctance to treat the

UAW as a “partner.” Despite consistent UAW protest, GM investment in North

American plants has faced a steep decline and the corporation has fought bitterly and

publically against union campaigns at several new facilities (Rothstein, 2005; Minchin,

2018; Silvia, 2018). In other words, the partnership is not equal. The UAW leans on structures that it developed in the post-war era, despite the fact that contemporary political economic conditions are not nearly as conducive to supporting union power.

Although Team production indeed blurs the lines between worker and manager, it also provides opportunities for unions to acquire direct influence. It would be very unlikely, for instance, for the UAW to have such a genuine measure of control over promotion in the absence of horizontalist Teams. Thus, GMS requires novel cooperation from the UAW, but it rewards that cooperation with more control over shopfloor life.

Both cooperation and control manifest primarily via the committee system.

The UAW also secured the right to advocate for its membership via regular meetings between the corporation and the Shop Committee. Members negotiate Local agreements, review planned reductions-in-force, and usually participate in grievance arbitration procedures. For example, at Local 2209, the Joint Activities Committee meets regularly:

This committee consists of the UAW and Management Joint Activities Representatives, the Plant Manager, the Local UAW President, the Personnel Director, the Shop Committee and other appropriate Management Representatives. This committee is responsible to provide guidance among all other local joint activities as specified under the National Agreement guidelines (Local 2209 p. 108).

At Local 2164, management meets with the Shop Committee once a week (Local 2164 p.

160). At all of the plants I analyzed, the Shop Committee meets continuously with managerial representatives in order to discuss complaints and make compromises.

Moreover, the majority of Shop Committeepersons are rank-and-file workers at each of the plants reviewed for this study. They work together with executive officials to prioritize demands and create negotiating strategies. Thus, through Shop Committee

meetings, the UAW-GM Locals under study successfully established avenues outside of grievance arbitration to challenge management overreach.

Several Local contracts also include “soft” language, which acknowledges management’s goal to improve efficiency. For example, at Local 31 (Fairfax, KA), the

Shop Committee complained during bargaining that lunch breaks and relief times were irregular and inconvenient:

During these negotiations the Union cited instances where it felt Management failed to communicate in a timely manner when it was necessary to utilize the tag relief method in certain situations. Management assured the Union that its intent is to communicate in a timely manner the purpose and duration of such relief methods. Further, selection of the relief person(s) will be the seniority employee(s) desirous and capable of performing this function within the department (Local 31 p. 56).

Similarly, Local 2164 (Bowling Green, KY) leaders requested changes to the plant’s practice of instituting Left Turn Repairs. In response, management committed to “support and implement GMS processes and procedures as well as the roles and responsibilities of the Team Leaders that will allow Team Leaders to support their teams and fulfill their roles and responsibilities in accordance with GMS Principles” (Local 2164 p. 174). Essentially, both contracts recognized these practices to be in violation of the spirit of the agreement, but neither provided an avenue for redress. In these situations, Shop and Joint committees are the exclusive means of expressing worker dissatisfaction and developing solutions.

In Detroit, UNITE HERE Local 24 signed a contract that included a much less extensive committee structure than the UAW-GM model. There are fewer committees, and these bodies have less authority. The labor-management committee created under the

“Positive Labor Relations” section resolves issues between workers and their bosses. This group consists of rank-and-file workers, union representatives, and hotel representatives.

It convenes no more than once a month, and the Westin pays employees for their time participating. Notably, the committee may not discuss “[g]rievances, complaints, and similar issues.” Essentially, then, it is a de-fanged complement to the grievance arbitration process. Moreover, the union has minimal influence over any hiring or promotion decisions that are not determined by seniority. Although representatives can contest the demotion or firing of any bargaining unit worker, there is no language that pertains to scheduled promotions or union evaluations for open positions. This contrast with UAW GM contracts is stark. UNITE HERE does not have nearly the same level of institutionalized influence over shopfloor conditions as does the UAW.

To some extent, the differences between these two arrangements can be attributed to discrepancies in organizing strategies. As I mentioned above, UNITE HERE builds campaigns by forming internal organizing committees that act as staunch union advocates and incorporate themselves intimately into worker social networks. When an employee has an issue with a supervisor or with working conditions, organizers usually ask committee members to accompany that employee to meet with management and to advocate on the laborer’s behalf. This strategy encourages broad rank-and-file mobilization that is founded in general solidarity. Accordingly, UNITE HERE’s model does not have much space for joint committees. Whereas UAW members turn to institutionalized cooperation to interpret contracts, UNITE HERE organizers encourage workers to confront management as they see fit.

Outside the shop floor, the union engages with employers confrontationally via corporate campaign strategies. These emphasize maximizing pressure against corporations as opposed to encouraging joint projects. External union activists attempt to

convince shareholders to make their investments conditional on employer neutrality in unionization elections, they lead boycott campaigns against uncooperative businesses, and they mobilize community support to organize direct action. The UAW, on the other hand, conducts most of its campaigns via paid external organizers, and it rarely asks rank- and-file employees to show the same dedication as UNITE HERE member leaders.

Instead, it creates institutionalized committees that encourage workers to speak out on the issues that matter most to them. The UAW solidified joint cooperation, which has since become less effective in a neoliberal political economic environment that permits GM to turn its back on its former partner. UNITE HERE, on the other hand, solidified confrontation, which has become increasingly relevant even as the service industry has become vital to the national economy. This confrontational model is conducive to SJU because it encourages the development of more democratic union structures that rely on direct rank-and-file input.

When I turned my analysis to museums organized by UAW Local 2110, I found essentially a loose combination of the two structures elaborated above. The Bronx

Museum and the New Museum both formed labor-management joint committees in 2019 that abide by a nearly identical structure to that of the UNITE HERE-Westin joint committee. These bodies have no , but they provide a space for workers to regularly express concerns before management. At the New Museum, the committee has the right to present its issues before the Museum’s Board of Trustees. The Museum of Modern Art

(MoMA), on the other hand, bargained to establish several joint committees that each address specific working conditions, which follows a similar path to that taken by UAW

Locals at GM plants. This museum, whose workers have been organized under Local

2110 since 1996, is unique in its concessions to the union with respect to control over promotions and evaluations. All bargaining unit employees at the MoMA follow a promotion track that includes three guaranteed advances over 13 years. Each comes with a pay increase. Moreover, Local 2110 has the right to monitor and object to worker evaluations. This stipulation is not present in any other museum contract, and it is the only provision that approaches the strength of UAW-GM agreements when it comes to management’s control over productivity.

This comparison reaffirms Local 2110’s placement as a midpoint between UAW

GM Locals and UNITE HERE. Depending on the employer, Local 2110 incorporates structures that appear in contracts pertaining to both other case studies. It does not follow a strictly business unionist, nor a strictly confrontational model. Instead, it seems that the strength of Local 2110 joint committees and workers’ rights to address grievances outside of arbitration derives from the amount of time that the local has represented a particular workplace. The MoMA incorporates the strongest worker protections, whereas the Bronx

Museum did not create committees until 2019, around eight years after the union won recognition. Employer ideology and reputation are also likely to impact Local 2110 contracts. Museums in New York City cater to a wealthy clientele that generally adheres to an elitist liberal vein of political identity that looks relatively favorably upon union representation and fair worker treatment. In order to maintain their image as progressive cultural centers, the museums represented by Local 2110 almost certainly take care to provide relatively solid working conditions. During the bargaining campaign at the New

Museum, organizers and rank-and-file workers emphasized the institution’s hypocrisy for resisting organizing. They even recycled some rhetoric from the museum’s 2018 triennial

“Songs for Sabotage” in their materials (Resnick, 2019). It is likely, then, that museums agreed to generous provisions in Local 2110 contracts in order to preserve their public reputations.

Health and Safety

Perhaps the most important factor on the shopfloor is worker health and safety.

Since their inception, unions have campaigned in both the halls of government and at the bargaining table for more stringent safety regulations in the workplace and expanded employer measures to protect worker health. In 1970, The AFL-CIO was a major influence on the Nixon administration’s decision to pass the Occupational Safety and

Health Act (OSHA), which created federal safety regulations for employers. Labor has remained a staunch ally to environmentalists by pushing capital to be transparent about its use of toxic chemicals and production processes (Asher, 2014; Rector, 2014). Since safety provisions are generally contained in Local agreements as opposed to national bargains, they fall outside of the purview of “bread and butter” issues. As a result, business unions tend to disregard these clauses compared to organizations in the SJU mold (Moody, 1988). The UAW and UNITE HERE, however, both won significant improvements to workplace safety provisions over the past two years.

The UAW, in part due to the physical risks associated with automobile production, has a history of leading the labor movement toward stronger safety protections. The union has pursued a variety of strategies to protect worker health that have often contradicted its business unionist tendencies. During the 1930’s and early

40’s, deskilling on the production line allowed employers to keep information about the health ramifications of their manufacturing methods hidden from workers. Union

officials pushed back strongly against this tendency and did their best to force Ford and

GM to confront high rates of tuberculosis and cancer among laborers. Between 1945 and

1955, staffers also wrote and lobbied for several bills that would have instated federal safety regulations, and members conducted repeated wildcat strikes at Ford plants during the early 1950’s (Asher, 2014; Rector, 2014). After the passage of Taft-Hartley, these policy-oriented and militant steps modulated slightly but remained confrontational and militant. The UAW created the Social Security Department to internally assess and handle safety issues while being more strategic about confrontation with employers

(Rector, 2014). Thus, although the union was transitioning to business unionism with respect to management discipline issues, organizational centralization, and racial justice, it remained steadfast in its pursuit of member safety.

During the late 1960’s, the UAW returned to the national policy scene with a fervor. It was instrumental in lobbying for the passage of the OSHA, which structures contemporary health and safety protections. Even after the legislation passed, militant forces within the union such as the DRUM linked dangerous conditions in foundries, to which Black workers were predominately assigned, with the struggle for racial justice.

The union built on these rank-and-file efforts in 1980 when UAW President Douglas

Fraser declared a public “war on workplace cancer” in response to a series of studies that showed the increased risk for disease among industrial laborers. GM and Chrysler each responded by instating ambitious cancer-screening infrastructure for their employees

(Rector, 2014). Since then, the UAW has maintained these institutional protections and relied heavily on the stipulations of the OSHA to protect its members from workplace accidents and disease.

Simply based on this historical sketch, it is clear that I would be misguided to characterize the UAW’s strategies on health and safety as deriving from a purely business unionist outlook. The union has not only maintained a focus on shopfloor conditions since Taft-Hartley, but it has also consciously articulated the intersections between workplace safety and both racial and environmental justice.

Upon first inspection, the safety protections at each of the plants I analyzed appear extensive and firm. Each Local agreement stipulates that GM will pay for either a plant doctor or ambulance to handle any emergencies. Workers receive paid time off in the event of any workplace accidents, and GM fully covers their medical bills if an incident takes place while they are on the clock. Plant managers also form a joint health and safety committee with union representatives to handle safety grievances and encourage maintenance. At Local 2209, this committee

consists of the UAW Health and Safety Representative(s) and the Safety Department Representative. This committee is responsible for reviewing and tracking plant occupational injuries/illnesses, identifying potential safety problems and advising District Committeepersons and Group Leaders in matters relating to Health and Safety (Local 2209 p. 110)

Bodies like this one are crucial because they allow workers to recommend safety improvements throughout the contract period. By monitoring conditions continuously, the Joint Health and Safety Committee protects against management negligence. Union officials at Local 2164 have continuous input regarding a variety of safety issues. They may conduct inspections and make recommendations to plant leaders.

In addition to these broad protections, UAW GM contracts also included extremely specific, “hard” language. For example, Local 31 gained a promise from management that the plant would have floor mats installed and that static pressure indoors would be maintained within a specific range. Page 63 of the contract reads, “[t]he

Static Pressure gauges will be maintained in proper condition with filter changes made when reading indicates 3.75 on the gauges and a copy of reading furnished to the UAW.”

In addition, managers committed to a specific exhaust grate cleaning schedule and to purchasing ventilation fans for employee restrooms (p. 69-70). These provisions include

“hard” language, or specific standards that the company must maintain in order to avoid arbitration. Local 2164, meanwhile, won similarly concrete language regarding crane safety training. These provisions constitute strong evidence that the UAW remains committed to addressing rank-and-file concerns with specific provisions. Safety issues are generally not included in national bargaining, so Local leaders have the capacity to address complaints that workers raise on a daily basis.

UNITE HERE, although a service sector union, also has an extensive history of confronting management’s neglect of worker health. In 2006, then-President John

Wilhelm noted in an interview that competition between hotel chains over maintenance efficiency was placing an unjust burden on housekeepers and other cleaning staff. He explained that expanding time pressure coupled with new materials forced hotel staff to work longer and more intense hours. Accordingly, the union prioritized health and safety concerns as part of its 2006 bargaining campaign with major hotel chains (Brown, 2006).

From 2012 to 2013, UNITE HERE also led a boycott campaign against Hyatt hotels nationwide after the corporation refused to address systematic muscular and skeletal health problems among cleaning staff. After a rebuke from the federal OSHA Office,

Hyatt conceded to several member demands (Professional Safety, 2013).

During the 2018 Marriott strikes, worker safety once again proved to be a leading concern. In particular, Marriott employees took issue with the hotel chain’s “Make A

Green Choice” program and its policy towards guests who had been accused of sexual harassment or assault. The “Make A Green Choice” initiative is an option that allows guests to opt out of housekeeping services for the duration of their stays. Marriott marketed it as an environmentally friendly choice, but the measure placed significant physical pressure on housekeepers. According to a UNITE HERE research report released in 2018, 92% of Marriott housekeepers claimed that uncleaned rooms were more difficult to clean, and 97% said that they were generally dirtier (Wise, 2018). In all eight cities where workers went on the picket line, they spoke out strongly in favor of protections for these workers. This was a particularly interesting issue in 2018, because the “Make A Green Choice” program was ostensibly an environmental issue. UNITE

HERE, which promotes itself as a supporter of environmental justice, had to be careful not to portray itself as anti-sustainability. As a result of the union’s advocacy, however, the Sierra Club, a major environmentalist organization, published an article in favor of

Marriott housekeepers on its website (Zilliac, 2020).

UNITE HERE members and organizers also promoted calls for staff protections against sexual violence. Specifically, all seven Locals demanded that the Marriott provide

GPS-enabled “panic buttons” to all workers so that they could call for immediate assistance in the event that they felt threatened. Outside of the bargaining table, UNITE

HERE extended its demands to the Seattle municipal legislature. In 2016, two years before the Marriot strike, the union was instrumental in passing a city-wide ordinance that required these panic buttons at all major hotels. In 2018, as the strike was heating up,

UNITE HERE organized a campaign to support the city in a suit filed by the American

Hotel and Lodging Association to strike down the ordinance (Jacobs, 2018). The union

also made this a national issue in 2018 when a group of workers met with the Marriott board of investors and top executives to discuss their experiences with workplace sexual violence (Siegel, 2018). This is a perfect example of the union’s corporate campaign strategy. It mobilized local community groups to conduct city-level advocacy, workers to conduct shareholder advocacy, and union officials to bargain directly with employers. In the end, UNITE HERE secured stipulations in its finalized contracts that institutionalize

“hard” language on the Marriott’s commitment to worker safety and sexual assault prevention.

Firstly, Marriott agreed to reduce all housekeeper workload associated with the

“Make A Green Choice” initiative. Specifically, no housekeeper will be asked to service an uncleaned room more often than every third day. When employees clean a room that has not been cleaned for at least two days, they will receive a 1.25 credit for their work.

Finally, all housekeepers will have their workload reduced by half for specific rooms throughout the hotel. All of these stipulations appeared in the contract under a section titled “Make a Green Choice” (UH p. 29). This implies that the union forced Marriott to directly address the harm that its program had been imposing on housekeepers and to outline specific steps to improve their working conditions.

With respect to sexual violence at the hotel, the Marriott finally agreed to provide

GPS-enabled panic buttons for all employees by the end of 2019. These connect workers with staff who exclusively respond to laborers who feel uncomfortable or violated. In the aftermath of any such incident, any guest that a worker accuses of assault will be kept on a site-specific danger list for 5 years. They will not be fully banned, but employees can request reassignment to a different floor for the duration of the guest’s stay and a no-

contact pledge if the guest ever returns. If local police file a report, then the guest will be definitively banned for 3 years (UH p. 26-27).

Both of these sets of stipulations represented crucial wins for UNITE HERE members. Leading up to the 2018 strikes, the union built national campaigns that rhetorically universalized these two objectives in the context of the environmentalist and

#MeToo movements. However, outside of these two arenas, UNITE HERE did not make any real strides with respect to health and safety. The “Health and Safety” section is less than two pages long, and aside from the stipulations about sexual assault, it contains very little “hard” language. Management committed to “mak[ing] reasonable provisions for the safety and health of its employees”, but provided no means for interpreting this clause in a concrete way (UH p. 25). Moreover, there is no joint health and safety committee for workers, so vague clauses can essentially remain unaddressed unless brought up during arbitration. Marriott did concede to provide emergency transportation to hospitals and paid time off for worktime missed due to a workplace accident. This is similar to UAW

Local agreements, but without the provision of a full-time doctor.

Clearly, UNITE HERE made major strides on its top health and safety priorities.

Hotel leaders in several cities strongly opposed providing panic buttons and reducing housekeeper workload, so these provisions represented significant employer concessions.

Unlike in UAW GM contracts, though, these two sections constituted the only “hard” health and safety language in the entire hotel contract. This reflects the effectiveness of the UAW’s militant institutionalization on health and safety grievances.

Since UAW Local 2110 represents workers who share general working conditions with hotel laborers, the union has fought for several provisions that it shares with UNITE

HERE contracts. Employees at the MoMA have had panic buttons since 2010, but this is the only museum contract that includes this clause. Interestingly, MoMA employees do not carry panic buttons with them; the museum has installed them at various points throughout the museum. The 2010 bargaining period appears to have been focused on health and safety at the MoMA. In addition to panic buttons, Local 2110 won seven new safety provisions including a lactation room, improved evacuation procedures, and ergonomics considerations. The MoMA also created a Health and Safety Committee that

“include[s] the Director or Assistant Director of Safety/Security. The committee will be notified as soon as practicable in the event of an emergency affecting Union members.”

The committee meets monthly, and it is additionally responsible for hearing and addressing worker grievances that relate to health (MoMA p. 2). As a result of these provisions, which have remained in place with no modification since 2010, the MoMA had the strongest health and safety protections of any museum I analyzed. At the New

Museum, management agreed to provide safety training and equipment at no expense to workers, and it promised not to initiate painting or construction without giving Local

2110 at least 24 hours’ notice (New Museum p. 8).

Racial and Immigrant Justice

Along with recognizing and highlighting shopfloor issues, SJU worker organizations tend to maintain a more intense focus on advocating for justice for their immigrant members and members of color. Internal committee organizational structure and an uncompromisingly inclusive social vision allow SJU groups to centralize hyper- exploited workers in their struggles for equality. The contracts that I analyzed clearly

indicate that UNITE HERE is leagues ahead of both UAW GM Locals and UAW Local

2110 with respect to provisions concerning workers of color and immigrant workers.

All of the contracts I analyzed included a non-discrimination provision, which is the most basic level of protection for workers of color. This includes a commitment by both the union and the employer to apply each contract clause equally regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity/expression. These clauses are an important complement to federal civil rights legislation, but they can be difficult to enforce.

Additional measures are necessary to build towards equity in the workplace.

No UAW GM Locals included any clauses that mentioned the words “race,”

“civil rights,” or “immigration” outside of the non-discrimination section mentioned above. This also held true in the 2015 and 2019 UAW GM national agreements.

Moreover, none of these contracts included “citizenship status” as a protected class under the non-discrimination section. This omission implicitly permits non-citizen workers to be turned away or excluded from the bargaining unit. UAW Local 2110, in contrast to the

GM Locals, included more expansive protections. At the New Museum, the non- discrimination clause includes “citizenship status” and “diversity” as priorities to be addressed by the labor-management committee. This provides workers with a specific and continuous avenue to negotiate instances of racial oppression as they arise. The

MoMA contract, meanwhile, contains even stronger language with respect to the rights of workers of color. Local 2110 negotiated an “affirmative action” section that states the employer’s commitment to recruiting and promoting a racially diverse workforce.

Moreover, the clause grants the union the right to meet with MoMA management upon request to ensure that the employer enforces this language. It is likely that the MoMA

included this provision, at least partly, because it has a predominately White staff. Unlike

UNITE HERE, the MoMA and other museums do not tend to hire a significant number of workers of color, which contradicts with their liberal ethos. The museum’s affirmative action clause can likely be read as another protection for its public reputation.

The UAW Local 2110 is far more progressive than the UAW GM Locals I analyzed with respect to racial and immigrant justice. The New York City Local not only includes specific steps that workers can take to enforce non-discrimination provisions, but it also stipulates the importance of promoting equitable hiring and training practices.

Moreover, Local 2110 includes undocumented workers as a protected class in all of its agreements. UAW GM contracts, on the other hand, provide no racial justice material outside of the most basic non-discrimination provision, and they do not consider undocumented workers to be a protected class.

In contrast, UNITE HERE contracts included explicit provisions that are specific to immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented. If a union member becomes a naturalized citizenship, that worker automatically receives a paid day off to attend the proceedings and to celebrate. Moreover, any worker who is in the process of receiving citizenship is guaranteed an unpaid leave of up to five days in order to attend hearings at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Finally, if any worker has their work documentation revoked for any reason, they will be guaranteed to be reinstated to their position, including seniority and benefits, if they return to the hotel within twelve months (Local 24 p. 27-28).

Although UNITE HERE Local 24 (Detroit, MI) did not include a section dedicated explicitly to racial justice in its 2018 contract, it is highly likely that other

workers who went on strike against Marriott hotels that year did win such a provision. I was unable to collect any contracts from these cases, but the Hilton Riverside Hotel in

New Orleans, LA, which UNITE HERE represents, includes a Civil Rights section that reads: “Incarceration, on its own, does not provide just cause for disciplinary action…”

The section goes on to guarantee that any worker who is arrested or incarcerated but who is able to return to work within thirty days must return to his/her/their full seniority and benefits package. Based on an interview I conducted with a UNITE HERE hotel organizer in Washington, D.C., this is generally a standard contract section for UNITE

HERE hotel contracts. Since systematic over-policing and mass incarceration disproportionately impact Black workers, Civil Rights provisions like the one are a crucial means of racial justice advocacy within the labor movement (Western and Muller,

2013). No similar provisions appeared in any UAW GM or UAW Local 2110 contracts.

Warren and Parks also conducted an analysis of UNITE HERE hotel contracts in 2015, and these scholars concluded that the union’s bargaining has been effective in confronting segregation in the workplace through various provisions.

This evidence indicates that UNITE HERE prioritizes Black and immigrant workers at the bargaining table to a much greater extent than do UAW International,

UAW GM Locals, or UAW Local 2110. Undoubtedly, the membership demographics at each of these organizations heavily influences this phenomenon. UNITE HERE represents an industry with a higher proportion of Black, immigrant, and undocumented workers than automobile manufacturing or art museums in New York City. These members play a powerful role in pushing their union to address concerns that are specific to their communities. UNITE HERE defines its identity by the rights that it wins for

laborers of color and undocumented workers. Prioritizing racial justice as a core component of labor rights advocacy is at the foundation of the SJU framework, and

UNITE HERE is unique in its dedication to this pursuit.

Evaluating Our Case Studies Between Business Unionism and SJU

The evidence I have presented in this section strongly suggests that my initial hypothesized typology is confirmed. The UAW acts as a business union with SJU characteristics on issues of health and safety. UNITE HERE is an SJU organization, and

Local 2110 constitutes a midpoint case.

Confronting Neoliberal Globalization Directly: Evaluating Successes and Failures

In addition to reflecting organizing strategies and bargaining priorities, union contracts also provide a glimpse into how organized labor hopes to achieve its long-term goals and the compromises it has to make to move forward. This, in turn, indicates the extent to which the SJU and business unionist models are successful in securing union objectives.

I hypothesized at the outset of this study that SJU tactics are becoming increasingly effective relative to the business union approach given the political opportunity structures of the contemporary neoliberal environment. My contract data provides an opportunity to test this prediction. For my purposes, the most relevant long- term goals to analyze are those that relate directly to neoliberal globalization: outsourcing, subcontracted labor, part-time workers, and technology.

In 2019, the UAW faced a structural disadvantage with which neither UNITE

HERE nor Local 2110 had to contend. GM threatened to further reduce domestic investment and to close four production facilities, which forced the UAW to choose

between preserving as many member jobs as possible and maintaining the quality of fewer positions. Despite this disadvantage, the UAW and UNITE HERE were equally effective in confronting subcontracting in their respective 2019 and 2018 campaigns.

UNITE HERE, however, faced the additional difficulty of part-time labor, and it struggled to make significant gains for these workers. With respect to technology, the

UAW and UNITE HERE both won control over how employers would implement new developments. However, UNITE HERE secured more concrete protections for workers who lose their jobs do to the implementation of new technology.

Outsourcing and Domestic Investment

The UAW and its rank-and-file have mobilized continuously over recent decades against automobile manufacturing companies’ practice of relocating production outside

United States and Canadian borders. The migration of U.S. manufacturing employment to the Global South and the declining quality of the domestic jobs have become emblematic of neoliberal globalization.

Major U.S. auto companies have invested in production facilities outside national boundaries since 1926, when Ford built a plant in Mexico City. However, these investments were generally limited, and workers in the United States benefitted from high tariffs that discouraged foreign production (Middlebrook, 1989). It was not until the late 1980’s, when Mexico became integrated into the North American auto market, that outsourcing became a dominant tendency in the industry. In 1986, the Mexican government signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and seven years later, it joined the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This most recent accord eliminated U.S. tariffs on both cars and vehicle parts imported from

Mexico, and it eventually cut duties on light trucks by more than half (Rothstein, 2016, p.

21). As the Big Three rushed South to open new factories, they simultaneously faced increasing competition from Japan, which prospered as oil prices climbed because manufacturers in that country tended to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. Throughout the 1990’s, vehicle imports from Japan to the U.S. grew sharply, and GM, Ford, and

Chrysler watched their revenues dip (Kenney and Florida, 1994).

These factors created a recipe for concessions from the UAW. Not only did the union have to contend with domestic employment loss to outsourcing, but auto executives also called for wage freezes and reduced healthcare contributions in order to preserve profitability (Rothstein, 2016). During the collective bargaining campaigns that followed, the UAW adopted a negotiating framework by which it traded major concessions on

“bread-and-butter” issues for vague promises that employers would do their best to invest in domestic production (Landon, 2008). Despite these sacrifices on the part of union members, the Big Three continued to underperform. In 2007, the UAW signed one of the worst agreements, from the perspective of its members, in its history of bargaining with

General Motors (Hill, 2007). Since the 1990’s, auto companies have used both their capacity to relocate production outside the U.S. and the fact that they face competition from foreign companies to “whipsaw” the UAW. They justify cutting benefits by claiming that it is necessary in order to keep production alive, and they threaten to further abandon domestic production if the union does not comply (Rothstein, 2016).

These are pressures that service industry unions generally do not have to face. The majority of service employment, and particularly hotel employment, is “non-tradable” in that it cannot be outsourced easily. Marriott cannot operate a hotel in Detroit exclusively

with housekeepers from outside the country, although it does its best to compensate by exploiting the J-1 Visa Program. The corporation thus cannot use globalized production chains as a stick against labor to the same extent that GM, Ford, and Chrysler can and have used it.

The UAW once again felt this pressure during its 2019 bargaining campaign.

Before negotiations began, GM announced that it was considering closing four U.S. plants in Lordstown, OH, Warren, MI, Baltimore, MD, and Detroit, MI. In fact, it went so far as to “unallocate” these plants in November, 2019. Naturally, the UAW promised that it would fight its hardest to keep these facilities open and running (Martinez, 2019).

Ultimately, the union was unsuccessful: GM promised to maintain only the Hamtramck plant in Detroit, which will transition to producing electric vehicles following an investment of around $3 billion from the company (Lutz, 2019). In the weeks before the

UAW and GM initiated the bargaining process, the union also promised to negotiate for the return of at least one factory from Mexico to the United States. Once again, it failed to force the company to concede, and Mexico is set to remain GM’s top production nation for the foreseeable future (Martinez, 2019).

The UAW did manage, however, to salvage a major win in the midst of these brutal concessions. GM committed to investing $7.7 billion into U.S. production facilities, which would include around 9,000 new jobs. This is a significant improvement over 2015, when GM limited its domestic investment to $1.9 billion including 3,300 jobs

(Hall, 2019).

These concessions indicate that the UAW sacrificed domestic production employment in exchange for more generous provisions in other areas. Unfortunately, I

cannot determine from the contracts themselves which exact stipulations the union won by conceding outsourcing. Only negotiators who took part in the bargaining process can say with certainty what tradeoffs the UAW made. This sacrifice on outsourcing heavily impacted the entire national agreement in 2019. GM almost certainly forced the UAW’s hand by threatening to take away benefits from other contract sections if the organization did not agree to take major losses with respect to domestic production. This was a decision that UNITE HERE and Local 2110 did not have to make when they negotiated their contracts. The service industry union’s capacity to extract concessions from Marriott in 2018 depended entirely on the group’s ability to mobilize internal and external pressure against the employer. As a result, UNITE HERE was able to lean on its SJU identity to push against the Marriott. This would have been a much riskier move for the

UAW. Local 2110, meanwhile, although situated within the UAW’s organizational matrix, is also fortunate not to be pigeon-holed by outsourcing. The museums, non- profits, and universities that it represents in New York City also employ predominately non-tradable labor, so the union can push its negotiations in some areas without worrying that it will be sacrificing member employment altogether.

Subcontracted or Temporary Labor and Part-Time Workers

Kalleberg (2009, 2011) and Harvey (2005) make the link between subcontracting, part-time labor, and neoliberal political economy explicit. Deregulation of temporary labor has sprouted a complex web of firms that specialize in “renting” workers to other companies in order to perform a variety of tasks. These laborers move frequently between work environments, and their direct employers are subcontracting companies, so they are very difficult to organize. Moreover, temporary workers fulfill production needs that

would otherwise be reserved for bargaining unit employees. Accordingly, subcontracting presents a major obstacle for unions, and limiting it has been a top priority for organized labor.

Both UNITE HERE and the UAW prioritized this issue. Throughout the course of its eight-city strike, UNITE HERE repeatedly affirmed that it sought to minimize temporary employment at Marriott properties so that most, if not all, hotel work would be reserved for bargaining unit workers. A majority of UAW members, when surveyed before the GM strike began, listed a defined path to full-time status for temporary workers as a bargaining imperative (LaReau, 2020). Around seven percent of GM employees are temporary. This means that they are not employed directly by GM, but they may work up to full time performing almost identical if not identical tasks as standard employees. (Naughton and Colias, 2019). Over the past ten years, the number of

GM workers like these, formally employed by temp agencies, has nearly doubled (Jones,

2019). Thus, workers at both the Marriott and GM felt the pressure of temporary labor.

In addition to subcontracting, however, UNITE HERE had to contend with another related dilemma that was not as relevant to the UAW: part-time or flexible workers. Part-time work is much more common in the U.S. service industry relative to manufacturing because it employs a younger workforce and emphasizes flexibility in production. Hotels, for example, require variable numbers of workers depending on how many occupants they have (Walsh and Deery, 1999; Sobaih et al., 2011). Accordingly,

UNITE HERE sought to improve scheduling for these workers, but it failed to make significant gains.

GM forced the UAW to compromise on temporary labor’s behalf, but the union secured a pivotal win through that compromise. From the outset of negotiations, UAW leaders emphasized that they hoped to formalize a pathway to full employment for all temp workers at all GM plants. In the auto industry, temporary laborers can indeed be union members, but they receive lower pay and do not have access to the same benefits.

GM has increasingly relied on these on-call workers over the past years, and rank-and- file workers are displeased that some of them receive vastly different compensation for the same work.

For the UAW, temporary workers who had been employed by GM for two or three years straight without ever being laid off for more than 30 days were a priority.

Before the contract, there was no pathway for these individuals to become full-time workers, so they always faced with the possibility of sudden layoffs with no severance packages. The 2019 agreement included a provision that granted full-time status to all temps who had been working for three years on January 1, 2020, and it will grant full employment to all temps who have worked for three years on January 1, 2021. A large percentage of temporary workers at GM fall under these two categories, but certainly not all of them. Other temporary workers, who have worked for less time or less steadily, will not have a clear path to full employment at least until the next round of bargaining begins. In fact, a provision of the 2015 contract that suggested this pathway should be developed was actually eliminated. Moreover, temps will be paid just less than half of the top salary for senior production staff. The union traded this concession for increasing control over when temporary labor can be used. The UAW will have full control over when GM hires temps in all plants opened after the end of 2019. In addition, GM will

need to seek union approval for most subcontracting projects over the course of the current bargaining period. This is a major win for the UAW. Essentially, the union recognized that it would not be able to make all current temps full employees, so it sought to limit temporary labor overall. This will force GM to hire more full-time production workers. Generally, employers like GM are deeply reluctant to agree to positions like this one. Corporate managers recognize how exploitable temporary workers are, and they go out of their way to keep them on staff without providing adequate benefits. Because the UAW included temporary workers as part of its rhetoric from the outset of the strike and because it compromised on currently employed temps, it was able to secure this considerable victory.

In UNITE HERE contract parlance, temps are referred to as “casual workers,” or staff that Marriott hires for a specified period of time to fulfill a particular purpose. They are not eligible for union membership, and the hotels hire them through subcontractors.

This form of employment is a primary threat to full-time employees, since it is usually cheaper for employers and nearly impossible to organize. The 2018 contract guaranteed that no senior employees could be replaced by these temporary workers, and it also instated a moratorium on temporary hiring, except in cases of contracts that had been signed before November, 2009, or in the event of emergencies. This is a considerably weaker moratorium than the one signed by the UAW since it provides more loopholes for

Marriott to exploit, but the provision still represents major progress. Moreover, Local 24 agreed that no casual laborer can continue employment for more than 90 days without automatically moving to regular status, and thus gaining eligibility for union

membership. This is a significant gain for Local 24. The provision both protects full- and part-time employment and also promises to secure more jobs for union members.

In the Detroit Westin, the hotel hires part-time workers. These part-timers can be union members, but they work less than 30 hours per week. UNITE HERE Local 24 was unable to win full scheduling protections for these workers. Full-time workers, or those who work at least 30 hours a week, receive relatively stable schedules that cannot be changed after Wednesday, with the workweek beginning on Saturday. Managers are meant to limit their schedule shifts to once every 30 days, and in these cases they must give at least seven days’ notice of the intended changes. Part-time workers, on the other hand, are not entitled to a set schedule, and their next week’s hours can be changed as late as Thursday of the preceding work week. This arrangement is notably less predictable than scheduling for full-time workers, and it represents no improvement over the previous contract. Still, UNITE HERE Local 24 did manage to gain access to employer-funded healthcare for its part-time members.

Confronting Technological Displacement

In a 1999 book chapter, Waddington identified international technological diffusion as one of the three core features of contemporary neoliberal globalization. As production chains have become increasingly internationalized since the 1970’s, corporate leaders have benefited significantly from new access to technological developments that originated in different parts of the world. This knowledge-sharing and development among capitalists is inseparable from the neoliberal environment that I have described at length. Keller (2004, 2010), for instance, finds that FDI and trade openness are two of the most significant factors in increasing rates of cross-border technology movement. In

other words, nations that have implemented broader neoliberal deregulation tend to oversee more rapid technological exchange among capitalists. Jung and Mercenier (2014) further contend that technological progress resulting from a globalized economy tends to increase income inequality in North America as it expands the divide between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor.

This evidence should not obscure the fact that technological innovation has not been a consistent dilemma within the union movement. Since the earliest years of worker organizing in the United States, laborers have been forced to contend with the downsizing, de-skilling, and wage inequality that are historically associated with private control over innovation (Dray, 2010). However, in the era of globalization, production technologies develop faster and multinational corporations increasingly share strategies on how to implement them to maximize exploitative potential. Accordingly, technological change has become an increasingly difficult obstacle to address for private sector unions. In a 2006 survey project for example, officials from 22 Canadian unions in various sectors named confronting technology as a top priority (Foley).

In 2019 and 2018, the UAW and UNITE HERE both successfully bargained for unprecedented provisions regulating technology. According to the “Job Security” section of the UAW’s summary of its 2019 national agreement, GM agreed to establish the

National Committee on Advanced Technology. Interestingly, joint Plant New

Technology Committees already existed at GM manufacturing locations, but there was no national entity. The National Committee will be

…made up of an equal number of union and management representatives. The committee will meet at least quarterly to discuss the impact of future technologies on UAW members and address instances where bargaining unit work has shifted out of the unit due to new manufacturing processes. The Plant New Technology Committee

will be given access to information and participate in discussions with the national committee to work through issues at impacted locations (Summary p. 6).

Specifically, the national contract stipulates that the Committee will perform four core functions:

[The Committee will] [t]our GM’s technical centers to gain long term insight into the company’s Manufacturing 4.0, electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle strategies; Review upcoming electric and autonomous vehicles; Review company plans for new technology implementation at UAW GM facilities; Review upcoming launches at UAW GM facilities to ensure UAW members are properly trained before launches start (Summary p. 6).

This national Committee constitutes an enormous victory for the autoworkers’ union. It guarantees that the UAW will have an avenue to influence new production processes.

This means that GM conceded significant managerial autonomy to the union in the interest of preserving domestic employment. The measure incorporates “hard” language that will be relatively stable moving forward but also dynamic in its capacity to adjust to unpredictable developments.

Before the 2019 agreement, the UAW and GM addressed technology via the

Statement on Technological Progress. This Statement relegated joint coordination on innovation to the GM-UAW Skilled Trades and Apprentice Committee. This body

…[met] a minimum of semi-annually to review any new technology introduced across multiple locations that may impact GM-UAW represented employees and discuss[ed] matters concerning new or advanced technology that [could not] be resolved locally and [were] referred to it by local unions or local managements as well as claims of erosion of the bargaining unit (2015 National p. 696).

Essentially, the GM-UAW Skilled Trades and Apprentice Committee, in addition to its functions that are not related to innovation, was empowered to “discuss” new technology, but not “review” implementation in advance as the National Committee now does. Union staff were guaranteed to be aware of all new technology in advance, but they were

powerless to influence implementation in most cases (2015 National, p. 698). The previous Statement on Technological Progress did guarantee that certain developments would not displace workers, but it limited this guarantee to specific technologies. The

2015 agreement

…recognized that advances in technology may alter, modify or otherwise change the job responsibilities of represented employees at plant locations and that a change in the means, method or process of performing a work function including the introduction of computers, energy management systems, modem, art to part, tool cutting paths and fiber optics, CAM, CMM, CAE, 3D Visualization … will not serve to shift the work function from represented to non-represented employees (2015 National, p. 697).

The union secured a guarantee that no workers would be reassigned as a result of these specific cases, but it did not have any concrete means to respond to unforeseen developments. The 2019 agreement, by permitting union review, addresses this weakness. The significance of this progress from the union’s perspective is already evident. The National Committee has already committed to review “[i]ntegrated control work; HMI programming; additive manufacturing; IT hardware and software installation and maintenance; data center support; data analytics; augmented and immersive reality design; virtual builds; visions system; drone programming and piloting; autonomous vehicle manufacturing and support; certain industrial engineering work, and software loading and validation” (Summary p. 6). Over the course of its review, the Committee will be empowered to determine whether these areas will adversely impact workers. It will also be able to identify opportunities for bargaining unit employees to take on new responsibilities. This evidence suggests that the UAW successfully bargained for concrete language and infrastructure that will permit sustainable protection for its members.

With respect to technology, the UAW failed to progress in only one realm. The

2015 Statement on Technological Progress included the stipulation that GM and the union would

…identify appropriate specialized training programs, which may be developed, purchased and/or vendor provided, and include a proposed training timeline to be made available as far in advance of the technology’s introduction to the plant as practicable, so that employees will be capable of performing new or changed work normally performed by represented personnel (2015 National p. 699).

This provision is crucial in that it requires GM to consider UAW members for new positions, even if this requires additional training. However, it lacks “hard” language.

There are no guidelines regarding potential cost of training; it is unclear if the union, the corporation, or the individual worker would have to pay for potential classes. Moreover, it does not specify what “practicable” means, implying that GM could refuse training opportunities by citing prohibitive cost or impairments to efficiency. Unfortunately, the

UAW did not modify this section in 2019.

Regardless, the 2019 agreement included major progress on technology from the

UAW’s perspective. The union created a new National Committee that reviews and influences GM’s new technologies. In doing so, the UAW secured for itself considerable influence over the corporation’s production process, and it streamlined communication regarding impending changes. Moreover, this infrastructure promises to create institutional space for worker influence over innovation without being so inflexible as to impeding GM’s competitive advantage. Although the union did not make progress on worker training, its business unionist approach was clearly successful in confronting the impact of rapid technological advancement on workers. This reflects an effective response to neoliberal globalization.

In 2018, UNITE HERE also made significant strides with respect to new technology at Marriott properties. Local 24’s (Detroit, MI) contract includes the following provision under “Article 28 Technology”:

UNITE HERE International Union shall form a Union Technology Committee (the “Committee,” representing the International and Locals 2, 5, 8, 19, 24, 26, 30, 75, 2850 and such other locals as the Employer and the International mutually agree to). The Employer shall provide the Committee at least 30 days’ notice before implementation of any plans to upgrade, modify, improve, or extend technology currently in use by bargaining unit employees that are made after the effective date of this Agreement at any hotel covered by a collective bargaining agreement with one or more of the foregoing local unions. The Employer shall provide the Committee at least 165 days advance notice prior to the implementation of any new technological change, occurring after the effective date of this Agreement, that replaces or substitutes for or materially increases or decreases the type or manner of work performed by employees in the Employer’s workplace, at any hotel covered by a collective bargaining agreement with one or more of the foregoing local unions (Local 24, p. 29).

This Committee is a similar structure to the National Committee that the UAW established, but the differences between these provisions are illuminating. First, UNITE

HERE’s Union Technology Committee only covers nine Locals, whereas the UAW won a resolution for all GM Locals. Seven of these UNITE HERE Locals, with the exception of Locals 8 (Seattle, WA) and 75 (Toronto, CA), were involved in the Marriott strike campaign. UNITE HERE does not engage in national pattern bargaining in the way that the UAW does. The above provision is the only one in Local 24’s contract that pertains to other Marriott employees. It would have been nearly impossible for UNITE HERE to contract a national stipulation on any issue.

Moreover, whereas the UAW and GM established a joint committee, UNITE

HERE formed a body made up exclusively of union officials. Marriott is under no obligation to invest in the Committee’s responsibilities, but rather the corporation takes on specific responsibilities in its interactions with the union. Article 28 continues:

With respect to the implementation of new technology and subject to appropriate confidentiality agreements, the Employer shall explain to the Committee the intended function of the new technology, the nature of the technology and who will develop it, the timing of its planned implementation, and the expected work needed to implement the technology and keep it running, and where available shall share prototypes. If the Committee requests to bargain, it must do so within fifteen (15) days of the Employer’s notice and shall include any information requests with such notice. The Employer shall promptly negotiate the impact of the new technology on the bargaining unit employees and the work they perform (Local 24, p. 29).

Thus, Marriott must notify UNITE HERE before any technological change, and the two parties initiate a standard bargaining procedure if there is any disagreement. This fits well with UNITE HERE’s confrontational character. The union likely prefers this arrangement because it permits greater opportunity to mobilize popular pressure against Marriott in the event of a disagreement. If UNITE HERE is forced to bargain on technology, it can rely on community and shareholder pressure in the same way that it conducts standard collective bargaining. The UAW, which does not generally implement these social movement tactics, would have no need to stipulate a separate arbitration procedure.

In the event that bargaining between the Union Technology Committee and

Marriott results in any layoffs, the corporation must send a list of all non-supervisory employment opportunities directly to affected workers and to the Committee. Marriott must also assign any “extra work” to these laborers, with preference given for seniority.

If the corporation rehires any laid off UNITE HERE members, they automatically retain their seniority positions, their accumulated paid time off (PTO), and their health insurance (Local 24, p. 30). In the event that no opportunities are available and union members must be permanently laid off, Marriott must maintain its health insurance contributions for six months. Laid off employees are also entitled to a full severance package that includes one week of pay for every year of service (Local 24, p. 30-31).

Unlike the UAW, then, UNITE HERE won an extremely specific process for all workers that are displaced by technological innovation.

UNITE HERE also made crucial gains with respect to training for employees in the wake of new technology implementation. Section 11 of Article 28 reads:

If new technology performs functions previously performed by bargaining unit employees and requires human operation of machines, the machines shall be operated by bargaining unit employees and the Employer shall train employees in the affected classification to operate new technology. If the machines used by bargaining unit employees require daily maintenance to ensure the continued operation, then bargaining employees will be trained to perform the work, unless such work is of the kind typically performed by other bargaining units or the Company’s IT department. The Employer may limit training to those employees who volunteer to be trained. Training opportunities shall be offered in accordance with house seniority among those in the affected classification. The Employer shall allow up to two (2) Union representatives to be present to observe the training but to not participate in it. If operation requires a level of skill which may practically be obtained only through academic study, and the necessary courses are offered at educational institutions in the county where the hotel is located, the Employer shall pay the tuition and fees, of an employee taking such coursework, up to maximum amounts agreed to between the Employer and the Committee. The hotel shall not be obligated to pay for the time employees spend in the coursework. If an employee completes the coursework successfully (average grades of at least “C”) the Employer shall offer the employee the work of operating the machine(s) associated with the employee’s former job functions. Such offers shall be for the next available position performing this work following the employee’s completion of this coursework (Local 24, p. 31).

This section essentially guarantees UNITE HERE members priority for any new jobs that technology creates. It consists of “hard” language on training, which leaves the Marriott minimal loopholes to escape its responsibility. The union thus successfully established two central pathways for workers who are laid off as a result of technological change, and both of these pathways are supported by concrete language as opposed to vague commitments. This constitutes a major discrepancy from the UAW model, which provides no firm recourse for workers to respond to decisions made by the National

Committee on Advanced Technology.

This evidence, taken together, suggests that UNITE HERE’s SJU organizing model was relatively more effective than the UAW’s business unionist approach with respect to developing solutions to technological displacement in the context of neoliberal globalization. This is certainly not to suggest that the UAW’s bargaining campaign was completely inept. Both the UAW and UNITE HERE secured the right to receive advanced notice in the event that GM or Marriott implement new production tools, and they both won unprecedented long-term control over implementation. The UAW secured these fundamental goals via a cooperative joint approach, whereas UNITE HERE developed a confrontational approach that is conducive to movement-building. However,

UNITE HERE separated itself from the UAW by institutionalizing hiring priority for laid off workers and guaranteed investment in worker training.

Conclusions

The data presented in this chapter is of central importance for two reasons. First, my findings with respect to shopfloor issues and racial and immigrant justice confirm that the UAW behaves as a business union with vestigial SJU characteristics whereas UNITE

HERE is an SJU-oriented organization. The autoworkers’ union uses a cooperative framework to build joint committees that address worker grievances outside of arbitration. Although this is an effective organizing technique to institutionalize avenues for worker advocacy, it does not emphasize investment in leadership development among rank-and-file members. Moreover, the UAW did not express any significant commitment to racial or immigrant justice in its 2019 GM contracts. UNITE HERE, on the other hand, uses internal organizing committees, community mobilization, and shareholder activism to confrontationally pressure Marriott. It sustains this adversarial relationship by

encouraging workers to express solidarity inside the shop and by guaranteeing its right to pull members for work for organizing training. The hospitality workers’ union also won the most progressive provisions on Immigration and Civil Rights of any case that I analyzed. UAW Local 2110 borrows from both of these models, and it is thus a midway point on the spectrum. Some museum contracts include extensive joint committees, whereas others maintain more adversarial infrastructure. It is important to note, though, that as Local 2110 remains active at a museum for a longer period of time, it tends to institutionalize more joint committees. This suggests that it leans toward the business unionist model with respect to coordination. Local 2110 was also more progressive than

UAW GM Locals with respect to racial and immigrant justice. It fell short, however, of

UNITE HERE’s social justice focus.

Next, I evaluated the extent to which the UAW and UNITE HERE were successful in confronting worker issues that were explicitly related to neoliberal globalization. First, free trade agreements, a hallmark of the globalizing era and an integral factor in the neoliberal political economic matrix, have forced the UAW to accept concessions over the past few decades. Although the union won a strong agreement in 2019, it was forced to watch GM close three plants and reject its request to relocate a plant from Mexico to the U.S. This almost certainly means that GM agreed to strong provisions in other contract sections in exchange for the UAW’s willingness to give up some manufacturing jobs. UNITE HERE and UAW Local 2110, on the other hand, did not face a pigeon-holed decision like this one because they represent mostly non-tradable labor. Although the exact implications of this divergence are impossible to precisely determine at this point, the difference between the three case studies certainly

manifested throughout the contracts I analyzed. Regardless, the UAW and UNITE HERE were approximately equivalent in their respective capacities to improve conditions for temporary labor and to limit the expansion of subcontracting. With respect to technology provisions, however, UNITE HERE set itself apart from the UAW by winning concrete protections for members who are displaced by innovation. The service industry union forced Marriott to agree to pay for all training that becomes necessary as a result of new tech, whereas the UAW was not able to secure “hard” provisions.

Ultimately, even though my analysis confirmed the typology that I initially hypothesized, evaluating whether business unionism or SJU is more effective in the neoliberal environment proved more complex than I expected. UNITE HERE used SJU effectively in 2018, particularly to win health and safety protections for Marriott housekeepers. The union not only advocated for these stipulations at the bargaining table, but it also engaged in shareholder advocacy nationally and mobilized legislative advocacy in Seattle, WA. UNITE HERE also successfully organized a boycott against striking hotels throughout its 2018 campaign (Frank, 2018). In Detroit, this boycott won very public support for workers. The Toronto Maple Leafs, a philanthropist group called

CityLab, and even Elton John refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with the campaign (Aguilar, 2018). This is a characteristic corporate campaign strategy. The union’s racial justice advocacy also paid off significantly, since I showed that UNITE

HERE hotels have much stronger protections for workers of color and immigrant workers than any other workplace I analyzed. These victories suggest that SJU is indeed well- adapted to the neoliberal environment since it directly addressed issues that derive from deregulation and globalization.

Still, I showed that the UAW had very clear reasons not to engage in this style of advocacy. The autoworkers’ union has developed joint committees over the course of more than half a century; abandoning this model would require an immense institutional overhaul. Moreover, the UAW cannot push for extreme concessions from GM as long as the corporation can threaten to reduce investment in domestic production. Union officials only made the gains that I outlined by sacrificing three U.S. plants. If they had adopted a confrontational stance that had further alienated GM, it is likely that the union would have lost more than it gained. Paradoxically, even as the neoliberal and globalized political economic environment has empowered General Motors to shirk its partnership with the UAW, the union has found that it needs to maintain this coordination more than ever. These observations offer a compelling reason why business unionist manufacturing unions like the UAW have been slow to transition to SJU. Despite the clear advantages of racial justice advocacy and rank-and-file militancy, partnerships with employers continue to provide a foundation for how these unions organize and advocate. It would not only be a very risky move to alienate employers, but such a transition would require substantial investment in completely reformulating organizing strategies and bargaining priorities.

Although I tried to be as thorough as possible in this analysis, this chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive exploration of the contracts that I included. Obviously, I did not touch on the “bread-and-butter” sections of these agreements, including wage and healthcare packages. These provisions are undoubtedly reflective of union bargaining power so they are unquestionably relevant for analysis. However, I had trouble standardizing such sections for comparison. Both the UAW and UNITE HERE won steep wage increases for its members (Local 24 p. 8; UAW Summary, p. 2-5). In fact, UNITE

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HERE Local 24 secured the largest wage increase for Detroit Westin employees in the history of its presence at the hotel (Frank, 2018). UNITE HERE also increased employer contributions to healthcare plans while the UAW maintained its health coverage even though GM publically sought to increase worker payments (Local 24, p. 11-12;, UAW

Summary, p. 7). However, accurately comparing these provisions would be very difficult since autoworkers and hotel employees have very different industry wage patterns. Such an endeavor would require a broader economic analysis for which I was not prepared. In the future, it would be interesting to conduct this comparison, and also to determine the precise tradeoff that the UAW made between “bread-and-butter” improvements and domestic investment.

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Network Analysis of Twitter Data

Over the course of its strike at GM, the UAW garnered public support from at least 25 national and state politicians, 14 unions and labor advocacy groups, and even celebrity actor Danny DeVito. The union and its supporters publicized this solidarity and contextualized it alongside other national issues over a central platform: Twitter.

During organizing drives, collective bargaining campaigns, and day-to-day grievance operations, unions rely on and interact with a broad matrix of structures, institutions, and organizations. Merely dissecting contract provisions, the end result of just one union function, is inadequate to depict the nature of these activities. Two other pivotal variables are (1) the nature of union communication and public content production and (2) the character of networks that exist between unions, union activists, and external actors. In this chapter, I intend to draw conclusions with respect to these two variables by analyzing Twitter data produced by UAW GM Locals, UAW Local 2110, and UNITE HERE Marriott strike Locals. Specifically, I constructed a list of all relevant union Local and International Twitter accounts, as well as a list of the accounts belonging to all executive board members and paid organizers that were involved in the 2019 GM strike, the 2018 Marriott strike, or that are affiliated with UAW Local 2110. I obtained lists of paid officials via the 2018 LM-2 tax forms that each Local filed with the

Department of Labor in 2018 and 2019. These are publicly available online. I then conducted simple Google searches and simple Twitter searches to identify the relevant accounts. Next, I downloaded the most recent tweets (up to 3,200 per account) in which the relevant officials and organizational accounts “tagged” other accounts. In order to do this, Dr. Patrick Rafail graciously allowed me to use python code that he had written to

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interact directly with Twitter’s API and to identify all tweets that use an “@” symbol followed by characters with no space in between. This progression of characters indicates that this tweet included a tag to another account. I applied this code to all of the union official and Local accounts that I initially listed. This left me with a list of 50,796 total tweets, from 45 unique Twitter accounts, in which union leaders interacted with other social media content producers.

This data source promises to hold a wealth of interesting information, but I must be careful to also outline its inherent faults. As I will show, the UAW is generally much less active on Twitter than UNITE HERE, which limits my capacity to draw conclusions from the union’s social media data. This divergence is likely the result of multiple understudied factors, but I also suspect that it is relevant to the present study. UNITE

HERE’s Twitter presence, as I will show, is dedicated more to interacting with organizing targets than either of the other case studies. This likely relates to the union’s corporate campaign strategy, since organizers and members can apply public pressure against employers over social media. King and Soule (2007) show that social media use in boycott campaigns similar to those that UNITE HERE organizes can facilitate a direct impact on target stock prices. UAW GM Locals, on the other hand, which do not engage in corporate campaigns, have no need to engage with targets in this way. Although this factor is likely influential, it is not the ultimate explanation. The UAW supports an older staff and has a generally older membership than UNITE HERE, so it is possible that leadership and members have simply not been exposed to social media to the same extent. Regardless of these confounding variables, the 50,796 tweets I gathered certainly warrant an involved network analysis.

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In the first analytical section of this chapter, I delve into “internal” communication patterns within each of my case studies. In other words, I isolate Twitter interactions that took place between two accounts affiliated with either UAW GM, UAW

2110, or UNITE HERE. By conducting various network analyses, I show that UAW GM

Locals and activists produce online content in a centralized manner. The International union acts as a core speaker, and official Local accounts and activists engage predominately with this account. Interaction between locals and activists is minimal. In other words, UAW International produces most original content, and other accounts respond instead of interacting with one another or creating new material. Both UAW

Local 2110 and UNITE HERE on the other hand, exhibit network patterns with multiple centers. Officials and activists engage directly with other Local accounts, and their online content networks are denser and more multi-polar. Moreover, both UAW 2110 and

UNITE HERE engage significantly with the UAW International Twitter account, marking the autoworker union’s historic relevance as an institutional leader.

In the following chapter section, I expand to include “external” social media interactions in my analysis. Since the total number of Tweets I collected is so large, I construct simple random samples of N=51 for each case study and classify the accounts with which each union is interacting. To do so, I eliminate any account that is randomly selected if it is a personal account or an otherwise irrelevant actor. This permits me to determine the sectors within which each union and its activists are embedded. I chose

N=51 by performing several iterations of sampling. I initially selected 25 accounts for each case, and then I randomly added five more cases at a time to see if any trends changed. By the time I arrived at N=51, all relevant variables displayed clear trends that

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warranted analysis. Based on this method, UNITE HERE stands out from UAW GM

Locals and UAW Local 2110 with respect to its engagement with non-union, non- politician actors. All three accounts interact with local and national Democratic politicians as well as other unions, but UNITE HERE activists and Local accounts also build networks with progressive movements of various stripes, including migrants’ rights, environmental justice, and indigenous rights activists. This is evidence that UNITE

HERE adopts the coalitional approach that is a hallmark of SJU.

Communication Within the Three Case Studies

Like most organizations over the past two decades, labor unions have reckoned with a paradigm shift in communication and information communication technologies

(ICTs) (Panagiotopoulos and Barnett, 2015). Union websites, online labor publications, and mailing lists have heavily influenced labor organizing, but social media, i.e. sites like

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, are the most contemporary manifestations of this transformation. These new platforms are somewhat controversial in labor activist and academic circles. Old guard organizers and labor leaders tend to be skeptical about the potential for social media to positively impact the workers’ rights movement. But scholars around the world have provided ample reason to be optimistic. Proponents of

ICT expansion in the labor movement generally see social media as an opportunity for organized labor to engage with working people who have traditionally been excluded from the union hall. Greene and Kirton (2003), for instance, found that British unions that were active on social media reached part-time, temporary, disabled, and women workers in more sustainable ways. Thornthwaite et al. also found that women were more likely to engage with unions online than through traditional communication channels such as

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house visits or community meetings (2017). Observations like these indicate that social media implementation is a relevant, if understudied, facet of the SJU typology. Since online engagement requires an enthusiastic base to build traction and input from younger members to be properly used, it is reasonable to posit that social media is associated with a more progressive, activist style of unionism.

However, the methodology that I designed for this section does not measure online engagement with “non-traditional” sectors or participation levels of younger activists, but rather to reflect organizational arrangements through visible communication strategies. Several scholars have already drawn out this crucial link. Greene et al. (2003), for instance, note that ICT development within unions can be an effective means of challenging labor oligarchy when it encourages member participation and uplifts initiatives that originate outside executive offices. Pulignano expands this thesis by pointing out that transnational social media networks serve to strengthen democratic structures by allowing workers to promote their collective bargaining priorities publicly and identify international commonalities (2009). Finally, Whittall et al., based on a study of European GM plants, found that ICT engagement by workers contributes to a sense of common identity that can be mobilized for active union member engagement (2009).

Although the extent of online communication is an important indicator of union democracy, the structure of social media networks is even more directly consequential. In other words, mass member presence online is not as indicative of democracy as social media engagement that opens space for members and local organizers to uplift their perspectives and goals.

UAW GM Internal Communication

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Only three UAW GM Locals have organizational Twitter accounts: Locals 2164,

2209, and 602, and only one official has a personal Twitter. UAW International headquarters maintains two separate accounts. These are incredibly low numbers, particularly relative to UNITE HERE. This reaffirms that the UAW is indeed significantly less active on Twitter, which hampers my ability to draw conclusions regarding the group’s communication network. Figure 1.1 represents the interactions between these accounts laid out according to the Kamada Kawai method. I incorporated this layout because it accounts for force of connections, in this case indicating the number of tweets in which two accounts interacted. Central positioning in the graphic thus easily conveys communicative centrality in an aesthetically pleasing way (Kolaczyk and Csárdi,

2014). The arrows located at the ends of each edge indicate the directionality of each

Twitter connection. In other words, when one account tags another, the arrow points towards the tagged account. Finally, each individual line represents a network edge, or a single tagged tweet. Accordingly, the density of each edge cluster directly represents the weight of connections between two accounts.

Refer here to Figure 1.1 in the Appendix

There are two striking characteristics of this network. First, UAW GM Locals and activists simply do not engage heavily on Twitter. Only three Locals have accounts, and these accounts do not interact extensively with other UAW GM accounts. The only relevant official who has a public Twitter presence is Local 276 President Terry

Valenzuela (tjv1963). He did not interact with the international UAW account once in the given data set. In fact, using a simple search function of his account, I found that he did not refer to the UAW in any of his Twitter content.. Since UAW GM Locals and officials

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don’t interact heavily online, there is simply less data to collect, and I cannot draw conclusions regarding Locals that do not participate over Twitter’s platform.

Despite this limitation, it is evident that UAW GM’s social media communication structure is heavily centralized, with the International account structuring almost all content production and distribution. The International only tagged Local accounts in two tweets, but Local accounts mentioned the International in hundreds of cases. This implies that the International account creates the majority of original content, and Local leaders share and interact with it after the fact. This does not serve to uplift Local rank-and-file perspectives, but rather to absorb those points of view into the International’s broader communication strategy. Individual Locals themselves barely interact with one another at all. Despite the fact that all three of the Locals participated in a national strike against a common employer over the period of time when collected tweets were produced, only two of these organizations interacted in a single tweet. Thus, internal online network focus was almost completely built around International headquarters, to the detriment of inter-Local communication.

Next, I incorporate non-UAW GM accounts into the network analysis, but I limit external accounts to only UAW Local 2110 and UNITE HERE Marriott strikers. This data allows me to look more closely at how the International structures UAW twitter communication without becoming overwhelmed with an unwieldy network. Moreover, the network provides a snapshot of how our other case studies interact with the UAW, and thus how the centralized internal network that I have just shown impacts communication between the UAW and other unions. Figure 1.2 represents this network

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with a similar design to Figure 1.1. It also employs a Kamada Kawai layout with directionality and weighted edges.

Refer here to Figure 1.2 in the Appendix

The centralized communication structure of UAW GM Locals repeats itself when

I incorporate external accounts. Although the UAW International accounts tag UNITE

HERE International on several occasions, they almost never mention UNITE HERE

Locals or UAW Local 2110 affiliates. Instead, all of these entities orient their communication towards the International twitter. Simultaneously, union Locals, both internal and external to the UAW do not interact with UAW Local accounts. There is no

Twitter communication between these organizations apart from the single tweet I mentioned above. This means that International online content is effectively prioritized above Local points of view. As a result, the International account is a singular center in the above network, so its content structures public priorities and ultimately the overarching narrative. This centralized dynamic coexists with, and is perhaps supported by, a clear perception of the UAW’s significant institutional and historical relevance.

Despite the fact that the UAW International does not contribute extensively to UNITE

HERE’s online network by interacting with its content, the union continues to seek out and promote UAW tweets and narratives. This reflects the influence that the UAW continues to have on networks within the union movement, despite recent decades of precipitous membership decline.

Based on these two graphs, it is clear that the UAW creates a heavily centralized internal communication network on Twitter. International headquarters is at the center of nearly all content production, both when I considered exclusively GM Locals and when I

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incorporated the other two case studies. This tendency reflects anti-democratic patterns within the union. It is difficult for workers of color, immigrant workers, and rank-and-file members more generally to center themselves in UAW rhetoric when the International dictates most content production. The extent of this centralization will be more clear when it is positioned relative to my other two case studies.

UAW Local 2110 Internal Communication

I now turn to UAW Local 2110. In this case, there are seven relevant non-

International accounts. The New Museum (newmuseum_union and NewMuseum_Union) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA_Local2110 and MOMA_Local2110) are each workplaces represented by Local 2110. Maida Rosenstein (UnionMaida) and Megan

Grann (happybirdz) are each Local Executive officials. Finally, the Local itself

(UAW2110) maintains a Twitter account. Figure 1.3 represents the interactions between these accounts, and it also includes UAW International’s two accounts. The attributes of this graphic are similar to the last two cases, but in this instance vertex area corresponds to the total number of tagged tweets that each account either sends or receives.

Refer here to Figure 1.3 in the Appendix

This network shows quite clearly that UAW Local 2110 is much more active on

Twitter than UAW GM Locals. There are more accounts associated with this singular

Local than for all GM Locals combined, and those accounts interact more by far. This tendency provides more fertile ground for interpretation. The other significant difference is that this network has several central actors, as opposed to exclusively the International or Local accounts. In fact, UAW International is only the fourth most active network

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participant following both museums and the Local President Maida Rosenstein. This arrangement is intriguing because it uplifts the individual workplace perspectives above those of the full Local. Workers at these two museums are likely to have different issues and diverse activist networks, so centralizing multiple workplaces allows for those issues and connections to help define the Local’s public identity. In direct contrast to UAW GM networks, museum union accounts are the central content producers that structure the Local’s online narrative. They interact with almost all other relevant actors, and they both send and receive messages. Moreover, the

Local’s President Maida Rosenstein has a much more active Twitter presence than any other personal account I have shown thus far. She has not only the third most active account in the Local 2110 internal network, but hers is also one of the most diverse in terms of its internal connections. President Rosenstein interacts with every account in the network, and she directs and receives messages from every account but the Local and the

International. As a result, the Local President appears to serve as a mediator between individual museums, the Local more generally, and the International Union.

Local 2110 provides an excellent contrast with UAW International and UAW GM

Locals. Not only are individual workplace accounts the centers of content production, but nearly all of the accounts associated with this account interact. Local President

Rosenstein, in large part, mediates this diverse interaction. She interacted with every single account, likely serving to construct a common public identity out of so many diverse perspectives. This decentralized and dynamic structure is much more democratic than the UAW GM network. Individual workers have two accounts dedicated to their workplace issues, so it is more feasible for them to share their concerns and their ideas

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publically. Although President Rosenstein is an executive official, she generally tags other accounts instead of the reverse. This implies that she primarily promotes content that other accounts produce instead of creating her own material for others to share. As a result, her Twitter presence actually serves to promote other Local 2110 issues and perspectives instead of projecting her own thoughts downward.

UNITE HERE Internal Communication

As the SJU case in this study, UNITE HERE should display the most democratic structures yet. There are four Local executive accounts, sixteen activist accounts, seven official Local accounts, and one International account associated with the UNITE HERE case study. This represents a total of 28 accounts, which is significantly higher than either of the other case studies, reflecting UNITE HERE’s relatively expansive Twitter presence. To construct the union’s internal communication network, I again used a

Kamada Kawai format that incorporates directionality. This means that points closest to the center have the highest level of engagement. In this case, each edge represents the total number of tagged tweets associated with a particular vertex, and I did not weight the size of points depending upon engagement. I was unable to do so because the graph would have been indecipherable. I also color-coded this graph in order to draw out any tendencies more clearly and legibly. Figure 1.4 represents UNITE HERE’s internal communication network, which means that it only includes tweets that were sent between two accounts affiliated with the union.

Refer here to Figure 1.4 in the Appendix

Figure 1.4 shows that there are several central content producers within UNITE

HERE’s internal network. The International account, various Local accounts, and Local

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Executives are all active at the center of the graph, indicating that they receive the most traction. This means that perspectives at three different levels dictate UNITE HERE’s public presence online. This provides two central opportunities for rank-and-file workers to speak out online since the International account is unlikely to centralize these points of view. Interestingly, Local non-executive staff such as organizers and hotel representatives play an intermediary role in the network. They interact with all four levels of UNITE

HERE staff, but they are not central content producers. This implies that Local staff promote material created by other levels of the UNITE HERE hierarchy. Finally, Figure

1.4 reflects a much more complex pattern of engagement than any previous diagram.

Most accounts interact with several other vertices at various levels. Unlike the UAW GM graph, which showed a single directionality leading to the International account, this figure shows that each account maintains a diverse set of connections.

Together, this evidence suggests that UNITE HERE is indeed the most democratic and active case with respect to Twitter engagement. The union constructs a web of interactions as opposed to a centralized pattern. This allows for several points of content production that are accessible to non-Executive staff and rank-and-file members.

This result is particularly clear when contrasted with Figures 1.1 and 1.2, which represent

UAW GM’s centralized communication patterns. UAW Local 2110’s internal network on the other hand, depicted in Figure 1.3, shows significant democratization but limited diversity of connections outside of President Maida Rosenstein. Accordingly, these network analyses, taken together, confirm the classification of each case study on the spectrum from SJU to business unionism with respect to democratic characteristics of

Twitter communication patterns.

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External Communication in the Case Studies: Network Embeddedness of Union Leaders

Unions and their activists also communicate extensively with allied organizations, local and national politicians, and other unions. These networks are crucial to my typology. The activists, politicians, and organizations with which union leaders interact reflect the character of their embeddedness in activist circles. In other words, these networks display the non-union issues with which UNITE HERE officials engage and the organizations they consider to be worthwhile movement centers. This is at the crux of the

SJU definition that I have been employing throughout this study. Unions that break from the business unionist mold lean on their allies outside the shopfloor in order to put pressure on employers, and they also use these connections to expand their advocacy into racial justice and migrants’ rights activism. This coalition-building mechanism not only improves union influence at the bargaining table, but it also allows SJU organizations to lay claim to the broad social vision that has historically animated the labor movement.

My methodological design fits this analytical goal because I included not only official Local and International Twitter accounts, but also personal accounts that belong to union activists themselves. This is meant to include in my dataset links that animate unionists personally, not just organizations that carry social or political capital in the public eye. In other words, I wanted to dig deeper than just the connections that official union Twitter accounts maintain, since these are subject to superficial optical politics.

Officials may interact publically with racial justice organizations in order to create the impression that Locals combat white supremacy, but that appearance may not translate into any actual commitment. Personal Twitter accounts, on the other hand, are not

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politicized to the same extent, and are thus more likely to reflect genuine passion on the part of users.

The following graphs represent the connections that officials and Locals maintained at UAW GM (Figure 2.1), UAW Local 2110 (Figure 2.2) and UNITE HERE

(Figure 2.3). These are clearly much simpler than our earlier figures, and they function essentially as color coded lists of organizations and individuals with which each case study interacted. Edges are not weighted, and I grouped all accounts affiliated with each case study under singular labels. The center of each graph represents all accounts associated with the particular case study. Each graph is followed by a table that includes color and shape legends as well as the exact number of connections within each category.

Refer here to Figures 2.1-2.3 and the Associated Legends in the Appendix

These graphs show that UNITE HERE is unique among my case studies in its engagement with non-labor rights advocates and organizations that are not affiliated with the Democratic Party. It is the only union to have tagged an indigenous environmental rights organization, a disability rights activist, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, a gender rights organization, and a migrants’ rights organization. These are all issues that reflect a progressive, multi-cultural coalition-building strategy. The fact that UNITE HERE officials and Local accounts are engaging with these sectors indicates that the union is at least somewhat embedded in their advocacy networks.

Moreover, UNITE HERE interacted with just three national Democratic officials, whereas the UAW tagged or was tagged in tweets with 13 national Democrats. This fact, coupled with the fact that the UAW did not engage with any local officials whereas

UNITE HERE interacted with two, reflects two trends. First, UNITE HERE directs its

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online advocacy more directly at target employers and less at the state. The union engaged with ten different member employers, whereas the UAW only interacted with one. This falls neatly in line with UNITE HERE’s SJU strategy, since corporate campaigning is public and adversarial. The UAW, on the other hand, engages in national- level policy lobbying that fits with its pattern bargaining model. Second, UNITE HERE maintains a much more local focus. It considers municipal politics to be an important policy arena, as I showed briefly in the context of its anti-workplace harassment advocacy in Seattle. The UAW, which bargains on a broader level and doesn’t maintain many plants in large urban areas, does not engage much with local politicians.

Conclusions

These two investigations of Twitter data confirm crucial elements of my typology.

UNITE HERE and UAW 2110 are both decentralized relative to UAW GM Locals with respect to their internal communication over social media, and UNITE HERE establishes a much more progressive external network than either of the other case studies. This portrays UNITE HERE as acting in a standard SJU vein, whereas UAW GM exhibits classic business unionist trends and UAW Local 2110 paves a middle ground. It is, of course, imperative to note, that Twitter engagement is not synonymous with organizational structure or coalitional network construction. Moreover, the UAW’s general lack of online engagement poses an interesting confounding variable that could be the subject of an entirely separate study. However, despite these limitations, my analysis provides strong evidence that my hypothesized typology is accurate with respect to communication structure and community organizing strategies.

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Chapter Appendix: Graphs and Figures

Figure 1.1: UAW GM Internal Network

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Figure 1.2: UAW GM Internal and External Network

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Figure 1.3: UAW Local 2110 Internal Network

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Figure 1.4: UNITE HERE Internal Network

Color Type of Twitter Account

Local Executive Officials

Local Non-Executive Staff

Local Organizational Accounts

International Organizational Accounts

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Figure 2.1: UAW GM External Network

Figure 2.1 Legend

Category Color/Shape N

Union Activist 1

Journalist 10

National Democratic 13 Official

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State Democratic 1 Official

Environmental Rights 2 Organization

Non-Union Labor 1 Rights Organization

Campaign Target or 1 Represented Shop

Union Organizational 4 Account

National Republican 3 Official

Migrants' Rights 0 Organization

Civil Liberties 1 Organization

Progressive Puerto 1 Rican Organization

Racial Justice Org 1

Artist 1

Academic 0

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Philanthropist 1

Non-issue specific 3 progressive organization

Activist Affiliated with 1 Democratic Party

Organization Affiliated 1 with Democratic Party

AFL-CIO Chapter or 5 Official

Gender Rights 0 Organization Local Democratic 0 Official

Indigenous 0 Environmental Rights Organization Rank-and-File Worker 0

LGBTQ+ Advocacy 0 Organization

Disability Rights 0 Advocacy Organization

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Figure 2.2: UAW Local 2110 External Network

Figure 2.2 Legend

Category Color/Shape N

Union Activist 1

Journalist 16

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National Democratic 2 Official

State Democratic 0 Official

Environmental Rights 0 Organization

Non-Union Labor 1 Rights Organization

Campaign Target or 2 Represented Shop

Union Organizational 5 Account

National Republican 0 Official

Migrants' Rights 0 Organization

Civil Liberties 0 Organization

Progressive Puerto 0 Rican Organization

Racial Justice Org 1

Artist 10

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Academic 4

Philanthropist 0

Non-issue specific 2 progressive organization

Activist Affiliated with 0 Democratic Party

Organization Affiliated 0 with Democratic Party

AFL-CIO Chapter or 0 Official

Gender Rights 0 Organization

Local Democratic 4 Official

Indigenous 0 Environmental Rights Organization

Rank-and-File Worker 3

LGBTQ+ Advocacy 0 Organization

Disability Rights 0 Advocacy Organization

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Figure 2.3: External Network UNITE HERE

Figure 2.3 Legend

Category Color/Shape N

Union Activist 1

Journalist 7

National Democratic 3 Official

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State Democratic 1 Official

Environmental Rights 1 Organization

Non-Union Labor 5 Rights Organization

Campaign Target or 10 Represented Shop

Union Organizational 7 Account

National Republican 1 Official

Migrants' Rights 1 Organization

Civil Liberties 0 Organization

Progressive Puerto 0 Rican Organization

Racial Justice Org 1

Artist 0

Academic 1

Philanthropist 0

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Non-issue specific 0 progressive organization

Activist Affiliated with 4 Democratic Party

Organization Affiliated 1 with Democratic Party

AFL-CIO Chapter or 1 Official

Gender Rights 1 Organization Local Democratic 2 Official

Indigenous 1 Environmental Rights Organization Rank-and-File Worker 0

LGBTQ+ Advocacy 2 Organization/Activist

Disability Rights 1 Advocacy Organization

Conclusion

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Since the early 1970’s, globalization has thoroughly disrupted the institutional matrix that once permitted business unions in the U.S. to secure firm protections for its members. De-regulation, anti-labor policy, and expanding market internationalism have collectively created an unfriendly organizing environment in which density has fallen and labor leaders have been forced to accept concessions bargains. This crisis is not only dangerous for union members and activists, but for the American working class as a whole. When organized labor has been powerful, it has historically uplifted all poor and working people towards an inclusive and equitable social vision. Even as unions in this country have struggled to overcome deeply engrained racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, marginalized people of all identities have engaged with the workers’ movement to fight for dignity and economic freedom. With the recession of unions from the forefront of this progressive tide, not only have income distributions in this country become increasingly unequal, but capital has also seized the opportunity to enact increasingly conservative policy. Quite frankly, a weak labor movement should trouble anyone who hopes to live in a just world.

But the movement’s crisis under neoliberalism is also an opportunity. Service industry unions in this country have successfully identified common cause with workers of color and immigrant workers, and they have become leaders in a coalition that relentlessly develops more militant social movement strategies. Recognizing that former institutional channels are closed, progressive unions are now working to build new, more inclusive advocacy strategies. As I have shown, SJU organizations not only centralize workers of color and immigrant workers more explicitly and with clearer goals, but they also mobilize enough popular support to win concessions where business unions are

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faltering. They tend to be more embedded in non-labor advocacy networks, and this embeddedness encourages SJU unions to win concrete provisions for their most heavily exploited members. Unions like UNITE HERE are not satisfied with non-discrimination provisions or with vague rhetoric on racial justice. From their organizing model to their contract priorities to their activist affiliations, these groups reaffirm their commitment to standing in solidarity with workers against racialized and xenophobic exploitation.

I have tried, throughout this study, to be careful not to glorify labor’s past or its future, but rather to draw on an accurate history of its development in order to inform a fair evaluation of the movement’s potential. I showed that there are very concrete reasons why manufacturing unions like the UAW may be hesitant to abandon their relationships to employers and their cooperative framework in favor of militant confrontation.

Companies like GM are increasingly empowered to extract concessions from their labor

“partners” or to eliminate domestic employment altogether. Even as the institutional space for cooperation dissolves, labor advocates find that space to be increasingly crucial for unions to achieve security for their members. It is difficult to estimate with any certainty what a transition to SJU would look like for business unions in the manufacturing sector, but such a shift would undoubtedly put decades of member gains at risk.

Still, given all of the evidence that I have presented in this study, the imperative to move towards SJU appears more important than ever. Manufacturing companies continue to gain leverage as neoliberal political economics regresses towards an unfettered capitalist model. If unions like the UAW fail to take meaningful action on issues of racial justice and immigrants’ rights, they will continue to alienate advocacy and community

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organizations that are quickly becoming their only potential allies. If business unions decline to invest in developing member leadership, they will be unable to mobilize the internal support that they need to protect their wins from capital’s onslaught. There is no question that social movement strategies are more intensive and riskier, but there has never been a moment in labor history when workers did not put everything on the line to earn the rights and the benefits they deserved. If the UAW needs inspiration to fight for the social vision that SJU encompasses, it need look no further than its own movement of the 1930’s and 40’s.

Although I have outlined several conclusions regarding my initial research questions over the course of this study, my project is perhaps most interesting because of the further questions that it raises. Firstly, although I showed UNITE HERE to be a much more progressive union than the UAW with respect to Black and immigrant workers, I did not analyze how both organizations advocate for gender justice. Women are overrepresented in the service industries relative to traditional manufacturing, so UNITE

HERE’s membership is much more gender-diverse than the UAW’s. I anticipate that this would lead the hospitality workers’ union to fight for stronger feminist contract provisions than the UAW. I also imagine that women are more active in UNITE HERE’s organizational infrastructure.

Future researchers should also consider digging deeper into the UAW’s engagement on Twitter. I noted that the union’s minimal online presence severely limited my methodology, but I would be interested to find out why this is. Labor scholars could analyze the UAW’s investment in its communications division and its ability to engage with younger union members. Research in this vein could reveal a great deal about how

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the UAW establishes its public presence and how it constructs networks with other social movements.

Finally, the present study raises the question of the specific role that rank-and-file members in SJU unions play in pushing their organizations toward increasingly progressive policies. It is clear that SJU labor advocates recognize the power of a coalitional approach and that they use this strategy to win specific provisions for their members, but it is unclear how leadership lands on this perspective. I hypothesize that rank-and-file militancy in a relatively democratic infrastructural environment encourages executives to consciously pursue progressive strategies. It seems unlikely to me that labor leaders have made this leap on their own. Future researchers should approach this question by engaging directly with workers, which I failed to do over the course of this project.

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