Collective action still vital this Labor Day

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri. or Sat., Aug. 30, 31 or Sept. 1, 2018

Enjoying a superb community-theater production of “Newsies” recently, I was moved by the enthusiastic determination and underlying message shown by the young cast in songs such as “Seize the Day” and “The World Will Know” as much as the talented players’ singing and choreography. In a fun, inspiring evening about the 19th century newsies strike against Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and other New York newspaper barons, the need for collective action was presented as reasonable, possible and vital.

Days after labor’s impressive, grassroots win defeating Missouri’s proposed Right-To-Work (for less) proposal, the musical’s joyful reminder somewhat offset this summer’s depressing and terrible “Janus” Supreme Court decision, which by ruling that public-sector employees need not contribute anything to the unions that negotiate and enforce contracts that provide wages, hours and working conditions, threatens not only teachers, fire fighters, government workers, and so on, but eventually private-sector workers, too.

Whether working for a municipality or media moguls, workers using a boots-on-the-ground collective approach can compensate for this country’s lack of meaningful power by individuals struggling alone.

In fact, a July AFL-CIO panel moderated by journalist Michelle Chan – “Collective Action on the Rise: How the Labor Movement Can Sustain the Momentum of Change” – had a similar message based on experiences from 2018 instead of 1899.

“Our union movements are more powerful when we are not separated by what kind of work that we do,” commented Rachel Sandalow-Ash, a research assistant at Harvard Law School involved in the campaign to unionize Harvard graduate students, speaking to Mery Concepcion of the Institute for Policy Studies. “We’re more powerful when we all stand together.”

Elsewhere, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) this spring finally won a union election at the airline JetBlue through an effective campaign of stepped-up outreach and face-to-face organizing.

“This is a very prosperous time for everybody but, it seems, the workers, and collective action is the only way to level the playing field,” said JetBlue flight attendant and TWU member Lyndi Wade Howard. “If you really want to make sure that everybody’s taken care of, you have to unite, you have to be together, you have to work towards the same goals.”

True, powerful and wealthy forces have been behind the decades-long attack on workers funded and fueled by a host of Right-wing activists, corporations and think tanks, and they remain poised to continue the assault.

But workers acting collectively are persisting and often prevailing. Another great example this year was the string of separate strikes by rank and file teachers in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia. In West Virginia, elementary school counselor Anna Simmons stressed the significance of collective action by school employees, whether or not they were members of a teachers union.

There, despite a contract settlement offer raising wages for teachers, the workers rejected the deal and continued their walkout until all public-sector workers were offered the same pay increase.

“If we all are together and we’re all unified and we’re all in solidarity on these issues we can make tremendous impact on the lives of ourselves, of our future generation and as a nation,” Simmons said.

Neither a newsie nor a public employee, of course, 19th century Native American leader Sitting Bull is quoted as offering a profound lesson in solidarity: “As individual fingers we can easily be broken, but together we make a mighty fist.”