The Biggest Private Sector Union Success You've Hardly Heard About

• In Event: 470 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Striking for Justice in Fast Food, Retail, and Home Care: Implications for the Broader Labor Movement

Abstract

This paper is a case study of a large, highly transient, ethnically divided workforce who fought for and won unprecedented gains in the manufacturing sector in a right-to-work state with the lowest union density in the U.S. It examines their organizing strategy, and reveals the key role of individual actors, challenging the concept of “leaderless” movements. My study focuses on the emotions and ideology that motivated key individuals and guided their understandings of power and strategy. I provide evidence that militancy, including a series of wild cat strikes, was central to the campaign in question, and allowed the workers to win a union, a strong first contract, and raised expectations - gains that have not been achieved with more typical contemporary accomodationist union politics, nor in campaigns to increase minimum wages. I describe how bottom-up majority participation by the workforce in a fight considered against-all-odds motivated and conditioned what became a significant statewide community campaign in a union-hostile state. I argue that in defeating the company, the workers achieved much more than a contract, more than $15 an hour, they won confidence in themselves, including the confidence to later help to organize other workplaces. These 5,000 workers are now an important constituency in the effort to help change the conversation among thousands of workers in rural North Carolina in the 2014 Moral Mondays movement whose leader, the Reverend William Barber, developed from seeds planted in this successful union campaign.

Author

• Jane McAlevey, City University of New York-Graduate Center