Black Lives Matter to Unions? The Revitalization of Labor and the Struggle for Racial Justice

• In Event: 501 - Regular Session. Labor/Labor Movements

Abstract

This paper looks at the role the labor movement has played in the Black Lives Matter movement, examining specifically actions unions have taken between August 2014 and December 2015. Starting with the death of Michael Brown and the uprising in Ferguson that sparked protests around the country, increasingly, parts of the labor movement have joined forces with Black Lives Matter activists and have taken on racial justice as an issue that both impacts the labor movement broadly and plagues unions internally. Building on social movement literature, this research argues that we can understand unions’ actions as a range of responses that fit into three categories. First, much of what unions are doing is not a departure from the past, but merely ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ so to speak, with the salient social justice movement of the moment for the purposes of image maintenance. Further, other union actions can be understood as using Black Lives Matter protests as opportunities for signaling power to employers. Nonetheless, in the midst of an ever growing black-lead movement, some unions are taking actions that demonstrate a step forward for the labor movement, such as those that are potentially costly to unions and those that blur the boundaries between “us” and “them” by building enduring alliances with Black Lives Matter groups. That these actions definitively signal a real transformation on the part of unions and a reckoning with the labor movement’s complex relationship with race and dubious commitment to racial justice has yet to be determined.

Author

• Amelia Fortunato, The Graduate Center, CUNY