"where are the unions?"
I’ve repeatedly wondered and heard others wonder something along the lines of ‘where is the labor movement on covid?!’ I think this wondering is appropriate because the seriousness of covid harms is not matched by an appropriate and widespread response. I do think it’s important to note that there have been workplace disputes over exposure to covid and covid harms, and some efforts by some unions to take some action. The National Nurses United have been pretty good on this in terms of public statements and lobbying for instance, and the teachers union in Chicago had some pretty serious disputes with management earlier in the pandemic related to this. But over all I think it’s fair to wonder.
This is a pre-existing view on my part, and I’m aware that it’s very easy to have the pandemic just confirm one’s pre-existing views, but I think part of the problem is the effect of labor law on unions. I’ve written about this, not specifically related to the pandemic, in some pieces at Organizing Work - https://organizing.work/author/nate-holdren/ The gist goes like this: while it’s good that people are pro-union, it’s unlikely that anyone is actually ‘pro-union’ in an abstract ‘any sort of union whatsoever’ because there are lots of different kinds of unionism or ways to ‘do’ a union. So ‘pro-union’ understood literally is about as empty as ‘pro-politics’. Instead when people say they’re pro-union they’re imagining some particular kind of actually existing unionism, or a range of such kinds, and different kinds are politically distinguishable. The law encourages some kinds of unionism and discourages others, and that encouraging and discouraging can be written into unions’ organization, practice, and outlook in a way that has some momentum or inertia to it. Very broadly, the prevailing kinds of unionism are pro-systemic, even if they take a conflictual orientation toward other pro-systemic positions. And they also have tended to cede the workplace as a site of politics, in the sense of having relatively little orientation toward seeing the labor process itself as political. (To be clear, politicizing the labor process is not necessarily anti-systemic, it’s a necessary element of an anti-systemic politics but is not alone sufficient to constitute such a politics.)
This has a lot to do with covid insofar as covid exposure is basically part of employees’ lives for lots of people now, it’s baked in to labor processes and those labor processes are only minimally something that is subject to official, legitimate politicization. Furthermore, that official, political legitimation via the institutions and practices of industrial relations is limited in time. It’s much more possible during contract negotiations than during the life of contracts. This is related to how union contracts organize politicization and depoliticization: agreements to keep doing work under certain conditions and for a certain duration are implicitly agreements to take the rest of the labor process as given, and so as largely depoliticized. This lends itself toward a kind of off-the-shopfloor citizenship politics, getting pay and benefits in exchange for subordination at work. (Of course, subordination at work can be mitigated by the kinds of partial democratization that are sometimes negotiated for - fair discipline processes and a grievance procedure and so on, but that mitigation is predicated on continued willingness to leave at least some aspects of subordination off the table. The boss is still the boss.) This means that periodic issues that come up between contracts are harder to politicize. Covid’s arrival was something like that, coming as it did suddenly and surprisingly, and furthermore by covid exposure becoming in effect a necessary component of the labor process it entered the depoliticized core of that process that is ideologically taken for granted in industrial relations. I think this could change but it seems unlikely to me that it would change via the ordinary operations of union organizing and negotiations, because those ordinary operations are constrained by the way unionism is constructed in the relevant institutions. (I mentioned the other day Simon Clarke’s point that we should see the institutions of capitalist society as significantly institutional forms of class domination and class collaboration, the latter being a subset of the former https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/thinking-out-loud-about-simon-clarke-and-public/.) This is not only a matter of labor law tying the unions’ hands, it’s a matter of unions being creatures of labor law: the specific ways to institutionalize class relations that exist now encourage forms of organization that are compatible with that institutionalization, however conflictual those organizations may be in relation to other actors operating within that set of institutions.
This was on my mind again because I’m reading Jason Resnikoff’s book Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work. It’s good. I think it’s illuminating regarding AI-talk these days and I recommend it to anyone interested in talk about the future of work, or in labor history broadly. Resnikoff mentions many times that in the mid twentieth century US union officials tended to treat changes in the organization of the labor process as technical changes without a political content and which were inevitable, ceding the workplace as a site of politics in an important degree as I said above. Instead of fighting for control over work, they’d fight over the pay and benefits that workers got in exchange for doing the work. They did so in ways that facilitated greater employer control, control often used in ways that directly harmed workers, above all through increasing the speed and physical intensity of work, leading to lots of injuries as well as generally lower quality of life for workers due to exhaustion. While this happened, workers themselves often complained and engaged in informal collective action over the harms of work. By doing so, workers still politicized work but my point is they had little means to do via the official forms of unionism and employer/employee relations.
This is pretty awful stuff. Resnikoff doesn’t go into as much depth on this as I’d have liked (this isn’t a criticism, he’s written a good book, this is just me saying that I wish he’d catered more to my particular interests, which is a little unfair on my part as it’s just not a book about occupational safety and health), but he does provide some poignant accounts of workers suffering from bosses using automation technology and talk thereof to force speed ups. The effects were bad for workers employed and helped push some people out of work as well - working one group of workers too fast facilitates having other people who are un- or under-employed.
It’s striking to me that this stuff happened in the supposed golden age of US unionism, at the time of peak density and with little response from the most progressive union officials (and in some cases, with a clear subtext that workers trying to do something about these problems were out of step with the agenda of union officials who were willing to trade speed up for better benefits). This is in part to say that in important respects the relative lack of union response to covid is in keeping with a historical pattern in the predominant forms of unionism after the National Labor Relations Act (fostering unions who would play ball in certain ways being a major priority of the Act, as I cover in one of my pieces at Organizing Work).
One thought I had on this as I was reading Resnikoff today is that I think we can think of this in terms of body politics - who can have what done to their body, or not. Workers’ informal action has tended to emphasize one set of standards and with an implication that whatever can be done to someone is a threat to everyone (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ as the IWW slogan goes), while the official and authoritative approaches to unionism have tended to involve implicit tradeoffs - a certain degree of baked-in harm to some few individuals traded for more pay for everyone in the bargaining unit, or a concentration of harms on a particular lower status job class and concentration of greater benefits on higher job classes. In important respects class is always a body politics, since it involves the use of some people by others within broad and contested boundaries for that use (and with the consequences for violating those boundaries being also variable and contested) but only some of that is subject to action or contestation through the official channels of prevailing unionism and related institutions. (We touched on something related last time I was on Death Panel - https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/unlimited-liabilities-nate-holdren insofar as the California Supreme Court in effect said that the harms from workplace covid exposure are too pervasive to deal with so they just have to be allowed to happen.) Covid harms generally seem to have been significantly pushed into what I called the depoliticized core of that body politics, and it looks like that’s the general direction things will continue for a while as well. Like I said I think that could be reversed but it will involve some conflict within and at least to some extent against the official channels of prevailing unionism. This also means that contemporary electoral, policy, and work-within-the-institutions kinds of approaches to left politics are going to mostly come up short on covid harms, to the limited degree they consider covid harms at all. I think for them to get better would require not only some pushing to take the pandemic more seriously but also some pushing that presses them a little more in a direction of social disruption that isn’t the immediate focus of that sort of politics. That is, covid harms are to some extent a square peg and a lot of official channels are a round hole - as are a lot of issues of health and safety generally, including some of the harms of climate change (I remain dismayed that the last Teamster contract was celebrated in parts of the left despite leaving trucks in the fleet that led to workers' dying from heat last summer). This means that further politicizing of covid exposure in workplace and the harms of covid is to a nontrivial degree wrongfooted within the prevailing approaches to issues regarding work and class, so that an adequate pandemic politics will require forms of doing politics that don't fit neatly into existing institutional channels. And as I said I think to a significant degree the same goes for climate change harms insofar as they appear in the course of work and for occupational health and safety in general.