Democratizing the Demand for Workers' Rights: Toward a Re-framing of Labor's Argument

...political democracy could not co-exist with unchecked corporate power—or "industrial autocracy," as they called it...

...Meanwhile, as fear of retribution pervades the workplace, the percentage of private sector U.S...

...As jobs are shifted across borders, states shed responsibility for social welfare, and markets are ever more unfettered, it seems shortsighted to cast labor's demand mainly as a question of "workers' right to choose" a union...

...workers' rights...

...Such criticisms have been dismissed by SEIU president Andy Stern, who argues that a narrow focus on union democracy might be self-defeating for labor...

...He is the author of Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (University of North Carolina Press...

...Thus, inherent in workers' demands for industrial democracy was a direct challenge to the unaccountable power of employers to determine working conditions: democracy meant having a "say" over those conditions...

...Labor not only has much to gain from social change of this sort, it remains better equipped to advance it than any other group...

...Just as durable industrial unions could not have been achieved independent of the political economy of the New Deal state, so the mass organization of post-industrial workers is not likely to happen without a new national and transnational regulatory regime...

...The current popularity of "rights talk" notwithstanding, history suggests that labor has much to gain by rallying around the standard of democracy once again...

...NUP critics like Herman Benson of the Association for Union Democracy argue that "the NUP seems to see union democracy as an inconvenience, even an impediment...

...workers do not enjoy the right proclaimed in Article 23: "to form and to join trade unions...

...Indeed, as it was at the end of the 1920s, the revival of organized labor today is in many ways dependent upon the creation of new forms of market regulation...

...Yet we can learn from the way labor once wielded that ideal...

...Central to the NUP's plan is a proposal to consolidate the nation's unions into a dozen or so large organizations, each devoted to a specific economic sector...

...On one level, the protesters aimed to build support for reform legislation introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative George Miller (DCA) that would simplify the union recognition process and stiffen penalties against lawbreaking employers...

...Both sides in this labor debate voice longstanding union traditions...

...In the early twentieth century, the idea of "workers' rights" was not prominent...

...Amid the social turmoil created by global markets, increasingly powerful multinationals, and the erosion of decadesold instruments of market regulation and social welfare provision, it is clear that rebuilding labor's power will require more than an emphasis on organizing...

...They want strength and a voice, not some purist, intellectual, historical, mythical democracy...

...Rather, I am arguing that the "workers' rights are human rights" formulation alone will prove inadequate to the task of rebuilding workers' organizations in the United States unless we couple it with an equally passionate call for democracy in our workplaces, economy, and politics...

...Moreover, to the extent that it provided a rationale for workers to act upon such connections, the ideal of industrial democracy helped articulate demands for a political economy consistent with durable mass unionism...

...In the fail of 2003, SEIU, HERE, and UNITE helped form an alliance for labor's revival called the New Unity Partnership...

...But the displacement of the older discourse has been a mixed blessing for labor, for a democracycentered discourse was able to address realities of work and union organization that rights talk poorly grasps...

...Whether the NUP's vision can succeed or whether its critics are right to question it remains to be seen...

...I am not suggesting that today's labor advocates should abandon their rights-based arguments...

...When labor embraced the ideal of industrial democracy, it could not avoid committing itself, at least formally, to internal union democracy...

...workers would join unions if they felt it safe to do so...

...If so, this healthy debate could in turn help labor revive its historic role as a vehicle for democratization...

...From Boston to Los Angeles, from Seattle to Atlanta, protesters took to the streets to highlight a shameful reality...

...JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN teaches U.S...

...In his recent book, The Roaring Nineties, Stiglitz argues that a central problem with the Clinton-era political economy was that "we pushed a market fundamentalist set of reforms, in any way we could, paying little attention to how what we did undermined democratic processes...

...Rights talk poorly serves efforts to imagine and build that regulatory regime, for it speaks to the limitation of state power rather than its augmentation...

...A second advantage of industrial democracy was that it demanded more than free association: it called for a measure of self-determination as well...

...The NUP's agenda and the contest for the leadership of the AFL-CIO suggest that a debate over the importance of union democracy may soon widen...

...More than ever, labor needs a way to make its case that avoids the individualistic undertow of rights talk, asserts majoritarian demands for democratic accountability in work relations, and couples empowerment in the workplace to regulation of the economy...

...In the decades after World War II, the rise of a rights-based political discourse gradually marginalized democracycentered discourse both within U.S...

...1. Nelson Lichtenstein, "The Rights Revolution," New Labor Forum (Spring 2003...

...This is not only in labor's own interest, but in the interest of all those who hope to see democracy survive and thrive in the emerging global economy...

...But labor critics of the NUP are skeptical, alleging that its plan would swallow up small democratic unions into larger and ever more bureaucratic entities distant from rank-and-file members...

...Yet to the extent that it eroded the majoritarian impulse embodied in industrial democracy—an impulse once central to the construction and maintenance of labor solidarity—rights consciousness also had ambivalent consequences for trade unionism...

...This becomes clear when one considers four advantages that have been lost to labor in the shift from democracybased to rights-based arguments...

...That political economy, whose foundations were partially laid during the New Deal, was to be built around the notion that markets—including the labor market—ought to be accountable to the public good...

...Such intimidation clearly has been effective...

...Indeed, the creative tension that flows from periodically recalibrating that balance has DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 6 5 WORKERS' RIGHTS enriched the internal life of labor's most successful unions over the years...

...Rather, in the early twentieth century workers portrayed their struggle as an effort to secure "industrial democracy...

...But the convergence of two recent developments—one in the direction of the global economy, the other within the U.S...

...2 Tellingly, such arguments did not trouble trade unionists decades ago...

...As AFL-CIO organizing director Stewart Acuff put it, "We want to get into a real fight for the rights of American workers to freely form unions . . . which is a fundamental human right...

...THE MARGINALIZATION of democracy within labor's vocabulary has left us less able to articulate the importance of unions for workers and the nation than we were able to do a century ago...

...As Steve Fraser observed not long ago in the pages of this magazine, the "relationship between power and democracy has never been a straightforward one" in the labor movement...

...Unless democracy could be secured in the workplace, Walsh and his contemporaries argued, it was at risk in the streets and in the halls of government...

...These have undeniable power, speak to basic truths, and connect to important traditions— including labor's historic internationalism...

...Eliminating overlapping jurisdictions and folding smaller organizations into larger groups will concentrate workers' power, NUP leaders claim...

...A recent poll found that as many as forty million U.S...

...As early twentiethcentury labor reformer Frank P. Walsh put it, "Political Democracy is an illusion, unless [built] upon and guaranteed by a free and virile Industrial Democracy...

...AFL-CIO leaders contend that as many as twenty thousand workers are fired annually for participating in union organizing drives...

...labor movement itself—may help push the ideal of democracy to the center of organized labor's revitalization project in the years ahead...

...This insight grew organically from the nature of the unionized workplace...

...The point is not simply that labor's current rights talk cannot answer such claims as well as labor activists once answered the likes of Walter Gordon Merritt...

...Unfortunately, the term "industrial democracy" no longer resonates for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it was the product of the industrial era...

...The "glory of America has been the untrammeled opportunities of the individual," he argued, and rights-bound individualism was the epitome of Americanism...

...But none of this is likely to occur unless a wide range of labor activists and their allies begin to reinsert the call for economic democracy into labor's vocabulary...

...We learn that the "Right to Work principle . . . affirms the right of every American to work for a living without being compelled to belong to a union...

...Thus, as these activists argued, to organize a union was to work toward democratic workplace governance...

...In a world in which the quality of democratic self-rule is being impoverished by the simultaneous concentration of wealth and the transnational expansion of corporate power, it is vital that labor explicitly reclaim its democratic vision...

...A final advantage that the ideal of industrial democracy once offered the labor movement was its reinforcement of democratic tendencies within trade union culture...

...It isn't likely that such a formulation can be constructed overnight...

...As one group of workers during World War I put it, "self-government in the workshop" was "one part of the democracy for which our armies are fighting in France...

...Present-day equations of workers' rights to civil rights imply no analogous political economy...

...Whereas activists once argued that organizing was an assertion of democracy, today they portray organizing as an assertion of freedom...

...The maturation of a global economy in which goods and capital move with ease across borders is raising serious questions about the future of democratic self-government...

...In empowering workers to break down historic patterns of discrimination and exclusion, rightsconsciousness made a truly inclusive form of solidarity possible...

...It is difficult to imagine how rights talk can foster this democratic spirit...

...These questions have been raised insistently by 64 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 WORKERS' RIGHTS antiglobalization activists...

...Yet at its best labor has balanced Benson's call for rank-and-file democracy with Stern's emphasis on efficient organization...

...It flows from recent debates in labor's ranks that have been triggered by the continued erosion of union membership...

...Compulsory unionism in any form—'union,' 'closed,' or 'agency' shop," they argue, "is a contradiction of . . . fundamental human right[s...

...There, one discovers how skillfully today's anti-unionists have updated their rights talk to argue that non-union workers' rights are also human rights...

...Workers want their lives to be changed," he points out...

...In that respect, the rise of labor's current rights talk signals an impoverishment of its political vision...

...Thus a labor movement that proudly embraced industrial democracy continued to tolerate or even foster racial and gender discrimination...

...Merritt assailed unions for elevating "the group in a way which infringes upon the rights and duties of the individual...

...The ideal of industrial democracy thus helped them illuminate connections between work and politics and to make simultaneous claims on the public sphere and the "private" workplace...

...With American workers intimidated daily by employers and the labor movement in sharp decline, it is imperative that we rally to defend the right to organize...

...The triumph of rights consciousness was essential for labor...

...It asserted the claims of the many against the few, the pro-union majority against the anti-union minority...

...ALTHOUGH THE DEMAND for industrial democracy provided a potent rationale for labor's forward march through the first half of the twentieth century, it failed workers in another way...

...workers organized in unions has fallen below 10 percent—lower than at any time since such records were first kept...

...In 2001, one such tribunal overturned environmental regulations enacted by the Mexican town of Guadalcazar when they were challenged by the U.S.-based Metalclad Corporation, which sought to operate a toxic landfill in the community...

...But one thing is clear: debate about the most optimal structure for the labor movement in the years ahead has already made the issue of union democracy central...

...A visit to the Web sites of the National Right to Work Committee or its educational arm, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, explains why...

...With the December 2003 protests, labor began to fight back...

...Employers regularly flout the National Labor Relations Act with little fear of its meager penalties...

...It is that an emphasis on rights alone keeps the debate mired on the very ideological terrain where the righttowork crowd is most comfortable...

...Because it was rooted in the distinctive political, economic, and cultural developments that accompanied America's industrialization, the ideal of industrial democracy cannot be refurbished and repackaged for present-day use...

...Union density across the industrialized world plummeted over the last two decades, even as the ideal of human rights gained legitimacy...

...Dissatisfaction with Sweeney has grown, and he will almost certainly face a tough re-election contest when his term expires in 2005...

...The ideal of industrial democracy gave solidarity an indisputably American accent...

...labor history gives us an important insight into this seeming paradox...

...A second development that may place the ideal of democracy at the center of organized labor's revitalization comes from within the labor movement itself...

...Arguing in a rights-oriented framework forces workers to demand no more than that their rights be respected alongside their employers' rights...

...The NUP's leaders would like to remake the labor movement's structure, concentrating resources on the organization of new members...

...As a majoritarian concept, it afforded little leverage for workers who suffered discrimination at the hands of the majority...

...For, as important as winning that right is, its achievement will be moot unless accompanied by fundamental changes in our political economy...

...labor history at Georgetown University and is working on a book about the 1981 PATCO strike...

...But on a deeper level they meant to frame labor's struggle as an effort to secure human rights...

...Moreover, the rights approach merges the struggle of U.S...

...As historian Nelson Lichtenstein has noted, the rise of rights consciousness has complex consequences for organized labor globally...

...No equivalent to the "workDISSENT / Winter 2005 n 61 WORKERS' RIGHTS ers' rights are human rights" slogan was evident during the 1930s industrial union upsurge...

...ATHIRD ADVANTAGE Of the demand for industrial democracy was its assertion of a connection between the distribution of power in the workplace and its distribution in the larger public sphere...

...Indeed, it made the majority's demands for representation appear to be even more "American" than the individual's "right to work...

...A 1922 book called The Struggle for Industrial Liberty by anti-union ideologue Walter Gordon Merritt formulated the basic argument...

...Because it puts freedom ahead of democracy, rights talk tends to foster a libertarian dialogue, where capital's liberty of movement and employers' "rights to manage" are tacitly affirmed rather than challenged...

...After eight years in office, the administration of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has proven unable to arrest labor's decline...

...Independent observers confirm as much...

...Recently, Human Rights Watch issued a report that found rampant violations of U.S...

...Historically the union has been a hybrid entity—part democratic town meeting, part disciplined hierarchical army arrayed for battle...

...Today, as in the past, labor needs a language that can simultaneously defend the act of organizing and the construction of a political economy conducive to trade unionism...

...In this way, workers shrewdly challenged the legitimacy of their employers' authority— indeed, questioned its very Americanism— while cloaking their demands for workplace power in red, white, and blue...

...There, as labor activists of the past well understood, the majority of workers enforced their will through a collective bargaining agreement upon the minority of workers—infringing upon the minority's rights to work as they pleased and forcing them to abide by democratically devised rules...

...But it is not just the protesters who have raised questions about the impact of neoliberal economic policies on the quality of democratic self-government...

...Only with the ascendance of a rights-based consciousness after World War II did it become possible for blacks and women effectively to challenge discrimination within the labor movement...

...Increasingly, mainstream critics of unregulated globalization, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, are expressing similar concerns...

...unions with efforts to advance human rights worldwide, gaining labor new allies...

...Clearly, there are advantages to labor's embrace of rights language...

...Foremost among these advantages was that the call for industrial democracy provided a potent counterweight to notions of individualism that were deeply inscribed in American 62 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 law, politics, and culture...

...Its eclipse began decades ago when cold war "freedom" replaced New Deal "democracy" as the touchstone American political culture...

...That challenge may come from unions such as SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and UNITE HERE (the recently merged United Needle, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees...

...And those changes cannot proceed without the revival of the discourse of democracy and the mobilization of the ideals of majority rule and self-determination against reigning visions of free-market fundamentalism...

...These second thoughts provide an important opening for those who wish to reassert the importance of democratic regulation and the indispensable role that unions play as engines of economic and political democracy...

...Nor will it make a comeback...

...Antiglobalization critics have rightly called attention to the dangerous implications of Chapter 11...

...If the ideal of industrial democracy once helped labor activists legitimize both unions and a politics supportive of them, there is reason to doubt that the "workers' rights are human rights" formulation can do the same...

...No issue has dramatized their critique of the emerging threat to democracy more clearly than Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which grants to appointed transnational tribunals the power to overrule democratically legislated regulations if they are judged to give unfair advantages to domestic corporations or investors over foreign-based rivals...

...Whereas labor's language once emphasized majority rule, it has come in recent years to emphasize rights...

...Democracy talk nourished a culture of accountability within unions...

...The evidence is clear: fifty-six years after the United States helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.S...

...The demand for industrial democracy worked so well as a rationale for unions that employers had to counter that demand with an early version of rights talk...

...As one Indiana miner argued in 1918, while "fighting for the great principle of democracy, it behooves us to preserve that same democracy within the ranks of our own organization...

...The ideal of industrial democracy was predicated on the recognition that rights and democracy are not only different things, they are often in conflict...

...Doing so links the right to organize to the U.S...

...Framing that defense around civil rights or international human rights makes sense...

...Unfortunately, the "workers' rights are human rights" formulation works poorly in battling Merritt's intellectual progeny today...

...Democracy even in its most diluted WORKERS' RIGHTS forms requires that those in power be accountable on some level to the desires of the majority...

...Such violations "have systematically stolen the freedom to organize from workers," argues AFL-CIO president John Sweeney...

...Indeed, if one just looks at the timing and the numbers," argues Lichtenstein, "an inverse relationship may well link the decline of unionism and rise of .. . rights-consciousness.'" U.S...

...In the United States, workers enjoy no meaningful right to organize and join unions...

...But history suggests that there may also be some less obvious, though significant, disadvantages inherent in the "workers' rights are human rights" formulation...

...Labor's commitment to democracy thus furnished a leverage point for rank and filers who wanted more of a voice in running their unions...

...Constitution's guarantees of freedom of assembly and free speech...

...The rise of this rights-based discourse has been liberating in many ways—especially for women and workers of color, who have used it effectively to challenge job discrimination...

...By DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 6 3 WORKERS RIGHTS offering such moral leverage to rank and filers, the demand for industrial democracy helped counter the tendency of unions to follow the "iron law of oligarchy," evolving into self-perpetuating bureaucracies...

...2. Walter Gordon Merritt, The Struggle for Industrial Liberty (New York: League for Industrial Rights, 1922), p. 97...

...It is doubtful whether the "workers' rights are human rights" formulation can challenge the legitimacy of workplace power imbalances with the same effectiveness...

...political culture and within labor's ranks...

...Such activists could join with an auto worker who professed to be "sick and tired of Czar Gompers and his bunch of Grand Dukes" and demand "DEMOCRACY in the labor movement as well as in politics and industry...

...Talk of industrial democracy is rarely heard anymore...

...And we can begin to search for a present-day analogue for industrial democracy...

...A recent report on NAFTA tribunals by Public Citizen was aptly titled NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-to-State Cases: Bankrupting Democracy...

...Nor do we have much time to lose...

...They answered Merritt's emphasis on individual rights with the trump of "democracy," thus privileging solidarity over individual freedom...