Labor: Mind Your Assumptions

Interview with Joe Burns by Stephan Kimmerle

Why a New Wave of Labor Militancy Needs Class Struggle Unionism

Joe Burns is a labor activist, author, and currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants – CWA. His recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, was published in 2022. Before that he wrote Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions (2019) and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America (2011).

You argue in your book, Class Struggle Unionism, that the new wave of labor militancy we’re seeing – around Starbucks and Amazon workers, but also with strikes of John Deere employees, or the carpenters in the Pacific Northwest – needs a theoretical approach and socialist ideas. But before we dive into that, how did you develop these ideas as a labor activist and author? 

I’ve been doing labor work for over 30 years. Out of college, I was a hospital worker and became president of my local union. That was at the end of the 1980s, early ’90s. That was the tail end of the fightback against the concessions of the 1980s. I witnessed firsthand that a lot of the left-wing or militants within labor had a class struggle union approach. We engaged in a lot of fight-backs against labor-management cooperation programs, a lot of emphasis was on building rank-and-file power. But over the years, that changed.

Subsequently, I went to law school in New York and then bargained in healthcare. For 20 years, I’ve been bargaining in the airline industry, and pretty much every week I’m bargaining, full-time. Now I’m the director of bargaining for the CWA. 

One of your theses is that labor militancy needs a theoretical approach. Well, why is that?

Whether we know it or not, we operate under a theoretical approach. It’s just a question of which one we use, and which class it serves. For the first hundred years of labor history, the two competitors were business unionism and class struggle unionism. And those are very different ideas and approaches. 

It starts with how you view the employment transaction. Whether you know it or not, you have the choice to pick your framework when you do labor work. And if you don’t do that, you’ll be following around with the liberal ideas which have been popular in the last couple decades, which are kind of a mixture of unionism and advocacy. And that’s really going to be what guides you.

A thesis I drew from your book is that you say we can’t ignore the dominant political trends in labor. We have to address them head-on. Can you explain a bit more about the dominant trends that you see?

The most dominant trend within labor unions was business unionism, or bureaucratic business unions, as we also call it. For the last hundred years, up until the 1980s, that was the main competitor to what I call class struggle unions. 

Classic business unionism has a very narrow view of labor. They see that the unions are there to negotiate a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work with an individual employer or sets of employers within a craft or industry. They basically accept management’s overall control of the workplace, and management’s rights to control what they call the profit so that after they perform the work and get paid for it, they have no ongoing right to the enterprise. And they don’t see themselves as really fighting for a larger working class. They see themselves in disputes with individual employers. 

This form of unionism at its worst was often racist and sexist and exclusionary. The American Federation of Labor allowed unions in it that explicitly excluded African American workers. The union label started as an anti-Asian immigrant badge. 

In contrast, we have class struggle unionism. When we think of the great struggles of trade union history, the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s, the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Seattle general strike, think of the bitter strikes in the 1920s that were led by the folks around the Communist Party, look at the great battles of the 1930s, the Minneapolis trucker strike, Toledo – all of them had heavy influences from folks who were socialists and communists of various stripes.  They all shared an overall class struggle approach. 

And their viewpoint of the employment transaction is quite different. The business union demands a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Classical class struggle unions say labor creates all wealth and looks at the employment transaction as where the workers perform the labor during the shift but are paid only a fraction of what they produce. 

You emphasize the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class, an internationalist approach, and a militant workplace-centered approach. How do these general ideas relate to concrete struggles? So, for example, what’s the value of such an approach for a strike at Starbucks?

The difference between the business unionists and the class struggle unionists flows through all aspects of unionism because the class struggle unionists see ourselves in a fight with the employing class in general, or the billionaire classes. We know we’re going to have to take on the boss. We know we’re gonna have to fight. We know that the government’s primary role is to uphold the system of private property and what we call exploitation. So we know that we can’t really trust government officials.

And we also know that shop floor struggles matter. Because one of the ways that employers and bosses can extract more value out of workers during a work shift is by intensifying the work or by making workers work longer. So that’s why we believe that work rules are really fundamental to the struggle. 

And then, of course, the whole idea that we’re fighting for an entire class. We don’t see individual strikes as just strikes against one employer. We see them as part of a larger struggle between the working class and the employing class. We see, on political issues, the need for us to have independence in a labor party and break free from the control of the main political parties. 

We fight for Medicare for All or universal health care as opposed to just trying to bargain with our individual employers. You can have tons of examples about what the differences are concretely, but I think they all flow back to this general philosophical difference.

You speak about business unionism and labor liberalism, and I struggled a bit to get the difference because they are not really mutually exclusive, are they? 

In the 1980s a new form of unionism developed, which I call labor liberalism. It claimed to be a break from business unionism, but in fact, it wasn’t. So you could say they’re just business unionists of a different stripe. But I think there’s enough difference between them and the classic business unionists to look at them as a separate trend. And the reason they’re different is they really aren’t looking toward collective bargaining and workplace struggles in workplace organizations to make their gains.

When you think about a lot of the initiatives – let’s say the Fight for $15 in fast food – it’s not really geared towards organizing the workers and taking on the employers in the workplace and getting agreements or directly dealing with the employers. It’s really about getting publicity, enough publicity so that they can get the left edge of the Democratic Party to pass protective labor legislation. 

Where even in a business unionist organization workers might reject a contract and a certain escalation follows, the labor liberals funnel everything into one-day strikes or carefully controlled campaigns that really don’t allow for any sort of explosion. Those unions are even more undemocratic than the old business unions. 

A lot of folks who may be reading my book may have more interactions with the labor liberals than the straight-up business unionists. 

A lot of the class struggle unionists don’t write on that or don’t write enough. They’re hunkered down and they’re doing great work. But who’s got all the time to write are these labor professors, union staffers, and so forth. So, they produce a lot of volume. If you look at the main outlets – In These Times or Jacobin and so forth – a lot of the content is coming from this narrow group of people who actually don’t have a lot of experience in direct class struggle unionism.

How does class struggle unionism relate to other attempts to overcome the current low level of organizing in the labor movement? There is a lot of discussion about Jane McAlevey’s proposals for example.

I have a lot of differences with that approach. Fundamentally, she claims to be breaking with what she calls “new labor” folks, like the folks from SEIU. However, I think she’s operating very much within that framework. To me, Jane McAlevey’s approach is very much based on this idea that the working class needs these outside organizers to come in and get them to fight. And so then it becomes a question of organizing skills and techniques. She goes into great detail about how you pick leaders, organic leaders, and structure tests, which I call hoops people have to jump through before they’re allowed to strike. 

When you step back and think about it, is that really true? It’s based on the assumption that struggle comes from outside the workplace and is imported in there. But struggle comes because of the conditions of capitalism and in particular the conditions and contradictions in that workplace. So that’s why we have strikes coming more out of bargaining or demands than out of organizing. And then organizing is how you get together to win.

Second – and related– is the idea that the unions themselves want to fight and they’re organizing the workers to fight harder. But that’s not the case. If we look at the strike of production workers over the last year or two, in almost all of them the workers were the ones who wanted to fight, and the unions were the ones who were kind of dragging their feet or reluctantly engaged in the battle.

A lot of them involved failed tentative agreements where the union said, “hey, this is good enough.” And the members said, “screw you, we’re gonna vote that down.” Sometimes even three or four times. So this idea that the main task is for the outside union staff to come in and get people to fight doesn’t track with reality. 

There’s also a reason that certain ideas become popular, especially among a certain stratum of people. So ideas that fit more within the union establishment are more palatable because it promotes an idea of change in doing things, but it’s not fundamentally saying, “hey, we’ve got a fundamental problem with trade unionism and with the union bureaucracy.”

You advocate forming caucuses for class struggle unionism in existing unions like CORE in the Chicago Teachers Union, or something in the direction of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, TDU. Is this what you mean?

That has been the classic approach. And it’s coming back now. For a period of 10, 15 years, it fell out of favor. But look around in the labor movement right now. A lot of the sparking in the labor movement isn’t coming from the staff-driven organizing that McAlevey is talking about. It’s coming from rank-and-file initiatives. 

The railroad strike – well, no longer a strike, but the railroad dispute – would not have been as big as it was if it weren’t for Railroad Workers United as a rank-and-file group that’s been existing for a couple decades and organizing.

Look at the carpenters’ strike in the Pacific Northwest. It was the Peter McGuire group, a rank-and-file caucus, that did that and voted down agreement after agreement. And then, finally, the executive director got bounced for rigging votes. 

Certainly, in the auto workers, you’ve got the members for democracy, UAWD, which is a caucus that’s been fighting for “one person, one vote.” They’ve made a great amount of change with a handful of people. 

But I’m somewhat open on the question, too, because there are initiatives that are outside of the existing labor movement with class struggle unionist approaches. Look at the Amazon workers, the folks in unaffiliated unions, independent unions. I think there’s a lot of space nowadays. There are a lot of different ways you can do class struggle unionism and one of them is caucuses within your union.

There’s a lot of debate in DSA about the Rank & File Strategy. What do you think about that?

Kim Moody wrote the Rank & File Strategy in 2006. His works are great. He is one of the class struggle unionists out there in terms of writers in the labor movement. 

When I think about the Rank & File Strategy, it comes from the title of Kim Moody’s article. And the full title is The Rank & File Strategy: Building A Socialist Movement in the US. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind because it was really written for people who have socialist ideas: How should they relate to the labor movement and class struggle?

I view the Rank & File Strategy as a kind of subset of class struggle unionism. 

But some of the debate within DSA, frankly, is a little confusing, with people talking past each other.

In your book, you speak about the labor bureaucracy as a force behind business unionism and labor liberalism. But what is that, the labor bureaucracy? Is every union staffer a bureaucrat?

I’m a staffer. I think staffers have an important role to play in the labor movement, and we need a strategy that’s gonna encompass them. It can’t just be all about the rank-and-file, because people get promoted within the labor movement and have access to resources. We want that, and we need a philosophy that encompasses everybody. I think that the concept of the labor bureaucracy – or labor establishment – is more of an objective standard that exists within the labor movement. 

There exists within labor a group of people who are doing union work, but their life is now divorced from the workplace. They’re not showing up to an employer. They’re maybe getting pay that’s higher and excess of the workers they represent. 

For example, they don’t experience the sort of direct oppression every day that railroad workers do. So the railroad union officials who may have been out of the workplace for 30 years, do they really know what rail workers are up against now with precision railroading, the scheduling, and how it impacts their lives? They don’t. There’s a fundamental difference. And then throughout labor history, that difference has translated into union officials having a lot more conservative and cautious approach.

They’re also more susceptible because their way of life is tied to the survival of the union as an institution. They don’t want to step out of line legally. Not all of them, but many of them have an interest in not getting into these big confrontations that might jeopardize the union treasuries. And some are just lazy. Fighting is more work than settling. If you go picking a bunch of fights in a workplace and get everyone filing grievances, guess what? You’re gonna be working harder. And a lot of people don’t do that. 

That being said, there’s a lot of great staff out there, and there are a lot of people who want to fight, and they go on staff because they want to do it. They are important. We can’t do this all from the rank-and-file. But I think we need to have a philosophy that helps them and says: Okay, stay the course. You entered staff because you want to do this. You need to recognize that you’re not workers, but you can still relate to the struggle in a certain way and live by certain principles.

You’ve mentioned the need for an independent workers’ party. In your book that’s left a bit open. Isn’t this also an important part of class struggle unionism?

I think I’m pretty clear in the book that labor needs to break with the stranglehold of the Democratic Party. I’m probably a little less clear that we need to form a labor party. It’s a long-term goal. But the labor movement is so screwed up right now that I don’t know how it can anchor a labor party that’s any good because we’re mired in labor liberalism and business unionism. How many unions are we really going to get to be the backbone of a militant labor party? It’s a pretty small group. I think that was the problem with the Labor Party Advocates in the 1990s which was the effort led by Tony Mazzocchi, the Presidential Assistant of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, to form a labor party thatmanaged to get a fair degree of support. But there weren’t enough good, strong unions in the labor movement to anchor that. My emphasis is probably more: we need to get on a class struggle basis, and then I think that will follow. 

You make a very strong case in your book that class struggle unionists need a framework of thinking beyond the limitations of a capitalist society. 

Yes, even if we have the most militant unions, you’re still negotiating the terms of your exploitation. Militant unionism in and of itself cannot resolve the contradiction because the billionaires are going to keep getting billions. And what is capital? A social relationship, right? It’s power. Over time, you give someone more and more power. Guess what? Eventually, they’re gonna use it to crush you. Employers very much view us as in a fight to the death. They want to exterminate unionism. So that’s one of the problems with business unionism. They crave stability and stable labor relations. But that is fiction.