10 BUILDING LONG-TERM LABOR-COMMUNITY POWER
Bargaining for the Common Good
Imagine the hypothetical community of Metropolis. A large chemical plant is located there that provides a high percentage of the community’s jobs. The plant was recently bought by a set of fund managers working on behalf of several banks that are known to own abandoned buildings and other blighted property in town. While the executives who manage the plant deny any involvement, the plant has been cited by several state and federal agencies for polluting the local waterways, including the sources of the community’s tap water, which has been linked to an increase in digestive problems in area children—including yours!
Now imagine that your spouse and several neighbors work at the plant and are part of a union local that is about to negotiate a new contract with the company. You all agree that one of the primary issues that should be covered in the contract negotiations is to get the plant to find a safer way to dispose of its chemical waste that does not harm the community’s children.
But is that allowed?
As we noted in chapter 1, the NLRA lays out three kinds of subjects for bargaining: mandatory, permissive/voluntary, and illegal.1 The examples provided by the NLRB almost exclusively focus on worksite-specific topics.2 However, this was not always the practice. Historically, union workers have often fought to have a say over an employer’s business practices and governance, attempting to negotiate over far more than wages and worksite conditions.
For example, in the 1945 strike at General Motors (GM), the UAW demanded that the company raise their wages by 30 percent without raising the price of cars.3 In doing so, they directly challenged the collective bargaining paradigm that aimed to limit negotiations to terms and conditions of employment. The economy of World War II provided a political context supporting these demands. However, after the war, labor unions lost the federal government as an ally, and companies were able to refuse to negotiate over any topic not explicitly stated as mandatory in the law. Not surprisingly, as became the practice in most industries post World War II, GM refused to negotiate with workers on any of its business practices outside of wages and working conditions. The UAW ultimately accepted a contract that addressed only those issues.4
This trend in bargaining persists today. So, while many unions in Germany, South Africa, and countries throughout South America have a role in governing a company’s business practices in addition to negotiating a fair wage, US unions have long been squeezed into a narrow negotiation position that precludes such a role. Unions in those other places have successfully pushed their governments to provide stronger social safety nets that include many of the benefits US unions bargain over—health care, retirement, sick time, sick leave, and more. This freed those unions in Europe and elsewhere to negotiate for all workers as a sector and take bolder action without fear of having to bargain away a critical benefit for workers and their families. While much of this is now under attack from the European Right and multinational corporations, European workers still have a stronger foundation to build from than their US counterparts.
Many unions in the United States have been attempting to overcome these challenges through various forms of social movement unionism. Over several generations, community organizations and unions in coalition with others have fought for quality public schools, hospitals, mass transit, affordable housing, and the regulation of health and the environment to create a civil society that serves all of us. These institutions are in jeopardy after years of attack from the financial sector and global capital, which lusts hungrily after the opportunity to profit off these sectors. The same forces that seek to defund government and privatize services are dismantling the social safety net, destroying good jobs (particularly in the public sector), and driving ever-increasing wealth inequality. Communities of color are particularly impacted, but damage to the public sector also hurts working-class white communities who are equally dependent on Medicaid, Social Security, public schools, and public hospitals. In fact, white workers make up the majority of families who benefit from most of these services.5
To navigate this environment, some unions who have largely followed the traditional models for bargaining are now moving to broaden the scope of what is negotiated to include the community interests where workers’ families live. These leaders recognize that an employer’s impact goes well beyond the worksite, and they are organizing to pressure executives and administrators to negotiate over those issues.
In the words of Allyson Perry, president of the West Virginia Educators Association’s Marion County local, “Within a profession like ours, the union not only protects your job but also this thing that we all love and value—the institution of public education and its role in shaping our democracy. Whether you legally have collective bargaining rights or not is far from the issue when your purpose is to defend the institution.”6
To bring these interests to the table, unions of working people are developing partnerships with the communities they serve and live in. They are striving to create a shared understanding of how their employers affect the community and engage community members in the process of addressing these impacts. During collective bargaining, workers are bringing community interests to the table and seeking permission to bring community members to sit in on bargaining sessions with them. Workers are also running campaigns that shift the context of organizing, striving to put pressure on employers to agree to these new forms of broader community-centered collective bargaining.
The Seven Pillars of Bargaining for the Common Good
One popular approach to using the collective bargaining process as a site of struggle to negotiate over issues beyond the worksite is known as bargaining for the common good. This approach is rooted in the reality that unions and community-based organizations are actually engaged in the same struggle. At its core this approach recognizes the role of corporations in driving the austerity agenda, particularly in the public sector, noting that the government representatives sitting across from public-sector employees are not necessarily holding all the decision-making power. Going after the corporate targets who are not necessarily at the bargaining table is central to winning when bargaining for the common good.
The Kalmanovitz Initiative at Georgetown University, the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) support union locals that are seeking to bargain for the common good and are willing to explore new forms of bargaining that can challenge the predatory impact of financialization on workers and their communities. They recommend incorporating seven key elements in the process.7
- Expand the scope of bargaining beyond wages and benefits: Identify issues that resonate with members, partners, and allies and that impact our communities.
- Put forth demands that address structural issues: Do not just focus on symptoms of the problems.
- Go on offense. Identify, expose, and challenge the real villains—the financial and corporate actors who profit from and increasingly drive policies and actions.
- Engage community allies as partners in issue development and the bargaining campaign: Bring in community partners on the ground floor and ask them what they need out of the bargaining campaign.
- Center racial justice in your demands: Address the role that employers play in creating and exacerbating structural racism in our communities.
- Strengthen internal organizing, membership, and member engagement: Deeply engage the memberships of both unions and community organizations, and create opportunities for deep relationship-building and joint-visioning between the members of the different organizations
- Leverage capital: Develop strategies that leverage the financial power of workers’ pension funds and endowments in order to win common good demands.
A campaign to promote community-centered bargaining should not end once the union settles its contract. Bargaining for the common good is about building long-term community-labor power, not about giving unions some good publicity during a contract fight. The boss does not automatically become a good actor once the contract is settled, and the community’s demands do not become any less important.
Bargaining for the common good presents a union’s contract negotiations as a site of struggle in ongoing efforts for social change in which community organizations, religious leaders, and students often engage. This is particularly true when the common good is defined to put racial justice at the forefront. For the leaders of Jobs With Justice, this approach has been an inspiring evolution of traditional labor-community coalitions that have been rooted in the values and practice of solidarity. This strategy has centered the opportunity for relationships based on long-term solidarity to create partnerships that are rooted in a shared vision and a set of interests that benefit everyone.
Bargaining for the Common Good in the Public Sector
Bargaining for the common good has been most often associated with public-sector unions because these employees are engaged in the provision of actual public goods—for example, teachers providing an education to a community’s children and bus drivers providing the means for people to travel to and from work.8
It is also particularly important for unions of public employees to reach out to the communities they work and live in. These unions have been under strong attack from the right wing, partly because union representation has remained much stronger in the public sector than in the private sector.9 Beginning in Wisconsin after the election of Scott Walker and then continuing in other states after they came under full Republican control, large numbers of public-sector workers have lost the legal right to organize, collectively bargain, fund their unions, and much more.10 In addition, in the Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 case, decided on January 27, 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the ability of such unions to collect fees from all the public employees that benefit from the work of the union.11
Bargaining for the common good provides a built-in way for public employees to strengthen their unions by determining what the community most needs as it relates to the services they provide and including them in the bargaining process to the greatest extent possible. This in turn encourages stronger community support for employees’ demands. This approach also ensures that both unions and communities can challenge the negative effects of financialization.
Teachers and school workers have waged some of the best-known versions of this strategy. One of the most discussed examples is the experience of the Chicago Teachers Union during its 2012 strike and later again in 2019. The union argued for proven educational reforms to dramatically improve the education of more than 400,000 students in a district of 675 schools, through increased funding, stronger curricula for students, better support infrastructure for parents and the surrounding community, higher-quality facilities, and equitable treatment of students, particularly those tracked and segregated.
Through bargaining, the Chicago Teachers Union uncovered a large gamble the Chicago Public Schools had taken to fund schools through the use of complex and obscure financial instruments known as interest rate swaps. No other school district in the country relied on this type of financial product to fund schools. According to the Chicago Tribune, this gamble ultimately forced the schools to pay back $100 million more (adjusted for inflation) than if they had chosen a traditional fixed-rate borrowing product. This needless expense competed with the money needed to fund schools in real time, causing the closure of some Chicago schools. The Chicago Teachers Union continues to negotiate with the school system, the City of Chicago, and the banks profiting from the toxic interest rate swaps. The union demanded that the city stop closing schools and renegotiate the terms of school funding to ensure that children and their schools receive the resources needed for a good education.12
In 2013, educators in St. Paul, Minnesota, went a step further, convening parents and other community advocates to outline a shared agenda before beginning their contract negotiations. In addition to the shared needs of educators at the workplace, the union took a bold bargaining-for-the-common-good approach by recognizing the role of finance capital and big banks in making life hard for students and their families. They inserted into their negotiations the request for the school district to cease all business with banks that foreclose on families with school-aged children during the school year, essentially seeking to leverage government contracts with banks in order to stop banks from taking actions that were harming kids’ educations.
Here is how Mary Cathryn Ricker of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) who hails from the Twin Cities in Minnesota, explained the strategy:
“Us” had become the rank-and-file members who no longer felt the negotiations were being conducted behind their backs. Now, local shop stewards were being treated as leaders in the process instead of just following orders. “Us” had become a neighborhood group that had been organizing independently but were now our partners. “Us” became parents who attended negotiations and shared their hopes and dreams for their children in our public schools at the bargaining table.13
When the employers tried to shut down negotiations, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers held firm and organized actions to change the employer’s position, including going door-to-door to explain what was happening and how they—parents and kids of these same schools—were being shut out of negotiations. The union also mobilized public demonstrations and rallies to show strength and support, organized school walk-ins (in a blizzard!), and voted to authorize a strike that was ultimately averted when the school system came back to the table.14
The Fix LA campaign is another example of how bargaining for the common good is not only morally right but also leads to bigger wins for working people when there is a clear understanding of the role of Wall Street. As described by Marilyn Schneiderman and Secky Fascione:
Prior to going into bargaining with Los Angeles in 2014, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 721 and AFSCME locals joined with community allies to craft demands that would push back against an austerity agenda that was hurting both municipal workers and the people they served. Under the banner “Fix LA,” city workers and community and racial justice groups documented how exorbitant Wall Street fees were draining the municipal budget and starving critical city services.
When the campaign demanded that the city bargain with Wall Street, it achieved a significant victory:
The campaign won a commitment from the city of Los Angeles to hire five thousand workers from disadvantaged communities into a range of jobs in Public Works, General Services, Recreation and Parks, the Airport, and a city-financed revenue commission to identify alternatives to high-fee Wall Street loans, closing a variety of local tax loopholes to raise revenue and avoid dependence on predatory Wall Street loans. The campaign’s narrative and power successfully fought off concession demands from the city.15
Los Angeles workers employed this strategy again in 2019 when the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) went out on strike. UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl said, “UTLA is part of a growing national movement that is centered on the idea of bargaining for the common good. By the time we get to the bargaining table, we’re taking demands and proposals that have come out of months of working with community organizations, youth, and parents, and that bring to light things that are not typical, mandatory subjects of bargaining.”
This bargaining approach can also provide a powerful method of dealing with issues of racial injustice. For instance, AFSCME Local 3299 made racial justice a central part of its bargaining with the University of California (UC) system, demanding that the system’s administration create local-hire and job-training programs to increase jobs for low-income people of color living in communities near the universities. Local 3299 also demanded that the UC system make a greater commitment not to collaborate with ICE agents unless they produced a valid warrant, and the UC system agreed not to impose additional requirements for work authorization, including not participating in any federal worker registry.16 In all these ways the union went beyond the traditional jurisdiction of bargaining and expanded it to include the conditions of their entire community and their broader workplace.17
In yet another example, Portland, Oregon, service workers—including librarians, social workers, and guards—organized with AFSCME Local 328 to ask for translation and interpretation services for the people accessing the services they provided, prayer spaces, gender-neutral bathrooms, multilingual safety training, the establishment of a community-employment committee to work on recruitment, and retention and career development of underrepresented communities, among other things.18
As a strategy, bargaining for the common good has also created a platform for addressing other community issues. For example, Oregon’s State Employees Union used this strategy when they demanded the state make mass transit passes available for purchase at pretax rates for employees and residents.19 And in the small city of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, nurses and hospital personnel attempted to include expanded pediatric care, especially for children without insurance, after the facility owners had eliminated it.
Some unions have even begun addressing the existential threat of climate change in bargaining, seeking policies that change practices to slow down and/or adapt to shifting climate patterns. The Florida Public Services Union, SEIU Local 8, demanded that the state stop providing subsidies to companies that rely on fossil fuels as a core component of their business model. A similar union in California insisted that their city government issue a report clarifying the impacts of any potential city contracts on the economy and the environment before signing. And the Oklahoma Education Association demanded the state institute a higher tax on oil production, gas production, and motor fuels in order to fund public education.20
Bargaining for the Common Good in the Private Sector
The idea of bargaining for the common good has also made inroads in the private sector. Here are few notable examples.
UNITE HERE Local 2 is a union that represents hospital workers in San Francisco. The union has seen a steady erosion of jobs for Black workers in its hotels at the same time that gentrification is forcing Black families out of the community. To address this two-pronged crisis, a decade ago the union won language in their collective bargaining agreement to increase hiring of Black workers in San Francisco hotels. The local has also helped create a nonprofit called Equality and Inclusion in Hospitality, Inc., that recruits, trains, and places workers of color from ballparks into higher-paid hotel jobs. Parallel to this effort, community organizations such as Causa Justa/Just Cause and several others are continuing the fight for affordable housing in the city, ensuring that workers from a variety of racial backgrounds can actually live a reasonably commutable distance away from their jobs.21
An alliance including Jobs With Justice of San Francisco, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, and the California Nurses Association forced Sutter Health into an agreement that stipulated that, as a condition of getting city approval to build a new hospital (California Pacific Medical Center), they had to agree to hire at least 40 percent of the hospital’s entry-level employees through a local community workforce program. This was in addition to a set of community-centered demands that focused on accessibility for patients at the hospital. Parallel language was included in a community benefits–style agreement as well as the collective bargaining agreements of the nurses.
The Health Professionals and Allied Employees union locals in New Jersey negotiated with Christ Hospital and Bayonne Medical Center to keep dialysis and pediatric units in-house instead of outsourcing them to for-profit institutions. They also requested that the hospital not sell the medical debt accrued by patients off to third-party debt collection agencies notorious for harassing people for the cost of their care.22
Some of the most exciting examples of private-sector bargaining for the common good come from the finance sector. The Communications Workers of America, the Committee for Better Banks, and other organizations have begun laying the groundwork for improving pay and benefits for the country’s more than one million bank workers. In doing so, the coalition has positioned itself as a defender of consumers and an opponent of banks’ most notorious predatory practices, including an end to sales goals and metrics that forced bank workers to sell predatory financial products as a condition of employment. In 2016, acting on their shared values with bank customers, Wells Fargo workers connected to this campaign acted as whistleblowers, exposing the bank’s cheating scandals.23 In 2019, Tim Sloan, the CEO of Wells Fargo, was forced to resign after congressional hearings where he was confronted by Wells Fargo workers who blew the whistle on Wells Fargo’s reinstitution of toxic sales goals.24
Employees of Santander, a multinational bank based in Spain that is known for its subprime auto lending in the United States, have exposed similar practices. And due to the organizing activities of bank workers, Bank of America increased the minimum pay for its employees to $20/hour in April 2019, thereby meeting one of the demands of CWA and the Committee for Better Banks.25 By taking a bargaining-for-the-common-good approach, bank workers are demonstrating how they can change their industry—and finance capital as a whole—from the bottom up.26
In all of these examples, union workers are taking on a broader set of issues in the bargaining process, galvanizing more community support for their workplace demands while also building increased power for the communities they operate within.
In addition to putting specific community-based remedies into a collective bargaining agreement, workers can propose that the company and community groups set up separate governing bodies to work for the public interest beyond the life of the workplace-specific contract, thus developing different types of enforceable agreements and expanding economic democracy.
None of the strategies we have described in this chapter are easy. Each requires targeted, intentional organizing to mobilize and then leverage the various forces of power people have, both as workers and as service recipients, consumers, clients, and taxpayers in their communities. The necessary relationships are not built overnight but instead demand long intentional strategies to authentically organize around shared interests.
Still, bargaining for the common good can help both unions and community groups move beyond reactive and defensive battles toward aligned and proactive approaches that challenge the financialization of the economy. This strategy has been embraced in the light and medium gray shaded states where traditional bargaining still prevails. And many workers in states filled with white and dark gray shading also see its potential—including the benefits that workers in more union-dense states can negotiate in support of those with fewer legal protections. Maybe most important, this approach brings to greater numbers of ordinary people the opportunity to participate in processes that lead to them governing themselves and their conditions, thus helping to expand the practice of economic democracy—one of the crucial goals of the twenty-first century.