Reading about an event you didn’t attend isn’t always fun. After all, now it’s over, and you missed it. And unless you were there and felt the passion, why do you care who attended and what was said?
This is the challenge of reporting on the Labor Notes 2022 conference held last weekend in Chicago. Yes, there were thousands of basic union members and a growing number of unorganized workers from across the country. Yes, excellent speakers too: Senator Bernie Sanders, newly elected Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, and Stacy Davis Gates, President-elect of the Chicago Teachers Union
But the real question is what, from the conference, will have lasting significance for labor activists – and beyond – for the progressive movement as a whole?
To answer this question, you need to understand the role Labor Notes has played over the past 40 years in “ put the movement back into the labor movement.” What began in the late 1970s as a monthly magazine quickly began publishing books and hosting national conferences. In the 2000s, he began organizing local schools of troublemakers organized by activists in their own towns. Labor Notes is an invaluable network that connects workers from different unions, worker centers, industries, communities and countries to build the movement from the bottom up.
Speaking at the Saturday banquet, Jesse Sharkey, the current president of the activist Chicago Teachers’ Union, summed it up well: “We trained our activists at Labor Notes. This is where we recruited key employees and learned new skills, ideas and approaches. And he pointed out that the magazine and biannual conferences are what connected him and hundreds of others to the radical traditions of industrial unionism.
Labor Notes has been that lasting bond for me. By the time I was a young radical organizer in the late 70s and early 80s, many left-wing labor activists were long gone: expelled during the McCarthy era. At the time, I wasn’t exactly embraced by union leaders; in fact, most were downright hostile. To subscribe to Working notes was a lifeline of practical organizing tips and inspiration that exposed me to other like-minded union activists and created a community of fellow travelers.
This is probably why I have attended all but one of the Labor Notes conferences since its first meeting over 40 years ago.
There are two important streams of reform in the labor movement. They are not at all contradictory, but activists tend to belong to one group or another. One side – let’s call it “grassroots strategy” – argues that to build a revived movement, we need to energize the grassroots and elect new militant leaders. The other trend says that change is more likely to come from organizing the millions of unorganized workers into new or existing unions.
The origins of Labor Notes are rooted in grassroots strategy. Our early conferences were largely a conference of pale, stale, male dissident members of the auto, steel, coal, and trucking industries. These meetings have provided opportunities to create internal reform caucuses and to share our experiences with others seeking to change their unions. The most successful example is Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the reformist caucus that was launched in the 1970s to fight corruption and build grassroots power. After more than 20 years of complacent national leadership under James P. Hoffa, in 2021 TDU formed a coalition to oust his chosen successor and elect Sean O’Brien.
Over the years, as the economy and the labor movement have changed, Labor Notes have evolved, especially since the Great Recession of 2008. Without abandoning the existing base, Labor Notes is now an important resource for the uprising of organizing new and non-traditional workers. And our conferences have turned into what one member called “Labor’s Coachella”, a festival of more than 200 workshops, panels and meetings where thousands of activists, young and old, share their lessons for building a more democratic society. , militant and inclusive. labor movement. It’s hard to convey the excitement generated by having hundreds of Starbucks, Amazon and other workers self-organizing and leading the formation of new unions.
And it’s a huge credit to the magazine’s staff and the volunteer policy committee to have been able to transcend the origins of Labor Notes and keep pace with this “moment of movement.”
This year I attended with my 32 year old daughter, Marlie, a food justice organizer. It was his first Labor Notes conference. When I met her at the end of the first day, she marveled at the racial, gender and age diversity of the attendees. She was also impressed by the number of workshops relevant to her work outside of the labor movement.
At the start of the conference, we held a special meeting of grassroots organizers from the new Amazon union; workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who are organizing with the RWDSU; Teamster organizers; and members of a national grassroots network, Amazonians United. The meeting included Amazon workers from Poland and Germany as well as representatives from many worker centers and nonprofit advocacy organizations that support the organization at Amazon. Each of these groups has different strategies and philosophies for building worker power at Amazon. Labor Notes was in a unique position to help us bring everyone together in one room for the first time to share our experiences and start building a community of supportive organizers.
Similar meetings of Starbucks workers, as well as health care, education, auto, postal, media, construction, rail, trucking and telecommunications workers also took place. took place during the conference.
Throughout the weekend, the focus was on developing smart contract campaigns and powerful strike strategies. There were dozens of workshops on member-to-member communications, overcoming apathy, strike preparation and techniques for identifying employer vulnerabilities. And at every turn, there were celebrations of the many recent successful strikes, including those at Nabisco, John Deere, St. Vincent’s Hospital and Minneapolis Public Schools.
A workshop I co-facilitated, “Get Ready to Strike,” was filled with Teamsters preparing for their national contract campaign and negotiations with UPS next year. They have high expectations for the next contract, spurred on by a rousing speech from International President O’Brien the night before.
In addition to meetings of Starbucks and Amazon workers, the conference also hosted meetings of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the United Caucuses of Rank-and-file Educators, and the Great Labor Arts Exchange (an annual gathering of musicians and of artists). At the banquet dinner, Labor Notes presented its annual Troublemakers awards to TDU, UAW Reform Caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy, gig worker network Los Deliveristas, social movement artist Ricardo Levins Morales and the late author and labor strategist Mike Parker. .
In the past four decades of Labor Notes conferences, the idea that achieving workers’ goals could also be tied to a political struggle for socialism has gone from a whisper to a cry. Judging by the number of Bernie t-shirts attendees wore, many activists were energized by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and are now active, like me, at some level in the Democratic Party. Yet, on the eve of the 2022 midterms, it was surprising that there were no workshops addressing the political challenges of securing the Labor vote, dealing with Democratic business or fighting for power in the Democratic Party. This is a blind spot that will have to be filled in the future.
Undoubtedly, the sharing of lessons and networking among activists will bear fruit in the labor struggles and strikes that will unfold over the years to come. I am already looking forward to our next meeting, in 2024, confident that our numbers will increase and that our experience in the class struggle will be deeper and more strategic. This is a historic moment for workers and their unions, so bosses beware: a new labor movement is rising, and we are building momentum for more than a raise. We will settle for nothing less than “a future we can believe in”.