Abstract
Labor, decidedly unsexy for decades, is “hot” again. From Amazon and Starbucks workers to teachers, nurses, journalists, actors, writers, hotel housekeepers, airport workers, graduate students, nonprofit staff, and package delivery drivers, it is undeniable that the American working class and their unions are imbued with a new vigor. To an extent not seen in recent memory, young people believe in unions as a vehicle both for improving the material circumstances of their own lives and for carrying out broad social transformation. They are organizing their own workplaces, taking jobs as salts, and filling organizing, research, and communications departments in union halls across the country.
Yet despite relatively favorable conditions, the labor movement has not yet found a way to “break through,” or even to simply reverse the continuing decline in union density. Disappointment can lead to disillusionment, especially for newly engaged labor activists and rank-and-file members who are less acquainted with the complex set of decisions and compromises unions must make to survive and grow in the face of capitalist opposition. It is thus a particularly important time to ensure the widespread accessibility of rigorous debate on important contemporary issues facing unions. Open discussion sharpens the movement’s collective priorities and develops the strategic analysis of a new generation of unionists.
Labor Power and Strategy, edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, models this type of discourse. The book begins with an extended interview with the historian John Womack, who argues that we should be laser-focused on organizing workers with a high degree of leverage due to their technical skills or strategic position within the division of labor. A group of ten veteran labor activists then follow with succinct responses that critique and extend Womack’s thesis. What emerges from this dialogue is significant insight into fundamental questions facing the twenty-first century labor movement. Written in plain, accessible language, this slim volume will appeal to scholars, experienced union leaders, and workers and organizers new to unions.
A distinguished historian of Latin America, John Womack is most well-known for his definitive study of revolutionary Mexico, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. His subsequent interest in Mexican labor history led him to study what he calls “technically strategic positions,” following the labor economist John Dunlop. These are positions, like dispatchers and mechanics in the rail industry, that have outsized leverage over production such that a relatively small number of workers on strike could effectively shut down operations. Womack’s central argument is that workers’ struggles can only succeed when they have this type of leverage because capital grants concessions only when it is “wounded” by labor’s collective action. Consequently, labor’s resources should be dedicated to identifying and organizing workers in technically strategic positions, rather than wasting time with workers who lack positional leverage—even if they are in motion, organizing themselves. As Womack puts it, the Bolsheviks in 1917 “didn’t spend effort on organizing shoe-shiners or barbers or bakers or street peddlers or rag pickers.”
Womack’s argument about technically strategic positions can be understood as a variation on the conceptual framework first developed by Erik Olin Wright and refined by Beverly Silver in her essential 2003 work, Forces of Labor, which differentiates between workers’ “associational” and “structural” power. Associational power is a measure of workers’ capacity to act collectively and in solidarity, while structural power derives from workers’ position in the economy or the workplace. Essentially, Womack advocates for prioritizing workers with a specific type of structural power—those in technically strategic positions in manufacturing, logistics, and infrastructure. By wielding their power to disrupt the economy through the control of bottlenecks or choke points, these workers can inspire other workers to organize in collective struggle by demonstrating “material power in action.” Most controversially, Womack argues that without the “material” power of technically strategic positions, “all you get is association in action, movements, which in their heyday may be inspiring, but continually, always fade.” To Womack, associational power is merely “derivative” of structural power.
Labor Power and Strategy would have been rather one-sided if it just concluded with Womack’s argument. But the strength of the book is its inclusion of responses by veteran unionists who use Womack’s thought-provoking polemic as a jump-off point to discuss key issues facing labor today. This friction between Womack and his respondents generates the text’s most fruitful discussion and insights. For example, Bill Fletcher, Jr. extends Womack’s definition of “strategy,” arguing that any strategic decision about where to concentrate resources must consider not only which workers have the greatest ability to disrupt capital but also “which sectors of society are in struggle,” that is, in motion and actively resisting oppression. He also calls on the labor movement to take a broader view of working-class strategy that understands race and gender oppression as central to capitalism, not merely an add-on. For instance, while Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 did not occupy a technically strategic position in the production process, their strike heralded the potential (and missed opportunity) for a fused black freedom movement and labor movement that would have been effective in that era—as well as today.
Several other responses provide insightful critiques of Womack’s privileging of structural over associational power. In a brief but penetrating essay, Jack Metzgar notes that when workers are in motion and ready to challenge capital, unions cannot counsel them to give up just because they are not technically strategic (think of Starbucks baristas). And even if they could, it would not necessarily be wise to do so. No organizer can perfectly predict the potential impact of a campaign of “non-strategic” workers, for instance, by inspiring other workers or winning policy reforms that lay the groundwork for further organizing. Effective working-class struggle takes many forms and cannot be reduced solely to the disruption of production at strategic choke points.
Katy Fox-Hodess further develops the theoretical relationship between structural and associational power. Her thoughtful response is informed by her deep research into unions of dockworkers across the world. Dockworkers are archetypically strategic in the Womackian sense: They occupy an obvious bottleneck that gives them the capacity to disrupt the flow of global commerce. She raises the crucial point that for workers with great structural power, the state is more likely to constrain its use or intervene when workers take collective action. In addition, the disruption caused when these workers’ strike is just as, if not more, likely to generate public opposition rather than public support. As Fox-Hodess argues, “the strongest position from a technically strategic perspective may simultaneously be the weakest position from a social or political perspective, with important consequences for labor strategy.”
Womack’s thesis and Fox-Hodess’ rejoinder help to explain the trajectory of two recent high-profile contract campaigns, those of freight railroad workers in late 2022 and UPS package handlers in summer 2023. These workers sit near the apex of Womack’s hierarchy of strategic positions. A nationwide strike by either group would have been enormously disruptive, with reverberations throughout the economy. Leading up to negotiation deadlines in both cases, there was much talk in labor circles about the potential benefits of a strike, precisely due to this disruptive potential. It was a golden opportunity to flex labor’s muscles, to deal a heavy blow to capital, to demonstrate “material power in action,” as Womack puts it. Why, then, did both campaigns end without a strike?
The case of the freight railroad workers is the clearest example of Fox-Hodess’ observation that “[t]he more strategic the industry, the more likely it is that the capitalist state will intervene.” Here, that intervention is actually formalized into law, a legacy of the strategic position railroads has occupied in the economy since the nineteenth century (as well as the history of violent state and company repression of strikes). The Railway Labor Act, enacted in 1926, imposes heavy restrictions on workers’ ability to strike and grants the state a formal role in negotiations—one that includes giving Congress the ultimate power to simply impose a contract through legislation. That is ultimately how the railroad contract was settled, with President Biden, arguably the most pro-union president in decades, justifying his signing of the bill in terms of railroad workers’ strategic power: “It was tough for me but it was the right thing to do at the moment—save jobs, to protect millions of working families from harm and disruption and to keep supply chains stable around the holidays.”
Although not directly regulated by the federal government, similar dynamics were at play with the Teamsters at UPS. Workers appeared ready to strike in July 2023, yet a tentative agreement was reached nearly a week before their contract was set to expire. A strike at UPS, which the company claims to transport 6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product on a daily basis, would have been a major disruption to the economy. There is little doubt that President Biden wished to avoid a strike that threatened to raise once again inflation concerns just as an election year was approaching. Thus, while Teamsters president Sean O’Brien publicly urged President Biden not to intervene, one can imagine the behind-the-scenes pressure brought to bear by the White House to resolve the dispute without a strike.
These episodes are instructive because they demonstrated the extent to which technically strategic workers require great social and political power to actually exert their latent disruptive power. Jane McAlevey’s sharp response to Womack posits that because the predominantly women workers in the fields of education and health care have succeeded in unlocking this power, they are the strategic leading edge of the labor movement. By developing deep relationships with the people they serve, these unions have positioned themselves as spokespeople for a broader set of concerns than simply wages and working conditions. This associational power has in turn allowed them to launch successful strikes despite the huge disruption they create. McAlevey convincingly argues that the power of teachers and health-care workers is not merely “social,” as Womack describes, but just as “material” as that of male-coded workers in logistics and manufacturing. In fact, these women workers are also the ones most likely to lay the political groundwork for Womack’s technically strategic workers to organize and strike.
McAlevey’s critique of the inherent gender bias of Womack’s concepts of strategy and material power touches on an implicit element of his argument worth grappling with: that the labor movement should operate like an army at war. Militarism pervades Womack’s argument, in its emphasis on choke points, sabotage, and how to “take and hold” strategic positions; his call for unionists to think like an “ancient Greek general”; and his extended analysis of Mao’s strategy for winning the Chinese Civil War.
Is the working-class struggle like war? Certainly, it is brutal enough—and as Mao said, “politics is war without bloodshed.” But for purposes of informing the labor movement’s strategy, the analogy is not entirely helpful. Framing unions as an army emphasizes the role of immediate, even physical force in the context of a manifestly non-revolutionary situation. We operate today within a web of cultural, social, legal, political, and repressive powers. Labor’s strategy must be flexible and open enough to identify the new and different forms power can take, like the power of teachers as a material force.
Yet for all the analogy’s shortcomings, wouldn’t the labor movement be stronger if it had the capacity to act like an army—that is, with decisive, disciplined, and coordinated action? Womack’s argument will force readers to reckon with the reality that U.S. unions couldn’t carry out his program of strategic disruption even if they wanted to. In highlighting our current incapacities, Womack provides a kind of negative blueprint for a structural reorganization of the labor movement. That is, we can derive the shape of a more effective movement by asking: How would US unions have to be organized in order to seize opportunities to disrupt twenty-first century capitalism? For example, if the power of technically strategic workers in each industry can only be fully leveraged in coordination with all workers in that industry, could unions and their federations make stronger commitments to joint organizing and contract campaigns? How, in this scenario, would unions make and carry out collective strategic decisions? And how would locals, internationals, central labor councils, and federations have to change the way they relate to one another?
The injection of new energy into the labor movement is undeniable, but it is no guarantee of a 1930s-style upsurge. As we continue in this period of heightened activity, the risk of missed opportunity is real. Rigorous, open debates like Labor Power and Strategy help us to secure every advantage we can.
