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Second part in an ongoing series of interviews with anarchists involved in the labor movement. Originally posted to website of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation.
This is the second in a new series of serialized interviews that we are calling Anarchists in the Labor Movement. In this installment we bring you interviews with two nurses in the Southern United States.
As the title suggests, this series engages with anarchists who are active in workplace organizing. Some of those we speak to in this series are building a militant minority within the rank-and-file of their existing union, others are organizing the unorganized through new union campaigns, while others still are finding ways to build the capacity to win shop floor fights in contexts where union support is not available.
In part, our aim with these interviews is simply to shine a light on the presence of anarchist militants in the U.S. labor movement. More substantively, we ask participants to critically reflect on their experiences, including both successes and failures, to draw out generalizable lessons.
Some, but not all of those interviewed in this series are members of Black Rose / Rosa Negra.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length
Xaquiri – Nurse
BRRN: How would you summarize your politics in one sentence?
Xaquiri: Anarchist-communist: a communist analysis of political economy with an anti-authoritarian praxis regarding power relations and the state.
BRRN: Please share some background on the campaign you are working on
Xaquiri: We are a group of 800 Registered Nurses at a level one trauma center in Louisiana that is the non-profit descendant of a large public hospital that was closed after Hurricane Katrina. I had dreams of unionizing since I started working there five years ago, but that accelerated after the obvious dire necessity of COVID. We have had several failed starts in organizing since then, but the most recent campaign really took off this past spring, after another group of nurses at a neighboring hospital were on the verge of filing for election right before their hospital was sold to the parent company of my facility, so a lot of the energy from that organizing was spread to us.
BRRN: Are you working with an established union or going independent?
Xaquiri: We are working with an established union National Nurses United (NNU) because they were already on the ground working nurses at the other hospital that got sold. I also chose to engage with them because they have a lot of resources to invest in supporting our effort, which is unusual for an established union to put resources in organizing new facilities in the South. I also found them to take a more militant approach to organizing than many unions — greater willingness to strike, aversion to worker-management partnerships, and engagement with intersecting justice issues instead of a narrow focus on building membership.
BRRN: How do you see your anarchist politics as relating to organizing for power with coworkers?
Xaquiri: A big part of my politics is the belief in ordinary people to get radicalized and shift power relations away from capital right where they are. I’m excited to see people who have never considered themselves political before now becoming engaged with all sorts of struggles, and that is all based on recognizing their collective power and where they are positioned in relation to the ruling class.
BRRN: Do you ever talk about your anarchist politics with coworkers? Do you talk “politics” (world events, local power structures) with your coworkers at all?
Xaquiri: At this stage I generally try to avoid it because so many people are so new to this way of thinking.
BRRN: Does organizing in unions fit into your vision for transforming society or for revolution?
Xaquiri: I guess you can say I have an anarcho-syndicalist theory of change and popular power. Unions are the closest thing to a radically democratic organization with control over resources in our society. Showing people that it is possible to take power on a local level with broader implications over the whole society is one of the most important parts of building unions for me.
David – Nurse
BRRN: How would you summarize your politics in one sentence?
David: I’d say nowadays the ideology most animating to me is syndicalism.
BRRN: Share background about the campaign you worked on.
David: I’m a nurse at a large university hospital in the Southeast. During the height of COVID, people in my unit were pretty pissed off and I started to hear that folks were feeling similar elsewhere in the hospital too. I heard from a friend in management that the hospital thought there was a union push happening, so I thought that if there was, I wanted to be part of it. NNU had recently won an election at a hospital in our state, so I figured that if folks were organizing at our hospital it was probably them. I got in touch with NNU and asked if they were organizing at my hospital. They said no, but if I wanted to initiate something, they would be willing to help. I asked some of my coworkers what they thought, and they were all pretty on board, so we started.
Now sadly, our effort was not successful. After more than two years of organizing, engagement dropped to nil and NNU pulled out, I think rightfully. That said, the effort was not a total bust. My unit, which was probably the most fully organized, got new equipment we had been asking for for years, our awful nurse manager got removed and replaced with our great clinical team lead, and faced with the prospect of a union, the hospital gave us the biggest raises since I’ve worked there, removed some of the hurdles placed on clinical ladder advancement, and gave us a parking stipend. Without a doubt the effort to unionize, even while unsuccessful, yielded improvements for nurses at our hospital.
BRRN: How did you decide between organizing with an established union and going independent?
David: We organized with NNU. What I found was that at our institution, in the South, there was a lot of fear around unionizing. People really had an impression that our institution was all powerful and could just crush anyone they wanted. Because of that, other nurses seemed to really want to be involved with a union that they felt was established enough to stand up to our institution. Organizing with NNU gave the nurses at my hospital faith that this was a serious effort that could actually make headway.
Sadly, I think organizing independently or with a smaller non-nurse union just wouldn’t have gotten the traction to get us even where we got. That said, NNU was not perfect. I generally perceived a reluctance from their leadership to invest resources in our effort because of the size of our institution. It seems that after their loss at Hopkins, they’re pretty gun-shy about large hospital systems and are focusing more on smaller institutions they think they can win more easily and with less perceived risk. I also think we would have benefitted from more organizers from NNU and more experienced organizers. They had a tendency to assign us organizers and then reallocate them frequently; hand-off was often not great and contacts were lost in the process. It created an air of noncommitment from NNU and unseriousness that definitely frustrated our nurses.
I wouldn’t say these issues defeated our campaign though. Ultimately, the major issue we ran into was just the level of turnover our hospital experiences — but the lack of experienced organizers and the frequent trading out of organizers didn’t help. Still though, I think NNU was probably the better choice for us because it opened door with nurses to have faith in the effort.
BRRN: How do you see your anarchist politics as relating to organizing for power with coworkers?
David: To me, workplace organizing is the ultimate expression of anarchist politics. I affiliate with anarchism mostly because I believe in the democratic organization of our society and economy. I believe in building democratically organized popular power at our jobs. It’s where we enlist ourselves into the application and production of power. So gaining power in our workplaces is one of the most direct ways for us to build popular power and change the conditions of our lives, and that’s what I’m seeking.
BRRN: Do you ever talk about your anarchist politics with coworkers? Do you talk ‘politics’ (world events, local power structures) with your coworkers at all?
David: We talk about politics at work frequently. My coworkers are generally either apolitical or progressive/liberal. I often engage in these discussions; I enjoy talking and debating this stuff with them. I think they know I’m pretty far to the left, and I generally share with those I’m close with that I’m an anarchist. I try not to get into too much leftist rhetoric with my coworkers: I dont think they’re very familiar with it so it doesnt connect with them. People are always willing to talk shit about our bosses and administration though. Folks are really animated by talk about controlling our own work, having power in our workplace, and what we’re owed for the work we do. I also have found that talk about workplace democracy is an idea that can connect with people. Apolitical people already have an understanding of democracy, so it’s not a big leap to be like, “Hey, why doesn’t our workplace work like that? Why do we supposedly have a say in our government but not when we’re at work?” People seem to get that.
BRRN: Did your campaign include others who see themselves as ‘political’, but are part of a different political tradition or political organization?
David: I reached out to some left organizations around our city to see if they could help me with connecting to other nurses, but sadly they weren’t much help. There were other political anarchist-aligned folks who were involved, some really actively and consistently and others not. I was honestly a bit disappointed at how some folks who seemed to profess our ideology didn’t show up. I also have been kind of bummed to see how many anarchists just uncritically went into travel nursing. Travel nursing has acted at a release valve for our institutions, allowing them to shuffle nurses around without having to fire anyone. Staff leaving was what ultimately undid our campaign.
We ended up at a place where many of the units had been cored out staff-wide, consisting only of very senior nurses just trying to get to retirement without issue and new grad nurses who didn’t plan to stay, neither were willing to take on the leadership in their units to make the union happen. The people who could lead in these units, middle-experience nurses with years of work left and who know their coworkers, all left for travel positions, especially the political ones and those who were agitated about our working conditions. This may have given them a better paid deal for a while, but in the end it’s leaving us all with a rawer one. I think all of us who align with anarchism need to consider what use having a political identity is if we are not willing to act on it.
BRRN: Does organizing in unions fit into your vision for transforming society or for revolution?
David: So I’ve lost a bit of faith in the idea of “the revolution.” I’m not sure it’s coming. I think we need to be honest with ourselves that our movement is relatively marginal at this point, we have limited reach and even more limited power, and I mean that for the entire left. So I think we need to be looking for niches where we can build power and expand from, so that when crises occur we can leverage our positions for greater popular power. I think nurse unions are a great avenue for that, so say the next time a crisis like COVID occurs, maybe we take over the hospitals, and who knows from there.
BRRN: What resources have helped you most as you’ve organized?
David: Honestly I’m not a big theory reader. I’ve been involved in radical organizing for a bunch of years now and I’ve learned a lot from my compatriots.
BRRN: What advice can you share with anarchists looking to organize a union? What do you wish you had known when you started?
David: Oh, I wish I did so much differently. First, I’d say we were too cautious to start. We should have started much earlier, even a few months earlier may have made a big difference. Talk to folks right away. There were a bunch of people that I held off talking to and by the time I did while they supported and wanted to help but they were leaving. A lot of this delaying ended up being due to concerns for security, and while it’s definitely important, we shouldn’t let it slow us down. I’d also say reach out to political people of course, but don’t count on them. I think it’s important to just engage in a spirit of solidarity with your coworkers: you’re all in it together, and you want to be reaching out to all of them.
I’d also say this probably applies to any union, but when working with NNU, try to maintain your own contact networks. The organizers try to route a lot of the connections through themselves, but can be kind of hit or miss on how good they are at following up. Further, it seems that once the union is formed, NNU doesn’t provide a lot of structure. It seems to me that for power to remain with the rank and file and not just default to national leadership in the absence of a governing structure, we’d need to maintain our own networks that we can use to fill that void. Don’t surrender the organizing to the organizers, we need to remain actively engaged to win and hold worker power.
If you enjoyed these interviews, we also recommend the first installment in this series: interview with June, an anarchist academic worker.
