Standing Tall: An Anarchist Approach to Workplace Organizing

The following contribution to the discussion on syndicalism brings the conversation back down to earth, and argues that workplace organizing is still a field of battle we should fight on, not only against the bosses, but also against bureaucratic union formation.

by Feral Dobbs

I’ve been following the debates on anarcho-syndicalism on IGD for a few weeks now. The other day I read something clunkily titled “Don’t want to be your ‘second pillar’: a response to RED.” I generally agreed with its premise that the IWW-led versions of non-labor radical projects can often be a pale imitation of the real thing.

What pissed me off about it was the general anti-union bent of the piece, same as a lot of post-left writing has. For example:

“Today, people find ourselves relating to our oppressors through police, ICE agents, prison guards, politicians, and, yes, internet aps” (as opposed to ‘workplace hierarchy,’ as if people don’t work shit jobs anymore) or “Unlike workplace organizing, they are vibrant expansive movements winning gains in cultural and social realms” (referring to pretty much everything else that left radicals might do).

I don’t want to write another critique-of-a-critique-of-a-critique-of-a-critique, etc. Instead, I want to talk about some implicit assumptions and attitudes that keep popping up in these debates.

This essay is not a defense of anarcho-syndicalism as a political project – I’m not a syndicalist. I found “Nothing to Syndicate” to be well argued and well thought out. But the steady flow of subsequent articles has been, for the most part, garbage. So this piece is about something much more basic and fundamental than syndicalism, which it unfortunately looks like there’s a need for: an anarchist defense of union organizing.

I’m not a wobbly, either, by the way. I’m an anarchist, sans adjectives, and I’m a Teamster. That’s the perspective I’m writing from.

Our job as anarchists is to take the conflict out of the file cabinet and put it back on the shop floor.

Here’s a quick history lesson. In 1934, the United States was closer than ever to social revolution. There were violent strikes in the auto industry in Toledo and Detroit, a wave of agricultural strikes across the American South, and an insurrectional general strike in Minneapolis. Minneapolis ended in Bloody Friday, when police murdered Teamsters in the street. More workdays were lost to strike action in ’34 than in any other year before or since. Capitalism was buckling; the state was genuinely scared it might give.

So what they did was, in 1935, they legalized unions. It was called the Wagner Act. It created the NLRB, and it created channels for workers to file for a union election supervised by the federal government. Before that, forming a union was considered a criminal conspiracy to extort money from your employer. This wasn’t the government saying “you know what, after all these years of shooting at you, we’ve decided that workers’ rights are a good thing.” This was a very explicit move to prevent the causes of disruption to interstate and international commerce. The text of Wagner itself literally says as much.

In 1947, the state tried to further tie labor’s hands. Congress passed another law called Taft-Hartley. This outlawed “secondary action,” or the strategic targeting of a company’s clients or suppliers by its workers. In effect, it said that a labor dispute has to be restricted to ONE union vs ONE employer.

The goal of these maneuvers was to take the conflict off the shop floor and put it in a file cabinet. The labor movement was neutered, tamed, domesticated. The state and the employers sought to transform unionism into something that happened between gentlemen in a smoke-filled room, not something that brought thousands of people into armed struggle in the streets.

Our job as anarchists is to take the conflict out of the file cabinet and put it back on the shop floor.

Nobody worth listening to writes polemics against doing antifascism. Nobody writes polemics against political prisoner support or migrant solidarity or clinic defense or Food not Bombs or disaster relief or eviction defense. But every couple of years, you fuckers come out of the woodwork to tell us not to organize in the workplace. Why?

I don’t know if you’re a young kid eagerly discovering anarchist sectarianism for the first time, or an oldbeard firmly set in your post-left ways, or a hipster activist who had a bad experience with the IWW. But I’m pretty sick of your tedious shit. Especially because you all seem to think you’re so goddamn interesting.

If you find the idea of unionism to be stodgy, stale, archaic, or quaint, maybe it’s because you live in a country where unions have been carefully neutered and civilized, channeled into becoming a very specific type of bureaucratic contractualist organization. Or maybe it’s because you’ve never had any experience of direct political struggle in the workplace.

Union organizing is the hardest and least boring political activity you can do. It’s high-stakes drama. You see people’s true colors. You lose close friends and gain unlikely comrades. You see the people around you transform in ways you thought were impossible. You confront your own fears, and the subterranean power relations that control your life are layed bare for anybody to see. It turns the daily banality of everyday life into a battleground. People literally stand taller.

It is SO much harder than any of that other bullshit that passes for anarchist activism. It’s the only political activity I’ve ever done where the conditions of my daily life are what’s at stake. I think I understand high stakes pretty well: I was a J20 defendant for 18 months, up until the very end. Psychologically and emotionally, organizing at a UPS warehouse was even harder.

We came into conflict not only with the company, but with our own union leadership, at every turn.

Like I said before, I’m a Teamster. Our union sucks. They sold us out in October: we had 54% of the workforce vote to reject a contract (and possibly go on strike). The leadership pushed the contract through anyway, against our vote. There are few people in this world I hate more than Jimmy Hoffa Jr.

We still managed to form a rank-and-file committee – like thousands of other UPS teamsters have done across North America. We agitated, we had t-shirt days, we organized slowdowns and sick-outs, we enforced 15-minute breaks through sheer shop floor intimidation, we prevented firings, we kicked out abusive supervisors. We released spicy flyers advocating sabotage and theft.

We came into conflict not only with the company, but with our own union leadership, at every turn. I saw normal ass men and women overcome their fear and stand up to management. By the crescendo of the struggle, the most grandiose, revolutionary things were coming out of their mouths. People stood taller.

I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t pretend to know how the social revolution will come about. Personally, I think organized labor is really fucking important. I think it could be the beating heart of the movement. But let’s say the anti-workers are right, maybe it’s not the heart of our movement, the way it was in ’34. So what? A friend of mine likes to say that bodies need more than just hearts. They need ligaments and clavicles and kidneys and shit too.

From a human perspective, prisons should not exist either. It does not follow that the uprisings at Attica or Lucasville or Vaughn were fought in vain. The point is not transition into self-management of the existing world. The point is to resist where we are, where our exploitation plays out, in the present.

If we cede the shopfloor as a site of struggle, we’re finished. Anarchism will remain a marginal internet phenomenon, and what’s more, it won’t deserve to be anything better. Work is where we spend a large part of our lives. It’s where our exploitation takes place. It’s where the daily confrontation between us and the representatives of capital plays out.

Like the author of “Nothing to Syndicate,” I used to work in catering. It’s where I got my start in the labor movement, organizing other catering workers into Local 11. The author makes a fair point that in a free society, catering would not exist. Motherfucker, NONE OF THIS would exist in a free society. Just-in-time logistics warehouses, fast food, private universities, 4-star hotels…none of it. Even socially useful fields like healthcare or electrical engineering or teaching or welding will have to be dramatically restructured. That is neither an argument against union organizing as a strategy, nor against syndicalism as an ideology.

From an ecological perspective, coal mines should not exist. It does not follow that the coalfield wars were not worth fighting. From a human perspective, prisons should not exist either. It does not follow that the uprisings at Attica or Lucasville or Vaughn were fought in vain.

The point is not transition into self-management of the existing world. The point is to resist where we are, where our exploitation plays out, in the present.