Hammers and sickles, sabotage cats, and ambiguously raised fists ensconced within pins flicked past me as the crowd within the Chicago Hyatt Regency bulged and rebounded, back and forth: a sea of truly organized chaos.
This was Labor Notes 2024, an iteration of the biannual conference that brought together unionists, activists, and organizers to talk shop. My friend Taylor (a fellow Seattleite) from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was organizing a panel dedicated to addressing climate-related issues in the workplace, and I was slated to contribute.
My own workplace, the Washington-based sandwich chain Homegrown, had within the last three years not only achieved a recognized union with Unite Here, but also a strong first contract which included “heat pay” language, a protection in which workers would be granted extra compensation based on the workplace’s temperature.1The contract states that if the internal temperature of the workplace reaches 82 degrees Fahrenheit, workers will receive 1.5 times base wage per hour, and anything above 86 degrees will warrant double pay with the option to leave work without consequence while receiving an extra hour’s worth of pay.
I was certainly proud to show off my union’s achievements, but I had an ulterior motive at the conference. I wanted to understand what was happening within my union. A small group of domineering, militant organizers from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) had become some of the loudest voices in our workers’ committee. They had gone so far as to try to prevent me from attending the conference in the first place. Though they deserved credit for my union’s recent victories, I was skeptical of their apparently blasé attitude toward democracy. There are pieces of their strategy and actions I needed to parse, to really get the hang of in order to truly understand where the FRSO’s strengths lie and where they – maybe necessarily – fall short.
Homegrown and the FRSO
Homegrown is a “fast casual” restaurant chain with multiple locations spread around western Washington. Its sister company, Catapult Northwest, employs close to 300 workers. The union committee is open to all members of the rank and file, but it is mostly made up of driven and dedicated union organizers who, over the course of the last two years, have been the forces behind both the recognition of the union and the negotiation and achievement of the union contract this last March. The committee is both tightly knit and small, ranging between 12 and 18 members at any given point.
Unite Here sanctioned the formation of the committee as a body, one mainly responsible for strategizing, planning actions, and disseminating information and news to the wider rank-and-file network. A couple staffers represent the union leadership, and everyone else are rank-and-file organizers. Most are in their early to mid-twenties, and most have lefty – if at times unintelligible – political sensibilities. Some of the most militant members of the committee, about a third of it, belong to the FRSO.
The FRSO is a US-based Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization dedicated to an old-school American socialist vision: class consciousness, international revolution, and the formation of a vanguard which will bring about the downfall of the “anarchy of production” and subsequently usher in an “economically rational” US socialist system, one to join the ranks of – if not eclipse entirely – China, the DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba. This would be achieved primarily through organizers, activists, and politicians across the US defecting to a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.2See: “Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution,” FRSO.org (3 August 2007).
Within Homegrown, their mission was slightly humbler. The FRSO members within Homegrown began as salts, getting hired for the expressed purpose of sowing the seeds of union affinity in a select few stores alongside unaffiliated organizers. After our union was established in 2022, the FRSO members bolstered themselves within the committee by becoming public figureheads of the union effort. It was an open forum for all union members, but the committee was mostly populated by dedicated organizers.
As I saw it, the FRSO members had a massive advantage in terms of mobilizing power within the committee. Because they shared a common agenda, strategy, and ideology, they essentially had a caucus before the committee had even formally materialized. As a result, the only thing in the way of carrying out militant action was getting other members of the committee on board.
This didn’t prove a difficult task. FRSO members and the rest of the committee shared a common purpose after all: getting a contract. To boot, the FRSO members proved to be extremely driven and energetically militant. They were built to be the vanguard, whether everyone else liked it or not. FRSO members would go to non-FRSO members’ houses and workplaces to win them over on strategy, even as it was perceived as an invasive practice by some rank-and-file members.
FRSO members live for militant union action above all else. Thus, their presence within the workers’ committee was unmatched. FRSO members knew exactly what needed to be done (or rather claimed so) and pushed for it, consistently calling for strikes, pickets, and boycotts, whether it was pragmatic to do so or not. Whenever the committee met, FRSO members were the loudest and most assertive in the room.
Within the bargaining team, FRSO members were even more fierce. Shouting matches with company lawyers were not unheard of. FRSO was coming for the company’s throat.
The apex of Homegrown union activity came in September of 2023, with a wildcat strike. The workers’ committee had unanimously called for a three-day work stoppage across almost every Homegrown store in the state. Marxists and non-radicals alike passionately participated, including many of my friends and coworkers. This proved to be a defining moment for our contract fight: it brought us a robust healthcare package alongside heat-pay benefits.
“Although several of my friends and I would regularly initiate conversations about workplace conditions and union activity among fellow workers, it seemed as though a concerted effort to grow an organic, self-sustaining base of worker-organizers was completely tangential to the union’s central vision.”
At that point, almost all of our demands had been met. The passions and adrenaline began to fade as opposition to our cause seemed to begin to buckle. Reality began to set in. For all the FRSO members’ strengths, the “shock factor” began to wear off. What would happen to us if the salts left to go exercise their militancy elsewhere? Where would we be when the energy was sucked out into the void? The reality of the situation was – and is – that the FRSO members had not really organized us at all.
To their credit, FRSO members had imbued our union with intense, unprecedented radical energy. Our local, Unite Here Local 8, had not seen a strike in years. Nevertheless, I had serious qualms with how much focus had gone into the short game and had almost completely missed the long haul ahead.
FRSO members had effectively seen themselves as the sole leaders of the union effort, and union leadership at Unite Here followed along. As a result, the only rank-and-file members being formed into union militants were the FRSO members themselves. Regular rank-and-file workers who had never been invited to union meetings, let alone knew what they were, were disregarded, being viewed merely as bodies to walk. FRSO members saw organizers with larger networks of connections as the most valuable and, effectively, the only people worth organizing alongside. Although several of my friends and I would regularly initiate conversations about workplace conditions and union activity among fellow workers, it seemed as though a concerted effort to grow an organic, self-sustaining base of worker-organizers was completely tangential to the union’s central vision.
The FRSO’s strategy of attempting to win everyone over to the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism was deeply ineffective and unpopular. A visit to a committee meeting effectively meant signing yourself up to be cornered by an FRSO member and subsequently invited to an FRSO meeting. While those within the committee were socialists or ambiguously left-liberal, the union’s uneasiness about the presence of an outside Marxist organization was palpable. It often felt as if the FRSO was only involved to garner more movement clout and more recruits for itself. For me, it felt like our fight was simply an FRSO pet project. The FRSO’s tight-knit clique often discouraged non-FRSO members from pushing forward their own agendas in committee meetings. Little by little, rank-and-file workers stopped attending committee meetings.
One of my own major takeaways from conversations with both friends at work and organizers at Labor Notes was how ineffective it was to appeal to abstract ideological maxims as a means of organizing coworkers. The FRSO’s case is already obvious here: attempting to rile up and militarize food service workers by convincing them that the international working class must support a dictatorship of the proletariat to eventually bring about a US socialist state is a dubious strategy. Although getting your coworker to adopt a robust worldview through which to make sense of social and economic relations is by no means a bad thing, it felt like the FRSO was less interested in political education than winning over potential recruits.
A friend of mine in the union experienced FRSO relational and organizing strategies up close. They had been solicited by some FRSO members to attend their meetings and adopt Marxism-Leninism. All too often, however, the tensions created by their strategies outweighed the social and political benefits of truly holding them in solidarity as comrades. It was from this friend that I learned the FRSO members were salts and had scant intentions of empowering regular rank-and-file members to take part in union decision-making and strategy building.
I fear organizing strategies which prioritize adherence to ideology have hurt long term rank-and-file engagement with the union. This is not so obvious to FRSO members. In fact, my friend informed me, FRSO members since early 2023 have begun leaving Homegrown and the Unite Here union due to a “lack of militancy.” It has not even occurred to them that it might be their own organizing strategy which has caused this “lack of militancy.” Probably the most devastating result of the FRSO’s centralization of decision-making power is that their practices have made them indispensable. They themselves are the source of militancy. If the FRSO completely abandons their project at Homegrown, then they would leave behind a union without a core of militant members within an industry with notoriously high turnover, thus risking complete demobilization. To wit, our contract is up in only three years. If our union stagnates and we lack a robust organization that can sustain long-term energy, a future contract could concede essential benefits. If militant members are up and leaving, we are actively being handed a ticking time bomb. So I went looking for solutions.
Labor Notes
Last April, when FRSO members in my union found out I’d be attending Labor Notes, they tried to convince me to let one of them go in my stead. To be fair, I hadn’t exactly gone as a fully sanctioned union representative. I was a union member who was invited to contribute to a panel – no more, no less. Several FRSO members had apparently been prevented from attending Labor Notes because, as they claimed, I had “taken their spot.” In reality, they had simply neglected to sign up for the conference in time to reserve a spot. This was going to be the largest Labor Notes to date, after all, and space was limited.
The issues within my union that had popped up over the past two years were my main concern, however. Although the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization would have me believe otherwise, I knew there were more valid organizational strategies out there. What strategic pivot might activate our rank and file’s potential for militancy and energy? I found two panels to be especially useful in drawing out positive strategies – ones that happened to be almost the exact opposite of those employed by the FRSO.
“Democracy in New Organizing” was the first panel I attended. It turned out to be a good choice. A NewsGuild organizer spoke about his experience participating in a decentralized union network of organizers who would disseminate information regarding negotiations or actions out to shop stewards, who would in turn share the information with larger networks of rank-and-file members. This, the organizer said, was a key process that could keep rank-and-file members consistently involved in what was going on (something I think the FRSO took for granted). It was a tried and true horizontalist strategy used for larger organizations, albeit one that some naysayers of horizontalism claimed would simply never work.
A graduate-student organizer from MIT added that membership meetings were the highest decision-making body within her union, with stewards reaching out to rank-and-filers to attend and participate in decision-making processes. All the panelists hammered home the necessity of cultivating rank-and-file members as future organizers. Organizers do not simply appear; they are made and developed through years of networking, socializing, and thinking. By engaging the rank and file in those ways, union leaders were able to grow the number of rank-and-file organizers, thereby increasing member participation in decision-making processes and actions.
The other particularly valuable panel was “Democracy and the Strike,” which focused on organizational strategies that could build support for militant actions. I was struck by the panelists’ emphasis on the importance of explicitly bottom-up organizing. As one panelist noted, “The only purpose of the [bargaining] table is to amplify the bottom . . . it is up to us as democratic unionists to provide the channels for what is there.” An automotive union leader from Brazil stood up from the crowd to give his two cents. Auto factories across Brazil had coordinated simultaneous strike actions through a comprehensive and deep network of organizers across factories.
Democratic, bottom-up modes of organization were really Labor Notes’ bread and butter. Labor Notes started off platforming trade union actions across the US in the late ’70s and ’80s through its self-titled newspaper. If only because the labor movement’s problems haven’t changed since then, Labor Notes’ self-proclaimed mission has stayed consistent: to promote and build bottom-up labor movements that confront old hierarchical union apparatuses and to revitalize unions to be more militant, more international, and more democratic.
I think I intuitively knew this core element – an intense focus on involving union members themselves – to be missing from my union, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to prioritize rank-and-file participation while the FRSO held the reins. I think in our case, the biggest problem is that of apathy and resignation among the rank and file. Because the FRSO have been the sole arbiters of organizational energy (contract negotiation, strike organization, and media outreach) and communication within the union, the rank and file have been given no reason to integrate themselves into decision-making processes on the committee.
I think this passage from the blog Fire with Fire is apt:
When working conditions are bad and opportunities for action present themselves, such superficial union methods [getting popular coworkers to win over others] can sometimes work in building worker unity towards action in the short-term. But that unity will often crumble in the aftermath of failed actions or half-won demands, when grievances are more local and personal, and when organizing runs into more determined resistance from the bosses. To really build lasting power in the workplace and in the labor movement, it will have to be based on the care, trust, and solidarity that organizers bring to their relationships with their coworkers.3“Self-Acceptance in Organizing (Listening Series, Part 1),” Fire with Fire (7 May 2023).
I think the FRSO has employed these sorts of short-term tactics in almost every area of its organizing. It eschewed solidarity born from organic bottom-up networking for short-term mobilization. On the one hand, turning potential organizers into actual ones while maintaining a thorough and deep network of members takes plenty of time and resources. On the other hand, it establishes a much more resilient mobilizing base for the present and the future while also maintaining a cohort of rank-and-file members who are actually able to organize themselves. And this way, apathy is much less likely to spread throughout the membership. Workplace relationships can also be vectors of mutual aid, non-union organizing, and genuine human solidarity. If you build those relationships, those relationships themselves become material, tangible things that, when threatened by the boss, can rally you and your coworkers to act.
Hearing a wide range of voices at Labor Notes sharing their experiences with horizontal and democratic organizing methods was cathartic. To my delight, these panels were some of the most popular ones at the conference. Even ten minutes in, attendees could be seen shuffling in to hear the panels, all of them vying for a space just to stand. I started running shoddy calculations in my mind trying to imagine how many workplaces could be transformed into more democratic spaces by all those in attendance. This gave me genuine hope for the future of American political life.
The Future
The most obvious place to look in order to grasp the near future of the larger American labor movement, I’d argue, is toward union presidents, and no union president was more important at Labor Notes than Shawn Fain.
I think Shawn Fain really embodies the current trajectory of the mainstream US labor movement. The grandson of two original UAW members, Fain got his start in the UAW almost three decades ago, working his way up through his local in Kokomo, Indiana, and eventually securing positions in the national UAW apparatus. Just a few years ago in 2019, rank-and-file members and activists of the UAW established Unite All Workers for Democracy, a reform caucus that in 2022 would boost Fain into the UAW presidency, injecting much needed energy into an ossified union leadership. The previous union leadership – the aptly named Administration Caucus – had kept power for 80 years.
“Fain, though a burst of energy for US unions, is a man of contradictions.”
I couldn’t help but feel that Labor Notes was one long red carpet just for Fain. In public appearances, he exudes radical energy: general strikes, fighting bosses, and taking an aggressive stance against corporate America are all on the table. He mostly appears in union t-shirts, only wearing a suit when in DC. At Labor Notes, he seemed to be a rockstar.
He would make a closing speech at the conference, greeted by a standing ovation as he took to the podium. Fain’s rhetoric focused on faith in the working class, democratic unionism, and militant union action: each pause properly anticipated enthusiastic applause. However, Fain’s invocation of World War II bombers was seen as tone-deaf by many conference attendees I met with:
You know in the 1940s, during World War II the UAW members were building B-24 bombers at Willow Run plant. Those bombers were a big piece in the arsenal of democracy which helped defeat the fascists who were seeking to divide and conquer the working class. The UAW is responsible for creating the arsenal of democracy that led the US to winning the war.
On an aesthetic level, Fain’s comment is intended to paint a romantic portrait of a distinctly American unionism, one which can appeal to a wide variety of political sensibilities: a patriotic ideal which appeals to a liberal aesthetic. At the same time, it’s a radical ideal which sees fascism as a purely evil entity pitted against the working class. No problem, right? Yet on a deeper ideological level, Fain’s vision ties unions with flexes of imperial power, preserving American unions’ complicity in the military-industrial complex. (It’s harder to cheer for unionized workers making the bombs that Israel drops to incinerate the civilians of Gaza.) Fain, though a burst of energy for US unions, is a man of contradictions.
Fain’s speech came two days after a protest at Labor Notes against Palestinian genocide – a genocide that has been enabled by US industrial giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as by the state itself, with several Republican congresspeople drafting sanctions against the International Criminal Court as of May 7th. On that same day, at a ceremony to remember victims of the Holocaust, Biden criticized the ongoing campus protests as antisemitic: “There’s no place on any campus in America, or any place in America, for antisemitism or threats of violence.” The UAW endorsed Biden in late January. At the State of the Union address in early March – just over a month before Fain’s appearance at Labor Notes – Biden gave Shawn Fain a shoutout.
Likewise, Labor Notes staff locked arms and prevented protestors for Palestine from entering a ballroom in which Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson was delivering a speech. While Johnson spoke, three protestors were being held under arrest by the Rosemont Police Department. Protestors, most if not all of them union organizers themselves, then surrounded the police cruisers holding the arrestees, eventually pressuring the police to release them.
The relationship between political establishments and unions is not guaranteed to be sure, but I suspect the Labor Notes organizers were valuing an aesthetic of respectability over opportunities for effective public direct action.
On a more positive note, the will to enact change was on full display at the conference. Members of the National Educators Association, the United Auto Workers, and the Amazon Labor Union (as well as most other large rank-and-file unions) were actively establishing caucuses – if they hadn’t established them already – which were addressing a lack of bottom-up decision making and militant action. Fundamentally, they were taking aim at the lethargy which the labor movement had succumbed to over the past half century. To me, this strategy seemed to be working. Fain’s own bid for ostensibly progressive union leadership, propped up by a reform caucus, was ultimately successful due to a concerted campaign to increase voter turnout within the UAW rank and file.
Although unions are back, they will likely not return as a unified radical force. I saw this muddled, liberal vision for labor power in the heart of Labor Notes itself. The barely visible line between liberal unionism and outright radicalism was intoxicating, but I couldn’t help feeling as though the larger labor movement in America was once again dashing itself against the rocks of the national political establishment, trying to live up to Fain’s nostalgia for a golden age of unionism in a time when unionists were shaking hands with senators.
I was determined to keep my hopes up. My experiences at Labor Notes – my panel on climate change, the hours listening to lectures on workplace democracy, and getting probably the majority of my life’s organizing education within the span of merely three days – were ultimately colored by the unending streams of solidarity I was exposed to. I met brilliant labor historians, deeply human activists, and a wide range of regular workers just like me, all of whom directly affirmed and prefigured my deepest hopes for a free, ecological society. I think then that unions, mine among so many others, are not ends in themselves. They are tools which enable each and every one of us to build a world in which relationships, work, and solidarity are harmonized. Although I wish that my union might have exercised militant action without the FRSO in a more democratic manner, there will be months and years ahead for the good work to be done. ~
