In December 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded just over 8 million production workers. Also in 2012, BLS reported that some 17 percent of the labor force were office employees and 5 percent were professional and technical employees. This translates into more than 26 million office workers and nearly 8 million professional and technical employees. The private sector had about 22.5 million office workers and 6.5 million professional and technical workers, not counting service professionals in nonprofits. Adding nurses, physicians, and other health professionals brings the total to 11 million professional and technical workers, almost half as many workers as in the industrial sector. Include teachers, social service workers, and professors—both full- and part-time—and there are more than 16 million professional workers. In sum, the professions now account for about one in eight members of the labor force. Apart from the health and higher education professions and public school teaching, where the density of unionized labor is high (80 percent in the K–12 schools, 25 percent in higher education and health care), the organization of private-sector professional and technical employees and the overwhelming majority of office workers has been negligible.

What these numbers tell us is that unions today do not speak for the whole working class, which includes the employed middle class, and that omission is killing the labor movement. Unions have organized only a narrow segment of workers in production, services, and public employment. It is not a question of lack of union density, where density signifies the proportion of union members in the overall workforce, but of a lack of breadth, of inclusion. It is the movement’s limited diversity that makes it easier for labor’s opponents to label the unions a pressure group that represents only its ever shrinking membership.

[...] Even in some unionized workplaces—never mind the vast majority of nonunion private sector plants and offices—the power to hire and fire belongs exclusively to the boss. U.S. unions have agreed to two-tier wage systems and wage freezes and for the most part have not resisted the runaway shop. Under these pro-capital conditions, the U.S. labor market is competitive, and in recent years, in some goods production sectors, the United States has been a favored shop site for European and Japanese corporations.

[...] Craftspeople and semiskilled operatives were once central to industrial production and services. Today, engineers, scientists, and managers control them, through computer and other electronically mediated technologies. This shift was recognized as early as 1921, in Thorstein Veblen’s book Engineers and the Price System. Veblen said that the AFL—a craft-based federation—was doomed to marginalization; engineers were the key to the highly mechanized labor process. However, he held out little hope that engineers could be recruited into unions as long as capital was prepared to pay them handsomely. This judgment remains a challenge to unions, one they have been reluctant to take up. [...]

In the health care field, however, as doctors have increasingly become salaried employees rather than self-employed and nurses have played a more central role in the delivery of services to patients, the main grievances are no longer about income. Doctors and nurses are very interested in workplace control. They complain that administration has subverted their autonomy, that decisions concerning patients’ health are no longer the exclusive province of the health professional. Treatment regimes are now handed down to them, often dictated from above. Management exercises control over issues of diagnosis, treatment—including choice of medication—and the organization of the professional’s time. In effect, the doctor and the nurse have been reduced to functionaries of the health care machine. [...]

Now that health care is managed by large organizations, some of them for profit, the once independent physician works under constant surveillance. Are these developments topics for union intervention? Where doctors have become unionized—about 15,000 in several organizations, most of them affiliated with the Service Employees—questions of autonomy are a theme of organizing drives. Yet once a drive is over, health care unions revert to making traditional trade union demands regarding salaries and benefits, even though for most doctors and, recently, registered nurses, physician’s assistants, and nurse practitioners, these are not burning issues. The question of autonomy is, but doctors’ and nurses’ unions have not consistently raised it.

[...] As the personal computer business grew, a major union, the Communications Workers, attempted to organize Microsoft’s Seattle professionals, but had little success, even though the company had just instituted a two-tier salary structure. The first tier enjoyed more or less secure employment and benefits but lower salaries than the precarious second tier, which had no benefits or job security at all.

Some unions still hire intellectuals as functionaries of their political machine. They edit the newspaper, do administrative work, and sometimes serve as organizing and line staff. But since unions have renounced a transformative vision of social and political relations, they no longer see the necessity of working with intellectuals who can help prepare the members and workers generally for participating in the work of social transformation.

Of course, professional intellectuals are not labor’s only possible source of ideas—there have always been intellectuals among factory, office, retail, and service workers. But professional intellectuals are needed to help create a collective intellect, so that vigorous new thinkers arise from the rank and file to replace them. Professional intellectuals need not be the only formulators of a new vision of the good life, but they may be needed to boldly put the questions associated with the good life back on the table. As we have seen, even political groups motivated by the promise of new social arrangements refrain from openly discussing their transformative views in their trade unions or in public forums, for fear they will be labeled as sectarians and lose access to the rank and file.

An effective strategy for this kind of organization is to form committees in and out of workplaces. These committees would not be traditional unions. They would not immediately ask people to sign union cards in preparation for an NLRB representational election. Instead, they would start as discussion or study groups focused on immediate problems in the workplace and outside. Certainly they might organize to make demands on their employers or join with community groups and unions in fighting for common goals. But they might also want to study labor theory, examine the history and current state of union and broader workers’ movements in their own professions or occupations, and explore appropriate forms of organization for a new labor movement. These committees would be allied with one another, affiliated through the new TUEL or whatever name is affixed to the independent labor organization. Both the national organization and the committees would raise money through membership dues, avoiding the complications and restrictions of foundation grants and gifts from rich donors.

1. Bargaining over wages, working conditions, and benefits need not culminate in a contract. If the workers’ collective power is sufficient to avoid a formal agreement, they are better off without one. If they must sign one, it should not include a no-strike provision. And if the workers are not strong enough to impose a deal that does not prohibit strikes during the life of the agreement, then the life of the agreement should be short—say, one year—and the terms should specify exceptional conditions in which workers may withhold their labor, such as discriminatory discharge or an arbitrary change in the work process.
2. The fight for shorter hours is essential and should be waged as a prolonged two-pronged attack: a strong push for legislation that mandates a reduced workday and workweek and direct action in the form of marches, mass demonstrations, and strike activity. This battle must be fought by the new and old labor movements.
3. There must be a national campaign to enact a guaranteed income equal to the minimum wage and/or unemployment compensation, whichever is higher. The guaranteed wage should take regional conditions such as housing, transportation, and food prices into account.
4. More than 800 local unions have endorsed single-payer health care, and single-payer legislation has been introduced in Congress. The national unions and liberal center, instead of joining the fight to enact it, backed the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s gift to the insurance companies. The fight for socialized medicine is not over, but it won’t succeed until and unless a new labor movement and a large fraction of the old one take up the cudgel together. This ought to be a priority of radicals who hope to revive the labor movement.
5. Deindustrialization and deterioration of the food sold in supermarkets have given workers a clear reason to ally with community activist groups and start their own producer and consumer co-ops, which would provide not only higher-quality food but also good jobs. Instead of relying on institutions of finance capital, workers need to create credit unions dedicated, in part, to financing these ventures, determining the best approach by a thorough study of federal and state credit union regulations.
6. The rank and file should demand the right to create minority unions. If traditional unions refuse, the radical labor movement should seize the opportunity to replace the old order altogether.
7. The fight against racial, gender, and ethnic discrimination in hiring, especially in the skilled trades, has languished for too long. One of the most egregious illusions today is that all remaining decent jobs require post-secondary credentials; this is far from true. Many good semi-skilled factory jobs have disappeared, but there are actual shortages of several kinds of craft labor—tool and die makers, ironworkers, and wheelwrights, among others. There are jobs in these trades, but not for all comers; they remain largely the property of white males. In the 1960s and 1970s, when independent black workers’ organizations fought through direct action and lawsuits for jobs in the skilled construction and goods production trades, there were some breakthroughs, as the craft unions sought to accommodate these movements. But the demonstrations, work-site disruptions, and legal challenges came to an end, and few further gains were made. It is time to resume the struggle.
8. Both new unions and old should demand and provoke organization of the vast and growing population of precarious workers, whether such unions are recognized by employers or not. If most of the old unions continue to slumber on this issue, new ones must rise and step in. Traditional labor leaders will scream bloody murder, or at least “Dual unionism!”—but if history is any guide, once the radicals take independent action, we can expect the establishment to jump in too. Then the fun begins.
9. The long-standing struggle for union democracy must go on. But the rank-and-file caucuses need not assume union leadership under the present crumbling labor law. Both the original law and its Taft-Hartley amendment must be challenged. They are the key reason why the rank-and-file demand for “a decent contract” is antediluvian. Rank-and-file caucuses must direct their efforts to building alliances with the 247 existing workers’ centers and organizations, such as the Taxi Workers Alliances, Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Our Walmart, the Restaurant Opportunities Center in New York. These are movements without contracts, yet they often take direct action and bargain with the state and private employers over their demands, and such organizations may be the right template for a new labor movement.
10. Many unions speak of the urgent need for a truly global labor movement. But even as Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi, and Greek workers engage in mass strikes and job actions, and Mexican minority unions struggle for decent wages and working conditions, mainstream U.S. labor continues to sit on the sidelines. Only the small but spunky United Electrical Workers, the Steelworkers, and the Communications Workers of America have reached beyond our borders to assist these battles, and their efforts, except for UEW’s, are sporadic. One of the major tasks of the new labor movement will be overcoming the implicit and explicit nationalism that afflicts workers and their unions. A globally divided workers’ movement inevitably sinks into racism. Recall the loud labor-union cries against the Yellow Peril, not only in the nineteenth century but in the twentieth century as well. Lately, China has been largely exempt from such reaction because of the close ties between American business and Chinese entrepreneurs and their government sponsors. When these ties begin to unravel under pressure from insurgent Chinese workers’ movements, the Yellow Peril fantasy will rear its ugly head again, unless steps are taken now to cement relations between U.S. labor and the Chinese and Indian insurgencies.