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My own view is that the best way for unions to grow is to combine the strengths of these different strata of the working class. SEIU has tried this, in a way. From its base of hospital workers and janitors (middle-stratum jobs), the union has made incursions up and down, attempting to organize adjunct professors and fast-food workers. The challenge of these campaigns is that the workers are spread across an entire metropolitan labor market. These groups don’t necessarily feature in one another’s lives in any way other than as consumers; they are unlikely to live next to one another, or play sports together, or get drunk together, or share spaces of worship. Their kids aren’t friends or even classmates. The union’s ability to throw its existing weight into new workplaces is thus limited by the social distance separating the organization’s existing base from its areas of expansion.
Our registered nurse, custodian, and fast-food worker, in other words, aren’t necessarily going to take risks on one another’s behalf. The union wants them to understand their fates as intertwined, but given hierarchies of race, economic position, and social status, that understanding is not going to come easily. Such an approach might work incrementally, as SEIU has found with its success in adjunct organizing campaigns — funded by janitors, organized by professionals. But to produce significant results, the labor movement needs to focus on where it can maximize whatever strategic resources it still has.
The members themselves are the most underused resource. America once had factories where thousands toiled together. Though divided by race, ethnicity, and skill, the great plants and mills were hothouses of proletarian consciousness. While such work sites are now extremely rare, their lesson should be remembered. The most promising targets for campaigns are employers large and multifarious enough to implicate workers of many different kinds, as well as the broader community. Hospitals, school systems, and universities leap out as potential targets. These are the institutions where the RN, the custodian, and the fast-food worker are under the same roof. They might actually know one another. The meaning of their alliance might cut across lines of race, gender, and status.
OUR ACCOUNTS OF HEROIC social movements tend to begin at the moment of insurgency, when the cameras show up. The years of bitter, lonely, and seemingly futile struggle get the Ken Burns treatment less often. Even of the heroic age of SNCC in Mississippi, the historian Charles Payne writes, “Field reports are filled with stories of spending day after day dragging from house to house without a single positive response to show for it. Most people were simply afraid and confused but reluctant to admit it.” One organizer reported in 1962 that for every hundred people they spoke to, ten agreed to register to vote, three showed up, “and those three were frightened away from the courthouse by the sheriff.” This is not the epic narrative we are taught. But it is the marrow of movement work.
Here’s another story. In the wake of the First Red Scare of 1919–20, the unions were ruined. Their militants were arrested, blacklisted, and deported. Labor’s most prominent political leader, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned for political crime — opposing the war — only a few years after receiving 6 percent of the vote in a presidential election; he ran for President in 1920 from his Georgia cell. The coal miners of West Virginia were gunned down and bombed from the air in 1921. For those who kept the faith in the factories, mills, and mines, fifteen years of ostracism followed. They had no hint that a moment was coming like the 1930s, when small cells of old believers across the country led millions of workers — many of whom had spent years shunning them — to victory.
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The organic integration of the working-class social world is gone. To remember, and keep remembering, now happens only on purpose. Memory looks like an office, with file cabinets and framed pictures from past victories. It smells like printer ink and sounds like bitter narratives of defeat often repeated, with lessons learned. It costs money to keep, and it takes sustained and uninterrupted time to accumulate. To remember and renew is itself an act of defiance: each dollar in dues money, each hour spent in some interminable meeting, passes the tradition on, despite constant efforts to extinguish it.
Just because a political project is difficult, in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong. It could just be that it’s hard — that the opposition is fearsome and you haven’t cracked it yet. Some kinds of success are bought with a dozen or a hundred failures. The key is to be there for the next round, and to know a chance when you see it.
One manifestation of this generational imbalance of power is the immense difficulty of health-care reform, since major constituencies — not just profiteering corporations, but segments of the markets they’ve captured, and the people who compose those segments — are materially tied to the current system. This is the underlying social basis of the attempts to fend off Medicare for All through appeals to incumbent health insurance, in particular Medicare itself. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is not — contra liberal snobbery — simply ignorance and false consciousness. It is rather, as Esping-Andersen would put it, the slogan of asymmetric chronopolitics. It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is not fundamental but is rather the outcome of specific historical developments, which have turned age into the medium of conflicts flowing from the relations of property. But this does not make generational conflict superficial, any more than the mediation of class through race makes race superficial. There is a genuine divergence in life chances and social power along the lines of age.