Solidarity is a Muscle: It Needs Exercise!
Labor unions do many things, but the most important thing is bring workers together into a collective project. The work of a union is to build solidarity among its members and to expand that solidarity into the rest of the workplace, then ultimately, globally throughout the entirety of the working class. Like all great athletic feats, the creation of an international labor movement requires lots of boring exercise. Daily practice at speaking to fellow workers, being attentive and supportive, reaching out and checking in on others regularly, and showing-up to socialize, commiserate, and plan. This is the un-sexy work required to build the muscles of solidarity.
Like all exercise, its gains can be lost is we just go back to sitting on the couch and eating potato chips afterward. If we ignore what we did to achieve our prime fitness, we risk it vanishing on us. Once a union helps to focus workers’ solidarity, it must be maintained. There’s the need to regularly work together on important issues and workout our solidarity muscles often. This means that workers need to regularly converge and rally, protest and march, and sometimes threaten to strike. And, it’s not just enough to say we’re willing to strike. (And it may be even worse to admit we don’t want to strike.) We must be willing, maybe even eager, to flex those muscles when necessary. Our solidarity is a living, breathing thing. It requires our energy, attention, and love. And a strike is the ultimate performance of solidarity.
Sometimes labor unions have been established and recognized for so long that its solidarity muscles atrophy. The original cohort of militants who brought the union to life have aged—maybe retired or moved-on, possibly just gotten distracted or disinterested in the exercise of solidarity. This is a natural part of life, as well as a natural part of organizations, including unions. But, those older generations possess crucial institutional memory and their knowledge of the earlier conditions that inspired unionization are valuable. Unions need to preserve the work that went into the creation of the labor movement, to keep the flame alive. This is a reason why regular organizing and labor actions are valuable. They form a bridge across time, they create a culture of militancy and class consciousness, and help to make the union relevant now, rather than just something that was relevant.
Recognized labor unions in the US have the luxury of certain protections from labor law. While these laws buffer workers from the worst excesses of earlier generations of capitalist exploitation, they are no panacea. The US labor market is no utopia and employers tend to fight every single attempt by workers to unionize, even in ways prohibited by law. Once recognized in a union, workers can collectively bargain together. This offers a group voice and strength that workers could never wield as individuals. But, bargaining occurs on the terrain of law, and employers have the advantage, since they have more information about the workplace and its finances. When we enter into bargaining negotiations, workers enter an alien world filled with lawyers and people telling them “no” or “you can’t do that”. This is why workers should never rely solely on collective bargaining. Our solidarity makes that bargaining possible, but it’s not where our strength lies. Our solidarity thrives when all of us can be together: inspiring and supporting each other, while marching and sitting-down. This muscle is exercised on the picket line, more than the boardroom. We flex the solidarity muscle more when we march on our manager’s office than while sitting at the bargaining table. We wield our solidarity when we link arms (physically or metaphorically), more so than when one or two empowered representatives speak on our behalf.
Collective bargaining is important and crucial, but it can be overly polite. Workers end-up having to bite their tongues or grit their teeth. We’re forced to compromise on things that shouldn’t be compromised. Our solidarity muscles weaken we’re not using them together. Solidarity means we can fight and that we are stronger in that fight together.