#labor studies

[racefortheironthrone]

If management finds a way to automate jobs during a strike, is that scabbing?

Peripherally.

The automation itself is more part of the general category of management strategies to restructure workflow and production methods in order to reduce the need for, and thus the power of, labor. This dates back to the origins of Taylorism itself in the 1890s as an effort to “steal the brains from underneath the cap of labor” and through to the emergence of Human Relations and Industrial Psychology in the early 20th century as a means to better control workers. So I think you could see in as essentially equivalent to classic speed-up and stretch-out efforts to maintain production at as low a cost as possible during a strike, and thus break the union.

However, the dirty truth of automation is that there is no clean way to fully substitute machinery for labor. Due to the inherent limitations of technology at any stage of development, you need labor to repair and maintain and monitor automated systems, you need labor to install and operate the machines, you need labor to design and program and manufacture the machines. (This is one reason why the job-killing predictions around automation often fall flat, because the supposedly superior new technology often requires a significant increase in human labor to service the new technology when it breaks. For example, this is why automation in fast food has proven to be so difficult and partial than expected: it turns out that self-checkout machines are actually very expensive to operate in terms of skilled manpower.) And to the extent that a given automation contract or project is being undertaken during a strike in order to break that strike, that’s absolutely scabbing.

[anniekoh]

On the Road: Two Migrant Workers in South Korea

by Changhee Chun 

During the last decade, one of the greatest social changes in South Korea has been the development of a multicultural society with increasing numbers of migrant workers. However, the population of unskilled laborers from South Asia is very much an invisible minority in Korea. The only time this population is mentioned is when a crime is committed by someone in this community, or to say that areas where large numbers of South Asians live are dangerous and should be avoided. Little is known about the “Korean Dream” of better opportunities that these people pursue after leaving their motherland. On the Road follows Moazzem and Maruf, two migrant workers from Bangladesh, who did not have any other alternative than to leave their country in search of better opportunities in Korea. Moazzem and Maruf labor as small factory migrant workers in rural Korea, sacrificing their lives in Bangladesh in hope of helping their families and themselves survive. 

On the Road profiles these two as they journey in a foreign-land in quest of their individual “Korean Dream.” The film chronicles their personal journeys of difficulties and witnesses some of the sacrifices they have to make in their daily lives as migrants, such as working and living in undesirable conditions, struggle with language barriers, and separation from their families. The unskilled laborers migrant community in Korea is doing their best to find happiness and success in a society different from their own, away from home, filled with the ups and downs of life. While hope of acceptance, harmony, and co-prosperity persists for Moazzem and Maruf in Korea, one cannot deny that for now their paths toward their dreams are not without turbulence. 

The film serves as an ethnographic observation of the daily lives of migrant laborers in Korea—allowing the audience to not only relate to the struggles towards success migrants endure, but also reflect on their own pursuit of success. No different from the audience, migrant laborers too are just ordinary people, traveling down the road toward their dreams. Whether one is a migrant laborer or not, our lives are journeys on an unpaved road filled with obstacles and challenges that we must overcome to reach a destination of success. On the Road gives the audience a view into an alternative road that may not be all too different from their own.

[racefortheironthrone]

There was a classic Simpsons episode where Springfield Elementary teachers went on strike, and the PTA responded by bringing in residents (including Marge Simpson) as replacement teachers. Would this count as union busting or crossing the picket line? If yes, I wonder why it was depicted as largely benevolent considering that Simpsons writers and plots tend to lean liberal.

Let's not mince words, it's 100% scabbing. It's not just crossing a picket line as a customer, it's crossing a picket line in order to work as non-union temporary labor, with the intent to crush the strike.

I don't agree that it's depicted as benevolent behavior - the whole gag of the middle portion of the episode is that the scabs are terrible fucking teachers. Frink is completely wasted in preschool and doesn't let the kids play with toys, Jasper is a physically abusive idiot who gets his beard stuck in a pencil sharpener, and Moe and the like are total pushovers when it comes to Bart's pranks. The only one who can manage a classroom at all is Marge, and even then she's incredibly embarrassing and unprofessional with Bart. (Notable difference compared to how she does in "Whacking Day.")

Also, it's not necessarily the case that Simpsons writers are always left-leaning. John Swartzwelder is notoriously incredibly conservative and his scripts tended to push his libertarian views pretty strongly.

[racefortheironthrone]

As someone with your history of labor activism and knowledge of labor history in the U.S., do you have an opinion on the modern IWW? Quite a lot of calls for unionization I see on line include links to the IWW website. However, as a dues paying member, it's always seemed to me like the IWW could stand to do (much) more than it does currently. Do you think that they are a good part of the drive to improve labor conditions, or a distraction?

Oh man, you're just determined to get me in trouble with a very vocal group of terminally online folks, aren't you?

Race For The Iron Throne

Any thoughts on the Industrial Workers of the World? I’m just starting to look into them and a cursory glance and what I’ve heard from donot

Race For The Iron Throne

I couldn’t be more clearly, in my role as a labor historian, talking about the IWW that operated from 1905 and that basically died off after

"but it was also a union that (for specific ideological reasons) so completely eschewed the hard work of building trade union infrastructure

To be honest, I think it's a bad sign that a lot of the high profile strikes and organizing drives of the past couple years - including in areas where the IWW used to have a presence like the Starbucks campaign - have happened outside the IWW's auspices, often showing that traditional unions like SAG-AFTRA or the WGA or the UAW or UFCW (in the case of the REI organizing drive) can combine the same spirit of grassroots militancy with an actual commitment to running their unions like unions.

That's not to say that the modern IWW is a bad organization per se, but in looking through their website for recent campaigns, it all seems a bit small ball. I think they may have gotten lapped in recent years.

[racefortheironthrone]

Was there any truth to Cesar Chavez's claims that undocumented migrants were being used to undercut the UFW? I doubt it was an organized plot, but there's been longstanding, unofficial US policy of doing little to effectively stop undocumented migrants from coming, and less to stop them from being employed when then come. Which creates a pool of people who can be employed in shit jobs for low pay and controlled through the threat of arrest and deportation.

No, I think it was a bunch of conspiratorial bullshit that led to violence between workers who would otherwise have been sympathetic to the UFW's cause. Huerta and the National Lawyers Guild and the Confederation of Mexican Workers and Bert Corona were in the right here, and Chavez was pretty clearly in the wrong.

[racefortheironthrone]

Would you say covid is having a black plague style effect with the rise of more militant labor leadership, or are there any other factors playing a role?

Not really, no.

I think the fundamental change has been a longer-term post-Great Recession tightening of the labor market that started around 2016 and (with the exception of a brief blip during the lockdown) has continued to the present, along with even longer-term changes in public attitudes about unions and inequality.

I would argue that the changes in union leadership and the increases in strikes and organizing drives we've seen recently are essentially a lagging response to that shift in worker leverage vis-a-vis the bosses.

[racefortheironthrone]

I understand that most unions have a formal or informal policy of not crossing another union's picket line. In the event that two or more unions share a work space, doesn't that mean that if one strikes, the other is effectively coerced into joining the strike, with all of the costs and none of the potential gains? This very issue has come up in the Vancouver, Canada transit system recently, so it's not just a hypothetical.

If there is a formal rule, it usually takes the form of a contractual right for individual workers to choose to honor picket lines, so that workers aren't penalized or lose their jobs for refusing to cross.

Those contractual rights are pretty rare at least in the North American context. Secondary boycotts (when a union launches a boycott against a company that does business with a struck company) or secondary pickets (when a union pickets a company that does business with another company) are usually not legal (It's a bit unclear whether they are legal in Canada), and the union having a rule that forbids workers or penalizes them for crossing another union's pickets would constitute a secondary boycott/picket and would be illegal under (at least U.S) labor law. Even the "right to conscience" steps up close to the line (pun intended).

That being said, sometimes unions do collectively bargain for that right - my old union (UAW 2865) had it although most U.C unions didn't have it, and the Teamsters usually have one because it's a big part of their internal culture (...when it suits them).

That being said, I do take issue with the framework of "coercion," and I certainly don't agree that the other union faces "all of the costs and none of the potential gains."

At its most fundamental level, the labor movement is and has always been about solidarity - about recognizing that we are all interconnected, that we share a common struggle and a common enemy. To be a part of the movement, to be in community with your fellow workers, is to accept a responsibility to act in solidarity with one another - and enforcing that responsibility as a price of membership in the community is not coercion, because without that no social group of any kind could exist. It's the same thing with prohibitions against scabbing or otherwise collaborating with the enemy during a struggle.

And just as that spirit of solidarity requires us to act in concert with the other members of our union, it also requires us to act in solidarity with other unions and the working class everywhere. This is not done out of guilt or moral altruism (this is a big part of my problem with the modern conception of "allyship" on the left), but out of a belief in reciprocity: we stand with others so that they will stand for us.

Or as someone more eloquent than me once put it:

[racefortheironthrone]

What are your thoughts on Kim Moody's writing?

I haven't read their work, but in general, I think the whole business unionism/social movement unionism binary is complete bullshit driven by people's ideological priors rather than an empirical-grounded reflection of what's happening on the ground.

Are there ineffective and corrupt "business unions?" Yes.

But as my colleague Erik Loomis has pointed out repeatedly, there are also effective and militant business unions (some that have been quite prominent recently), and ineffective and corrupt social movement unions. And I agree with Loomis that it is not at all clear that there is any corrolation between the internal structure/culture of a union and the actual outcomes.

I strongly support community unionism and in general I support social movement unionism, although I'm more on the wing of social movement unionism that supports representational democracy and developing permanent organizational capacity than those social movement unionism types who equate direct democracy and horizontality with union democracy writ large.

However, I fully accept that my position on these issues is normative and ideological in origin, rather than utilitarian.