The "new" NUP structure proposal is a weak parody of the 100 year-old IWW (aka the Wobblies) idea that people working in the same industry should be in the same union. The NUPsters propose to merge the 62 AFL-CIO unions into about 15 larger unions and move millions of dollars into organizing. Departments that educate and advocate for members – like civil rights, education, publications, legal, and health & safety – will be cut.

But if the NUPsters want to caricature the One Big Union structure they want nothing to do with the rank and file democracy and local autonomy at the heart of the IWW. Newspaper Guild member Andy Zipser writes, "Questions about union democracy have been dismissed by Stern and his supporters as essentially beside the point: the ship is sinking, they point out, and there’s no time for the luxury of education, discussion and consensus building."

State and local AFL bodies are to be taken over by the national. Herman Benson, Association for Union Democracy, calls this "an authoritarian straightjacket" already in place in the Carpenters which "has already been reorganized to show the way. Its locals have been reduced into impotent units. Merged into sprawling regional councils... Locals have lost all control over collective bargaining."

Cornell University labor studies professor Richard Hurd advocates changing union culture to improve external and internal organizing. In the late ‘80s the AFL-CIO "decided to contrast the typical union workplace with an activist one, using the terms servicing model and organizing model," writes Hurd. 

The original idea of the organizing model "argues that unions can be more effective when representing workers if they use the same mobilizing techniques with current members that are most effective when recruiting new members." Activist union locals would be the goal. 

In the ‘90s this idea of "organizing the organized" and building a social movement of union members was sacrificed to recruiting goals. The emphasis shifted to a "nearly single-minded focus on external organizing" which, says Hurd, increases the problems of poor service to members and leads to an alienated membership.

The challenge is difficult and no one has all the answers.

Reviving the real organizing model that sought to organize the unorganized and the organized is one part of an answer.

Defying the US system prohibiting ‘minority unions’ in a workplace is another – if some workers at a workplace want to join the union, they join the union and start acting like a union by building shop floor power and defending co-workers.

Another is workers centers that bring together unorganized and organized workers, immigrants and native-born workers. Such centers can serve the employment law needs of the unorganized and educate all workers on rights, not abstractly, but more importantly teaching ways to organize with co-workers to gain shop floor power. Workers centers act like old time union halls did: as the center of working class community.

Simon Greer of Jobs With Justice says labor leaders should be asking "How do we build a progressive movement?" rather than "How do we restructure our bureaucracy?"

"At a minimum," says Hurd, "labor needs to recapture the organizing model ideal of injecting social movement zeal within the rank-and-file… there really needs to be a coherent vision about how our economy and our society would be different with a more vibrant labor movement."

Building the space and the networks to express a vision of a society outside the grip of corporate control and eternal war is a place to start.

Jack Fate