Where I live, grassroots organizers are doing all the hard work. I'm not talking about protesters. I'm talking about people who are building and connecting organically, who are facilitating workshops and popular education sessions, who are raising awareness about what's going on in local government to enable democracy to happen. Democracy doesn't function without grassroots participation. This country would be a hell hole without the hard work of local organizers everywhere.
It was clear they wouldn’t do it and talked about it like it was a joke. Something poor people do.
Part of it is that unions badly need reforming.
The other part is that nobody cares enough to reform them.
Most folks at my company don’t care because they get paid too much to care. Not a bad reason.
Once the economy goes to crap that might change.
This country is not a hell hole? That's a tough argument to make for a lot of people!
The irony, of course, being that government bureaucracies are inherently an instrumentality of the managerial class. It's not as if the Secretary of Labor is a line worker with no college degree.
So the agency becomes subject to regulatory capture the same as any other and private sector unions declined. Meanwhile the public sector unions remained because most government workers are themselves members of the managerial class, so the public sector unions, rather than representing line workers against a corporate bureaucracy that employs them, came to represent the bureaucracy itself against the elected representatives of the people.
Is it so surprising that it doesn't come first to mind as an instance of successful activism?
Basically anyone in public policy circles, even on the right, should know some labor history. But America hasn't seen a major private-sector strike victory in 20 years, and the 1997 UPS strike was a rare exception: "traditional" mass strikes haven't been a major force since the 1980s at best. It's true that pattern bargaining and labor laws have decreased the need for mass strikes since the bad old days, and people sometimes forget that OSHA and the NLRB are not a replacement for labor power but a consequence of it. But it's also true that union membership, labor bargaining power, and the union 'edge' over nonunion labor have been in decline for decades. The heyday of the UAW, the AFL-CIO, and the UFW was over by the 1980s, and even where labor has made substantial gains since they've come through courts and legislation rather than grassroots action. Even for someone who's been in public policy for 30 years, grassroots labor action has basically been a historical topic, not an active concern.
Harlan County was the cradle of the modern labor movement, but for 30 years its only political relevance has been as a symbol of the Democrats losing their labor support. I only know how things used to feel from movies and songs, not from anything that's happened in my lifetime. Maybe that'll change, the miners struck just months ago, but they haven't won yet. I've never seen grassroots labor wield power either, but that's not the same question as asking whether I know what it used to be like, or whether I want it to come back.
It's not a knockout victory, it looks like only 57% of members ratified the new contract, but it's an impressive show of solidarity given how tiered employment has weakened unions. Salaried workers got less overtime, hourly workers got better rates, and temp workers got PTO and full-time opportunities. Plus, post-08 hires will be brought up to pre-08 wages, which has been a concern ever since the bailout.
Even if it's not an overwhelming win, that's impressive news for UAW keeping its influence across a growing range of workers statuses.
I think you are confusing stunts with long term sustained lobbying.
For example I got several k people a substantial improvement to their pensions, passed a motion at a union conference got it put on bargaining agenda and successfully changed the companies mind.
But didn't all that happen almost a century ago?
I'm not one of those people who thinks the planet is actually going to kill us off. We're a clever bunch, we'll survive. That said our world in 100 years or so will look significantly different, and I don't think in any of the ways people wanted.
How have you spent your career working in public policy circles and come away with so little understanding of what grassroots activism is, and the impact it has historically had?