Strike for America Read Online Free PDF

their caucus on the lessons of failed attempts to reform the CTU and the objective conditions faced by Chicago educators in the early twenty-first century, they were also drawing from a long lineage of labor radicals who had transformed their unions into militant, democratic organizations—not just through leadership challenges to replace conservative leaders with progressives but through the building of rank-and-file worker power independent of the union bureaucracy.
    Adherents to this strategy see the stratum of labor leadership, the “bureaucracy” highly prevalent in American unions, as having its own set of interests separate from those of the union members, leading leadership to often act on behalf of their own interests rather than those of the workers so as to reproduce their power and prestige—and, often, their wealth. Thus it is often necessary for labor radicals to fight both the boss, attempting to extract more and more profit from them, and the union bureaucracy, who will attempt to clamp down on any kind of worker activity that could loosen its grip on power and threaten its privileged position as the “working-class aristocracy.”
    Such organizing has often been carried out by socialists throughout American labor history, from the pitched union battles during the Great Depression up to the twenty-first century. In 1934, facing conservative union leadership at the international and local levels, radical Teamsters in Minneapolis organized workers independently of official leadershipto—in the words of socialist leader and rank-and-file organizer Farrell Dobbs—“aim the workers’ fire straight at the employers and catch the union bureaucrats in the middle.” (Some CTU staffers and activists held a study group on
Teamster Rebellion
, Dobbs’s book, in the lead-up to the 2012 strike.) Eventually the strategy led to not only a string of organizing victories headed by rank-and-file workers but also the Minneapolis general strike of 1934—an event that never would have come to pass if the dissidents had simply attempted to gain leadership rather than transform their local from the bottom up.
    In 1976, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed the reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Its aim was to capitalize on rank-and-file anger at corrupt and inept union leadership by posing repeated challenges like no votes on dismal contracts and forming independent worker committees on issues facing long-haul truckers and other members of the union. Nearly two decades after its founding, after years of organizing workers independent of the union bureaucracy, the TDU played a key role—in the first democratic election in the union’s history—in electing Ron Carey as the Teamsters’ international president. This was the election that led to the successful national United Parcel Service strike in 1997 and eventually tipped the balance of power in the AFL-CIO, kicking out Lane Kirkland, its deeply conservative president, in 1995. 8
    Such rank-and-file efforts today are often associated with the organization Labor Notes and have been carried out by everyone from New York City transit workers in the mid-2000s to New York State nurses today. The key is the recognition of rank-and-file workers themselves as the real movers of reform rather than any individual contender for leadership, no matter how charismatic or politically principled. The CTU is firmly within this tradition of organizing, which helped lead to the overwhelming majority of the union’s membership (79 percent in the 2013 union election) backing CORE’s confrontational, member-led, leftist style of unionism.
    The CTU has grown into a dissident, radical caucus of rank-and-file teachers in strong partnership with community organizations; this is the vehicle that brought its signature brand of confrontational unionism into being. But there were no shortcuts to building the kind of fighting union that the CTU has