We need an all of the above organizing strategy to transform industries and welcome tens of millions of workers into our movement. This is a resource challenge, a coordination challenge, and an intellectual challenge, to be sure.
But it’s first and foremost a political challenge, and the labor movement must confront the barriers in its way to build and grow. Here are a few ways to potentially inspire the level of organizing we need.
Idea #5: Make Democratic Elections a Regular Part of the Workplace
There’s nothing stopping states from establishing regular elections in unorganized workplaces. Anti-union legislators have passed or tried to pass these types of laws in Iowa and Florida to union-bust public servants, and progressive states should consider doing the same things in unorganized workplaces.
Here’s how this type of law would work: states would pass a law requiring the state government to conduct a union election in unorganized state-law-governed workplaces every two or three years. Unorganized workers would have at least two options—to form an independent union or to continue without a union—and they would also be able to join an existing union if the union met the criteria to be on the ballot. If they won an independent union, the state would help them establish their union and get it off the ground. If they lost, no harm no foul—no election bar would apply from this rote election. And if they joined an existing union, they would kick off the same process that millions of other workers have done over the last seventy years.
Imagine, say, if California passed a law like this. In California, there are about 425,000 agricultural workers, of whom maybe 5% are union members. Even if only half of them were eligible to unionize, and even if just one in five elections were successful, the law would allow about 40,000 workers to form a union.
To put that number in perspective, that’s four times more union members than the United Farm Workers has in the entire country.
Add to that the number of public servants who would unionize—there are at least 600,000 unorganized public servants in California who would be eligible to join a union—and you’ve got a significant addition to the labor movement. And two or three years later, the rest of the unorganized workplaces would vote again.
This strategy, if implemented in several states, could bring hundreds of thousands of workers into the labor movement while making union elections a standard part of work.
I’m not the first to propose this, although we came up with this idea independently. But I think we should be clear that this type of regularly mandated election is not needed in union workplaces because a version of it already applies to almost every union: the federal Landrum-Griffin Act requires regular union elections for unions under federal labor law, including unions with a mix of federal and state union members. Because almost every union has some federal union members, almost every union must have fair, open, regular democratic elections. It is only unorganized workers who don’t have the opportunity to decide for themselves how they want their workplace to run.
But for the unorganized, state governments could make real, democratic decision-making a basic part of the workplace.
If you have thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up on Twitter or email.