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 #4: Expand Unions Beyond the Workplace
Unions first developed in the workplace because that’s where workers spend so much of our time and energy. But there’s no reason that unions should end there: the labor model can expand so much further than actual laborers.
My research found unions outside the workplace all across America. Collective associations like student unions are part of communities across the United States, from tenant unions in big cities to student unions in small university towns, to resident associations in rural mobile home parks. States across the country have statutory frameworks extending legal rights and responsibilities to these types of collective associations. While significant scholarship has focused on American unions in the workplace, little attention has been paid to these unions outside the workplace. Labor unions are organizations of workers who have joined together at a workplace or in an industry to improve working condition, raise wages, and have a voice in the future of their jobs and their communities. Collective associations outside the workplace are similar: They are organizations of students or tenants or nursing home residents who seek to improve their lives through mutual aid and solidarity.
Collective associations are widely prevalent in many non-labor contexts, and the statutory schemes recognizing non-labor unions often provide them similar rights and authority. Twelve states and Puerto Rico assign significant rights and power to student associations, while fourteen other states and the District of Columbia assign advisory roles or limited institutional authority to student governments. Three states create expansive residential tenant rights, twenty-nine states offer protections for tenant union organizing but no collective certification process and little if any statutory support for tenant unions, and nineteen states extend specific and often robust rights to tenants of mobile and manufactured home parks. Federal law creates a nationwide right to organize resident associations at nursing homes receiving Medicaid or Medicare funds, and another fourteen states significantly expand residents' rights and resident council power beyond the federal level, including eight which actually require that facilities create resident councils in some or all circumstances, rather than merely permitting or assisting them. Non-labor unions are thus a part of public and private institutions all across the country, organizing, negotiating collectively and working to advance the interests of their members.
Labor unions should consider pushing for state legislative changes expanding collective representational rights to tenants, secondary and post-secondary students, nursing and long-term-care home residents, consumers, and welfare recipients. I have a lot of ideas for how to structure the legal frameworks around expanding these rights, ideas I explore in my piece on this subject.
But these associations would benefit us all. Unions would gain new, powerful partners in the struggle for economic and social justice. These partners’ interests would largely align with labor unions—because workers are also tenants, are students or the parents of students, and sometimes receive public assistance—so they would build a multi-modal form of independent worker power.
States should expand these collective associations to build organized constituencies of public service users, to safeguard against further cuts and fight for a better world. By creating statutory frameworks giving workers collective associational rights outside the workplace, states can further the movement for economic and social justice.
And maybe the AFL-CIO of the future unites not just worker unions but student, tenant, residential, and consumer unions.
If you have thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up on Twitter or email.