The right-wing offensive against public sector unions in states around the country needs to be defeated. But even if the attack is turned back, it’s doesn’t seem likely that a revival of the labor movement as we know it will necessarily follow. If a labor revival is to happen, it’s going to begin outside the actually existing labor movement and outside the system of labor relations codified in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Recognizing this reality, many workers and labor activists have experimented in recent years with forms of organization that operate outside the NLRA: worker centers, non-majority unions, and independent unions. While these are still, for the most part, fledgling efforts they have won some important victories and shown what is possible when workers take organizing into their own hands. Fabricio Rodriguez, a former co-chair of Young Democratic Socialists and labor activist based in Philadelphia, played a key role in helping to organize the independent Philadelphia Security Officers Union (PSOU) against both the employers and SEIU. He was gracious enough to participate in an email interview with The Activist to discuss this and other organizing efforts, as well as the future of the U.S. labor movement.

The Activist: How did you become involved in the labor movement?

Fabricio Rodriguez: I got involved in the workers’ rights movement when I was a sub-surface miner in 1996. At that time I was working for a non-union company at Greens Creek Mine on Admiralty Island, Alaska. My father also worked in this mine and he began to fight back. Our employer banned lunch breaks. He and I attempted to organize our co-workers to protest the lunch ban. My activism resulted in my termination, but the experience changed me and gave me a mission. I left the mines to help build a movement for worker power. I started off in the labor underground and have stayed here ever since.

TA: With all of the protests and demonstrations against the attack on public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, hopes are high for a renewal of the labor movement. Your take on the prospects for labor renewal – at least in labor’s current form – is more pessimistic. Why?

FR: I think that the workers’ movement will rebound, but I don’t believe that workers will find themselves organized into labor organizations as we know them. In the past few years, we have seen the rise of alternative worker empowerment organizations such as worker centers, non-majority unions, worker associations and independent unions. These organizations point to some exciting possibilities.

I have been working with labor unions and non-union worker formations as an activist and as a staff person for the last 15 years. During that time, the unions have been shrinking. The decline started long before I was involved. In my time as an organizer, there have been several opportunities for resurgence (usually this has involved rallying around Democratic politicians). Mostly, we have lost. The few of those that we won have not turned the tide.

In the mines, we used to say, “Put your hopes in one hand and take a shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first.” You cannot look at that trend line [of union decline] and not see that the writing is on the wall. If you think that Wisconsin will change the 50 year trend, you’re wrong. “Hope” will not change our material reality.

Organized labor is essential for a democratic society. That is why I we have to continue to build worker collectivity, but the legal, economic and political environments have changed and unfortunately labor unions have been unable to adapt. Most importantly, though, statistical reality tells us that the labor unions are not coming back for us. We will have to organize ourselves for our families and for our democracy.

We have all heard that our nations labor law are broken. It is. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is a death trap. The rules set up by the NLRA, as they have been interpreted by the courts, make forming a union and winning a decent contract nearly impossible. They have become increasingly restrictive. Employers have found every loophole possible and they mostly have made it an obstacle course rather than the road map that it was intended to be. Because of this, labor unions have had to become increasingly reliant on “experts,” politicians and attorneys. The corporations have been able to take the liberation struggle of workers and turn it into a long and expensive series of legal maneuvers. Working people are fighting on a battlefield on which they are unlikely to win.

This is fundamentally disempowering to the working people who should be the agents of change. This change also creates a high cost structure for labor unions. This cost structure makes it impossible for labor unions to engage many workers in organizing efforts. If the workers’ wages are too low, or their shops too small, it simply will not “add up.” The dues coming in will not match the representation costs going out. Now that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is dead for another generation, labor law is not going to change in our favor. In Wisconsin and other states, it is getting worse by the day.

Macroeconomic changes that have taken place over the last few decades have also led the demise of traditional labor unions. For example, labor unions are set up to organize a certain kind of work place — many people working for a single employer at a geographically defined location. Many of our contemporary work places do not look like that. Service economy jobs are generally more dispersed geographically, and workers in many of these jobs are often isolated from each other and may even work at a different location every day. We are sub-contracted, sub-sub-contracted, temporary, self-employed, internationalized and seasonal.

These type of work situations make it very difficult to organize using traditional union strategies, and business has adapted to the NLRA far better than we have. Unions have a harder and harder time in the political realm too. Both parties have become more closely tied to corporate money. We cannot match our opponents in this realm. The Democratic party has bought the corporate message of low business taxes and low social spending. The Democrats are largely ready to sacrifice the essential services that working people rely upon for false promises of economic growth. Despite the fact that there is no economic evidence that this upward distribution of wealth produces more job or better jobs, there is virtually no push back by the Democrats. More importantly, though, they pose no alternative. The Democrats have allowed, and even lead, a systemic assault on working people for the last three decades. Much like the labor unions, the few Democrats that do stand with working people end up fighting in a defensive posture. I was boxer when I was a kid, and I can tell you that it is hard to score any points while you are against the ropes.

Most of all, though, the unions have atrophied so far that they are incapable of helping most workers. We just cannot wait for them to come and save us. To sit back and wait for the unions is to propose that 89% of us take sub-par wages and treatment while the other 11% (in reality, only about 10% of a union’s members are activists, so we are talking about 10% of the 11%) figure out how to get us out of this situation. That is not a realistic option. Everyone can improve their lives through collectivity, but a union in the traditional sense is probably out of many workers’ reach and if you can reach that elite level of organization, you will not likely end up how you’d expect in the beginning.

My message to working people is that you have to fight back and start organizing yourselves. If you are waiting for the unions, you are being lazy. You are waiting for someone else to determine your fate. That idea runs counter to everything that the worker justice project was supposed to be about. That is “hope.” I say, let’s start making the shit hit the fan. The idea of collective activity was supposed to mean that you and your fellow co-workers were standing up and determining your own fate. You are tired of being a victim. You are standing up for your own dignity. Labor unions were started by working people just like you, like most of us. They sought self-determination through interdependence and collectivity. That takes work and risk taking. The unions at one time were excellent at getting us to do those things. But given the pitfalls of organizing in traditional labor unions, we have to find some workable alternatives. The models that rely on worker power with low “over-head” and are easily won without the experts are non-traditional models; direct-action, non-majority union, worker-centers and independent unions.

TA: You’ve been involved in efforts to organize workers into non-traditional unions operating outside of the legal and institutional framework shaped by the NLRA and traditional forms of collective bargaining – namely, the Philadelphia Security Officers Union and the Restaurant Opportunities Center. How do these kinds of labor organizations work, and what advantages do they have over the normal way of doing things?

FR: The Philadelphia Security Officers Union (PSOU) was many things before it was a union. We first started off as a organizing drive led by SEIU. Many people have heard the stories of how SEIU turns its back on workers. SEIU made a lot of arrangements with employers in the 2000s to gain membership. We were their premier experiment. We did not know it at the time, but we were a bargaining chip. If we had known we probably would never have joined their effort. SEIU sold out the security officers at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University in order to gain voluntary recognition for security officers in other cities. We found ourselves like the workers in Wisconsin, without any hope to join a union.

That did not mean that we had to quit organizing and fighting. The few security officers that we had plus our campus, union, community and faith activists formed a direct action campaign. After our campaign won paid sick leave for security officers at Penn, Temple and Drexel University and after that we won 50% wage increases for some security officers at Penn. All told this amounted to more than $2.8 million in new wages, benefits and work place improvements for hundreds of security officers in Philadelphia. After these victories, we decided to formalize the security officer’s organization.

We then formed Philadelphia Officers and Workers Rising (POWR). POWR was a workers center led by security officers. POWR and Jobs with Justice added legal support to our effort and were able to win $120,000 in stolen back wages for some security officers that worked at Park View Towers. With that win behind us, POWR felt that they had enough strength to win a union election at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. POWR had affiliation talks with other unions. We talked with everyone from the Security, Police, Firefighters Professionals Association to SEIU and the IWW. It was at this time that we learned that security officers cannot join most unions. Due to Section 9(b)(3) of the NLRA, security officers can only join unions that have no other workers in them besides security officers.

This explained why SEIU has had to spend most of its time organizing employers rather than security officers in order to win recognition. They have to get the permission from an employer, on the front end, before they began organizing the workers. In order to win voluntary recognition, SEIU has to clarify the “next” reality with employers. SEIU had to tell employers what the most important features of a collective bargaining agreement will look like if and when they grant recognition. SEIU also has to work out with the employer which workers will be in the union and which will not. The workers are not made aware of this until it was too late. Instead of the workers choosing their union, the union and the employer choose the workers.

We were not the chosen ones. We had very few options. The security officers figured that they were better off taking their chances on their own. That is when the PSOU was formed as a non-majority labor union. While we were a non-majority union we won paid sick leave at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we were able to form a steward system that the employer respected in some firings. We were able to win a back the jobs of all of our activists that were fired during the organizing drive. We also won lunch breaks for security officers in the Perelman Building. The PSOU filed a petition for a union recognition election in September 2009 and they won on October 10, 2009. We are still fighting for our first contract. We will win that eventually and we will have set up a permanent working class institution. However, if you look at the record of actual victories the union won, they virtually stopped for two years when we stepped into the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) system.

TA: What are some of the disadvantages and challenges confronting non-traditional unions?

FR: The biggest challenge facing working people who want to organize for victory is the lack of knowledge about how to run effective campaigns and build strong organization. Many people say that these groups lack money and that this is a big problem. It is true that they lack money, but I don’t believe it is that big of a problem. The truth is, even the lowest paid worker can cover the cost of a hundred fliers. It takes more than fliers, of course, but the material costs are low. Our movement has come to rely on expert organizers, consultants, union executives and lawyers. These are unnecessary costs for most people who just want to gain some control over their work lives.

If you are a pissed off worker, you can win if you know how. It doesn’t take much specialized knowledge and just a little bit of discipline, a lot of creativity and patience. Professional organizers in the labor movement, in our declining days, should be focused on spreading the “know-how” to the unorganized. If that does not happen, I am sure that working people can figure it out. Anyone can learn basic direct action workplace activism techniques. You can win. We did it in Philadelphia with dozens of volunteers and workers fueled with little more than welfare checks and track bikes.

TA: How have established, AFL-CIO and Change to Win affiliated unions reacted to the organizing drives you’ve been part of? Have they provided any kind of support for these efforts or are they seen simply as incursions into what they consider to be their turf?

I was employed by Jobs with Justice (JwJ) during most of this, and JwJ is primarily financed by unions. So in that regard, we were mostly supported by labor money. That stayed pretty consistent. The mobilization support from unions started off great and declined as we began to look more and more like a labor union. AFSCME DC47 and their locals were the last unions standing with us. They have a history as our city’s most progressive union.

I have to point out though, that it was not JwJ’s job to form independent unions. I think it stands to reason that if your organization veers too far off task that you will lose some support. Meanwhile, we gained support from students, faith leaders and community groups. These supporters felt like they were a vital part of something. They were an essential element in a campaign that no one else was going to run. They were not an appendage of a campaign that they had no control over.

TA: What do you think the U.S. labor movement will look like ten years from now?

I think that NLRB-recognized labor unions will shrink even further. I cannot say by how much but some scholars predict they may shrink to as little as two percent of the workforce. I hope that they are wrong. With EFCA in the grave, and as conservative governors assault us and win, I don’t see any reason to expect any rebound from the existing model. Since the assault on public sector unions began, we’ve been saying “We are all Wisconsin! Ohio! Rhode Island! Pennsylvania!” To me that sounds more like a recognition that we are all getting our asses kicked.

My prediction is that other kinds of worker justice organizations will have to rise. They may be informal, and their goals will be focused on collective empowerment and not collective bargaining agreements. Workers’ rights and civil liberties have been rolled back so far that some people even feel comfortable talking about repealing the 14th Amendment. But working people will fight back. We will get through this wilderness without a guide through creativity and hard work. If we’re willing to do it, then we can win.