Organizing for Power: Building a 21st Century Labor Movement in Boston

By Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

Boston’s economy has become defined by a disconcerting trend that has intensified throughout much of the United States since the 2008 recession. Economic growth now delivers remarkably few benefits to large sectors of the working class – a phenomenon that is particularly severe for immigrants, people of color, and women. Labor in 21st Century Boston explores this nation-wide phenomenon of “unshared growth” by focusing on Boston, a city that is famously liberal, relatively wealthy, and increasingly difficult for working people (who service the city’s needs) to actually live in.

Labor in 21st Century Boston is the only comprehensive analysis of labor and popular mobilizing in Boston today, the volume contributes to a growing body of academic and popular literature that examines urban America, racial and economic inequality, labor and immigration, and the right-wing assault on working people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642596458

Book preview

PRAISE FOR ORGANIZING FOR POWER

What an excellent look at the significance of class struggle and progressive social movements in the Boston metropolitan area! This is a book that goes beyond examining the institution of unions, but instead focuses on the multifarious efforts to refound a genuine labor movement. Though this book focuses on the Greater Boston area, the examples explored and the lessons learned have a value throughout the country. That the book focuses so clearly on one geographic site of struggle helps it to avoid a level of generality that frequently undermines other analyses.

—BILL FLETCHER JR., author of Solidarity Divide d and They’re Bankrupting Us! and Twenty Other Myths about Unions

These fresh, wide-ranging perspectives on recent labor struggles in the greater Boston area shed light on a surprisingly understudied region of the United States. Taken together, they offer a sobering, yet hopeful portrait of organizing efforts among increasingly precarious working people—including immigrants, women, and people of color—to challenge and transform the neoliberal order.

—RUTH MILKMAN, author of Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat

"As America has ineluctably transformed into a postindustrial economy, so has the character and nature of its working class. Organizing For Power: Building a Twenty-First Century Labor Movement in Boston is a comprehensive guide to understanding the formative changes in the American class structure and how organized labor can regain relevance to a chaotic spectrum of contemporary workers. Drawing on the shifting landscape of Boston, Chomsky and Striffler’s book is essential reading for grasping the opportunities and challenges of trade unions in the United States today."

—IMMANUEL NESS, author of Organizing Insurgency:

Workers Movements in the Global South

"Organizing for Power offers an uncommonly comprehensive yet granular view of a single city labor movement’s attempt to cope with structural and demographic change in the early twenty-first century. Striffler and Chomsky have convened an impressive array of postindustrial Boston’s labor brain trust—including academic activists, union leaders and alt-labor strategists—to sketch a path forward on both the organizational and political fronts."

—LEON FINK, author of The Long Gilded Age:

American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order

With political polarization and legislative paralysis forestalling progressive innovations at the federal level, unionists and community activists have rightly looked to cities like Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston to build power and construct social policies designed to give workers—of all ethnicities, sexual orientations, and legal statuses—a voice in twenty-first-century America. In this splendid collection, Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler have put in dialogue a wide-ranging set of activists and academics who offer important and insightful accounts of how the Hub City has become a terrain of struggle where the working-class has won important battles, even in an era bookended by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Their stories bare careful reading—and emulation!

—NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, editor of Capitalism Contested:

The New Deal and Its Legacies

© 2021 Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

Published in 2021 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-64259-645-8

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [e-mail] for more information.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Race, Immigration, and Labor in Boston

Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

Part I: Labor, Power, and Inequality in Boston

1.Unshared Growth: Earners and Earnings Inequality in Boston Before and After the Great Recession

Randy Albelda, with Aimee Bell-Pasht, M A, Urata Blakaj, M A, Trevor Mattos, M A

2.Boston’s Public Sector and the Fight for Union Survival

Enid Eckstein

3.A Tangle of Exclusion: Boston’s Black Working Class and the Struggle for Racial and Economic Justice

Aviva Chomsky

Part II: Boston’s Workers and Unions Confront the Twenty-First Century

4.It’s Not in the Water: Surviving the Neoliberal Onslaught in Lynn, Massachusetts

An interview with Jeff Crosby by Aviva Chomsky (April 26, 2018)

5.If We Don’t Get It, Shut it Down!: University Cafeteria-Worker Organizing, the Information Economy, and Boston’s Inequality Problem

Carlos Aramayo

6.Non-tenure-track Faculty: On the Vanguard of a Renaissance in the Boston Labor Movement?

Amy Todd

7.Raise Up Massachusetts: Experiment in a New, Universal Labor Movement

Harris Gruman

8.Coalition Building in the Age of Trump?: Lessons from the Solidarity School

Eric Larson

9.Immigrants and Worker Centers in Boston in the Shadow of Trump

Aviva Chomsky

10.Policy Group on Tradeswomen’s Issues: A Collaborative Learning Community Crushing the Barriers to Women’s Careers in the Construction Trades

Susan Moir and Elizabeth Skidmore

11.Organizing under Criminalization: Policing and Sex Workers’ Rights in Rhode Island

Bella Robinson and Elena Shih

12.Conclusion

Erik Loomis

NOTES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Race, Immigration, and Labor in Boston

Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

Boston’s economy is booming, but many Boston residents continue to struggle to make ends meet. The unemployment rate has fallen to pre-recession levels, but the median income has remained unchanged for a generation. A quarter of full-time, full-year workers, and just under half of all labor force participants, earn less than $35,000.¹

In July of 2017, twelve hundred nurses at the Tufts Medical Center carried out a one-day strike—the largest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history, and the first one in Boston in more than thirty years. By the end of the year, the union signed a compromise contract that won enhanced staffing to improve conditions for nurses who had been overloaded with up to five patients at a time, along with raises and some management concessions to sweeten the unwanted transition from a defined-benefit pension to a defined-contribution retirement plan—a 401(k). In part because the union had framed the action in terms of patient safety and quality health care, the strike quickly got the support of local labor unions, including apparently unlikely allies like the Building & Construction Trades Council and the Teamsters. Boston mayor Marty Walsh, a former union leader himself, and other community leaders also backed the strikers. The strike captured the attention of the news media, which provided the nurses with generally sympathetic coverage.²

Was the nurses’ strike a sign of increased or resurgent militancy, solidarity, and working-class power? Or is it to be understood as an inspirational, but ultimately isolated, expression of worker discontent that would do little to reverse the decades-long decline of union density and working-class power in the city? Or a mix of both? Only time will tell, though in the intervening period since the summer of 2017, the United States has experienced a remarkable wave of strikes, with New England playing its part. The February 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike started it, quickly followed by statewide walkouts in Oklahoma and Arizona as well as teacher revolts throughout the country. By the fall, close to eight thousand Marriott workers were striking in eight cities, including Boston. And some thirty thousand Stop and Shop workers went out on strike throughout New England supermarkets in April 2019, only to be followed by fifty thousand GM workers nationwide that fall.

In all of these cases high levels of community and political support for the workers contributed to broad public approval of unions—driven in part by increased concerns about runaway inequality. All of this suggests that we are perhaps at a pivotal moment, with the labor movement poised between decades-long decline and potential revival. To be sure, labor unions are decimated and powerful interests continue the political-economic assault against working people. It is far too early to suggest that the strike wave has altered the balance of power in any significant way. Yet, as recent revolts suggest, more and more people are concluding that not only is the system rigged, but that a labor movement rooted in unions and community organizations may provide one of the few ways of blocking or even reversing this decades-long attack on working people.

In this respect, the nurses’ strike is instructive of some of the obstacles labor faces, which of course are not unique to Boston. This was not a case where management quickly caved when confronted with a powerful union backed by community support. Prior to the one-day strike, the nurses had negotiated for well over a year in more than thirty long and bitter meetings. Their demands around pay, benefits, and working conditions were modest, and focused more on forcing the hospital to meet regional standards than achieving radical change. The nurses’ backs were up against the wall, and achieving the kind of unity and courage needed to pull off a strike took years of hard work—but by no means assured success. Tufts’ immediate response was to lock out the nurses and hire out-of-town scabs, threatening patient safety.³ This arrogance ultimately proved to be Tufts’ undoing, but it is nonetheless suggestive of how brazen and confident today’s employers can be when dealing with labor. Had Tufts not been one of the crown jewels in Boston’s vaunted global healthcare innovation economy, or had it handled the conflict with a bit more discretion, the nurses might not have received such overwhelming support and attention from labor, community groups, and the media.

It is also unlikely that the strike produced a sea change within the health care industry, let alone altered the balance of power more broadly between workers and capital. While Tufts ceded on the all-important staffing issue, nurses were forced to give up their defined-benefit pensions, albeit with the sweetener of additional employer contributions to the hospital’s 403(b) retirement plan. Union bargaining committee chair Mary Cornacchia concluded, somewhat ambiguously, that it is a win for us, a compromise, but both sides did do a lot of compromising to get to where we’re at now.⁴ Moreover, when the Massachusetts Nurses Association attempted to scale up in 2018, sponsoring a ballot measure to mandate safe staffing levels statewide, the state’s Health and Hospital Association mobilized massively against it and the initiative was resoundingly defeated.

The nurses’ strike, the hardline response by Tufts, and the mobilization and risks involved in the move to the electoral arena, offer a glimpse at how the working class, as well as forms of labor organizing both within and outside of unions, have changed in the Boston region during the past several decades. While in some ways the trajectory of Boston’s labor movement mirrors nationwide trends, the area’s particular pattern of collapse and recovery, progressive politics and provincialism, and racial division and immigration can deepen our understanding of the multiple structural challenges facing the twenty-first-century labor movement, and how unions and other working-class organizations are struggling to overcome them.

In this respect, the greater Boston region is an ideal place to study this larger conflict, in part because it presents a complex picture of the nature and strength of organized labor and what is sometimes referred to as alt-labor—new forms of worker and working-class organization. The city upholds a reputation for being liberal and union-friendly, and organized labor continues to wield significant political clout. The election of Boston Building Trades Council president Marty Walsh as mayor in 2013, and the blueness of Massachusetts as a whole, testify to the continued political influence of organized labor. And yet, despite labor’s relative strength in Boston and Massachusetts, the labor-liberal alliance has never been particularly militant, and has often aimed more at delivering gains to a small sector of relatively privileged (and often white) workers than at empowering working people or addressing the gross inequalities that have long plagued the city. The union fortress has at times defended its walls and protected members’ interests, but it has been less capable of going on the offensive or expanding coverage to include broader sectors of the working class.⁵

Taking the greater Boston region as its lens, our anthology explores the political-economic transformation of the United States and its labor movement since the late twentieth century. The neoliberal era—characterized by deregulation, deindustrialization, free trade, and public sector cutbacks—has weakened labor’s traditional core and its political clout, even as immigration and the growth of the informal and service economies have created new potential sites for labor militancy. These changes have also challenged unions to rethink older strategies and explore new forms of solidarity with allies outside its historic comfort zone. The nurses framed their strike in terms of the larger public good—what has come to be known as social justice unionism—and their successful appeal to more traditional unions like the Teamsters and Building Trades is but one of many instances in which Boston labor is beginning to respond in innovative ways to the disintegration of the New Deal order that had shaped it. These transformations, including organized labor’s struggle to navigate a changing landscape, have created new conditions and sites of militancy that have led working people who were historically excluded from the house of labor to devise alternative strategies, approaches, and organizations.

The chapters in this book explore these new spaces, approaches, and organizations, which have challenged how we think about the past, present, and future of the labor movement and the larger working class. How do unions look to redefine themselves, and help advance broader working-class interests outside the workplace, while also retaining and expanding workplace-based organizing and power? What types of alternative forms of labor and community organizing based both within and beyond the immediate workplace are emerging, and how do they help (or hinder) working people in advancing their interests? Finally, in what ways do these various forms of organizations interact with each other, and what does this mean for the future of the labor movement?

Themes and Overview

In the epilogue of James Green and Hugh Carter Donahue’s seminal 1979 study entitled Boston’s Workers: A Labor History, the authors summarized the challenges facing Boston workers in the post-World War II period.⁶ They identified key issues that have remained relevant to the city’s workers in the four decades since the book was published. One theme that was central to Green and Donahue’s work, and to this volume, is the structural changes that have shaped Boston’s labor market. Since Boston’s Workers was published, the city’s postwar decline was reversed by the so-called Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980s and beyond, which created vast wealth and distinguished Boston from other deindustrialized cities of the northeast. The high tech, financial, education, tourism, and medical industries have created a sharply divided local labor market in the context of national neoliberal retrenchment, particularly in the privatization of public education and other government cutbacks. Waves of new immigrants came into the racially divided city and entered both the top and the bottom tiers of the new economy.

The low-wage, precarious economy serving Boston’s better-off is populated primarily by immigrant and other workers of color who live in an expensive region with a limited safety net. Massachusetts, and in particular the Boston area, are among the most expensive regions in the country.⁷ The city itself ranked first in the nation in inequality in 2014, although researchers cautioned that its large student population could be depressing the lower levels of the income spectrum. Nevertheless, the city’s Office of Workforce Development acknowledged that too many Boston residents are having trouble accessing economic opportunity. One in five Bostonians lives in poverty—close to one in three children under eighteen—and a far greater share earn too little to afford the high cost of living in the city.⁸ Not surprisingly, people of color suffer the highest unemployment rates and the highest poverty rates in the city.⁹ Median household earnings are $79,802 for non-Hispanic whites, $38,454 for Blacks, and $30,883 for Hispanics.¹⁰ While people of color comprise 53 percent of Boston’s population, union leadership is still predominantly white, and unions have not been immune to the city’s racial divide.

A second theme addressed by Green and Donahue as well as this volume is the role of organized labor in Boston. Massachusetts has historically enjoyed strong unions that have been important players within the city’s political life while insuring relatively high wages and strong benefits for a significant portion of the working class. Yet Boston’s unions have suffered from some of the same political, internal, and structural forces that have decimated unions nationwide. Union density has fallen to about 12 percent in Massachusetts, and unions are overwhelmingly concentrated in the public sector (with over 50 percent density, versus 6.4 percent in the private sector).¹¹ Like their counterparts around the country, unions in Boston struggle between seeking to protect the declining, but still considerable, power and benefits that organized labor has won for the unionized sector of the workforce, and attempting to recreate a social movement unionism in alliance with immigrant, ethnic, and other community organizations.¹² These represent different visions of unions’ role in society, the constituency of unions, and what kind of working class the labor movement represents. This debate, in Boston as elsewhere, has produced both tension and innovation within the labor movement.

The final theme is the lives and organizations of Boston’s precarious workers, both inside and outside traditional labor unions. A number of our case studies highlight different types of strategies and campaigns pursued by low-wage workers in Boston and beyond under adverse political and economic conditions. It is not surprising, given the region’s combination of economic expansion and inequality, that workers have sought multiple and alternative ways of organizing and fighting for their rights. Black workers have combined struggles for access and autonomy both inside and outside of unions. On the margins of Boston’s famed universities, food service workers and adjunct faculty are fighting for union representation. Raise Up Mass, a union-community coalition, has fought for state-level legislation to raise the minimum wage and provide benefits for workers regardless of union membership. Sex workers struggle against policing, while immigrant-based worker centers struggle against wage theft.

Organizing for Power paints a picture of labor in Boston that is both dynamic and grim. As the nurses’ strike demonstrated, although the political and economic forces arrayed against workers and their organizations are powerful and well-organized, workers continue to struggle for dignity, improved wages, and decent lives. The diversity of Boston’s working class is both its strength and its weakness. Divided by language, culture, race, and workplace, and facing both anti-union and anti-working-class policies at the national level, Boston workers nevertheless have the strength of their many histories to draw on, and the energy of their hopes and dreams.

This anthology emerges from an ongoing dialogue between politically engaged academics and area labor activists to reflect upon the challenges facing the labor movement today. Part I of the book, Labor, Power, and Inequality in Boston, consists of three chapters that explore transformations in the city’s recent history, with a particular focus on how economic shifts since the 1970s have not only increased inequality (impacting different groups in distinct ways), but have posed particular challenges for labor unions’ ability to advance the interests of working people as a whole. Part II, Boston’s Workers and Unions Confront the Twenty-First Century, examines how labor organizations and working people have tried to survive and organize on this shifting terrain.

Boston’s Labor History in National and Historical Context

The making of Boston’s working class was deeply shaped by industrial-ization and the associated waves of immigration from England, French Canada, and Ireland in the early nineteenth century, and from southern and eastern Europe in the latter half of the century. After European immigration was curtailed in the 1920s, Boston, like other industrial cities in the north, received new migrants: African Americans from the US South, followed by Puerto Ricans in the 1960s, and other immigrants of color from Latin America and Asia in the later twentieth century. The city’s economy was global from the start. Shipping, trade, and finance were pivotal industries and their ties to slavery and the plantation economies of the West Indies and the US South ran deep.

In Boston as elsewhere in the country, nineteenth-century immigrant and labor radicalism was mostly subsumed and contained by the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by the early twentieth century. The AFL had a long history of representing white, native-born craft workers and excluding immigrants, workers of color, and lower-paid, marginal workers. In much of the country, the Congress of Industrial Workers’ (CIO) industrial unionism surged in the 1940s and 50s and challenged the exclusivity of the AFL while bringing Black and white workers together in unprecedented ways. In so doing, the CIO greatly expanded the reach of the labor movement among new sectors of low-wage workers and workers of color.

As Green and Donahue showed, however, Boston’s trajectory was particularly unfriendly to the industrial unionism of the mid-century. The city’s economy was based in small-scale, lighter industries like shoes and textiles, which began to experience industrial decline early in the century. Although most studies of deindustrialization in the United States rightly focus on the 1980s and 1990s, in Boston the process started much earlier. The mainstays of Boston’s unionized industries, meat packing, printing, rail transport, textiles, docks, and light manufacturing all went into steep decline after World War II. Government-funded urban renewal projects created some jobs, but its long-term effects were to expand the low-wage, nonunion service and clerical sectors.¹³ Thus Boston’s, and New England’s, industrial workers faced the challenges of capital flight, plant closures, and industrial decline a half a century before deindustrialization confronted what came to be known as the Rust Belt.¹⁴

Boston’s trajectory of labor organizing was also out of step with that of the country’s industrial heartlands. As Green and Donahue explain, when a new industrial union movement, the CIO, arose to challenge AFL business unionism in the mid-1930s, Boston’s workers took a backseat to the workers in the great, mass-production industrial centers . . . [The] working class as a whole did not take the great step forward in Boston that it took in other cities.¹⁵ The city’s unions retrenched into what Heiwon Kwon and Benjamin Day call political collective bargaining, a top-down strategy exchanging loyalty to politicians for favors to their members.¹⁶ Postwar migrants and immigrants to Boston faced a far less hospitable economy and labor movement than in many other northern cities.

New postwar immigrants entered low-wage sectors of the economy, and upward mobility was curtailed due to limited opportunities for gaining access to better, unionized employment. The first generation saw migration as a door to opportunity, but, especially among migrants of color, their children confronted joblessness, discrimination, and segregation. The civil rights and liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s reflected their frustrations, raised expectations, and made them much less willing to accept poor working and living conditions.¹⁷

The 1970s: A Key decade?

Labor historians have pointed to the 1970s as a transformational decade.¹⁸ Global economic restructuring and deindustrialization, a concerted attack on unions, civil rights gains, the beginning of a new influx of immigrant workers from Latin America, and the Wars on Crime and Drugs coincided and inter-related to shift the contours of labor in the United States. Women and people of color pushed for unionization in the aftermath of gains associated with the civil rights and women’s movements. The business class went on the offensive and successfully reduced the power of unions and working people. Private sector unions lost ground in the workplace and in the political arena. Growth in the public sector partially masked unions’ decline in the private sector. Some white workers, encouraged by their employers and conservative politicians, turned their frustrations against the very groups who had just acquired basic rights and were pushing for economic justice—women and workers of color.¹⁹

In Boston, deindustrialization was well underway by the 1970s. By 1980, 54 percent of Boston’s workers labored in office-related activities—the highest proportion in the country.²⁰ In 1972, Boston employed a third of the metropolitan region’s workforce; by 1992, this was down to one fourth as the suburbs attracted both new businesses and relocations from the city. Even manufacturing grew in the larger metropolitan area, while declining by 44 percent in the city proper between 1972 and 1990. Boston also lost thirty thousand retail jobs between 1970 and 1990, while the retail industry exploded in the suburbs. The new suburban jobs were much less likely to be unionized.²¹

The city’s population fell from 801,444 in 1950 to 562,994 in 1980.²² Much of the population decline was due to white flight, as federal policies encouraged suburban development through highway construction and low-interest mortgage loans. Routes 128 and then 495 circled the city and laid the foundation for a booming new high-tech industrial corridor that drew its workers from the expanding suburbs. School desegregation—dubbed forced busing by its opponents—came late to Boston, and it was met with violent protest. Like elsewhere in the northeast, desegregation ended at municipal boundaries, becoming a further motivation for white flight.²³

The 1970s saw the beginning of a new surge in immigration nationwide, primarily of people of color from Latin American and Asia. Black migrants to Boston in the 1950s and 60s had come from the US South. In the 1970s this pattern shifted and the Black population grew primarily with migrants from the Caribbean. These immigrants entered an already racially divided city and labor force, in the context of industrial decline.

The relationship of Boston’s unions with its populations of color, including the new groups of immigrants of color, has been complex. Green and Donahue pointed out that the city’s history of strong ethnic politics and the absence of heavy industry and CIO-style unions undermined the development of a multiracial working-class identity and politics. Lacking the experience of integrated unionism created by the CIO in other cities, they write, Boston unions have failed by and large to meet the city’s racial crisis of the 1970s they wrote at the end of that decade.²⁴ When Boston’s Black and other workers of color mobilized in the 1960s and 70s, it was outside as much as inside of unions, and it was for access to jobs, housing, and schools as much as for greater rights in the workplace. Rising activism by workers of color coincided with ongoing job contraction, making it less likely that white males would open their unions to women and minority workers. As Green and Donahue explain, in an economy of scarce jobs and scarce housing, in which economic security is harder to obtain, efforts to desegregate in any area—schools, jobs, neighborhoods—will be perceived as a threat by many white workers, even in cases where desegregation benefits everyone by increasing federal and state funding. Boston-area labor unions focused less on defending the interests of the working class as a whole than on protecting the limited privileges enjoyed by their white members. Within a contracting economy, trade unions, which earlier won immigrant workers steady jobs and better working conditions, had become part of the problem rather than part of the solution as far as minority workers are concerned.²⁵

Women and people of color carried on their struggles both inside and outside the workplace. Community organizations like 9to5, the United Community Construction Workers and the Third World Workers Association organized to press for the rights of women and workers of color for equal pay, treatment, and access to jobs. As Lane Windham noted, the women’s organization 9to5 mobilized "the