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| Source: Chattanooga Times |
Richard Mellor
Affscme Local 444 retired
HEO/GED
2-12-26
I’m reading an article in Jacobin by Chris Brooks, the former Labor Notes Staffer who made it to where he wanted to be, a mover and shaker in the UAW before he was fired. Brooks and other former so-called labor experts like Jane MacAlvey have nothing but contempt for working people. Jacobin is full of experts on unions and workers struggles that have never spent more than a day or two on the job fighting in the workplace. There’s a few more of them. They have no shame at all these people as so many of us witnessed them kissing up to the union hierarchy in an effort to work their way in to the labor bureaucracy.
Brooks Jacobin article is titled: Unions Are Going to Die Unless Something Big Changes Soon. This is the title from a desperate aspiring bureaucrat who has no understanding about how workers or union members think and why we act in ways that we do.
This depressing article is enough to put you off your supper and shows how ignorant Brooks is about history and how little he understands working people. After all, he’s not now or never has been one.
Brooks writes:
"Unfortunately, the vast majority of the 115.5 million nonunion private sector workers out there have little to no idea what the NLRB is, what their rights are, or the extreme hostility they will face from their employer once they start talking to their coworkers about why unionizing makes sense. "
This is standard arrogant garbage from people like Brooks and other Labor Notes types who think they were born to lead the working class as we are too stupid to recognize we’re opressed. Workers might not know what the NLRB is or their union leadership, but why would they? Neither produces the goods so they appear to play no role in the workplace or in members’ lives. Wages and benefits decline and union dues rise, go figure.
But we know very well how "hostile" the boss can be as we are in the workplace every day. That statement just confirms my point that people like Brooks have no right to lecture workers about any aspect of the workplace, him and others like him have been part of the problem; an obstacle to organising because to change the nature of our unions we will have to have an open confrontation with the present leadership and from Brooks et al, that has to be avoided at all costs; you might not get a staffers job.
I remember someone making the point about how workers just didn’t get it when they voted the union down at the Amazon factory in Bessemer Alabama twice. “What’s the matter with them” this very trendy lefty said to me. Well, those workers that don’t know how hostile the boss can be knew how hostile the boss can be. They knew very well that if they voted “yes” to unionization the boss would go on the offensive. They also had a good idea what the union leadership’s response would be; a letter writing campaign perhaps, or have an informational picket line or have Bernie Sanders stop by the town for a public photo op and they knew the boss, in this case Jeff Bezos, would not find that threatening at all. So they played safe. The worker knows that if you want us to stand up in the workplace, put our job and families welfare on the line, you better shut this bastard down. You’d better bring some real power to the table.
I am writing this very quickly as I have little time. But there is one other very important point to mention about Brook’s Jacobin article and I have made this point many times in general when Brooks was writing about the UAW organizing drive at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee. As far as I can see in the Jacobin article, Brooks never mentioned the labor leadership, leaders, or the word “leadership” with regards to the hierarchy and the policies of the organization. Brookes refers only to “the union” when he tells us how desperate and weak the union is and why union density is so low.
This is not an accident. It is a deliberate tactic to avoid the inevitable conflict that will arise if he places the blame for the failure to organize more members and win major material gains where it belongs, the group that develops these policies, the trade union leadership.
I took this up with him a long time ago in a previous piece on the trade unions and groups like DSA and Labor Notes. One explained my view on why the present leadership refuses to fight and that a new militant leadership will not be built by Labor Notes or DSA and their staffers or the academics that claim to be labor experts and are regularly sought out by the mass media during labor disputes.
In response to Brooks explanation for why the “unions” organizing drive at the UAW plant failed I wrote:
“…in this latest report Brother brooks again, when raising failed tactics and strategies, refers to the UAW as opposed to the UAW leadership. But the tactics are not developed by the UAW; they are determined by the leadership of the UAW. The only way the unions will be made into democratic fighting organizations and the unorganized will be organized, is if we look at the policies of the union leadership as distinct from what is in the interests of the union membership.”
Jane McAlvey has the same approach when she mentions the VW defeat writing that in “…. Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the United Auto Workers were out-organized in 2014 during the Volkswagen campaign…”
I have the same response to this, “Again, the “workers” in the UAW, the rank and file of the UAW, were not “out-organized”. It was the leadership of the UAW that developed the disastrous strategy that led to three defeats at the Chattanooga plant, the UAW leadership is responsible for that defeat, not the membership.
To point to the real cause of the defeats and the present state of the unions would ruin any chance of these characters from making any headway at all in the ranks of the labor hierarchy which is their goal. So they blame the “union” which means the members and the real culprits are off the hot seat. They are a left cover for a right wing class collaborationist bureaucracy to which they all aspire to penetrate.
Brooks is a labor faker and unfortunately the left, in many of its forms is full of them
Here’s a couple of pieces relating to this subject.
A Fighting Union Leadership Will be Built by Rank and File Activists
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