BOOK REVIEW: Tell The Bosses We’re Coming
by C.M. Lewis
The recent revival of labor’s militant wing has had an additional blessing: new voices and new ideas presented in ways accessible to those unfamiliar with labor.
Journalists like Sarah Jaffe did that work long before it was en vogue; now, voices like Kim Kelly, Juliana Feliciano-Reyes, and others have widely enriched the state of labor journalism. Jane McAlevey made the provocative decision to pierce the bubble of labor secrecy—and conventional wisdom that labor organizers don’t write about organizing—with her autobiographical Raising Hell and Raising Expectations, followed by practical strategy guides like No Shortcuts and A Collective Bargain, which synthesize existing approaches and analyses for an audience hungry for ideas.
Shaun Richman’s book, Tell The Bosses We’re Coming, seeks to join that company. Richman—the Director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College—draws on decades of experience as a union organizer, including Deputy Director of Organizing at the American Federation of Teachers. The purpose of his book, as he puts it, is to “get past abstraction” and identify “what parts of the system are worth preserving—and possibly reforming—and which we should seek to get rid of.”
Richman’s core argument is a familiar one: that labor law, regardless of its original intent, has become a prison for workers. It’s not without merit. Over time, the original format of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has been changed by case law and subsequent legislation, especially the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. Public sector labor law (where it exists) has been modeled on the same regime that prevails under the private sector, sometimes with even more stringent restrictions (as under New York’s Taylor Law) on the right to strike. Few states (California and Illinois, among a few others) have provisions for greater union rights not afforded in the private sector, such as card check elections.
His solution becomes more apparent partially through the book: to create structures and alternative approaches for worker organization that surround, rather than fully replace, the enterprise bargaining system created by the NLRA. He offers a number of options: wage boards and sectoral bargaining and minority unionism among them. Again, they’re familiar arguments, if presented differently here. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has heavily emphasized alternative forms of worker organization, including minority unionism (such as graduate unions at private universities like Emory) and the Fight for $15 campaign. At their most extreme, SEIU officials like David Rolf have teetered on the verge of jettisoning traditional labor organization; ex-SEIU President Andy Stern has abandoned the idea of unionism altogether.
One of his ideas is more innovative, and there’s one key chapter in Richman’s book for which he deserves credit: universal just cause. Just cause is a familiar concept to unionists, even though “at-will” employment prevails for most American workers. It has often been touted as part of the “union difference,” and few advocated for universal just cause as a policy position except Richman and his frequent collaborator Moshe Marvit until it was included in Bernie Sanders’ Workplace Democracy Plan in the 2020 primary. Not only is Richman right that it would serve to encourage new organizing, it would present one of the most fundamental shifts in labor relations in American history, sharply curtailing the right of employers to hire and fire with near impunity. Polling shows that it’s popular with workers, to boot.
Though it treads more familiar ground, Richman presents an engaging argument regarding multiemployer pension plans and healthcare trusts that addresses nuance and detail in a way few union proponents of Medicare for All do. Single payer advocates often seem unable to grasp the nature of union objections to healthcare, in part because they seem to misunderstand how union healthcare works and how it plays a role in how unions operate and organize institutionally. The result: unconvincing and schematic arguments that do little to woo unionists reluctant to embrace single payer. Richman has no such difficulties.
This speaks to one of the book’s strengths: engaging and accessible presentation of issues that are often complex even for seasoned unionists. Gatekeeping is often an unintentional—and sometimes intentional—issue in labor, with the arcane procedures and quirks of labor law treated as esoteric knowledge guarded by business agents, officers, and stewards. Democratizing that knowledge isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s good unionism. Every steward and representative has a story about discovering long-standing contractual violations that had been let go for years by workers because they didn’t know it was a violation, and didn’t know to ask their union.
He also very appropriately critiques the tendency of overvaluing “received wisdom” in labor circles. Things are often done because that’s the way they’re done, with little interrogation of whether it’s right to do it that way. Questioning assumptions isn’t iconoclastic—at least, not inappropriately so—it’s a necessity. Any organizer knows that honest debriefs, while sometimes ego bruising, are an utter necessity to advance the cause of labor. If what you’re doing isn’t working, get rid of what doesn’t work. The same exacting standard should be applied to our strategy.
But there are downsides to Richman’s book. For all its narrative accessibility and appropriate skepticism toward idols, Richman’s arguments seem written for policy wonks looking for ideas. His casual dismissal of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act is at odds with his insistence on addressing many of the issues (like the ban on secondary striking) that PRO addresses. At times, his world is one of legal maneuvering run by lawyers and union leaders, with workers cast as victims of the system. His solutions are sometimes equally byzantine.
Take his proposal for a judicial assault on boss-friendly elements of labor law, for example. Richman suggests, based on his reading of case law, that the legal decision allowing for permanent replacement of economic strikers was flawed. So he proposes a campaign to overturn it. Workers themselves play no defined role in his proposed campaign—the levers of action are filing grievances and unfair labor practices, jamming the courts, and provoking a Supreme Court showdown (one that will not happen in the current Supreme Court as it requires four justices to grant cert to a case). If we lose at the Supreme Court, who cares? We won’t have lost anything—we didn’t have it already.
Organizers and workers could be forgiven for balking at this plan. It proposes a large investment of time, money, and union resources into backing an arcane gambit that Richman acknowledges is more likely than not to fail—in fact, it’s far less likely to succeed than securing a legislative fix (an approach Richman views with skepticism). Even if there is little to no legal downside—he is correct that we have nothing to lose legally—unions are composed of real, living workers, and are certainly negatively impacted by expensive defeats, especially when defeat is known to be a likely outcome.
Several foundational claims made by Richman rely on unsubstantiated assertion and supposition. Some, such as his claim that unions commonly propose management rights clauses and that contract expiration results in the “status quo of the newly organized shop,” are overstated or misleading, but not foundational to his argument. They serve as more evidence of the rottenness of the system. However, one is crucial: that employers prefer to deal with a single union versus multiple unions (a consequence of exclusive representation), and that multiple unions would lead to competition to the benefit of workers.
This deserves more careful scrutiny—and the best answer to it is offered by Chris Brooks, who wrote on Tennessee’s system of multi-party bargaining. Actual evidence demonstrates that multi-party bargaining significantly weakens the position of workers. Competing “yellow unions,” such as the Professional Educators of Tennessee, weaken the ability of workers to bargain with management. It’s a central tenet of unionism that divide and conquer is one of the core weapons of the boss, and an even more fragmented workplace only strengthens their hand. Moreover, the often internecine raiding between unions is bad enough—in a setting without exclusive representation, less ethical or solidaristic unions will be encouraged to fire sideways to gain members, rather than focusing on fighting the boss.
The idea that competition will lead to better representation mirrors free market thinking—that healthy competition leads to better outcomes or “products,” and that a competitive market of unions will lead unionists to vote with their feet to join the best union available. Richman is no reactionary, and is clearly dedicated to the labor movement, but there is a clear symmetry between his arguments and those raised by union opponents. The Right has used the idea of union competition to attack “monopoly bargaining”—their term for exclusive representation. According to them, they’re not opposed to unions. They want better unions—which will be best provided through injecting competitive, free market principles into worker representation.
Another question is raised by his analysis of “no strike” clauses. He is correct regarding the pervasiveness of no strike clauses, as well as the bizarre case law establishing “implied” no strike clauses under the assumption that some contracts require that all disputes be resolved through the grievance procedure. The private sector penalties for violating a “no strike” clause can be severe; in worst-case scenarios, unions can be decertified for material breach of contract.
However, a look at the public sector—which includes even stronger strike restrictions and similarly harsh penalties, such as jail time and onerous fines—raises the question of whether this is an intractable problem. New York’s Taylor Law imposes punitive fines and threatens jail for union leaders that violate the ban on strikes; unions still violate it. New Jersey likewise establishes stiff penalties for unions that strike in violation of the law; Jersey City educators still struck in 2018. Strikes are banned in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona; all still struck. In the case of the United Teachers of Los Angeles strike, educators struck over charter expansion—which is prohibited under California law, as charter expansion is not a mandatory (or even permissive) subject of bargaining. In the world Richman portrays, those scenarios are impossible—and yet they happened.
An argument could be made that this is more possible in the public sector and that public employers are more susceptible to pressure and public opinion. However, private employers are not immune either. General Motors revoked healthcare for striking auto workers in the fall of 2019—something fully within their “legal rights.” By refusing to pay for healthcare, the company shifted costs on to the union strike fund, making it difficult for the union to maintain a prolonged strike. Public outcry and union pressure forced them to reverse course. The demonstrable ability to strike in violation of the law and win—and for even private sector workers to leverage public opinion against companies—suggests that restrictions on strikes are not insurmountable obstacles, and that careful organization and campaigning can win even where the law is unfavorable.
A final part of Richman’s argument is the idea of tripartite labor relations—in simple terms, the state more aggressively intervening in labor relations. It’s a key aspect of corporatism and is commonplace throughout Europe; Germany is arguably one of the most advanced examples of tripartite labor relations. One of Richman’s suggestions is industrial wage boards on a federal level, with appointments made through the Secretary of Labor. To counter suggestions that the government may simply become another vote for management, he points out that labor would be able to run “boss campaigns” against the state.
Setting aside ideological problems—tripartite bargaining originated as a Christian democratic antidote to labor militancy—there are practical challenges. European nations with tripartite bargaining have a broad political consensus supporting tripartite labor relations, and largely lack the bloody history of industrial warfare that has characterized the United States. In short, all the parties agree that the fundamentals of the system are necessary; German corporations have even sought to expand works councils abroad (as in the case of Volkswagen operations). Basic political consensus is necessary to make the system work as intended.
This can’t be said of the United States, and tripartite bargaining is a policy wonk fix to a political problem. Neither major political party can be said to champion workers’ rights; one is dead set on razing labor law to the ground. If such a system existed under the Trump administration, we would face regulatory capture run amok. It’s a fair assumption that a radically anti-worker majority would have had de facto control of even more labor policy than they did through control of the National Labor Relations Board. We can’t craft clever policies that will supplant the basic political problem posed by lukewarm-to-hostile views of organized labor.
Richman’s book raises interesting and sincerely provocative questions, and his thoughts on just cause should be adopted by organized labor as a major policy demand. He is correct that much of labor’s approach comes from unquestioned received wisdom, and he does everyone a service by questioning it. Our present approach isn’t working, and we can’t keep ignoring the hard reality that stares us in the face every year when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data showing union decline.
However, his argument is undermined by selective evidence and a tendency toward abstract wonkishness. In seeking to prove that the law is a prison, Richman sometimes fits the facts to suit his argument, selectively presenting scenarios and interpretations of how law restricts unions while ignoring examples of unions defying or pushing the law. The reality is far more muddled: a contest of power mediated through legal and contractual structures. Sometimes, those structures do work to contain the struggle. Sometimes, those structures break under the pressure.
We need to dramatically rethink how we approach worker organization, and we need to push labor law to reshape the structure of labor relations in the United States. Tinkering around the edges won’t work. But we have to think practically about the political reality we inhabit—which isn’t an argument for inaction, but rather an argument to think soberly about what we can and can’t accomplish in the short and long terms.
One place we can start: what we control. This is less discussed by Richman, but is the most logical place for organized labor to begin reshaping the movement. Internally, within organized labor, we can take concrete steps to broaden the idea of unionism beyond contract maintenance and enforcement, expanding youth programs and at-large membership programs and meaningfully including non-bargaining members in internal culture and decision-making. Decoupling union membership from membership in a bargaining unit doesn’t require the boss or the state to approve it, and doing so is a necessary precondition for any expansion of alternative forms of organization like minority unionism.
Richman’s book offers ideas for the future—some of which, like just cause, are truly innovative ideas that should be adopted. At its best, it makes one question many fundamentals of union wisdom. It’s a valuable contribution to a discussion, even at points where it missteps. Unionists serious about reviving the movement should read it—even if they come away with sharp disagreements on how best to proceed.
C.M. Lewis is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.
Editor’s Note: Two Strikewave editors offered commentary on early drafts of Tell The Bosses We’re Coming and were thanked in the acknowledgements. Neither were involved in the writing or editing of this review.