Solidarity Unionism

Description

Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below

By Staughton Lynd
Introduction by Immanuel Ness
PM Press

Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd’s experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement.

While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic.

To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers’ self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas.

This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.

Check out our 2021 Industrial Worker content about Staughton Lynd’s Solidarity Unionism and what it means today.

“Solidarity Unionism is an essential text for all rank-and-file workers as well as labor activists. Beautifully succinct, it outlines how CIO unions grew into an ineffectual model for rank-and-file empowerment, and provides examples of how alternative labor organizations have flourished in the wake of this. Lynd illustrates to a new generation of workers that we do have alternatives, and his call for a qualitatively different kind of labor organization gives us an ideological and strategic framework that we can apply in our day-to-day struggles on the shop floor.”—Diane Krauthamer, former editor, Industrial Worker

“Staughton Lynd’s Solidarity Unionism mines his decades of labor activism and a century of American workers’ struggles to shine a beacon on an alternative path that replaces top-down labor organization with local autonomy and community-level networking. Before you despair of reasserting workers’ rights and power, read Solidarity Unionism!”—Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!

“In Solidarity Unionism, workers are protagonists, not spectators, and that makes all the difference in the world. Staughton Lynd’s ideas will be at the heart of the next mass worker rising.”—Daniel Gross, co-founder of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union and co-author of Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks