The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

One of my best friends is a very accomplished labor organizer, with years of experience working for teachers and nurses unions; he also has really solid politics, and is one of the handful of people who can make me rethink my assumptions from scratch.  I recently sent him a quick note about my STO research, and in passing used the phrase “extra-union organizing,” without giving the term much thought.  He wrote back:

“And now, I have to give you some shit. What is extra-union organizing? like, say, workplace organizing? like a different name for union organzing? I know you aren’t an academic, but that one sounds very academic to me.”

Those couple of sentences reminded me that I need to be more clear with my language.  I wrote back to him, attempting to explain what I understand by the term “extra-union.”  My initial reply was brief, and I have greatly expanded and revised what I wrote, but what I said went something like this:
 
As far as I can tell, “extra-union” is not really academese, but more a variant of old-left jargon, probably of European origin.  In Europe (and in Latin America), revolutionaries sometimes speak of movements and actions as being “extra-parliamentary,” which I understand to refer to political organizing outside of parliamentary channels, which we in the US would call “legislative.”  Similarly, extra-union organizing, as I understand the term, refers to labor organizing outside of the traditional unions, especially the AFL-CIO.  (Another term with a similar construction is “extra-legal,” which I have always thought of as a slightly evasive way of saying “illegal.”)

Extra-union organizing seems to have some overlap with another relic of old-left jargon:  “dual-unionism.”  As I understand it, dual unionism advocates the creation of a second (dual) union in shops that already contain an established labor union.  I think the IWW did this sometimes back in its heyday, although I’m not really sure.  In contrast, extra-union organizing seems more concerned with a direct approach toward class struggle on the shop floor, mobilizing workers around specific campaigns without pushing the creation of or recruiting members for an additional institutional structure in the workplace.  However, to the extent that a “union” is broadly defined as any grouping of workers organized to improve their conditions of work, extra-union organizing could be seen as a form of dual unionism.

Framed this way, extra-union (but not necessarily dual unionist) organizing was the general practice of STO, especially during its early years:  members got jobs in factories, and often worked with independent shop floor committees around issues of particular concern to other workers.  Some workplaces were represented by established AFL-CIO unions (some better, some worse), but others had no union whatsoever.  In unionized workplaces, STO members were sometimes involved in apparently “anti-union” work, when they came up against a particularly corrupt local.  In some of these cases they worked toward replacing a bad union with a better one, but in other situations the emphasis was more directly on confronting collusion between management and the union.  A common example here involved challenging the results of fraudulent contract ratification votes, which involved an implicit challenge to the union without going to the extent of attempting decertification.

In shops with no union, STO was sometimes involved in struggles to unionize the workplace, but often members organized independently on the shop floor to obtain improvements in working conditions.  Wildcat strikes were part of the arsenal in situations like this, but more low-key forms of struggle such as slowdowns and sabotage were more common. 

The overall goal was always to build the power and consciousness of the workers themselves, which for STO was contrasted with union reform campaigns and appeals to contractual grievance procedures and so forth (although STO sometimes made tactical use of such systems when they were available). 

I don’t want to draw too extreme a picture here:  as Noel Ignatin explained in his preface to the 1980 edition of Workplace Papers, “STO is not dual unionist in principle and it is not anti-union.”  The “in principle” clause was important here, “because the question is not one of principle but of tactics. There are times when it makes sense to break with an existing union and organize another.” (p.1)  For STO, the context of a particular struggle was highly important in determining the appropriate way to proceed.  

To me, at least, this seems quite different from union organizing in the traditional sense.  On the other hand, STO always admired the old original IWW, without apparently noticing that the Wobblies had undergone a modest resurgence in the very years when STO was most heavily focused on workplace organizing.  In the broad sense of “union” described above, one could argue that the “extra-union” organizing pursued by STO was in fact “a different name for union organizing.”  But to the extent that most people understand a union to be a formal institution like the IBEW or the Teamsters, it seems to me that there is a distinction here worth making.

I hope that makes it clear what I meant by the term. 

…

My friend wrote back not long after I finished writing this, to expand on his own thinking.  I like what he wrote, so I’m quoting it here:  "I was trying to (in a fairly inarticulate way) make the point that most fights that take place in the workplace — including an organized workplace–are fights about issues or power, not ‘union’ per se. And, the fun ones and the fights more likely to be successful are the ones where the workers are running things and the union staff are a resource to help with info, strategy, etc. That’s actually the goal of being a union organizer — to make yourself unneeded. Even with places where people have been organized for a long time, a lot of times being in a union with a decent contract means workers have the job security to be able to fight over a given issue. (Which isn’t to say workers in unorganized workplaces don’t fight over issues). That’s why people talk about forming a union as a tool to address the things workers care about, and why a union vote shouldn’t be a vote on ‘the union’ but on issues and whether workers want to change them…"

[Also tangentially related to all this:  In a different context and in a more theoretical way, Harry Cleaver makes a similar argument, one which ties the question of extra-union organizing back into the question of dual consciousness (which Cleaver reconceptualizes, I think less helpfully, as “divisions within the class”). In Reading Capital Politically Cleaver contends that: “The alternative to ideological critique, whether of the political economy or the philosophical variety, is to begin from a strategic analysis of the pattern of development of working-class power as the only possible ground for answering the question of how that power can be increased. Such an analysis requires starting from an examination of workers’ actual struggles: their content, how they have developed, and where they are headed. By this I mean the struggles of the workers themselves, not of their "official" organizations (trade unions, parties, etc.). The actions of these organizations may accurately express the struggles of the workers themselves, or they may not. They are often completely at odds with them. It is because of this that we must begin with the unmediated struggles themselves. Since the class is not monolithic but is divided — capital rules by division — the examination of such struggles necessitates an analysis of the different sectors of the class and their interrelations, especially how the struggles of one sector are, or are not, circulating to other sectors. It is only through a circulation of struggles, in which those of various sectors of the class interlink to become complementary, that real unity against capital is achieved. Without such complementarity, "class consciousness" is only an ideological gloss; with it, "class consciousness" is superfluous. Therefore, it is essential for an assessment of present working-class power to clearly perceive both the divisions within the class — which must be understood as basically hierarchical divisions of power vis-a-vis capital — and the degree to which those divisions are being overcome. It is only within this framework that we can correctly situate the role of the "official" organizations of the class.” (2^nd edition, p. 58)]