In June of 2023, the Durham, North Carolina city council voted down a raise for city employees which would have made up for the two years workers did not receive step pay increases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers were frustrated with the raise they did receive, which did not keep up with inflation and the rising cost-of-living.
In September, workers in the solid waste department “stood down” for six days, refusing to load their trucks and demanding a $5,000 bonus to make up for income they lost during the pandemic.
Public-sector workers in North Carolina are prohibited by law from collective bargaining and striking, but a month later, the city council approved $6.5 million in bonuses for city workers, with all workers earning under $42,800 per year receiving the full bonus of $5,000 demanded by the workers’ union, UE Local 150. The following spring Local 150 won the largest wage increase in years in the 2024-25 budget, with full-time workers receiving an average raise of $8,000.
Business unions, on the whole, tend to avoid conflict with management. If most of the work of bargaining contracts and arguing grievances is done by paid business agents, those business agents have an incentive to bargain and settle quickly, even if they are accepting settlements that do not meet the members’ needs.
Even some militant or progressive unions cannot always be relied upon to take on a given fight, if they are run in a top-down manner or too reliant on staff. If a group of workers’ issues do not align with the priorities of the top leadership, they may not be given the staff support that such unions have come to believe is necessary to mount resistance to the employer.
Member-run unions, on the other hand, will never shy away from a fight that the members want to take on, because they rely on the members themselves to carry out that fight.
Furthermore, as UE noted in our 2020 booklet Them and Us Unionism, our economic system itself is constantly creating conflict in the workplace:
The very nature of a corporation in the capitalist system requires it to constantly strive for a higher and higher profit, so under capitalism workers have to constantly struggle against the employer’s drive to increase the amount of profit they extract from us.
Corporate domination of our society means that even employers who do not need to seek profits, such as schools and universities, state and municipal governments, nonprofits and cooperatives, tend to emulate corporations in their treatment of workers.
The purpose of a union is to defend its members’ rights in the workplace; whenever bosses trample on those rights, a member-run union will be able to engage in aggressive struggle to fight back.