Betting on the Future: Youth and the Labor Movement

By Ben Waxman, WireTap. Posted March 15, 2005.

There is a crisis facing American workers. Union membership has plummeted to a measly 12 percent of the workforce, compared to 35 percent 50 years ago. Forty million people are without health care and real wages continue to decline. The concerns of workers are frequently absent from public policy debates, with many politicians eager to embrace corporate centrism. Many believe the rightward turn of U.S. politics can be directly linked with the decline of organized labor.

Recently, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council met in Las Vegas to discuss a variety of proposals for rebuilding the strength of the labor movement. The location was ironic because of Vegas’s appeal to young people. Reaching out to young people is precisely what unions aren’t doing well enough. It wasn’t on the agenda in Vegas, but it should have been. Part of the answer to rebuilding the strength of unions was right under their noses. While some young people might fantasize about winning big money at the high-stakes poker and craps tables adjacent to the meeting, strong unions are the real key to economic security for the next generation. And the labor movement needs to start paying attention to young people if it wants to rebuild its strength.

The AFL-CIO actually has several innovative programs for facilitating youth participation in the labor movement. For example, the Organizing Institute (OI) is widely regarded as one of the best training programs in the country. Thousands of people have been tutored in campaign strategy, grassroots mobilization, and community organizing at the OI. The OI also has strong programs to reach out to traditionally marginalized groups in the labor movement, such as people of color and LGBT workers.

While these programs are excellent, training young people to be organizers isn’t enough. It’s hard to fill organizing schools if students and youth aren’t even interested in the labor movement in the first place – organized labor needs to make itself relevant to us. To reach out to the next generation, organized labor needs to make a concentrated effort to become involved in movements led by young people.

This includes initiatives led by groups like United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and living wage campaigns. Besides the reaching out to young people, these campaigns are obviously in the self-interest of labor unions. The Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), as a joint effort between Jobs with Justice and the United States Student Association, is an important attempt to build alliances between young people and the labor movement. These campaigns in support of workers rights are often an important educational experience for progressive student activists.

But if labor wants ongoing support from young people, it must in return provide support for student struggles. Several unions in the education industry take an active role in campaigns for fully funded public schools and higher education, but many sectors of the labor movements are absent from these fights. Sadly, when students assemble a list of possible allies for these campaigns, unions are often left out. The labor movement can correct this oversight by actively reaching out to students fighting for quality education. By showing support for a broader social justice agenda, unions can develop a pool of potential organizers and activists.

Moreover, supporting broader educational justice campaigns tends to involve larger segments of the student population than campaigns like sweatshop labor. While groups like USAS and SLAP are almost exclusively composed of left-leaning students, campaigns centered on education engage less partisan young people as well. While these individuals might be less likely to become organizers, receiving support from the labor movement might favorably alter their disposition towards unions in the future. Young people have to be conditioned not just to want to work for the labor movement, but to join unions as well.

And this is the biggest hole in the AFL-CIO’s current strategy to reach out to young people. Too much effort is spent on idealistic activists and not enough on making regular students more sympathetic to unions. Young people must be conditioned to become pro-union. When campus workers go on strike, students need to know why honoring picket lines is important. College students are often tempted to be scabs during labor disputes. If more young people become pro-union, the labor movement would be strengthened during campaigns that rely on community support to succeed.

Unions need articulate spokespeople making their case to the general public. This is something the business community and free market ideologues understand. They pump millions of dollars a year into public intellectual training programs designed to build the next generation of right-wing thinkers. There are literally dozens of post-undergraduate fellowships in economics, journalism, and public policy for conservatives. In contrast, there isn’t one program sponsored by the labor movement to train promising young people for similar careers. The labor movement needs students not just to become future staffers, but allies in public discourse.

Ultimately, politics is a war of ideas. I believe the labor movement can win over the next generation because cooperation and dignity are more attractive than greed and cutthroat capitalism. Investing in students isn’t a gamble; as conservatives have found out, it’s a sure bet. The labor leadership who met in Las Vegas would do well to realize unions have a huge stake in winning over the next generation.

Ben Waxman is a political science major at Juniata College. He has worked for several labor unions and can be reached at benwaxman@gmail.com.

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