No Illusions and No Retreat for Union Militants at Labor Notes
Nearly 5,000 workers packed Labor Notes’ biennial conference outside Chicago last week. The mood was sober, the challenges immense, and the appetite for organizing as large as ever.
Whether labor is on the march or in a defensive crouch, Labor Notes remains the place where union militants go to learn how to strategize and fight back. (Jim West / JimWestPhoto.com)
Labor Notes’ biennial conference used to be the sort of gathering where veteran attendees could recognize many of the others in attendance. Barry Eidlin, a labor sociologist at McGill University who first attended Labor Notes in 1998, remembers a conference that felt very different. “I think they broke a thousand, and that was crazy,” he told me. “I remember the Labor Notes staff just being gobsmacked by that attendance.”
Back then, the conference occupied a much smaller corner of the labor movement. “There was a much sharper divide” between the Labor Notes crowd and much of organized labor’s official leadership, Eidlin recalled.
“It used to be that the UAW [United Auto Workers] and Teamsters and SEIU [Service Employees International Union] would send pickets to the Labor Notes conference,” said Eidlin. “We haven’t seen that in a while.” A lot has changed since those years. These days, the UAW, Teamsters, and SEIU all have leadership affiliated to varying degrees with the project, both at the international and local levels.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.