By The Rank and Filer, July 2012.
The following are the notes from a presentation the Rank and Filer gave at a panel on nonprofit unions.
Today we’re getting together to talk about the possibility of building a labor movement, and labor unions, among nonprofit and social service workers today. Outside of hospitals and government jobs, few social service workers are members of unions, and union drives at nonprofits are rare. In my social work education and during my years a community organizer in HIV and AIDS nonprofits, I rarely heard anything about social work unions. I’m here to talk a little about the remarkable history of social work unions that’s widely ignored in our education and among nonprofit social workers today. In the 1930s and again in the 1960s, social workers were on the leading edge of radical labor struggles in the United States. Working at government relief agencies, social workers built some of the fiercest, most militant, most democratic and most effective labor unions in the country. They built strong alliances with the rest of the labor movement, and with organizing among poor people themselves. They challenged the rest of the social work profession to think deeply about not only our work as social service providers as labor, but understanding social services in a broader radical vision of social justice and social change.
In the 1930s, radical social workers built “The Rank and File Movement”. In the midst of the Great Depression, broad social movements and militant organizing by the poor and unemployed demanded and won relief programs from the Federal government. These new social service programs hired thousands of new social workers, many of whom recent laid off from other industries and jobs. Social workers in the Depression faced every day the failure of the economic system to meet people’s basic needs, and the inadequacy of poor relief programs. They also realized that they themselves suffered as workers; they faced very low wages, massive case loads, and lived barely above their own clients. When social workers would get laid off, they’d often end up on the same welfare roles they used to administer. Large numbers of social workers joined the Rank and File Movement to build labor unions at relief agencies. They formed radical study groups on capitalism and socialism, established a newspaper called Social Work Today, and formed radical and democratic labor unions at relief agencies all over the country. Many of the core leaders of the Rank and File Movement identified as socialists and Communists, and saw their efforts as social workers as part of a broader movement of the poor and of workers to fight for a more just economic system.
After World War II, the Rank and File Movement was brutally crushed in the United States. Under mounting anti-Communism, the leaders and spokespeople for the movement were blacklisted from welfare agencies, and fired from their jobs at social work schools. The labor unions in welfare departments built by the Rank and File Movement were outlawed and broken. Welfare Commissioners, including in New York, fired everyone who was in leadership in the left unions built by the Rank and File movement, refused to recognize their contracts, and instead favored unions that banned Communists and socialists from leadership. These left unions were eventually thrown out of the national alliances of labor unions, and by the mid 1950s had been driven out of existence.
Only a decade later, however, social workers in welfare departments around the country again launched a radical union movement. In New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, workers in welfare departments formed independent, militant labor movements. In 1965, New York City welfare workers went on strike––shutting down the welfare system for an entire month in January. A year later in 1966, welfare workers in Chicago stuck for 14 days in May, and in Los Angeles County welfare workers went on strike for 18 days in June. These strikes were all enormously successful. Each were considered victories, and established new, independent and left-leaning unions.
In all three cities, this was a break from the conservative, timid and weak AFL-CIO unions that had replaced those unions crushed in the anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1950s. In Chicago, social workers built the Independent Union of Public Aid Employees, one of the only labor unions that openly challenged the Democratic Party machine of Mayor Daley. In New York City, social workers formed the Social Service Employees Union, quickly known as one of the most democratic and left unions in the U.S.
In each case, labor unions built alliances with the growing welfare rights movement. Leftists within these unions, especially caucuses of radical socialists, had a vision of poor people and workers fighting together to challenge city politics. In the contract they won in the 1965 strike, New York City welfare workers not only won full payment for their healthcare—a first for public employees in the city—but also an automatic clothing grant for all welfare recipients. This was unprecedented: never before had a NYC public employees union successfully won a demand that directly benefited the public, in this case welfare recipients, without any connection to their wages or working conditions. The New York City administration totally transformed the process of working with labor unions to make sure this never happened again.
A number of factors made these unions possible. The Black Freedom Movement, begun in the South, had expanded into Northern cities, battling chronic unemployment and severe poverty among Black Americans. Their struggle won expanded welfare benefits from the Federal Government, through a “War on Poverty”, creating new jobs for social workers.
Many of these new social workers had been activists in the civil rights movement. Many had been in active in Civil Rights groups like CORE and SNCC, and had joined left socialist organizations and deliberately decided to go to work in welfare departments as a strategic, core site for organizing and struggle. These left socialist anti-racist activists met older Communist social workers who had held on from their organizing in the 1930s and 40s, and together they organized their co-workers, established new independent unions, allied with their clients and social movements of the day, and launched their remarkably militant and successful labor struggles.
Many of these radical welfare worker unions were absorbed into broader federations of unions in the 1970s. Under constant pressure from city administration to behave themselves and become more conservative, many of them lost their radical edge in the mid and late 1970s. They were defeated in later strikes, forced to take weak contracts in the midst of the economic crisis U.S. cities faced in the mid-1970s. By the time welfare reform rolled around in the mid-1990s, few of the unions among welfare workers around the country put up any real fight.
While there are many differences in our grim political climate today characterized by broad attacks on welfare, social services and public employees, we still can learn a lot from these struggles for our work today.
One, social service workers absolutely can form unions. As social workers, we have a radical history of labor unions and labor struggles that can inspire our work today. These unions were made possible because social service workers recognized that what we do is work, often under intense exploitation, impossible expectations and inadequate support. They recognized that labor struggle and union contracts could improve their conditions, raise their wages, and win them dignity on their jobs. This is as relevant today as it was in the 1930s or the 1960s. We are all still workers.
Two, in both the 1930s and again the 1960s, unions were built by radical activists who chose to go into welfare departments in order to organize. For radical social workers today, often we go work at the most progressive non-profit we can find. These workers did something else: they chose places to work where they understood there could be a major labor struggles among the workers with an impact on society. They chose to be rank and file workers at large public service agencies, in order to build these unions. More radical social workers, I argue, should choose to work at large agencies, hospitals and government offices where labor unions already exist or could be built and play a leading role in the struggles ahead.
Third, these radical social workers recognized their fight was not separate from their clients. They build close alliances with militant movements among the poor and among welfare recipients, recognizing they shared a common struggle against capitalism and governments that served the wealthy. Together with their clients, they fought for economic justice, expanded social services, and economic and political democracy. As social workers today, we need to support movements lead by poor people and for welfare rights.
I’d like to close with two quotes, taken from these two moments of radical social workers from these two moments of labor militancy. The first comes from Mary Van Kleeck, a social worker in the Rank-and-File movement of the 1930s. The quote comes from a conference in 1934:
Those of us who say “Let us have evolution and not revolution”; those who say “Don’t let us go into chaos; let us just patch up the old”–those people are really supporting the old; they are swinging their support to the status quo…there must be no preaching of peace where there is no peace. It lies with the working class, with which social workers have the bond of common goals, to transform the principle of government and of industry alike from possession to creative work.
The second quote comes from the Program of the Rank and File Committee, active in the New York City Social Service Employees Union among workers at the Department of Welfare and the Department of Social Services in the late 1960s. Probably written in 1966:
In trying to present and develop a program for community action for the SSEU, the Rank and File Committee has three interrelated goals in mind. The first is to help the poor fight for their real needs, like jobs, job training, decent housing, education and the like. The second aim is to build an alliance between our unions and the poor that will increase the strength of both groups vis-a-vis the City. Thirdly, in conjunction with the poor, we want to begin the task of radically changing the nature of our job, welfare, and turn it into something progressive for the poor and meaningful to ourselves.
Post Script
Where did I get my information? In a post script to an earlier post, I go into some detail about sources on NYC, including the archival material from the Social Service Employees Union available at the Tamiment Library. Russell Schutt’s book Organizations in a Changing Environment is the most in-depth published work on Chicago. When it comes to California, I’ve only been able to find bits and pieces. Still working on it!
The blog’s current editor, the Rank and Filer spent about ten years working in the social services, most often as a community organizer. Now she’s studying Marxism and welfare. She’s recruiting co-editors and guest writers. You can write her at editor@rankandfiler.net.