Union membership in the United States is at its lowest level in decades. Nonetheless, unions have hit a 50-year high in public approval. Enthusiasm for unions is not manifesting solely in polls, but also in shop floor organizing by young and lower middle-aged workers.

Simultaneously, the 2010s have seen a proliferation of social movements focused on race, gender and other forms of identity. Despite this simultaneity, it is unclear if present-day union structures and leadership are capable of learning from and incorporating the insights of such social movements.

At a national scale, unions have been slow to diversify their leadership, with continued underrepresentation of women and people of color. Even where there is such representation, it is unclear if unions are positioned to convert this newfound mass approval into an inclusive rising tide for the entire labor movement — let alone for, and towards, socialism.

In this context, what should socialists opposed to all forms of domination and exploitation be doing about labor unions? Through what framework might insights and personnel offered by social movements be learned from and incorporated into unions?

A partial answer has come from a broad swath of socialists: rank-and-file power. This means union members exercising control over their unions, rather than union bureaucrats or officials doing so. The 2018 re-release of Kim Moody’s “The Rank-and-File Strategy” has most widely propagated this approach. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy has become the terms of debate within Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a point of discussion for socialists in general.

However, this strategy overlooks the potential for rank-and-file interventions on various forms of structural racism. Such interventions translate into a rank-and-file strategy that does not consign itself to a simplistic focus on bread-and-butter and the point of production but rather points itself towards the interwoven wealth issues of racialized housing and education. This brings us to a modified union position that accounts for and immediately acts upon the dynamics of an immediate and racialized lived-space: municipalist syndicalism.

Municipalist syndicalism broadly means democratizing unions as a means to democratizing local and regional public power. This is done through advancing an anti-racist dual power agenda for the labor movement by building and acting with communities of color on issues beyond the job. Jobs are simply not enough, even as unions often exclusively focus on them as a means of community empowerment while harmfully conceding total control over land use. Yet, as Marnie Brady notes, “Pitting decent jobs against decent housing is a false dilemma,” particularly where the legacy of “redlining” (housing discrimination and wealth differentiating residential segregation) is still with us.

Thus, a municipalist syndicalist rank-and-file strategy begins with pluralistic “militant minorities” democratizing unions so as to include the rank-and-file of neighborhood, housing and other municipal struggles. It means reorienting labor unions towards funneling resources into constructing and sustaining vibrant tenant unions that in the long term seek to democratize residency and bring about a housing and homes guarantee and reducing harmfully long commutes.

Just as Big Capital increasingly controls real estate, making the lives of workers more precarious, One Big Union is needed to combat this. It means One Big Union includes not just labor unions, but tenant unions and those struggles addressing structural racism head on — and this One Big Union finally takes municipal and regional power and democratizes it.

When labor fails to do this, it fails surrounding communities and fails itself in the process, as shown by the case of 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

Proto-Municipalist Syndicalism among the New Left

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict, in which largely white labor unionists found themselves in direct conflict with Black and Brown residential communities in New York, highlighted the limits of mainstream US militant unionism and at the same time provided a roadmap of how to move beyond it.

The conflict was a result of the refusal of the predominantly white United Federation of Teachers (UFT) — previously elected as the exclusive bargaining agent between teachers and the New York Board of Education — to prioritize racial desegregation of schools in the district. The social democratic UFT simply saw race as “epiphenomenal” to class, and, failing to recognize the embedded racism of the system, it believed that “the course of history rather than the race-conscious hiring policies of community control would integrate school staffs.”

Moreover, UFT leaders argued “that teacher professionalism precluded parents from exercising significant authority in the schools.” In practice, this meant white teachers were opposed to parents of color exercising any real influence or authority and were invested in keeping such a racialized hierarchy intact.

Whereas the UFT had supported desegregation in the South, it chose to stay on the sidelines in fighting de facto segregation at home — it would not challenge the New Deal’s legacy of redlining wherein residential segregation cemented urban school segregation.

Despite the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decisions to desegregate schools in the mid-1950s, de facto segregation had only worsened in New York schools. This resulted in worsened wealth disparities and the early expressions of a school-to-prison pipeline. In response, the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools (CCIS) called for a one-day boycott of New York City public schools in 1964, which resulted in half a million students boycotting their classes in favor of attending major marches and pickets across the city. Despite requests by the CCIS, the UFT leadership refused to join.

This refusal, along with the failure to open an integrated public school in 1966, was seen as part of “white New York’s thwarting of integration,” which in turn fueled a “Black turn toward community control,” writes Daniel Perlstein in Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism. In December of that year, Black and Latinx parents led a sit-in at the Board of Education, and under pressure from the community, Mayor John Lindsay piloted three community-controlled school “demonstration” districts the next year. The community-controlled school district of Ocean Hill-Brownsville became the epicenter of conflict between white teachers and Black and Puerto Rican communities.

The newly elected school board, which included prominent Black nationalists who had been voted-in by the community — sought to transfer 19 white teachers and administrators out of the district. The UFT leadership, fearing that this type of decentralized community-controlled power structure would undermine their influence, chose the side of the dismissed teachers and administrators and demanded their reinstatement. The white teachers and administrators were provided with a police escort as they re-entered their schools, solidifying the commonplace belief that white professionals and unionists were agents of white supremacy. The school board and wider community rebuffed their entry.

Three citywide and UFT-led strikes ensued, pitting the 90 percent white union and its 54,000 members against a majority of predominantly students, communities, schools and neighborhoods of color. Public service had become the terrain of contestation, and it appeared that union officialdom was against any kind of substantive democratic anti-racist agenda.

In the midst of this conflict, a proto-municipalist syndicalist rank-and-file revolt emerged. Teachers aligned with the New Left “helped reopen hundreds of schools which [striking] UFT teachers had abandoned.” In taking over the schools, these teachers provided their students with a radical alternative to formal education. After two dozen teachers crossed the picket line and took over the Bronx High School of Science in alliance with students and parents, it was renamed as “Liberation School” and “governed by a committee of eight teachers and eight students whose decisions were subject to ratification by daily assemblies of all students and teachers.” The school declared itself in solidarity with community control advocates at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and in opposition to the city bureaucracy.

As such, New Left teachers advanced and briefly enacted an anti-racist vision of joint teacher-community control. Nonetheless, they did not hold the influence or formal organizational authority to shift the UFT towards such a stance, let alone the broader labor movement. Ultimately, school decentralization was significantly watered down. Union-community relations continued to sour.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict highlights what was true for much of the Long Sixties when identity-based social movements came into conflict with labor unions: the strengths and weaknesses of this era’s militancy. On the one hand, the era of rank-and-file revolts recalled and carried forth the “students’ demand for self-government” of the 1960s into unions and workplaces. On the other, it laid bare the “debilitating weaknesses” of the era’s revolts and strikes, including the confinement of respective rank-and-file organizations to their particular industry and union; a focus on replacing union leaders who often “did little, however, to alter the behavior of the unions”; and a failure to “build material alliances with the era’s social movements.”

Building on such strengths and rectifying these shortcomings bring us to municipalist syndicalism.