The San Diego Labor Council Gets New Leadership: What Will It Mean?
...with only a little more than 1 in 10 Americans in a union, labor needs to cast off the narrow, strictly bread and butter unionism of the past and embrace a more inclusive social justice model.
By Jim Miller
There’s a new labor leader in San Diego. With Keith Maddox stepping down as Secretary-Treasurer of the San Diego Imperial Counties Labor Council, Brigette Browning, President of UNITE HERE, Local 30, will be taking over the helm after running unopposed for the position. While there was no opposition for leadership of the council, the election of Browning does represent a significant and hopeful change for progressives in the local movement.
As a labor history educator in the only Labor Studies Program in San Diego County, the co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (a bottom-up history of our city’s labor and other social movements), and a long-time Labor Council delegate and a Vice President in my union, I’ve been through a lot of local battles and take a big picture, historic view of the current moment. And from that vantage point, I see a window of opportunity.
But here is the essential question: will local labor work with allies to help build a new, more diverse, and progressive San Diego or will it continue with business as usual?
While Maddox deserves credit for his good work in weaving the local labor movement back together in the wake of the split driven by the Mickey Kasparian scandals and subsequent civil war inside San Diego labor as well as his fundraising acumen and single-minded promotion of Labor Council food distributions during the pandemic, his leadership also had its drawbacks. An old-school labor conservative in the AFL mold, Maddox’s leadership was characterized by top-down, Chamber of Commerce business unionism.
Maddox’s close ties to the Faulconer administration, local corporate interests, and his failure to rigorously promote organizing and/or alliances with the community pleased some but left many rank and file progressive activists out in the cold. Unionists who wanted someone to take on corporate interests rather than schmooze them were inevitably frustrated as were those who prefer bottom-up rank and file democracy in the historic CIO mode to unreconstructed Gompersian leadership.
In sum, if local labor along with the broader national movement are to survive and prosper, we need to move beyond protecting the ever-shrinking labor status quo, broaden the movement, and fully embrace the kind of grassroots organizing and labor-community alliances that will win the future.
As Doug Porter pointed out in his column last week there is much hope on the horizon for labor with a broad swath of the American public now supporting collective bargaining (73% according to a new Politico-Morning Consult poll) and big possibilities out there like the PRO Act and the push for a massive infrastructure package that fights climate change and creates union jobs.
But with only a little more than 1 in 10 Americans in a union, labor needs to cast off the narrow, strictly bread and butter unionism of the past and embrace a more inclusive social justice model. As Donna Murch observed in her insightful Guardian piece on how the failed Amazon union-drive in Alabama still held the seeds of the future of American labor:
At the dawn of the Biden presidency, the most vital sector of the labor movement is in dialogue with the Movement for Black Lives’ call for reinvestment in communities of color. From the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) fighting for the rights of homeless students during the pandemic, to public sector unions at Rutgers University demanding layoff protections for the most vulnerable, a new generation of labor activists see workplace struggle as an essential staging ground for racial and gender justice. The turn toward intersectional unionism matters, because it is the new face of labor militancy in the United States.
In contrast to the images of a predominantly white male workforce in hard hats and heavy industry that has dominated popular imagination of unions over the past three-quarters of a century, this new labor movement skews black, brown and female. It is steeped in the social justice unionism that has been growing since the early 1970s. Black feminist concepts such as intersectionality and prison abolition have influenced a younger generation of labor organizers; they have repudiated the cold war’s narrow bread-and-butter unionism, which benefited the most elite workers, who were overwhelmingly white and male.
Brigette Browning’s work in UNITE HERE, Local 30 is a good illustration of the kind of organizing and militant unionism that can win the future for local workers. Her union took on large corporations, went on strike, and won big. And despite the heavy toll the pandemic took on their workforce, it’s clear that the UNITE HERE model of rank-and-file unionism driven by a heavily female, multiracial workforce fits the model Murch outlines.
Thus, with new leadership in the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council calling for an emphasis on organizing, building better alliances with community, and finding a way to assure that the new green jobs of the future are good union jobs, perhaps local labor can move from being happy it survived a bitter, divisive period to beginning to organize the workforce of the future and build a larger sense of solidarity that really believes that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Given the long, steep decline of union density over the last several decades and the recent turmoil in the San Diego labor movement, it would be easy to view the possibility of transformative change with skepticism, but hope, as Percy Shelley once said, is a moral obligation.