by Cathy Highet

Why is a vibrant democracy important to a strong union? One way to answer this question is by comparing unions to human bodies. To be strong, they need strong bones, strong muscles and a strong heart.

In our bodies, our bones give us structure, solidity and leverage. The labor movement has bones too, things that give it long-lasting, concrete power. These include written documents – such as contracts with employers, union constitutions, and labor laws – as well as tangible assets – like union halls and bank accounts.
For example, suppose you want overtime after eight hours worked in a day. Having a union contract that requires daily overtime is by far the easiest way to get it. Often, employers will simply follow the contract. If they don’t, a grievance is often enough to make them, and if that doesn’t work, an arbitration probably will. If you have good contract language or not, you can always organize, but with the contract language you’ve got an additional, powerful tool.

Or within your union, perhaps you want “one member one vote” – direct election of international officers. If your international union’s constitution provides for direct elections, you can be pretty sure those elections will occur. Otherwise, to get direct elections will probably take a major battle.
Overtime language in a union contract and direct elections in a union constitution are examples of union bones. Good bones give union members good leverage.

We strengthen the bones of the labor movement when we fight for long-term, enforceable concessions. Perhaps the reason you have daily overtime in your contract today is that your union went on strike ten years ago. The Teamsters have direct elections today because Teamsters for a Democratic Union fought for them thirty-five years ago. Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act because a century ago workers were in the streets.

If we are strategic, we can turn our wins into long-term gains. These long-term gains are the bones of the labor movement.
But bones are static – they can’t move themselves. The overtime provision in your contract doesn’t magically produce overtime in your paycheck. Your employer will pay overtime if they think the alternative to paying overtime now is paying it after an arbitration. However, I’ve seen many workers with overtime rights on paper who don’t actually get overtime in the real world. Sometimes people work off the clock because they want the work done and know they won’t get permission to work long enough to do it. Sometimes members are scared to file grievances. Sometimes their union doesn’t push their grievances.
What makes paper rights a reality is people fighting for them. Just like human bones need human muscles to move, union bones need union muscle. A union’s best muscle is members standing up for their rights – organizing.

When you tell a coworker about that eight-hour provision and help them file a grievance, you turn that paper right into a reality. You use union muscle to move the union bones. Similarly, your right to elect union officers (bone) doesn’t do any good unless you use it – and that means not only signing up to run for office but organizing large numbers of members around the issues they care about (muscle).

So, muscles need bones and bones need muscles. What’s more, you can use each to build the other.

Take the UAW as another example. Unite All Workers for Democracy organized UAW members to win direct elections – muscle strengthened bone. Those direct elections enabled UAWD and other reformers to elect a militant organizer (Shawn Fain) as a leader – bone strengthened muscle. Fain and a courageous, mobilized membership fought to eliminate wage tiers in the Big Three auto contracts – muscle strengthened bone. Reduced wage tiers mean all members are in the same boat and strengthens solidarity – bone strengthens muscle. And so on.

One reason why strong unions are strong democracies is that both use the same muscles. Human bodies use the same muscles to do lots of different tasks. The same strong back that helps you pick up something heavy at work helps you carry a sleeping child home.

The same is true of union muscles. Gearing up for a strike requires members who can take initiative, map out their workplace, and mobilize each other to reach out to every member. They need to understand what matters to members and get commitments from them to fight for it. And that’s exactly what it takes to elect new leadership.

If you have strong union strike muscles, you’ve probably got strong union democracy muscles, and vice versa.

Another thing you already know about muscles is that if you exercise them, they strengthen – and if you don’t they go away. If you work out regularly for a year until you’re nice and buff, you can’t then sit back for the next year and congratulate yourself on a job well done. Your muscles will weaken if you stop flexing them. Organizing requires relationships and skills, and those relationships and skills weaken if you ignore them.

If your union election isn’t for two years or your contract doesn’t expire for three, you can’t just sit back until the big event. You have to train up for it. Luckily, there are many ways to train. If excess overtime is an issue right now in your workplace, you can build a committee right now to fight it, and those skills and relationships will be there for you come election time. Maybe there’s even some bone you can strengthen, like a change to your union’s bylaws.

But that sounds like an awfully long, hard path doesn’t it? If you don’t answer yes, you haven’t thought it through properly.
So that brings us to the last part of a strong body – the heart. In the human body, the heart brings food and oxygen to the muscles.

When the muscles are weary, the heart takes the lactic acid and carbon dioxide away.

What’s the heart of the labor movement? If you’ve picked up a copy of Union Democracy Review, you’ve got your own answer to that. Perhaps you call it solidarity. Or the right of all human beings to put a roof over their heads and live the dream in their hearts. Or the magic of seeing someone stand up and take back their dignity. Or a belief that you should do onto others as you would have them do onto you.

Over my years in the labor movement, I’ve had the privilege of watching a lot of people stand up for something they believed in. Their reasons were all a little different, but most of them involved dignity, integrity, and autonomy. Those are the sorts of things that get you through a tough night; a slick slogan won’t. If you want people to dig deep and sacrifice for their union, it must be their union.

So, if you want a strong union, it needs a strong heart. And that strong heart takes a genuine, healthy, on-the-ground democracy.

And if you’ve got that heart? Then you can rebuild your bones and muscle, no matter how weak they are now. We have direct elections now in the Teamsters because decades ago truck drivers built a movement – against mobsters. We have the National Labor Relations Act today because a century ago, immigrant textile workers and ordinary autoworkers were willing to face armed militia and police.

Believe it or not, we’re made of the same stuff they were. We’ve got the same hearts. So we can rebuild the labor movement no matter what our opponents throw at us.