Dan Morris

Improving White-Collar Organizing

"With so many financial firms in the dumps, a labor union that normally represents nurses, janitors and bus drivers is aggressively seeking to expand its ranks with disgruntled bank workers." That was the lede of a recent New York Post business article exploring the uphill battles of an emerging SEIU white-collar organizing campaign. There is certainly anger over how some banking executives received huge pay packages as they created the conditions that led to increased uncertainty and vulnerability for average employees barely getting by. But whether this level of frustration can translate into sustainable momentum for successful organizing remains to be seen. "Any organizing attempt of white-collar workers" is "more challenging," one union rep was quoted as saying.

One of the best accounts of those challenges is a 1952 essay by C. Wright Mills called "A Look at the White Collar." Many offices aren't unionized, Mills noted, because unions haven't learned how to organize employees who work in them. This is still true today. We need to build white-collar organizations that could actually work directly with employees of banks and financial services firms. "The unionization of white-collar workers will solve many of their income and security problems, in the same sense that unions have solved such problems for many wage workers," Mills concluded decades ago. Let's finally prove him right.

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Posted at 6:11 AM, Dec 11, 2008 in
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