If the Political Front of Our Revolution is the mind of our Movement, then the Green Front is its heart and its soul.  It is the most compelling reason that Our Revolution absolutely had to take place to start with. Moreover, it is the very human survival requirement that absolutely dictates why we can never allow Our Revolution to fail. No matter how hard the struggle, no matter the setbacks, no matter the sacrifices we must make, we must continue this fight at all costs.  Our failure will mean human misery, poverty, disease, displacement, war, starvation and death on a scale we don’t even want to think about.

The ecological challenge before the three or four generations that will vote in the 2020 election, and the three or four that will come after, is absolutely epic.  It is not only about carbon emissions, global warming, and man-driven climate change, although those are indeed huge parts of it that desperately need to be addressed. The greater problem is how do we transform our current, highly-quantitative, industrial and commercial systems (i.e. our greedy corporations) into the highly adaptive qualitative systems that we need to establish a post-industrial Human Ecology that is truly Sustainable on a global scale. The many complex and interconnected issues that must be confronted in this desperate quest for Sustainability are far too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that they are momentous enough that the empowerment of nearly the whole humanity is going to be required to meaningfully address them.

The move to Sustainability in a fully industrialized world is going to require that we become 4 times more qualitatively efficient. That does not mean producing 4 times as much product, or producing it 4 times as quickly, or gobbling up precious resources at 4 times our current rate.  That is Quantitative efficiency.  It is how we got into this sad predicament in the first place, and to continue utilizing these highly maladaptive economic strategies of quantity only digs our hole deeper.  Qualitative efficiency in the quest for Sustainability means doing what do now with ¼ of the resources or finding new methods that reduce our environmental impact by a factor 4 or better. This is the only way the Earth can sustainably support an industrial population of 7 to 9 billion people living modern lifestyles roughly equivalent to the lifestyles of those who live in the Western industrial nations today.

But here is the real kicker. All of this must be done in a mere blink of evolutionary time, about a single century or perhaps a few decades more if the rough consensus of the scientific community is to be believed. Beyond that time frame, scientific predictions based on our current trajectories get truly grave indeed.

What true post-industrial Sustainability really means is that we have to transform our societies in some fairly radical ways. A mere century from now every home, every school, every business, every public institution, every factory, every single human facility on the face of this planet needs to be seamlessly integrated into whatever natural occurring local ecosystem it happens to occupy, with near zero negative environmental impact.  This going to require a degree of qualitative adaptability that humanity has not needed in many millennia. The big quantitative, one-size fits all solutions, dictated from above, of our remembered past simply do serve us very well in bringing about such localized sustainable systems. Our time for the quantitative is largely over.  We no longer need to worry about bigger, faster, and more.  That is quantitative adaption. It is how we got here.  What we need to worry about now is how to locally continuously improve our post-industrial processes and systems to make them qualitatively BETTER, i.e., more Sustainable. By constantly improving our local systems to make them as environmentally integrated and self-sustaining as possible we can survive this global environmental crisis and we can successfully adapt.

Transforming our present quantitative economic methods, and the societies they support, to the qualitative economic systems we need to reach Sustainability in time, will not come easy, however.  Millions of powerful elites around the globe have personally invested stakes in preserving these maladaptive quantitative economic systems.  There is but one way to overcome this unbelievably formidable obstacle.  We must empower the masses of the whole of Humanity with a passion that is truly revolutionary in character.

The role of the Green Front of Our Revolution here in America will be to empower people to help make these vital ecological changes.  We must recruit and organize members from the myriad of environmental groups out there, and where possible co-opt entire organizations into the Green Front of Our Revolution.  These groups should range from the mainstream groups like the national Serra Club and the International 350.org to the more radical and determined groups like Earth First! and The Green Resistance.  That said, we can not afford to embrace groups that openly support offensive violence.  As with all the Fronts of Our Revolution our methods must remain based in modern adaptations of the peaceful, non-violent resistance model as practiced by Gandhi, King, Mandela and so many, many others in these last 70 years or so.  I can not say with absolute certainty that the other kind of revolution will be never be required to get us where we need to go if we want our descendants to survive. But I am certain that it is imperative to the success of our movement, of Our Revolution even, that we never are seen as the aggressors. If the Oligarchs and the reactionary forces they control attempt to use systematic state or paramilitary violence against us, armed resistance will eventually undoubtedly occur, but we should in no way encourage that horrible state of affairs. If it does occur, let the ocean of blood that will follow be on their hands, and in the final decrees of inevitable justice, upon their heads.

The Green Front of Our Revolution should operate on several sub-fronts.  1) We need to organize our allied scientists to better utilize their expertise in identifying ecological threats, suggesting what kinds of measures are required to address these threats, and to generally better raise the public consciousness of climate change/Sustainability issues. 2) With the help of these scientists, working together with legislators, and political and environmental activists, we need to flesh out the specifics of The Green New Deal and the most practical ways to legislatively achieve it. 3)  In the next 20 months or so we also need to be ridiculously visible to the whole of the American people in our resistance to the fossil fuel industry’s decision not to meaningfully change, to put today’s profits over the survival prospects of our descendants. We should organize protests at all kinds of facilities, from coal power plants to fracking sites to the Corporate headquarters of companies like Exxon-Mobile. Among the sea of signs, slogans and banners of diverse environmental organizations at these demonstrations there should be a fair few that read quite simply “Our Revolution.” 4) Finally, the Green Front should target, expose, and where ever possible, contribute to the political demise, of the many traitorous politicians that are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, at all levels of local, state and federal government, no matter what their political Party affiliations may be.

So, who should lead the Green Front of our Revolution?

One prospective leader that immediately springs to mind is Gov. Jay Inslee.  I do understand that he is currently a little busy running for President and governing the state of Washington. Nonetheless, he is the first mainstream Democratic candidate seeking the Presidency to publicly announce, in a very definitive way fully backed by his public record, that Climate Change/Sustainability is his number one priority.  The science tells us that it needs to be the number one priority of every human being on the face of this planet, for that is the actual scope of the threat.  Currently, it is not, and Kudos to Jay Inslee for doing all that he can to change that.

Having said that, I do wonder if Governor Inslee fully understands the root causes of our environmental crisis. Modern international corporatism, as exercised in America since World War II and followed by the rest of the world, is undoubtedly the culprit. I simply don’t have enough information on Governor Inslee to know if he understands the basic truth that in order to truly adapt to and mitigate man-driven climate change we have to deal with these fundamental root causes. We must profoundly change the culture of Corporate America/International. This is why I, personally, continue to consider Bernie Sanders as the best choice to address climate change/Sustainability, in spite of the fact he has not specifically labeled it as his top priority. To me, it seems he gets holistically closer to the corporatist heart of the matter.

Two other individuals that might be considered appropriate candidates for the leadership of the Green Front of Our Revolution are Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, sponsors of The Green New Deal Resolution in the House and Senate respectively. AOC, in particular, could bring her social media organization of about 2.5 million people to bear and all the energy and life that surrounds her to the Green Front.  I absolutely adore the little hellion from NYC. She gives me hope for my children’s Millennial generation and the grandchildren that are part of the next generation. Perhaps there is still a bit of fight left humanity, in spite of the colossal failure of my own Generation X when taken as a whole.

Nonetheless, my first choice to lead the Green Front of Our Revolution would be one of the great exceptions among Generation Xers, one Naomi Klein. Her insight and thoughtfulness on the root causes of our overall environmental plight, and her courage in confronting these forces of modern corporate capitalism directly, to me mark her as the great ideological guru of our green revolution. Truly, it is isn’t about carbon, or at least that is only a major symptom. It is about a maladaptive system of economic production, the overall culture of modern international corporate capitalism, that wages a war of eco-economic extermination on future generations, and even on the planet itself.  Klein, understands, as too few yet do, that to successfully adapt we have to change that broken system of political economy. We have to take up some socialist principles and we have to make deep systemic changes to our current form of corporate capitalism.

I have shared a similar view for two and a half decades now, even if my perspective came from the shop floor rather than from some broader overview.  The greatest fault I find with modern Corporatists, is that for at least 40 years, that they have had at their disposal the means to successfully transform into organizations that are truly ecologically Sustainable in the long run. Instead, they have, for reasons that have everything to do with their core cultural values of Ego and Greed, deliberately chosen to keep humanity on the path to ecological self-destruction.

What I am talking about here, the pivotal turn our corporatist leaders have, so far, so tragically missed, is the whole Total Quality/Continuous Improvement business ideology that began in 1950’s Japan and reached the shores of America by c. 1980. These Quality systems stressed: 1) the human empowerment of the entire workforce; 2) management and problem-solving by small, continuous improvement teams (of many types) using consensus decision-making in all matters, including in the selection, removal, and replacement of team leadership when required; 3) decisions driven by empirical data, with PDCA cycles that allow for the empirical testing of measures taken by team and subsequent rapid adjustment of such measures when so warranted by the data;  and finally, 4) an intense customer focus, both internal and external, to drive the continuous improvement of all process and systems in an upward spiral without end.  To just keep getting better and better. Is this not exactly what we need to do to reach Sustainability?

Had we done these things in the 1980s or even in the early 1990s when I was first introduced to them, we have could have been halfway to global Sustainability by now. Unfortunately, the corporations have chosen to use these Qualitative systems on only a very limited scale. You can find thousands of Quality and Continuous Improvement managers in our corporations today. Moreover, the work they do does in fact positively contribute billions of dollars of savings to the bottom line. However, these systems of Quality are allowed to only work within the confines of the existing corporate hierarchy. They are controlled from the top and they are never allowed to challenge the cultural root causes within Corporate International of our continued failure to develop Sustainable economic strategies.  Most of the time the savings generated by Quality/Continuous Improvement are not even reinvested back into operations. Instead, they are hoarded by corporate executives for the purpose of playing Wall Street acquisition games because this is a quicker and easier way to grow the market value of a company. But such strategies do little or nothing to actually make our systems qualitatively better. Instead, acquisitions produce short term gains by allowing companies to find synergies between the old company and the newly acquired one that allows them to lay off workers….and overburden survivors.  None of this does a damn thing to get us to Sustainability in time.  Instead, it just lines the pockets of the Oligarchic investors and company executives.

Edwards Deming, regarded by many as the Father of Quality management systems, throughout the latter stages of his life, positively begged the Corporatist powers that be to make Quality/Continuous Improvement our universal way of doing business.  Although Deming was a conservative man and he came along just a bit too early to fully understand the ecological crisis we face and the potential of his work to take us to Sustainability, he did recognize that the corporate system was (and remains) fundamentally broken.

Of course, the corporatists chose not to hear Edwards Deming.  They could not bring themselves to do the right thing. They refused to make deep systemic changes within their internal corporate cultures, to abandon their primary cultural values of Ego and Greed, and to exchange them for systems of Continuous Improvement that serve all stakeholders in a company, not just oligarchic shareholders and the upper levels of management.

For nearly a quarter of a century now I have made these arguments and I have fought for the ideal of Quality/ Continuous Improvement. I have written fairly extensively on the subject, although with very limited publication.  Nonetheless, I have sent such works to numerous individuals and organizations, politicians, business leaders, Quality consultants, and environmental organizations. I have helped instigate one nationwide strike around the issue of Total Quality and I have also run a couple of union educational/organizing campaigns around this concept of Quality as a way of life. To date, I can’t say that my successes have been stellar.  Nonetheless, while I live, I must continue to fight for these ideas, because I am certain that they are essential to the survival of my granddaughters’ grandchildren, or of some generation very close to theirs.

That fight goes on.

Five months ago, I submitted a Kaizen, an improvement idea, at my current workplace, the BD Medical manufacturing plant in Sandy, Utah. This 40-page, single-spaced document entitled “Quality by Consensus: A Kaizen for Us All”, is a bit more than the “small change” that the usual Japanese term “Kaizen” would suggest.  It proposed a sweeping change in BD Medical’s work culture that would allow Quality/ Continuous Improvement to flourish.

It advocates a change from this model of social organization:

Not too much effort is needed to explain the Command Pyramid model.  It has been the predominant human form of social organization for a few thousand years now.  We all know how it works.  The triangles all represent individuals, from the little ones at the bottom to the large one at the top representing the supreme commander. In the middle are all the various ranks of sub-commanders, who along with the organizational structure of respective fiefdoms they command, make up the quantitative bureaucracy. The primary role of this quantitative bureaucracy is to uphold the entire command pyramid through a system of fear that threatens negative consequences upon anyone acting outside of the social hierarchy. These negative consequences can range from violent death, dismemberment, corporal punishment, torture or other coercive measures in the historical context, to things like termination of employment, denial of promotion, disciplinary actions and the like in the modern corporate context. It is also the quantitative bureaucracy that acts to suppress most human efforts at Quality/Continuous Improvement because Quantitative command cultures evolved to specifically to overwrite the Qualitative consensus cultures of our hunting and gathering ancestors. This enabled the pursuit of “great things” growing out of quantitative production, but almost always to the principal benefit of a socioeconomic elite.

Again, we all know how the Command Pyramid works.  It works astoundingly well for those at or very near the top and for the unshown Oligarchs who capitalize the culture, but barely at all, just enough to get by, in fact, for the masses at the very bottom.

To this one:

This Consensus Circle model was derived from two stereotypical models of the social organization of consensus-using hunting and gathering peoples, at the band and tribal levels. I first developed those models back in the 1990s when I was first exposed to Total Quality and something just “clicked” with my limited training in the field of cultural anthropology.

The various circles on this model do not represent individuals.  Instead, each represents a small team of between 4 and 16 members, with the optimal size being about 8 team members. These teams operate strictly by consensus decision-making in all questions relevant within their appropriate managerial span of control boundaries, including in the selection of team leaders and team facilitators, and the replacement of such team leadership as required. Teams will need to be trained in continuous improvement methodologies and tools, in team dynamics and behavioral styles, in the collection, analysis and testing of data, and, most critically of all, in the proven principles of effective consensus decision-making.

Leadership under such a system is not about command. It is about the ability to build consensus, to most effectively organize the economic efforts and the unique talents of individual team members towards the shared goals of the whole.  It is a natural form of leadership that is recognized as such by the group. It is not the kind of leadership that is appointed from above to serve, almost solely, the interests of corporate executives and oligarchic investors. It is instead a form of leadership that is based on one’s actual contributions. It is leadership that is genuinely earned.

To give a brief idea of how this Consensus Circle, might work in practice, I will use the example of a factory, because I am most familiar with the customary divisions of labor in such an industrial setting, around which individual teams must be formed. Typically, in a factory, the primary divisions of labor are shift and lines. The blue circles forming the outer ring of the Consensus Circle/Quality Wheel are natural work groups representing three shifts each on 9 production lines. Each of these natural work groups would, by consensus, self-manage its operations within appropriate span of control boundaries. They would not make decisions for other work groups and their decisions would need to be compatible with the decisions of the Line Lead teams represented by the green circles in the model.  These Line Lead Teams would be composed of representative members from each shift on that line, selected through consensus by each natural work group.  These line lead teams would, again, by consensus, select their own leader and their own facilitator. They would manage the operations of the line generally and across all shifts, again, within appropriate span of control boundaries.   The red circles in the next most inner layer of teams represent departmental lead teams. Same drill.  Line lead teams would select two or three members each to represent them on the departmental lead team. These departmental lead teams would select their own team leaders and facilitators and would manage the department as a whole.

All team members of the departmental lead teams would probably be full-time process/systems managers, much like managers in the command pyramid are today. From these departmental lead team members would be selected to serve on the three plant level lead teams represented by the three yellow circles within the lighter blue circle at the center of the model.  Again, following hunter/gather evolutionary precedent, each yellow circle represents a different sphere of plant-level management. In the Kaizen I submitted to the BD Medical for the Sandy plant, the three spheres were: 1) A Business Lead team, to focus financial performance ( for the oligarchic investors must still be fed, just not quite as voraciously)  2) A Human Ecology Lead Team, to manage both environmental concerns and human resource-type issues, only in a vastly more holistic manner, and a 3) Continuous Improvement Lead Team (or Local Steering Committee) to commissions cross-organizational project or problem-solving teams and generally coordinate Quality/ Continuous Improvement efforts throughout the plant.

The larger blue circle at the center of the model and in which the yellow circles representing plant lead teams are placed represent the whole of those three Lead Teams, perhaps 24-30 individuals in all.  For lack of a better term, we might call this body the plant Lead council.  This super-team would also use consensus to make decisions but in a much more structured form because of the large size of the body.  It would only be used to make decisions that transcend these normal spheres of plant-level management and affect the whole of the plant.  An easy example would be when major changes in the volume of business take place and wide-ranging adjustments in production are required to successfully adapt.

Finally, in closing this manufacturing plant example, let me state that if the simplified consensus circle conceptual model were truly geared for a manufacturing plant it would also include several other teams of specialists within the departmental and plant level layers.  Engineering teams, accounting teams, warehouse/logistic teams, quality assurance teams would also be shown on the model, for they are all necessary to production and would need to participate in the plant’s overall culture of consensus-based Quality/Continuous Improvement.

Now let us zoom back out.  The consensus circle model of social organization can be used in any economic endeavor where a command pyramid presently exists. Doing so offers tremendous qualitative advantages that free us from the crippling repression of quantitative bureaucracies, individual command fiefdoms, the good ole boy game, and senseless and wasteful internal competition over rank, status, power and money, the contemporary corporate culture of Ego and Greed.

Let me once again call the reader’s attention to the outer rings of the consensus circle model, to the natural work groups there, which roughly correspond to the clusters of little triangles at the bottom of the command pyramid model.  It is in these relatively small groups that our primary economic efforts are made across all industries. It is here that the actual work is done, and it is here that our systems and process actually touch the Earth in ecological relationships.  It will be at these “lesser” layers of socioeconomic organization that humanity’s desperate race to Sustainability will be won or lost. The methods of people like Edwards Deming applied in small groups making decisions by consensus give great promise. Humanity can be empowered to make the billions of industrial changes we must make across the globe.  We can reach the near 100% buy-in we need for the task at hand, achieving global Sustainability.  However, there is pretty good evidence that the command pyramid utilized by our modern corporations can’t get us to Sustainability in time.

The Kaizen I submitted to BD Medical five months ago has never been formally answered. Like hundreds of other Kaizens submitted by employees, it has simply been ignored.  This is in spite of the fact that BD requires 6 completed kaizens each year from each employee for that employee to be eligible for a favorable review. But it is a Kaizen system that only seeks cheap and easy gains to the bottom line without meaningful managerial or capital reinvestment on the part of the company. It is not just BD Medical, however. Such methods of systematic mind rape of employees to coerce improvement ideas without providing just compensation for them are exceedingly common in many modern corporations. It is yet more good evidence just how morally deficient corporate culture has become.

And therein lies our problem.  The corporations do not want to change into the kinds of organizations that can empower humanity and get us to Sustainability.  They wish to preserve the maladaptive culture of Ego and Greed that benefits the few for now but threatens the many with horrible environmental consequences in the not very distant future.

As Naomi Klein points out, neoliberal economic fascism, the collusion of big business and government against the ecological survival needs of the People, is the root cause of the problem. Yet given the relatively short time span in which we have to act definitively, we probably do not have the option of tearing these corporations down and replacing them with something else. We have to work with what already exists. We have to fundamentally change corporate cultures from within.

There is only one thing that oligarchic investors and their corporatist executives and managers really care about. Profits. This greed drives the whole corrupt corporate system. There is but one institution in all of American life that can, quite legally and non-violently, dry up profits to get the attention of these economic elites. That institution, of course, is the American Labor Movement, severely battered though it undoubtedly is. It is the means by which we can take Our Revolution to the very economic heart of the corporate beast.

All of this, of course, leads to the third part of this series, to the pivotal role of the Labor Front in Our Revolution.

Despite the fact that Our Revolution was founded by Bernie Sanders and is, at this point, yet an extension of the Sanders campaign, I am trying very hard concentrate on the issues here, and rise above the cults of personality and pie flinging between them.  Indeed, in the conclusion of this series (if I ever get through the rather laborious effort of actually writing it all), I will argue that all of these proposed Fronts of Our Revolution should support any progressive nominee in the 2020 general election and in meaningful concerted actions throughout that individual’s Presidency.

I have four criteria for that definition of progressive: 1) Understands that our current form of neoliberal economic policy, as practiced by the Right, Center (Clinton) and the Center-Left (Obama) for the last 40 years, has been economically devastating to the working and middle classes of America; 2) Understands that modern Corporatism, as practiced internationally since World War II, is the number 1 root cause of our dire global environmental straits, and the number 1 barrier to us reaching Sustainability in time; 3) Supports and actively fights for the preservation of Human Rights in all forms, in all places, and for all groups; and 4) Recognizes the need for a massive and ongoing  human mobilization effort, like Our Revolution, to have any real hope of bringing timely and meaningful change to this decidedly rigged system of political economy.

Any 2020 Democratic nominee meeting these criteria should have the full support of Our Revolution, even if that candidate is not Bernie Sanders. Somehow, I highly suspect that Bernie Sanders would be the very first to agree.

There are many good Labor supporters among this field of Democratic candidates, especially by the standards that have prevailed for the last 40 years or so. Harris, Gillibrand, O’Rourke, Klobuchar, Booker, Inslee, Gabbard, Warren, and the still unannounced, Biden all have reasonable positions and records on supporting Organized Labor.  Some, like Joe Biden, do have certain issues when it comes to legislation that impacts working class people more generally, like support for anti-worker bankruptcy laws and trade agreements in his specific case. Nonetheless, all of these candidates, including Biden, can make legitimate claims to being sound friends of Labor.

Even so, it is a bit hard for me not to be a little “my candidate’ centric in this particular Labor/Working class realm. That is not based on hero worship or messiah seeking. It is fully based in the indisputable fact that Bernie’s entire public life has been devoted in service to the working classes of America. This is reflected in virtually every vote he has cast, in his unrivaled attempts to address the systemic flaws in US Labor Law through his Workplace Democracy Act, which he has repeatedly reintroduced since 1992 right up until most recently in 2018, and in his speaking out for Labor and working-class families at every given opportunity throughout his long career. There is a reason that Bernie Sanders polls so well with those that make less than $50,000 a year.  The well informed among them know well that his heart is unquestionably with them. The same may well be the case with some other candidates, but it has not been demonstrated to the same degree and over such a long time span.

Our goal in establishing the Labor Front of Our Revolution should be no less than the total mobilization of what is left of the United States Labor Movement.  We need every single Local and International Union in this nation actively involved in Our Revolution. We need public and private sector unions, AFL-CIO affiliates, Change to Win Coalition affiliates, and the unaffiliated, usually leftist, unions like the IWW. If Our Revolution can be expanded, as I am arguing for in this entire series of articles, to a revolutionary movement that is greater than just Sanders campaign, there is really no good reason all of these unions cannot come together to reverse the anti-worker economic climate that has prevailed these last 40 years.

Towards that unifying end, I would propose that the Labor Front of Our Revolution become an International Union itself.  As the prospective leader of this Labor Front Union, my personal first choice would be Frank Trumka, current president of the AFL-CIO.  My second choice would be Jimmy P. Hoffa, president of the Change to Win Coalition. Again, we need the entire American Labor movement actively involved in Our Revolution.

But even this unprecedented mobilization of Labor will not be enough on its own. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm, only 10.5 percent of the American workforce is unionized.  These 14.7 million unionized workers can be divided up into two distinct groups. In the public sector 7.2 million union workers, mostly firefighters, police, teachers, trainers, and librarians, represent 33.9 % of the public sector workforce. The 7.6 million union workers in the private sector, however, represent only 6.4% of the private sector workforce. Thus, the rate of unionization in the private sector is less than one-fifth of that in the public sector.

This is a critical deficiency. Public sector unions alone cannot do what is required. They have no real ability to strike at the wealth generating machines of the Oligarchic investor class, their modern corporations. Only private sector unions can do this.  We have to have the ability to threaten corporate profits through strikes in order to improve the lives of working people and to enforce the necessary changes in corporate culture to take us to qualitative Sustainability rather than quantitative self-destruction through greed-driven overexploitation.

To do this we must quickly bring 20 million more workers into the unionized private sector fold. Only then will we really have the critical mass to change America from the shop floor as we did in the post-World War II era. Only then will we have the unionized density necessary to seriously threatening the income stream of the Oligarchy. Only then will it be in their self-interest to rise above their greed and listen to science, reason, and the needs of the working classes.

The barriers to us accomplishing this are tremendous.  The mission of the Labor Front of Our Revolution, a radically revitalized U.S Labor Movement, must be to tear down all of these formidable barriers within the next decade or so. Let us these barriers in turn:

Globalization

The development of one international economy, the international corporate financial /business culture that has developed around it, and the willingness of many corporations to utilize substandard environmental, labor, and safety laws and regulations in many developing nations to generate additional profits, has hurt the Labor movements in almost all industrial nations. International trade agreements, in practice, rarely do much to close these disparities and thus hurt the relatively high standard of living working class people like Western unionized workers who now have to compete with more economically desperate workers in developing nations. The Western Industrial nations have responded in one of two ways.

In what might be called the Great Northern Model, Canada, the whole of Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, Austria, and the Low Countries, corporations and national governments have acted more patriotically in the face of these economic challenges.  They have served the interest of the whole of their respective Peoples, not just those citizens near the top. They have not engaged in a race to the bottom by declaring a brutal economic war on their own workers. Instead these nations, social democracies one and all, have responded with increased cooperation between, government, business, and workers.  They have adopted more collaborative measures. They have respected their unions as legitimate voices of working people. They have established work councils to solve workplace problems and manage for the sake of all stakeholders, not just Oligarchic investors. In many cases, workers are even represented on Boards of Directors. Governments, while generally engaging in free trade agreements, have also managed to keep their labor, safety and environmental standards among the highest in the world.  They have provided their national corporations with some of the best-educated workforces on the face of the planet and this has allowed those corporations to very often compete in the global export market with generally high-end quality goods and services. These, strategies along with good social welfare programs such as cost-effective universal healthcare, quality childcare, and adequate pensions, have allowed these countries to minimize the shrinkage of their manufacturing base. These countries are now the most industrialized nations on earth, and nearly all enjoy the true economic security of at least having the means to satisfy domestic demand if necessary.

The other group of Western industrial nations, the Southern group if you will, includes the United States, the UK, Australia, France, and to a lesser degree, Spain and Italy. Increasingly it also encompasses the industrialized Balkan and Eastern European nations, and even the “new” capitalist and highly oligarchic Russian Federation. The political, corporate and oligarchic elite of these nations have embraced a neo-liberal form of capitalist globalism, that has often led to a decline in the standard of living of working-class citizens. They have continued to choose the Quantity of competitive greed over the Quality of human life. Sadly, the United States leads this race to the bottom. Its national corporations have shown little national loyalty.  They have been all too willing to relocate or farm out work to places like Mexico, India, Brazil, Malaysia or China.  Domestically they have engaged in a concerted campaign to break unions, especially in the private sector.  A four billion dollar a year union-busting industry now exists here.  Consequently, only France now has a lower rate of union density among the Western industrial nations. Wealth inequality has skyrocketed and the willingness of the elites to tolerate tens of millions of Americans living below or perilously near the poverty line borders on economic treason. Workers are seen as little more than disposable biological machines in the quest for profits. The human suffering that such “sound business decisions” cause, does not even warrant serious consideration. Greed, while certainly present in the Northern Model, has become an absolute absurdity in the much more populous Southern Model. In many cases, the US steel industry, for example, whole vital national industries, have effectively been given away for the sake of short-sighted greed. Moreover, these unreasonable and unsustainable levels of corporate/oligarchic greed are also the principle driving force behind the still-escalating global climate crisis.

Clearly, one of the principle long term goals of the Labor Front of Our Revolution must be to transform the United States, the current world leader of the competitive Southern Model, into something much closer to the Northern Model.  If we can do so, much of the world will follow suit.  While hardly perfect, the more collaborative and qualitative Northern Model of post-industrialization is the best hope for our nation, our planet and for all of Humanity. With it, we might just be able to mitigate climate change, to successfully adapt to that which we have already caused, and ultimately to get to global sustainability.  The Southern Model, by contrast, can only lead to more of the same, more global wealth inequality, more environmental destruction for the sake of short-term profits, more appalling levels of poverty and more human suffering and death.

Another long-term goal of the Labor Front should be to foster a truly global sense of worker and union solidarity because ultimately a national Green New Deal is not going to be enough. We are going to have to have an international one.

Automation

Many of the losses that unions around the world have experienced in recent decades have been due to robotics and automation. Such technologies have led to many millions of union jobs lost.  On the other hand, most of those jobs were highly repetitive, monotonous, and often painful jobs that were not well suited to human minds and bodies anyway. These legacies of industrial Taylorism yet result in millions of repetitive injuries every year. Still, to the average worker struggling to provide for his or her family, such jobs are much better than no job at all. This a complex problem.

There are many good reasons to let the robots that were designed for such repetitive motion tasks perform them rather than letting humans do them who clearly were not.  The real question is what to do with the labor that has been freed up. As we all know, our current form of corporate capitalisms’ solutions is almost always to cut headcount and put workers in the unemployment line. Only the Japanese have truly tried to resist this temptation, and even with their traditional Quality focus, they have not always been successful against the pressures of modern oligarchic banking systems and international markets.

It is not like there is nothing to do with all that labor that has been freed up. Here in America, infrastructure is crumbling and there are countless important tasks in the social services realm that are currently being sadly underperformed.  The vital quest for Sustainability means that millions of homes, offices, factories, schools, and other facilities and buildings need to be improved or replaced.  A herculean effort needs to be put into the shift to solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources like yesterday.

There is plenty that needs to be done that is not being done. The only real questions are:  1) Does this work belong in the public or private sector? And; 2) how will it be paid for? I certainly don’t know what all the answers are here, but I am certain that the Labor Front of Our Revolution should be actively on it, in no small measures as vocal advocates for a federal jobs program under the Green New Deal.

U.S. Labor Law

Another reason why trade unions in America have taken such devastating losses in the last fifty years has everything to do with the weakness of U.S. Labor Law. There is a long and sorted history to this dating back to the Taft-Hartley amendments of 1947 and the weakening of enforcement regulations by presidential authority, mostly under Republican administrations. There has also been a decided assault on the law from the Business community and such Oligarchs as the Koch brothers. The National Labor Relations Act, for example, is weak enough in its organizing protections to be effectively ignored by companies undergoing organizing efforts.  They violate the law, illegally threaten, intimidate and fire pro-union workers and too often they get away with it. Once the Federal government is once again back in the hands of a Democratic majority and a Democratic President, the reform of US Labor Law should be the very top priority of Our Revolutions’ Labor Front.

I don’t believe that even the Workplace Democracy Act, although better than other efforts such as the Employee Free Choice Act, goes quite far enough.  While it does increase penalties for Employer violations of the National Labor Relations Act, I am not sure these are strong enough to deal with the threat.  Anti-union consultants customarily advise the companies that hire them to willfully break the law in combating union organizing campaigns.  And they do.  Even the hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential fines that the Workplace Democracy Act calls for may not be enough.  The gains workers can receive over a decade or so under a collective bargaining agreement can run into many millions depending on the size of the shop.  There also need to be stronger measures against illegal retaliatory actions such as plant closings or shifting of business to other facilities due to hurt corporate executives’ feelings over successful strikes.

Both “Right to Work” laws and “At will” employment laws need to be made illegal under federal law, superseding all state laws on these questions.

Perhaps most importantly to reversing the trend of wealth redistribution over these last 40 years, we need to give union members the right to strike over economic issues without fear of being permanently replaced. We need to go back to the Wagner standards here. In the hands of a revitalized Labor Movement this change, along with appropriate changes in national tax policy could be instrumental in dealing with the issue of income inequality.

Finally, there is a great need to limit the virtually wide-open “Management Rights” doctrine of the NLRA and other US Labor Laws. At a minimum, this doctrine needs to be qualified in at least two critical respects. 1) Companies should not have the right to mismanage union facilities out of existence. Workers should have the right to bargain for their long-term economic security and the economic vitality of operations. 2) Workers need to have the bargaining authority to press for all issues related to improving the ecological Sustainability of operations. This is absolutely critical to getting the corporatists off the path they continue to cling to, the road to Death through Greed.

The International unions and union coalitions that I hope will eventually come to participate in the Labor Front of Our Revolution should begin establishing think tanks to consider what changes in the law are required and to start drafting models of such legislation.  Again, many useful lessons and examples come from the Scandinavian heartland of the Great Northern Model where union density rates range from 66% to 91%. The Labor Front also needs to take a page from the Justice Democrats playbook and let it be forcefully understood that any corporatist, blue dog, congressional Dem that votes against that eventual legislation, as many did in 2009 against the Employee Free Choice Act, will most assuredly have their traitorous ass primaried. If, as a Democrat, you cannot stand with the Worker, you need to stand with the rest of our always pro-corporate Republican adversaries. There is no longer any middle ground here.

Hearts and Minds

Perhaps the greatest reason that union membership in America has declined so much in these last 50 years or so is the fact that the U.S. Labor Movement has to a great extent simply been beaten in the public relations realm by the forces of modern Corporatism. This is really not at all surprising given the indisputable fact that the business community of America has expended a great deal of effort and treasure seeking both to discredit unions and make them as ineffectual as possible. The Koch brothers alone have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on disinformation campaigns aimed at both workers and management.  Once reputable, but now Increasingly fascist, economic organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have become decidedly anti-worker in their policy goals. They now share the general corporatist view that only Oligarchs and their corporate executive puppets really matter.  Workers and even managers are utterly disposable in the quest to impossibly satisfy Oligarchic Greed. Tens of billions of dollars have been paid over the years to delay or derail the timely enforcement of Labor Law, to undermine workers’ bargaining and organizing rights, and to generally reduce the public perception of union effectiveness.

It is not surprising that the Oligarchic corporations have been able to cower the American worker to a considerable extent.  After all, against their billions of dollars in union busting efforts, few International unions can boast of a treasury of more than a few tens of millions of dollars, most of which must be spent fulfilling their legal obligations to their members. Within the mind of the worker, this great disparity in economic power is crystal clear. But what is truly remarkable is that all of these billions of dollars spent have not been able to purchase the heart of the American Worker. Polling across the decades has shown consistently that the majority of Americans approve of unions and that currently, support for unions is at a 15-year high.  A  summary of Gallop’s polling on the matter since 1936 can be found here.

So, if more than 60% of Americans believe in unions, why are only roughly one-third of union organizing campaigns ultimately successful? It is because the American workers know that the law and the economic realities of modern corporatism put unions at severe disadvantages in effectively representing them. We must find a way to level out the playing field. This, of course, means changing US Labor Law, but even more so it means reminding the American people that improving our lives in the face of the economic evil of contemporary corporatism means aggressively fighting back for the economic security of our families and the right of our descendants to not be eco-economically exterminated by oligarchic Greed.

Here, in this realm of hearts and minds, I offer a fairly specific suggestion as to the course of action the Labor Front of Our Revolution should take over the course of the next 18 months or so.  Until we actually have enough true friends of Labor in the Executive and Legislative branches of Government to change the law, this proposed course of action should be the major priority of Our Revolution’s Labor Front.

What I am proposing is a massive union educational campaign, a break room table campaign, if you will, that utilizes the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act to reach something on the order of 25 million American workers/voters. The primary goals of this campaign should not necessarily be the organization of particular shops except where support for the union cause is overwhelming. In such cases, participating unions should begin having workers sign authorization cards and when they have 75%-80% of eligible employees so committed they should petition the Board for elections. But these cases will undoubtedly be the exceptions.  The real goals of this utterly unprecedented national union educational campaign should be:

• The re-education of the American people on exactly how unions effectively work, why they are necessary for a capitalist society, and on the vital issue of worker Solidarity across all organizational boundaries;
• To reach 25 million voters in the workplace in the 26 weeks leading up the 2020 General election, 40 percent of whom don’t usually vote, and another substantial percentage who are low information voters too easily manipulated by establishment media, from either the Right or the establishment Center-Left;
•  To embolden the American worker with the courage that is going to be necessary for the many, many fights to come, as we desperately work to change the face of modern corporate capitalism into something that is fair to American working families and into something that can get us to Sustainability in time to save our descendants.

The inspiration for this idea comes out a couple of such “Why Unions?” break room table campaigns I have run on my on since 2008.  Giving workers literature on their breaks is surprisingly effective.  Glad to be away from the stress of their duties on the line, but with limited time and lacking the ability to really do much or go anywhere, workers very often read that literature if only out of boredom and the desire to put their minds somewhere else.

Here is how I would envision such a national educational campaign working.  Let us make the colossal assumption that in the next six months or so the unions of America will come together to form the Labor Front of Our Revolution as proposed here.  All the challenges of international and local officer egos, all the turf battles over jurisdiction and all the establishment pressures of the Washington bubble (where nearly all international union Headquarters are located) have been overcome. The American Labor movement has united and is ready to fiercely fight to take back our democracy and to confront the maladaptive economic evil of modern corporatism.

At that point, a 2020 National Educational Committee should be formed, composed of representatives from a variety of both private and public sector international unions.  This Labor Front committee would be responsible for organizing and coordinating the support of this campaign by every local union in America, each of whom would use local and/or international resources to support 1 to 5 low-cost educational campaigns at individual non-union shops, depending on the size and resources of the Local. This would allow us to run about 200,000 such educational campaigns across all American industries, from manufacturing to service industries, from transportation to all forms of retail. Each Local union would be responsible for the printing of 26 weeks’ worth of single page double-sided, black and white newsletters, printed on either 8.5” x 11” or 8.5” x 14” paper at a cost of around $40 per hundred. In addition, they would be responsible for giving a brief one-hour training to the volunteer employees of these nonunion shops, so that they can be trained in the “dos and don’ts” of legally distributing union organizing materials under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act.

The front page of each newsletter would deal with all the traditional topics of trade unionism.  The principle of collective bargaining, the need for Solidarity, union job bidding procedures, the economic advantages of union workers compared to nonunion workers, seniority, benefits, grievance procedures, how member’s union dues are used, and other such topics should all be covered.  These 26 newsletters should be written by a variety of international union presidents, international union communication directors, and other such union officers. These authors should all be selected for being highly skilled at writing succinctly and effectively to a very general audience.

The back side of the newsletter would deal with issues of more general interest to the worker, the very topics that will become the planks of the 2020 democratic platform.  Such topics as Medicare for All, dependent child care, the fight for $15, College/vocational training for all, the Green New Deal, and its associated Federal Jobs program should all be covered in the early weeks of the educational campaign.  Once, the Democratic National Convention is over and a nominee has been selected, this back page of the newsletter would transition into direct political action.  At that point, we start confronting the disastrous economic policies of the Orange Oligarch to working people, exposing his many lies to them, and generally advocating for a progressive Democratic candidate.

At the International Union, AFL-CIO, Change to Win Coalition, and the Our Revolution Labor Front levels a media campaign consisting of podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media pages should support the contents of each newsletter. We already know that we can expect nothing but doublespeak and opposition from the corporate media, Fox, CNN and MSNBC especially. The example of the late great Ed Shultz shows us that all too clearly. The major corporate media outlets are without exception anti-union in their coverage, or more often, lack of coverage.  They will only cover us when we have leverage enough on them to make them cover us. But there are an increasingly growing number of independent media sources out there that would likely be highly sympathetic to our cause. Such individuals and organizations as the Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show, The Ring of Fire, Status Coup, Tim Black TV, The Rational National, The Humanist Report, New Progressive Voice, Kim Iverson,  Graham Elwood, Thom Harman, The Majority Report, Beau of the Fifth Column, Rebel HQ, BOB TV and many others could be very useful in helping us spread the word of our National Union Educational campaign and in helping us to inspire courageous volunteers to run such campaigns at their nonunion workplaces.

Nonetheless, the main recruitment source for the 500,000 to 1 million volunteers needed for this herculean educational effort would need to come from the candidates themselves.  In particular, the “rock star” status of Bernie Sanders among younger Americans and relatively low-income earners would be sorely needed.  We would need Bernie and all other Democratic candidates whose hearts are really with the working classes to publicly encourage all sorts of workers to participate in this National Union educational campaign; to stress the importance of it to lifting the standard of living of working-class people and of resisting the dark forces of corporatism that have perverted our economy and our government for so long. There will also be the need, however, to be completely honest with those workers about the personal risks these workers will take in participating in this national campaign.

At current rates of companies disregard for the law, one out of five of those participating in this National educational campaign will be illegally terminated.  Indeed, I have personally been illegally fired for distributing such educational materials, but subsequently made whole under NLRB proceedings in 2014. There will be causalities, but if linked to a widespread national effort tied to the political processes of the 2020 elections, the number of such causalities might be limited out of Corporate’s fear of the consequences of such actions once a pro-Labor Democratic President has control of the NLRB. In particular, they are terrified of a Sanders appointed Board. It is a large part of why the corporate establishment, both Republican and Democrat, is so opposed to his Presidency.

On the other hand, the corporate powers that be may choose to double down and fire every single one of us in an unprecedented effort to intimidate the American worker and keep her in her place. But such an effort will backfire spectacularly.  With every single employee they so immorally terminate our support will grow. Each and every such illegal termination will be contested by our united Labor Front, through all of its affiliates, at the NLRB, and in the end, we will inflict billions of dollars of damages on the oligarchy in the form of back pay and attorney fees. We will overwhelm both the union busters and the administrative structure of the current Board.  The NLRB will have to be expanded to handle the increase in workload.  Moreover, the inherent injustice of all these illegal company actions can be used to shine a much-needed spotlight on the desperate need to reform U.S. Labor Law for the American public. We might even be able to use the issue to threaten some Republican districts composed of large numbers of working-class whites, especially in the Midwest.

Now obviously not everyone will be able to take the economic risk of participating in our National Union Educational campaign. Working parents, desperately trying to get by, living paycheck to paycheck, are unlikely to be the best candidates for running union educational campaigns at their workplaces.  But others may be better suited for it.  Baby Boomers and Generation X workers who already have already meet the requirements for retirement might well be able to take the risk.  Young people, still living at home and often working in various types of retail might not have too much to lose.  Workers whose spouses make money enough to help them handle the hardship of a transition are other likely candidates. And then there are those few like me, those have seen first hand the deprivations corporations have inflicted on our People for more than a generation and simply need to fight back, whatever the personal cost.

As each individual worker comes to consider and make the personal choice as to whether or not they are in a position to be among the 0.3% of the American workforce that we need to effectively take this fight to all corporations, to the very economic backyard of the Oligarchy, I would make one final point.  We are at a pivotal point in human history.  The excesses of corporate capitalism are now threatening everything, even the Earth’s ability to sustain current levels of life in the very near future. To stop the corporate juggernaut humanity is going to have to make considerable sacrifices, for it is simply not within them to do the right thing on their own anymore.  They are too blinded or too morally lost to care about anything beyond their titles, their fiefdoms, their educational “right” to look down at others, and, most especially, their never-ending Greed.  In this generation, we might yet be able to stop them with sacrifices such as being fired for standing up to them, or enduring the economic hardship of strikes, or in other realms, by going to jail in mass acts of civil disobedience.  But if we shirk our duty to our descendants and fail to make such sacrifices in numbers enough to change this broken system, then those descendants will have to make much more horrific sacrifices. The eco-economic circumstances we will leave them will make the violent overthrow of the corporate fascist state the only desperate option left for the survival of their own children.  The Oligarchs themselves, through their greed-driven corporate system, will have made Marx right about the necessity of physical revolution. Make no mistake about it. Whatever near future generation that horrible fate falls upon will have no choice but to make their sacrifices in blood. It is this generation’s sacred duty to stop this near-future bloodbath, relatively peacefully, while we still can.

It is for this reason that I must fight, for the sake of my still young granddaughters’ unborn grandchildren. Even if this idea falls on deaf ears in the realms of Organized Labor and the current Sander’s organizational structure of Our Revolution, there will still be one such educational campaign conducted at BD Medical of Sandy, Utah. The corporate culture of Ego and Greed must be opposed and moved to change from within, as well as from the outside.  Unions have to be an essential part of this process, for no other institution in America has the potential economic power to force the deep systemic changes in corporate culture necessary to achieving global eco-economic Sustainability.

In the next article of this “On Broadening the Scope of Our Revolution” series, we will look at the establishment of a Human Rights Front to protect the rights of all people, to oppose discrimination in all forms, and to stop the threatening, intimidation, bullying, physical assaults and sometimes the murder of law-abiding citizens, mostly people of color, by the sanctioned forces of the corporate fascist state.

mMIn both the 2016 and, now, in the 2020 Presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders, the good Senator has made his position absolutely clear.  I both summarize here and expand on the implications here in my own words, but I do not believe brother Sanders would to find too much fault in it.

We, the American People, are currently faced with a broken system of political economy where more than 300 million people have been marginalized under our democracy by the tremendous wealth and power of an Oligarchic class of about 300,000 and the corporations they own and control. These corporations of sundry types have come to dominate almost every aspect of our lives and they continue to feed the ever-growing wealth and power of the Oligarchs and the corporatist lap dogs that do their bidding. This powerful Capitalist investor class of about 1 tenth of 1% of our population, has over the last 40 years or so, through the corporate executives they have hired and through their cash-backed subversion of our system of representative democracy, has all but destroyed the opportunity of working Americans to live a stable middle-class existence, once referred to as the American Dream. Instead, the working classes of America (defined very broadly indeed) have been subjugated in all aspects of their economic lives to a corporate culture based in large part on inflated corporate Egos and unbridled corporate Greed.

The banks and credit card companies of the Oligarchy keep untold millions in a state of economic bondage, living paycheck to paycheck trying to somehow care for themselves and their families while also trying to stay current on their debts, be they predatory mortgages and car loans, maxed credit cards or astronomical student loan debts.

The Oligarchy’s pharmaceutical and health insurance corporations have made America the most expensive place on the planet in which to be sick, and a place where tens of thousands of preventable deaths occur every year because of the prohibitive cost of healthcare. Moreover, their lobbying efforts against single-payer systems have prevented the adoption of an effective system of national healthcare as a basic human right of all Americans.

The fossil fuel corporations of the Oligarchs continue to operate solely on the principle of Greed, knowing full well the environmental crimes they are committing. They are making no meaningful efforts on anywhere near the scale required, to transform us to renewable and sustainable energy systems.  They continue to ignore the world’s climate scientists, even as the scientists tell them such grave news as we have but a dozen years or so to prevent the destruction of every coral reef on earth and all the marine bio-diversity that goes with them (2018 UN report on Climate Change). The Oligarchs, and their corporatist dominions, simply do not care. Fulfilling the sick need of their Greed is all that matters. If hundreds of millions or even billions of human beings must die a century from now because of it, that is an acceptable price to them.

We could go on and on here.  The Military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the wasted, and increasingly scare, resources corporations squander to provide disposable products to consumers. The petroleum-based plastics that fill our oceans and landfills, the static quantitative corporate systems of production that do not allow us to successfully adapt to the greatest ecological challenge humanity has ever faced. Billions of individual solutions are going to be required at tens of millions of unique sites around the globe in order to get us to Sustainability in time, but all the Oligarchs and their corporatists can think about is hitting their greed-driven numbers.  All of these issues and hundreds of others rest squarely on the Oligarchs who control more than 90% of the Earth’s wealth and resources, and on their great corporate monoliths, who in small groups monopolize almost every single American industry, ruthlessly robbing and exploiting the American People at every given turn.

Bernie says, quite rightly, that changing this broken and maladaptive system of political economy is going to require millions and millions of people standing up to these special interests…. i.e. these corporations.  His election to the office of President of the United States will not be enough on its own. Even as we work to make sure that he is our next President, we must prepare for the colossal battles that will be necessary to bring the social and economic changes we so desperately need after he is elected, and indeed, even after he has taken a sacred place among the Ancestors. At all costs, the fight must continue. Towards that end, we must greatly expand the mission of Our Revolution far beyond the merely political. We must mobilize ourselves to take the fight against the Oligarchy to the totality of our society, most especially to the very heart of every single corporation, both public and private, where Oligarchic wealth is generated and by which their near-total economic control over the circumstances of our daily lives is so ruthlessly exercised. Millions, or better, tens of millions, of people, must indeed stand up. But it is my contention here we must stand up everywhere. Therefore, as just a working-class prole member of Our Revolution, I make the following recommendation for a seven-fold expansion to the scope of Our Revolution.

Our Revolution: The Political Front

President Nina Turner already has this one well in hand folks.  See:

https://ourrevolution.com/about/

As the Parent Organization of the proposed subunits, Our Revolution would, of course, retain a certain authority over the other fronts in terms of unity of mission and successful coordination. As the political arm of our progressive movement, Our Revolution, this is appropriate.  Its officers would remain the leaders of the overall movement.

Listed below are the other Fronts I hereby propose:

Our Revolution: The Green Front.

Our Revolution: The Labor Front.

Our Revolution:  The Human Rights Front

Our Revolution: The Health and Welfare Front

Our Revolution: The Financial Sector Front

Our Revolution: The Veterans/Security Services Front

Our Revolution:  The International Diplomacy and Coordination Front

As my 12-hour workday schedule permits, I will endeavor to write about each of the proposed Fronts in turn in the coming days and weeks. I will seek to explain the need for with each of them, some of individuals and organizations that might be recruited to join them, and what revolutionary gains might be expected of them.  I very much appreciate all comments and thoughts on the subject, even those of the critics if their responses are civil and thoughtful.  I would especially request that any reader that has an opinion on who the best leaders of these various Fronts might be put their suggestions forth.

Finally, I would ask all progressives who believe in the necessity of profound social, political and economic change consider a much more personal question.  Given your own unique human qualities, where can you best give service to Our Revolution?

Five months ago, I submitted a Kaizen, an improvement idea, at my current workplace, the BD Medical manufacturing plant in Sandy, Utah. This 40-page, single spaced document entitled “Quality by Consensus: A Kaizen for Us All”, is a bit more than the “small change” that the usual Japanese term “Kaizen” would suggest.  It proposed a sweeping change in BD Medical’s work culture that would allow Quality/ Continuous Improvement to flourish.

It advocates a change from this model of social organization:

Not too much effort is needed to explain the Command Pyramid model.  It has been the predominant human form of social organization for a few thousand years now.  We all know how it works.  The triangles all represent individuals, from the little ones at the bottom to the large one at the top representing the supreme commander. In the middle are all the various ranks of sub-commanders, who along with the organizational structure of respective fiefdoms they command, make up the quantitative bureaucracy. The primary role of this quantitative bureaucracy is to uphold the entire command pyramid through a system of fear that threatens negative consequences upon anyone acting outside of the social hierarchy. These negative consequences can range from violent death, dismemberment, corporal punishment, torture or other coercive measures in the historical context, to things like termination of employment, denial of promotion, disciplinary actions and the like in the modern corporate context. It is also the quantitative bureaucracy that acts to suppress most human efforts at Quality/Continuous Improvement because Quantitative command cultures evolved to specifically to overwrite the Qualitative consensus cultures of our hunting and gathering ancestors. This enabled the pursuit of “great things” growing out of quantitative production, but almost always to the principle benefit of a socioeconomic elite.

Again, we all know how the Command Pyramid works.  It works astoundingly well for those at or very near the top and for the unshown Oligarchs who capitalize the culture, but barely at all, just enough to get by, in fact, for the masses at the very bottom.

To this one:

This Consensus Circle model was derived from two stereotypical models of the social organization of consensus-using hunting and gathering peoples, at the band and tribal levels. I first developed those models back in the 1990s when I was first exposed to Total Quality and something just “clicked” with my limited training in the field of cultural anthropology.

The various circles on this model do not represent individuals.  Instead each represents a small team of between 4 and 16 members, with the optimal size being about 8 team members. These teams operate strictly by consensus decision-making in all questions relevant within their appropriate managerial span of control boundaries, including in the selection of team leaders and team facilitators, and the replacement of such team leadership as required. Teams will need to be trained in continuous improvement methodologies and tools, in team dynamics and behavioral styles, in the collection, analysis and testing of data, and, most critically of all, in the proven principles of effective consensus decision-making.

Leadership under such a system is not about command. It is about the ability to build consensus, to most effectively organize the economic efforts and the unique talents of individual team members towards the shared goals of the whole.  It is a natural form of leadership that is recognized as such by the group. It is not the kind of leadership that is appointed from above to serve, almost solely, the interests of corporate executives and oligarchic investors. It is instead a form of leadership that is based in one’s actual contributions. It is leadership that is genuinely earned.

To give a brief idea of how this Consensus Circle, might work in practice, I will use the example of a factory, because I am most familiar with the customary divisions of labor in such an industrial setting, around which individual teams must be formed. Typically, in factory the primary divisions of labor are shift and lines. The blue circles forming the outer ring of the Consensus Circle/Quality Wheel are natural work groups representing three shifts each on 9 production lines. Each of these natural work groups would, by consensus, self-manage its operations within appropriate span of control boundaries. They would not make decisions for other work groups and their decisions would need to be compatible with the decisions of the Line Lead teams represented by the green circles in the model.  These Line Lead Teams would be composed of representative members from each shift on that line, selected through consensus by each natural work group.  These line lead teams would, again, by consensus, select their own leader and their own facilitator. They would manage the operations of the line generally and across all shifts, again, within appropriate span of control boundaries.   The red circles in the next most inner layer of teams represent departmental lead teams. Same drill.  Line lead teams would select two or three members each to represent them on the departmental lead team. These departmental lead teams would select their own team leaders and facilitors and would manage the department as a whole.

All team members of the departmental lead teams would probably be full time process/systems managers, much like managers in the command pyramid are today. From these departmental lead team members would be selected to serve on the three plant level lead teams represented by the three yellow circles within the lighter blue circle at the center of the model.  Again, following hunter/gather evolutionary precedent, each yellow circle represents a different sphere of plant-level management. In the Kaizen I submitted to the BD Medical for the Sandy plant, the three spheres were: 1) A Business Lead team, to focus financial performance ( for the oligarchic investors must still be fed, just not quite as voraciously)  2) A Human Ecology Lead Team, to manage both environmental concerns and human resource-type issues, only in a vastly more holistic manner, and a 3) Continuous Improvement Lead Team (or Local Steering Committee) to commissions cross-organizational project or problem solving teams and generally coordinate Quality/ Continuous Improvement efforts throughout the plant.

The larger blue circle at the center of the model and in which the yellow circles representing plant lead teams are place represent the whole of those three Lead Teams, perhaps 24-30 individuals in all.  For lack of a better term we might call this body the plant Lead council.  This super-team would also use consensus to make decisions but in much structured form because of the large size of the body.  It would only be used to make decisions that transcend these normal spheres of plant-level management and effect the whole of the plant.  An easy example would be when major changes in volume of business take place and wide-ranging adjustments in production are required to successful adapt.

Finally, in closing this manufacturing plant example, let me state that if the simplified consensus circle conceptual model were truly geared for a manufacturing plant it would also include several other teams of specialists within the departmental and plant level layers.  Engineering teams, accounting teams, warehouse/logistic teams, quality assurance teams would also be shown on the model, for they are all necessary to production and would need to participate in the plant’s overall culture of consensus-based Quality/Continuous Improvement.

Now let us zoom back out.  The consensus circle model of social organization can be used in any economic endeavor where a command pyramid presently exists. Doing so offers tremendous qualitative advantages that free us from the crippling repression of quantitative bureaucracies, individual command fiefdoms, the good ole boy game, and senseless and wasteful internal competition over rank, status, power and money, the contemporary corporate culture of Ego and Greed.

Let me once again call the reader’s attention to the outer rings of the consensus circle model, to the natural work groups there, which roughly correspond to the clusters of little triangles at the bottom of the command pyramid model.  It is in these relatively small groups that our primary economic efforts are made across all industries. It is here that the actual work is done, and it is here that our systems and process actually touch the Earth in ecological relationships.  It will be at these “lesser” layers of socioeconomic organization that humanity’s desperate race to Sustainability will be won or lost. The methods of people like Edwards Deming applied in small groups making decisions by consensus give great promise. Humanity can be empowered to make the billions of industrial changes we must make across the globe.  We can reach the near 100% buy-in we need for the task at hand, achieving global Sustainability.  However, there is pretty good evidence that command pyramid utilized by our modern corporations can’t get us to Sustainability in time.

The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union is a union with a 120 year history of successful representation of a wide range of workers, from bakery workers to chemical workers, from sales groups to retail and office workers. The current President of the International Union is Frank Hurt, a man I personally know to be of high moral integrity, of genuine devotion to working class people, and of a fiercely protective nature when it comes to BCTGM members.

Before I go much further here I guess I should declare my personal biases. From February 2, 2001 until November 23, 2003, I served as the executive officer (president and business manager) of BCTGM, Local 149. For more than 15 years I was a very active member of the BCTGM union. As such, it would probably be in my own personal best interest to see us organized under the BCTGM. I declare that openly to all.

I do have proven talent and experience in most facets of American trade unionism. Such union talent is comparatively rare, in large part because so much union talent tends to get stolen by the corporatists who can offer so much more in the way of money. As such, it is not unlikely that I will eventually come to take some leadership role in any union we choose to join. But that task would undoubtedly be made much easier in a union where people already know me.

Most of you may have noticed by now that I have a rather strong itch to get back into the Labor Movement’s fight against the Corporatist enemies of all Humanity. But this is a matter of my personal choice and ambition. It should not be the first concern of my coworkers here at BWAY.

On the other hand, personal relationships do matter. I have known most of the International officers and tepresentatives for something approaching twenty years now. David Durkee is International Treasurer and Director of Organizing. He is also a fine strategist. Ray Scannell who heads the International Research department is a very smart man who is very resourceful at getting the information needed for a variety of union purposes. Second Region Vice President Bob Oakley is also the International’s Chief Negotiator for pattern bargaining. In my opinion, he is one of the best in the business in this role.

Tony Johnson, Vice President of the 4th Region covering the Southeast region of the country, is a man with whom I have always had a good working relationship. Tony and I first met each other in the great Earthgrains strike of 2000, where we were thrown together to manage and maintain the Memphis plant picket for the duration of that successful month-long strike. Tony was also quite helpful in helping me get Local 149 back to the point of solvency when I served as president and business manager of the Local. He is also a very funny guy.

In addition I know the strengths and weaknesses of most of the International Representatives, certainly every single one in the 4th Region. This is important because I will already know which reps would be most helpful for particular tasks as we face the challenges of:

1) Organizing ourselves into a union and facing all the legal Labor Board challenges that process is likely to entail
2) Successfully negotiating our first and all subsequent contracts.
3) Working to improve wages, benefits and working conditions at the BWAY Memphis plant
4) Teaching our membership and shop stewards all they need to know to make our union effectively work for all members
5) Helping us to most effectively use our union leverage towards the goal of transforming BWAY into a Quality by Consensus kind of company.

I also know personally that all of the BCTGM people mentioned and nearly all that have not been mentioned are deeply committed to the causes of working class people. Corruption and illegal ties have never been a major problem in the BCTGM although a few isolated instances can be found in any large International Union with such a long history. There are always those few bad apples.

On the Local level, the current president and business manager of Local 149 is a man named Simon Ebarb. Simon has served as the executive officer of Local 149 since 2006. He has done an outstanding job in the role.

When I took the helm of BCTGM, Local 149 back in early 2001, the Local was not in very good shape. A previous administration had made a series of rather idiotic blunders that had lead the Local into several hundred thousand dollars of debt and eventually into International Trusteeship. Even after two and half years of this Trusteeship, the Local was not yet quite ready to support the two full-time officers its By-laws required at the time and still be able to continue to work its way toward complete solvency. But charges were filed with the D.O.L. by the remnants of the previous administration that had so mismanaged Local 149 and by joint agreement with the charging parties, the International Union, and the Department of Labor it was agreed that Local elections would be held and the International Trusteeship would end, somewhat prematurely. As such, I was left to do many of the things that the International Union should have done and probably would have done if they had been allowed to hold the Local under Trusteeship as long as was needed to get it in proper shape.

Some of the things that the circumstances of the Local dictated I do as its executive officer would have a high political cost. Chief among these would be the sale of Local 149 union hall, a building that was draining $30,000 a year out of our General Fund. It was a very unpopular move. The former Trustee of the Local, International Representative, James Rivers called it “political suicide”. He turned out to be right. Nonetheless, it had to be done, so I did it and with the proceeds of that sale I got Local 149 back to the break even point at least.

When I won that election in the fall of 2000, I inherited a Local that was still deeply in debt and where membership confidence still remained low. My administration concentrated on the basics, effective bargaining, good membership service, high visibility in all 52 locations that the local served. These were the years of the first Bush recession and in my term the Local would lose members at three major facilities due to plant closings. Nonetheless, we would manage to largely make up this lost ground by signing up non-members in shops all over Local 149’s territory. These vital gains were made through effective membership service.

In the 2003 Local 149 elections, the Local’s 2nd officer, a man named Joseph Anderson, would go renegade on me. He was also able to run on my service record while avoiding executive responsibility for decisions like the sell of the Local union hall. He managed to eek out a narrow victory over me in those elections.

To his credit Joseph did manage to keep the Local pretty much at the point it was when I left office over the two years he ran Local 149. By hiring Simon Ebarb to do the considerable leg work in such a spread out Local union for much of his administration, Joseph did manage to maintain the service standards I had set in my administration. Still, Joseph would come to find the stresses of executive leadership of the Local a bit more than he had anticipated. He would rather suddenly decide to retire in early 2006, nearly a year before finishing his first term of office.

Since that point Simon Ebarb has been the principle officer of Local 149. He has proven himself an able administrator and a tireless advocate of Local 149 membership. He has steadily grown the Local’s treasury throughout his multiple terms of office and on a weekly basis he travels the near 1000 mile circuit necessary to giving all BCTGM, Local 149 members effective and timely grievance service.

Simon has fulfilled the vision of restoration that I had for Local 149 when I took office in 2001. I could have done no better job myself. As such, he will always have my support as long as he chooses to hold that office. He has earned it.

Now, once again, BCTGM Local 149 is one of the premier factory locals in the Mid-South. It deserves our earnest consideration as a likely union to represent the workers here at BWAY, Memphis.