Families will soon gather around holiday dinner tables as tradition demands, and just as predictably as the turkey will vie with the pie to overstuff our stomachs, someone is likely to set off a family tiff or awkward moment. That’s because family dysfunction is as normal as the holidays themselves. That goes for our labor family as well.
Our big tent shelters a wide range of workers, from stagehands to analysts, from nurses to plumbers, from dancers to doctors. We work different shifts, wear different uniforms, and have different opinions. We are Democrats, Republicans, nonaffiliated, alienated, and third-party voters, and some of us ignore politics entirely. Our priorities are as varied as our opinions, whether it comes to how to prep the turkey or how to vote our ballots.
There is, however, one uniting feature of our big, boisterous family. We care about workers and their families, and we see our right to bargain wages, hours, working conditions, and other issues as fundamental to the health of our workforce and our communities. We also know that our labor movement is a bulwark against autocracy as well as the secret sauce for narrowing the income inequality gap that has widened alarmingly in decades of union erosion.
And that’s why we do this work. It is the opportunity to convert unity of purpose into solidarity and solidarity into power that keeps most of us at the banquet table.
In their 2024 book “Solidarity: the Past, Present, and Future of a World-changing Idea”, authors Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor describe two kinds of solidarity. “Reactionary solidarity” seeks to exclude others and shrink the group, promoting the politics of divide and conquer. By contrast, “transformational solidarity” seeks to expand the circle of inclusion to change the overall balance of political power. Each type of solidarity is deliberately constructed.
Leading a labor coalition, I have learned that some of our family members prefer the exclusionary kind of “solidarity” – not a majority, of course, but enough to cause a family food fight. Passing a purity test, to these folks, supersedes the imperative to grow power by growing our numbers. The problem with such demands is that the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, resulting in smaller self-satisfied but less effective entities. Such people are essentially the picky eaters at our labor table.
But powerlessness doesn’t move the needle for workers. An alternative vision, one shared by most in our labor family, is that transformational solidarity can move beyond superficial alliances to achieve greater wins for workers, just as a potluck yields a wider variety of side dishes to go with the turkey.
Building collective power requires us to achieve fundamental changes by committing to long-term relationships, sometimes with unionists who see things a bit differently from others. By forging networks to bridge divides, rather than solidify them, we can deliver success at the ballot box, at the bargaining table, and in the economic wellness of our communities.
Moving forward through the holidays and into the new year, the question for our labor family is this: Will we break bread with all who would like to feast with us, or will we limit our guest list and therefore our opportunities to build power?
Laurie Wimmer is executive secretary-treasurer of the Northwest Oregon Labor Council.
