What Progressive Foundations Should Be Funding
It's labor organizing.
In the new issue of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner has a thorough and well-informed deep dive on the the role that foundations play in the institutional left—and why the right wing’s foundations seem to have been more successful at accomplishing their goals in the long term. Kuttner’s specific focus is on the threat of a new Trump administration, which could use bureaucratic tools to selectively undermine left-leaning foundations. What the piece really made me think about, though, is the broader and more tantalizing question of what foundations could accomplish, if they redirected resources into more direct solutions to the problems they say they want to solve.
One thing that Kuttner points out is that the critical role of foundation funding to the activities of the left is a relatively new phenomenon. Neither the labor movement nor the civil rights movement were built on foundation money. They—the two most meaningful progressive movements of the past century—were mostly built with grassroots believers and self-funded. There is a different piece to be written on how this increasing ubiquity of private money has warped the goals of progressivism, and how foundations are expressions of capitalism’s tendency to sap public power and transfer all power into private hands. Those are real things, which we are not going to solve right this minute. Today we will restrict ourselves to briefly discussing a glaring hole in the giving world that holds us all back.
The activity of all do-gooder foundations falls into one of three main buckets: 1) Winning the intellectual battle on an issue, by funding things like studies and think tanks and educational programs; 2) winning the political battle on an issue, by lobbying and supporting friendly candidates; and 3) directly addressing the issue, by, you know, spending money to directly fix a problem. On the issue of, let’s say, homelessness, the first strategy would be funding think tank studies on homelessness, the second would be trying to get more government funds for homelessness, and the third would be building housing.
None of these activities are bad, in a vacuum. Each represents a separate road towards the same outcome. But when determining how to spend limited resources, it’s vital to do an issue-level analysis of which of these paths will be most productive. For issues that are novel or still on the fringes of public consciousness, the intellectual groundwork may be the most pressing task. For issues where a single federal bill in a closely divided Congress could achieve existential victory, politics might be the way to go, at least temporarily. In many cases, though, the third option—directly addressing the problem—is the quickest and most useful way to spend money. Whereas the other two paths are long-term investments with highly uncertain prospects of success, you can be absolutely certain that if you build a house, you have solved homelessness for at least one person. That money wasn’t wasted.
After the Occupy movement propelled inequality to the top of the Problem Charts, and Obama declared economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” the liberal foundation world has thrown itself into the task of mitigating inequality, somehow. Because our half century-long explosion of inequality is the inevitable outcome of global capitalism meeting political systems in which political power can be purchased with money, it is an issue that will need to be tackled on many fronts—regulatory, electoral, and otherwise. We will avoid spiraling off into “How to save the world” here. In my book, I make a very simple argument about inequality. There are, broadly speaking, only two ways to turn around inequality: Either the government can do it, via taxes and regulation, or the working class can do it by gaining enough power to claim its own fair share of the wealth, thereby reducing the grotesque wealth distribution inequalities that now exist. If you think that the US government is poised to tax the rich and rein in corporations enough to accomplish this task, you are far more optimistic than me. That means that—in the near and medium term, in the real world, if you want to see measurable and tangible results—the single most direct and effective way to fight inequality is to increase the power of organized labor. Specifically, to raise union density. Giving many more American workers unions is the fastest and most streamlined and most certain way to increase their wages and wealth and health and political power.
Not only does giving workers unions improve the economic position of those workers directly, which is the actual mechanism for reducing inequality—it also changes the political playing field. Bigger and stronger unions are richer and more influential politically and tend to be more successful in winning legislative victories that help the working class. This is important to note, because even if you think that electoral political wins are where the action is, this is a case in which money spent directly fixing the issue you want to fix—in this case, organizing more unions—is also an extremely effective way to get to electoral wins as well. In other words, spending a hundred million dollars organizing workers into unions will not only achieve direct economic gains, it will also achieve lasting, long-term political gains downstream in a way that simply pouring that same money into political campaigns will not.
Organize workers into unions. This is the task. This is, I would argue, the single best place to spend money to push back against inequality—both directly, by pushing the distribution of income and wealth back in the direction of workers, and through second-order effects of increased political power for pro-worker and anti-inequality causes and candidates.
And what is the factor holding us back from organizing workers into unions at a large scale? What do we need to get there? I’ll tell you one thing we do not need: more white papers. We do not need more think tank studies about The Future of Work or Labor’s Path Forward or The Challenges Facing Workers in the Modern Political Environment. Trust me. I’ve read em all. I am in the top .1% of American consumers of research reports about labor. If you don’t want to read the next research report on this topic, just read the ones from last year, and the ones from five years ago. The main points haven’t changed. We are well supplied with think tank reports here. We know what the problems are! I’m happy to keep reading updated reports forever, but no one can seriously argue that this is the area of greatest need for investment.
America has shitty anti-worker and pro-corporate labor laws that make it difficult to organize and sustain unions. This is a fact. For this reason electoral politics are important. There’s a bill called the PRO Act that would vastly improve these laws. We should pass it. But we need to understand the electoral political fight as a long term one that will never ever cease. It is an arena where battle can be waged more effectively by permanent institutions like labor unions than by one-off do-gooders writing checks to individual candidates in individual campaign cycles. In two years there will always be more candidates and more campaign cycles. It is a bottomless black hole for spending, if you approach it as simply a place to write checks to fund particular campaigns. Build the institutions that are equipped to fight those battles. Build the unions. Build the labor movement, and let it work.
The actual limiting factor that holds us back from organizing millions of workers into new unions is simply this: Resources. Which is to say, money. The money to hire organizers and do the organizing and wage the fight to win a first contract for the workers. We know how to do all of those things. There are many great union organizers who know exactly how to organize workers into unions and win contracts. If you want more unions, you need to put more resources into more organizing in more places. Ding ding ding! What’s that I hear? It’s the answer to the question of what foundations should be doing! Fund labor organizing. It is the opposite of a black hole for money. You are not temporarily throwing money into something that will just need more money again every year forever. Unions are self-supporting institutions. They fund themselves with dues money. They just require an up front investment into organizing them in the first place. Once they exist, they can take care of themselves. From the perspective of institutional funders like foundations, this is the magic quality. This is “teach a man to fish” applied to one of the knottiest social problems that faces humanity.
It is a serious failure of both the foundation world and the labor world that there is not already a big, functional pipeline of money directly into labor organizing. Foundations rarely give money directly to unions for the purpose of organizing workers, and unions rarely ask for it. There are progressive foundations that do fund labor organizing in various ways, but the type of organizing that produces new union members scarcely registers for most major funders. There is not a perfect freestanding organization that sits apart from unions themselves that fulfills this critical task. (In my book I write about Sara Nelson’s ideas on building such an organization, but it is not something that exists yet). There are things like worker centers, that help organize workers who can’t or don’t have unions, and there are things like EWOC, a pretty ad hoc attempt to connect workers with union organizers, but there is no comprehensive national institution that can effectively take in foundation money and use it to run large scale union organizing campaigns that produce significant numbers of new union members, with the goal of increasing union density. I have written a number of times on some ways that we can get closer to building something like this. It is, at the end of the day, just a construction project like any other.
What it will take to complete that construction project is money. How to get the money to do the amount of labor organizing necessary to move the needle on inequality is, in my mind, the most important questions in the entire realm of American economic inequality. This is an incredible opportunity for foundations. They can directly build this structure that can directly solve the most important problem in the most direct way. It’s measurable. Its effectiveness is well-documented. There is an entire set of existing institutions ready to help it along. And it offers wonderful multiplicative effects: a dollar spent giving a worker a union can produce many more dollars in increased wages and other benefits down the line.
Fund union organizing. Think about how to increase union density. Measure your donations with this metric. It’s a good fucking idea. It’s sitting right there. All it needs is the money, and a little work.
Related: A New Idea for New Union Organizing; Mississippi Believes It Can Be Organized. Does Anyone Else?; We Have a Distribution Problem; We Are Failing.
My book, “The Hammer,” is about this stuff, and I encourage you to buy a copy for any of your friends who may be, you know, the president of the Ford Foundation. I have a number of new book tour events coming up in the next two months that I promise I will publish here as soon as I get them all nailed down. If you’re interested in bring me to your city to speak or just to harangue some nonprofit program managers, feel free to email me.
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Pairs well with the expose on GLAAD's spending from yesterday.
My favorite chapter from my second book is all about the role of nonprofits in left organizing and how they distort everything. I would say that the core points are
1) It's the nature of human institutions, even those staffed by good people, to inevitably become more invested in perpetuating themselves than in whatever cause they're devoted to
2) Fundraising becomes an endless self-perpetuating timesuck that turns these organizations into black tie dinner factories
You need to raise money, so you hire people to raise money, and now you've taken on those salaries so you need to raise more money, and you need somebody to manage the salary-money-raising enterprise, so you hire some managers....
The former director of the Wikimedia foundation wrote this once
" Every nonprofit has two main jobs: you need to do your core work, and you need to make the money to pay for it. . . . Nonprofits also prioritize revenue. But for most it doesn’t actually serve as much of an indicator of overall effectiveness. . . . That means that most, or often all, the actual experiences a donor has with a nonprofit are related to fundraising, which means that over time many nonprofits have learned that the donating process needs—in and of itself—to provide a satisfying experience for the donor. All sorts of energy is therefore dedicated towards making it exactly that: donors get glossy newsletters of thanks, there are gala dinners, they are elaborately consulted on a variety of issues, and so forth."
As a long time global union sraffer I fully agree that helping fund union organizing to help workers build power is a key element. I applaud the UE and DSA for launching EWOC, but its scale is way too small. With the IUF I oversaw a global union organizing project within the food and beverage industry that received modest funding controlled by German and Dutch union federations but ultimately sourced from taxpayers in those countries. We were able to hire four energetic organizers at minimal salaries to help unions on various continents to organize and represent workers within global corporations in those industries. The results were quite positive in building global union density within Nestle and Coca Cola, enabling our combined union networks to exert considerable leverage on those global corporations. The IUF could not have funded that campaign from affiliated union membership alone.