Report on Labor Notes 2024

This somewhat belated report captures Black Rose/Rosa Negra Labor Committee’s participation in the 2024 edition of the Labor Notes Conference.

Prepared by the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Labor Committee.

The 2024 Labor Notes Conference was held from April 19th to 21st in Chicago, bringing together some 4,700 unionists from around the United States and beyond. This year, the biennial conference smashed the previous record set for attendance during its 2022 gathering.

Now in its 45th year, Labor Notes began its life as a simple black and white newsletter, coming on to the scene one year prior to the election of Ronald Reagan. Carrying labor news and pointedly advocating for reform caucuses within unions, Labor Notes emerged in a period marked by the accelerating retreat of the labor movement––a trend that continues into the present. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of wage and salary workers belonging to a union was 10% in 2023, down from 20.1% in 1983, four years after the founding of Labor Notes. Whereas union density as a whole has declined, the record breaking attendance at Labor Notes, along with increased organizing in new industries and geographic regions is cause for hope that a committed rank and file will not only turn the tide, but give rise to a new and more combative unionism.

In the intervening years, Labor Notes expanded beyond a print newsletter to an organization that offers training and brings together rank-and-file activists from across the US for its large biennial conference. The organization seeks to foster militancy and union democracy in the labor movement, advocating for reviving the strike weapon and moving from the weak tactics of business unionism. While members of the organization Solidarity first helped to cohere Labor Notes and continue to play important roles within it, the project takes a politically non-sectarian approach. As such Labor Notes exists at what we refer to as the intermediate level, being neither a political organization united around a specific ideological perspective nor a mass organization that functions as a vehicle to carry out fights directly. 

Since the 2018 conference, Black Rose/Rosa Negra’s (BRRN) Labor Committee has made it a point to attend and participate in each Labor Notes gathering. Mainly this looks like financially and logistically supporting the attendance of BRRN members and encouraging them to speak on conference panels. 

In late 2023, the BRRN Labor Committee began to identify several specific objectives related to our active participation in the Labor Notes conference, including aims to:

• Begin building networks of rank-and-file activists within industries where we have some presence (focusing on K-12 education, higher education, the building trades, and healthcare).
• Gather information about the current state of labor struggle and organization in the US, so that we can have a better analysis of conditions.
• Establish a presence for anarchism by articulating our perspective on building workers power via a fighting rank-and-file led labor movement as panelists, at our social event, and by tabling during the conference.
• Attend with co-workers and organizing contacts, in order to build organizing relationships through discussion, debate, and shared learning.
• Bring attention to the Palestine solidarity organizing that our members are engaging in through their unions and make the case for an anti-imperialist labor movement.

With these objectives in mind the BRRN Labor Committee committed to sending at least 20 members to the 2024 iteration of the conference. As well, we made plans to organize a public social during the conference and to support the attendance of a member from one of our international sibling organizations.

Recognizing early on that these plans would require a significant financial investment, we launched a fundraising campaign with the goal of crowdfunding $5,000. By the end of the campaign nearly 110 individual supporters had donated more than $7,000, far exceeding our goal and ultimately allowing us to underwrite the airfare, lodging, and attendance for a total of 27 Black Rose/Rosa Negra militants. This fundraising effort also played a crucial role in enabling us to secure spots for members early on, prior to the cap on attendance that was later imposed by conference organizers in response to overwhelming interest.

During this same period we worked closely with our Argentinian sibling organization Federación Anarquista Rosario (FAR) to plan the travel, attendance, and participation of one of their militants who is active in the public sector employee union Asociación Trabajadores del Estado (ATE). This came at an especially critical time as Javier Milei—the recently elected far-right president of Argentina—began rolling out a package of extreme neoliberal policies. In supporting the attendance of our FAR comrade, we hoped to not only deepen the relationship between our political organizations, but to bring the experience of Latin American labor militancy to a largely North American gathering.

As always, it was exciting to walk through the doors of the Chicago O’Hare Hyatt, where Labor Notes takes place, and immediately find oneself in the company of thousands of other unionists from around the United States and beyond. The agenda was packed with full days of workshops, trainings, industry specific breakouts, history panels, cultural events, lectures, discussions, and more.

Members of Black Rose/Rosa Negra participated on several panels throughout the weekend, offering lessons from campaigns that were made successful by rank-and-file militancy. This included panels that focused on organizing the unorganized in the South, building bottom-up power to carry out indefinite strikes, and organizing for Palestine solidarity in our unions. As well, we were happy to be able to arrange for the comrade from our sibling organization FAR, to speak on an international panel about public sector organizing in Argentina.

Other than its record breaking number of attendees, another detail set the 2024 conference apart from those in the past: this year Labor Notes lifted a ban on the official presence of political organizations. While political organizations, including Black Rose/Rosa Negra, had long held unofficial events during and around past iterations of the conference, 2024 was the first year that they were invited to table and list their own events in the conference agenda.

We took advantage of this new openness by booking a large event room on the main floor of the hotel to host our ‘Red and Black Party’. With it we aimed to create a more casual space to gather, meet, and network with unionists who share our political and strategic principles. While daytime conference proceedings present some opportunity to do this, it’s often hard to have anything more than passing chats as everyone rushes to get to the next event on their schedule. Given that one of the objectives we commit to in our political program, Turning the Tide, is the development and expansion of a “militant minority of anarchists dedicated to organizing at a rank-and-file level within strategic industries”, we felt that we needed a place to have more sustained conversations.

With the decorations up, drinks on ice, and music bumping we opened the doors to our party right around 9 PM. Kicking things off, we had members of the Blue Bottle Independent Union—who had just recently announced gone public with their effort—speak about the choice to organize independently of a parent organization, what it takes to run an underground campaign, and what they hope to accomplish in the future.

Over the course of the night hundreds of Labor Notes attendees filtered into our party, with many visiting our literature table, lining up for our party photo booth, and grabbing drinks from the bar. BRRN members chatted with dozens of fellow unionists, articulating our strategic vision within the labor movement and gathering contacts from those who are organizing in our same industries. At one point in the night we cut into the music to announce that the United Auto Workers (UAW) had won their campaign at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, news that was met with an explosion of cheers and applause.

By the time the party wound down a little after 1 AM, our literature table was picked clean, our contact lists were full, the beer stockpile was nearly depleted—and we were confident calling the Red and Black Party a success.

While members of the BRRN Labor Committee believe that the Labor Notes conference is playing a key role in creating an opportunity for labor militants in the United States to congregate and develop a resurgent labor movement, we do not participate uncritically. As a matter of strategy, Labor Notes the organization stresses the formation of rank-and-file reform caucuses oriented toward challenging and replacing the existing executive leadership of unions. Unfortunately, the overemphasis on leadership has led Labor Notes to tacitly or expressly endorse high profile labor leaders and politicians who have little interest in developing a militant, democratic, and rank-and-file led labor movement. 

This was exemplified in the choice to provide Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson with stage time on the first night of the conference this year. Johnson, a former Chicago teacher and staff organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, won his mayoral campaign as a Democrat in 2023. Since taking office, he has overseen the repression of Palestine solidarity protests in Chicago over the last year. More recently, Johnson helped to broker a deal with union bureaucrats that would prevent strikes in the city during the Democratic National Convention.

But Johnson’s presence at the gathering did not go without response. Immediately prior to his appointment to take the stage, hundreds of Labor Notes attendees—many adorned in Palestinian keffiyehs—gathered to demonstrate outside of the hotel where the conference was being held. Responding to the gathered crowd, local police quickly arrested several participants, though were eventually forced to release them without charge after police cruisers were surrounded.

The power we have built and must continue to build, did not and can not come from politicians—whether they have their own labor movement bonafides, or claim to be the most “pro-union” elected in history. Neither can it come from electing the right reform candidates to our executive boards. Rather than investing ourselves in winning and defending control of a particular office, we can instead build a more durable power through the development of independent rank-and-file organization. 

Labor Notes continues to present the best opportunity to regroup a militant labor movement in the United States. Despite the shortcomings identified in the previous section, it would be beyond foolish to refuse participation or attempts at intervention in one of the few independent labor oriented projects that have achieved the scale and momentum that Labor Notes has built.

It is still the case, as we offered in our reflection on the 2022 conference and at the beginning of this piece, that the labor movement in the US continues its slow quantitative decline. While there are bright spots to be proud of—the explosion of organizing in the service sector; recent UAW victories in the South; the choice by a small but growing number of workers to pursue independent unionism—it is impossible to ignore the statistical reality. Should this lead us to a state of resignation? To abandon labor as a sector through which we can build and assert class power? We refuse this position.

In fact, in the decay of what has passed for unionism over the last 50 years, a renewed and militant unionism—animated and controlled by the rank-and-file—might find more room to breathe and grow. It will take a great deal of work to make this hope a reality. 

If you share our commitment to such a project, reach out.