Unions are finally fighting two-tier contracts

How the actual fuck did they fail to see through this bullshit decades ago?

Now that Striketober has given way to Strikesgiving, let’s pause for a moment and be grateful that labor made 2021 the year that unions wised up to the self-immolating scam that is the two-tier contract.

As Alexandra Bradbury writes for Labor Notes, this year’s most prominent labor actions fought against two-tier contracts, from the Teamsters to John Deere to Kaiser to Kellogg’s to UPS.

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2021/11/year-im-thankful-revolt-against-two-tier

What’s a two-tier contract? Just what it sounds like: management offers the union concessions on its key demands, but only for current workers. Future workers get a worse deal.

Management’s theory is that workers may have solidarity with one another, but not with workers who haven’t even been hired yet, and that a two-tier contract will lead to an ever-expanding cohort of workers who pay full union dues but don’t get full union benefits. Thus, over the span of years, the union will get weaker and weaker, and eventually it will be too weak to stand up for any of its workers — even the top-tier workers, who will see all those gains clawed back in future negotiations.

The leaders who backed two-tier are retiring or being forced out, as with this month’s historic leadership vote in the Teamsters, which saw a decisive win for reformers who made killing two-tier the centerpiece of their campaign:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

As Bradbury writes, two-tier and even three-tier systems are in place at the Big Three automakers, the USPS, and universities, where they are responsible for the mass immiseration of adjuncts.

Giving in to two-tier made unions weak, poisoning the rank and file and making strikes all but impossible. But as Eugene Braswell, a Teamsters United activist, notes, fighting against two-tier is a way to bring young workers into union activism, ready to go to the wall for workers’ rights.

“I thought it would be hard to get young workers] involved [in the Teamsters United…