Labor gains and labor losses are most often incremental and these days successes and failures can go in both directions at the same time.

At the turn of the last century, the American Federation of Labor — unlike its “pie in the sky” predecessor, the Knights of Labor — agitated for limited, achievable, immediate goals rather than trying to transform the economic landscape all at once. The 14-hour day became the 10-hour and then the eight-hour day; demands for a six-day week led to a five-and-a-half and then a five-day week, and then we had the weekend.

The UFT collective bargaining negotiations with the city during our in-service days achieved economic and professional dignity in small or large steps depending on the administration and circumstances of the day. So many metaphors or aphorisms could be used to characterize this dynamic: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; the tortoise and the hare, etc.

We cringe when we hear former Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker crow about wiping out collective bargaining in Wisconsin as the right-to-work momentum grows across the country. That atmosphere makes it important to take a look at the current tapestry of losses and gains.

A small but significant gain is the 2–1 victory by workers in a small auto supply factory in Piedmont, Alabama, to join the Automobile Workers union. The South has always fought unions and is a bastion of right-to-work legislation.

Recently the New York State Board of Regents established an appeals process in teacher evaluations following efforts of the UFT and NYSUT to limit the importance of student test scores in the evaluation process — an incremental but significant gain.

In New Mexico, car wash workers found that even though they could not easily form a union, a provision of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act supported their efforts to create committees of workers that could lobby their employers for fairness including no longer forcing them not to clock in for an hour and a half so they would not have to be paid for a full day’s work. When these committee members were fired, the courts reversed the firings and ordered back pay for the time they lost — another small step in the long journey toward worker dignity.

In Missouri, the anti-labor state Legislature passed a bill to end union dues emulating neighboring right-to-work states. The Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, vetoed the bill and friends of labor in the Legislature blocked an override attempt preserving, for now, a hard-won right.

But incrementalism has a negative side, too, where the slippery slope down erodes our past gains.

Congressional opponents of labor’s landmark gains — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and now the Affordable Health Care Act — know those institutions are too popular with Americans to try to wipe them out in one fell swoop, so they are going after them incrementally like cutting Social Security disability payments to those most in need. We know how fast President George W. Bush had to retract attempts to privatize Social Security and how persistently conservatives attempt to destroy it completely. And we know that all over the country courts are hearing cases to eviscerate the AHCA bit by bit until it is reduced to nothing. They want to “starve the beast” and then label as failures all the social safety net institutions they deliberately underfund.

The courts can play both a positive and negative role in this incremental process. The car washers in New Mexico are current beneficiaries. But regressive, anti-labor forces funded by corporate and hedge fund types are now using the courts to reverse decades of achievements. Public employees, notably teacher unions because of their perceived power, are their special targets. The Supreme Court recently in Harris v. Quinn disallowed agency fee payments (union dues) for certain employees and now has announced it will consider the legality of fair share/agency fee requirements for nonmembers covered by all the gains made by a union’s collective-bargaining unit. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would be a crushing loss to unions. The court’s current conservative composition does not bode well for labor on this issue.

What to do?

Asked about his strategy to win the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln referred to Mississippi River pilots who sailed from point to point within their sight line to navigate piecemeal rather than thinking of sailing the whole river. With this method they actually achieved the long-range goal of their journey. We must keep pressing forward even if our achievements are only incremental in order to ensure labor victories but our efforts must also be fought in the context of a broad progressive labor vision.