Commemorability and Mnemonic Capacity in the Modern U.S. Labor Movement

Members of ALU celebrate their union becoming recognized (from Vox)

 In the last year, the United States has seen a resurgence of labor organizing and unionization efforts. Jennifer Elias and Amelia Lucas at CNBC relay that between October 2021 and March 2022, there were 57% more union representation petitions submitted to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) then were submitted in that same period one year earlier (Elias and Lucas 2022). Unions are taking hold at some of the largest employers in the country including Amazon’s Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United at Starbucks, and employees of Google at the Alphabet Workers Union. However, these corporations that rely on undervalued labor are not going to allow unionization without a fight. The New York Times reported that the NLRB recently “found merit in accusations that Amazon and Starbucks had violated labor law” (Scheiber 2022b). While primarily a legal issue, these accusations also have distinct ramifications in the court of public opinion. If the public, or a segment of the public, recognizes and remembers this event as corporations unjustly targeting innocent workers, unions and unionization efforts everywhere benefit. On the other hand, if this event is commemorated as greedy workers falsely accusing their employer of crimes, it might have the opposite effect. In this way, we can view unionization efforts as sites of contested memory as we move forward through time, sites that could have important impacts on the United States labor movement as a whole.
        Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage provide an interesting look into the process through which collective understandings of events are formed in their piece “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” In the article, they argue that for a group to make an event broadly remembered throughout the country, the group needs to see the event as commemorable and have the mnemonic capacity to create commemorative vehicles. Armstrong and Crage write that “events defined as commemorable by one group may not be defined as such by others. Groups are more likely to find an event worthy of memory if they view it as dramatic, politically relevant, or newsworthy” (Armstrong and Crage 2006:726). They define mnemonic capacity as “the skills and resources needed to create commemorative vehicles” (Armstrong and Crage 2006:726). This includes media contacts, publishing facilities, competency in creating public events, and the ability to create memorials or statues, but could be anything. Today, securely in the age of the internet, I would posit that social media, both as a resource and as a skill, is as important, if not more important, than any other facet of mnemonic capacity.
        When we view recent unionization efforts through the lens of commemorability and mnemonic capacity, we can come to a better understanding of the movement’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of groups' ability to create lasting commemorative vehicles. It seems as though the labor movement’s strength is in its mnemonic capacity but its weakness is in commemorability. Modern labor unions are adept at using social media, both to organize and to publicize their efforts. The most successful of the new unions are grassroots, ground-up organizations (Scheiber 2022a) in which every member can act as a PR person and a link in the organization’s mnemonic capacity through their individual social media accounts. Corporations understand the power of social media as well. Amazon pays employees to respond positively to mentions of the company on Twitter, for example (Gilbert 2021). This creates a mnemonic battleground on the website, in which the two sides struggle for control of the narrative going forward. The unions might have the upper hand because their perspectives are authentic rather than paid for.
        In terms of commemorability, however, the labor movement might not have enough to create a commemorative vessel. While unionization efforts and being victims of labor law violations may be relatively politically important and newsworthy, due to their collective nature they may not be especially dramatic. There is a general antagonist (boss) and protagonist (labor), but it seems difficult to find individuals who can be memorialized as heroes and villains because the process is necessarily one of two groups. Furthermore, the slow progress of NLRB-enforced union recognition sucks the drama out of the process. On Kenyon’s campus, the unionization effort may have lost some steam as the College slowed the process with corporate lawyers and multiple injunctions, while students lost momentum. If groups within the U.S. labor movement hope to create powerful commemorative vessels to cement their efforts in the country's collective memory, they need to begin to understand, and push an understanding among others, of unionization efforts as commemorable.

References

Armstrong, Elizabeth A. and Suzanna M. Crage. 2006. “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” American Sociological Review 71(10):724-751.

Elias, Jennifer and Amelia Lucas. 2022. “Employees everywhere are organizing. Here’s why it’s happening now.” CNBC, May 7.

Gilbert, Ben. 2021. “Amazon is sending employees into the trenches on Twitter as it battles its first union vote and reports about workers peeing in bottles.” Insider, March 29.

Scheiber, Noam. 2022a. “Amazon Workers Who Won a Union Their Way Open Labor Leaders’ Eyes.” New York Times, April 7.

Scheiber, Noam. 2022b. “Labor regulators find merit in accusations by unions at Amazon and Starbucks.” New York Times, May 6.