Review of Phil Cohn’s Maximum Leverage

Union strength or weakness is often seen only through the light of a strike or lockout. Phil Cohn’s memoir, Maximum Leverage, tells a different story. Union building is on-going, from organizing to win a first contract, to maintaining and strengthening that contract over time, from grievance handling to arbitration, from safety and health to pension rights. And in every situation there is a need to build membership participation, develop and support local leadership, strengthen mutual support, ensure understanding of rights, understanding of power and how to wield it (or lose it). Cohn demonstrates as much as he explains, how every aspect of the above is at the heart of a union’s ability to improve conditions on the job, improve pay and benefits, and ultimately be able to win on the picket line if it comes to that.

A chapter recalling fighting back against a union-busting attorney during bargaining is emblematic. BTR Sealing Systems in Reidsville, NC – a factory making wiper blades for auto companies – negotiated a first contract with workers after the plant was organized in 1995. Frequent grievances and conflicts with supervisors were part of the reality where both workers and frontline supervisors were unfamiliar with negotiating day-to-day disputes via a contract; nonetheless, eventually issued were resolved and a working relationship developed between the union and the company.

The developing good workplace environment turned poisonous when the second contract came up and management’s proposal included eliminating the union’s right to file NLRB or discrimination charges, eliminating past practice as an argument during a grievance procedure, requiring the union to resign all members at the end of each calendar year, amongst other poison pill provisions. Complicating matters, some union members were pushing for wage demands beyond what the union could win or the company could pay. For Cohn this meant waging a no-holds-barred campaign against management while educating the membership about what would or would not be possible to achieve. He makes clear, too, that while compromises are necessary in any battle, these ought not compromise rights or unity, and that while maintaining a good relationship with managers can be helpful, but members interests and needs always must come first.

Key in all of this, however, was aggressively resisting management’s assaults, winning improvements in conditions, pay, benefits wherever there was an opening, while all the while maintaining workplace unity. As Cohn tells a manager who wants him to support an inadequate contract, “One thing you’ve got to understand about me. My goal isn’t to ratify by fifty percent plus one. I’ve got good instincts about a local’s threshold. If I don’t sense a nearly unanimous ratification, I’ll get out in front of the militants and recommend the contract be voted down. A split vote means a divided local for the next three years. I’d rather walk a picket line.” Ultimately, none of the company’s anti-union proposals were in the final contract, the union won some wage gains and improved contract language – and strengthened the local’s in-plant leadership.

Similarly, Cohn describes the strategy he employed in 1998 engaging a vastly different workforce when winning a first contract with newly organized Starlite Bedding (a company manufacturing mattresses) in Greensboro, North Carolina and again when resisting a decertification attempt at a Kmart distribution center (also in Greensboro) in 2002. Other fights he recounts address potential layoffs/threatened closure at a textile mill in White Oak, NC; overcoming KKK influence at a foam manufacturing plant in Cornelius, NC; resisting concessions at a large clothing manufacturer in Philadelphia.

Yet his memoir is not just a recitation of war stories. When describing how he successfully defended a warehouse worker unfairly fired, Cohn explains the difference between non-union “employment-at-will” and union contract “just cause” protections. So too in a chapter on helping a worker at a textile mill (making carpets) get compensation for a workplace injury, he explains how employers try to get around fairly paying workers’ compensation claims.

Although each situation is different, each situation similarly involves total awareness of the personalities and economics involved, each situation requires judgement of how to involve local communities, media, utilize union legal and research resources. Cohn’s approach, even when holding a seemingly weak hand, is to go on the offensive while maintaining realism about objective, while never losing sight of the goal – be it a good contract, saving pensions, ensuring workplace safety.

There are good books that explain how unions function, that discuss the role of the NLRB or OSHA, that discuss labor strategy and cite examples of what has or has not worked in the past. What gives Cohn’s book a substance most “how to” or theoretical accounts lack, is that he is writing about his own experience, giving names and faces to vivid personalities with all their quirks and contradictions that is the living reality of a union. Thus readers see the range of experiences that embodies labor organization, in a way no textbook can provide.

One lesson that comes through always be aggressive on behalf of the membership – even (or especially) when under attack. Union building for Cohn is rooted in understanding points of strength and weakness on both sides, thereby discovering where the union has “maximum leverage”. His own life experience informed his practical and moral understanding of where the difference between the boss and workers lies:

“Management investigations tend to be little more than an exercise in rubber-stamping previously made decisions. They seldom take time to scratch beneath the surface of what appear to be straightforward incidents, in search of the whole truth. Employees are considered expendable and the impact on human beings and their families isn’t a corporate consideration.

“Human resource directors, even the few who actually give a damn, understand that keeping their job depends on maintaining levels of productivity that won’t tolerate distractions motivated by compassion or justice.”

Cohn became a union activist when working as a bus driver in Chapel Hill, NC, in the early 1980s at a facility where the workers were represented by a do-nothing local. Success there took him on the path to become a union rep for ACTWU (Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union) on through its various iterations as UNITE, UNITE HERE, and continuing into its current incarnation as Workers United-SEIU. From first to last (the final campaign noted in his memoir was in 2018) it was the culture and the militance of the southern textile workers that he embraced.

Life experience before moving South, however, prepared Cohn for the union organizing to come. On the streets of New York from 1967 (when he was 16) through the late 1970s, Cohn was part of New York’s East Village scene during a time when the counter-culture was collapsing into survival mode, where life was cheap in every sense of the word. During those years he frequently drove cabs which, in pre-gentrified times, was considered the most dangerous job around. He washed dishes, lived in and “managed” a hotel for people who fell through the porous cracks of the city. It is a world vividly described in the first section of Maximum Leverage — bringing to mind my own memories of those times and neighborhoods.

Being part of the world with people who were handed a bad deck, every day on the knife’s edge, set the framework for how Cohn approached unionism as he notes in the prologue: “I always had an instinct for survival and playing the system, sometimes using it to keep other street kids alive or out of prison … I had the soul of an outlaw but was never a criminal. An outlaw ignores the rules in favor of his own code but doesn’t prey upon the weak and innocent.”

Similarly, life where food, shelter, safety were always in question helped shape the convictions that made him a unionist — as he writes “Living on the fringes of society did far more to shape my views about social justice and how the system really works than any classroom could have.”

Maximum Leverage was published by Hardball Press and is available at https://www.hardballpress.org/Email