We Need Rank and File Unionism Because of Fran Drescher

Building a strong labor movement means replacing the Frans.

Major studios have until midnight Wednesday to reach a deal with the SAG-AFTRA actors union before they go on strike. How does SAG-AFTRA union president Fran Drescher feel about this?

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Last summer I saw an article congratulating Fran Drescher on being elected as President of SAG-AFTRA. IDK, maybe it was even a meme.

With no context and a weird gay positive feeling about The Nanny, I thought — “cool nice” and hit retweet.

Unions are good! The Nanny is good!

Fran Drescher is in charge of a Union, so that also must be good? Retweet.

Nice job H! You’re doing your part for labor!

But it turns out Drescher’s election was NOT the win for unions I thought it was.

In spite of SAG-AFTRA’s decision to go on strike alongside WGA, Fran has not shown much uh… solidarity, as union president — she’s gone on trips during key negotiation moments and is taking pictures with Kim Kardashian, who can’t figure out why no one wants to work anymore and is involved with American Horror Story, one of the only productions ongoing during the WGA writer’s strike.

During the leadup to SAG AFTRA’s strike, many people wondered if Drescher would allow for the strike at all, considering that the leadership position seemed to more be a PR move than an actual desire to say, collectively bargain.

So, in spite of my retweet, turns out that Fran Drescher being in charge of the Actor’s Union, was not good, but bad, actually. Or at least — not great.

But what’s interesting to me about Fran is that she illustrates a type of union leadership that is rapidly being toppled (or at least agitated into action, which is how some say SAG went on strike in the first place).

And when we compare Fran Drescher’s leadership to some of the “Hot Labor Summer” moments happening right now, it illustrates many behind-the-scenes fights happening across the labor movement. It shows how the rise of what is called rank-and-file unionism is what’s behind the Teamsters’ major negotiations right now, what made Brandon Johnson’s win possible in Chicago, and is a major catalyst for change in the labor movement that, as James Glimco, president of Teamsters Local 777 told WBEZ, is suddenly growing exponentially.

So, with Fran at the helm, let’s try to understand what rank-and-file organizing within unions looks like and why it matters.

Thanks, Fran! Thanks, gay people who made The Nanny ubiquitous for some reason!

Note: If you’ve already read No Shortcuts don’t read this because I’m just going to try to poorly explain those lessons there. Lilly, close the tab!

What is a Union?

Okay — let’s start basic. A union is an organized group of workers who come together to advocate for their rights and interests in the workplace. Nice!

The primary purpose of a union is to collectively bargain with employers on behalf of workers: by representing a collective of workers, a union has more power than each individual worker would, and as a result, can get better wages, benefits, working conditions, and other workplace rights as a collective of workers.

Unions can be independent, formed only in a single workplace — but the power of a union (which, boy, there are a lot of folk songs about) comes from lots of workers in lots of workplaces working together.

When we see the massive wave of groups starting a union in their workplace as we have over the few years, the short media cycle often makes it seems like these workplaces are independent unions — forming out of nowhere and answering to no one. They exist to strike and only to strike. But in reality, most workplaces unionize with at least some support from larger and more established unions. The bigger the active group of people organized and able to take action (like striking, but often much smaller actions), the more powerful the union. The more powerful the union, the more workers are able to get their demands met and improve working conditions.

Cool! That’s what a union is!

What is Rank and File Unionism?

Like any group of people sharing power, unions also have internal politics, because groups of people using power to change things often disagree on how to use that power.

And so, unions, like any organization, have politics. These politics include campaigning and running candidates for union leadership elections, including the president. In order to be effective in these politics, unions often have parties or caucuses — groups of people who agree on a certain set of main issues and work together to get internal power within the union.

Rank-and-file unionism, or rank-and-file organizing, is a style of union organizing that prioritizes workers — gee, that sounds like something everyone can get on board with in a union! That’s just… what a union is, right? Haha.

Unfortunately, within many unions, the “rank and file organizing approach” is a partisan political issue — the same way that something common sense like “we shouldn’t kill all the trans people” is a partisan issue in our national political system.

And, much like our national political system — often the people who DON’T believe in the reasonable thing are often the ones in charge, especially in the last 30 years. Nice!

We’re finally getting to Fran.

Who is Fran Drescher, really?

Drescher is a really good example of a common pattern in union leadership right now: a"business as usual” leader who creates vague plans and only involves workers at the peripheries. They negotiate black box style, without workers present, and tend to be fairly professionalized — they’re lawyers, advocates, lobbyists, rather than people who do the same job people in the union do.

The Actor’s Union isn’t a powerful, well-established union — the politics in the last few decades have been limited because involvement and engagement is fairly limited (though if the strike is any indication, that’s changing rapidly).

People like Fran often get elected because the people running those unions count on low turnout, limited engagement, and inactive union members to keep things going as they have been for many decades.

This seemed to be Fran’s MO — others have speculated that the SAG presidency was more about brand promotion than a desire to do much with its membership.

What happens when Fran Drescher is in charge of the union:

Today, less than 12% of Americans are in a union. Of those 14 million people that are, very few of them are particularly active. To be clear: the ultimate reason for the devastation of unions in the last 50 years is because of the systemic and calculated decimation of working-class power by the Right Wing. Cool!

There are many reasons for this — labor history is wild and often suppressed, and I won’t get into how powerful unions used to be (powerful enough that the government and capitalist forces who ran the government suppressed them with a lot of violence).

Still — some things… could have been better internally.

And the Frans of the world… didn’t help.

In the last 30 years or so, many unions have often ended up playing a kind of lobbying and advocacy role, with leadership focused on funding and working to support Democratic candidates and issues on a national level.

This strategy for unions, whether chosen because of necessity or scarcity, was goal for leadership and strategy for many unions over the last three decades. It meant they occupied a space as a kind of weird national advocacy group, deeply disconnected from members’ actual workplaces. But this also meant that unions were far from workers — NOT a rank-and-file ideology.

The vaguer the plans of union leadership become, focused on national platforms, the less the union has to do with the workers in it, with their concerns in the workplace. And the less meaningful the union is to your life, the less it makes sense for you to get involved, to be engaged.

At least — that’s what happens when Fran Drescher is in charge of the union.

Rank and File Works.

Thankfully, most of the exciting stuff happening in labor right now demonstrates how powerful unions can become, very quickly, with post-Fran union leadership.

The unions leading the national Strikewave: the Teamsters, the WGA, CWA, even the Chicago Teacher’s Union’s rank-and-file caucus CORE — these unions are growing and building power because they are building a rank-and-file model strong enough to get their leadership in office.

That means prioritizing rank-and-file unionism and choosing to put resources and leverage into efforts that make it easier for workers to run the union: things like forming their own committees, electing their own leaders and making decisions democratically about bargaining priorities, tactics, and strategies.

It also often involves a focus on workplace issues that directly impact the workers in the union: wages, benefits, and working conditions — though this can often include social and political issues that affect workers like racism, sexism, and immigration policies.

After years of organizing, some unions are starting to build this rank-and-file organizing into the mechanism of their union enough that they have a much stronger union overall — one that can build more power for workers, and actually win things.

I have no idea what SAG-AFTRA's next steps will be, internally or externally.

Will they strike? Will Fran be the best person at the front if they DO strike?

No idea.

But Fran doesn’t have to be the end for SAG — no matter how contract negotiations end.

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