From the editorial team

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FALL 2005

The recent rift within organized labor will generate more seismic changes than we've seen in over half a century. With the Service Employees, the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers having left the AFL-CIO, and, as we go to press, the Laborers, and the Hotel, Restaurant, Needletrades and Textile union (UNITE HERE) contemplating leaving the Federation, the AFL-CIO may lose roughly 30 percent of its membership base and per capita payments. At the same time, a rival federation is being born. Will this development produce a healthy competition for the hearts and minds of the nearly 90 percent of workers outside unions? Or will it set off internecine battles, including raiding between the two factions? Will huge national organizing campaigns like the one for Wal-Mart finally take off? Or will divided allegiances and resources kill the chances for such efforts? What will the rift mean for the political prospects of workers locally and nationally? New Labor Forum is committed to exploring these and other related questions on an ongoing and multi-partisan basis. The next issue of New Labor Forum will carry two articles, one by Ruth Milkman and another by Jeff Crosby, discussing the prospects for labor in this newly configured world.

In this issue, Jonathan Tasini reports from the floor of the AFL-CIO convention held this July. In Tasini's view there are a number of crucial questions that both sides have ignored or inadequately answered. Among them: What would constitute a viable plan for large scale organizing? How can labor help spark a social movement that would increase the chances for such organizing? How should labor address challenges posed by a rapidly expanding Chinese economy? Is labor law reform a sensible, strategic priority for the immediate future? Tasini proposes some provocative answers to these questions and we invite our readers to respond.

The search for strategies to reignite the labor movement has already provided, in some quarters, an occasion for thinking the unthinkable: that something other than conventional trade unionism must supplant or supplement what we have up to now taken for granted. Does the nature of both the 21st century domestic economy and the international one to which it is now intricately tethered marginalize the normal workplace-based forms of collective bargaining? Simon Black and Dorian Warren would not go so far as to argue that. But they raise for our consideration the phenomenon of community-based unionization. Black examines community unionism in general, argues that under certain circumstances it is a more effective way of mobilizing today's working class, and suggests how community unions and workplace unions might collaborate. Warren describes the way community organization has been critical in the campaign to confront Wal-Mart in Chicago. The Chicago story is an object lesson in the way community mobilization and political alliance building hold out the hope of taking on this immensely powerful corporation from the outside rather than relying on organizing from within. A more customary but no less critical story is unfolding in Florida, where SEIU is trying to organize condominium workers. Bruce Nissen describes that campaign, a pioneering attempt to penetrate the economy of the Sunbelt, which includes efforts to enlist community support, and explores its implications for unionizing Florida and the South.

Churches and other religious institutions are part of the community, and carry increasing moral and even political authority, including in many working-class urban, suburban, and exurban locales. Much, although by no means all of that authority has gravitated to the right, and with rather devastating political consequences. Peter Laarman and Alexia Salvatierra explore the nature of faith-based politics and how those spiritual resources might be marshaled instead on behalf of the movements for social justice, including the labor movement. Tanya Erzen describes the way right-wing evangelicals in Ohio and elsewhere mobilized their congregants for the 2004 presidential election. Part of the secret of their success, Erzen observes, has to do with the way these churches have become substitute mini welfare states, ministering to the material needs of their members, while the conservatives they support for public office whittle away at what remains of the public safety net. If the labor movement is to be reborn, it does seem essential that in one way or another it speak to those intangible as well as material desires and anxieties of the born-again, many of whom come from the ranks of working-class Americans.

Many commentators have noted the incongruous alliance between the corporate elite and, especially, although not exclusively, white working-class people—an odd mating which defines the conservative populism of the Republican Party. What makes this chemistry work even though in practical terms there have been precious few payoffs for ordinary folk, and bundles of goodies for big business and the rich? Part of the answer is sure to lie in the realm of foreign policy. People who've lived through a prolonged period of economic and cultural dislocation, who feel dispossessed and disrespected, may find compensation in a bellicose chauvinism. It is not war so much as the reaffirmation—whether at home or abroad—of a nationalism heavily inflected with historic patriarchal, religious, and racial instincts, that keeps them bonded to an elite that means them no good. For the labor movement this means that becoming part of the antiwar movement is as much a matter of domestic policy as it is one about the country's foreign affairs. In this issue Michael Zweig provides an account of the very significant growth of antiwar activity within the labor movement, and analyzes where that sentiment has taken root and why. In fact, among the surprising developments at the July AFLCIO convention was the standing ovation by delegates in favor of a resolution for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Iraq is hardly the only global hot-spot posing serious questions for labor. A debate between Lee Sustar and Stan Gacek over the nature of the AFL's activities in Venezuela before and after the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez helps sharpen our thinking about what role organized labor ought to be playing abroad, especially in regions like Latin America, where opposition to U.S. power and policy has taken on robust form.

The conservative assault on the New Deal may have crossed a bridge too far in its attempt to privatize social security. As we go to press the issue remains unresolved. Part of what's at stake is the desire of leading financial institutions to profit from such a transformation. Joel Solomon explains what Wall Street may have in mind. Chile privatized its retirement system some years ago, and Ruth Needleman reports on how that country's pensioners have fared. No matter who wins the debate here in the United States, union pension and benefit funds (especially health care funds) will remain in deep financial trouble. Christian Weller analyzes the origins of that crisis and examines possible legislative remedies.

Two new features introduced in the last issue of New Labor Forum continue here. In this installment of “Working-Class Voices of Contemporary America,” Amber Hollibaugh writes about her life as a lesbian of workingclass background. She recounts how her experiences at and away from work were deeply marked by the phobic reactions to her erotic desires by her family as well as her fellow workers and employers. Kim Phillips-Fein's column, “Caught in the Web,” alerts our readers to valuable nuggets of information and analysis available on the Internet about matters ranging from the Federal Reserve Board to the international garment industry, written by experts but designed for the lay reader.

Boxing and football have long been arenas in which working-class men found pathways to upward mobility, indulged their fantasy lives, and were systematically exploited. Our contributing editor Kitty Krupat reviews two movies—Million Dollar Baby and Friday Night Lights—to see what they tell us and fail to tell us about these matters. In the case of Million Dollar Baby she explores how all this gets treated from the standpoint of a woman boxer, and dissects the film's underlying assumptions about race, class, sexuality, and gender. Women and children are also the subject of a review of two important documentaries. Malini Cadambi dissects the Oscar-winning Born into Brothels, noting its visual power but finding it politically wanting when compared to the more didactic but more penetrating examination of child labor in Stolen Childhoods. Also included in our Books and the Arts section is a review by Peter Goldberger of The Right Nation, an attempt by two British authors to account for the remarkable success of conservative politics in America, and a review by Marilyn Harris of Susan Gordon's Nursing Against the Odds, a thought-provoking look at the attempt to unionize this vital sector of the health care industry. We conclude as we always do with a selection of poetry, this time a sampling of poetry from abroad about workingclass life, assembled by our guest editor Padraig O Donoghue.

Finally, New Labor Forum takes this opportunity to express our great sadness at the sudden passing of Miguel Contreras, the indefatigable leader of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which by any measure has been one of the most dynamic sectors of the labor movement for at least the last decade, winning major political as well as organizing victories.