Spring 2010 Abstracts

Under the Radar

"My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift."
-Speaking of Britain’s severe recession, Anglican priest Rev. Tim Jones explained to his parishioners that it "is permissible for those who are in desperate situations to take food [so] that they might not starve."

"We're going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It's going to be great."
-Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, when asked about the replacement of newspapers and books with online news sources and electronic devices like the Amazon Kindle. Murdoch estimates the process will take about twenty years.

Labor Unionists at Core of Movement against Home Foreclosures
Since 2007, the non-profit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) has helped over one hundred thousand homeowners restructure their loans to stay in their houses. . .

Sixteen Deaths Per Day
According to the latest available figures from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), sixteen workers die every day on the job in the United States . . .

Largest Mass Arrest Settlements in U.S. History
After nearly a decade of class action litigation, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) announced the settlement of two mass arrest cases with the District of Columbia . . .

Required Reading: Labor History
In 2010, Wisconsin became the first state to require the teaching of labor history in all public schools . . .

Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game

The current hard times have been harder on some people than on others, harder on the poor-obviously-than on the rich; but harder also on blacks and Hispanics than on whites. As of this writing, the unemployment rate for blacks is at 15.6 percent, and for Hispanics it’s at 12.7 percent. For white people, it’s 9.3 percent. Of course, the vast majority of the unemployed are white. But it’s the disparity in rates, not in absolute numbers, that tends to get foregrounded, since that disparity functions not only as a measure of suffering but also, in William A. Garity’s concise summary, as “an index of discrimination in our society.” And it’s the ongoing fact of discrimination that motivates our ongoing interest in identity politics. As long as inequality is apportioned by identity, we will be concerned with identity.

This is obviously both inevitable and appropriate. But it is also-and almost as obviously-irrelevant to a left politics, or even to the goal of reducing unemployment, as we can see just by imagining what it would be like if we finally did manage to get rid of discrimination. Suppose, for example, that unemployment for whites and for Asian-Americans were to rise to 10 percent while for blacks and Hispanics it fell to 10 percent. Or suppose that unemployment for everyone went to 15 percent.  In both cases, we would have eliminated the racial disparity in unemployment rates, but in neither case would we have eliminated any unemployment. And we don’t even need hypotheticals to make the point. About three quarters of the job losers in the current recession have been men, which means that the numbers of men and women in the workforce are now roughly equal. So, from the standpoint of gender equity, the recession has actually been a good thing. It’s as if, unable to create more jobs for women, we’d hit upon the strategy of eliminating lots of the jobs for men-another victory for feminism and for anti-discrimination since, from the standpoint of anti-discrimination, the question of how many people are unemployed is completely irrelevant. What matters is only that, however many there are, their unemployment is properly proportioned.

Identity Politics: Part of a Reinvigorated Class Politics

Identity politics has its share of shortcomings. But the problems that plague an anemic class politics won't be solved by eliminating its supposed competitor. In recent decades, identity politics has mushroomed to include more and more social groups for good reason: numerous categories of persons have been systematically denied rights, privileges, and social respect. Major social categories, like race and sexuality, are not a “distraction” from the “real” problem of economic inequality; rather they are an integral part of an individual's lived experiences. But identity politics cannot end all forms of inequality. At best, it is one strategy in a larger assault against systems of inequality.

The Skip Gates debacle of July 2009 illustrates the importance of identity politics, as well as some of its limits. Professor Gates, an esteemed Harvard University professor who is African-American, found himself arrested on his front porch by a white police officer responding to a call of a break-in. Hands down, race mattered. It is difficult to imagine that a fifty-eight-year-old white man, living in a stately home near Harvard’s campus and walking with a cane, would be arrested after showing proof of residence. But the attention generated by identity politics often focuses on sensationalized details at the expense of understanding systemic dimensions of social problems. The media’s coverage of this shocking, frightening, and embarrassing public incident often focused on Professor Gates's professional achievements while alluding to, but never fully addressing, the structural dimension of police officers’ abuse of authority, especially when racial minorities are involved. Public conversation centered on whether Professor Gates's achievements should have exempted him from the indignities of “being black”-a view rebutted by the answer to the question, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?” Consequently, the systemic suffering of poor and minority communities, whose encounters with police officers too often end in death or imprisonment, received relatively little comment. Furthermore, some observed that Gatesgate upstaged President Obama's major address on health insurance reform scheduled for that week, detracting attention from the most significant social and economic reform in over six decades. Finally, the entire affair culminated in a friendly beer summit at the White House, demonstrating how “kumbaya handholding” trumps actual accountability when politicians face difficult political situations.

The U.S. economy faces enormous questions and challenges in attempting to recover from the collapse of 2008-2009.  Some of the most pressing questions are short-term and cyclical:  When will unemployment start falling?  When will banks start lending at reasonable levels for productive purposes?  At what level will the housing market stabilize and foreclosures fall off?  Can an overall economic upswing be sustained? 

But equally daunting are a series of longer-term, structural challenges:  Can we establish a growth engine driven by something other than financial bubbles?  Can we renew the automobile industry and, more generally, reestablish a healthy manufacturing sector?  Can we accomplish these various tasks while also rebuilding the economy on a new foundation of clean energy as opposed to fossil fuel energy sources?  Are all of these projects also compatible with expanding decent job opportunities throughout the U.S. economy?  Addressing these longer-term challenges is the overarching theme on which we focus in this paper. 

We begin by examining these questions within the general context of debates around public investment and industrial policy.   This includes a brief review of the longstanding question as to whether public investments in the traditional areas of transportation, energy, and water management divert scarce resources that would otherwise be available to private investors, or whether these public investments create a nurturing environment that encourages more spending by private investors.  We conclude from our review of this evidence that a large-scale commitment to public investment projects that are well-designed and implemented does indeed provide a crucial foundation supporting the healthy long-term growth of private investment, in addition to much higher levels of public safety and amenities.

We also review similar issues regarding industrial policies-that is, policies to promote research and development (R&D), moving technical innovations from R&D investments into commercial use, and raising productivity and competitiveness by getting businesses to adopt these innovations as rapidly as possible.  Opponents of industrial policies in the U.S. context have long argued that government policymakers are singularly incapable of “picking winners” in the areas of technological innovations that will become commercially successful.  But the historical record tells us that the U.S. government-and particularly the Pentagon-has been instrumental in developing all the most important commercially successful technologies of the last century, including jet aviation, the computer, the Internet, and bioengineering. 

The other factor we consider with respect to public investments and industrial policy-both in traditional areas of transportation, energy, and water management as well as new clean energy areas-is the impact of these investments on employment.  In fact, investing money in anything will create at least some jobs.  But as we show, spending on traditional infrastructure and clean energy development is a powerful source of job creation in the U.S. relative to major alternative spending targets, including the military and fossil fuel industries.

Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California’s Retail Fortress

On a clear day, flying into Los Angeles from the East, if you glance down about twenty minutes before landing, the desert and mountains give way to the beginnings of the massive sprawl that stretches inland from the L.A. basin. Under a cloud of smog, curly subdivisions spread as far as the eye can see, ringed by mountains. Then a proliferation of large white squares and rectangles, clustered together at the intersections of three major freeways. The outsized checkerboard you are looking down upon is the heart of the Inland Empire, the largest concentration of warehouses and distribution centers on the planet. In these giant buildings, most of them one million square feet-seventeen football fields laid end-to-end-an army of low-wage workers sort and package a huge portion of the nation’s consumer goods and send them on their way to the shelves of the big-box retailers where we shop. The Inland Empire, once an insignificant exurb, is now the pumping heart of the vascular system of the world’s largest retail corporations: Home Depot, Target, and, most of all, Wal-Mart.

The Global Supply Chain

The workers who sort the goods in the warehouses of the Inland Empire-over one hundred thousand people in roughly three hundred buildings-are part of a vast supply chain that starts in Southeast Asia and extends to every town in America. Almost half of the goods we import-flat-screen TVs, dolls, garden tools, sneakers, iPods-gets put in forty-foot-long steel containers, piled on cargo ships, and sent across the ocean from seaports in China to the giant seaports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. From there, longshoremen put the steel boxes on trucks and trains that haul the boxes to the warehouses of the Inland Empire. It is the logical place for these facilities to cluster: Los Angeles no longer has the space to accommodate the giant buildings, and the San Jacinto Mountains are a natural barrier beyond which trucks require much more fuel and time, as the mountain passes get blocked by snow while the containers must be delivered strictly on time to meet the requirements of a Just-In-Time supply chain.

The dynamic that created the cluster of giant white boxes that fill the valley east of Los Angeles-the steel container, the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and the opening of China, the digitization of commerce-is in many ways a marvel of technology and organization. Yet it is invisible to most Americans and ignored by people outside the industry of “goods movement,” or logistics. The human beings who make it work are also largely invisible and ignored; and for them, the dynamic of the logistics industry has created conditions that are intolerable. 

Why the Labor Movement Is Not a Movement

Fifteen years ago, John Sweeney’s election to lead the AFL-CIO symbolized what many hoped would be a new era for the labor movement.  Gerald McEntee-head of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-captured the general mood among labor activists, calling Sweeney’s election “a crucial turning point for the working men and women of this country” and “the first step in revitalizing the labor movement.” Amid the swirling optimism, labor movement proponents-practitioners and academics among them-speculated about the possibility that a labor renaissance was at hand.

Renewed interest in labor by scholars led to a surge of new research, new labor journals were started, scores of books and articles were published, conferences on labor transformation were convened, and a new language of labor revitalization emerged.  A dominant theme in this discourse has been the idea that to regain the power it once had as the voice for the working class, organized labor must become a movement again.  Many observers promoted social movement unionism as a necessary and welcomed departure from the old model of “business unionism.”  Commentators used the rhetoric of social movements while exploring ways that unions could adopt movement-style tactics, recruit a more diverse membership, fuse with social movements, broaden their goals, and mobilize workers.

So how have we fared in our efforts to transform labor and make it a movement again?  While there have been signs of improvement and pockets of success over the last decade and a half, it is clear that the renewal many had hoped for has not occurred.  There are a million fewer union members today than in 1995.  And union density is nearly 20 percent lower than it was when Sweeney took over, continuing its downward trend and nearing levels not seen since the 1930s.

Labor has not become a movement again in part because we still do not think of it as one. Despite efforts to adopt the language and tactics of social movements, our analyses remain tied to the conventional wisdom that treats organized labor as an agent in the labor market rather than an actor in a movement.  On three key dimensions this tacit assumption undermines our ability to conceptualize labor as a movement: through the use of union density to measure labor movement power; by viewing trade unions as the movement’s constitutive organizational form; and embracing an all-or-nothing approach to organizing workers. 

An Injury to All: Going Beyond Collective Bargaining as We Have Known It

The hope and optimism of the 2008 election is being derailed by economic meltdown and a legislative process seemingly incapable of producing real change. We entered 2010 with workers having lost trillions in income, homes, and retirement funds while the banks and corporations that crashed the economy continue to use taxpayer subsidies to further consolidate their economic control. The majority of union members are in the public sector at the very time when states are drowning in hundreds of billions of dollars of budget deficits.  And if labor and other progressives don’t offer an alternative, there is a real danger of the right-wing capturing the growing populist anger and using it to attack government’s ability to limit corporate power, and regulate and repair the economy.

This is the time to offer a moral voice for those devastated by the economic crisis, and to have the courage and passion to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of limited expectations. Unions, and their members, must join with communities long mired in poverty-and the tens of millions of people being forced out of the middle class-to imagine and articulate a vision of a better world, and to help lead the battle to win it.  We have the opportunity to work with a growing group of potential allies to develop a plan and strategy to achieve that vision-but, to do so, we have to question and challenge long held assumptions and ideas.

The labor movement in the United States suffers from a version of “the Stockholm Syndrome.” We have been held hostage for so long by a messianic free market ideology that we have come to empathize with it and adopt the views of our “kidnappers.” We have been on the defensive and losing for so long that we have internalized the idea that the economic system we currently have is the only one possible, and that the only progress we can make is modest and incremental at best. Instead, we have no choice but to chart a fundamentally different course grounded in the idea that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small economic elite and giant corporations is warping democracy and undermining the ability of the vast majority of the people in this country-including workers, unions, and progressives-to organize, bargain, pass legislation, and make substantive change.  

Although we missed an opportunity last year-offered by the economic collapse to organize against Wall Street, the banks, and giant multinational corporations-the ongoing economic crisis and recession continues to create the conditions to organize on a far grander scale. It is precisely in times of economic and political turmoil that movements have been born, and the radical redistribution of wealth and power becomes possible.

Strike!: Why Mothballing Labor’s Key Weapon Is Wrong

When the labor movement rises again, it will not be the result of improved methods of organizing house calls, the passage of legislation, or one-day publicity strikes.  Rather, it will be because the labor movement rediscovered the power of the strike.  Not the ineffectual strike of today, but an effective strike grounded in traditional union economics, tactics, and philosophy.   

 For generations of trade unionists and labor analysts, the strike was considered essential to collective bargaining and, as declared by economist Albert Rees in 1962, “by far the most important source of union power.”During the heyday of American unions, from the 1940s to the 1970s, workers secured real wage gains, pensions, and employer-paid health care through hard-nosed collective bargaining backed by a powerful strike.                  

However, after the employer offensive in the 1980s crushed striking unions in industry after industry, trade unionists largely abandoned the strike in favor of other strategies. Thus in 2008, there were only fifteen major work stoppages, compared to 470 major strikes in 1952.   In place of the strike, unions developed less effective forms of struggle, such as the corporate campaign and the one-day publicity strike.  While innovative, these tactics proved unable to inflict sufficient economic pain upon employers to substitute for a strike that halts production. 

Since the mid-1990s, trade unionists have embraced organizing the unorganized as the preferred path for trade union renewal.  However, despite massive outlays of union resources, labor’s strategy of organizing the unorganized failed to reverse, or even halt, labor’s decline.  Labor actually lost over 1.1 million private sector members from 1995 to 2008, with the percent of private sector workers in unions dropping from 10.4 percent to 7.7 percent during that period. 

While organizing is vital, basic labor economics dictate that the strategy will not be successful unless accompanied by a powerful strike. To attract members, unions must be able to provide economic benefits to potential members. Despite employer repression against union organizing, one must assume workers are rational economic actors who, if they believed the benefits of joining a union outweighed the possible negative or threatened consequences, would still join unions. In an era of union weakness and decline, workers have little incentive to join unions.  But when unions are on the march and demonstrate an ability to win improvements, history shows workers flock to them. 

Vietnam at the Crossroads: Labor in Transition

There is a bumper sticker on the bathroom wall at Ming’s, Hanoi’s legendary jazz club, that reads “Vietnam: a country, not a war.”  For a certain generation of Americans, Vietnam will always be linked to a painful period in U.S. history. Today, however, interest in Vietnam generally centers on its role in the global economy. It is the economic tiger that emerged from the brink of economic collapse to realize industrial growth unrivaled in the world. Perhaps even more remarkable is that-like neighboring China, but in sharp contrast to Russia and Eastern Europe-Vietnam transitioned to a market economy, under the leadership of its Communist Party, while maintaining its socialist ideology. Some socialist concepts-central planning, collectivized production, class struggle-either disappeared or have been watered down in official rhetoric; yet the introduction of the market economy has been couched not in terms of dismantling socialism but in terms of protecting and reinforcing it. This has led some authors to suggest that there may well be an Asian socialist reform model.

China Lite?
While my observations of Vietnam are based on three trips over the course of the past twelve years, my observations of China are based on four official visits and one independent trip over the span of thirty-five years. If I learned anything from those trips it is that these nations are much more dynamic, complicated, and ideologically diverse than old Cold War formulations would allow. That said, I am going to risk a simplistic comparison between Vietnam and China. Both countries transitioned to market economy, attracted unparalleled levels of foreign investment in a relatively short period of time, experienced spectacular growth, improved the standard of living, saw an explosion of consumer products, made impressive gains on human development indices, and integrated themselves into the global economy with astonishing speed. Vietnam and China also share many of the same problems: persistent poverty, growing inequality, gender disparities, abandonment of their social safety nets, a record of human rights violations, and corruption.

Some observers view Vietnam as “China Lite,” pointing out that Vietnam is less harsh with dissidents, its censorship less pervasive, and its capitalism softer. For example, unlike China, Vietnam doesn’t impose restrictions on Internet use, and surfers not only have free access to foreign news websites but have used the Internet to circulate anti-government petitions. When I asked a Vietnamese General Confederation of Labor (VGCL) official to identify Vietnam’s most significant labor dissident, he didn’t hesitate and I had no trouble accessing the dissident’s website while in Hanoi. Government corruption has led to scathing exposés in the press and protests in front of the National Assembly. Anti-government dissidents, a critical press, and political protests are not only more tolerated in Vietnam than they are in China, but also in comparison to many of Vietnam’s democratic neighbors, including Singapore (where orderly protesters are jailed) or the Philippines (where anti-government activists and clerics are murdered).

In the Rearview Mirror

When, on December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his decision to send thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan, he felt obliged to distinguish the current war from the War in Vietnam.  The equation of the two conflicts, he said, “depends on a false reading of history.”  Of course, there are differences.  But it is their similarities which are most troubling (and no doubt the reason the president went out of his way to deny them).  Both wars occur in an era during which the once-momentous process of going to war has been transformed, with the bar for unleashing the military lowered and lowered again.  As a result, it is now possible for a president to take the country to war, or dramatically escalate a war, with the support of neither the public nor Congress, which is just what Obama did.  

Starting with Vietnam, the wars the United States has fought have been very different than the ones in the past.  For the past half-century, the U.S. has sought to defeat distant insurgencies, topple governments judged by our political establishment as inimical to national interests, and create pro-American regimes, rather than to counter military attacks.  These have been wars of empire.  (The Spanish-American War provided a preview of such imperial warfare in the extended campaign to defeat the independence movement in the Philippines.)  In World War I, World War II, and Korea, the United States fought the armies of nation-states that had crossed borders into neighboring countries.  However else they may be viewed, those wars had defined goals and limited durations.  But the counterinsurgency wars that have followed have been marked by enemies hard to even identify, as the line between civilian sympathizer and guerilla insurgent has proven a hazy one.  War goals were ill-defined or deliberately concealed.  And conflict has tended to be interminable because U.S. domination has bred chronic insurgency. The war in Afghanistan already has lasted two years longer than United States combat in World War I and World War II combined.

Caught in the Web

It’s a tough time to be an American worker, but an even worse time to be out of work. About 15.3 million people are unemployed-and their distress has not been eased by so-called economic “recovery.” Yet many of these displaced workers are startlingly productive: this recession has launched a virtual boom in blogs, many dedicated to the topic of unemployment itself. Since so many journalists and advertising industry folks are among the jobless, many of these blogs are expertly executed: they’re attractive, informative, and a pleasure to read.

Some provide news, statistics, and analysis of unemployment, lightly seasoned with personal reflections. Recession Wire (http://www.recessionwire.com) includes a feature called “Screwed”-a daily roundup of news about the “employment fallout around the country and the world.” Unemployment Statistics (http://unemploymentadvice.blogspot.com), in addition to helpful data, reports “nuggets” of news: for example, a bit that notes Maryland’s lack of unemployment offices-and the consequent hassle in collecting any unemployment benefits.

Others focus on layoffs, reporting which companies are giving out pink slips, and how many people are affected. Layoff List (http://www.layofflist.org), in addition to chronicling layoffs, recently reported the shocking reality that a bad credit report can keep you from getting a job.  Jobless and Less (http://www.joblessandless.com/layoff-tracker-dont-bother-sending-your-resume-here) maintains an ongoing, though not comprehensive, list of layoffs nationwide. Some online news organizations are also tracking this information. Reporter Jim Edwards of BNET, for example, keeps an “Ad Agency Layoff Counter,” and readers can e-mail him tips on layoff news in the advertising industry at http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/1000433/bnets-ad-agency-layoff-counter. But it’s important to remember that all information about layoffs can be sketchy; companies often announce layoffs to intimidate the workforce, and then don’t follow through.

A few of the blogs eschew traditional reportage, aiming instead to cheer fellow sufferers with a bit of dark humor. Stuff Unemployed People Like (http://stuffunemployedpeoplelike.com)-the title of which is derived from the successful Stuff White People Like-often mines the ambivalence that some of the unemployed have about finding a job. After all, these days, any new job will likely pay about the same as their unemployment benefits, and provide considerably less leisure than unemployment. One post instructs the job seeker on how best to sabotage interviews: show up hungover or intoxicated, and “wear inappropriate clothing that screams, ‘I don’t care.’” Unemploymentality (http://unemploymentality.com) has a feature called “Can’t Read? We Have Videos” and some terrific photos, including one of a cheerful-looking woman in a pink leopard-print leotard with a bunny tail, holding a sign that reads “Out of Work Prostitute: Will Work for Food.”

Books and the Arts

Paradise Lost

Richard Florida became the darling of the neoliberal economic, technocratic, and artistic communities early this decade with the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class.  Building on ideas developed during the high-tech and dot-com bubbles, Florida argued that America’s future lay in metropolitan regions with a high density of “sexually diverse” cultural, professional, and high-tech workers whose creativity would attract capital and spur future economic development.

 Undaunted by the bursting of these bubbles and the subsequent jobless recovery, Florida continued to suggest, in Who’s Your City?, that the answer to post-industrialization lies in the continued migration of the so-called creative class to a few cosmopolitan urban areas. The transformation in economic geography would produce winners and losers, both individually and regionally, based on the ability of communities to develop and attract human capital. Of course, all of this reflects Florida’s neoliberal view that such changes are part of the “natural economic order.”

 Florida’s ideas have had a powerful influence on public discussion of economic development and urban renewal, particularly among those in urban studies, “coasters,” and mobile, privileged, educated workers.  But Florida has said relatively little about the real working lives of members of the creative class and the emerging organization of work produced by the changes he predicts.  Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times provides a powerful antidote to Florida’s brave new world. In fact, Ross argues, “Florida’s nostrums” are nothing more than a “warmed over version of American bootstrap ideology” (p. 41).

Andrew Ross chairs the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and has been an early advocate of a new working-class studies. The author of numerous books in cultural studies, Ross has turned his attention in recent years to issues of work and labor with three books: No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, Fast Boat to China: High-Tech Outsourcing and the Consequences of Free Trade-Lessons from Shanghai,and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor.  Nice Work is his most recent effort using “people-based research” that he describes, in the September 4, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, as “a blend of ethnography and investigative journalism.”  The book covers a striking array of socioeconomic, legislative, cultural, and environmental issues.

Picture This!

Twenty-five years ago I walked into the Austin, Minnesota Labor Center for a rally to support Hormel meatpacking workers who were resisting their employer’s demands for deep wage- and work-rule concessions.  A display of union buttons on the lobby wall caught my eye.  At first glance they appeared to be from that early twentieth-century radical labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, best known as “the Wobblies.”  They were emblazoned with that iconic globe, crisscrossed with longitude and latitude lines.  But where the Wobbly buttons were-and are-typically red, these buttons were in all sorts of colors.  Indeed, no two were even the same color.  I drew closer and discovered that the buttons read “IUofAW” rather than “IWW,” and that each included the name of a month in 1934.  A grizzled meatpacker explained to me that these were monthly-dues buttons from the “Independent Union of All Workers,” a predecessor of both the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).  They were color-coded so that, in the days of shop floor dues collection, stewards and workers could easily ascertain whether their fellow workers had paid their monthly dues.  Born in a sit-down strike at the Austin Hormel plant in the fall of 1933, the IUAW had stretched to thirteen communities in the Midwest by 1935, reaching beyond the industrial boundaries of meatpacking to organize iron molders, founders, machinists, truckers and warehouse workers, and service, retail, and municipal employees in Iowa, Wisconsin, and North and South Dakota, as well as Minnesota, before carving itself up into separate organizations-some AFL and some CIO-in the late 1930s.  The iconography of the dues buttons, of course, was intended to evoke and invoke the legacy of the IWW, an organization which had imprinted itself on the labor souls of Austin activists like Frank Ellis, Svend Godfredson, and Casper Winkels.

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities by Brian Mayer and Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training by Ariel Ducey both raise critical issues about movement building, about challenging management’s control over the work process, and about strategic directions for labor-issues that are life and death for the labor movement.

Workers and unions are being undercut by new technologies and work-restructuring programs that are invading every industry, and essentially every workplace, altering not only conditions of work but power relations between workers and management. Meanwhile, a narrow view of the trade-off between toxic exposures and jobs has kept many unions silent as their members and the communities surrounding the plants (generally working-class communities) are deeply affected. Fundamental re-thinking by the labor movement-of its acceptance of the management-rights doctrine (giving management virtually unlimited control over technology and work processes/work organization) and its tendency to pursue short-term interests over strategic thinking and class-based movement building-is desperately needed.

Blue-Green Coalitions examines three distinct attempts to build coalitions between environmentalists and labor, in search of lessons that will help future Blue-Green formations develop and succeed.  With almost everyone, including Big Oil and coal companies, wrapping themselves in the green flag, the labor movement needs to dig beneath the surface to deeply understand the politics of Green, how they relate to the recession and jobs, and how to connect with the environmental movement.

Never Good Enough evaluates union-based workforce training in the health care sector. It raises important issues about the collective worker voice in the work process (or lack thereof), about ideology embedded in training, and about union strategies around work organization. As we potentially face a new round of restructuring stemming from health care reform-and as billions of federal stimulus dollars are devoted to promoting management-driven technological transformation in health care and providing training to support that transformation-this book’s relevance only grows. Unions will have to figure out if they are going to sit on the sidelines and watch, or engage in a fundamental challenge to management’s right to design, develop, and implement new technologies and work-restructuring programs without significant collective workforce input.

Lessons in Labor Solidarity

How do we best protect the rights of workers in today’s global economy?  Within the labor community, there is a debate between two approaches: a focus on getting protective language into trade agreements versus an emphasis on strategic campaigns.  Two recent books offer very different perspectives on the issue, one through describing the history of a significant strategic campaign and the other through a largely statistical analysis of the effects of trade agreements.  Together they explain why, in many ways, we’re better off working together on coordinated, cross-union, cross-border campaigns. 

Strategic campaigns have a long history in the labor movement.  My first exposure was in 1978, when Baldemar Velasquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) came to the Notre Dame campus and inspired a group of us to join a boycott of Campbell Soup. Farm workers in Ohio would only achieve a fair contract if Campbell joined in three-way negotiations with tomato growers so that the price Campbell paid to the growers would cover the cost of fair wages and benefits for farm workers. A student referendum at Notre Dame convinced the administration to stop buying Campbell’s for the campus cafeterias. Finally, in 1986, FLOC won a groundbreaking three-way labor contract with Campbell and the growers. Since then, FLOC has expanded its organizing efforts to cucumber harvesters in North Carolina with a successful boycott of Mt. Olive pickles and is now building a union among R.J. Reynolds tobacco farm workers.

I asked Baldemar about the history of worker struggles in the Campbell's factories in New Jersey and around the country. He told me that union leadership at the Campbell soup plants in Ohio and New Jersey opposed the boycott, but since the contract was settled they have built strong cooperation. Other than that, Baldemar didn’t know much about the history of worker organizing at the company.  If FLOC and Campbell’s UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers Union) locals had known more about the history of struggle with the company, perhaps FLOC would have won the contract sooner. 

Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century tells the fascinating social history of workers at Campbell’s original plant in Camden, New Jersey.  Despite fierce opposition, these workers built Local 80 into a social justice union. David Sidorick tells the story well, weaving together interviews with former employees and union activists and research on the various national unions that Local 80 was affiliated with. The story also details the innumerable forces that conspired to discourage and destroy the union.  These forces include the company's ownership, management and business strategies, politicians linked to the company, technological change, and the process of globalization.