Labor Pains: Eight Simple Rules
By Jonathan Tasini
Full Text Article

We’re two months away from the AFL-CIO’s watershed convention, at which the roiling debate over the future of labor will be played out.  No labor activist doubts the urgent need for change. Rather, the question before us is what changes are necessary and sufficient.  I offer the following rules as my criteria for determining whether the convention has done what is required to save labor from extinction.

Rule #1: As Deep Throat counseled, follow the money. Several unions are pushing a proposal to rebate up to 50 percent of the dues paid to the AFL-CIO back to unions that put the money into organizing. Other than weakening the AFL-CIO (and you can believe that’s good or bad), this may not actually result in many new union members. Virtually every union could organize more effectively today (though whether they can be successful is another issue involving strategy and the corporate warfare against workers who try to unionize). Why they don’t is a deeper question that a rebate won’t answer. More than a decade ago, the AFL-CIO set up an organizing fund that was supposed to support campaigns launched by individual unions; to tap into the fund, unions were supposed to meet certain criteria. The fund ended up doling out money to anyone mouthing the word “organizing” with no criteria for accountability. Nothing in the current proposals for rebates sets any kind of real standards by which unions will be judged to have invested the rebated money into organizing.

Rule #2: To quote Don Corleone, this is business, not personal. When the Service Employees kicked this whole debate off last year, critics skewered the SEIU proposals by claiming they were being driven by arrogance and ego. I was shocked—shocked!—to read that leaders of big organizations might be arrogant and have big egos. Mark me down as one person who isn’t interested in selfless, wallflower leaders—they are likely ineffective or lying about their real motives.  While all the other “progressive” labor leaders said nothing as the ship was sinking, SEIU provoked a debate—and people should be kissing their behinds, not bickering over style. If you read personal attacks, assume that people don’t like the substance.

Rule #3: Size does matter. SEIU ticked a lot of people off by suggesting the AFL-CIO be empowered to force mergers among unions. The critics used a lot of convenient terms such as “democracy” but the truth is people don’t want to give up their positions of power, even if that would be good for the movement. That there are too many ineffective unions, set up for an economy that doesn’t exist anymore, has been obvious for sometime.  Here's one suggestion that might make labor leaders accept mergers: Create a labor House of Lords for those union leaders left without organizations to run, a kind of advisory body with prestige but no power (throw in a small salary and health care coverage to sweeten the deal). In any case, it’s unlikely the merger ideas will go very far.

Rules #4: Size doesn’t matter. Mergers are not going to solve labor’s problem. In fact, they could do the opposite: Unions that merge may all of a sudden feel fat and happy with more members and more money.

Rule #5: It doesn’t matter who is at the head if the culture stays the same. Forget the question of whether John Sweeney should step down or be challenged (he says he’s running). Having a new AFL-CIO president will only matter if there is a credible strategy and plan with real accountability—not a culture that favors the least-common denominator (meaning, every decision ends up tasting like vanilla to keep everyone happy) and an environment where people turn a blind eye to incompetence or laziness.

Rule #6:   More of a failed program is not a strategy. John Sweeney has announced that labor will spend more money on politics, after almost 30 years of questionable results. Hello? Unions have attempted to reverse declining power in the workplace by playing in a political arena that is happy to take labor money but not really change the rules of the game when it comes to workers right to organize. I think we should take a break at the federal level of politics and build power at the workplace and community. Shifting money earmarked for the coffers of politicians to projects like the Apollo Alliance (which is pushing for a multi-billion dollar investment in good-paying jobs in sustainable energy projects) is a sounder strategy likely to gain labor more clout in the long haul.

Rule #7: It’s about China. Until labor has a meaningful plan to deal with the global movement of capital and an economic system driven solely by wages, the rest of the debate is a waste of time. If labor can’t figure out China, it will end up being a movement representing only people who work in industries that can’t pick up and move. Admittedly, this is not an easy task. It’s not easy to figure out how to get a British or German union to put its political capital on the line for Americans and vice versa; across borders, unions have different cultures and bargaining histories. To its credit, SEIU is investing a fair amount of time and money into trying to create some skeleton of a global labor movement. If you don’t hear a plan for a real global strategy, we’re doomed.

Rule #8: Strategy matters. Here’s a shocker: I’m uneasy about calls to weaken the AFL-CIO. Not because I think the Federation does such a great job (though there are some wonderful people at the AFL-CIO). Labor needs a strong center, whether it’s the AFL-CIO or something else, to enforce a labor-wide organizing strategy. With an economy driven by powerful multinationals and a pervasive anti-union culture, individual unions have no prayer operating alone. Join me and cringe when you hear left-wing academics, union “democracy” types or labor activists trumpet a strategy based on union “culture” and the spontaneous upsurge of the rank-and-file; most of these pontificators have never organized a single worker. There has to be a strong vision and strategy articulated by someone.

Is This the Second Coming of the CIO?
By Jack Metzgar

Though the circumstances could not be more different, some New Unity Partnership (NUP) invoked the example of the CIO as justification and inspiration for roiling the already uncalm waters of the American labor movement.  In the 1930s the CIO changed the American labor movement's "structure," temporarily divided labor's unity, and initiated a period of dramatic growth in union membership that eventually transformed working-class life, changing the rules of the capitalist game in the process.

Although the NUP has disbanded, the analogy is apt, I think, not because of its precision, but because the CIO experience informs most thinking about how to renew the labor movement.  If nothing else, the CIO is invoked to show how dramatically unions can grow and how powerful they can become in a short period of time. It's easy to poke holes in any historical analogy, but particularly this one.  The CIO was formed in the midst of a worldwide Depression, for Pete's sake, when socialist revolution seemed a real option and when the miners and clothing workers of the CIO had all they could to channel and control the self-organization and militancy of rubber, auto, and other workers.  The CIO was a spark in a California drought, whereas what we need today is a flamethrower in a rain forest.  But there are deeper analogies that may apply to the very different world of an altogether new century. more...

What is Labor’s True Purpose?: The Implications of SEIU Reform Proposals for Organizing
By Kate Bronfenbrenner

While some of the recommendations in the Unite to Win proposal are not particularly controversial, it is the recommendations relating to the restructuring of the AFL-CIO to unite workers into unions by industry, sector, or craft, and reduce the number of unions through mergers and consolidations that have provoked the most debate. There is a great deal of merit in much of what first Stephen Lerner and then Andy Stern put forward. First and foremost, it has generated desperately needed debate. There is no question that increasing union power in the United States depends in part on unions using density where they have it and increasing union density where they do not. There is also no question that current corporate structures more often than not require taking on entire firms and industries in intensive multi-site and sometimes multi-country organizing campaigns.

Yet, union power is about more than density, resources, jurisdiction, and structure. There are many unions that stick to one jurisdiction, or even have density in that jurisdiction, but have no power because they failed to capitalize on that density when it came to a critical moment in organizing or bargaining. Talking about density, resources, jurisdiction, and structure, as the Unite to Win proposal does, absent a real discussion of strategy, purpose, and vision leaves out the power and soul of the movement. 

Just as the Kerry campaign failed to provide American voters with enough of a vision to overcome their fear of terror or their economic insecurity, the labor movement has to stand for something worth fighting and hoping for.  We have to be organizing for something and it needs to be more than that lowest and safest common denominator—“a voice@work.” If we are going to be challenging a ruthlessly anti-union, right-wing government that is closely aligned with some the world’s largest multinationals, we are indeed going to have to be using the language and strategy of power and transformation, and it is going to take a lot more than restructuring the AFL-CIO to get us there.  One of those key issues is building a global labor movement. more...

Labor’s Future in the Imperial Age
By Juan Gonzalez

The program of the now-disbanded NUP unions fails to tackle organized labor’s most persistent and profound problem: how do you build a progressive and democratic trade union movement within the most powerful empire in the history of the world? Few observers would disagree that the current AFL-CIO structure is anachronistic, and no one doubts that the labor movement, if it could somehow be born all over again, would opt for a leaner and more efficient structure with a few big powerful unions. But the systematic and decades-long decline of trade union membership in the United States is not primarily due to labor’s organizational weaknesses, in my opinion, nor even due to the spread of draconian anti-labor laws. While both these factors have indeed played a role in the current crisis, each is a symptom or product of a more fundamental weakness, one that organized labor shares with the rest of U.S. society.

That weakness—the dirty secret of the American trade union movement—is that pro-imperialist and anti-labor views have found fertile ground among American workers for decades, and such views have deeply undermined the organizing and fighting capacity of trade unions. SEIU’s ten-point Unite to Win proposal, while it mentions the need to devise new strategies to stem the flight of manufacturing plants to low-wage countries, provides no insight into why so many American workers have so little consciousness of themselves as a distinct class, or why so many are easily won over to nationalist appeals to defend American hegemony abroad.

My many years of reporting on trade unions, and before that as an activist in the Puerto Rican anti-colonial struggle, have convinced me that both the old guard of the AFL-CIO and the new reformers suffer from the same critical malaise. Both fail to comprehend that since the United States is the largest, richest, and most powerful superpower in history, the key test of labor solidarity for American workers is not whether they support fellow members of other unions at home, but how well they defend the most oppressed workers and popular movements in the forgotten outposts of our own empire. more...

Airborne Distress: How Can Labor Recover in the Airline Industry?
By Thomas Kochan, Andrew von Nordenflycht, Robert McKersie, and Jody Hoffer Gittell

These dramatic traffic and revenue declines have led many to argue the industry is facing a long-term structural change in demand requiring the introduction of new business and labor relations models in the legacy carriers capable of competing with low cost carriers in a price sensitive market.

Since airlines are one of the most highly unionized industries in the country, the labor movement has an enormous stake in shaping these reforms. As such, what happens in this sector affects not only the jobs of many members but also the image the American public has of the role and impact of labor unions. Yet to date, efforts to address the problems in this industry have proceeded union by union, company by company, and even occupational group by occupational group. The result has been widespread and deep wage and benefit reductions without an end in sight and without any clear vision for how the industry will recover and support jobs that pay good wages and benefits in the future. 

 We call on labor to take a more proactive and coordinated approach i.e. to play a leadership role in fostering the changes that are needed in this industry. Here, we focus first on the large legacy network carriers.  We will discuss issues facing employees and firms in the newer low cost sector of the industry later in this paper. 

In recent years revenues per seat mile have declined more than either unit labor costs or total costs. In 2003 real revenue per available seat mile was more than 33 percent below the 1982 level.  Most importantly, the revenue generated per available seat mile was less than the total cost per seat mile by a sizeable margin. This is the essence of the problem and translates into the large financial losses for these carriers. more...

Response to “Out of the Ashes”: The Airline Industry Requires Stabilization First
By Robert Roach, Jr. and Beth Almeida

“Out of the Ashes” makes some important recommendations which could help to foster better labor-management relations in this industry where they are so desperately needed.  But before any such recommendations can be implemented, the airline industry needs to be stabilized.  Only with active attention, intervention, and engagement from labor, management, and government can such stabilization occur.

Myths abound when it comes to the airline industry: that only non-union carriers can be profitable, that airfares are too high, that militant, uncompromising unions are to blame for the industry’s troubles. Kochan and his co-authors clear the air and present three very important findings that are critical to understanding this industry.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which our current system of labor regulations and bankruptcy laws fosters dysfunctional labor relations in airlines, operating as they do within a deregulated industry in desperate need of stabilizing forces.  In our view, and the view of thousands of airline workers, the system is broken and has contributed to a downward spiral with no end in sight.  There are two dynamics at work in this spiral. more...

A Response from the Association of Flight Attendants – CWA to Airborne Distress
By Patricia A. Friend

The Association of Flight Attendants – CWA, AFL-CIO, represents approximately 45,000 flight attendants in 26 different airlines.  As the bargaining agent for these airline workers, our experience during our 64-year history is vast and varied. However, in the current industry climate, we find that large or small, profitable or in bankruptcy, legacy or regional carrier, all those we represent seem to face the same labor relations difficulties that are so well defined in the article “Airborne Distress.”

Two recommendations in the article merit consideration. First is the idea that industry-wide portable seniority might help alleviate some of the problems faced by both the unions and the carriers. AFA’s constitution and by-laws already has a seniority merger policy that is applicable when “…two or more AFA-represented carriers engage in any merger, consolidation, acquisition of control, purchase, sale, lease, or other similar transaction between them….”  However, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to implement an industry-wide seniority system unless all cabin crew members in all carriers nationwide were represented by the same labor union.

Secondly, the concept of developing firm-wide negotiations to offset what are described as the limitations of craft-based structures is an interesting theory. We have seen that this is frequently the method of collective bargaining that is used by carriers in other countries, particularly in Asia.  Often, the labor representation at those carriers is a company-based union, with strong ties to the company, and one that exits at the will of the company. Whether or not labor unions in the United States or their members are ready for this type of collection bargaining, and are able to engage in it effectively, becomes the real question. more...

Leveraging Labor’s Revival: A Proposal to Organize Wal-Mart
By Wade Rathke

As the debate concerning labor’s future rages on, prodded by Andy Stern, International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and answered by one union after another, President Sweeney has agreed on the need for debate and the need to form committees to discuss the various proposals generated.   Workers in general and union members in specific can hardly find cause for inspiration or action in these multi-point programs. This is true, except in one very important area: the proposal for a full-scale campaign against Wal-Mart. 

I would argue that a campaign on all fronts against Wal-Mart is the single organizing effort that offers the most hope for working families. Furthermore, driving an organizing program around Wal-Mart and its workers could potentially change the tide for labor and create organizational capacities that would give us fighting and winning forces for our future.

The size, scale, strength, and location of the company are a direct challenge to almost any usual or common organizing strategy. One cannot go store by store with NLRB-style direct certification elections.  There are just too, too many stores to believe that one could conceivably get a handle on the company in this way. Furthermore, the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) has already tried this model aggressively and thrown the kitchen sink at the company without much success.  One cannot also underestimate the weakness of the current law and the robber baron ruthlessness of the company and its culture. The often repeated true story of the UFCW winning an election in a butchery department in the Dallas area and Wal-Mart switching every store in the American empire to processed meat speaks volumes of the futility of this approach. 

A market-oriented strategy effective in direct recognition successes in other industries is also unlikely to be effective in organizing Wal-Mart. Arguably the southern California market had UFCW’s best contracts and highest unionization rates, yet the threat of Wal-Mart’s entry was sufficient to destabilize the bargaining relationships preemptively, rather than forcing Wal-Mart to move up to the market rates and benefits in order to enter the area.  The power and efficiency of the Wal-Mart business model acts as a pervasive threat regardless of unionization.

Collective bargaining is one, but only one, of many possible outcomes from organized activity by workers, so the absence of collective bargaining as an organizational goal or result, should not confuse anyone about the difference between means and ends in looking at this organizing problem. The first priority for workers at Wal-Mart has to be building a powerful organization on the job and in public vis a vis their employer. more...

Hoisted on Its Own Pitard: Organizing Wal-Mart’s Logistics Workers
By Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson

The labor standards that Wal-Mart influences, therefore, are not restricted to those of its own direct employees or the employees of its retail competitors. It also critically affects the labor standards of the employees of the producers that supply the wares it sells, and the transportation and warehouse workers who distribute the goods to its stores, even though these workers are not direct employees of Wal-Mart. The labor impacted by Wal-Mart consists of three major components:  sales workers, production workers, and distribution (logistics) workers.  These three sets of workers are all both domestic and global.  The labor regime which Wal-Mart governs is imperial in scope.

Demands that could be made based on the power labor would attain based on its ability to interfere with the global logistics system could be extended beyond the economics of a single company. Too often the solution to offshore production proposed by the U.S. labor movement, and especially regarding production in China, is protectionist:  to try to prevent capital from moving to China, or to call for limitations on imports from that country.  We do not believe that this is the right approach. Anti-China positions only serve to alienate China’s workers, and to divide workers along national lines.  Rather, workers around the world need to join together to fight our common enemies.  Workers in China, often employed in gigantic, mass-production factories, need our support, not our opposition. The stronger they are, the stronger we will be, and vice versa. We need to develop a campaign against Wal-Mart that builds a coalition stretching across its whole global empire of exploited workers, including its sales labor force, here and abroad, the labor force of its thousands of suppliers wherever they are located, and the logistics workers who move the goods around the world and to the stores. This army of workers is gigantic. If mobilized and unified, it could force the company to change its low-wages-at-all-costs philosophy. 

What might such a campaign look like? more...

Cotton Clouds: Working-Class Life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
By Nelly Rosario

It doesn’t matter that the morning skies are grey through the bedroom window. From the bed, it’s nice to wake up to flocks of pigeons drawing circles above the coop over the adjoining building.  The pony-tailed man on that roof who tends them must be named Angel or Tony, you think. Sometimes, two or three triangular flocks cross each other’s number eights without colliding, all the while in formation. Sometimes, the background sky is streaked with ochre, and often, with your mother in the kitchen, the clouds can smell like fresh-brewed coffee.

It’s the early smell of coffee you always remember, how the entire building reeks of it every morning. Reeks, because only your mother’s brew tastes sweet to your nose. Coffee for her; tea for your father.  Radio WADO blares news with words like “Vietnam” and “Iran,” “Nixon” or “Reagan,” slicing through ticker-tape Spanish. Julio Iglesias croons over the sounds of running water, slamming drawers, and an ever-flushing toilet.  You and your sister vie for the iron to press yellowed Peter Pan collars and the pleats of uniform skirts. You’re down to your last pair of clean green socks, whose elastic has been stretched by a week of recess rope jumping. Your two brothers are still watching cartoons in their underwear; your mother is wrapping leftovers in aluminum foil; your father is making the perfect tie on his thigh before slipping it over his head.  You ask him for 50 cents for after-school potato chips and Lemonheads.  He gives you a dollar.

You and your siblings make the school-walk rounds.  First, pick up the Durans next door, then Eduardo around the corner, maybe Teddy, if his father works early and can’t drive him the five blocks to Marcy Avenue. Sure enough, the public school kids laugh at your wilted socks and ashy knees. And there go the long-haired, bearded guys nodding on each corner; the single leg of their army fatigues are pinned to corresponding back pockets.  You wonder if they’re all related. After the el tracks on Broadway, the birds chirp louder, and you think twice before littering.  Yeshiva buses drive by, sometimes in a hail of spit. But you don’t care.  Our Savior School is still home turf.

The desks are hard as hell, but you don’t care, either. You’re lucky.  You have a seat near the window, from where you can smell the chocolate skies above the factory buildings. If you squint at the flying dots in the distance, you swear to God and His Grandmother you see Angel or Tony.  But generally, you pay attention in class. You like to know things: that the bones of birds are hollow; that God is really a three-in-one deal; that two words that sound the same can have different meanings. You laugh when you beat Rudy—the second smartest in the class—by 5 points on the latest multiple-choice test. “Clouds are made of A) water vapor, not B) cotton,” you tell him. “They could be,” he answers. more...

Women’s Power is Union Power: Banana Worker Unions in Latin America
By Dana Frank

In early September, 2004, thirty-three women banana workers  from Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panamá, Costa Rica, and all over Honduras  gathered in a modest beachfront hotel in Puerto Cortés, Honduras, for a women's conference of the Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions (COLSIBA). The first day, the women, who'd all brought copies of  their union contracts with them, broke up into groups to compare clauses in their contracts regarding women's concerns like maternity leave or equal pay. They identified clauses already  in place and then strategized about which they wanted standardized across their seven countries and three transnational employers, Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita.

After the conference was over I asked Telma Gomez,  a young rank-and-file activist in a new union representing Chiquita workers in Honduras, what her favorite part of the conference had been. Without a second's hesitation she shot back: "That presentation on the free trade agreement.  Now I  really have it down."

Telma Gomez's preference for political economy over partying, her presence at an international conference of women banana union activists, and her strategizing about how to insert women's demands into contracts spanning seven countries and three megacorporations—not to mention the emergence of her own new union near El Progreso, Honduras, boasting the first woman president of a banana workers' union in Latin America history, offer a few clues that something exciting is going on in the banana labor movement of Central and South America.

Since the mid-1980s, beginning slowly and carefully on the North Coast of Honduras and spreading in the late 1990s and 2000s throughout the region, women banana workers and their male allies have inspired a new understanding of the gender politics of Latin American  labor.  Through workshops at the local level and through regular regional conferences linking women leaders throughout Latin America, they have placed women's concerns at the center of union concerns. In banana unions through a broad swath of Latin America, women's power and union power are now widely understood to be inseparable and mutually reinforcing. more...

Conservative Mythology: The Axis of Good
By Ira Chernus

No matter how you look at the numbers, it is hard to deny that the Bush strategy was a success. An incumbent with a failing economy and two lackluster wars (one on terror, one in Iraq) should have been handily defeated.  He had nothing to offer the voters but that grand story.  Yet even if all the votes had been counted and counted fairly, he would have garnered nearly half (and perhaps more than half) of the votes. Never underestimate the power of a grand story.

For most of human history, most people have lived in abject poverty. They survived, in part, on stories.  In the United States, where we have no religious myths that we all share, the history of the nation has become our most powerful shared myth. Like all religious stories, the most popular versions of American history are a mixture of fact, fantasy, and wish fulfillment.  It's not clear that Democratic strategists understand the power of this potent brew. The Republicans seem to understand it all too well.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Bush stuck doggedly to his script, retelling the most popular American myths. Millions of us were not sure whether to laugh or cry. But millions more undoubtedly took him absolutely seriously, and cheered. For many, he became the hero and the very embodiment of the meaning of America.  His rhetoric since Election Day has aimed to keep him playing that role. more...

The Comic Primer on Global Capitalism
By Kent Worcester
El Fisgόn, How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor
Metropolitan Books, 2004

Political cartooning has undergone something of a revival in recent years, as creators of comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons have responded as citizens and artists to 9-11, the war on terror, and the ongoing polarization of democratic electorates. Metropolitan Books and the American Empire Project are to be congratulated for sponsoring an English-language translation of El Fisgόn’s feisty deconstruction of economic globalization, which represents a noteworthy contribution to this process of cartooning revitalization.

El Fisgόn is the pen name for the Mexican cartoonist Rafael Barrajas; the term means “busy body” in Spanish. Barrajas has been described as Mexico’s leading political cartoonist, and he has published several volumes of editorial cartoons as well as illustrated children’s books. In this book he parodies the genre of self-help manuals for would-be business leaders, by introducing an impoverished character named Senor Machorro, who turns in desperation to Cassandra Carrera’s “cutting edge clinic” that “treats third world people in a second-rate corner of the first world.” Machorro hopes, of course, that Dr. Carrera will help him become a successful businessman in the high pressure global economy. “I’ve tried a few start-ups,” he mournfully explains, “tacos, shoe shine, and this full-service car wash,” but “no matter what I do I just can’t get my company listed on the [stock] exchange.”

But Dr. Carrera’s advice is singularly unhelpful. She points out, for example, that Machorro would have been “better off starting up in eighteenth century Europe, or even the United States in the early 1900s.” She emphasizes the contribution that colonialism has made to European and North American prosperity, and notes the crucial role of war in protecting colonial holdings.

For nearly two hundred pages, El Fisgόn dramatizes this clash between two dramatically divergent worldviews. more...

Monsters, Inc.
By Jefferson Cowie
The Corporation
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
Zeitgeist Films, 2004

There were very few chartered corporations in early nineteenth century, and those that existed tended to be highly regulated and had a very limited scope of what they were allowed to do.  As the industrial revolution took off, however, the advantages of incorporating quickly became evident to large enterprises: capital could be pooled, investors' liability was limited, money could be raised by selling stock, and the organization outlived its founding generation.  By the  time of the Civil War, the right to incorporate was available pretty much for the asking, and it became the dominant form of business organization.

Most importantly, a corporation was and still is regarded by law as a single being—a legal but fictitious person. While workers who acted in concert had to shake off the legacy of conspiracy, capital acting in a collective manner received all of the constitutional rights and privileges of an individual.  In one of the greatest of historical ironies, as the film points out, the equal protection clause was used to protect the corporate individual rather than free blacks.  Between 1890 and 1910, there were 307 cases argued on 14th Amendment grounds, 288 were corporations seeking equal protection, and a mere 19 were on behalf of African Americans.

The Corporation, a clever and perhaps too ambitious film, asks a basic and long overdue question about this history: if we as a society have granted the constitutional rights of personhood to this entity, then what kind of person have we created? more...

AlieNation
By Ruth Milkman
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
By Mae M. Ngai
Princeton University Press, 2004

If the most virulent anti-immigrant sentiments of our time are directed at Arabs and Muslims, the broader foreign-born population is also still a lightning rod for populist ire. The latest manifestation of this is Arizona’s recent referendum on Proposition 200, which won the support of 56 percent of the state’s voters (and 47 percent of its Latino voters) in November 2004. It denies child care, housing assistance, and other public benefits to the undocumented, and requires state and local government workers—on penalty of jail terms—to report undocumented persons seeking such benefits to federal immigration officials. There are plans to place similar measures on the ballot in other states as well.

Anyone who cares about these issues should read Mae M. Ngai’s superb new book, which judiciously dissects the tortuous and often ugly history of immigration law, politics, and policy in the twentieth-century United States. The narrative focuses on the period demarcated by two key watersheds in that history:  1924, when the Johnson-Reed Act first introduced broad, quota-based restrictions on immigration to the United States; and 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act opened the door to a massive new immigrant influx—loosening and restructuring, although by no means eliminating, the restrictive regime. The era of reduced immigration in between these two pieces of landmark legislation has been far less studied than the high immigration years before or since; yet as Ngai powerfully demonstrates, the basic parameters of today’s ongoing debates about immigration policy took shape precisely during these years. more...

The Promise of the Living Wage Campaign
By Heather Boushey
Fighting for a Living Wage, Cornell University Press, 2004
By Stephanie Luce

While living wage campaigns have been with us for over a decade, what they have accomplished is still somewhat of a mystery. Stephanie Luce, in her new book, Fighting for a Living Wage, brings new insight into what these campaigns have accomplished and what they have not. Luce and a team of researchers surveyed all municipalities with living wage ordinances between 1999 and 2002, assuming the role of a business owner or worker with questions about the law. Luce’s research question is what happens after a successful living wage ordinance is passed—who does it help and how many people are actually covered? Her answer is that enforcing a living wage ordinance can be even more difficult than getting it passed. more...

Black Political Thought: A Lens on Liberalism
By Phil Thompson

Nikhil Singh’s Black  is a Country is a fascinating book; it captures the critical edge of 20th century black political thought and uses it as a lens to dissect American liberal ideology and pose important contemporary questions. Singh shows the extent to which a large segment of black activists and intellectuals, beginning with Frederick Douglass, have criticized U.S. liberalism’s failings with respect to equality. He turns liberal universalism on its head, arguing that the color-blind rhetoric of anti-racism, whether expressed in the constitution, by Ronald Reagan, or by Marxists, are not color-blind at all but instead endorse the legacy of white supremacy by suggesting that black people “do not possess any distinct historical, cultural, or political claims on the U.S. body politic.” More importantly for Singh, many black leaders went further than criticizing the failings of U.S. liberalism with respect to African Americans, and rejected the belief that blacks’ problems could be resolved within the confines of the U.S. nation-state (or that of a simple ‘black-white’ paradigm). Singh points out that black leaders who espoused an internationalist viewpoint on democracy—supporting liberation struggles in the Third World—paid a high price for it during the Cold War, as did Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, when they reiterated these themes in the mid-1960s. He counterposes the assassination and ostracism of such radicals to the meteoric rise of conformist mid-century black leaders, such as Ralph Bunche, who promoted the more passable view that blacks could attain freedom within the confines of U.S. political institutions. more...

Autobiography of a Union Democrat
By Paul Buhle
Rebels, Reformers and Racketeers
How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement
By Herman Benson
First Books, 2003

This volume may be said to be the evangel of the Association for Union Democracy, as well as the memoir of its founder and singular leader, Herman Benson. It is a curious volume in many ways. Yet it is important because it gives us recollections and sharp observations on a particular problem that’s so often swept under the rug, and how union reformers have battled to bring it to light. Its publication  immediately brings to mind another recent volume by a remarkably parallel historic figure: My 60 Years as a Labor Activist, by Harry Kelber. Aged but militant, these two self-created characters both plough on when others of their generation are long since retired or dead.

The particular that concerns Benson most is gangsterism and the broader presence of an absence—an absence of democracy in day to day union life. Across two hundred-plus pages, he mainly traces his own efforts to use the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959 to pry loose the bureaucratic reins. There is naturally what the Hollywoodites call a “backstory,” the author’s own.

Benson joined the Young People’s Socialist League in 1930, at age 15, later became a Trotskyist, worked various blue collar jobs, and served as Labor Editor of the weekly tabloid Labor Action, until the dissolution of the sponsoring Independent Socialist League in 1958. A dedicated socialist of the anti-communist stripe, he created a new, independent spot for himself as self-publisher of the newsletter Union Democracy in Action. It involved a curious set of alliances, on the one hand civil rights activists, pacifists, and dyed-in-the-wool oldtime socialists (including Norman Thomas), and on the other hand erstwhile labor radicals, members of the same former group as Benson, now moving sharply rightward toward creating their own bureaucratic strongholds, and soon to be best noted for their vociferous support of the Vietnam War and their adamant resistance to affirmative action.

It was all very odd, highly inconsistent to say the least. Yet the emerging AUD did much good work, supporting now forgotten reformers like Burton Hall and Dow Wilson, assisting in many specific campaigns among the painters, ILA, teamsters, and other unions. In the interest of full disclosure, it must also be noted that the Kaplan Fund, the foundation Benson acknowledges as largest single contributor, was later exposed for the role that informed observers suspected at the time, as a CIA “pass-through” essentially laundering dirty money. Ironically, a few union leaders complained about the AUD receiving funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, hardly comparable to the CIA in coups, or more to the point, bribes to and involvement in the assassinations of Third World unionists—if also hardly among the angels.

The story goes onward to the present but wanders from union to union, case to case, and crusade to crusade, often making careful note of further attacks on the AUD and how they were repulsed. more...