Table of Contents

Table of Content | From the Editors | Abstracts                        

4 From the Editorial Team

Labor at the Crossroads

9 Labor Pains: Eight Simple Rules
By Jonathan Tasini

12 Is This the Second Coming of the CIO?
By Jack Metzgar
The NUP-CIO analogy may have been a false one, but it has stirred up a crucial debate within labor.

19 What is Labor’s True Purpose?: The Implications of SEIU’s Unite to Win Proposals for Organizing
By Kate Bronfenbrenner
How useful are the Unite to Win proposals on the key organizing questions?

27 Labor’s Future in the Imperial Age
By Juan Gonzalez
Will labor’s reformers confront the empire?

39 Airborne Distress: How Can Labor Recover in the Airline Industry?
By Thomas Kochan
Options for rebuilding airline-labor relations.

51 A Response from the International Association of Machinists to Airborne Distress
By Robert Roach, Jr. and Beth Almeida

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

Taking on Wal-Mart

59 Leveraging Labor’s Revival: A Proposal to Organize Wal-Mart
By Wade Rathke
Why organizing Wal-Mart should be priority number one.

67 Hoisted on Its Own Pitard: Organizing Wal-Mart’s Logistics Workers
By Edna Bonacich
Wal-Mart’s Achilles heel is its global logistics chain.

The Working-Class Voices of Post-Industrial America

76 Cotton Clouds: Working-class life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
By Nelly Rosario

85 Women’s Power is Union Power: Central American Banana Worker Unions
By Dana Frank
The new gender politics of Central America’s banana unions.

97 Conservative Mythology: The Axis of Good
By Ira Chernus
Bush’s success lies in knowing how to repackage the frontier myth.

103 Caught in the Web
By Kim Fein
Labor news, views, and resources online.

Books and the Arts:

106 The Comic Primer on Global Capitalism
How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor
By El Fisgon et al
Reviewed by Kent Worcester

108 Monsters, Inc.
The Corporation
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
Reviewed by Jefferson Cowie

112 AlieNation
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
By Mae Ngai
Reviewed by Ruth Milkman

116 The Promise of the Living Wage Campaign
Fighting for a Living Wage
By Stephanie Luce
Reviewed by Heather Boushey

120 Black Political Thought: A Lens on Liberalism
Black is a Country
By Nikhil Singh
Reviewed by Phil Thompson

123 Autobiography of a Union Democrat
Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement
By Herman Benson
Reviewed by Paul Buhle

126 Poetry

129 Letters

131 About Our Contributors                                             

Copyright © 2006

Summer 2005