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Wal-Mart’s
Tale of Two Cities: From Bentonville to Guangdong
By Nelson Lichtenstein
A globalized world of commerce and labor has existed
for centuries. The Vanderbilts and the Victorians knew all about the
China trade. But today’s globalization differs radically from that of
even a few decades past because of the contemporary role played by the
corporate king-makers of our day, the big box retail chains that now
occupy the strategic heights once so well-garrisoned by the great
manufacturing firms of the Fordist era. At the crux of the global supply
chains stand the Wal-Marts, the Home Depots, and the Carrefours of our
time. They make the markets, set the prices, and determine the worldwide
distribution of labor for that gigantic stream of commodities that now
flows across their counters. The deindustrialization of Detroit,
Pittsburgh, and Cleveland entailed not just the destruction of a
particular set of industries and communities, but the shift of power
within the structures of world capitalism from manufacturing to a retail
sector that today commands the supply chains which girdle the earth and
directs the labor power of a working class whose condition replicates
much that we once thought characteristic of only the most desperate,
early stages of capitalist growth.
All this is graphically apparent upon a visit to the
two most dynamic nodes of transnational capitalism today. It is easy to
get to Bentonville, Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has its world headquarters
in an unimpressive, low-slung building hard by the company’s original
warehouse. There are lots of direct flights from Denver, Chicago, La
Guardia, and Los Angeles to this once remote Arkansas town. It is still
not very big. Between Fayetteville and the Missouri line there are
hardly more than 300,000 people. But it is now the fastest growing
metropolitan region in the country. The parking lots are full, the
streets crowded, and new construction everywhere. Most important,
Bentonville is now home to at least 500 branch offices of the largest
Wal-Mart “vendors” who have planted their corporate flag in Northwest
Arkansas in the hopes that they can maintain or increase their sales to
the world’s largest buyer of consumer products. Proctor & Gamble, which
in 1987 may well have been the first company to put an office in
Bentonville, now has a staff of nearly 200 there; likewise Sanyo, Levi
Strauss, Nestle, Johnson and Johnson, Eastman Kodak, Mattel, and Kraft
Foods maintain large offices in what the locals sometimes call “Vendorville.”
Walt Disney’s large retail business has its headquarters not in Los
Angeles, but in nearby Rogers, Arkansas. These Wal-Mart suppliers are a
who’s who of American and international business, staffed by ambitious
young executives who have come to see a posting to once-remote
Bentonville as the crucial step that can make or break a corporate
career.[i] If they can meet
Wal-Mart’s exacting price and performance standards, their products will
be sucked into the stream of commodities that flow through the world’s
largest and most efficient supply chain. For any manufacturer, it is the
brass ring of American salesmanship, which explains why all those
sophisticates from New York, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles are eating so
many bad meals in Arkansas.
If Bentonville represents one nerve center of
capitalism’s global supply network, Guangdong Province is the other.
Located in coastal South China, it constitutes the raw entrepreneurial
engine that links a vast new proletariat to the American retailers who
are putting billions of Chinese-made products on a million U.S.
discount store shelves every day. With more than 40 million migrant
workers, 130,000 garment factories, and new cities like Shenzhen, which
has mushroomed to more than seven million people in just a quarter
century, Guangdong lays an arguable claim to being the contemporary
“workshop of the world,” following in the footsteps of 19th century
Manchester and early 20th century Detroit. This was my thought when we
taxied across Dongguan, a gritty, smoggy, sprawling landscape located on
the north side of the Pearl River between Guangzhou (the old Canton) and
skyscraper-etched Shenzhen. We drove for more than an hour late one
Sunday afternoon, along broad, but heavily trafficked streets,
continuously bordered by bustling stores, welding shops, warehouses,
small manufacturers, and the occasional large factory complex. This is
how the cities of the old American rust belt must have once looked,
smelled, even vibrated.
  
Immigration: The No-Man’s Land of American
Politics
Immigration Reform: Too Hot to Handle
By Roger Waldinger
Immigration lies at the heart of the American
experience. But a history of more than 200 years of immigration has not
yet imparted the understanding needed to implement an immigration system
that most Americans would deem wise. On the contrary, the system seems
broken, frustrating both the new and would-be Americans, while yielding
substantial social costs and tensions from the Mexican to the Canadian
border, and just about everywhere in between. Though the problems are
complex, there is one over-riding single ill: greatly intensified
efforts at border enforcement have largely had perverse effects.
Immigrants continue to enter or work in the United States without
authorization, but do so under increasingly difficult conditions.
Tragedy at the U.S.-Mexico border is a daily occurrence—undocumented
migrants who get across are forced into growing dependence on
unscrupulous smugglers, whose interactions with U.S. residents living
and working along the border are ever more contentious. While the
build-up of dollars and personnel for enforcement has done nothing to
calm the anxieties of border state residents, the undocumented
population has risen to unprecedented levels, with 11 million
undocumented immigrants now living in the United States. Moreover, the
inflow of undocumented immigrants currently exceeds the influx of those
who arrive through legal channels.
These are the developments that have made
immigration reform a matter of urgency in the halls of Congress. The
politics are complex and the disagreements intense. For over a century,
the political fissures generated by immigration have taken a distinctive
form, yielding “strange bedfellow” alliances that span common political
divisions. As described by political scientist, Aristide Zolberg,
commitments to expansion or restriction fall out along the two
dimensions of identity, on the one hand, and interest, on the other.
Identity motivates both nativists and nationalists, who want to exclude
foreigners, and likewise immigrants and their descendants, who find
affinity with the people that the nativists see as aliens and want to
keep America a welcoming place for newcomers. By contrast, interests
impel employers, on the lookout for foreign labor more skilled or more
tractable than what can be found available locally. The very same
factor has historically galvanized workers here at home who have often
viewed themselves as competing with newcomers for jobs. Consequently,
left and right have often combined, immigrant advocates allying with
capitalists, big city workers and their unions coalescing with small
town xenophobes.
Not only are the combinations unholy, they are not
necessarily stable, since disagreements on the twin issues of rights and
admissions threaten to drive partners apart or create divisions among
parties previously able to coalesce, as Daniel Tichenor has explained.
Free market expansionists and cosmopolitans (ethnic or otherwise) can
cooperate, for example, when the question involves opening the doors
into the United States. But they are likely to squabble when the debate
turns to measures that could help or hinder the newcomers after arrival
in the promised land. In theory, admissions and rights can be
separated, but in practice, successful surgery proves hard. A temporary
worker program is particularly appealing to free market expansionists,
eager to move skilled workers around the world with greater ease while
importing low-skilled labor at bargain rates. To be sure, exchanging
today’s de facto temporary worker program (furnished via the recruitment
of illegal immigrants) for a de jure guest worker program will probably
alleviate the plight of some, if not many, undocumented immigrants.
However, the net benefit to the immigrants will largely depend on the
options for easy movement to better jobs—most important for the
immigrants yet to come—as well as the possibilities for a predictable
shift from illegal to legal status—most important for the undocumented
workers already here.
The War on
Immigrants
By Harold Meyerson
The conventional wisdom is still unpersuaded that
the Republican Party is about to mount a full-force attack on American's
undocumented immigrants—of whom, by some counts, there are 11 million.
After all, the Republicans are the party of employers—large
(agribusiness), medium (construction companies), and small
(restaurateurs) —who have long depended on immigrants for cheap labor.
The cheap labor sectors of American capitalism are a huge source of
donations for the GOP. How could the Republicans turn their back on
them?
But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Republicans
are coming up on a midterm election in which their control of both
houses of Congress is very much at stake. Their advantage in foreign and
military policy has been diminished by the president's stunningly inept
handling of the war in Iraq. And on the domestic and economic fronts,
they have nothing to offer at all—save only a greater zeal than the
Democrats possess to “do something about immigration.” With control of
Capitol Hill very much in the balance, they will beg the forbearance of
their longtime friends at the building contractor, big agra, and
restaurant lobbies, and go after the immigrants tooth and nail.
And no wonder. Fear and resentment of the effects of
an open border—primarily the economic effects, and only secondarily the
cultural ones—are rampant throughout the American working class. That is
clear from all available polling, and to any journalist who writes about
the economy and gets responses from his or her readers. That's certainly
been the case with my own column in the Washington Post. Whenever I
write about wages and incomes, characteristically in columns that take
the side of unions and question the benefits of globalization, I always
get dozens (at least) of e-mails from readers sympathetic to my
viewpoint and to liberal politics generally, but who want to impress on
me that the other huge problem is all those immigrants who are taking
jobs away from the native-born, and driving down wages across the land.
There is a response to this argument that is popular
among both employers and pro-immigrant liberals: that immigrants take
jobs that no native-born workers would want. Among affluent liberal
professionals, comfortably cocooned, it is almost possible to see how
this illusion could be sustained: immigrants mow the lawns and take care
of the kids, something nobody else in the neighborhood would do. But
this belief is utterly wrong, and pro-immigrant liberals who invoke it
are doing their cause, and themselves, no favor.
For there are all manner of jobs in which the
immigrant labor force has supplanted the native-born one, uncomfortable
as it may be for the champions of immigration to acknowledge. In most
major American cities, for instance, hotel housekeepers used to be
overwhelmingly black. Then hotels let those workers go, and replaced
them with immigrants—a grim reality that the hotel workers union, HERE
(before it merged to become UNITE HERE), recognized at its 2000
convention by resolving to pressure management in negotiations to begin
rehiring African Americans. (Every four years, when I cover the New
Hampshire primary, I even rediscover hotel housekeepers who are white.)
As anyone who's followed the efforts to clear away
the damage from Katrina and rebuild the Gulf Coast can plainly see, the
contractors who have received our tax dollars are using them to hire a
largely undocumented immigrant work force (though some of them have now
been constrained by the reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act that was
forced on the president by Congress). What's gone on in the Gulf is
emblematic of the far greater shift in construction in America, in which
immigrants are the preferred work force for nonunion jobs (and almost
all construction in the Sunbelt, and all residential construction
everywhere, is nonunion).
Since the late 1980s, the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) has done a brilliant and heroic job
unionizing the largely immigrant janitors who work in the downtown
high-rises of the nation's major cities outside the South (and now, with
the recent success in Houston, inside the South as well). But in the
’80s and ’90s, that immigrant work force largely supplanted a
native-born, often heavily African American work force. In Los Angeles,
the flood of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in the mid-80s
was exploited by janitorial contractors, who discharged their unionized
black employees (the union was notably weak in those days) and hired the
immigrants at a pay rate that was a little under half of what the
unionized workers had been getting. Small wonder that when Pete Wilson's
appalling Proposition 187—which would have denied all public services,
such as the right to attend K-12 school, to undocumented immigrants and
their children—appeared on the 1994 ballot, the African American
precincts of Los Angeles joined the most conservative white
neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley in supporting it. (Proposition
187 passed overwhelmingly, though a court subsequently struck down
almost all of its provisions.)
A lot of the industries that disproportionately hire
immigrants—agriculture and slaughterhouses, for instance—do indeed offer
the dirtiest, most dangerous and thankless jobs in the nation. But
unionized packinghouse workers at least made a decent wage (and still
do) in the dwindling number of factories that are still unionized. And
unionized construction workers, in cities such as Las Vegas where
projects are plentiful, make a good living. It is folly to deny that
immigrants take jobs that might otherwise be taken by the native born.
None of this is to deny that the reasons for the
broad stagnation of working-class incomes in this country since the late
1970s—and their steady decline even amid the recovery of the past nearly
four years—are many and varied. American employers' very successful war
on unions is a primary culprit. So is automation. So is the process by
which previously American manufacturers, retailers, and now even service
providers have been able to shift their production abroad, a cosmic
shift greatly abetted by trade laws promoted by investment institutions.
But if globalization offers one plausible explanation for the decline in
incomes during this recovery, and for the paradox of a declining
unemployment rate absent any significant job creation (that is, people
are dropping out of the labor force), so does immigration. Anyone who
follows the declining ranking over the past 40 years of the Los Angeles
metropolitan area (the mega city most impacted by the immigration of the
past quarter-century), when the median income of cities is compared,
would be hard pressed to argue that immigration, combined with
deunionization and all the rest, isn't a factor.
It should come as no surprise that tens of millions
of Americans are sorely vexed by the changes in the economy and the
elimination of vast numbers of decent paying jobs. When it comes to the
causes of this stagnation, Americans have three distinct reactions. By
the evidence of polling, an increasing number—clearly a majority
now—recognize the importance of unions, though fewer and fewer have any
firsthand contact with unions or an understanding of what they do. This
is, however, something of an opinion in vacuo—the number of Americans
who understand how labor law reform could revive the union movement is
miniscule. Secondly, as any number of focus groups have made clear,
globalization to most Americans seems an inevitable process, as
unstoppable and even natural as the movement of the tides. That it is a
system both constructed and gamed by the investment community and large
corporations may be partly understood, but that hardly means anybody but
a few progressive trade and union economists has the slightest idea, or
inclination, as to how to alter its terms.
Which brings us to immigration, on which public
opinion is becoming as active as it is passive toward globalization. We
may not be able to keep Wal-Mart production here, but we should be able
to patrol our own borders -- this is a credo that wins broad support.
The desire to punish those undocumenteds currently here is a more
narrowly held belief, but it's still widespread, and growing. It is
growing particularly within the white working class, which since Nixon
has been an important part of the Republican coalition. Up to now, it's
a group that Republicans have appealed to on issues of military
toughness, cultural traditionalism, and here and there, when electorally
necessary, good old-fashioned racism. Until recent years, the economy
has performed just well enough, and mass immigration hasn't been so
obvious a fact, that the Republicans haven't been forced to appeal to
this constituency with an all-out war on immigrants. Individual
Republicans facing imminent defeat have done this, most notably Pete
Wilson, who salvaged his floundering re-election campaign in 1994 by
backing Proposition 187. But Wilson's campaign cost the California
Republicans the support of Latino voters (the fastest-growing group in
the state, and national, electorate) in subsequent elections, and Wilson
quickly became a pariah in his own party.
This year, however, dozens of Congressional
Republicans will likely find themselves in the kind of bind Wilson was
in just before he endorsed Proposition 187. And their response, no
matter what the National Restaurant Association wants, will likely be to
wage a Wilson-like campaign.
Against this, liberals will have plenty of their own
themes to run on. And when the subject turns to immigration, we are
right to insist, as a matter of human rights, on the legalization and
naturalization of the undocumenteds among us. As the dominant power in
the United States of NAFTA, we need to provide the funds for the
economic development of Mexico—likely the only way to stop the flood of
immigrants here. We need to support smarter border security as well,
though the idea of the militarization of the border runs counter not
just to liberal values, but to the very essence of America. And we are
right to insist on labor law reform and on a negotiated change in the
global economic order that makes worker rights and labor standards the
prerequisites for doing business in the world market.
But the grim fact is that outside the creation of
massive public works projects, the Left, like the Center and Right, has
no real idea how to bring back millions of decent-paying jobs to the
United States in an era of globalized work. And until we do, the
Republican solution to the great stagnation will be to beat up on
immigrants. It may only work for them in a relative handful of races,
but it is their chief opportunity for election-year demagogy, and we
must prudently assume they will take it.
This article first appeared in the online edition of
American Prospect, Dececmber 31, 2005.
Young Workers
are the Future of Organized Labor
By Kristen Kuriga
As the labor movement’s membership dwindles and
youth face increasingly exploitative work conditions, what is the labor
movement’s youth strategy? Excited by the recent debate about the
revitalization of the labor movement, I flew to Chicago to the AFL-CIO
50th anniversary convention to interview youth delegates and to hear
from the federation about their youth strategy in organizing workers. I
scoured the convention floor, of over 800 delegates from international
unions, state federations, and central labor councils, for someone who
might fit into my loose definition of youth—anyone under the age of
thirty. In my search, the reaction I received from delegates, was
often a chuckle, and more commonly “what youth?”
I finally found two “youth” on the floor, Eric Lehto,
29, organizing director of AFSCME Minnesota Council 5, and his
colleague, Rusell Hess, 33, an Organizer for the Laborer’s Union and
president of the Minnesota Southeast Central Labor Council. In reaction
to the lack of youth on the convention floor, Lehto felt that his
presence alone was a testament to how much the labor movement has
changed under the Sweeney regime; after all, he is probably one more
youth than there was at the last convention. Lehto and Hess both agreed
that the future of youth in the labor movement lies in their role as
staff, officers, and top officials, such as Hess and himself.
While the convention featured a lively debate around
issues of diversity with regard to race and gender representation within
the federation, there was little mention of youth’s role in the labor
movement, and none on increasing youth representation at the next
convention. Ajita Talwalker, president of the United States Student
Association, and Allie Robbins, national organizer for development for
United Students Against Sweatshops, made the sole report on youth
organizing. They told of labor-student solidarity actions, successful
living wage campaigns, hunger strikes for campus worker contracts, and
new university affiliations to the Worker’s Right Consortium. They ended
their report with the rousing pledge for students to be the “skilled
foot soldiers of the labor movement.” While Lehto praised the strength
of student-labor solidarity, he also wanted to emphasize to Talwalker
and Robbins, “This is your movement too, sisters.”
In the eyes of the AFL-CIO, the labor movement may
be the movement for college-educated staffers like Lehto and Hess, or
college students interested in solidarity campaigns, but it is not clear
that it is or plans to be the movement of working-class youth. The
labor movement has too often defined “youth” as college students and
future staffers, instead of a group of marginalized workers whose
organization is essential to the growth and revitalization of the labor
movement. With the growing emphasis on organizing the unorganized, the
labor movement has attempted to harness the passion, commitment, and
energy of young activists by recruiting and training college-educated
youth to be the “foot soldiers of the labor movement.” The AFL-CIO has
developed the Organizing Institute and the Union Summer program, both
designed to train a new cadre of labor organizers. The labor movement
has also tapped into the power of student labor solidarity campaigns
through support from United Students Against Sweastshops, the Student
Labor Action Project, and other campus-based student groups. Yet, all
of these initiatives have neglected to identify youth as workers, to
raise their class consciousness about their own place within the labor
market, and to empower young people to organize within their own
workplaces.
Is the House of Labor Holding Firm on the Ground
Floor
Pulling Together in North Carolina
By James Andrews
The disaffiliation of national unions from the
AFL-CIO has had a major short-term negative impact on the labor movement
in North Carolina. The loss of 12 percent of our financial base and 25
percent of our activist base is a major blow to the labor movement in
this small Right to Work state with the lowest union density in the
country.
Organizing support for public sector workers was a
major aspect of our work prior to the split within the AFL-CIO. We also
used the collective strength of our movement to build a massive
political program in the so-called “red state” of North Carolina. This
effort allowed us to gain national attention by reelecting a
worker-friendly governor and all incumbent Democratic members of
Congress, and by increasing the number of worker-friendly members of the
North Carolina General Assembly. In the 2005 session of the General
Assembly, we were successful in fighting back an effort by the business
community to gut our workers compensation laws. This victory speaks to
our ability, prior to the split in the labor movement, to mobilize our
members and build a broad-based coalition of union members and community
partners.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT),
with about 8,000 members, is the largest union in North Carolina and has
a very strong organizing and political program. Although not fully
affiliated even prior to the formation of the Change to Win Federation,
this union has been a major supporter and participant in our political
and legislative work. IBT’s participation in the political endorsement
process and their significant resources—such as free meeting locations
around the state, financial contributions, and an organizing staff—make
them a key player in our effort to build power for working families in
North Carolina.
Communications Workers of America (CWA) and United
Steel Workers (USW), with around 6,000 members each, are our largest
AFL-CIO-affiliated unions. Both unions are deeply involved in all
aspects of our work and are major players around our political and
legislative programs. Since 2004, the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) has a working agreement with the 50,000 member State
Employees Association of North Carolina (SEANC). This partnership has
provided SEIU a strong base to support public sector organizing, and
proved to be a powerful force in recent legislative races and local
elections.
Local
Ties Hold Strong in Oregon
By Tim Nesbitt
Days after the presidents of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) and the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters announced that their unions were leaving the AFL-CIO, and
hours after the AFL-CIO concluded its convention in Chicago on July 28,
2005, I joined several dozen state federation and central labor council
leaders in a hotel meeting room to hear from top AFL-CIO staffers about
what our next steps should be. By then, it was clear that keeping our
state federations and labor councils intact despite the disaffiliation
of our largest unions was not an option. And, as president of the
Oregon AFL-CIO, I was already thinking ahead to other options that could
keep our unions in Oregon working together, at least in our
all-important political campaigns.
What we heard from the AFL-CIO staffers at that
meeting was consistent with the sentiments expressed by the remaining
unions of the AFL-CIO throughout the convention: institutional integrity
required us not only to enforce our constitutions, but to enforce the
principle of a unified union movement. Thus, we were directed to
terminate the membership of the breakaway unions.
At the time, I thought this was a proper
directive—constitutionally, institutionally, by all standards by which
organizations govern themselves. We could find new ways to work
together, for example, by creating a coordinated campaign structure with
a seat at the table for all of our unions, or, perhaps, by creating new
and distinct labor organizations open to all unions in or out of the
AFL-CIO. But we couldn’t ignore the split at the local level.
I left Chicago with an executive board meeting
scheduled in Oregon the following week to begin the reorganization of
our state’s union movement around a smaller core of AFL-CIO unions. By
the end of 2005, what we ended up with was a lot closer to a unified
local labor movement than we ever thought possible when we left Chicago.
Organizing Takes a Hit in Cleveland
By John Ryan
After a year of calling for discussions and debate,
it was frustrating when I heard that leaders of most of the Change to
Win unions were “boycotting” the AFL-CIO convention. The word “boycott”
really stuck with me on the day I saw it on the front pages of papers
across the country while I was still in Chicago at the AFL-CIO
convention, and when I returned home to Cleveland to pick up the pieces.
For me, the word “boycott” is a powerful word that
is connected directly with social justice. The lettuce boycott was what
first inspired me to devote my life to the labor movement The
convention boycott, instead of providing inspiration, would force me and
many others to confront the disarray at the local level of a split in
the national labor movement.
Returning Depressed & Redirected
There was so much to do that first month following
the convention. We had to communicate with our local union leaders,
downsize our budget by 40 percent and put what was left of our yearly
plan on hold.
Many of us also devoted considerable attention to
pressuring both sides of the national dispute to allow us to continue to
work together on the local level. We had meetings, conference calls,
public letters, and visits to national presidents on both sides.
We returned from Chicago to witness daily the
self-inflicted wounds of a splintered labor movement. Newspaper
headlines continued to remind our enemies of our disunity and raise
questions among union leaders who wanted to stand under our umbrella.
The worse day was when a respected union leader from one of the national
unions disaffiliating said that we needed to tear down the labor
movement in order to rebuild it. It was tough to read such a quote in
the paper, especially since the Cleveland AFL-CIO had repeatedly helped
his union organize workers.
Much of the harm on the local level caused by the
disaffiliation fight on the national level had already been realized
before Chicago.
Manufacturing Discontent
Is
Deindustrialization Inevitable?
By Bob Baugh and Joel Yudken
Rebuilding America’s industrial base is essential
for maintaining our country’s living standards and restoring the
American Dream for future generations. Today we must borrow an
unsustainable two billion dollars a day to pay for the goods we consume
that we do not produce as a nation. Eventually, we must either produce
more of what we consume, or be forced to consume less. Our national
competitiveness is eroding despite the fact that American manufacturing
workers are the most productive in the world. As a high–wage country in
a rapidly globalizing world, we must restore our competitiveness by
developing a national industrial strategy centered on innovation. Such
a strategy requires raising the level of public and private investment,
harnessing the distinctive technological and organizational capacities
of U.S. manufacturing companies, and developing the skills of American
workers.
Manufacturing has been the foundation of the
nation’s economic and national security throughout its history. It is a
vital engine for economic growth, generating good jobs and guaranteeing
a high standard of living for America’s working families. It is a
mainstay of state and local economies, providing both jobs and tax
revenues for essential public services. Manufacturing jobs create as
many as four other jobs in local economies, and the earnings and
benefits of those workers exceed those of workers in services and other
sectors. In addition, manufacturing is the leading industrial sector in
providing health care benefits. The sharp increase in uninsured
Americans, five million over the past four years, is directly related to
the decline of manufacturing employment. Manufacturing is also the
major driver of U.S. productivity growth and technological innovation.
The past five years have been especially brutal, far
different from earlier manufacturing downturns. The nature of the
decline is structural, widespread, and deep. The 2001 recession was
precipitated by a manufacturing depression that continues to this day.
Since 1998, over 3.4 million manufacturing jobs have been lost—2.9
million of those since 2001—with over half that total coming from union
shops. In addition, since 1999, over 40,000 manufacturing
establishments have closed—medium and large plant closures have
accounted for 90 percent of the job loss.
The crisis has hit everywhere and everyone. State
and local tax revenues have withered, undermining important public
services. On a per capita basis, it has hit minorities, the south, and
rural areas the hardest, as textiles, clothing, furniture and more
closed or went offshore. Within manufacturing, nearly every subsector
has suffered double-digit employment declines—48 percent in textiles,
nearly 30 percent in computer and electronic parts and primary metals,
and 23 percent in machinery.
The crisis has spread throughout the economy to
encompass both high–and low– end occupations. In 2003, engineering
unemployment hit seven percent, a level that, even in the worst of times
in the early 1980s, never rose above three percent. From 2001 to 2004,
the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there was a loss of 221,000
technical and engineering jobs: computer programmers, electrical and
electronic engineers, and so on. Since January 2001 we have lost 725,000
professional, business, and information service jobs. In five years, the
U.S. economy created only 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering,
many of which are clerical.
Manufacturing is the canary in the coal mine for a
“new economy” that has seen outsourcing spread to software, info tech,
and financial services. The losses also have spread to the university
level where engineering and sciences experienced declining enrollments,
as students turned away from degrees for which there was no perceived
opportunity. Just as troubling is the precipitous decline in domestic
manufacturing investment, which fell nearly 17 percent in real terms
from its peak in 1998 and 2004, while investment in manufacturing
structures declined 44 percent over the same period. At the same time,
many of the same firms are making record offshore investments in R&D,
engineering, design, and production jobs.
The investment flows portend future production and
exports to the United States. Apologist claims that outsourcing is
matched by insourcing (foreign investment in domestic manufacturing) are
meant to mislead. The insourced investments are overwhelmingly a mere
change of ownership that does not result in new jobs and production
facilities here. Not so in China, where these are startups and
expansions.
A
Corporation with a Conscience?
By Fred Block
For the last twenty-five years, political and
economic debates in the United States have been dominated by market
fundamentalism—a vastly exaggerated belief in the capacity of market
competition to solve economic problems. It has been the justification
for regressive tax cuts, rollbacks in the government’s regulatory
capacity, and the widespread use of privatization to weaken the public
sector. Its dominance has been a key factor in weakening the labor
movement and generating the current conflict over how labor can rebuild
its strength.
While labor and its allies have tried to resist
market fundamentalism on many fronts, these efforts have been weakened
by the absence of a coherent alternative. For too long, we have fought
defensive battles, attempting to hold onto the New Deal settlement
despite its obvious limitations. Now that market fundamentalism’s
failures are becoming more obvious, it is urgent that we elaborate a
coherent alternative vision of how the economy should be organized.
One promising alternative to market fundamentalism
is the idea of a “moral economy.” In a moral economy, the pursuit of
profit and self-interest would be subordinated to deeply held values
such as equality, environmental sustainability, democratic
self-governance, and the obligation to do unto others as they would do
unto you. The goal is to reframe the old debate between advocates of
“more state” or “more market” into a new choice between an immoral
economy and a moral economy.
To make this approach persuasive, it is necessary
to explain what a moral economy might look like. This essay is intended
to describe what large corporations might look like in a moral economy
and to suggest a strategy for transforming our ethically challenged
corporations into ethically responsible firms.
The
Problem and Its Roots
The current crisis of the corporation hardly needs
to be belabored. Its most obvious symptoms are the explosion of
executive compensation, a long series of corporate accounting
scandals, and management’s myopic focus on short-term profitability.
As corporate officers are focused on boosting the share price and on
paving the way for the next big deal, they send word down the hierarchy
to increase profits by any means necessary. A collapse of corporate
ethics has been the logical consequence of the pursuit of quick wealth.
The current corporate crisis is closely linked to
the rightward shift in American politics. The story began with the
social upheavals of the 1960s and the difficulties of the U.S. economy
in the first half of the 1970s. The public was increasingly distrustful
of large corporations, and was insisting that they play a more active
role in solving social problems such as racial inequality and
environmental degradation. U.S. firms were also facing intensified
foreign competition and a domestic economy suffering from both inflation
and weak demand.
Corporate leaders could then have responded with a
reform agenda that involved both systematic efforts to revitalize their
firms combined with efforts to negotiate new cooperative relations among
business, government, and civil society. This path was not taken. Most
voices in the business community chose instead to blame all of their
problems on outsiders; they claimed that expanded government regulation
and heavy tax burdens were responsible for all economic difficulties.
They insisted that a return to long discredited ideas of market
fundamentalism, characterized by small government and little regulation,
would miraculously revive the corporate economy.
Working
Class Voices of Contemporary America
The View from Building 99
By Robert Andersen
Come 0715 hours and the steam whistle goes off with
bald authority, a sonic mustering of the workforce from towns as distant
as Saco and Biddeford in Maine, Seabrook and Rochester in New Hampshire.
Five minutes later, a longer more resounding refrain heralds another day
in the two hundred and five year history of The Portsmouth Naval
Shipyard. In the mid-eighties, when I taught there, there were three
shifts and ten thousand civilians heeding that arresting summons. Now
there is a single shift employing well under half that number. For much
of this past summer (2005), that downsized workforce was harkening to an
unnerving silence, the proverbial final whistle, thanks to the
recommendation of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission in late
May that the Yard be closed by 2009 at the latest.
For a Yard long reputed to be the best in the Navy,
this was a bitter fate. Throughout the summer there were numerous
demonstrations and rallies to show the depth of local protest and
resolve. In early June, thousands wearing yellow Save Our Shipyard (SOS)
t-shirts lined Walker Avenue in Kittery, Maine, conduit to Gate One, as
the Commission, apparently unconvinced of its own cost-cutting logic,
went on a belated tour of The Yard. And later that month those same
thousands bused down to Boston, where the Commission, conducting its
final hearing, listened in rapt attention as the Congressional
delegations from Maine and New Hampshire made their impassioned pleas to
reverse the provisional vote to close. Those demonstrations, that
eloquent and compelling testimony, did finally make a difference, did
secure a volte-face, for at 1130 hours on August 24 that whistle went
off with triumphal force, the jubilation finding itself on the front
page photo in the NY Times the next day, as the Commission voted seven
to one to rescind its recommendation to close The Yard. For now, the
PNSY remains an industrial site and that stentorian whistle will
continue to sound for the indefinite future.
But these days that signature basso is anyway an
anachronism, a smokestack era vestige, an auditory nuisance for those of
affluent means who have flocked to the Seacoast and dramatically altered
its socioeconomic profile. The days of the company town, when The Yard
was the employer of first and last resort, a blue-collar haven in a
rustbelt world, have passed into history. The sad truth is that much of
the Seacoast could care less, indeed would probably welcome a shutdown
and subsequent "privatization" along the lines of the nearby Pease
International Tradeport, the former Pease Air Force Base, a first-round
casualty now trumpeted as the gold standard of base conversion. The
demographic tide is as powerful a countercurrent as the eddies and
swirls that roil the Piscataqua River. An actually functioning
industrial site enveloped by an upscale infrastructure, moreover one
that sits on prime waterfront real estate in a seven-figure housing
market, is a beset haven notwithstanding the euphoria attending its
last-minute reprieve.
The Yard, it seems, is a luxury the Seacoast can ill
afford, given the view from Building 99 where I taught English and
Speech in the Apprentice Program. Overlooking the River and Portsmouth
on the opposite bank, the building commands a ten-figure panorama. That
at least is the sum, real and fanciful, that this long-coveted piece of
riverfront real estate could be said to be worth five or ten years down
the road, when the Superfund site is finally cleaned up and vacated
buildings are converted to luxury housing or leveled to make way for
hotels and malls. The industrial arts and sciences are to be consigned
to the dustbin. What remains must conform to a template perfected in a
thousand upscale commercial venues. Hence the massive white edifice
anchoring the downriver side of Seavey Island—until the late sixties a
Naval Prison—may be too far gone to be restored to habitation, but its
singular perch on the river bend, overlooking the classic New England
village of New Castle, invites developers to salivate at the prospect of
turning that site into a lucrative "statement." The Yard, in short,
still awaits its long overdue overhaul, its transformation into an
upscale emporium, thereby completing the gentrification of Portsmouth.
The New Face of the Antiwar Movement
By Tod Ensign
The third anniversary of America’s war to occupy
Iraq is a good time to assess the state of the movement that is working
to end this illegal war.
George W. Bush and his cronies insist that there are
no similarities between their current war in Iraq and America’s long and
disastrous intervention in Vietnam. While these two wars are actually
similar in several respects, there is one crucial difference. Unlike
Vietnam, the U.S. armed forces deployed to Iraq are almost entirely
drawn from America’s working class and its underemployed. For example,
only four members of Congress had a child serving in the U.S. military
in 2004.
One scholar of the Vietnam war, Chris Appy, divides
the 2.5 million GIs who served there into three groups of roughly equal
size. One third were draftees, another third were draft-motivated
“volunteers” and the final third were “true” volunteers. Appy argues
that the second and third categories were predominantly working-class
kids who lacked the resources that allowed their more affluent brethren
to go to college or find draft-deferred employment. While the draftees
did contain many middle-class men, the system offered a variety of
occupational, medical, and educational exemptions which allowed those
with the expertise and money to escape serving. As a result, Appy
estimates that about 80 percent of those who served in Vietnam came from
working-class or poor families.
Nonetheless, though the proportion of middle-class
GIs was relatively small, the Vietnam-era military consisted of a more
representative cross section of society than the one we have today. In
addition to becoming almost entirely working-class and poor, the present
military has changed in in other ways as well. For one thing, it’s much
smaller, having shrunk from 2.1 million active duty GIs at the end of
the first Gulf War in 1991 to just 1.4 million today. This downsizing
has meant that Reserve and National Guard troops have had to be
activated to shoulder much of the combat burden in Iraq. About 35
percent of the U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq are reservists.
Another big change from the past is that female soldiers now make up 15
percent of the total force and serve in most military jobs—except for
some involving combat.
The most important factor pushing working-class
families to the center of the Iraq war debate has been the abolition of
the draft and the shift to an “all-volunteer” military.
When he orchestrated the end of conscription in
1973, Nixon likely intended to insulate middle- and upper-class children
from death and injury in future wars. If those called to fight are far
removed from those wielding political power, then elected officials can
passively support unpopular military interventions without fearing much
constituent pressure. Further, the death or wounding of a “volunteer”
can be rationalized merely by the risk he or she assumed in exchange for
receiving the benefits of the enlistment contract.
My sense is that there has been less public outcry
about the deaths of 2,300 GIs and the wounding of 17,000 more (as of
February 2006) than there would have been during the Vietnam War. This
may be partly due to the media blackout Bush has imposed on returning
coffins or when reporters want to report on the problems of injured
veterans. But I think the identity of the victims also helps explain
the difference.
Caught in the Web
By Kim Phillips-Fein
The conflict between the labor movement and
environmentalism is an old stereotype, one that reflects the supposed
tensions between blue-collar workers and the social movements of the
1960s. But while this is a caricature, it is not without some basis in
reality. On the one hand, the labor movement’s core strength, at least
in the past, has been in manufacturing and heavy industry. If these
industrial processes inevitably inflict damage upon the natural world
that we all share, how can the labor movement engage in broader social
transformations to address these environmental depredations, while at
the same time protecting its own power?
In recent years, however, unions and environmental
groups have begun to find new ways to work together, especially in
protest of international trade agreements that give both the environment
and workers’ rights short shrift. Green Labor, a project of the Public
Health Institute and District 11 of the United Steelworkers
(representing thirteen Northwestern states, including Minnesota, Kansas,
Oregon, and Washington), is one organization seeking to find ways to
bridge the divide between industrial unions and the environmental
movement. The website features stories about the evolving alliance
between labor and environmentalists. For example, there’s an excellent
report on the Steelworkers’ efforts to work with local greens to protest
pollution and public health hazards posed by the American Smelting and
Refining Company of Hayden, Arizona, where the cancer rate is 50 percent
higher than it is in nearby Phoenix—a fact that might have something to
do with the tons of lead, copper, and arsenic compounds the company’s
operations emit each year. There are also reports on the Steelworkers
and the Sierra Club joining forces to protest the Central America Free
Trade Agreement, and an ad produced by the Steelworkers, SEIU, and the
Sierra Club about investments in clean energy, which could produce
hundreds of thousands of good manufacturing jobs. The Public Health
Institute, in turn, was founded in 1986, in the wake of the Bhopal
catastrophe in India; the organization worked with the late Tony
Mazzochi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union to publicize Just
Transition policies, which help workers and industries that have been
destabilized by environmental regulations. At the website, you can sign
up to get free email updates or issues of the online newsletter. Check
it out at
http://www.greenlabor.org.
The National Apollo Alliance is another organization
pursuing partnerships between labor and environmental groups, with an
eye towards developing major new policy initiatives regarding renewable,
sustainable energy sources. Unions including the United Mineworkers, the
UAW, the IBEW, and the Steelworkers have joined together with
environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to support
the exploration of new energy strategies for the United States. The
organization’s website is filled with easily downloadable studies of our
currently flawed energy policy, and strategies for how to move to
something better. Especially exciting is an extensive analysis of how to
build “green” cities—with examples of policies tried in cities ranging
from Santa Monica to Chicago (the former a longtime hippie Mecca, the
latter better known as a Grey than a Green city). Look at the website at
http://www.apolloalliance.org.
******************************
Once upon a time, daily newspapers had reporters
whose beats were devoted to covering the labor movement. Today, labor
news is buried in the business section, or maybe highlighted for some
human interest coverage (except, of course, in the Wall Street Journal,
where labor still makes the front page—that paper’s readers know what
matters!).
For regular labor news updates that don’t require
thumbing through every page of the paper, check out Workplace Issues
Today. This handy digest is published by the Catherwood Library of the
School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. The
service provides daily abstracts of news articles relevant to labor, as
well as links to the articles themselves. On recent dates, featured news
items included an Associated Press story on the protests of thousands of
Irish against the hiring of low-wage Eastern European replacement
workers by Irish Ferries, an Ireland-based ferry company; a New York
Times article about IBM’s decision to freeze its pension fund and
provide employees with 401(k) plans instead, despite the company’s good
financial health; and a Los Angeles Times article about a civil rights
lawsuit against Best Buy, claiming that the company routinely steers
women and minorities into low-paid, low-visibility jobs as cashiers and
warehouse workers. The website (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/wit)
features a searchable news archive, but you can sign up to get the news
briefing emailed to your desktop Monday through Friday.
**************************
When it comes to building a popular movement to
combat economic inequality and fight for a fairer distribution of
income, one of the biggest obstacles union organizers and activists face
is the pervasive sense that economics is specialized knowledge, packed
with graphs and numbers and too complicated for ordinary people to
understand. This is linked, of course, to the idea that citizens should
feel no responsibility for economic life—it’s all determined by the
market, anyway, and the best thing that we can do is stay out of
politics and let the market’s magic work.
United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit Boston-based
organization, seeks to give people the intellectual tools they need to
combat this feeling of powerlessness. The organization’s website
features links to resources used in UFE’s popular education programs on
topics such as taxation, the racial wealth divide, the global economy,
and the relationship between war and economic inequality. The education
workshops, based on the teaching and educational philosophy of Paulo
Freire, seek to help people connect the economic problems they face in
their own lives to the larger structural inequalities of the American
economy. Also notable on the site is Responsible Wealth, a project of
UFE which is a “national network of businesspeople, investors and
affluent Americans who are concerned about deepening economic
inequality.” This organization, whose membership is restricted to the
wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, gives its imprimatur to continuing
the estate tax and to progressive taxation. While such policies are
unlikely to become immensely popular among the members of this tax
bracket, there is still something amusing about the press releases which
describe “the wealthy” saying “no, thanks” to Bush’s tax cuts. Check out
the UFE website at
http://www.faireconomy.org.
*******************************
In June 1979, labor singer and songwriter Joe Glazer
asked fourteen musicians to come to a retreat at the George Meany Center
for Labor Studies. In the years since then, Labor Heritage, the
organization which grew out of that first retreat, has made its mission
bringing art, culture, and music into union struggles. The Labor
Heritage website contains many useful cultural resources of interest to
activists and organizers. Among them are ideas for new picket line
chants (“trustees cease your mythic fable, forthwith back to the
bargaining table!”), parodies of popular songs with pro-union lyrics
(“Punch It In Is All We Do,” to be sung to the tune of “Breaking Up is
Hard to Do”), and songs of union solidarity for the holiday season (such
as “Wal-Mart Stores are Coming To Town” and “I’m Dreaming of a Just
Workplace”). The site contains links to an antisweatshop fashion show,
an inventory of labor landmarks throughout the United States, and a full
directory of labor-friendly artists, poets, theater groups, cartoonists,
and musicians who have participated in the annual Great Labor Arts
Exchange retreats sponsored by Labor Heritage. Also of note is a CD of a
jazz opera, first performed in Detroit in 2003, telling the story of the
murder of a union organizer at the Ford River Rouge Plant during the
1930s. “We fight for roses, too” is the motto of Labor Heritage, and
this terrific website will be of great assistance to any union activist
wanting to use the culture and history of the labor movement to make
history in a struggle happening today. View the site at
http://www.laborheritage.org.
Books and the Arts
The Sweatshop Epidemic: Is there a Cure?
By Richard P. Appelbaum
Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New
Sweatshops
By Robert J.R. Ross, University of Michigan Press,
2004
Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and
the Global Apparel Industry
By Jill Esbenshade, Temple University Press, 2004
Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity
in the Americas
By Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Routledge, 2005
It has been nearly a decade since 71 young garment
workers from Thailand escaped from slave labor in a garment factory in
El Monte, an urban suburb of Los Angeles. That scandalous event—some of
the women had been in captivity for as long as seven years, sewing
clothing for Montgomery Ward, BUM Pacific, and other well-known
companies—focused national attention on sweatshop production in the
apparel industry.
Because the apparel industry is so labor intensive,
factories can be opened with little capital investment, the chief
requirements being low-cost labor and weak (or no) enforcement of local
labor laws or environmental standards. As a result, countless
independently-owned factories around the world are forced to compete for
orders from retailers and manufacturers, in a far-flung production
system that invites abuses while obscuring lines of accountability.
How widespread are such abuses, and how effective
have been efforts to eliminate them? The three books reviewed here
provide a comprehensive picture of the seemingly paradoxical return of
sweatshops to the United States, their rise in the developing world, and
the challenges and pitfalls of workers’ efforts to assert their rights
in a global production system.
Robert Ross’s Slaves to Fashion provides a detailed
account of the history of sweatshops in the United States, explaining
why they have reappeared in recent years, and how social movements have
sought, with mixed success, to combat them. Ross, director of
international studies at Clark University, is no stranger to garment
production and its labor struggles. As he notes in his
acknowledgements, “this topic was one that united heart and intellect”
(ix), given that his father and grandfather were both garment workers
and activists in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).
Ross, who sits on the Advisory Board of the antisweatshop Worker Rights
Consortium, is a prolific public commentator on the resurgence of
sweatshops in the United States.
The first section of the book, which documents the
“fall and rise” of U.S. sweatshops, begins by distinguishing a sweatshop
in legal terms (“sweatshop” is usually defined in terms of chronic
and/or multiple labor law violations) from the moral question (a factory
can be fully compliant with local labor laws, and still be a hell-hole
of a place to work). Through a complex series of calculations
(mercifully reported in an appendix), Ross concludes that in the year
2000 there were some 7,000–10,000 U.S. sweatshops, employing anywhere
from 229,000 to 264,000 textile and apparel workers. One has to go back
100 years to find such a high incidence, and Ross does just that,
chronicling conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century, along
with the epic struggles of the ILGWU to gain minimal rights for the
young women immigrants in New York City’s tenement factories. From the
“Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to the
New Deal, Ross shows how organized labor eventually triumphed, and
sweatshops were all but disappeared from the U.S. scene. But this “era
of decency” was to be short-lived (and, as Ross notes, not shared by all
workers: the ILGWU was less aggressive in organizing shops with minority
workers than it was with its base of Jewish and Italian labor).
Beginning in the 1970s, when the current wave of globalization took
hold, sweatshop production began to reappear in the United States.
In the second part of the book, Ross chronicles the
now familiar story of the global “race to the bottom” and its adverse
impact on the efforts of workers to unionize. He leavens statistics with
case studies, including a detailed account of the U.S. protectorate of
Saipan, where young women from China—“only a shadow removed from
indentured servitude” (141)—labored long hours under harsh conditions
for the Gap, Dayton-Hudson (now Target), Sears, and other major U.S.
companies. Although the clothing they sewed boasted “made in the U.S.
labels” (Saipan, part of the U.S. Commonwealth of Northern Mariana
Islands, is subject to U.S. labor laws), conditions were strictly third
world, resulting in a successful lawsuit against Saipan’s principal
buyers. Nor are conditions all that much better in the United States,
what with the privatization of regulation and enforcement that began
with the Reagan era. Ross shows that sweatshop conditions in the United
States are largely the result of globalization, in which capital flight
(both real and threatened) have weakened unions, and not (as is
frequently claimed) due primarily to the weak and vulnerable position of
its immigrant (and often undocumented) workforce.
The
Rise of Progressivism in L.A.
By David Halle
The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle For a
Livable City
By Robert Gottlieb, Mark Vallianatos, Regina M.
Freer, and Peter Dreier
University of California Press, 2005
This book, by four professors at Occidental College,
is a wonderfully thorough and useful account of the attitudes and
actions of LA progressives throughout the twentieth century as they
encountered the central political, economic, social, and environmental
issues facing the city and surrounding region. It is an adroitly
crafted and beautifully written book that combines a rich history–about
three-quarters of the book–with well-thought–out policy
recommendations. These recommendations derive from, and are being
pushed by, LA’s progressive social movements, individually and in
combination. They were, for instance, used to frame a progressive set of
issues in the 2001 mayoral election. Over half of the recommendations
are about fixing the environment, underlining California’s critically
progressive role in this aspect of national policy.
Avoiding an excessively gloomy approach, “Los
Angeles noir,” that sometimes characterizes radical accounts of this
city, the authors see the positive as well as the negative in LA’s
recent history. On the downside is the smog; the residential
segregation; the two mega riots of 1965 (Watts) and 1992 (Rodney King);
the production of a long line of reactionary police chiefs who saw
their job as safeguarding the city from “Okies, Mexicans, Blacks and
Reds”; anti-unionism, with Los Angeles one of the first cities to adopt
the “Open Shop” enormous economic inequalities; and assaults on the
environment via “endless landscapes of subdivisions, freeways, and
malls,” as well as the bizarrely mutilated LA river, dried up and
enclosed in concrete.
On the upside is the city’s now famous ethnic
diversity; its strikingly successful examples of multiethnic collation
politics as in Tom Bradley’s four terms as mayor; its being the site for
a reinvigorated labor movement as in Justice for Janitors; its nurturing
of a community-oriented environmentalism; its new (since the 2000
charter reform) “neighborhood councils” which, in hyperdemocratic
fashion, allow residents to themselves decide on what constitute the
boundaries of their own “neighborhoods”; and the generally hospitable
environment in LA for “progressivism.”
Can Worker Centers
Fill The Union Void?
By Steve Early
Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant
Rights
By Jennifer Gordon, Harvard University Press, 2005
Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the
Edge of the Dream
By Janice Fine, Cornell University Press, 2006
If America had a union movement worth its salt,
would there be any need for foundation-funded "worker centers?"
Shouldn't unions themselves be places where workers go to get
job-related legal advice, leadership training, and organizational
backing for workplace campaigns? With a membership base of thirteen
million, collective bargaining rights, and thousands of full-time
functionaries, doesn't organized labor have the capacity to wage "the
fight for immigrant rights" so vividly described by Jennifer Gordon and
Janice Fine in their new books on worker center activity?
The answers to these questions are, respectively,
no, yes, and apparently not. As Gordon and Fine report, a network of
more than 135 labor support groups has developed in the United States
precisely because its unions aren't meeting the needs of workers—largely
foreign born—who toil under terrible conditions in low-wage labor
markets. Suburban Sweatshops and Worker Centers appear in the wake of a
big win for the worker center movement—against Taco Bell—and last year's
unraveling of the AFL-CIO, which made mainstream labor look even more
disorganized than usual. The combination of these two developments has
led some observers, like Monthly Review editor and author Michael Yates,
to wonder whether "existing labor unions and leaders might not be the
vehicle through which unions become relevant again. Maybe new
organizations, outside traditional labor, will be necessary...[to]
reinvent class struggle unionism."
The Taco Bell fight involved a decade-long
organizing campaign by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). As Fine
notes, the Coalition and its allies "succeeded at a boycott where so
many others have failed in recent years," forcing Taco Bell's owner, Yum
Brands, to take direct responsibility for the pay and conditions of the
tomato pickers employed by its Florida subcontractors. The March 2004
settlement with the company has been hailed by United Farm Workers
president Arturo Rodriguez as "the most significant victory" for
agricultural laborers since the UFW's first California grape boycott in
the 1960s. CIW volunteer Elly Leary, a retired UAW activist, contends
that the Immokalee Workers and other "non-union working class
organizations" now play a key role in the labor movement because they
can aid "poor, immigrant workers struggling for a just future" without
the political baggage "associated with 'special interests' or 'big
labor.'"
Gordon and Fine would agree, although the authors'
accounts of worker center funding and functioning reveal much about the
limits and difficulties of this form of community-labor activism. Long
term, the only way to institutionalize and expand the worker protections
that some centers have won is through stronger, more democratic unions,
willing to embrace the creativity and dynamism of organizing currently
being conducted outside the AFL-CIO and Change To Win Coalition (CTWC).
Now a law professor at Fordham University, Gordon
founded and directed the Workplace Project on Long Island, a grassroots
initiative that made her one of the few labor organizers ever to win a
MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Her book is deeply rooted in the
personal experience of aiding a largely Hispanic workforce of janitors,
domestic workers, day laborers in landscaping and construction, low-wage
factory hands, and fast food restaurant help.
“Wal” of Shame
By Gordon Lafer
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Directed by Robert Greenwald, distributed by Brave
New Films
With Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,
filmmaker Robert Greenwald has produced a devastating critique of the
world’s biggest company. In November 2005, the film was released in
thousands of living rooms, churches, union halls, and school cafeterias
across the country. Following the strategy pioneered by Moveon.org and
used to great effect with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the film was
distributed directly to potential activists, bypassing the chokehold of
more mainstream, corporate-owned media.
Greenwald’s film comes at a critical time in the
effort to push back against the sleazy and damaging practices of the
country’s largest corporation. For those who know nothing about
Wal-Mart, the film is an excellent introduction to the company. In just
over an hour and a half, the film takes viewers through a series of
exposés of Wal-Mart practices, analyzing in turn the company’s impact on
labor, the environment, local businesses, public services, customer
safety, race and sex discrimination, exploitation of workers abroad and
undocumented immigrants at home, and the export of American jobs to
China. Greenwald seems to have worked hard to avoid any sense of this
being a fringe-left rant. The characters explaining Wal-Mart’s
destructiveness—small-town family business owners, for example—include
flag-waving veterans and conservative Republicans. Some of the most
devastating testimony comes from interviews with former Wal-Mart
managers, who attest with brutal directness to the company’s systemic
abuse of its employees, customers, and surroundings. The film thus
presents its critique through voices of towering, undeniable
credibility. In addition, because the filmmakers’ arguments are
interspersed with actual Wal-Mart commercials touting the company’s
virtues, viewers get both sides of the argument and are inoculated
against the corporate spin.
The film is equally useful for already committed
activists. Generally, those around the country who have been working to
keep Wal-Mart out of their communities have focused only on one aspect
of the corporation’s behavior: either its labor practices, for instance,
or its impact on local downtown economies. The breadth of Greenwald’s
critique, and the depth of facts that he marshals in telling his story
will both broaden and strengthen the arguments of Wal-Mart’s opponents.
Greenwald mixes some perfectly chosen personal
stories with a devastating array of facts.
China’s New Female Proletariat
By Eileen Boris
Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a
Global Workplace
By Pun Ngai
Duke University Press, 2005
(With an Interview with Pun Ngai by Eileen Boris)
Young women, from the countryside, rushing pass the
factory gate, governed by the timeclock and the production line, crowded
eight to a dormitory room, and subject to rules of personal conduct:
like the Lowell Mill girls of the first industrial revolution, an ocean
away and more than a century later, China’s working daughters, the
dagongmei, have emerged as the proletariat of global capitalism. They
leave behind the patriarchy of their villages for special economic zones
like the Blade Runner-like city of Shenzhen, and trade field work for
piecework in a quest to become modern that is as fierce as that engaged
in by the post-Maoist state. They yearn, as did one survivor of a
factory fire, “to save money to go to Beijing” (3). They desire to buy
lipsticks and fashionable jeans, day-dreaming of romance, while laboring
for twelve hours until they wear out and return to their villages to
marry. Made In China is about the transformation of these rural women
into factory laborers, the making of a new class.
A decade ago, activist ethnographer Pun Ngai,
founder of the Chinese Working Women’s Network, used family ties, much
like the working daughters themselves, to gain entrance into an
electronic plant. The director of the factory gave her access. For seven
months she toiled on the assembly line, placing screws in an automobile
route finder, and sleeping in the dormitory, queuing for hot water and
eating in the company cafeteria. With refreshing self-critical
awareness, she recognizes herself as a “novice” ethnographer, who sought
“identification with the female workers . . . to prop up my intellectual
and ‘radical’ fantasy of resisting the irresistible advent of global
capitalism” (16). No one really considered her a dagongmei, though
workmates came to involve her in late night chatting, when they shared
stories of women’s lives to make sense of their own. Managers treated
her differently, hiring another woman to enhance output on her line, and
excluding her from reprimand during the weekly “admonition meeting”
(118). “Indeed, from the beginning, the production machine had no
interest in incorporating me,” she confesses (112). Though based on
reconstructed field notes, because the routines of factory life left
little time to record impressions, Made in China provides a nuanced and
vivid portrait of day-to-day existence under the low wages, long hours,
and toxic environment that are a product of the Chinese alliance between
local government and global capital.
Crossing E.P. Thompson with Foucault, Ngai charts
the development of individual psyche and group identity as “a state
socialist system gave way to the capitalist world economy and . . .
capitalist practices depended on the regulation of class and sexual
relations” (19).
Making the
Poor Visible
By Beth Shulman
Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor From
Below
By Vanessa Tait
South End Press, 2005
Over the past quarter century, there has been a
fundamental change in the philosophy of government. From Ronald
Reagan’s first inaugural address, when he asserted that “Government is
not the solution. Government is the problem,” to Bill Clinton’s 1996
State of the Union pronouncement that “the era of big government is
over,” there has been an attack on government’s role in ensuring real
opportunities for all Americans.
Faced with the greatest economic inequality since
the 1920s, the current Bush Administration has taken this philosophy to
another level. It has starved government through tax breaks for the
rich, and reduced needed investments in the vast majority of Americans.
As the private sector withdrew from its post-war role of providing
workers with livable wages, health care coverage, and retirement
security, the government further deregulated the labor market and
increased its attacks on labor unions. This leaves corporations to
unilaterally decide the fate of workers.
There is great hand-wringing among progressives in
the United States about this profound change in America. Yet, if we want
a society in which there are real opportunities for all Americans, if we
want to reclaim America, we need to rebuild a vibrant trade union
movement. A strong trade union movement has historically been the most
important institution representing the broad interests of working
Americans.
In Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor From
Below, Vanessa Tait gives us a window into the model of “poor
workers unions” and the important role these community-based
organizations have played and will need to continue to play in
rejuvenating the entire U.S. labor movement.
Blue-Collar Joke
By Anna McCarthy
Blue Collar TV
Bahr/Small Productions and Parallel Entertainment
with Riverside Productions. Distributed by WB TV
Blue Collar TV is the title of the Jeff
Foxworthy sketch comedy series, now in its second season, that airs on
the Warner Brothers network and repeats on Comedy Central. The show is
an extension of the Blue Collar Comedy tour inaugurated in 2000 and
featuring Foxworthy and fellow performers Daniel Whitney and Bill
Engvall. Both the tour and the show have spawned highly popular DVDs and
an assortment of merchandising tie-ins. The Blue Collar brand, and a
brand is really what it is, draws in very high revenues for the stars
and the enterprise’s manager J. P. Williams. The Comedy Central website
describes this show as “a hometown buffet of TV parodies, sketches and
stand-up, celebrating everything from spouses to spoilers, Winnebagos to
Waffle Houses, cheap beer to even cheaper lingerie.” That pretty much
sums it up; as this list indicates, it’s about identifying and finding
humor in cultural references that are presumed to speak especially
directly to a white working–class audience.
In my opinion as a regular TV viewer, the show isn’t
especially funny, or rather, it’s no funnier than Saturday Night Live on
an average night. Sometimes it gives me a giggle, but mostly the humor
is pretty predictable. The show, however, reveals something important
about the kinds of assumptions that underlie television’s definition of
itself and a particular group of people as “blue collar.” At one point
in time, blue collar meant a kind of worker, but Foxworthy’s monologues
and the sketches that make up the show rarely talk about work, and this
is significant in itself. As jobs that fall into the blue collar
category have become increasingly hard to come by—especially union
jobs—the meaning of the phrase has changed. It is clear from watching
the show and listening to what its star says about it that “blue collar”
has become a racial category, not an economic one. As we shall see, the
Blue Collar Comedy brand makes this point very clearly.
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