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President Bush pronounced the state of the union to be
good and getting steadily better when he addressed Congress back in late
January. Yet, it is hard to recall a time when a presidential administration
seemed as beset by so many simultaneous and serious crises of confidence. From
the Iraq war to spying in violation of the constitution, from corruption at the
highest levels to gross mismanagement of natural catastrophes, from an energy
policy that produces unimaginable oil company profits to a health care system no
one understands and few can afford, the public again and again registers its
disaffection. Yet the same Administration burdened by those potential political
disasters has only minimal trouble getting its way, executing draconian cuts in
the social welfare budget, soldiering on in Iraq, and staffing the Supreme Court
with ideologues from the Right. The opposition, such as it is, can’t seem to
muster the courage and social vision to confront such a vulnerable regime,
perhaps hoping it will overthrow itself (which after all is not inconceivable).
The situation at ground level is just as murky. The last
vestiges of the nation’s once vaunted industrial machine are jettisoned on an
almost daily basis while the country gets itself ever more in debt to the rest
of the world, yet Wall Street doesn’t seem to mind. Wal-Mart is leading the
world economy back to the future, resurrecting a work regimen Dickens would have
found familiar, yet globalization is heralded as the sunny face of Progress, and
not just by self-interested businessmen and financiers. The corporate scandals
that first emerged at Enron in 2001 continue their endless cascade, yet the air
is full of calls to lighten up on the new regulations that followed in the wake
of those first debacles. The American army of invasion and occupation in Iraq
is more working class in composition than it was during Vietnam and shows
serious signs of discontent and disillusionment, yet the antiwar movement can’t
seem to sustain its momentum despite the unpopularity of the war.
The state of the union is
mysterious indeed. We don’t pretend to unravel that mystery in the pages that
follow, but we hope to shed a little light into the gloom.
We begin with Nelson
Lichtenstein’s dissection of Wal-Mart as the template for a new form of global
capitalism, one that has shifted the world’s economic geography and balance of
power with fateful consequences. Lichtenstein analyzes the company’s managerial
culture, and how it sits atop a worldwide supply chain that dictates what is
produced, determines the prices, establishes the markets, and commands the
distribution of labor from the Ozarks to the South China Sea.
Ross Perot, when he ran for
President in 1992 emphasizing his opposition to NAFTA, talked about that “great
sucking sound,” the sound of a tidal wave of jobs leaving the country if NAFTA
became law. Wal-Mart has played its role in helping Perot’s prophecy come
true. But the sound also echoes in the opposite direction, generated by the
enormous flow of immigrants, legal and undocumented, into this country. This is
an issue on the boil waiting to explode and it is not a simple one to figure
out. Many liberals assume that immigrants by and large go to work in places and
under conditions that working-class Americans find unattractive, so at least
there is no need to worry about dangerous division and conflict. Harold
Meyerson argues here that that is a consoling delusion, that on the contrary
sizeable numbers of immigrants do indeed take jobs once held by American
workers, and that the labor movement and its allies must reckon with that hard
fact of life. The immigration issue is also a political hot potato, not only
for labor, but for the conservative coalition running the country. Roger
Waldinger provides a meticulous analysis of the divisions within the Republican
Party, between its corporate elite which welcomes in this pool of cheap and more
easily exploitable labor, and the Party’s working-class constituents worried
about their livelihoods and sometimes prone to xenophobic scapegoating. And, as
Waldinger makes clear, the situation is even knottier than that. Part of the
labor movement finds itself in alliance with the NAM and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce in supporting a guest worker program, a coalition of strange bedfellows
that gives pause for thought. New Labor Forum will continue to watch
this issue develop as it promises to reconfigure the political landscape and
make the chemistry of conservative populism more unstable.
Accompanied by steep
increases in immigrant workers, the U.S. labor force is also becoming younger in
composition, a phenomenon likely to accelerate if the extraordinary trend in
high school drop-out rates continues. But the labor movement does not reflect
this great shift in age composition. Kristen Kuriga explores the causes and
dimensions of this trend. She argues that its long-term implications are
worrying indeed, and begins to suggest ways the labor movement might come to
terms with its own generation gap.
The labor movement’s capacity
to address the problem of young workers, or any other workers for that matter,
is severely compromised by its present organizational weakness. And now it is a
divided labor movement. Whatever the long-term and national implications of the
recent split may be, we were curious to know how that dynamic is playing itself
out at the local level. Here, we present three accounts of the way state
federations and central labor councils are handling relations between unions
still in the AFL-CIO and those who have joined the Change to Win Coalition.
James Andrews, president of the North Carolina State Federation of Labor, Tim
Nesbitt, former president of the Oregon State Fed; and John Ryan, president of
the Cleveland Central Labor Council report on a split that has remained more
national than local.
One vital place labor used to
recruit the lion’s share of its members, but where the pickings have grown
increasingly slim is heavy industry, and that is because there is less and less
heavy industry in which to hunt for new members. It is impossible to
underestimate the economic, social, cultural, and political significance of this
great sea-change in American life, the hollowing out of its industrial core.
One question we asked Bob Baugh and Joel Yudken to address is whether, in the
end, this is inevitable, an irreversible consequence of the logic of global
capitalism. Their article argues that, on the contrary, there is a future for
heavy industry here in the United States, but that first we must understand the
real causes of its decline. That will tell us what needs to be done as a matter
of national industrial policy to bring about its revival, not, to be sure, in
its old form, but in ways appropriate to the technologies and markets of the
twenty-first century. There is no more conspicuous example of
deindustrialization than what has been happening in the auto industry lately,
where the domestic workforce of the big three American producers is now a shadow
of what it was not so many years ago. Jeff Rothstein examines that phenomenon
and challenges a series of assumptions about why it’s happened, including the
too easily arrived at conclusion that it can all be blamed on outsourcing. The
outlook in auto is not good, but to figure out the remedy we must first consider
Rothstein’s sober assessment of what went wrong.
Deindustrialization is
another word for what some have called the “financialization” of the economy.
That means Wall Street and the power it has exercised over the well-being of
American industry, beginning in the Reagan era, the age of asset stripping and
downsizing, the age of Gordon Gekko. Since then the mechanisms for heaping up
huge profits on the basis of trading and speculating in paper assets has become
increasingly undecipherable to all but the insiders. All this resulted finally
in the unprecedented corporate scandals of the last five years. Those charged
with governing what goes on in the corporation have been grossly delinquent at
best, and often enough accomplices before the fact in ripping off the companies
they were supposed to be protecting. Fred Block takes up this crisis of
corporate governance. His article analyzes how things got so bad, and how they
might be reformed, including how and why the labor movement should become a
stakeholder in a new regime of corporate democracy.
Governing the American empire
faces its own crisis. The U.S. government’s position in Iraq seems increasingly
hopeless, and here at home that position commands the loyalty of a dwindling
minority. One expression of that disaffection is the remarkable and remarkably
vocal opposition of the working-class families of soldiers who are getting
killed and maimed in Iraq. Todd Ensign provides an overview of this new
development in antiwar organizing and explores the social dynamics of a
“volunteer” army more and more dubious about its mission and about the
military’s promise to rescue it from a lifetime of dead-end jobs and
unemployment.
One working-class community
that received a reprieve from such a future is Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where
the oldest Navy shipyard in the country was nearly deep-sixed by the Defense
Department last fall. Saving it was good news for the skilled workers who have
long made up the heart and sole of New Hampshire’s only seacoast city. But in
our column, Working-Class Voices of Contemporary America, Robert Andersen says
that way of life is on its way out anyway. He describes the process of real
estate speculation and gentrification that has transformed Portsmouth over the
last twenty years, marginalizing its working-class residents, leaving them
social and cultural outliers in their own town. Andersen reflects on the
significance of that loss. In our other regular column, Caught in the Web, Kim
Phillips-Fein alerts our readers to valuable websites for those interested in
the budding alliance between labor and environmentalist movements, in getting
regular updates on labor news of the day, in getting better educated about key
economic issues, and in finding vital cultural resources to help in the
struggle.
Some argue, not without
reason, that the whole global economy is founded on sweatshop economics. Most
of the books reviewed in this issue’s Books and the Arts section (and one
of the two movie reviews) examine this phenomenon. Richard Appelbaum leads off
with a review essay covering four books that explore the reemergence of garment
sweatshops the world over, and that assess efforts by workers and others to
monitor and regulate what goes on in them. Eileen Boris reviews a book about
Chinese women factory workers by Pun Ngai, a scholar and activist trying to
address the grave problems faced by these women as they migrate from rural China
to the hot zones of the Chinese industrial revolution. An interview with Pun
Ngai accompanies the review. In the United States, immigrants make up the bulk
of the sweatshop labor force, so Steve Early reviews two studies that address
the battle for immigrant rights. Nontraditional forms of worker organizations
have been cropping up all over the country as complements or alternatives to
conventional trade unions. Beth Shulman examines one account of these “poor
workers unions” to see how they are doing.
On the cinematic side, Gordon
Lafer reports on the widely-discussed documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of
Low Price which examines a company whose contribution to worldwide sweatshop
economics can’t be underestimated. Los Angeles is both a site of recent great
labor movement victories and a favorite locale for sweatshops in the United
States.. David Halle reviews a book about the growth of progressive politics in
L.A., and what we can expect for the future. And in keeping with our ongoing
attention to the burgeoning conservative sentiments within the working class,
Anna McCarthy takes a look at the popular TV comedy show, Blue Collar TV,
analyzes its appeal and how it is so different from earlier television
depictions of the blue collar world. As always, we conclude with a selection of
poetry, this time on the theme of the Iraq war.
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