New Labor Forum — Fall 2006

For three days last December, New York City looked like a bloodless disaster movie, in which normal life halted and mass improvisation took over. Businessmen with briefcases hitchhiked rides, as thousands of workers braved winter weather to walk across the East River bridges. High school students, less concerned with duty, stayed home, watching videos and killing time. At Lord & Taylor, executives, with no workers to deploy in the battle to sell, manned the sales floors themselves. Crowds jammed normally quiet commuter train stations, while city residents used to hearing screeching wheels on elevated tracks tossed in bed, disoriented by the eerie quiet. The transit workers had gone out on strike.

There are moments in history when particular groups of workers carry symbolic and practical weight disproportionate to their numbers, when their struggles become struggles for a whole working class or even a whole society: the 1937 Flint sit-down strikers, whose victory heralded the triumph of industrial unionism and a democratic transformation of national politics; the tin miners of Bolivia, who in the 1950s shattered the repressive army and put a populist regime into power; the Coca-Cola workers in Guatemala, whose heroic refusal in the 1980s to abandon their union held out hope in a time of terror; the striking air traffic controllers, whose mass firing in 1981 inaugurated the Reagan-era decimation of organized labor. On a more modest scale, New York transit workers, in undertaking an illegal strike to block the imposition of a two-tier system of benefits, engaged in a struggle with ramifications far beyond their own ranks. Its full impact on labor’s willingness to use militant tactics to confront head-on the long campaign to diminish the social protections working people have won remains to be seen.

Three times over the past half-century, New York transit workers have gone on strike in outsized battles that have redefined the balance of power in the region. Without having sought the role, they have been the shock troops of Gotham’s working class. In 1966, transit workers shut down New York City for twelve days, ushering in an era of public worker militancy and economic uplift for what was still a grossly underpaid municipal workforce. In 1980, they shut down the city for eleven days, refusing to accept the calculus of austerity imposed a half-decade earlier during New York’s fiscal crisis. In 2005, they struck for two-and-half days in an effort to preserve social benefits for the next generation of workers. In each case, the very act of striking represented a shot across the bow of normality, an insistence that workers’ rights and needs justified doing what was simply not done.

The 1980 and 2005 strikes book-ended an era when job actions virtually disappeared from the arsenal of New York’s public sector unions. Government worker strikes have been illegal in New York State since shortly after World War II, with the current prohibition in the 1967 Taylor Law, which provides the framework for public sector labor relations. For years, municipal unions risked severe penalties by ignoring the law, but starting in the Reagan era they became unwilling to do so. Instead, they increasingly just let contracts expire, hoping for an advantageous moment to cut new deals, seeking leverage in their ability to mobilize members at election time rather than in the threat to walk out. (As New York public workers stopped striking, so did everyone else; from the late 1970s on, the annual number of strikes in the United States fell steadily until it reached a historic low level and stayed there.) Slowly, public employee strikes disappeared from the consciousness of New Yorkers as anything but a memory of by-gone days.

Except in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, which represents New York City bus and subway workers.

Not long ago, University of Miami janitor Elsa Rodriguez was one of the millions of Southern workers that the labor movement seemed powerless to help. Living in Florida, far from any union stronghold, Elsa was stuck working for a cleaning contractor that paid her $6.70 an hour without health insurance. Up north in Boston, many janitors working for the same contractor, UNICCO, made more than twice that amount, and had health care to boot. But those janitors belonged to the Service Employees International Union, and when Elsa and her co-workers began to organize with SEIU last year, UNICCO harassed the union’s supporters, fired and suspended key leaders, and seemed about to smother yet another Southern organizing drive.

But instead of giving up, Elsa and the University of Miami janitors grew more determined. With strong support from students as well as community and religious leaders, they went on strike in February demanding that the school rein in UNICCO and give them a chance to form a union without facing threats and intimidation. In April, with the university still refusing to intervene, Elsa and seven other janitors launched a fast for justice.

Their fast proved to be a crucial test of our union’s decision in 2004 to reach out to the workers of the South and Southwest. At SEIU’s 2004 convention, members voted to fund what we believe is the most ambitious effort ever to unite workers in the seventeen states stretching from Florida to Nevada.[1] SEIU members saw that millions of workers in the South and Southwest were mired in jobs where poverty pay is the norm, and that we had a moral obligation to help them and their families build a better future.

For too long, most of us in the labor movement acted as if the Mason-Dixon Line was a border we could not cross. But while we retreated to union islands like New York and California, the non-union sea kept rising around us and we grew more and more isolated from workers like Elsa who so desperately needed our help.

As the director of SEIU’s South-Southwest organizing project, I got to know Elsa and her co-workers during their fast, visiting with them in “Freedom City,” the humble tent city they set up just off campus. It’s one of the most inspiring experiences I’ve had in forty years in the labor movement.

Like Elsa, who emigrated from Cuba in 1999, the majority of the Miami janitors are Cuban-American. These workers, who had sacrificed so much to build a better life in the United States, said they considered the fast just one more step on their path to the American dream. Their courage was remarkable. During the strike, the university gave the workers a substantial pay raise—nearly 30 percent for Elsa—but because the administration wouldn’t agree to a fair process for forming the union, the workers rejected the attempt to buy them off, and refused to end the walkout. Finally, on May 1, the university and UNICCO relented. The janitors, having won the right to shape their own future, called off the fast and ended the strike.

Elsa and her co-workers proved SEIU members made the right decision in 2004. Since beginning the South-Southwest project, workers all across the region have shown they are eager to stand together to win a better life:

[1] The 17 states of SEIU’s South-Southwest region are: Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The Legacy of Failure: Why the Solid South Has Proved So Hard to Crack

By William P. Jones

Recent organizing victories have highlighted renewed possibilities for building unions in the South. In 1998, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) won a six-year-long strike in Las Vegas, capping an effort to organize more than 40,000 casino employees in that city, and setting the basis for an ambitious campaign to unionize hotels, airport concessions, and industrial laundries across the Sunbelt. The following year, over 5,000 textile workers voted to join the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) at Cannon Mills, a North Carolina firm that had resisted unionization successfully since the 1920s. In 2004, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) signed the largest labor agreement in North Carolina history, winning wage increases, health care benefits, and seniority and grievance procedures for nearly 8,000 immigrant laborers, and a system to monitor recruitment, work and living conditions in the United States and Mexico. In the past year, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) won representation of 5,000 janitors in Houston and nearly 500 janitors at the University of Miami.

That the largest of those gains occurred in the service sector and among Latino and African American workers indicates that unions may benefit from the dramatic changes in the southern economy and workforce over the past fifty years. Only two decades earlier, analysts predicted that the survival of unions in the South depended on reversing the trend toward deindustrialization. “If the industry base moves more toward service industries,” a labor attorney told the Houston Chronicle, “the unions will have a much harder time organizing because workers are in very small groups and are very decentralized.” For most of the previous century, union leaders had also focused their southern organizing campaigns on white manufacturing workers—out of the belief that whites would not join unions that were dominated by workers of color or had a reputation for challenging white supremacy. In contrast to earlier efforts to downplay racial difference, the recently merged UNITE-HERE boasts of its “diverse membership, comprised largely of immigrants and including high percentages of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American workers.”

Despite the justified optimism that union leaders expressed in the wake of those victories, it will not be easy to transcend the region’s long history of anti-unionism. Unions have succeeded among mostly Latino and African American service and agricultural workers because they work in sectors that are less vulnerable to the threat of relocation—a weapon that manufacturing firms still wield quite effectively. According to the 2000 Census, service and agricultural jobs combined account for just 15 percent of southern employment, compared to over 50 percent in sales, production, construction, and transportation. Furthermore, southern manufacturing is still concentrated in “non-metropolitan counties” where the workforce is mostly white, and particularly vulnerable to the threat of plant closings. It makes sense for unions to initiate their southern organizing campaigns among workers who are most likely to support them, but it is difficult to imagine how they can build a viable southern labor movement without also organizing the white workers who still compose the majority of the southern working-class.

Unions have made unanticipated gains among Latino immigrants, but they will also have to maintain goodwill among African Americans, who have been the most consistent supporters of organized labor in the South since the 1940s. Until recently, historians assumed that labor was defeated in the South because mostly white textile workers did not join Operation Dixie, the CIO’s million dollar campaign to organize the South following World War II. More recent studies reveal that unions made small but significant gains in largely African American workforces in lumber, tobacco, food processing, and steel.

After six annual meetings, the World Social Forum faces major decisions about its future. Especially since 2004, the forum has seen vigorous debate about what it should be and how it should engage the world to realize its slogan "Another World is Possible." It was founded as a space for dialogue and debate, not a movement, and the founders explicitly foreswore any drive for programmatic unity. But many activists have grown impatient with the idea of a mere debating society or a bazaar of progressive causes, and are calling for something more: a unified body to undertake coordinated political action.

The forum has met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005; in Mumbai, India, in 2004; and in a "polycentric" meeting intended to take place simultaneously in Caracas, Venezuela; Bamako, Mali; and Karachi, Pakistan, in 2006. The meetings are held in January to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which the social forum was created to challenge. Every year it has brought together tens of thousands of people (155,000 in 2005) from the world's social movements and nongovernmental organizations, pursuing many agendas, whether for women's equality, small-scale worker-controlled enterprise, public health, community-controlled schools, or any of a host of other causes.

Attending the WSF is an invigorating experience. The scene bursts with energy as people who work on particular causes at home compare notes and strategies, managing to communicate across barriers of language, political orientation, and issue emphasis. Musicians and other performers entertain in the open air during the breaks, and dozens of organizations and publishers promote their projects and publications. The forum meetings are highly disorganized, probably inevitable with such large crowds (always bigger than expected) and the short time for planning and holding the meetings, but despite the frustrations, the disorganization intensifies the feeling of spontaneity and dynamism.

The assembled forces have been dubbed the "antiglobalization movement" by much of the press, but they reject the label. Opposed to neoliberal corporate globalization, they prefer to be thought of as the global justice movement. They favor a unified world, but one unified around common human values and respect for diversity rather than trade. They reject the dictation by international financial institutions (IFIs) and transnational corporations in the affairs of their countries. As the forum's Charter of Principles says, the WSF is “opposed to neoliberalism and to the domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism….The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations' interests, with the complicity of national governments.”

They join in opposition to the proliferation of the misnamed "free" trade agreements which, they believe, subject underdeveloped economies to unfair economic competition; more than that, many fear that free trade will cement U.S. political control over their countries, exacerbating the pressure from the IFIs and U.S.-based corporations. Combined with the subjection of domestic policy to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), critics fear that free trade threatens their national sovereignty.

Labor's representatives have been present every year, but they have not played a major role in the forum's debates. The Unified Workers' Confederation (CUT) of Brazil, linked to the Workers Party (PT), is part of the committee that has organized the Porto Alegre meetings. Trade unions and international organizations, notably the ICFTU and its affiliates, have used the forum as a venue for their own networking activities. But labor takes part in the forum in more or less the same way as did AFL-CIO unions at the Seattle protests in 1999: uncomfortably.

At a recent conference in Beijing on international labor standards and labor rights, a German colleague delivered a paper entitled “Is Fordism Back?” His remarks focused on a foreign-owned industrial facility in South China that employs 130,000 workers. He punctuated his talk with slides of the assembly line, and spoke of the segmentation of work, an elaborate new de-skilling process, and enhanced methods of managerial control. When he had finished, the Chinese scholar seated next to me raised his hand and said, “Professor, I understand what you were saying, but I don’t understand your point. Is what you are describing good or is it bad?” The Westerners in the room were perplexed by the question but did their best to respond politely. Afterwards, I asked my Chinese colleague about his question. He said that when he looked at the slides he saw a clean, efficient, technologically advanced facility, and thought about the 130,000 jobs it created. “I come from the countryside,” he said. “This looks good to me.” Then he added, “Besides, wasn’t Fordism key to the development of the U.S. as the leading industrialized nation in the world?”

The conference at Renmin University, attended by academics and labor movement activists, included left-liberal speakers from three countries—a dozen each from the United States, Germany, and China—and attracted several hundred Chinese participants. If there was a unified theme among the U.S. participants, it was this: We are not a model. In fact, many of us wondered why a nation that considered itself a workers’ state—whatever that means in China today—would turn over ownership and control of its resources and enterprises to the very multinational corporations that have been the bane of the progressive movement’s existence in the West for so long—and do so without greater regulation and a stronger safety net for those who are hurt by this massive privatization. Perhaps worse still, the dismantling of an already existing safety net (including universal health care) and the rapid emergence of a super-rich class, suggests that China was choosing not the “kinder and gentler” capitalism of the New Deal, but the unfettered capitalism of robber baron days.

Although I am not an expert on China, I have visited the country five times over the past thirty years—the first time during the Cultural Revolution—and over the years, I have seen many changes and had the good fortune to speak to many people about them. In this essay, I want to reflect on some of those conversations as they relate to the Chinese economy and to broad questions about the future direction of labor in China and internationally.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that commonly held views about China today can be summed up as follows: (1) “China has seen the light,” (2) “China has sold out,” (3) “China has no choice,” (4) “None of this matters anyway.” At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I want to suggest that there is considerable truth in all of these arguments.

In 1978, after nearly three decades of a socialized economy, the Chinese government introduced a series of economic policies that began the process of moving China from a planned to a market economy, from domestic to export-oriented production, and from state to private—and increasingly foreign—ownership and control of economic enterprises. Think what you may about the nature of socialism in China prior to 1978, the decision to shift from an economy with virtually no private enterprise and no foreign investment to one driven by both, has had a dramatic impact on both China and the rest of the world.

In an open air amphitheater in New Delhi, India hundreds of delegates representing nearly a million workers from trade unions and other worker organizations launched the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), a formation of independent unions seeking to unite and build power for Indian workers. The delegates came from across India and around the globe—the air was warm and breezy, and the mood was exciting and fresh.

Jobs with Justice was one of the international organizations present at the founding conference in early March of this year. We had delegates from the national office as well as from Chicago JwJ. Jobs with Justice and the NTUI have been building an international collaboration for more than a year. It was exciting to be at the founding meeting of our key partner in Asia, along with our colleagues from other parts of the world.

To understand the significance of this event one has to understand the history of the Indian trade union movement. After all, India already has about half a dozen major trade union federations. Why does India need another federation of unions?

India used to have only one central trade union federation—the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), founded in 1928 through rank-and-file struggles. At the time of India’s independence from British colonialism in 1947, the ruling Congress Party formed its own trade union wing, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC). This began the tradition of union affiliation to political parties in India.
The INTUC emerged out of the Congress party leadership, and the then party leader Nehru said, “…the INTUC … derives its strength from the moral and other support of the Congress…it is imperative that in all political matters all Congressmen working in the INTUC should treat the Congress as its supreme body and abide by its code of conduct.” This period set the tone for the dominance of political parties in the Indian labor movement. After independence, the Indian government of the newly independent nation-state took a proactive role in shaping the voice of labor in the interest of a nationalist economic policy that promoted state-based planning and import substitution. The government believed that labor disputes should be resolved and industrial peace maintained in the interest of the country’s economic progress. So, the ruling government was centrally involved in resolving labor disputes at the industry level through unions under the INTUC (of the Congress Party) and AITUC (of the Communist Party of India, CPI).

During this time, jobs grew as the government supported the growth of domestic industries. Bargaining for wages and other working conditions was centralized. Since the Congress party controlled the INTUC, forming unions and controlling the bargaining process was not a problem.

In the following two decades after independence, due to competing interests and frustrations among the working class, the CPI no longer remained the only Left party. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI-M was formed and it gave rise to the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in 1970. Several other central trade unions emerged. The Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) had already emerged in the socialist tradition. The Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also formed its trade union wing called Bharatiya Mazdoor Sabha (BMS). The trade union movement began to reflect the party splits and their respective ideological rigidities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, two phenomena had deep consequences for the Indian labor movement. One was the rise of independent unions at the local workplace level in the private sector. This phenomenon started with the split of the AITUC and the formation of the CITU. The independent unions practiced workplace level collective bargaining and industrial level collective action without affiliating with politically controlled central federations. They believed that political parties and their unions did not represent workers’ interests adequately. Gradually, they grew to be 30 percent of the organized workforce.

The second phenomenon was the ushering in of neoliberal economic reforms in 1991, especially under the prime ministership of Rajiv Gandhi of the Congress Party. The Indian government began to withdraw support for labor, and began to aggressively open up the Indian economy according to the dictates of global capital. There were loud cries for labor flexibility, an euphemism for labor deregulation. The public sector began to shrink, employers could fire workers and declare closures more easily, and contract workers could replace permanent workers. Unions faced tremendous pressures to increase productivity which in turn reduced job growth.

With the government’s gradual withdrawal from the interests of labor, traditional trade unions that had relied on political support began to face new crises. Privatization, contract labor, anti-unionism, growth of multinationals, and overall changes in employment structure and management practices threw open a whole set of new problems for the Indian workers and their unions.

On August 3, 2006, twenty-five years will have passed since one of the best known, most costly, and most consequential labor action of modern times. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) led four out of five of the nation’s air traffic controllers (ATC) on a disastrous strike against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Four days later 11,345 strikers were victimized by the largest mass firing (and longest ban against re-employment) in federal employment history. A few months later, PATCO became the first federal union ever to be destroyed by a court-ordered decertification. Employers felt emboldened as never before to replace strikers with strikebreakers, and tell replacement workers they were permanent new employees. The alleged solidarity of the labor movement was exposed as uneven at best, and fraudulent at worst (calls for a general strike to back up the controllers went nowhere, and unionized pilots and machinists—support of either of which could have guaranteed a PATCO win—crossed the picket line). Labor lost very heavily in public regard, and was pilloried for long after in the media. Congressmen to whom PATCO president Bob Poli had sworn the union would not strike were outraged, and anti-labor bills were taken off the shelf for (short-lived) consideration. Not surprisingly, then, this 1981 strike remains a watershed event in American labor history.

Organized labor must learn constructive lessons from the PATCO debacle. The strike was over two years in preparation—on both sides—as the union had engaged in six job actions since its 1968 founding. So it was no stranger to the process. Having spent nearly two years (1980-81) as the union’s part-time survey researcher, I observed first hand the remarkable efforts entailed in strike preparation. Three major lessons emerge from that experience, all of which are timely, especially given ongoing efforts by the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and various international unions to help reinvigorate the labor movement. Given recent federal interventions in strikes, as in the case of the ILWU longshoremen's strike, the PATCO experience warrants careful review.

Given the high emotions, nervous energy, and wishful thinking that accompanies gearing up for a possible strike, the temptation is very strong to think those on the other side of the bargaining table are so well-known you can readily anticipate and thereby effectively counter their every likely move. As this assumption is critical, it must be based on an adversary analysis—exacting and imaginative research into what motivates those on the other side of the bargaining table (and their key allies, such as board members, friends in the media, and allies in the Legislature). PATCO failed to do this. Instead, the leadership relied on a superficial “read” of their key likely opponents, the new president of the country (Ronald Reagan), and the new (and notoriously anti-labor) administrator of the FAA, J. Lynn Helms. PATCO's officers focused especially on the president, and they made much of the fact that in 1980, union president Bob Poli had met privately with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. In return for PATCO’s election endorsement, Poli had secured a letter pledging Reagan’s support to “bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers.” As well, private letters between Poli and the Reagan Election Committee (later made public by a boastful PATCO, albeit not signed by Reagan) promised to allow the controllers to strike in certain unspecified circumstances, and to replace the current FAA head with someone “competent.” As many controllers were young Republican-voting veterans of the military, PATCO's endorsement of Ronald Reagan was a popular one.

Overlooked however, in PATCO’s rush to think Reagan an ally were many clues to the contrary. Had an in-depth adversary analysis been carefully prepared, PATCO could have learned Reagan had been a very reluctant member of the Screen Actors Guild (he always opposed the union shop concept of mandatory membership).

Real political power is about more than electing good people. Corporate elites govern because they define issues the public debates, frame policy solutions, and lend support to sympathetic government actions. Recognizing this, a growing grassroots mobilization of labor and community leaders has begun to put together long-term strategies to build the capacity of progressives to govern.

By the 1950s, “big C” Conservatives faced a situation loosely analogous to that confronting labor today. Not only was their party no longer the party of national power, but when individual Republicans won office they all too often stuck within the New Deal’s framework. In seeking to transform their party and the nation, conservatives drew from the grassroots techniques pioneered by the left. Several elements of their success point toward progressive strategies for transforming the Democratic Party and the nation’s politics:

To this we can add Thomas Franks’ insight that by denouncing an all-pervasive “liberal elite” the New Right tapped into the very class-oriented, anti-elite frustrations of working people that one hundred years ago provided the basis of powerful left-wing movements. Right-wing strength is thus also a reflection of Democratic Party and liberal weakness on class issues.

Obviously, the New Right has important differences from a resurgent progressive movement. As an elite effort it enjoys large-scale corporate funding, access to right-wing media, and early opportunities to join in governing through the nation’s virulent anticommunist and imperialist foreign policy. Yet, labor and its allies enjoy the unique advantage of pushing a democratic agenda that reflects the interests of the vast majority.

Regional power building strategies first emerged in California, far from the halls of national union power. Out of the economic contradictions of the “new” globalized economy—growing inequality, contingent work, and mass immigration—several key unions, such as SEIU and HERE, developed aggressive organizing efforts. Labor leaders first in San Jose and Los Angeles and then elsewhere in the state began to experiment with new strategies for transforming their region’s political economy. At a general level, these experiences share three core elements:

Central labor councils have sought and gained more authority and resources to coordinate and manage regional electoral mobilizations. For the 2001 Los Angeles mayoral race, for example, the LA Federation mobilized 2,700 volunteers, while the labor-Latino mobilization effort (Organization of Los Angeles Workers) fielded one-hundred-and-fifty full-time precinct walkers six weeks before the election. At the same time, a labor-black-Latino alliance, ALLERT, ran an elaborate precinct system to contact tens of thousands of residents in South LA. Such mobilizations have produced progressive-leaning legislative majorities not simply in Los Angeles and San Jose, but also in conservative communities such as San Diego.

These aggressive political programs also cultivate progressive champions, even when this has meant challenging moderates within the Democratic Party, such as when the LA County Federation backed minimum wage champion Hilda Solis against centrist Congressional incumbent Marty Martinez in 2001.

The explosion of political activity by immigrant workers in April and May 2006 seemed, to many observers, to come out of nowhere. But of course these immigrant rights marches have a history. Community organizations, unions, and political organizations worked for months leading up to the demonstrations, helping to ensure that they were as successful as possible. And many of these organizations have excellent resources available online.

The national debate over immigration in recent years has been framed by the treatment of immigrants as potential terrorists. But there is an underlying political economy to the backlash against immigrants of the past few years: in an economy in which working-class people are struggling to stay afloat, immigrants are an easy scapegoat. The debate over immigration also reveals widespread anxiety over the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world—on the one hand, the sunny bromides of globalization, on the other, the barbed wire on our own borders.

To get a sense of the truth about immigration, it’s helpful to look at some of the rich statistical sources available online. The Census Department, for example, makes statistics about international migration and its effect on the American population available online at its website at http://www.census.gov/popest/international.html. But the Census site, not surprisingly, focuses on legal immigration. One of the best online resources for information about undocumented immigrants is the Pew Hispanic Center. The Center estimates that the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States is about 11.5 to 12 million, and that about two-thirds of this population—of which nearly half is male, 35 percent is female, and the remainder are children—have been in the United States for more than ten years. Of these, 7.2 million are employed, accounting for nearly 5 percent of the American labor force—and making up a quarter of the labor force in agriculture, 17 percent in cleaning, 14 percent in construction and 12 percent in food production. The Center also has data on the modes of entry, family composition, and a state-by-state breakdown of undocumented immigrants. The site can be found at http://pewhispanic.org/. (The Pew Hispanic Center website also contains extensive information about the overall Latino population in the United States.)

Another terrific site for exploding myths and getting real information about immigration is the National Immigration Forum. The NIF, founded in 1982, is one of the oldest immigrant rights organizations. With a board of directors that includes representatives of UNITE-HERE and the National Restaurant Association, the organization seeks to develop broad-based positions on immigration, and to advocate for “immigration in the national interest.” The group’s website (http://www.immigrationforum.org) offers a wealth of data, studies, and resources on almost every aspect of the immigration debate—the economic benefits of immigration, the fact that most undocumented workers pay taxes yet rarely access public benefits (popular images of immigrant welfare queens to the contrary), the plight of immigrant children who excel in school yet cannot attend college because they are undocumented. Nor is the site only for policy wonks—there’s a section specifically on community organizations, an activist-oriented guide giving advice to immigrants who have been fired for participating in the recent demonstrations, and a breakdown of anti-immigrant organizations and their scary politics.

One especially insightful report at the NIF website deals with the failure and irrationality of enforcement-only immigration policies. In the years since 1990, spending on border patrols increased tenfold, yet this has not ended immigration (about nine million undocumented workers have been added to the American population since 1990). Undocumented immigrants make up about 5 percent of the total labor force, concentrated in particular economic sectors—for example, one quarter or more of the nation’s meat and poultry processing plant workers are undocumented immigrants. And precisely because crossing the border is so dangerous, undocumented workers coming to the United States are less likely to return home.

Two more excellent online resources on immigrant rights are the websites of the National Immigration Law Center and the Immigrant Solidarity Network. The NILC is an organization devoted to dealing with the legal problems of low-income immigrants and their families. In addition to providing useful legal information, the website contains a variety of “talking-points” packets for community and union organizers, developed by NILC with input from organizers, on issues such as the “no-match” letters that the Social Security Administration sends when they receive information from an employer for a worker for whom there is no matching social security number. These letters naturally cause panic among workers; the information packets help organizers respond. The site also contains basic pointers for union organizers working with immigrants, dealing with immigration enforcement during labor disputes, and a media guide for immigrant activists working with the press. Check it out at http://www.nilc.org. The Immigrant Solidarity Network (http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org), a coalition of community, labor, student, and political organizations, provides up-to-date information about demonstrations, protests, and other political activity oriented around immigrant rights. At the website—whose headline is a Martin Luther King, Jr., quote: “Never forget that everything Hitler did was legal”—readers can sign up to receive briefings about demonstrations. Had you heard, for example, of the thousands of people who marched in Nashville, Tennessee on March 30th?

Finally, the website of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York provides an example of a political organizing project among workers who are frequently immigrants. Although it’s a local organization, people across the country might want to emulate its example, which combines grassroots activism with sharp research and analysis. The ROC was formed in the wake of September 11th, when 73 Windows on the World workers—almost all immigrants—died, while 300 more lost their jobs. Initially, the ROC acted as a support organization for these workers. But it evolved over time into a group fighting for immigrant workers’ rights in restaurants across New York City, through a combination of legal and corporate campaigns, and has also opened a cooperatively owned restaurant. On the website, readers can download copies of ROC-NY’s research reports—on topics like the correlation between labor and safety violations in the restaurant industry—and also read about the organization’s ongoing campaigns. Check it out at http://www.rocny.org.

When Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to violations of federal lobbying law, the scandal shone a light on one of the darker corners of the American political scene. While Abramoff breached the limits of legality, thousands of corporations and their lobbying representatives seek to do essentially what he promised—to use their dollars to shape our nation. And despite the fairly massive political donations of labor—AFSCME, which has donated over $30 million to national political parties and candidates in federal elections since 1990, is the single largest political donor in the nation, and other unions like SEIU and the Teamsters are also in the top ten of donors—the overall money game is one that unions really can’t hope to win. Even though unions gave over $61 million to political candidates in 2004, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector donated more than $300 million, the health industry over $123 million, and agribusiness over $52 million.

The Internet makes it possible for union researchers to find information about political donations. The website OpenSecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics, provides a wealth of information about the financing of campaigns. The website centers on a feature which allows you to search Federal Election Commission data in a variety of different ways. For example, you can enter an industry and see how much money it has historically donated to Democrats and Republicans. Oil and gas companies, for example, donated more than $25,600,000 in the 2004 election cycle, of which 80 percent went to Republicans and 20 percent to Democrats. You can break it down still further, looking at which companies are the most important donors in the industry—in oil and gas, Koch Industries leads the gang, with Exxon Mobil coming in second, and Chevron Corporation third. Then you can break it down to see which politicians benefited most from this largesse (Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas won this race, with Tom DeLay coming in second and Richard Santorum third). Might this political windfall have something to do with the Bush Administration’s reluctance to impose a windfall profits tax on the energy producers, or the Republican enthusiasm for opening the Arctic to oil drills?

The Democrats, of course, take plenty of corporate money as well. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, has collected more than $3.8 million from the fire sector already for her reelection campaign this year, over $1.6 million from the communications and electronics industry, nearly $2 million from miscellaneous businesses—and over $335,000 from labor. Overall, about 40 percent of business donations go to the Democrats in industries like fire and health, and the Dems get more than half of all the money coming from casinos.

Other features on the site include a database that you can search with the names of individual contributors (for example, if you want to see just how much your boss or your employer is giving away); brief descriptions of the basics of campaign finance law; and an excellent although somewhat longer report on the largest donors in American politics, and what exactly it is that they are buying. Check out the site at http://www.opensecrets.org.

This column is adapted from World Wide Work, written by Matt Witt and published eight times a year by the American Labor Education Center, an independent nonprofit that operates www.TheWorkSite.org, a free website that provides downloadable tools and tips for educators and activists.

Mike Davis is one disturbed individual. And trade unionists with the stomach to read Planet of Slums will quickly discover why. This is more than a book about how the other half lives; it’s really about how the other half largely fails to really live at all. Davis shows how Victorian-era squalor compares favorably to the living conditions endured by up to a billion people who inhabit the earth’s 200,000 slums. While most slums are today in the global South, the fastest growing slums are to be found in the “transition” countries like those of the former Soviet Union. Close to 12 million people in Mumbai live in slum conditions, and by 2015 Delhi will have 10 million of its own. China’s slum population is exploding, as is the case with sub-Saharan Africa. If present trends continue, by 2020 half of the urban population of the world will be slum dwellers.

Davis’ book, however, is more than a collection of jaw-dropping numbers. His overall analysis, dour though it is, is important for today’s labor movement. For many trade unionists, the concerns created by globalization rarely go beyond the “race to the bottom” checklist: workers’ rights (the lack of), Walmartization, offshoring of knowledge work, and, of course, sweatshops. The pro-market defenders of the present order maintain that all this adds up to economic growth, and, over time, prosperity and progress. So what’s wrong with a bit of sacrifice along the way? Planet of Slums offers an indictment of the present system that is perhaps more graphic and powerful than even the worst accounts of labor exploitation. It provides a picture of human distress that will stretch the imagination of the most seasoned union activists. A tough read, for sure—but one that should fan the flames of our indignation in new and perhaps productive ways.

In its opening chapters Planet of Slums documents the growth of urban existence over recent decades, illustrated by the fact that cities like Kinshasa, Dhaka, and Lagos are today forty times larger than they were in 1950. Burgeoning new megacities of eight million or more residents and the hypercities of twenty million plus residents are only part of the story, however. Perhaps more significant has been the even faster growth of large towns or second-tier cities which have proliferated in scores of countries. In China the truly mind-boggling pace of urbanization has created 166 more or less new million-plus cities since 1978. A rural exodus is transforming the face of the planet.

“If the Workers Took a Notion”: The Right to Strike and American Political Development

During the 1970s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded nearly 300 major work stoppages per year. By the 1990s, the number of major strikes had fallen to 35 per year, despite a far larger workforce. In 2003 it reached 14. Using such measures as the total number of work stoppages, the number of workers involved, or the working time idle from strikes, the strike rate has decreased somewhere between 60 percent and 90 percent in the last three decades (p.2) .

This unprecedented decline is not explained by a general pattern of “American exceptionalism”: between 1946 and 1976 the United States was third among eighteen Western countries in strike activity (p.3). Nor is it explained through globalization or other historic changes affecting the industrialized world as a whole: strikes have remained a vibrant vehicle for social struggles in many countries, as exemplified by the recent mass strikes in France. Nor is it explained by the normal variation of strikes with economic cycles: the change has now persisted through repeated cycles. Nor is it the result of the decline in “union density”: the strike rate for unionized workers has fallen comparably. (4)

In If the Workers Took a Notion, Josiah Bartlett Lambert revisits the history of the right to strike to gain a new perspective on this situation. While strikes are most often the province of labor historians and economists, Lambert is a political scientist with a strong historical interest but a focus on political development. He finds the principal cause of the falling rate of strikes in the erosion of the right to strike, exemplified by the use of permanent replacement workers. He attributes this to labor law’s historic decision to treat the right to strike as a commercial matter, rather than as a question of fundamental constitutional rights. He proposes to draw on the traditions of 18th and 19th century “labor republicanism” to reground the right to strike in the Constitution’s 13th Amendment—the “Free Labor Amendment” that bans “involuntary servitude.”

The conventional story of the right to strike in the United States—tracing to the work of John R. Commons and his associates—holds that from colonial times through much of the 19th century, strikes were banned as common law conspiracies. Judges gradually renounced the conspiracy doctrine, and established the right to strike, a great advance in labor and human rights. Labor has by and large accepted the remaining limitations on that right.

During the winter of 2005 movie theaters were hit with a spate of explicitly political films, a genre usually as rare in Hollywood as agents without cell phones." These films— Syriana, The Constant Gardener, and Why We Fight, a documentary about the military-industrial complex—shared two characteristics: they were highly critical of both American foreign policy and corporate globalization and they took audiences beyond revelations of corruption or conspiracy to careful analyses of the modus operandi of our political and economic institutions. They eschewed the populism and implicit incitement to protest of Michael Moore’s films, for something potentially more important: an intricate understanding of the global system that dominates and simultaneously destroys our world.

Syriana is a highly serious film that could well be used as the central text for a graduate seminar. Indeed, the conventional criticism of Syriana is that it is “too complicated,” meaning that its story line is unclear, there are too many subplots and details, and the movie’s ideas and development are too intricate and aimed at too sophisticated an audience to be considered “entertainment.” Not that Syriana is “arty,” but rather, it is weighty and educative. From it we learn a great deal about the geopolitics of oil, about the rivalry between nations, about the coincidental collusion between corporations and governments which, while acting based on relatively autonomous motives, nonetheless cooperate in targeting and subsequently eliminating danger spots and individuals who threaten American economic and political hegemony.

The plot of Syriana revolves around the competition between a Chinese oil company and an American corporation, Connex-Killen, for extraction rights in an unnamed Emirate. There are innumerable subplots: a covert CIA operative is investigated for his role in an explosion in Iran; an unemployed Arab boy becomes a suicide bomber; an African-American corporate lawyer is told by his sinister boss to “look into” corruption at Connex-Killen; an Assistant Attorney-General at Justice seeks a pigeon at Connex-Killen who can be charged with illicitly securing oil rights in Kazakhstan; the young son of a hedge fund manager is accidentally killed at one of the Emir’s parties and the manager subsequently becomes advisor to the Emir’s eldest son, a prince who wants to reform his backward country and end its dependence on oil. At the end of the movie the suicide bomber finds his mark and may undo the best laid plans of global corporations in collusion with government. But, by this time, all the good guys have been vanquished or killed (the CIA operative, hedge fund manager, reformist prince), and the bad guys — conspirators all — seize the day.

In 2000, Al Gore based his presidential campaign in Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Music Row (a street that is to country music labels what K Street is to corporate lobbyists). When Gore’s campaign decided to invite a major musical act to warm up the crowd for a Nashville rally headlined by Gore and his newly chosen running mate, Joe Lieberman, the obvious choice was a country musician. Instead, the campaign picked Jewel, a decidedly untwangy singer-songwriter. A Gore spokeswoman lamely defended the choice of a noncountry artist as an effort to “appeal to a young crowd”— never mind that by 2000 it had been several years since Jewel’s last major hit.

In Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music, music critic Chris Willman recounts the Jewel rally in Nashville as a typical example of how liberal-left politicians miss opportunities to connect to working-class country music fans. And to preempt claims that country fans are too conservative to consider voting Democratic, he draws a portrait of a music genre that is less rigidly conservative than people on both sides of the political spectrum might assume.

There are, of course, many conservative Republican country music fans, as the huge success of Toby Keith and Daryl Worley’s swaggering pro-Bush anthems makes clear. But country music is much more than oversimplified flag-waving. At its best, country’s straightforward willingness to face up to the issues of work, family, infidelity, and heartbreak can give it a more mature voice than its rock cousin. As Willman points out, Alan Jackson’s stunning “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” spoke to America’s national grief after 9/11 far better than underwhelming songs recorded immediately after the attacks by rock legends Paul McCartney and Neil Young.

Virtually every Oscar pundit has noted that 2005 was a year of serious political, or politically inflected, films. Among the obvious were Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Munich, and Paradise Now. Less obvious but no less provocative were Brokeback Mountain, the first Hollywood film I know of to deal explicitly and fully with a homosexual relationship in a profoundly homophobic time and place; and Capote, a film that explores the line between exploitation and artistic license in literary journalism. Then there was North Country, an overtly political film about sexual harassment in the workplace. Despite plenty of advance publicity and a great cast, including Charlize Theron, Sissy Spacek, and Frances McDormand, it came and went in a matter of weeks—at least in New York, where I live. Though Theron and McDormand were nominated for Academy Awards, the film itself barely figured in the pre-Oscar blab about the “political-ness” of 2005.

The screenplay for North Country is based on Class Action: The Story of Lois Jensen and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. Despite its dreary title, the book is written in a novelistic style, blending personal stories with legal history. It recounts the ordeal of Lois Jensen, who was among the first women hired to work in Minnesota’s iron mines in 1975. In 1984, after enduring nearly a decade of humiliating abuse at the Eveleth Mines, Jensen and fourteen of her co-workers filed (and eventually won) the first ever class action sexual harassment suit in the United States. In North Country, the character of Josey Aimes—played by Charlize Theron—is inspired by Jensen.

Translated to film in a fictionalized account, the Lois Jensen story has all the ear-marks of a stirring working-class drama. Inevitably, it has been compared to Norma Rae, Silkwood, and Erin Brockovich, three films about courageous working-class women who decide to fight the bosses for a measure of justice in the workplace and the community. These earlier films, all also based on real events, were quite successful and continue to have a following. North Country, on the other hand, was a flop in any commercial or critical sense. Were the first three better movies? Maybe so. At least they avoided the flights of melodrama that weigh North Country down.

Nevertheless, I was profoundly moved by North Country and felt that it got a raw deal. So, I decided to read as many reviews of it as I could. The Internet yielded more than 150 on just one site (www.rottentomatoes.com). Geographically diverse, the reviews on this site ran the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow, including such venerable publications as The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as online zines and blogs such as Movie Eye, Scene-Stealers.Com, and Hollywood Reporter.Com. Of the reviews I read, about half were good or fair; half were bad to bruising. The majority of reviewers were men. Of those, a large number simply couldn’t come to terms with the harsh realities of sexism and misogyny.

You won’t find many songs like “Brother on the Line” on the pop music charts. You won’t find many Grammy winners who say things like, “Most people don’t know what the pioneers of the labor movement did for this country.” But Dave Alvin is not your typical pop star, or your average Grammy winner.

As a guitarist steeped in the deepest traditions of American music, from folk, blues and country, to rockabilly and R&B, Alvin has the musical chops to keep up with anyone on stage. But what sets him above and beyond most of his peers is his storytelling, which comes from learning about class and labor issues from about the time he could walk.

“My old man was an organizer for the steel workers,” he says in his rich, warm baritone, “which in the west was steel mills in Maywood, and Fontana and South Gate (California), and then copper mines and coal mines in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. He was involved in all the great copper strikes in southern Arizona. Sometimes our family vacation was going with him on his organizing trips. He’d throw my brother Phil and me in the car and we’d spend the summer going from mining town to Indian reservation to mining town. I saw things as a five-year-old that most five-year-olds don’t see, or don’t even have a concept of.”

Alvin tells the story of driving with his dad into Red Cloud, Colorado, on a one-lane dirt road into a canyon to hold a secret union meeting, because they had to hide in a company town. “Seeing things like that, you learn that there’s more than one side to every story, and that’s what I’m going for. What’s the side that you’re not hearing?” he says.

For a while, it looked like Lou Dobbs was a friend of labor. Who else but an ally of the working class would start a 2004 jeremiad against the exportation of American jobs overseas with the following: “The power of big business over our national life has never been greater. Never have there been fewer business leaders willing to commit to the national interest over selfish interest, to the good of the country over that of the companies they lead.”[i ]

Dobbs is indeed an articulate critic of the most egregious practices of U.S.-based multinational corporations. He speaks often about how business executives and their cronies in both political parties are destroying the “American middle class.” He regularly condemns the “so-called free trade” orthodoxy, the high salaries of CEOs, tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare, and the destruction of good-paying jobs. Every once in a while he even laments the decline of labor unions. And he does it on national (cable) television.

Lately, however, Dobbs has blended his anticorporate rhetoric with a repugnant nativism. Now, undocumented immigrants are a threat to the American middle class equal in magnitude to corporations. The equation is revealing, for it exposes much about the wellspring of Dobbs’s ideas. He is an American nationalist, fighting for the good of the country against enemies without and within. He sees the world as divided horizontally into nations, not vertically into classes. That is why he is a fickle friend of labor.

Dobbs’s main vehicle is “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” an hour-long, early evening television show of “news, debate, and opinion.” The show’s format combines the CBS Evening News, the O’Reilly Factor, and the McLaughlin Report, with Dobbs playing anchor, host, and opinionated moderator, sometimes all at once. The bulk of the show comprises news segments reported by regular correspondents. Dobbs editorializes on the news before and after each segment. He also opines at length during the show’s frequent panel discussions and one-on-one interviews.

Unlike Bill O’Reilly, Dobbs never rants and raves or insults his guests. He remains calm, often self-deprecating, and respectful. He tries to marshal facts to support his arguments, but makes no pretense of being objective. “The fact is that I am passionate about issues such as the outsourcing of jobs, the high cost of free trade, immigration, the failure of government to represent working men and women and our middle class,” he told an interviewer. “I’m very sorry to whichever partisan extreme is concerned, but my job is to report an independent, nonpartisan reality, and that’s what we do.”[ii ] Dobbs is nonpartisan only in the sense that he critiques both Republicans and Democrats (though he almost always favors Republicans). Otherwise, he is a partisan for his point of view, which he insists, based only on the fact that he gets fan mail, stands for the majority of Americans.