|
Labor Day has come and gone again, this time a year after the
formation of a new, alternative labor federation, “Change to Win,”
established to reverse labor’s decades-long decline. Looking for signs
of labor’s turnaround this early out may be premature, yet people
concerned about the conditions and voices of workers in our society can
hardly be blamed for reading the tea leaves. In spite of some notable
victories in the past year—among them 8,000 janitors in Houston and
18,000 Cingular Wireless workers nationally—new organizing did not keep
pace with the outsourcing of union jobs and creation of new non-union
jobs.
At this early stage the question is: are there hopeful signs? Whether
unions and their allies will find a way to open Wal-Mart up to
large-scale organizing remains to be seen. Organized labor,
environmental, and civic groups have managed to push the behemoth into
defensive mode, creating its own war room and hiring Andrew Young to
stem the tide of public challenges to the corporation. On the other
hand, an ominous threat to labor, as we go to press, is the Bush
administration’s effort to get the National Labor Relations board to
redefine what constitutes a “supervisor,” enabling it to deny
representation to roughly a third of currently unionized workers, and
barring thousands of potential future members from unionization. This
would be a devastating blow. Good news came last spring with the biggest
national uprising of workers in recent decades, the massive immigrant
protests. That these protests were organized, with a few local
exceptions, largely outside the house of labor is cause for concern and
also surprising, given labor’s spearheading of the hugely successful
Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003.
In the next few years, one of the surest gauges of U.S. labor’s
prospects will be whether it manages to recruit large numbers of workers
in the sunbelt, the country’s fastest growing region. This is a tall
hurdle to jump, given the South’s political conservatism, right-to-work
laws, and collective bargaining restrictions for public sector workers.
The Service Employees International Union, founder of the Change to Win
federation, is staking its reputation on surmounting these challenges.
In this issue, Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of SEIU,
describes his union’s ambitious southern organizing strategy. Not unlike
other unions organizing in the sunbelt, SEIU appears to rely on
initiating this work in the public sector, free as it is from the
clutches of the multibillion dollar union avoidance industry. We also
publish an essay by Will Jones examining the CIO’s failed Operation
Dixie and its aftermath, as a way of exploring obstacles to southern
organizing since World War II. Jones suggests that, having been stymied
by the historic reluctance of white southern workers to take up the
union cause, unions appear to have opted, in recent decades, to organize
workplaces with majorities of workers of color, and increasingly service
and public sector workers. The long-term implications of such a strategy
are worth contemplating.
In more heavily unionized northern cities, labor finds itself fighting
defensive battles, often against employer efforts to shake loose of
pension and health care commitments by pitting more senior workers
against new hires. Such were the conditions the Transit Workers Union,
Local 100, chose to confront in the New York City transit strike of
2005, examined in this issue by Joshua Freeman. That the Metropolitan
Transit Authority felt emboldened to demand a two-tier system for
pension and health benefits, even as they recorded a large surplus
budget in a city with a prospering economy, shows the power elite’s
determination to defeat a last remaining bastion of public sector
resistance in the Big Apple. The TWU’s decision to strike was a bold
move in a period of that weapon’s decline, which began dramatically in
1981 with the colossal defeat of the PATCO strike. On the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the air traffic controller’s strike, we have invited
Arthur Shostak to assess the impact of that watershed moment in labor
history and draw lessons from it for future strikes.
With the diminishing use of the strike, unions have sought other forms
of leverage. Politics has become an important arena for bolstering
labor’s power to organize, negotiate decent contracts, and improve
workers’ living standards. In an essay that analyzes recent successful
community-labor attempts at transforming local governments, David
Reynolds and Barbara Byrd extract lessons from these victories in the
interest of multiplying them.
Increasingly, labor’s fate is tied up with global economic trends and
its ability to exert a counterweight against neoliberalism. The World Social Forum
has served as the premier gathering for a broad assortment of
organizations that share that goal, with U.S. labor a marginal player.
Here, John Hammond examines conflicting trends among the participating
organizations, some calling for concerted political action to confront
national governments, and others insisting the forum remain an arena for
dialogue.
China and India, both centers of gravity for global markets, will prove
central to international efforts to combat global neoliberalism. In this
issue, we take a look at both these countries. Gregory Mantsios examines
differing perspectives within Chinese society regarding that
government’s engagement with capitalism. He offers evidence that China’s
engagement with global markets has brought both significant improvement
in living standards as well as growing inequality. Acknowledging the
many criticisms leveled at the Chinese labor federation, he nonetheless
argues it has played and continues to play an important role in making
China a more equitable and democratic society. Recognizing that this
issue is a contested one, the editors will invite a response to Mantsios
in a subsequent issue. In contrast to China’s restrictions on
independent labor organizations, India hosts a plethora of labor
federations. This would seem to make the formation of a new federation
less than newsworthy. Yet, according to Anannya Bhattacharjee and Fred
Azcarate, the formation of India’s New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), is
cause for celebration because, unlike the other federations, it is not
beholden to any political party, and is dedicated to organizing the
dalits or “untouchables,” as well as women and workers in the burgeoning
informal sector.
In an effort to inform discussion on the nature, impact and policy
options regarding U.S. immigration, this issue’s installment of Kim
Phillips-Fein’s column, Caught in the Web, offers useful internet
resources for a broad range of information on this subject. And this
issue’s Books and the Arts section inaugurates what will be a regular
column by Matt Witt, Out of the Limelight: Books and Films You May Have
Missed. The column will provide our readers with a brief synopsis of
selected current books and films neglected by mainstream media and of
likely interest to labor activists.
Book and film reviews in this issue extend our feature essays’
discussions of the nature of global neoliberalism, the strike weapon,
and the national immigration debate. Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, an
examination of neoliberal policy’s hand in creating and sustaining the
squalid poverty that brutalizes a majority of the world's increasingly
urban population, is reviewed here by Sean Sweeney. Wallace Katz
reflects on Syriana, Why We Fight and Constant Gardener, arguing that
these three recent films offer an intricate understanding of the global
system and its institutions—the national security state, the military
industrial complex and transnational corporations—that dominate and
simultaneously endanger our world. Jeremy Brecher reviews Josiah
Bartlett Lambert’s If the Workers Took a Notion: The Right to Strike and
American Political Development, an exploration of the decline of the
strike and the vulnerability of its grounding in the commerce clause of
the constitution, rather than in the Thirteenth Amendment. A central and
controversial figure in recent immigration policy debates is Lou Dobbs,
whose TV show, combining a complex admixture of anticorporate critique
and anti-immigrant vitriol, is made sense of here by Aaron Brenner.
Kitty Krupat assesses the critical reviews of the film North Country,
the cinematic depiction of a landmark sexual harassment suit, noting the
widespread failure of reviewers to accept the reality of sexual
harassment as portrayed in the film.
Political trends in country music, often viewed as a partial gauge of
working-class leanings, is the subject of Chris Willman’s Rednecks and
Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music, reviewed by Carter Wright. And
Dave Saldana provides a critical appreciation of musician Dave Alvin’s
recent album, Son of a Union Man, containing intimate stories about
working people’s lives. We close with a selection of poems by two
southern writers: Natasha Trethewey, a young award-winning poet from
Mississippi, who contemplates the history of southern black women’s
work, and Kate Daniels of Virginia, who writes powerfully about growing
up white and poor in the south of the 1950s and ’60s. Finally, we
welcome Jeremy Brecher aboard as international contributing editor to
New Labor Forum.
 |
