Fall/Winter 1998 Issue

Table of Contents

6

From the Editorial Team
 

9

Class Conflict in the Classroom: Privatization and the Democratic Right to a Public Education
Norm Fruchter, guest editor

11

American Public Education: Crisis and Possibility
by Norm Fruchter
Free-marketeers are ferociously attacking a bedrock institution of our society. How do we defend our public schools?

19

The Midnight Hour: A Progressive Strategy for School Reform
by Noreen Connell
School reform is doomed unless we confront head-on the issues of race and inequality.

27

Teachers Unions on the Brink: The Merger that Wasn't and the Future of Educational Reform
by Ann Bastian
The surprising vote against the merger of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association spotlights basic questions about whether teachers' unions can enlarge their missions and defend public schools.

35

Educational Reform and the Merger that Wasn't: An Alternative View
by Tom Mooney
Bastian uses faulty logic characterizing the American Federation of Teachers as less democratic than the National Education Association. For both unions, emphazizing professionalism is key to mobilizing the membership and affecting educational reform.
.

41

Unions and Democracy
Gregory Mantsios, guest editor

43

Black Caucuses in Steel
by Ruth Needleman
Building independent organizations within unions is essential to securing true minority representation, avoiding tokenism, and achieving equal access to employment opportunities. It is also key to increasing accountability and democracy for the rank-and-file as a whole.

59

Appealing for Democracy
by Mike Parker
The right of members to challenge the actions of officers is an important part of achieving and maintaining union democracy. The idea of impartial watchdogs, internal or governmental, is attractive.  But whether or not these actually aid democratic reform is ultimately the function of organized rank-and-file activity.

76

Is Democracy Good for Unions?
by Steve Fraser
It's all too easy to assume that increasing democracy will lead to greater gains for workers. Justice and reform don't always come from the bottom up. (Reprinted from Dissent magazine.).

84

Democracy is Key
by Stanley Aronowitz
Intense debate and conflict are signs of a healthy labor movement. US unions must work themselves out of the prevailing system of labor relations if democracy within them is to flourish. Some European unions, which function like competitive political parties, demonstrate how unions can become more democratic..
 

96

Organizing is a Civil Right
Joshua Freeman, guest editor

99

Elections Without Democracy
by Craig Becker
The electoral framework of the National Labor Relations Act is critically flawed. Fundamental labor law reform is needed to reverse labor's decline, and that will require rethinking the multiple roles of unions in the American political economy.

112

Communities at Work: How New Alliances are Restoring our Right to Organize
by Linda Chavez-Thompson
Organized labor must take steps toward restoring the right to organize by breaking with past practices. Unions need to make injustice at the workplace visible and build alliances that will enable them to get the community involved in organizing.

120

The Case for Card Check Campaigns
by Dorothee Benz
Organizing through card check agreements was once limited to exceptional cases with unusual leverage opportunities. Not any more. As employers routinely break the law to stop union drives, card check strategies are attracting new attention from organizers fed up with the futility of labor law protection.

131

A Question of Rights
by David Brody
Why is it that employers get away with murder when it comes to labor law? A reading of history provides us with a key to action: separate labor's core right—the right to organize—from the bundle of weaker rights in the law, and defend it vigorously.

141

Knocking at Labor's Door: Workfare Workers Organize
by Vanessa Tait
Thousands of welfare recipients who have been forced into mandatory workfare programs across the country have begun creating new and militant organizations to advocate for their rights as workers. Workfare presents a challenge as well as an opportunity for AFL-CIO unions: how are they responding?
 

153

Books and the Arts
Gerald Hudson, editor

153

Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor,
by Peter Kwong
reviewed by Mai Ngai

159

Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America,
 by Winston James
reviewed by Jeffrey Perry

163

The Quiet Sickness: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America, by Earl Dotter
reviewed by Matt Witt

166

Bulworth , produced and directed by Warren Beatty
reviewed by Herb Boyd
 

169

Letters
 

176

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