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By the time you read this, the presidential election will have been decided. No one can know with any precision just what its results will mean for the labor movement. Nonetheless, we asked David Moberg to take a stab at that question. He did so, of course, without knowing who would win, and in fact, two months before the fateful day. What we were really after was not crystal-ball gazing, but rather some serious wrestling with perhaps the most portentous political development of the past twenty years. We are all increasingly aware of the growing anti-corporate mood in the country. Indeed, even publications like Business Week blazon the news on their front covers. Nothing quite like it has been seen for probably two political generations; even the New Left was more pre-occupied with government than with corporate trespassing on the rights and well-being of the people. The sources of today’s resistance to corporate overlordship are multiple, arising both here and abroad. The newly insurgent labor movement certainly must be counted as one of the major players. Moreover, its relationships with other elements of the embryonic anti-corporate coalition is of the greatest significance in trying to forecast the future. On the other hand, the official labor movement continues to be deeply entangled with the Democratic Party. And Al Gore’s flirtation with populist rhetoric notwithstanding, one prophecy it seems entirely safe to make is that the Democratic Party will remain bound by a thousand golden threads to Corporate America. Moberg’s article begins with those facts of life and then entertains a series of informed speculations on what it will take to turn the current anti-corporate mood into a sustained and efficacious political movement.
Following on Seattle, China turned out to be one hot-spot where the AFL-CIO’s alliance with the Democrats threatened to come unraveled. Even in the teeth of Al Gore’s support for the China trade bill, labor pulled out all the stops in trying to defeat
it . . . and failed. Was this a strategically wise campaign? That is the question thrashed out by Kent Wong and Elaine Bernard on the one side, who think it was a deeply ill-advised political undertaking, and by Mark Levinson and Thea Lee on the other side, who defend labor’s assault on the China bill as a vital response to the menace of globalized capitalism. New Labor Forum is dedicated to airing these kinds of important differences of policy and strategy within the family of labor. We invite our readers to join the debate.
If the anti-corporate coalition is to get off the ground, there is perhaps no more important issue than the labor movement’s relationship to immigrant workers. The domestic economy increasingly rests on the labor of immigrants, both documented and undocumented. Much of the vast population of the working poor consists of immigrants. Their presence here is a function of globalization, and it enables corporations to fuel the international sweatshop. The American labor movement has had a long-standing love-hate relationship with immigrant workers going way back into the nineteenth century. Recently, the AFL-CIO adopted a far more welcoming posture than characterized the pre-Sweeney era. But the question remains: what is to be done to bring them into the house of labor and how will these workers, many with extensive labor organizing and political experience in their home countries, transform the American labor movement. Hector Delgado tackles these issues and others in the first of what the editors in tend to be a continuing series of articles on the immigrant workforce.
It is only fitting, in the age of the global sweatshop, that labor should come front and center as a form punishment as well as super-exploitation. Nor is it any coincidence, argues Cynthia Young, that the conversion of prisoners into sweated workers should occur precisely as the jailed population swells to overflowing with African-American and Latino prisoners. For too long the labor movement has largely ignored this development. That’s becoming increasingly counter-productive, not to mention socially regressive, as the products pouring out of the nation’s prisons invade one sector of the economy after another.
One place these “made in jail” commodities are showing up is on our college campuses. In our last issue we published a cluster of articles on the corporatization of the university, of which the purchase of prison-made goods is one symptom. In this issue we present two responses to our cluster. One, by Kitty Krupat, is an “up-close-and-personal” account of her rather nerve wracking experience as a poll-watcher at the historic vote on unionization by the graduate students of New York University. The other, by Corey Robin and Julie Kushner, announces a new campaign to compel universities across the country to adopt codes of fair labor conduct that would protect the rights of university employees – both teaching and non-teaching – to form a union, to earn a living wage, to bargain collectively free of harassment and discrimination, and to rid campuses of the taint of prison labor.
Our Books and the Arts section begins with Dan Georgakas’ review of three films that each in its own way refracts dilemmas explored elsewhere in the issue. The Organizer, recently re-released, is a classic depiction of organizing in the coal mines of 1890s Italy, and of the relationship of the radical intellectual to an insurgent labor movement. The Cradle Will Rock is a view of New Deal era’s labor populism and the way it penetrated deep inside the cultural community. La Ciudad presents a series of portraits of Latino immigrants in New York and how they cope in their new and often harsh homeland. In addition, our book reviews take on a wide ranging series of books about organizing yesterday and today, as well as studies of the origins of consumer credit and the state of class consciousness (or the lack thereof) in contemporary America. The section concludes with three striking poems, one a dare to the border police issued by a Mexican woman crossing to the U.S., one a miner’s son’s memory of dirt, and, in the last poem, the son of a Black maid imagines talking to the daughter of his mother’s former white employer. And finally, last issue’s article by Bill Fletcher and Richard Hurd on the shortcomings of the current AFL-CIO national organizing program elicited a number of letters from our readers, including the two we publish here.
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