Edited and with an introduction
Mills, Nicolaus
In the new television series "Sisters," one of the main characters spends most of his time around the house in his bathrobe. He is not sick. He is not crazy. He is unemployed. Years ago, we would...
...Indeed, the essays that follow here overflow with suggestions on what unions might do to cope with the changing American work force and economy...
...Hamper provides the perfect excuse for those (especially on the left) who suspect labor is a lost cause to abandon it...
...WINTER • 1992 • 31...
...It is no accident that the kind of worker who gets the most attention from the press is someone like Ben Hamper, the ex-auto worker, who in his best-selling Rivethead stories describes life on the assembly line as a hell in which neither management nor union officials do anything to relieve the agony...
...Years ago, we would have imagined Archie Bunker, not a suburbanite with a wife and a car and two children, in such a situation...
...But today none of the old rules apply, even on television...
...Yet never has it been more fashionable to criticize labor...
...If some of these problems can be solved with tougher strikes and better organizing, most cannot...
...Never in the last quarter century has labor so needed allies...
...Above all, they are men and women who by their long-term commitment to a job, a neighborhood, their child's school, have more at stake in the stability and competitiveness of the American economy than most corporate heads...
...Who these days finishes college and wants to be a labor reporter or a labor lawyer, let alone a labor organizer...
...The workers described in these pages are neither proletarian heroes nor hapless victims...
...They are more complex and diverse than that...
...To talk about work in the 1990s is to talk about worklessness and a labor force in which blue-collar and white-collar workers find themselves in constant peril—as likely to be fired because of a new computer as because of a steel plant in Korea...
...For them, it is a steady salary that will pay the bills, not a sudden takeover or a spectacular quarterly profit...
...This special issue of Dissent is not so politically correct that it avoids criticizing labor and its leaders...
...Among the young, this is especially true...
...But what characterizes these essays is the very opposite of the kind of "well-intentioned" criticism that would scapegoat labor for labor's problems...
...They require political solutions as momentous as those responsible for the New Deal of the 1930s...
...Underlying these essays is thus the larger assumption that the catastrophes—from deindustrialization to Reaganomics— that have befallen labor over the last twenty-five years are problems that engage us all...
...And they require a popular culture in which the need for such solutions is taken seriously...
...N.M...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
