LETTERS
Editors: Richard Rothstein sets out a useful labor-law reform program (Dissent, Spring 1993) that would bring about noticeable improvements in the dire condition of labor. Nevertheless,...
...Labor law in Clinton's America will never amount to much, and socialism, market or otherwise, may not be around the corner...
...The setting is John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that created one of the most potent myths of modern revolutionary history...
...As America's youngest Menshevik (in my time), it was one of my sad duties to write the obituaries of my elders...
...As part of a recent lawsuit brought by Bronx Legal Services, a social worker stated in a sworn deposition, "I have recently been advised by a foster care agency caseworker that her facility had imposed a three-month moratorium on discharges, because it was not receiving sufficient referrals to fill its beds...
...But Reed had it wrong...
...The writer is co-chair of the Socialist party USA Erratum Our apologies to Todd Gitlin and Contention, the journal of the history department of UCLA, for not noting that Gitlin's essay on identity politics in our Winter 1993 issue was excerpted from a longer essay, "From Universality to Difference: Notes on the Fragmentation of the Idea of the Left," published in the Winter 1993 issue of Contention...
...Perhaps even more important, Rothstein's program gives no attention to the needs of nonunion workers...
...Though Reed's book was labeled an eyewitness account, he spoke no Russian, and many of his facts came from what he had been told or from next-day newspaper accounts...
...Nevertheless, Rothstein's proposals are unduly narrow in scope and fail to deal effectively with some of the crucial problems facing American workers...
...Yet it was Abramovitch who had been enveloped in the swirling myths of Russian revolutionary history...
...And Trotsky, standing up with a pale, cruel face, letting out his rich voice in cool contempt, "All these so-called Socialist compromisers, these frightened Mensheviki, Socialist Revolutionaries, Bund—let them go...
...Reed writes: Then came Abramovitch for the Bund, the organ of the Jewish Social Democrats—eyes snapping behind thick glasses, trembling with rage...
...Intensive family preservation programs, which emphasize rent subsidies, child care, and other efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty, must become the centerpiece of the system...
...Reliance on government agencies like the NLRB or EEOC risks underenforcement due to budget cuts and hostile administrations...
...396 • DISSENT...
...And definitions of neglect must be narrowed to make it more difficult to confuse poverty with neglect...
...The next day or so, I received a call from Alex Erlich, the elder son of Henryk, the author of the foundational work The Soviet Industrialization Controversy, who had become a professor of economics at Columbia University, telling me of Reed's mistake, and that it was his father who had been the object of Trotsky's scorn...
...In fact, repealing this provision, or "reforming" it away, would cause very serious harm—allowing employers to defeat organizing drives by setting up phony "committees" to defuse worker grievances and, even worse, to break down the distinction between labor and management and breed a new form of corporatist company unionism...
...How many young orators on the soapboxes of revolution have consigned their opponents to the dustbin of history...
...Without a workers' organization SUMMER • 1993 • 397 in the workplace to enforce such a right, the benefits of a legislative solution will, as with so many other attempts to substitute substantive reform for collective bargaining, benefit mainly lawyers and upper management, not workers...
...As soon as the agency returns a child home, the money stops...
...Of course, his ideas for improving union organizing law would certainly help some nonunion workers—but with under 12 percent of the private sector workplace organized, it would be hopelessly optimistic to imagine that nonunion workers will not remain the great majority for the foreseeable future...
...DAVID MCREYNOLDS New York, N.Y...
...How do I know about the confusion of individuals...
...And yet, irony of ironies, Abramovitch died peacefully in New York, though his son, Mark Rein, a journalist, had been murdered by the GPU in Spain in 1937...
...Good heavens yes, there were disagreements, sharp, painful, and sometimes profound...
...In the view of the Wagner Act (and McLeod) labor relations are entirely adversarial...
...We invite all delegates to this Congress...
...his family...
...Finally, in a journal that rightly "avoid[s] the provincialism of the immediate," as Irving Howe put it, it is disappointing that Rothstein does not risk more fundamental suggestions for change...
...The warehousing of children in foster care to keep the money flowing was documented in a six-part New York Daily News series in May, 1975...
...New York City reimburses these agencies on a per diem basis...
...q Foster Care Editors: David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz do a fine job of explaining how institutional racism, in the most literal sense, has contributed to the plight of foster children in New York City ("Race and Foster Care," Dissent, Spring, 1993...
...To do that, financial incentives must be reversed...
...When Raphael Abramovitch, with whom I had been the co-editor of the Modern Review, passed away in 1963, I wrote a memoir for the New Leader and mentioned the account in Reed's book...
...but we should at least plan and hope for something better...
...Rothstein's sanguine comparison of current labormanagement cooperation schemes to West German works councils is fundamentally misleading, both because many unionized employers clearly use such schemes to break unions (Du Pont) or impose speedups (General Motors) and because nonunion employers have no intention whatsoever of ceding power to their workers...
...This highly partisan, if not irresponsible, view of labor-management cooperation also appears in the articles by Jo-Ann Mort and Harold Meyerson in the same issue...
...And in California, homeless families were denied shelter unless they surrendered their children, until a lawsuit put an end to the process...
...It was not Abramovitch who had led the Menshevik-Bund delegation out of the hall, but Henryk Erlich...
...It is the night of November 7th, 1917...
...Unarmed we will expose our breasts to the machine guns of the Terrorists...
...Kameniev [sic] jangled the bell, shouting, "Keep your seats and we'll go on with our business...
...reliance on private lawyers and the courts risks ossification, delay, and insufficient access for low- and moderate income workers...
...Legislating workplace rights (like a universal just cause standard) is far less preferable than reforms that expand union density and power...
...The federal government spends at least eight times more on foster care than on programs to keep children out of foster care...
...And meanwhile the garbage-heaps of history keep rising...
...the leading proposal, partially endorsed by the AFL-CIO, involves a Uniform Employment Termination Act that would be adopted piecemeal, state by state, probably with considerable variations once fifty legislative processes had done their work...
...At least half the children now languishing in foster care—more than 200,000 children—could safely be in their own homes if proper services were provided...
...The writer is author of Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Prometheus Books: 1990...
...both he and Erlich were short men, with Vandyke beards, and both were eloquent orators...
...Our duty to the Russian proletariat doesn't permit us to remain here and be responsible for these crimes...
...Federal aid for foster care should be capped, then phased out, with the funds transferred to family preservation...
...the literary community at large...
...q History Editors: May I offer a footnote to Maurice Isserman's account of the fate of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, the two leaders of the Polish Jewish Socialist Bund, who were murdered by Stalin (Dissent, Spring 1993...
...There is also the problem of federalism...
...This fundamental protection is now deemed an obstacle to labor-management cooperation and the almighty pursuit of "competitiveness...
...It is an endnote — about Erlich—a stunning denouement to one of the most famous remarks of the twentieth century, an episode that we can now rescue from the dustbin of History...
...The Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies is opened in the great meeting hall of the Smolny Palace...
...Because the firing on the Winter Palace doesn't cease, the Municipal Duma together with the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Executive Committee of the Peasants' Soviet, has decided to perish with the Provisional Government, and we are going with them...
...q Genuinely Radical Editors: The death of Irving Howe leaves me momentarily at a loss as to whom I address this letter —DSA...
...They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history...
...What is taking place now in Petrograd is a monstrous calamity...
...Regrettably, little has changed...
...We are richer for his many dissents and affirmations...
...But the speakers are hooted down by soldiers brandishing their rifles...
...The challenge facing most unions today, however, is how to enhance productivity with cooperation while winning a fair share of the benefits of that productivity with confrontation...
...Richard Rothstein Replies: Wilson McLeod sees an aggressive drive by management to repeal the employer-domination provision of the NLRA, but I'm not aware of it...
...The problem is worsened when private agencies like those Rosner and Markowitz wrote about get into the act...
...The failure of the recent WARN bill (requiring 60 days' notice of major layoffs or plant closures) to provide any meaningful benefit for workers should be a caution to those who think that legislating rights can benefit workers if they are without the power of a union to enforce those rights...
...Ruling on two lawsuits, one of them brought by the ACLU Children's Rights Project, State Supreme Court Justice Elliott Wilk has found that New York City routinely takes away children from impoverished parents because of homelessness or poor housing conditions...
...Is any other kind of genuinely radical and perceptive political life possible...
...398 • DISSENT with child "neglect...
...Lev Davidovich Trotsky had an ice-axe driven into his brain in 1940 by the Stalinist agent Jacques Momard, who after twenty years in a Mexican jail vanished into Czechoslovakia and beyond...
...The greater tragedy is that many of the children Rosner and Markowitz write about never needed to be in foster care at all...
...He accomplished a very great deal in his time among us...
...DANIEL BELL Cambridge, Mass...
...Whatever the complexities, though, this is a crucial issue that has to be addressed, not least because employers will continue aggressive resistance to unionization if unionization imposes expensive legal restrictions from which nonunion employers are completely immune...
...WILSON MCLEOD Sierra Madre, Calif...
...Erlich and Alter died in the cells of the NKVD in 1941...
...Some management consultants are trying to stir up such a drive, but, given the NLRB's and courts' tolerant view of most labormanagement cooperation schemes, corporate leadership is quite happy with the way things are, and is not likely to try to rock the boat with an aggressive drive to change anything in the NLRA...
...A New Jersey study found that 25 percent of the foster children in Newark were in care because their families were homeless...
...The Mensheviks, led by Martov and Dan, warn that one party alone cannot seize power, otherwise the revolutionary democracy will collapse and civil war erupt...
...As a result, thousands of children are torn from the parents they love, and those parents are branded child abusers, because the family has no home, or the food stamps ran out, or a child was left alone while a single mother worked to stay off welfare...
...RICHARD WEXLER Albany, N.Y...
...If Dissent will not propose eliminating the bans on secondary boycotts, hot-cargo agreements, and sit-down strikes, or simply making it illegal for employers to close American plants and reopen slave-labor factories abroad, who will...
...Surprisingly, Rothstein does not explicitly mention one of the most immediate, and problematic, issues on the labor-law reform agenda: management's aggressive drive (implicitly backed by the Clinton administration's Reich Commission) to repeal the provision of the National Labor Relations Act that prevents employers from dominating or assisting labor organizations...
...Perhaps the single most basic reform would be a universal guarantee against dismissal without good cause—a guarantee provided by almost all union contracts, but still next to nonexistent for the unorganized...
...Dissent readers deserve and need a more probing exploration of these problems...
...My condolences to the editors, to his family, and to the organization to which he contributed so much, Democratic Socialists of America...
...Broad, vague, laws enacted as part of a national panic over child abuse make it easy to confuse a family's poverty Continued on page 396...
...In the view of some contemporary labor relations experts, labor relations should be only cooperative...
...For me the answer is Dissent itself, with its long history, full of that creative controversy that marked Howe himself, the child he, perhaps more than any others, brought into the political scene...
...To some extent, one can understand the mistaken identities...
...But Lev Borisovich Kamenev, liberated from Siberian exile in 1917, and the leader with Zinoviev of a faction opposing Stalin after the death of Lenin, was in the dock in the first Moscow Trials in 1936, and was shot shortly thereafter in the cellars of Lybiyanka...
...But discrimination in access to foster care services is only one piece of a much larger puzzle...
...But financial incentives at the federal and state levels encourage needless removal of children...
...Abramovitch at the time had been primarily known as a Bund spokesman...
...The rest was lost in a storm of hoots, menaces and curses which rose to a hellish pitch as fifty delegates got up and pushed their way out...
...For a variety of practical and technical reasons, designing an effective mechanism to ensure "good cause" protection might prove difficult...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
