LABOR'S RENEWAL?: Rebuilding the Alliance

...In the short run, toward more of the same...

...Running like an electric current through all the proceedings was an acute recognition of the event's social significance, its bringing together two worlds that had been estranged for so long...

...Nine other campuses, from Detroit to Texas, hosted smaller teach-ins, loosely linked to the Columbia event...

...Cultural memory being so weak in America, a relationship between progressive intellectuals and the "working classes," for a century practically a given of American public life, came to seem odd, infeasible, even quaint Yet almost everyone who attended the Columbia teach-in came away with a sense of possibility, inspired not only by the huge turnout and stirring rhetoric, but by the serious wrestling with complex issues in the standing-room-only workshops...

...Because the center of gravity of intellectual life has shifted so heavily to the university since the Age of Roosevelt, teach-ins are an appropriate form through which to mobilize cultural opposition to corporate greed and intimidation...

...The startling openness of the new labor leaders in agreeing to facilitate an event they did not control gives hope that desperation and possibility can combine to allow us to overcome the grudges and factionalism that have crippled laborleft politics for many years...

...Some 1,300 students, unionists, and teachers crammed Low's rotunda and nearby rooms while hundreds more stood by outdoor loudspeakers to hear AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, Betty Friedan, Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Eric Foner, and Patricia Williams excoriate the corporate domination of American economic, political, and cultural life...

...moreover, it used their presence much in the way (if not nearly to the same extent) that Mississippi Freedom Summer did a generation ago, to make the national media take notice of a world it had grown accustomed to ignoring, the world of the marginalized and exploited and intimidated working poor...

...Was Columbia a truly historic moment, as some of its organizers claimed...

...Perhaps the time is right to establish a national organization of scholars, writers, and artists for a revitalized and democratic labor movement...

...In the meantime, aside from a teach-in here, a conference there, are we consigned to wait for Godot...

...In addition to holding more teach-ins, it would provide resources for student groups and for campus labor struggles...

...Without successful organizing drives, a more independent political presence, and actions that clearly position the labor movement at the riskier, cutting edge of democratic social change, the momentum of Columbia will be hard to sustain...

...There are obstacles to overcome...

...Along with other vehicles of student activism, they have become a breeding ground of future trade union organizers...

...First of all, the new labor leaders must make good on their good intentions...

...The glaring absence of the major industrial unions, let alone the building trades, would need to be overcome in creating any broad alliance...

...But surely there are moments when the sparks can come from the outside...

...Breaking down the walls of the academic ghetto—a postsixties isolation ward that breeds its own, often exotic forms of social ignorance and self-absorption— will not be easy...

...The same networks could rally on behalf of labor legislation, demonstrate against corporate malefactors of great wealth (including those on university boards), and expose how the "labor question" touches the university...

...Is this the beginning of a new kind of student movement...

...At Columbia, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka called for academic supporters to come to the front lines when labor struggles erupt...

...Over the last few years, student labor action coalitionsSLACs—have popped up on a number of campuses, including Wisconsin, Brown, and, in the wake of the teach-in, Columbia...

...The teach-in combines a more distanced educational purpose with the agitation of a social movement in the making...

...The AFL-CIO's Union Summer exposed well over a thousand college students to the world of the labor organizer...

...The Columbia teach-in grew out of links a handful of academics made with the upper echelon of the new AFL-CIO leadership, bypassing the rivalries among individual unions...

...Where is this attempt to reconstruct a once fertile alliance headed...

...With attacks on tenure gathering steam, even those in more elite layers of the professoriate may soon find themselves walking the same picket lines as department secretaries and cafeteria workers...

...The teach-ins—with the exception of Columbia's—largely took place at schools either with heavily working-class student bodies or unionized faculty or both, like Clinch Valley College, in a mining area of southwest Virginia, Wayne State University in Detroit, and the University of Cincinnati...

...Labor speakers at the Columbia teach-in mainly came from a few internationals: UNITE, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and from the AFL-CIO itself...

...Noted Yale historian David WINTER • 1997 • 29 Labor and the Intellectuals Montgomery announced to a cheering teach-in crowd that he came from "ValuJet University," a reference to his Ivy League employer's effort to undercut campus unions and wages through subcontracting...

...Also, some teachin participants seek stronger ties to rank-andfile groups, whose relationship to the Sweeney regime is ambiguous or hostile...

...There ought to be repeat performances of Union Summer, enlisting new legions of college students and perhaps targeted more strategically at sites likely to ignite widespread indignation and action...

...Students probably will play a growing role in the teach-ins as they spread...

...Then, too, campuses have become the site of labor struggles involving service workers, clerical employees, graduate teaching assistants, and faculty, perhaps a bellwether of a dawning "labor consciousness" in sectors of the economy and segments of the population thought to be immune to this sort of collectivist mentality...

...Well, maybe yes...

...Navigating the shoals of labor politics has its dangers, too...

...30 • DISSENT...

...And reaching out to the world of arts and letters beyond the confines of the campus holds out the hope, at least, of challenging the corporate domination of commercial culture...

...We think it was, insofar as no such fraternal, mass public gathering was even conceivable for the past two political generations—certainly not since the early 1960s, and probably not since 1948...

...The next day, plenary and workshop sessions featuring leading unionists and intellectuals were filled to capacity...

...Already, teach-ins are planned at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Washington, with others likely...

...Such steps might begin to relegitimate labor-oriented research in the academy, where it has been ghettoized in labor studies departments or business schools...

...SLAC members, with energy and e-mail at their disposal, would do well to take up Trumka's suggestion, organizing flying squadrons to back labor struggles on and off the campus...

...It might also sponsor a newsletter, journal, or magazine, even a think tank, in which intellectuals could grapple with the labor question in its broadest sense— not only as a matter of industrial and economic democracy, but as a social question impinging on everything from race and gender relations to popular culture...

...Even the most sober-spirited could not help but feel a thrill seeing the long line of people on the steps of Columbia University's Low Library on October 3, trying to get into the opening session of a "Teach-In with the Labor Movement...

...Everything in the end depends on the creation of real social motion, and at this writing there are still only slender signs of what we're all looking for...