Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss's Hard Work, Dan Clawson's The Next Upsurge, Steven Henry Lopez's Reorganizing the Rust Belt, and Rebuilding Labor, edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss
Mcneill, Jim
IN 1926, one of the leanest years the labor movement has known, a group of dissident miners challenged the rule of United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. That may seem odd to us today, for...
...Not surprisingly, the study shows that campaigns using the most tactics had the greatest success...
...When two sociologists who study unions feel compelled to defend the relevance of their life's work, you know times are tough...
...As Nelson Lichtenstein wrote in his biography of United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, "the industrial unions of the late Depression years were built from the ground up in a massive surge of rank-and-file participation, but the CIO unions were also built from the outside in, by well-connected and ideologically motivated organizers...
...They question whether SEIU is building a vibrant mass movement of workers or a listless army of alienated dues-payers...
...During the 1926 campaign for Mine Workers president, Lewis bullied key dissidents into withdrawing their support for John Brophy, his fiercely democratic opponent, and several members of Brophy's slate who wouldn't drop off the ticket were arbitrarily thrown off by union election officers...
...If I turn out to be wrong," he wrote, "we will at least have climbed a few flights of steps in the long struggle from the depths...
...In 1984, Ganz and a colleague interviewed more than a hundred lower and mid-level California labor leaders...
...Hard Work contends that because unions have been so besieged in the United States, labor here has been unable to fill the broad social and political role it has in Europe...
...Looking back to the 1930s, Clawson says the CIO's "new form was created by people in struggle, not by labor leaders...
...When Broil 6 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 BOOKS phy's campaign manager, Powers Hapgood, showed up at the union's 1927 convention to protest, three of Lewis's men pummeled him in a hotel room before it began...
...SEIU has humanized its organizing department somewhat...
...nizing, Stern calls the AFL-CIO an obsolete ship "not built to navigate the storms of the modern world...
...But to achieve that goal, Hapgood argued, "we have to use institutions, which, because composed of human beings, are not perfect...
...They argue that labor must return to its social movement roots, and they claim, a bit boldly, that the process has already begun...
...Fantasia and Voss do convince us of labor's importance, but they show that U.S...
...REORGANIZING THE RUST BELT is the best book I've read about contemporary organizing...
...Full disclosure: I worked in SEIU's communications department from 1999 to 2001, and I've consulted on several campaigns for the union since then...
...As a result, labor is connecting with broader social BOOKS movements in a way it hasn't since the 1930s...
...I've even been urging friends who aren't labor bureaucrats to read it...
...unions matter not because they're strong, but because they're so weak...
...And instead of flooding into the union spontaneously, workers often fled from its organizers...
...Thus was born the ideologically cramped business unionism that persists in America to this day...
...Lopez was smitten, so he decided to study two Pennsylvania SEIU locals that had recently concluded an ambitious statewide contract fight with one of the nation's largest nursing home chains (renamed in the book as "Megacorp...
...DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 121...
...even Ganz's fifty-page overview feels cramped...
...But Rooks's study suggests that if the labor movement hopes to intensify its organizing efforts, it must do a better job of retaining organizers...
...There have been brief interruptions in the reign of business unionism— the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World and the CIO, most notably—but their broad ambitions also provoked a bitter reaction from business...
...Many of labor's current leaders come out of the civil rights, feminist, or peace movements, so they naturally see union work as part of a larger struggle for social justice...
...they also worked to elect their own candidates for public office— candidates who contested the laissezfaire order of the day...
...In a letter defending his decision, Hapgood, a Harvard-educated radical, reassured a skeptical friend that he was still committed to "the complete emancipation of the working class...
...This time the insurgency is led by Andrew L. Stern, president of the fast-growing Service Employees International Union...
...But during the 1920s, many miners saw Lewis as a hidebound labor boss, a cowering autocrat who responded to industry's assault on their union not by fighting back but by falling back into a defensive crouch...
...Nevertheless, Clawson's unshakable faith in bottom-up organizing causes him to overlook some vitally important top-down campaigns...
...Fantasia and Voss note that one of modern labor's most successful campaigns, SEIU's Justice for Janitors project, requires staff-intensive research, careful selection of corporate targets, and intensive education of members before any serious rank-and-file mobilization can even begin...
...IN THE NEXT UPSURGE, University of Massachusetts sociologist Dan Clawson agrees with Fantasia and Voss that labor's revival lies in a return to its social movement roots, but he disagrees that staff-driven campaigns can substantially increase union membership...
...To them, Lewis seemed more intent on stifling rank-and-file militants than battling despotic coal companies...
...Soon Lopez stopped searching for favorable conditions and started focusing on all the obstacles and difficulties that the organizers had to overcome...
...Fortunately, another author has been wrestling with these problems...
...Perhaps the most interesting piece in Rebuilding Labor is the report on a long-term interview project overseen by former United Farm Workers organizing director Marshall Ganz, who now teaches public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School...
...these new connections, Fantasia and Voss hope, could build the base for labor's revival...
...His argument stems from the belief that labor's last upsurge— the dramatic growth of unions in the 1930s—was built, and led, from the bottom up...
...to believe that a smart and committed staff can by themselves draw up and implement plans for a societywide mass movement, or even for a dramatic increase in the number of union members...
...Like the CIO, NUP is pressing for a radical restructuring of the labor movement...
...Young and naive, Lopez headed east and began interviewing staff and members from the locals...
...And their agitation didn't stop in the workplace...
...Sadly, the most important legacy of the CIO today may be the dizzying array of anti-union laws it provoked, laws that turned even the most idealistic postwar labor leaders into harried grievance handlers...
...SEIU and its NUP allies argue that the entire labor movement must undergo a similar restructuring or face extinction...
...She interviewed thirty-one current or former organizers and found an alarming number who felt they'd been used as "cannon fodder...
...SEIU is still struggling to turn its gigantic home care locals into something more than direct mail operations...
...Advocating a broad social vision, one that challenged the primacy of business, seemed a sure path to destruction: better to pursue a pure and simple unionism that sought higher wages and not much more...
...This oversight is unfortunate, because there are problems with these kinds of massive campaigns that cry out for the input of a learned critic like Clawson...
...It gives organizers more training now before they go into the field and offers a bit more mentoring once they get there...
...Jim McNEILL, a writer in Washington, D.C., was managing editor of In These Times and editor of Racine Labor...
...Because it requires an enormous commitment of resources to organizing, and that generally requires a wrenching change in the union's culture...
...It's not that he doubted the workers' heroism, but he suspected the reality must be more complicated...
...At the time, the AFL-CIO's old guard had just been ousted, universities were holding labor teach-ins, and unions, for a brief moment, seemed almost sexy...
...In a book that aims to promote the "massive growth" of unions, Clawson devotes ten pages to a student-labor campaign at Wesleyan University that organized 29 janitors, yet he spends only two paragraphs on labor's biggest organizing victory in 60 years, the staffdriven campaign by SEIU that organized 74,000 Los Angeles home care workers in 1999...
...The Knights were arguably more powerful and progressive than Europe's unions...
...Unlike in Britain and France, where the government imposed some restraint on anti-union attacks, federal and state officials here did nothing to stop the assault on the Knights and often dispatched troops to help crush them...
...That may leave many friends of labor in the same place as Powers Hapgood's friend in 1935: forced to choose sides...
...Fantasia and Voss argue that the most promising changes in labor aren't welling up from the grass roots, but rather are being driven from the top down by progressive leaders...
...Stern argues that SEIU has been able to organize more than half a million new members over the last decade—at a time when most unions lost members—because once-autonomous locals have been integrated into a strong national structure...
...They show that it's possible to fight the good fight even in a time as difficult as our own...
...Seventy years later, the AFL-CIO is again plumbing the lower depths, and once again a fight has erupted within labor to determine the steps unions should take to climb out of the abyss...
...Standard theories about social movements see them arising almost organically from promising social and economic conditions, so Lopez initially searched for the fertile ground that must have been nourishing SEIU's organizing work in Pennsylvania's nursing homes...
...I did not consult with SEIU about the opinions in this review, however...
...Having seen his dark side, the interviewer asked, didn't he feel uneasy with Lewis running the CIO...
...Reading some of the responses from Ganz's subjects, I couldn't help but think of an interview conducted fifty years ago with John Brophy, the dissident who'd run against Lewis for Mine Workers president and then gone back to work for him at the CIO...
...But we would also do well to look at four DISSENT / Winter 2005.117 BOOKS new books about labor that, taken together, may help us determine whether the SEIU/ NUP model has the unavoidable imperfections that Hapgood urged his friend to tolerate in the CIO or whether it's marred with fatal flaws that will leave labor tumbling even further into the depths...
...Ironically, America in the 1880s was considered exceptional for the strength, rather than the impotence, of its labor movement...
...Workers commonly considered unions to be just as obsolete as the abandoned steel mills that dotted the landscape...
...Rebuilding Labor has other essays worth noting as well...
...118 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 THEIR DESTRUCTION taught a troubling lesson to the American Federation of Labor, which succeeded the Knights in the 1890s as the nation's dominant labor group...
...Inevitably, the conversation turned to Lewis...
...Steel's chairman, was "more a deal negotiated between fellow executives than the direct fruits of worker activism...
...Rebuilding Labor also includes the latest iteration of Kate Bronfenbrenner's epic inquiry into the reasons for the success and failure of union organizing drives...
...Its first contract, hammered out behind closed doors by John L. Lewis and U.S...
...that local autonomy is good and national control bad...
...they are my own...
...The responses are too rich to do justice to here...
...The article challenges all sorts of left assumptions: that bureaucracies stifle innovation...
...Clawson's book is filled with smart and engagingly written case studies of innovative campaigns, and his focus on bottom-up organizing allows him to see promising activity at the grass roots that others overlook...
...Clawson says it's "delusional...
...It's the next turn in their argument where things get dicey...
...Just as Lewis considered the AFL's craft-union model too antiquated for industry-wide orga*Details of the 1926 election are drawn from Robert Bussel's invaluable biography of Powers Hapgood, From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor...
...While it may be true that a small group of CIO leaders didn't implement such plans by themselves, they did draw up plans that provided an indispensable blueprint for America's workers...
...When Hapgood tried to speak at the convention, Lewis had him silenced and he was beaten again on the convention floor.* We can understand, then, the shock the dwindling Mine Workers opposition felt when first Brophy and then Hapgood went back to work with Lewis in the mid-1930s to help build the CIO...
...Thanks to centralization, SEIU has been able to pool resources and staff and pour them into massive organizing campaigns that focus on whole companies and entire markets rather than individual worksites...
...Even workers in the far more anarchic UAW relied heavily on the CIO's guidance and resources...
...Even when unions do win, unionized firms are left at a competitive disadvantage, and that in turn gives American employers yet another reason to fight unions so ferociously...
...This part of their analysis presents few problems for anyone on the left...
...Their claim draws on an article Voss co-authored in 2000 called "Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy" A study of unions in northern California, it found that the local unions organizing most effectively were doing so not because rank-andfile workers pushed them to, but because of pressure from leaders in their national unions...
...Then, in 2001 and 2002, he and several other colleagues tracked down sixty-eight of the respondents, those now between forty-five and sixty years old, and interviewed them again...
...One hopes a book is on the way...
...They say it's been underway since at least the end of the cold war, when labor's obsessive anticommunism faded and room opened up for more progressive leadership...
...And if they seem reluctant, I tell them to read the condensed version of Lopez's study that exists as a chapter in Rebuilding Labor, a new collection of essays edited by the hardworking Kim Voss and UCLA sociologist Ruth Milkman...
...In today's intensely anti-union environment, they argue, the rest of the labor movement will have to adopt similar methods if they hope to survive...
...Brophy had evaded such questions earlier in his life, but this time he addressed it directly: Yes, Brophy admitted, "I had my fingers crossed all the time, of course...
...Lopez saw that "in many cases, without the union's organizing efforts, workers might not act collectively at all...
...Ganz wanted to find out what caused them to go into union work in the first place, why they had stayed or left, and how their work in the union, or out of the union, changed over time...
...And that's true not only in post-industrial Pennsylvania...
...But this is a dangerously simplistic reading of that history...
...Stern has promised to "either transform the AFL-CIO or build something stronger," and because it's entirely possible that NUP will lack the votes needed to force a transformation at the convention, SEIU and its partners could be on their way out of the federation by fall...
...I don't want to criticize The Next Upsurge too severely, though...
...That may seem odd to us today, for we remember Lewis as the defiant founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the great labor insurgent who inspired millions of workers to build America's industrial unions in the 1930s...
...We tend to forget how precarious the support was for the Flint strikers and how close they came to losing...
...Officially, Lewis won the election in a landslide, but there was massive ballot fraud during the vote...
...This is a remarkably astute, if deeply depressing, analysis of labor's predicament...
...A chapter by Daisy Rooks, a graduate student in sociology at UCLA, looks at the troubling phenomenon of progressive unions that make appalling demands on their own organizers...
...And because the government here doesn't guarantee basic social provisions, our unions waste enormous energy going company by company to win benefits for their members...
...The interviews, he admits, were dismal...
...One after another, they told him "a glowing tale about how the heroic Megacorp workers were determined to stand up to the company for as long as it took to win justice...
...I've got to admit, I've worked on more than a few SEIU hospital campaigns where I wrote stinging press releases about the high turnover rate of nurses at the facility while working alongside organizers who were chewed up like Australian soldiers at Gallipoli...
...And that's all to the good...
...But because Fantasia and Voss understand the history so well, their prescription for the future is that much more compelling...
...The key problem, as he sees it, is that while many employers have gone global, unions have remained stubbornly local and decentralized...
...And the level of rank-and-file involvement varied from union to union...
...His work has appeared in the American Prospect, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baffler...
...Still, we learn, encouragingly, that the majority of Ganz's subjects went into labor as "social reformers"—not as narrow-minded labor bureaucrats—and that the majority of those social reformers, whether in or out of the movement, have remained committed to that broad vision...
...Bronfenbrenner and Hickey judge each campaign by determining how many of ten different "comprehensive organizing tactics" were used...
...While corporations have altered their form—using outsourcing, offshoring, and other innovations to shed union workers—Stern complains that the labor movement has changed hardly at all...
...I N THE SPRING Of 1997, Steven Henry Lopez was just another Berkeley sociology student trolling for a dissertation topic...
...Clawson says bluntly that "top-down changes won't reverse [labor's] slide...
...Here, Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education and research at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, teams up with Cornell graduate student BOOKS Robert Hickey to study more than four hundred organizing elections conducted in 1998 and 1999...
...DISSENT I Winter 2005E119 BOOKS Had Clawson grappled more fully with such campaigns, his book would have been far more valuable...
...Lopez set aside the interviews and got permission from one of the locals to join its staff...
...If we want to remake the global economy, Fantasia and Voss argue, then first we'll have to rebuild American labor...
...and that staff-driven campaigns inevitably suppress rank-and-file militancy...
...In 1955, the year the CIO was reabsorbed into the AFL, Brophy sat down with an oral historian to talk about his remarkable career...
...findings that reaffirm the results of her earlier studies...
...No doubt, some will scour histories of the CIO looking for guidance...
...IT'S A SIGN of how grim things have gotten for unions that Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, the authors of Hard Work, have titled their book's first chapter "Why Labor Matters...
...They organized the skilled and the unskilled, black and white, women as well as men...
...So why doesn't every union maximize the number of tactics it uses...
...It's the weakness of labor that has left American capital free to craft such a cruel economy in the United States and to impose its business practices on much of the globe...
...Even 120 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 during the 1937 sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, the majority of the city's GM workers kept reporting to work each morning...
...But the longer he worked at the local, the more apparent it became that the ground could not have been more rocky...
...Where European unions have helped build strong welfare states, we're stuck with a patchwork health care system and punitive relief programs...
...But there are plenty of people in labor, on the right and left, with strong reservations about the SEIU/NUP model...
...They believe that SEIU's structure is so top-heavy, so driven by the imperatives of staff rather than the initiative of members, that it's manipulating workers rather than mobilizing them...
...Hapgood urged his friend to look beyond Lewis's flaws and join forces with the CIO leader now that he was using his "power and fighting ability" to combat American business...
...This already heated debate over NUP will almost certainly boil over in July at the AFLCIO's quadrennial convention...
...In 2003, Stern joined with the leaders of UNITE HERE, the recently merged needle trades and hotel employees union, and with the presidents of the carpenters and laborers unions to form the New Unity Partnership (NUP...
...The tactics—sort of like organizing best practices—include committing adequate staff and resources to the campaign, having one-onone contact with workers, and building a rankandfile organizing committee...
...He spent the next two summers as an organizing intern, and his thinking about labor and social movements was profoundly altered...
...They lay the groundwork for this epic task by tracing the roots of the current crisis all the way back to the late 1880s and the destruction of the Knights of Labor, the leading workers' association of its day...
...Over the course of his two years in Pennsylvania, Lopez came to believe that collective action is not so much an effect of social factors, but a cause of self-conscious social actors...
...They believe that Stern, in his rush to centralize and expand SEIU, has built a union that doesn't oppose corporate America so much as mirror it...
...The Knights, in short, weren't a narrowly focused labor federation, they were a broad social movement, and employers, recognizing the threat, moved quickly and viciously to counter them...
...Only sixteen organizers stuck it out for more than a year and a half...
...In The CIO, Robert H. Zieger noted that the steelworkers union was "a highly centralized organization with little provision for local union initiative or rank-and-file participation...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
