New Mission

...Aronowitz stresses the need for new organizing of the immigrant poor and the professional and managerial employees...

...David Moberg (David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times...

...Neither more organizing nor more militancy will suffice...

...But they also could count on little effective solidarity from other unions, and they relied too heavily on their strike power...

...a strong emphasis on worker self-management and greater worker control over firms...

...According to Aronowitz, social contract unionism originated with Samuel Gompers and triumphed after the success of the New Deal and the CIO organizing drives...

...Stanley Aronowitz, the union organizer-turned-academic who wrote an important work a decade ago on the labor movement, False Promises, returns in Working Class Hero to modify some of his earlier views and propose a new strategy for labor...

...Rather than attack it head-on, the labor movement and the Left should transform it: Take people's work in a company as establishing a property right (and a community property right), and generate new forms of property that combine elements of public and private ownership...

...The new strategy must return to the heroic vision...

...Much as the disastrous air traffic controllers' strike represented new stirrings among highly trained technical workers, it also represented a failure of the old unionism, Aronowitz argues...

...Although American unions did not abandon conflict with their employers—indeed, they have tended to strike more than European unions—they subscribed to an ideology that linked workers' fates to the growth and worldwide expansion of American business...

...Yet it may eventually be persuaded to join in, for its own good and the good of us all...

...The political coalition that sustained the corporate liberal compromise has collapsed, Aronowitz writes, largely because the labor movement that was central to it has itself been grievously weakened...

...Now those old industries are undergoing radical change as capital flits from state to state and country to country, a scientific and technological revolution eliminates many jobs and skills, and a new international division of labor emerges...

...labor movement is in desperate need of something new and different...

...Legislation, especially for repairing the social safety net and controlling capital investment, would be a necessary complement...

...closer alliances with movements of blacks, women, environmentalists and peace advocates in an effort to build a radical independent political force...

...Such a program, if conceived in terms of extending democracy and expressed in values and concepts indigenous to American culture, could appeal to people not in the labor movement...

...The old instrumentalism has now failed and cannot be revived, Aronowitz suggests...

...Tighter editing would have improved Working Class Hero by eliminating some confusion and repetition and by saving Aronowitz's generally energetic style from unnecessary academic expressions...

...Although American unions have typically been categorized as business, social, craft, or industrial, Aronowitz argues that in recent decades all American unions have shared a similar perspective that he labels "social contract unionism...

...Unable to wield as much clout as their European counterparts, they began to rely on the State for legal protection and social welfare instead of depending on bilateral struggles between unions and employers...

...The air traffic controllers failed to take their case to the public, and failed to formulate the issues in terms of control over their work rather than escape from their stressful duties...

...In part, labor has itself to blame, with its failure to organize new regions and new fields of work, its narrow emphasis on contracts, its woefully limited education efforts, and its alienation from many potential allies-minorities, women, antiwar activists...

...Any approach to organizing—such as using rank-and-file workers or recognizing distinctive women's issues, as Aronowitz recommends—will face rough going in those sectors...

...It is too burdened with its own unheroic past to open up the necessary ideological debate...

...To a large extent, unions have abandoned their earlier "voluntarism," the fraternal association of workers, and have adopted a more centralized, military character, Aronowitz suggests...

...His shifting terminology indicates some of the tension within his own mind about what labor's program should be...

...and an orientation toward workers in new sectors of the economy rather than toward the dwindling numbers in the old manufacturing sectors...

...The key is for organized labor to take on the heroic, historical mission of working toward an alternative organization of society...

...The alternative for the labor movement is a "new social contract unionism," which he alternately refers to as "class struggle unionism...

...The American obsession with private property is one principal stumbling block Aronowitz mentions...

...The decline of the labor movement, and with it the old Democratic coalition, is aggravated by the failure of unions to connect their economic battles to the broader struggle of politics and ideas...

...Instead, they tried to establish their members as "industrial citizens" who would benefit financially from the growing economy...

...Although Aronowitz emphasizes the need for a new style of unionism, even old-style contract unionism would be a boon to the unorganized workers in sales, service, and clerical jobs—the largest non-unionized sector of the economy...

...At the same time, he adds, there is a new cultural fragmentation of the potential working class that is at least as difficult to overcome as the old ethnic divisions...

...This was the expression of the essentially instrumental character that the labor movement has had since the days of Gompers: day-to-day efforts to improve workers' lives, and political action to defend and extend those ameliorations...

...But even though there are a few signs of change and openness within the labor movement as it gropes for ways of managing its current crises, the initial battle for new perspectives is not likely to originate with labor...

...American unions became a "state within the State," he argues, increasingly administering union programs that were like businesses...

...Aronowitz is right in arguing that the unions must take up this "heroic" cause if they are to succeed and if the labor movement itself is to regain any meaningful power...

...The old social contract unionism, Aronowitz notes, was based on a craft-union style of leadership grafted on to an industrial union base...

...As part of this "corporativism," unions abandoned efforts at influencing the direction of economic life— whether it concerned new technology, patterns of investment, or decisions on products and prices...

...But since governmental action itself was inadequate, unions had to compensate by negotiating major health, pension, and other benefits that Europeans won politically...

...But there has always been another, minority conception of the labor movement, one that endows it with a heroic mission to transform society—"to abolish exploitation and hierarchy and establish a new social order based upon equality...