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Reutherism Redux
What Happens When Poor Workers' Unions Wear The Color Purple
by Steve Early September 2004

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An essay/review on:

Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding Labor From Below
by Vanessa Tait
Boston: South End Press, forthcoming in January, 2005
300 pages, $ 20 paper/$40 hard cover.

Hard Work: Remaking The American Labor Movement
by Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
244 pages, $19.95 paper/$50 clothbound.

Reorganizing The Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement
by Steven Henry Lopez
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
292 pages, $21.95 paper/$55 clothbound.

Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union Movement
by Suzan Erem
New York: Monthly Review Press,2001
212 pages, $17.95 paper.

S.E.I.U.: Big Brother? Big Business? Big Rip Off?
by Harriet Jackson
Bloomington: Authorhouse Books, 2004
81 pages, $11.95/paper.

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Don't they realize if they really push this organizing, the labor movement is going to wind up being a movement of strawberry pickers and chicken pluckers?

-Anonymous 1997 AFL-CIO Convention delegate from the American Federation of Teachers, quoted in The New York Times.

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Despite stepped-up union recruitment, farm workers and poultry processors still haven't taken over the AFL-CIO. But the old guard's fear of being swamped by low-wage workers--expressed by this AFT delegate seven years ago--has materialized in other ways (even while organizing among "strawberry pickers and chicken pluckers" generally flopped). Tens of thousands of janitors, nursing home workers, home health care aides, and hotel, laundry and food service employees are now in the forefront of union struggles around the country. Under the post-1995 leadership of John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO has demanded a "living wage" for the millions of African-Americans, women, and recent immigrants who work in such jobs. Progressive allies of labor, including minority community activists, have widely applauded this new focus on the "most oppressed." Many believe it represents a renewed labor commitment to social justice, empowerment of the poor, and greater diversity.

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The piece can be found here on the Labor Notes site.

(Edited to fix your link -RD)

[ 17 September 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]