United States: Solidarity sometimes (exclusive excerpt from Steve Early’s new book, Embedded With Organized Labor)

[With the permission of Monthly Review Press, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing an exclusive excerpt from Steve Early’s new book, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home. Embedded With Organized Labor describes how trade union members in the United States have organised successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past. Steve Early has produced a provocative series of essays -- an unusual exercise in “participatory labor journalism” useful to any reader concerned about social and economic justice. As workers struggle to survive and the labour movements try to revive during the current economic crisis, this book provides ideas and inspiration for trade union activists and friends of labour alike.
[Steve Early has been an organiser, strike strategist, labour educator and lawyer. He recently retired from his job as national staff member of the Communications Workers of America. Early's articles, reviews and op-ed pieces have appeared in The Nation, New Politics, CounterPunch, The Progressive, American Prospect, WorkingUSA, New Labor Forum, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and many other publications. He is currently completing a book on the role of 1960s activists in US unions.
[Links readers are encouraged to purchase a copy Embedded With Organized Labor, HERE.]
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By Steve Early
In May of 1970,
hundreds of flag-waving construction workers—egged on by
labor officials linked to the Nixon administration—attacked a crowd of antiwar
demonstrators on Wall Street. As played up by the media, it became an encounter
emblematic of the Vietnam era—a battle of political stereotypes in which hard
hats showed their hatred of long-hairs, “patriots” were provoked by “kooks”,
and real-life Archie Bunkers railed against a whole generation of spoiled
“meathead” college kids. In some middle-class circles, the incident tarnished the image of
unions for a long time afterward.
Nearly
thirty years later, news reports from presented a different picture of
organized labor. In the fall of 1999, Teamsters and sea turtle lovers,
steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least
on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization
(WTO). There was no blue-collar cheering squad for the cops or the
establishment this time; instead, top officials of the AFL-CIO proclaimed their
support for alliances with feminist, environmental, consumer, and
The
contrast between these two scenes raises some questions: What has happened in
the intervening decades to produce such an apparent “greening” of the labor
movement? Has
The authors
offer varying assessments of how much potential for conflict still exists
between “middle-class movements” and organized labor. Now a research professor
at
James Green
has tried to find common ground with workers by way of labor history. A
coordinator of labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Green draws on
twenty-five years of experience with a
As Rose
acknowledges, workers without an ideological predisposition toward coalition
politics are more open to alliances when they’re engaged in a high-stakes
strike or lockout. For example, prior to their
Aroused by
such incidents as a chlorine dioxide leak and a waste treatment plant
malfunction that dumped 16 million gallons of waste into the river, the
strikers joined forces with Ralph Nader, Greenpeace, and other
environmentalists in Maine to get the town of Jay to adopt an unprecedented
local ordinance empowering it to monitor and enforce state and federal
environmental standards. According to Rose, this labor and environmental
alliance remains intact, aided no doubt by IP’s continued nonunion operation of
the plant.
A more
recent lockout of 3,000 steelworkers at Kaiser Aluminum in
Still,
there’s no guarantee that making new friends during a strike produces lasting
changes in a union’s political orientation once its hour of need has passed.
Green provides a stirring account of the United Mine Workers (UMW) strike
against Pittston Coal Group in 1989. He describes how the union mobilized its
own members, linked arms with Jesse Jackson, used civil rights movement tactics
like nonviolent civil disobedience, staged the first plant occupation since the
1930s, and created an encampment in southwest Virginia (Camp Solidarity) that
became a magnet for thousands of supporters from around the country. According
to Green, UMW leaders, including current president Cecil Roberts, won the
strike because of their willingness to take risks. “They promoted and supported
a local culture of solidarity and consciously transformed a strike into a
people’s resistance movement against corporate greed”, Green writes.
Today, this
same union’s position on what might be seen as another manifestation of
“corporate greed”—global warming—is not so inspiring. Fearing job losses due to
legally mandated reduction of carbon emissions, the UMW has played a lead role
in an industry-backed group called Unions for Jobs and the Environment (UJAE).
As labor journalist David Moberg reported recently in The Nation, UJAE
“was launched with a grant and loan from a consortium of coal, railroad, and
related businesses that promote coal use.” Its membership includes AFL-CIO
affiliates in the cement, utility, construction, retail, and trucking
industries. The group “accepts the most exaggerated forecasts of job loss while
disputing
In 1996,
two other Pittston strike leaders lauded by Green—Rich Trumka and Eddie
Burke—teamed up with some of the key figures in the fund-raising scandal that toppled
Teamster reformer Ron Carey, dealing a major setback to the “social movement
unionism” that the author advocates. Taking History to Heart describes
Carey’s 1991 election to the Teamsters presidency as “the single most important
political event in the revival of the labor movement.” The product of twenty
years of rank-and-file
This
criminal conspiracy ultimately led to the very result that the liberal
activists were trying to avoid: election of Jimmy Hoffa as union president.
Carey was barred from the union, TDUers were purged from the staff by Hoffa,
and six upper-middle-class professionals have pleaded guilty or been convicted
of illegally diverting money into Carey’s reelection campaign (including one
who received a three-year jail term). Not surprisingly, Teamsters reformers
have concluded that, with “progressive” friends like these, their movement
doesn’t need enemies.[1]
Most outsiders who seek to work with unions or rank-and-file
The
political synergy on display in the streets of Seattle will be hard to
duplicate in other locales and even in future national mobilizations related to
globalization (although subsequent protests in
Washington against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund drew a
similar eclectic mix of labor and nonlabor participants). The emergence of a
post–Cold War debate about the merits of corporate-dominated trade deals
creates a political opening for the left. This did not exist when protests
against
[First published as “Solidarity Sometimes”, a review of Coalitions across the Class Divide: Lessons from the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements, by Fred Rose (Cornell University Press, 1999), and Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements, by James Green (University of Massachusetts, 2000), in The American Prospect, September 11, 2000.]
[1] For more on the cast of characters involved
in “Teamster Donorgate”, and how that scandal came about, see the series of
articles written under my pen name at the time, Jim Larkin: “What Went Wrong:
The Campaign Money Scandal of Ron Carey,” In These Times, December 14,
1997, 18–21 ; “Teamster Tragedy,” The Progressive, January 1998, 20–22;
and “Teamsters: The Next Chapter,” The Nation, January 4, 1999, 17–20.