Book review: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, by Steve Early

Abstract

Steve Early Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, Monthly Review Press: New York, NY, 2013; 343 pp: 9781583674277, $79 (hbk) Those looking for an analysis of recent trends and events in the USA's beleaguered trade-union movement will do no better than Save Our Unions, by the long-time union organiser, socialist, and labour journalist Steve Early. Save Our Unions is not another dreary look at declining union membership and concessionary agreements. Nor it is a rerun of the by now superannuated debate between the 'serving model' and the 'organising model' as the universal salvation of organised labour in neoliberal America. Rather, Early turns an experienced and critical eye on what is actually happening beneath the conventional industrial relations radar. In this highly readable volume, we find not only fading confidence in labour-management co-operation schemes, but the new forces implementing different approaches meant to fit situations that unions have not always found familiar. Early in the book, we meet the 'unorganised' fast food workers who struck at McDonalds and other major chains in cities across the USA in 2012 and 2013. Though supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they were not union members, and nor were they seeking traditional union recognition or formal agreements from their employers. Rather, they have merged into a movement known as 'Fight for Fifteen', demanding a US$15 minimum wage. No doubt the long-range goal is union organisation, but the methods are more those of social movements than those of traditional trade unions. Similar tactics have been used by workers in the huge concentrations of warehouses at the centre of the USA's reshaped just-in-time logistics system, found near Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New Jersey. Again with some backing from unions, these workers have formed their own workplace organisations, and have taken various levels of action to win small gains and grow. In seeking possible ways out of organised labour's decline, Early also looks inside the more conventional unions; offering a history of the rank-and-file rebellions that have often appeared in US labour history. Starting with the Miners For Democracy in the 1970s, which threw out the corrupt leaders of the United Mine Workers, the author takes us through the 1990s, when the Teamsters for a Democratic Union-backed reformer Ron Carey beat an equally corrupt clique in one of America's biggest unions. Both rebellions eventually saw grassroots mobilisations beat back attacks by powerful employers for a time. Early also looks at more recent rank-and-file upsurges in large local unions of the Teamsters, Communications Workers, and Machinists, among others. All these rebellions reveal a strong desire for change from below, and an ongoing, possibly accelerating trend. Most notable of these was the 2010 victory of the grassroots Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the Chicago Teachers Union, the second-largest local teachers union in the country. This electoral overthrow was followed by one of the best organised strikes in recent years, when in 2012, more than 27,000 teachers beat back most of the tidal wave of neoliberal 'reforms' proposed by the mayor and backed by the Obama administration. What all of these rank-and-file movements have in common is a commitment to union democracy, a rejection of the labour-management co-operation ethos of the last three decades, a greater willingness to employ militant direct action tactics, and the construction of dense workplace organisation--in other words, a turning away from the norms of US 'business unionism'. …