Michael Sacco on Steve Early’s Save Our Unions
August 28, 2014
Michael Sacco
Labor law is outdated and rotten in the US, corporations have an inordinate amount of power, so it is rare that unions win or even strike these days. Solid activist leadership in our unions is rare in these last decades of concessionary bargaining and the sustained war on the working class. The lack of a class perspective by many Americans makes them susceptible to the ugliest sorts of manipulation against their own interests.
Steve Early has seen much of it and described it in a clear-eyed fashion in his latest book, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review 2013). It should be read by unionists and their supporters and the more than 60% of Americans who pollsters say would like to be unionized.
Early, like this author, is a retired telephone union staffer with the Communication Workers of America (CWA.) He has been a prolific writer on labor and social movements since he was a labor journalist working for the Mine Workers (UMWA) in the 1970s. He’s been published in many periodicals over the years and this book, like his first, Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (Monthly Review, 2009) is an expanded collection of his reviews, reporting and commentary. It’s a coherent collection that is of good use to young and old union members and leaders, as well as labor historians looking for the “Inside Baseball” after game insight of an experienced practitioner with a class perspective that is normally missing from “union books.”…
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