Life Support for Labor?
— Meredith Schafer
Save Our Unions
Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
By Steve Early
New York, Monthly Review Press, 2013, 344 pages, $19.95 paperback.
THE DEBATE OVER how to save the labor movement suffers from a serious deficit of books written by organizers. Rarely do we get an entire book by someone who has been organizing for four decades, and is still actively engaged with union members, staff and leaders. Steve Early’s Save Our Unions doesn’t suffer from the luxury of being a memoir, but it is chock full of rich first-hand experience, as well as research, interviews, book reviews and labor history, followed by 26 pages of meticulous endnotes.
Save Our Unions begins with stories of union reform battles beginning in the late 1960s, including the United Mine Workers upset election of 1972, the formation of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and the PATCO air traffic controller strike that altered the legal environment for strikes in this country and was also an enormous missed opportunity for industrial action by several unions.
The intersection of internal union power struggles and battles against concessions on the shop floor and at the bargaining table is sharply laid out in smart and witty prose. More broadly, the book chronicles the ways in which the onset of neoliberalism in the United States during this period has impacted workers and unions, and transformed what it takes to fight the boss.
The book makes for an excellent study group tool for anyone interested in the labor movement. Readers new to labor activism will get important context in the early chapters — context that makes the more recent struggles within healthcare workplaces and healthcare unions tackled at the end of the book more interesting…
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