Labor Pains: Inside America’s New Union Movement

Labor Pains is an insider’s account of the struggle to rebuild a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer, and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement.

The role of the unions is defined mainly by larger economic and political agendas. While keeping these agendas clearly in sight, Erem focuses primarily on aspects of the life of the union which often remain hidden. The personal crises of union members become entangled in the work of the union. The energies of the union are focused not only on winning gains from bosses but also on maintaining internal cohesion and morale among workers. Barriers of race, age and gender are constantly negotiated and overcome, and conflicts flare up across them at moments of tension. And union life goes on not only when the workers have made their point, or won a victory, but after defeat as well. The personalities and ambitions of union organizers converge at times and become a source of tension at others. Each individual within the larger collective has their own task of finding a viable balance between public and private selves.

These intersecting lines of force are imaginatively recreated in this book. Erem writes as a woman in a union movement which is dominated by men; as the child of immigrants in a movement whose members are increasingly immigrants themselves; as one who finds herself in the racial no man’s land between black and white. While never underestimating the obstacles in the way of the union movement, she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the unorganized and empowering the powerless.

Contents

PROLOGUE

Introduction

PART ONE: CENTRIFUGAL FORCE

• Make Way for a New Day
• Spinning into the Job
• No Reds in the Rainbow
• Lois Anne’s Labor Movement
• The Stage is Set
• Union Staffer: A Job Description
• Even the Dead
• The Evolution of a President
• Child’s Play in the Toy Store
• The Day I Got Freedom
• Organizing, When it Works
• A Toast to the Winners
• Going in Unarmed
• A White “N” and Other Slander
• Barbie in Workboots
• Hanging Them Out to Dry
• Enter a Health Care Giant

PART TWO: FUTILITY

• Another Night Alone
• Still Can’t Win for Losing
• The Revival of the Boycott
• The Mysterious Death of Josef
• When Bullets Fly
• The President Creates his Generals
• The Violence Inside
• Bad Boys
• The Smell of Scotch
• Playing the Race Card
• Finding My Lines

PART THREE: HOPE

• Striking a Hospital
• The Union Begins to Crumble
• As United as we Get
• A Home for the Holidays
• Frogs in a Beaker
• The Reverend Returns
• Our Doors
• From the Beginning
• Going East?
• The Struggle Continues

EPILOGUE

Suzan Erem has worked in the union movement for the past dozen years as an organizer, union rep, communications director and elected officer, mainly in Chicago. An earlier version of Labor Pains—her first book—won the non-fiction category of the Great Chicago Stories Contest. She is now a freelance writer, and lives in Iowa.