Amidst the many failings and shortcomings of unions and the labor movement, there have been bright spots too. Not long after the first edition went to press, many unions joined the fight for global justice and against the uncontrolled globalization that had been driving wages and working conditions downward worldwide. The most famous struggle occurred in Seattle in 1999. But just as this movement was gaining traction, the events of September 11, 2001, created conditions in the United States that made it difficult for a labor movement so tied historically to U.S. foreign policy to continue to participate. To its credit, the AFL-CIO and many member unions did not give the full-throated support for the “War on Terror” that its predecessors had given to the war in Vietnam. And unionists opposed to it formed a group that continues to exist—United States Labor Against the War (USLAW). Fernando Gapasin and I described this group as follows:

This organization, comprised of individuals, unions, and other progressive organizations is not only opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq but to U.S. foreign policy itself. Its statement of principles—a just foreign policy, an end to U.S. occupation of foreign countries, a redirecting of the nation’s resources, bringing U.S. troops home now, protecting civil rights and the rights of workers and immigrants, and solidarity with workers and their organizations around the world—is remarkable in light of the sordid history of organized labor’s support for U.S. imperialism.

Just as remarkable is that the AFL-CIO has not only tolerated USLAW but given it tacit support by itself condemning the war in Iraq.

Dan Clawson in his book The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements describes and analyzes several important and successful organizing campaigns:

# unionization by women that focused on nontraditional issues such as child care;

# union alliances with community groups, most notably the famous Justice for Janitors campaigns of the SEIU, but also efforts by unions and community groups in Hartford, Connecticut to win affordable housing for workers;

# campaigns waged by Workers’ Centers, sometimes independently and sometimes in alliance with labor unions. Janice Fine defines such centers as “community-based and community-led organizations that engage in a combination of service, advocacy, and organizing to provide support to low-wage workers. The vast majority of them have grown up to serve predominantly or exclusively immigrant populations. However, there are a few centers that serve a primarily African American population or bring immigrants together with African Americans.” I have much more to say about Workers’ Centers in the book. As Fine says, they are intimately connected to growing immigrant communities in the United States, and they will be a critical component of any future labor renewal;

# living wage and anti-sweatshop organizing, which have been successful in forcing many cities to pay workers employed by firms with public contracts a wage that would yield an income at least equal to the federal poverty level of income and compelled universities to stop selling apparel manufactured under appalling conditions in low-wage countries. College students have expanded their anti-sweatshop actions to include the organizing of poorly paid employees on their campuses.

Some of this organizing has born fruit in terms of union membership. During the end of 2007 and the first half of 2008, membership increased in two important cities—Boston and Los Angeles. In Boston, cab drivers, security guards, truck drivers, communications technicians, and home-care assistants, among others, added more than 6,000 workers to union rosters.

Most of these employees were organized through atypical means, that is, outside the purview of the National Labor Relations Board. In Los Angeles, union density rose from 15.9 percent in 2007 to 17 percent by mid-2008, while in California it increased from 16.7 to 17 percent. Both increases reversed many years of declining density. Remarkably, union density also went up in the nation as a whole, from 12 to 12.6 percent. This is not enough time to establish a trend, but it is heartening nonetheless.

I am not as optimistic as Clawson that there will soon be a labor upsurge. Still, his book shows that there are important and interesting things happening in the world of organized labor. For the past twenty-eight years I have been a labor educator, teaching union workers and students in union halls, motel and hotel meeting rooms, in college and university classrooms, and through the Internet. I know from this experience that unions are as needed as ever, that there are thousands of thoughtful union brothers and sisters out there, struggling to rebuild their unions and give back to unions the local and national relevance they once had. There are union officers around the nation trying to mobilize and educate their members, not just to empower them in their own workplace, important as this is, but to help them grasp the economics and politics of the times in which we live. They are trying to build the multiethnic, multiracial unions and labor movement of men and women that will really mean it when saying, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Notes:

# The data in this paragraph are taken from Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009, advance proofs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), Tables 3.32 and 3.33. An invaluable source of union data is the Web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov. This is the source for union membership in the article.

# Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition (London: Verso, 2007), especially chapter 8.

# Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, 136.

# Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008), chapters 14 and 15. Moody also analyzes Change to Win, in chapter 9.

# Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, 172.

# Fernando Gapasin and Michael Yates, “Labor Movements: Is There Hope?,” Monthly Review 57,  no. 2 (June 2005).

# Janice Fine, http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp159.

# Daniel Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

# Nicole C. Wong, Boston Globe, August 30, 200.

# Ruth Milkman and Bongoh Kye, The State of the Unions in 2008: A Profile of Union Membership in Los Angeles, California, and the United States (Los Angeles: UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2008).

Michael D. Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly Review. His many publications include, Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (2003), and Why Unions Matter (2009).. This article is a slightly expanded version of the preface to the new second edition of Why Unions Matter

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