Unions, Labor Movements, Labor

13 May 1997 11:03

---

My grand-father belonged to one (also to the Communist Party, but that's a story for another time); my mother belongs to one; I'm rather proud to belong to one --- in fact I was the physics department steward; my wife belongs to one. They are, as the bumper-sticker says, the anti-theft device for working people, and while I can't claim the courage to start one --- the horror-stories told by organizers are, indeed, horrifying --- it really seems like the height of folly not to support them. (I shan't embarrass you or myself by singing "Solidarity Forever" at this point.) In fact, if you want a stable private-ownership economy, a big, strong, duly-recognized labor movement cannot be over-rated, since the alternative leaves most of the population without a stake in the system --- poor, insecure (pensions and safety regulations were not exactly introduced out of the goodness of stockholder's hearts), without legitimate political force --- and that makes things all too easy for lunatics and fanatics like Thomas Müntzer and Lenin and Pat Buchanan. Of course, unions are often corrupt and stifling; but this doesn't exactly single them out from among governments, corporations, churches, schools, armies, political parties, social movements, think-tanks, bowling leagues, etc., as the most depraved and vicious of human institutions.

Query: Could one give a neo-institutionalist account of unions, as the equivalent for labor of a joint-stock company?

See also: Democracy; Economics; the Left; Revolutions and Revolutionaries

Recommended:
• Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 [for which read America in 1890, Japan in 1920, Indonesia in 1995 ad revolutionem. Strangely, this book is not on-line yet.]
• Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's flat on Its Back
• E. J. Hobsbawm Labouring Men
• Richard Rorty, "Back to Class Politics" [but he is alas wrong about free trade driving down wages in the developed countries; see Krugman's Pop Internationalism for a refutation of such errors]

To read:
• Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
• Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
• Richard Donkin, Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Evolution of Work
• Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity
• Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60
• Jill Andresky Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America
• Mary Elizabeth Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China
• E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour
• E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing
• Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor
• Howard Kimeldorf
  • Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement
    Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront
  • Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State
  • Mirra Komarovksy. Blue Collar Marriage
  • Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt
  • Martin Jay Levitt with Terry Conrow, Confessions of a Union Buster
  • John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates, The Real World of Employee Ownership
  • Steven Henry Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement
  • Long, Where the Sun Never Shines [coal-mining]
  • Kim Moody, Labor in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy
  • Mike Rose, The Mind at Work
  • Shogan, The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
  • Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870
  • Vicki Smith, Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy
  • Reg Theriault, The Unmaking of the American Working Class
  • E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
  • Jasmien Van Daele, "Engineering Social Peace: Networks, Ideas, and the Founding of the International Labour Organization", International Review of Social History 50 (2005): 435--466 [From the abstract: "In 1919 a pioneering generation of scholars, social policy experts, and politicians designed an unprecedented international organizational framework for labour politics. The majority of the founding fathers of this new institution, the International Labour Organization (ILO), had made great strides in social thought and action before 1919. The core members all knew one another from earlier private professional and ideological networks, where they exchanged knowledge, experiences, and ideas on social policy. In this study, one key question is the extent to which prewar 'epistemic communities' ... and political networks, such as the Second International, were a decisive factor in the institutionalization of international labour politics. In the postwar euphoria, the idea of a 'makeable society' was an important catalyst behind the social engineering of the ILO architects. ... This article also deals with how the utopian idea(l)s of the founding fathers --- social justice and the right to decent work --- were changed by diplomatic and political compromises made at the Paris Peace Conference...."]
  • David Wellman, The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco Waterfront
  • Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies
  • The World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World
  • Zieger and Gall, American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century