Review From The UE News, Winter, 2009

Review From The UE News, Winter, 2009

By Al Hart, Editor

The title of Steve Early’s book is somewhat misleading. It’s a collection of 38 essays he’s published over the past 11 years in a variety of labor journals, newspapers, and progressive political magazines.

Almost all of these articles are reviews of books about contemporary labor issues. So among other things, his book is a very useful reader’s guide to dozens of other labor-related books published in recent years – and reading this book, you may be surprised how many books have been written about labor over the past decade. (Sadly, only one of the books he reviews – Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed – ever made it onto the best seller list.)

Early has been a union activist, organizer, and educator since the early 1970s, working for the United Mine Workers, a Teamster reform group and, for 27 years starting in 1980, for the Communications Workers of America (CWA.) He has a very high opinion of UE, which he describes as the first “real workers’ organization” he encountered, in Vermont in the early 1970s soon after he finished college. One of his essays he gives a positive review of a very deserving book on UE history – Rosemary Feuer’s Radical Unionism in the Midwest. Early analyzes the leaders, strategies defeats and victories of American labor’s recent history from a perspective very close to that of UE. The qualities he values in unions are the ones we value: democracy, accountability, inclusiveness and genuine empowerment of members to conduct their own battles.

Among the themes Early addresses are race, class and gender; labor and the left; dissent and reform movements; globalization and international solidarity, and labor and the law. His essay of EFCA, first published in November 2008, usefully reminds us how both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton disappointed their union supporters who had hoped for labor law reform during their respective presidencies. Many of the essays address the 1995 palace coup in the AFL-CIO in which John Sweeney and Rich Trumka ousted the Lane Kirkland old guard, and the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO. He devotes the last section of the book – four essays and nearly 50 pages – to the union that led that breakaway from the AFL, the SEIU. He’s very critical of SEIU leader Andy Stern for his top-down restructuring of the union.

Early’s epilogue, “Reading, Writing and Union Building,” regrets that books about labor do not sell better, particularly among labor people. Part of the problem is that many of these books are published by university presses who don’t do much to promote them. But he also criticizes union leaders who could gain much by reading books about the strategies and experiences of other unions. And he criticizes them for not doing more to promote union books as a means to educate and activate members. Two unions gain his praise as notable exceptions – UE, for marketing on our website “two labor classics,” Them and Us and Labor’s Untold Story; and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union whose newspaper plugs labor books and videos, including biographies of ILWU founder Harry Bridges and histories of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

For those of us who care about the future of the labor movement and would like to read more about what’s going on in labor, Early’s book is a good place to start. By the time you set this book down, you’ll probably have assembled a list of several other books you’d like to read based on Early’s reviews – as well as a list of other books he’s convinced you that you can skip.

Steve Early’s reflections on being embedded with organized labor.

by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

Being an “embedded” journalist has negative connotations for many in the industry, but some may change their opinion after reading Steve Early’s book.

A long-time union organizer for the Communication Workers of America, Early has gathered many of his reviews of labor books and ruminations about things labor in general. Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home is a collection that sparkles with Early’s intelligence, many years of experience, perspective and heart.

Many thanks to dear friend and uber-connector Danny Postel for sharing this book with me. I may add a category of books bearing his name since he has given me so many useful ones!

Early divides his work into six sections, each of which has some introductory text before moving onto the specific articles that comprise that part of the book.

Readers are treated to essays about some of the labor movement’s historic dimensions, the movement’s inconsistent and even tortured relationship with race, class and gender, voices of dissent and reforms, workers’ rights and wrongs, organizing in the global village and changing to win.

Early’s values are evident throughout the book.

His tone shifts at different points from an earnest and informed historian to a disappointed friend to a hopeful brother. But his belief in the potential for a truly grassroots and democratic union made up of actively reading members in which race, class and gender are seen but do not disqualify people from full participation does not waver.

That Early has attempted to live out his beliefs give his words more credibility.

Embedded with Organized Labor gave me literally dozens of books from which to draw to learn more, knowledge about individuals about whom I had never heard and a clearer sense of the broad narrative arc of labor in the American story.

Such sharing of information could easily be accompanied by arrogance. However,at no point did I that Early was performing intellectual pirouettes to show off his vast knowledge of the movement. Rather he is continually sharing and evaluating texts, and the people who wrote them, in an effort to inform, prod and help move people to productive, collective and positively self-interested action.

Early’s got guts, too.

The section of race, class and gender squarely confronts the way in which the movement has fallen short in history and today of reaching some of its loftier ideals,for example. The failure to deliver on promise shown during the early part of John Sweeney’s New Voice era gets similar treatment.

One of my favorite sections involved the pieces about the growth of SEIU and the anti-democratic and technocratic leadership that he says has emerged under Andy Stern. These articles were not as book review-oriented as some of the others, but were no less informative for their different focus.

Again, Early’s unyielding commitment to the role of labor and his considerable critical faculties allow him to make these critiques in an unflinching and constructive spirit.

My only quibble is that it would have been helpful to know the where and when of the publication so that we could see his reflections and thought develop over time.

If this is a blemish, it is a small one.

Early will be speaking next Monday night at the No Exit Cafe at an event organized by Postel. Whether you can make it or not, I urge you to consider purchasing, reading and sharing this valuable and informative book.

They Should Get a Union

By David Swanson

"If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States." --Barack Obama

Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has drifted down to the bottom of the AFL-CIO's website, buried beneath good economic proposals which, however, do nothing to build a labor movement. EFCA is not to be found anywhere on the front page of Change to Win's website at all. The media's not smearing EFCA with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lies anymore. Congress and the White House are silent. Any escalation of pressure on senators from union members has never materialized, the polite letter-writing campaigns having drifted away rather than ramping up into pickets or sit-ins.

In this context, Steve Early's new book "Embedded With Organized Labor" may be an extremely valuable resource, especially part IV on "Workers' Rights and Wrongs." Early is a journalist, an activist, a book reviewer, a historian, and a synthesizer of lessons from the past and present. We should draw on his knowledge, rather than viewing the current vice president's "middle class task force" out of the context of so many recent failed commissions.

The Clinton administration's "Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations" sought to determine how, and whether, unions could benefit management -- as if that were the only good they might accomplish. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich was then able to encourage the commission to question the need for having unions at all: "The jury is still out," Reich wrote, "on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace."

It strikes me that the fundamental error in such endeavors (commissions, task forces) lies in avoiding the real goal. When you push for a living-wage law because it will benefit businesses, you can lose out to the advantages of paying poverty wages. When you push for peace because Americans die in wars, you can lose out to wars carried on by drones and mercenaries. When you reform healthcare with the goal of pleasing the insurance companies, you lose sight of actually reforming healthcare. And when you defend union organizing as good for management, you lose touch with the purpose of union organizing, namely to allow workers to have some control over their lives.

The same mistake can be made when laws ARE passed. The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) of 1935 sets up an official body to mediate labor disputes. But when that body delays, stalls, and abuses its power, workers can be left with a weaker right to organize than they had to begin with. Just as the War Powers Act weakened congressional checks on warrior presidents while trying to strengthen them, just as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act weakened Fourth Amendment protections, just as statutory contempt eliminated the Congress's power (or at least habit) of holding people in contempt itself, a law that formalizes something won through eternal struggle cannot replace the struggle and risks creating new impediments.

That doesn't mean better laws aren't part of the solution. The Employee Free Choice Act would give teeth to the right to form new unions, assuming it was enforced after passage -- something which will have to be fought for, not assumed. But what happens when a first contract runs out and new union members go on strike to demand a decent second contract? They can legally be replaced by scabs, and other unions cannot legally strike to support them. Those restrictions on our freedom of assembly must be undone with new laws that go further than EFCA, laws that repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and ban replacement workers. And then enforcement of those new laws will have to be insisted upon through collective action for as long as we hope to have them enforced.

How can this be done? How can we even get to the first step of demanding passage of EFCA? Whether we influence enough key senators to throw out the anti-democratic filibuster rule and then force 50 senators to pass EFCA, or we compel 60 senators to pass EFCA under the current outrageous arrangement, either way we are going to need an aggressive and activist labor movement organized democratically and controlled by its members, working in coalition with other groups, and investing in the long-term future of labor organizing as well as broader national policies that benefit workers and a communications system that benefits workers. This will necessarily mean a labor movement capable of recognizing and acting on the fact that electing Democrats alone accomplishes very little. Our labor movement's leaders need to develop a lot less interest in access to elected officials and a lot more in access to unorganized and organized workers. And that access to workers must be used not merely to build membership from the top down, but rather to facilitate workers' own building of a movement, a movement that includes all of us who work for a living.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

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Labor Notes Book Review: Embedded with Organized Labor

by Chris Kutalik | Tue, 11/17/2009

Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home

by Steve Early, Monthly Review Press, $17.95, 288 pages.

Journalists—even the muckraking labor kind—love to have big, fat, juicy stories fall straight into their lazy laps.

I can testify from my years at the editorial desk of Labor Notes that reality rarely obliges—with a few notable exceptions.

The 288-page book is a collection of essays and articles from Early's many contributions to the labor press in recent years. Unlike the slog one may find with many books about unions out these days, it's both eye-opening and fun to read.

Roughly every couple weeks, I would find nestled in my staff mailbox what one labor educator dubbed a “Steve-Early-o-gram”: a plain brown packet jammed with tens, sometimes hundreds, of pages of goodies ranging from analysis of what was happening to union work in the telecom industry to the latest obscure dirt on the shenanigans of top-ranking union officials.

Fortunately, access to that wealth of information, analysis, history, and yes, some flat-out enjoyable Yankee snark recently became available to a wider audience. Early's Embedded with Organized Labor is quite simply a Steve-Early-o-gram for the whole labor movement.

The 288-page book is a collection of essays and articles from Early's many contributions to the labor press in recent years. And unlike the slog one may find with many books about unions out these days, it's both eye-opening and fun to read.

For the handful of Labor Notes readers living under rocks, Early has played a visible and active decades-long role in the union democracy side of the labor movement.

Maturing from a wide-eyed college radical of the ’60s, he found himself in the coalfields fighting the good fight for Miners for Democracy. After a stint running the Mineworkers' national publication, he went on to be a national organizer for the Ralph Nader-created Teamster reform group, the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), and helped lead that group into a merger that created Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

Though he went on to have a high-ranking staff role in Communications Workers District 1 until his “redeployment” last year (the ever-active Early loathes the word “retirement”), he never lost his passionate advocacy for troublemaking rank-and-file members.

IGNORING THE FIRST RULE

With an equal passion Early skewers the high priests of U.S. unionism. One nagging factor in labor's crisis has been its internal culture of silence. Difficult issues are often sidestepped, finessed, or ignored altogether. Writing of his days running the Mineworkers Journal Early tells of his early brush with the first rule of business unionism: “Thou shall not criticize another union.”

Early bangs on this rule with a prose sledgehammer.

Embedded aims its fire at both obvious old-school dinosaur targets as well as more controversial contemporary ones. Early attacks the shameful involvement of the pre-Sweeney AFL-CIO in CIA schemes as well as union strategies progressives considered less politically acceptable to knock a few short years ago.

From AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's palace revolt in the mid-1990s to the 2005 AFL-CIO split and the creation of the new federation Change to Win, he charts the quick rise and fall of the “reform from above” camp in U.S. unions.

While some labor educators were still writing “sacred narratives” about the progressive nature of unions such as the Service Employees (SEIU), Early was quick to catch on to what is problematic about the rising stars of that trend; many previously published essays on the subject make up the climactic last part of the book.

A critical (and lengthy) piece titled “Reutherism Redux” lays out flatly the dividing line: “From the standpoint of creating real rank-and-file power, SEIU's top-down, technocratic, transformation-by-trusteeship strategy is deeply flawed.” As important, he outlines the historical parallels between SEIU's bid for dominance and the abortive Walter Reuther-led Alliance for Labor Action in the late ’60s. Like CTW, the Alliance attempted to revitalize labor, but did so without throwing out the most limiting elements of the post-war bargaining system.

Interestingly, the “air of arrogance” or institutional hubris Early points to in this section has seemed to crack under its own sheer weight in the last year.

PERMANENT RANK AND FILER

But for Early, it's not all about the failings of bureaucratic leaders. It’s also about bolstering the notion of an exemplary figure found in union trenches: the thinking, fighting worker-activist.

Beating on the press's overemphasis on shining biographies of union tops, Early points to the need to tell the stories of “the permanent rank and filer”—activists who stay rooted in shop floor environs for years. He points to people like Kay Eisenhower, a 25-year veteran of SEIU who “repeatedly spurned opportunities to join the union staff or even run for higher-level elected office because [she] believed in rising, as Debs said, ‘with the ranks, rather than from them.’” In several essays, he details how a generation of radicals made the leap themselves into the union ranks and how a number of them were transformed by the experience.

He gives nods to these quiet heroes who have struggled with finding the “right balance between an exclusive focus on grievances, contract negotiations, or union democracy and efforts to engage workers around issues related to societal transformation.”

WORKING CLASS INTELLECTUAL

Early also praises that rare breed called the “working class intellectual.” He points back a few decades to shop floor writers and thinkers such as Marty Glaberman, a Detroit auto worker, and Stan Weir, a West Coast longshoreman. He details the lives of the old breeds of labor activist-journalists in the more distant past as models for those striving to be “participatory labor journalists.”

And while acknowledging the post-millennial problem of waning reading among union members—and the public in general—he points to steps labor could take to reverse the slide. Indeed, one of the most interesting sections of the book is the afterword, in which Early calls on unions to pump greater resources into redeveloping a vibrant labor press—and to deploy those resources in more worker-friendly media formats.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE

A quick review cannot do justice to the range of the book. Beyond banging on the top and highlighting the bottom, Early spins out useful pieces on a range of subjects. Whether it's a discussion on culture and unions; the role of the organized left in labor (or lack thereof more recently); the state of strikes or labor legislation; biographies of the few U.S. labor leaders who got it right, like Tony Mazzochi; or the viability of new alternative organizations like worker centers, there are solid pieces for any Labor Notes reader to mull over.