> >From: Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com>
> > > I think it's
> > > really hard to look at what's actually happening with
> organized labor
> > > and find much that is inspiring.
> Uh, could you expand on this? I'm groping for reasons to be
> optimistic, and any assistance would be welcome.
>
> Doug
Maybe the real problem with an NYC address is not the affete liberalism but the depressing local politics - mayoral and often labor - because while it's not leaping buildings in a single bound, there are amazing success stories out there for labor. And most of the gains are going to those at the bottom of the economic ladder: immigrants, women and people of color.
** Just this last April, 90,000 home health workers in Los Angeles, making minimum wage and representing the broadest multicultural group of workers possible, voted to unionize after a long, complicated political and organizing struggle mounted by SEIU.
** Hotel employees and Restaurant Employees in Las Vegas have mounted the most sustained organizing drive seen in the country in the city of Las Vegas, converting a near-death local into a 55,000+ union local that has continually employed radical, cutting edge tactics against the corporate hotel-casino owners of the city.
** The janitors of Silicon Valley, and now up to Sacramento this year, challenged the techno-elite of our age and organized company by company, Oracle, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and so on, to bring decent wages to a largely latino workforce among the yuppie elite of the Bay Area.
** Just a few weeks ago, after multiple and unrelenting campaigns, UNITE was able to organize 3500 Fieldcrest textiles employees in North Carolina in the heart of the anti-union South.
These are some of the most dramatic campaigns, but each is matched in lesser ways by similar campaigns across the country. There are still fucked up locals and timid and stupid top international leadership in some unions, but there are an amazing array of good organizers fanning out across the country fighting for the rights of the most emploited workers in the country.
And as for democracy, unions are not perfect - and I've written for LABORNOTES a number of times in support of the union democracy movement - but they are infinitely more democratic than all but a handful of progressive non-profits, who are run often as pure individual fiefdoms, living and dying on the power of the top fundraisers, with democratic votes among members meaning less than nothing. There are obvious, nasty violations of democracy in unions across the country, but the violations exist because there is a democracy to violate. The same cannot be said for most other institutions of the progressive movement.
--Nathan Newman