>Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
>>Was I right to pick up skepticism in your interview of Spiro?
>
>Not at all.
Good. It seems to me that Spiro's story also complements Brenner in that he supplies another mechanism, less 'economic' in nature, by which the US recovered hegemony other than recourse to a cheaper dollar and a wage assault. It would be interesting to know what Brenner makes of Spiro's argument.
> I wish I'd cut back on his time budget and extended
>Adolph Reed's.
Right. The essays in *Stirrings in the Jug* most of which I have read before are not be missed! Now as for well intentioned graduate students making too much of racial exclusion in the union movement, I am still interested to learn more about the status off affirmative action for access to apprecenticeship into the skilled trades, an issue that came on to the scene explosively with the Fletcher/ Nixon Philadelphia Plan. (As Linder points out, it took massive affirmative action to displace blacks from the skilled trades in the North since they had accumulated skills in the South.) It seems to me an interesting question now that affirmative action controversy is centered on set aside programs and admission to elite colleges, that domicile of the well intentioned graduate student. Far from dissing the union movement for racism, I also am surprised to learn that blacks may be even less represented in open shops than in union firms. This seems to be an unexpected result given the so called laws of economics (non union shops should have made greater use of cheaper black labor once unconstrained by unions). What are we to make of this (if indeed it is true)?
Yours, Rakesh