Spriro on American Hegemony

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Nov 21 10:32:34 PST 1999


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


>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).

I don't know if you heard Adolph's answer to your question about how comfortable blacks should feel about working with unions in the Labor Party. His argument basically was, unions have been racist compared to what? Sure it's an embarrassing history, but often less so than other institutions of American society. And as for the Labor Party, he pointed out that the delegates to the last convention were far more diverse than your average graduate school.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list