-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
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>Are Boeing workers in China, Japan, Israel etc. crossing a picket line when
>they continue to work while their brothers and sisters in Puget Sound are
on
>strike? Or is that just retrograde nationalism?
Both sides should honor the other's strike, no? We're a long way from that in the real world, but it'd be a nice idea.
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Quite, but look how fast we went from Teamsters/Turtles to the utterly disgusting China MFN campaign and the IAM episode and the recent WA fleecing, the latter part of a trend that organized labor here has exacerbated in the process of creating one of the most regressive tax structures in the USA. How is *any* of that strategic solidarity/reciprocity? Granted the recent AFL-CIO paper and lobbying effort re working conditions in China shows they're rethinking some of the errors of their ways, but simply focusing on the point of production and picket lines obscures some serious issues that we need to address fast. The repercussions of the end of the Multi-Fibre Agreement is gonna be a perfect case for getting beyond the 'one step forward, two steps backward' problem US unions have been having.
>This whole discussion concedes too much to the business unionism model we
>all abhor and the fallacy of simple location in a world being
>de-re-territorialized at the click of a mouse..........
This got started with a query about a retail informational picket line. Retail is ultimately about location. It has a long supply chain, sure, but if nothing's sold, then the retailer has a problem. We could also talk about messing with the supply chain, or using retail campaigns to affect production, or a whole lot of other things. But we can get carried away with mouseclicks and placelessness.
Doug
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Who's getting carried away and what's placelessness :-)? The problem of organizational fluidities is real. I'm all for dreaming up Jerry Tucker strategies all along the value 'chain' but that means rethinking the conditions for solidarity and that means rethinking the spatialities and emotionalities [of race/gender etc.] of production/resistance in a non-Newtonian way. That's all.