[lbo-talk] Solidarity for Sale: UNITE'S Garment Gulag

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 10 08:31:54 PST 2006


Guest writes:>>as bad as they are, unions are all us workers have right now. <<

[are you related to Lance Guest, the star of "The Last Starfighter"?]

On 3/10/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> I have not finished reading Robert Fitch's Solidarity for Sale yet (I have one more chapter to read), but one thing that the book makes clear to me is that it is NOT true that even bad unions are always better than no unions....<

yes, but it up to the workers themselves (with our help, if it's wanted) to fix this situation. Just as workers in Franco's Spain were able to use the existing system of government-run unions to improve their lot, worker here can and should use the existing structures to create real unions.


>... This point becomes clear in the chapter entitled "UNITE's Garment
Gulag," where Fitch compares union sweatshops in New York (where workers' wages rarely rose to the federal minimum wage) and non-union shops in California (e.g., American Apparel Co.) that pay much higher wages ($13.00 an hour plus benefits on average in the case of American Apparel Co.) than them.<

I haven't read Fitch (though I've ordered it for our library), but this comparison is quite fair. Labor-market conditions (including those outside of union control) differ between New York and California. -- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles



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