Nathan Newman wrote:
>What's shocking is that Fitch
>is writing a story that plays into every mainstream stereotype of unions
>and
>he actually wants to pose as some brave iconoclast in the labor writing
>field. Hell, he's not even an iconoclast in the Spring 2006 labor writing
>field, since Linda Chavez has a new book out:
-Elementary point, Nathan: Fitch is a socialist and a friend of the -working class; Chavez is a right-wing publicist for capital. And so -fucking what if he write things that right-wingers can use? He's not -making this stuff up.
I pointed to a bunch of other pieces about corruption from other sources as well, although Chavez would claim to be a friend of the working class as well, just with a different ideology. But my point was that what he's saying is hardly iconoclastic, even among many leftwing folks. Last semester, I taught multiple sessions with my classes talking about union corruption with pieces from Tom Geoghegan and Nelson Lichtenstein, but somehow they are both able to talk about such issues without this monolithic brush you get from reading Fitch.
Maybe my reaction to Fitch is precisely because so little of what he writes is news to me, yet it seems so grossly out of context to everything else I know about labor history and present labor politics. Any set of "facts" can be "true", yet so fatally incomplete as to convey to the reader a completely false narrative.
There are little examples where he takes complicated stories and simplifies them, such as the upheaval in the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors local back in 1995. Fitch on pg. 305 simply says that a multi-racial alliance won a large majority on the board, yet fails to mention they deliberately chose not to run for the actual power position of head of the local, because they didn't have the political strength to win. So you ended up with a political stalemate between the elected executive head of the local and the board. And the grassroots unionists who won decided to try to illegally fire existing staff, in violation of the internal union contract -- SEIU staff unionized a number of years ago -- which added to the internal meltdown. The Los Angeles local at the time was a mixed local of janitors and health care workers and SEIU nationally was trying to consolidate janitors locals together, so the whole internal meltdown was used as justification for separating out the janitors from the health care workers, with the janitors becoming part of a statewide janitors local and the health care workers eventually becoming part of a statewide health care workers local.
Yes, the "facts" in Fitch's paragraph on p. 305 are all true, but by skipping over all the other facts in the paragraph above, Fitch conveys a basically false narrative because the real story is far more complicated.
Nathan Newman