Whatever the weaknesses of Bob's book, they are not the one's you describe. Have you actually read it? Has anybody beside Yoshi (and me) read it? He claims to be writing an institutional history, one that does what neither lefties such as Boyer and Morais and Art Preis nor the cultural historians including David Montgomery do. He argues that the structure of clientalism (or fiefdoms) dooms our unions. Argue with that, but at least get his argument right. Can we have a moratorium on Fitch baiting until everyone has actually read the book? You wouldn't opine on a movie you hadn't seen. Go the extra yard and read this one.
Mike H
On 3/10/06, Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>
> 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
>
>
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>
-- ________________________________________ `And these words shall then become Like oppression's thundered doom Ringing through each heart and brain, Heard again -- again -- again-- `Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number-- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you-- Ye are many -- they are few.' --------Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester" [1819] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060310/fc740336/attachment.htm>