> Unions have not been a movement in 6 70 years, and they make up an
> increasingly irrelevant aprt of the working class of the United States.
> I don't know Whether AFL/CIO unions (exepting honorable locals) ever
> honored even noinally, "An Injury to One is and Injury to All," but a
> Unon movement that _was_ a movement and not a collection of grievance
> porcessors would give foremost priority at the present time to defending
> the rights (or rather, _establishing_ the rights) of undocumented
> aliens.
To be fair to the unions, even the AFL-CIO and SEIU, they have been pretty good on migrant issues the last few years. At least they are saying and doing some of the right things, re. organizing, defending, not demonizing, etc. Of course, as the offshoring and other debates have shown, raising the specter of the foreigner taking our jobs remains unions' primary default position, but I guess it's an advance of sorts that lately the specter seems less specific (Mexican, Chinese) and more general and unnamed.
But I agree with you that they are increasingly irrelevant, less and less a site for politics that's not of the administrative variety. I don't think this irrelevance is attributable to either their small memberships or their bad leaders but because the postwar compromise successfully recuperated the union form (as C. Wright Mills predicted it would) into capitalism. This was done by integrating the working class fully into the nation, making the national state the absolute border of politics. (There were other borders, of course -- racial, gender, and sexual -- but the national one unified all these various stratifications.) So even though unions now say the right things about migrants, their national structure ensures that migrants will always be of the outside and their inclusion will always be predicated on exigencies, not necessity. I'm skeptical that the union form can ever overcome this.
This is all pretty banal history, I know, but I'm reminded of it when I hear things like "the revival of the working class." Just as unions weren't supposed to unify a working class that was toiling in segmented occupations and industries, class now is supposed to act as the unification of all oppressions and stratifications. I'm skeptical, for reasons I've bored with before, but also because in takes like Gindin's, "class" reads like an institution that exists a priori to actual struggle. I would think the idea would be to create forms during struggle, without the compulsion to unification.