It’s mid-December as we ship this issue of the Forum off to the publisher.  Stormy weather lies ahead.  By the time you read this statement the United States may have declared war on Iraq. At home, barring a miracle, the Democratic Party, the official party of opposition, will likely remain paralyzed by its own cynicism and cowardice which led to its ignominious defeat in the fall elections.  Casino capitalism will rule the roost unchecked.  Every item on the right-wing’s dream list—eternal tax cuts for the wealthy, boondoggles for the pharmaceutical and health care industries, Arctic oil wells, universal government snooping, a federal judiciary to the right of Atilla the Hun, and on and on¾ will command front-rank Congressional attention with a much better than average chance of becoming nightmarishly real.  Already the new Department of Homeland Security has successfully dumped overboard those unions of federal employees it didn’t want to be bothered negotiating with. 

            Stormy weather indeed and no forecast of relief in sight.  The labor movement was frankly stunned by the miserable showing of the Democratic Party last November and is understandably at sea about what to do next.  Meanwhile, the domestic and international agendas of the Bush administration¾imperialism abroad and corporate unilateralism at home¾feed on each other.  The labor movement can no longer indulge the “luxury” of opposing one while saluting the other. John Sweeney recent forthright criticism of the Administration’s adventurism in Iraq makes that point well.  The way out of this dilemma is not immediately apparent, except to those satisfied by the tired formulas of the past.  Certainly you will find no panaceas in these pages.  However, New Labor Forum will continue in the months and years ahead to confront head on the dire challenges to labor and its social allies posed by this imperial moment.

            In this issue we explore a recent disquieting reality: trade union support in New York and elsewhere, for candidates of the party of big business.  Kim Phillips-Fein examines the various rationales for taking this position on the part of some of the nation’s most progressive unions.  She analyzes how they ever came to be in such a fix and sketches what seem to be the four principal political strategies now under debate among socially conscious trade unionists.  Frances Fox-Piven responds to Phillips-Fein to suggest that perhaps conventional electoral politics is not only a road full of king size pot-holes, but one not worth travelling down in any event.

            “Don’t Mourn, Organize!” has been a movement maxim for nearly a century, never more urgent if also more difficult to implement than today.  The AFL-CIO will have held its “Summit on Organizing” by the time you read this and we plan to include a commentary on the “summit” in the next issue.  For now, we offer three articles on different routes to organizational victory.  Jane McAlevey dissects a multi-union campaign in Stamford, Connecticut, which focused most of its formative work not on the shopfloors of that city, but in its housing projects and churches.  Linda Guyer in our “strategies” column provides a blow by blow account of how IBM white collar workers invaded the company’s cyberspace to turn its own technology into an organizing weapon.  Carolina Bank, Jazmin A. Ochoa, and Cristina Vasquez tell us about how African-American and Latino workers overcame their cultural distance from one another to reign in an aggressive garment manufacturer.

            Global social justice movements around the world have provided some of the most encouraging signs of resistance to the juggernaut of international corporate capitalism.  Those movements have drawn some of their energy from the soaring influence of the campaign for human rights.  Nelson Lichtenstein asks a provocative question: why is it that the struggle for human rights has gripped the imagination of millions while the notion of labor rights has lost much of the salience and political cachet it once had?  His analysis suggests how the fight for labor rights might recover its lost momentum.  The international sex trade industry, has grown geometrically driven by globalization.  Human rights organizations have taken the lead in defending abused and exploited women.  Svati Shah observes that the international sex trade must become a key issue for the labor movement as well. She summarizes the still hotly contested moral, as opposed to economic, approaches to dealing with the global sex trade.

     Tony Mazzochi died some months ago, as most of our readers will know.  There have been many tributes.  Here we publish a memoriam by Rand Wilson, one of the many people Mazzochi inspired with his devotion to militant trade unionism and labor’s political independence.  Whether his particular remedy¾a labor party¾is an effective way to confront the daunting dilemmas of the present remains to be seen, but there is no question his example will live on.

     Joe Blum is a long time trade unionist and social activist who took up photography when he retired.  His extraordinary talent is on display here in a photo essay that captures the oddly balletic intimacy of men and technology high above the straits of Carquinez in California.  Blum’s pictures of workers erecting the country’s first new suspension bridge in thirty years is accompanied by his story of Al Zampa who spent a lifetime building bridges, and after whom, remarkably enough, this new bridge is named. 

     In each issue we try to do something a bit different in our Books and the Arts section.  This time, in addition to including reviews of important works of fiction, non-fiction, and film, we include for the fist time a theater review.  Both Urinetown and Topdog/Underdog defy, according to our reviewer Jon Fraser, Samuel Goldwyn’s old saw that messages are meant for bottles, not for the stage.  And finally, we are proud to include in this section a retrospective appreciation of the poet June Jordan, whose life and work, we think, pose a set of lyrical challenges to organized labor.