What will the second coming of
George W. Bush mean for the labor movement and for working people
generally? At this very early stage in
his second administration, no one can know precisely. The news is bound to be bad; the question is
how bad, and the answer, in part at least, depends on the popular reaction to
the corporate and imperial imperatives that we must assume will continue to
mark the Bush regime. New Labor Forum will of course be
following these developments closely in the years to come.
One prerequisite for building a robust
resistance movement is developing a better grasp of why some working people
find populist conservatism appealing enough to vote for someone like George
Bush whose affections for the corporate elite and hostility towards the labor
movement couldn’t be more transparent.
So we begin this issue with James Steele’s anatomy of this historic
election. Steele dissects the electoral
demographics, focusing particularly on the whiteness of the Bush majority, the complexity of the “moral values” vote, and the critical
importance of the labor movement in shifting the country’s political center of
gravity leftwards. In addition to Steele’s examination of the electoral
results, we offer an article by Linda Kintz which explores
why religious and free market fundamentalisms have of late managed to convey a
real spiritual and emotional charge to people whose material security has been
severely undermined by the corporate order. She argues that a quarter century
of right-wing organizing and deft media manipulation has “re-enchanted” the
corporate economy, re-connected it to deep-rooted American mythologies about
the West, about manhood, and about the heroic, self-reliant individual.
The
tenacity of populist conservatism is the bad news. On the other hand, one recent hopeful sign
has been the gathering resistance by local communities, employees, and others
to the domineering presence of the world’s largest corporation, Wal-Mart. There
is considerable talk in the labor movement of making Wal-Mart the strategic
centerpiece of a national organizing campaign.
Whether or not that gets off the ground, the conception is a compelling
one. Wal-Mart is not only the country’s
largest corporation, it is, as Nelson Lichtenstein argues in these pages, a
template for global capitalism in the 21st century. Just as General Motors once defined the basic
contours of mid-20th century industrial life, so now Wal-Mart’s
system of production, distribution, technology, and labor relations functions
as a model for the global sweatshop, for what’s become a universal “race to the
bottom.” Such a race invites
opposition. A group of female Wal-Mart
employees have instituted the largest civil rights class-action suit in
American history, charging gender discrimination in the corporation’s pay and
promotion policies. Brad Seligman, the
legal counsel for the women suing Wal-Mart, describes here the origins and
nature of the suit, and why a Federal judge found the evidence overwhelming
enough to allow the class-action to proceed. Ellen Rosen provides a ground-level picture
of work life at Wal-Mart based on her interviews with a great range of workers
from store managers to sales clerks.
This cluster concludes with a portentous report by Greg Tarpinian on the shift in the composition of the labor
force which confirms that the Wal-Marting of the
economy does indeed seem to be the way the future is shaping up.
Reforming the nation’s labor
law would also help galvanize resistance to corporate domination, at Wal-Mart, and
throughout the economy. The prospects
for such legislative help are not great, but the labor movement is committed to
the crusade. In this issue, however, Mark
Dudzic challenges the prevailing legal and political
assumptions that have for many years informed the labor movement’s approach to
this question. He argues the case for
scrapping the existing Constitutional basis of the Wagner Act and substituting
an entirely different Constitutional rationale.
It would provide the legal foundation for protecting democratic collective
rights as opposed to the present emphasis on individual rights which can and
has been effectively used to undermine the power of labor. Our contributing editor, Josh Freeman, and
Larry Cohen, Executive Vice President of the Communication Workers of America
(CWA), respond to Dudzic’s daring proposal.
The movement for a living wage is certainly
one of the success stories of the past several years during a time when
victories for the working poor were hard to come by. Stephanie Luce assesses the movement and
focuses particularly on the question of the actual enforcement of living wage
ordinances. Looking at Baltimore,
Boston, and Los Angeles particularly, Luce teases out the
reasons why some movements, but by no means all, have been able to translate
good intentions into tangible gains, and explores the relationship of organized
labor to these social insurgencies.
Everyone agrees that the labor
movement has to break with its past, try out new approaches to address its dire
dilemma. Matt Witt analyzes the existing
communication skills and methods of the trade union movement and finds them
seriously flawed. He recommends new ways
for labor organizations to convey their message both to their own members and
to the broader public which continues to view unions with considerable
skepticism, thanks in part to the stereotypes regularly circulated by the mass
media. Debate about whether and how the
labor movement ought to be re-organized is becoming heated and may soon come to
a head inside the AFL-CIO. New Labor
Forum will feature a cluster of articles on this historic crisis in its
next issue. Here we publish an interview
with John Wilhelm in which he explores the rationale for the recent merger of
UNITE and HERE.
The global dimensions of
labor’s predicament are apparent to everyone.
Out-sourcing was enough of a hot-button issue to make its way into the
presidential campaign, and promises to remain so. Thea Lee dissects
the free market defense of outsourcing and offers a series of proposals to
address the concerns of American workers and the needs of the working poor
throughout the developing world. Also on
the international front, Kent Wong’s critique of the AFL-CIO’s policy on trade
with China
in the last issue of New Labor Forum produced
a spirited response from Barbara Shailor, Director of
International Affairs of the AFL-CIO. We publish this defense and Kent Wong’s
reply.
In dark times like these it helps to remember moments in the past when
the labor movement proved its capacity for militant struggle and inspiring social
vision. Thus we begin our Books and the
Arts section with an excerpt from a new comic book history of the IWW to be
published this year, which is the 100th anniversary of that unique
organization. Paul Buhle provides a brief introduction,
and the drawings that follow do the rest.
In keeping with New Labor Forum’s
ongoing interest in popular conservatism, Alice O’Connor reviews the much
talked about book by Thomas Frank, What’s
the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Ken Peres of the CWA reviews Democracy and Regulation, a provocative study
suggesting that American regulatory law, oddly enough, offers the most
effective and democratic approach to reining in the power of giant
corporations…which is probably why conservatives have been so dedicated to
dismantling it. We close on another upbeat
moment from labor’s past. Dorian Warren
reviews Ruth Needleman’s insightful Black
Freedom Fighters in Steel which reminds us of the extraordinary capacity of
ordinary people to change the course of history.
New Labor Forum would like to
offer a belated thanks to the “How Class Works” Conference held in June 2004 at
the State University of New York at Stony Brook from which the articles in our
last issue by Jefferson Cowie, Adolph Reed, and
Heather Bouchey were drawn. In this issue we want to note that versions
of the three articles on Wal-Mart were first presented at a conference
“Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?” held at the
University of California, Santa Barbara in April 2004.
