Piven: Labor Revival Needs Push From Outside and Below

[xchrom]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12875/piven_labor_revival_needs_push_from_outside_and_below/


Frances Fox Piven in New York City in August 2009. (Photo by Zach D Roberts for In These Times.)

Frances Fox Piven, the City University of New York sociologist best known for her work on poor people's movements (which led to unwanted attention as the bete noire of right-wing fulminator Glenn Beck), turned her attention last week to an oft-repeated question: "Can American labor recover?" Her short answer might be: Maybe (I hope so), but not on its own, and not without a push from outside.

For more than a century, Piven told an audience primarily of University of Chicago graduate students, most visions of the left revolved in some way around the unions and their power to organize the working class at work and in politics, thereby disciplining capitalists and supporting social democratic gains or the flimsy U.S. "safety net." At its high point after World War II until the 1970s, the unions created a "tacit social compact" with broadly shared benefits.

But the left, in and outside of unions, has also typically criticized unions and many of their leaders as too bureaucratic, oligarchic, stuffy; or too discriminatory against women, people of color, or workers in the secondary labor market. During the time of the social compact, despite support for some unions' support of the civil rights movement or other political insurgencies, she said, unions gradually became more distant from other popular movements and less of a movement itself.

"Still, it was an accomplishment," she said. 'For many working-class families, life got a lot better—a union, higher wages, security, dignity at work." But growing global competition triggered the barely contained desire of most executives to roll back unions and their gains.


*** i just her.

[Zalatix]

1. Is this a long way of saying

that unions need help from other (what I call falsely disparate) groups such as African Americans, Latinos, and poor working class whites? Catholics, whose church calls for social justice, should also be joining in. It is, after all, a higher commandment than falsely accusing women of "banging it 5 times a day."

[qb]

2. It's time for the truth about unions to drown out the lies.

They are responsible for improving wages, safety and benefits for many employees - including those who aren't unionized.