The Lost City of Solidarity
from
Dissent magazine:
The Lost City of Solidarity
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NYC fast food strike (April 4, 2013, by peoplesworld, Flickr)[/font]
By Colin Gordon - April 17, 2013
Organized labor in the United States has always been an urban institution. Early organizing depended heavily on the natural solidarities of workplace and neighborhood, and on the ability of urban labor unions to support one and otherthrough boycotts and secondary pickets, and through political bodies like City Feds or Central Labor Councils. And while the CIO shifted labors attention from metropolitan to sectoral organizing, its sustained successesautoworkers in Detroit, packinghouse workers in Chicago, dockworkers in San Franciscowere still rooted in urban settings.
The relationship between urban and union density remains important. Cities facilitate organizing. This months fast food strikes in New York City, for example, would have been much harder to pull offand much less visiblein New Rochelle or New Paltz. It is easier to sustain organizational victories in urban settings, where other workers, customers, and the broader public are attentive to working conditions and employer tactics. And, once organized, metro unions can make it harder for marginal employers to bid down wages; they can block the low road and pave the high road of local economic development.
But new estimates of union density in American metropolitan settings show that relationship unraveling. The first graphic below ranks 284 metropolitan areas by their 2012 union density (private, public, or all workers), andin the second panelshows the sectoral breakdown for each of those metro areas. The second graphic maps private sector employment and union density across all (continental) metro areas. ..................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-lost-city-of-solidarity