What can we do to turn around decades of union decline? This is the key challenge of our era, because without the power of a revitalized labor movement it will be exceedingly difficult to pull America off its descent into oligarchy and authoritarianism. There are no easy answers, which is why I welcome the contributions made by Labor Notes cofounder Jane Slaughter and labor scholar Ben Fong in response to my new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. (You can also read an outline of some of the book’s arguments here.)
Whereas Slaughter’s critical-but-comradely review accurately addresses my book’s major arguments, Fong’s dismissive polemic is marred by straw-man claims and tendentious logic. Nevertheless, both of their pieces raise important questions about just how new worker-to-worker unionism is; the role and industrial scope of strategic targeting in our contemporary political economy; and the generalizability of the types of campaigns profiled in the book. I’ll do my best here to address their major criticisms.
Seeking to demonstrate that I am simply “overhyping a branded ‘model,’” Fong argues that my conceptualization of worker-to-worker organizing is “a far cry from anything that might resemble a ‘roadmap’ for labor revitalization,” and that it in fact constitutes “something of a barrier” to our shared goal of workers’ self-activity.
The starting point of Fong’s critique is his case that worker-to-worker unionism “is not a fundamentally ‘new model’ of…
Auteur: Eric Blanc
