Workers looking for jobs, unions looking for members

Monthly Review, April, 2004 by Michael D. Yates

14. Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

15. See Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Boston: South End Press, forthcoming).

16. For details on the NUP, see William Johnson and Chris Kutalik, "New Unity Partnership: Five Union Presidents Launch Bid to 'Revolutionize' AFL-CIO," Labor Notes, http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2003/10/a.html; JoAnn Wypijewski, "The New Unity Partnership: A Manifest Destiny for Labor," Counterpunch, October 6, 2003, http://www.conterpunch.org/jw10062003.html, and the rebuttal by Tom Woodruff (along with Wypijewski's response) in Counterpunch, November 4, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/woodruff11042003.html.> 17. See Kim Scipes, "AFL-CIO Refuses to Clear the Air on Foreign Policy Operations," Labor Notes, February 2004.

18. See the speech given by Bill Fletcher Jr. at the 2003 Labor Notes conference, http://www.labornotes.org/conferences/speeches.html#fletcher.

19. See David Bacon, "Class Warfare," The Nation, January 12, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=bacon. It is very unfortunate to note that organized labor itself is not always keen on labor education, especially when the educator is critical of labor's leaders. Eighty-nine year old labor educator Harry Kelber, a longtime critic of AFL-CIO and member union leaders, was recently expelled from his local union on suspect charges of missing a couple of months of dues payments.

Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. He was for many years professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the author of Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (1994), Why Unions Matter (1998), and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global System (2004), all published by Monthly Review Press.