Book Review
Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
By Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 2013)
Veteran labor journalist and rank-and-file union activist, Steve Early, brings over 40 years of experience and insights to his new collection of essays, Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress. Early’s collection of short articles provides us with snapshots of the challenges that face workers in today’s era of growing employer hostility and governmental indifference.
He brings together the stories of past and present labor activists who have been helping workers organize new unions, fighting for more union democracy, fighting to retain union jobs in the face new technology, reaching across borders to build solidarity with workers around the world, and developing more effective strategies for political action.
Many of Early’s essays have previ- ously appeared in Labor Notes, In These Times, and other pro-union publications. All are based on his first-hand reporting which is combined with excellent reviews of important books on labor history and memoirs from labor activists. These stories are told through the voices of rank-and-file activists, union officials, academics, and labor journalists. He combines all these per- spectives into a book that highlights the biggest issues confronting Ameri- can workers during the last 40 years: declining union membership and power, decreased worker militancy, problematic ties to the Democratic Party, the lack of rank-and-file democracy within many unions, and a troubling shortage of solidarity between unions.
Early tells the heroic and some- times tragic stories of labor activists who must battle hostile employers along with conservative, complacent and sometimes corrupt forces within their own unions. He begins the book with a look at past reform efforts, pro- viding details and inside information about courageous reform movements that were waged within the United Mine Workers (UMW), Teamsters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), United Autoworkers (UAW), and the International Asso- ciation of Machinists (IAM). While all these efforts have fallen short of their goals, they have also scored some important gains in the process.
Early’s sympathies for “bottom up” unionism are clear, and his accounts of reform struggles and the sacrifices made by reformers are both heroic and deflating. He shows that building and sustaining reform efforts over many years takes hard work. He describes reformers who sometimes put their jobs and safety on the line with no guarantee of success. Because Early does not avoid talking about failures, younger activists will have learned many valuable lessons after finishing this book.
Early also looks at strategies for increasing union membership in the private sector. He profiles several innovative organizing campaigns that used “salts,” including an ILWU campaign in the late 1990’s to organize San Francisco bike messengers. Early details the “salting” strategy by explaining how union activists take jobs in shops where they slowly help co-workers learn how to organize and build union power.
Early also looks at the importance of “cross border” organizing campaigns by describing an effort by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) to organize T-Mobile call cen- ter workers with help from a German labor union.
Another section of his book is devoted to what Early calls “labor’s health muddle.” He covers the fight for a single-payer health care sys- tem in Vermont – the type supported by the ILWU – that could serve as an alternative model to our current Obamacare system that was designed by and for health insurance compa- nies. He explains how the Affordable Care Act was designed to hurt many union health plans, including the ILWU Longshore plan. In 2018, all high-quality plans must begin paying a federal tax that will punish union members who struggled for many years to win good health benefits. By one estimate, the tax on the ILWU Longshore health plan could cost $150 million in 2018.
Besides hurting patients, Early explains how many health care workers face poor wages and miserable working conditions in our profit-oriented health care system. He reports on campaigns to organize hospital and home health care workers, and the “civil war” that erupted within the Service Employees Union (SEIU) over a dispute whether to organize from the top-down or bottom-up. Early ends his coverage of health care by examining employer-promoted “wellness programs” that sometimes punish workers for smoking or being overweight.
Early’s essays are not for the faint of heart and it’s hard to be hopeful about labor’s future after finishing his book. But he does suggest a way forward, without pretending to have all the answers. It begins with a clear under- standing of past errors, so the next generation doesn’t have to repeat our same mistakes. And Early is convinced that the best ideas will come from rank- and-file members and their elected leaders who belong to democratic unions. In this sense, his book affirms the ILWU’s “Ten Guiding Principles” – and encourages all union members to put them into practice.