03.09.2007
THOUGHTS ON LABOR DAY
I am in the middle--actually quite near the end--of Richard Kahlenberg's at once exquisitely complex and grandly contextual book on the life and passions of a Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy. Rick was a student of mine and his first book, The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action, was co-published by TNR Books with Basic Books.
As Rick points out in the very first sentences of the volume, most people who remember Shanker at all may do so only because of a characteristically spiteful crack about him by Woody Allen in Sleeper. But Shanker deserves a lot better, and not least in the fact that he was among the first to realize that what was then so fuzzily called "the movement" was actually imperiling American liberalism and was imperiling it with deliberation and passion.
I am now on page 350 of the book. And here's a set of combustible thoughts:
...the work world was changing, growing more white collar, Shanker said, but labor had not caught up...'If you try to promote a trade unionism which is based on a sweatshop where you work 75 or 80 hours a week and where Triangle Shirt Factory goes on fire, that's not the truth in most people's experience today. So the trade union movement itself has to change its orientation or otherwise it's going to lose out. 'Shanker felt that the AFL-CIO 'had become so fossilized,' said Phil Kugler, that 'it was incapable of change.' Bella Rosenberg: 'He pretty much hated going to AFL-CIO meetings' because of the lack of debate. 'It was stultifying.'
Well, there were three articles on the ed and op-ed pages of the Boston Globe this Labor Day. And the word "stultifying" apllies to all three.
The editorial, "The labor day that wasn't," is standard Globe fare. "American labor unions haven't shown the cohesiveness and aggressiveness of their counterparts in Europe...[This] denied American workers the benefits of the social-welfare state that became the norm in Western Europe after 1945." The Globe does not ask whether American workers would prefer living in Europe. And, by the way, how productive is Europe these days?
Robert Kuttner's screed, "For workers, it's no holiday." Why? Because the U.S. has not put into law each and every one of his rather abstract nostrums. You read this all decades ago when Kuttner wrote for TNR.
And, finally, "Labor's Failure" by James Carroll. It's all because of the American war machine.
Please do read these three Globe articles. They are sillier than I make them out to be.
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