Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Story of the American Labor Movement (review)

In 1997 and 1998 Steven Lopez worked as an organizing intern with a western Pennsylvania Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local. He returned for interview and archival research in 1999. The result is this book, which is a fine example of the kind of research that labor leaders and activists need to rebuild the labor movement.

Lopez opens by noting that capital mobility has decimated the industrial unions, leaving the labor movement in places such as Pittsburgh shrunken and increasingly reliant on government and service sector unions for any significant presence. The SEIU local he worked with there has membership in both of these sectors of the economy; furthermore, SEIU has been one of the pioneer unions in developing a new "social movement unionism" to replace the dysfunctional "business unionism" practiced by the mainstream unions for most of the post World War II era. This makes the SEIU local an ideal subject of study to test out the limits and possibilities of social movement unionism.

While Lopez's definition of social movement unionism is modest compared to the visions of some who write on this topic, his concept, which uses the following four elements, is very realistic and practical in the present context. First, it uses "rank-and-file intensive" grassroots approaches to organizing. Second, it builds a sense of collective power through a wide variety of public protests and collective action campaigns beyond the traditional strike. Third, it employs labor-community coalitions to mobilize communities alongside internal union mobilizations. And fourth, it frames many of its goals politically, rather than in narrow labor market terms.

To test the prospects for social movement unionism approaches, this book compares unsuccessful and successful organizing drives at the same nursing home in a two year period, analyzes an anti-privatization battle and subsequent contract campaign at a string of public nursing homes, and analyzes a two-year battle with a major nursing home chain that involved numerous tactics employed in typical corporate campaigns against employers.

Rather than analyze these events in terms of factors, as most social movement theories would, Lopez analyzes them in terms of the main obstacles faced by the union in each case, and how the union overcame those obstacles. He finds three major obstacles to success, each requiring a creative solution. The first obstacle is the anti-union attitude of many working class individuals, even those who are very angry with their boss. The second obstacle consists of the internal organizational barriers that most unions have to carrying out effective action and mobilization. The third obstacle is the institutional and legal power of most employers, which makes union resistance seem hopeless.

This book offers an important contribution by deepening our understanding of why certain grassroots and mobilization strategies work. It does not revel in "glory stories" without painstakingly analyzing weaknesses, including internal weaknesses of the union. The analysis, moreover, is very concrete and is tied to actual events on the ground, making the conclusions much less abstract than those authors, myself included, who have written about social movement unionism. The relationship of these case studies to social movement theory is very clearly drawn, and in the process shows some of the failings of the existing theory. In addition, it demonstrates that victories against enormous odds are possible, even with a very low paid workforce facing powerful giant corporate employers. Finally, it shows how incredibly intricate and difficult it is to win those victories in the present environment, even when the union does almost everything right.

This is a very valuable book, and I highly recommend it to all who are interested in the struggle to revitalize the American labor movement. It breaks new ground and helps us to get closer to empirical testing of the many claims being made for social movement union approaches.