Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities by Brian Mayer and Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training by Ariel Ducey both raise critical issues about movement building, about challenging management's control over the work process, and about strategic directions for labor—issues that are life and death for the labor movement.

Workers and unions are being undercut by new technologies and work-restructuring programs that are invading every industry, and essentially every workplace, altering not only conditions of work but power relations between workers and management. Meanwhile, a narrow view of the trade-off between toxic exposures and jobs has kept many unions silent as their members and the communities surrounding the plants (generally working-class communities) are deeply affected. Fundamental re-thinking by the labor movement—of its acceptance of the management-rights doctrine (giving management virtually unlimited control over technology and work processes/ work organization) and its tendency to pursue short-term interests over strategic thinking and class-based movement building—is desperately needed.

Blue-Green Coalitions examines three distinct attempts to build coalitions between environmentalists and labor, in search of lessons that will help future Blue-Green formations develop and succeed. With almost everyone, including Big Oil and coal companies, wrapping themselves in the green flag, the labor movement needs to dig beneath the surface to deeply understand the politics of Green, how they relate to the recession and jobs, and how to connect with the environmental movement.

Never Good Enough evaluates union-based workforce training in the health care sector. It raises important issues about the collective worker voice in the work process (or lack thereof), about ideology embedded in training, and about union strategies around work organization. As we potentially face a new round of restructuring stemming from health care reform—and as billions of federal stimulus dollars are devoted to promoting management-driven technological transformation in health care and providing training to support that transformation—this book's relevance only grows. Unions will have to figure out if they are going to sit on the sidelines and watch, or engage in a fundamental challenge to management's right to design, develop, and implement new technologies and work-restructuring programs without significant collective workforce input.

I admit to three significant biases going into this conversation. First, I come from the labor movement and look at these works through that lens (although I have had some involvement with each of the coalitions Mayer discusses). Second, I have a deep disappointment with the failure of many commentators to acknowledge the fundamental importance of the work process and the ways in which management is changing work to meet their needs not only for efficiency, but also for flexibility, power, and control. We cannot understand the world and develop clear solutions if we are analytically trapped on the edges of workers' reality. Finally, while advancing years have made me wary of rhetorical flourishes disguised as deep thinking, I yearn for analysis that penetrates the underlying dynamics of capitalism and their impacts on working-class movements of resistance.

Readers of this journal do not have to be reminded of the disaster that the last five decades have been for the U.S. labor movement. I am reminded of the quote that is so often thrown at workers being enticed into work-restructuring programs: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." These books both want us to do something different, to learn from experience, and to build a stronger, broader, and more vibrant movement.

In Never Good Enough, Ariel Ducey takes us inside the training apparatus created by SEIU Local 1199 in New York City and critically evaluates the impact of the training programs on individual workers, on the struggle to improve the lot of health care...