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

American unionism has been swimming against the tides for much of the last half century, bucking wave after wave of economic restructuring, capital flight, and mounting judicial and political hostility. And yet, as we know, the main flow of history often conceals beneath its opaque surface surprising countercurrents that are only visible to those who are bold enough to dive in with eyes wide open. Thankfully, Steven Lopez has taken the plunge into those uncharted waters, emerging with a rich and revealing ethnographic account of recent efforts to rebuild a viable union movement in the heart of the nation's rustbelt.

Reorganizing the Rust Belt is structured around an imaginative and powerful comparison of three pairs of union mobilizing efforts carried out by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) among low wage nursing home workers in western Pennsylvania. In each matched pair, which are distinguished by the geographic scope of organizing, Lopez seeks to explain why one case was more successful than the other. Drawing primarily on his two-plus years in the field as a union intern, and supplemented by extensive interviews with other organizers, rank-and-file workers, and archival materials, his goal is to lay bare the conditions that both facilitate and impede successful worker mobilization. While attentive to the wider socioeconomic environment, Lopez's explanatory framework focuses on the lived experiences and understandings of Pennsylvania's health care workers who from 1995 to 1998 were asked to choose sides in the escalating conflict between the SEIU and employers.

Lopez begins his analysis at the local level by comparing a failed and successful effort to organize the same nursing home over a two-year period. The first attempt, carried out in 1997, resulted in a narrow defeat for the union. Little more than a year later, however, the same Local won recognition by more than a two-to-one margin. Lopez attributes this dramatic turnaround to a tactical shift, in particular the Local's decision in 1998 to wage more of a grassroots campaign that proved more effective at tapping into existing worker networks, framing the case for unionization, and mobilizing the rank and file. But Lopez does not stop there, for he is primarily concerned with analyzing how networks, framing, and mobilization — the standard stuff of social movement research — are understood and acted upon by ordinary workers. Thus, he argues that the key to success in 1998 was not simply using networks, framing the union's position, or even mobilizing supporters, but rather deploying each of these "resources" in ways that successfully challenged the deeply engrained anti-union sentiments that barely a year earlier led a majority of workers to reject unionization.

Widening the analysis from the workplace to the union itself, Lopez next examines how a single SEIU Local attempted to construct solidarity across multiple work sites. Once again, he takes full advantage of his comparative design, contrasting a highly successful mobilization in which union and community supporters joined forces in 1996 under the banner of quality health care to resist privatization of four public-sector nursing homes, with a much more limited mobilization a year later to secure a first contract in which union leaders took the lead in "servicing" a generally passive membership. Lopez argues convincingly that the deeper and broader mobilization against privatization was largely a consequence of the Local's ability to construct the struggle around the broader and more compelling theme of social justice, rather than union rights. In this way, the struggle against privatization elicited support far and wide from nursing home workers, residents and their families, religious leaders, and savvy politicians, whereas the campaign for a first contract was construed more narrowly as a union issue, and to that extent reinforced the traditional practice of business unionism in which leaders collect dues in exchange for various services like negotiating contracts.

The last paired comparison extends the analysis to the regional level where...