Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below (review)

Vanessa Tait couldn't have picked a better time to release her book. The tremendous changes that have taken place in organized labor and the debates leading up to these new labor formations about who has the "magic bullet" for success in organizing the unorganized have inspired organizers to look to the future for exciting possibilities for the labor movement. However, Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding Labor From Below, provides us a much needed glimpse into the past—a look at organizing campaigns among poor and marginalized workers who at one time were considered unorganizable and campaigns that were thought unwinnable. Most of these efforts were initiated by underfunded and fledgling community organizations as well as progressive trade unions.

In the introduction to her book Poor Workers' Unions, Vanessa Tait asserts, "Poor workers' organizing efforts have much to teach the labor movement.… Poor workers' unions fight for justice in the workplace and at the same time consciously challenge the balance of economic and political power in local communities." Tait sets out to support this assertion by providing readers with descriptions of key innovative, hard-fought campaigns to organize marginalized workers of color and women. Tait conducted dozens of interviews, mainly with staff in labor and community organizing. Instead of giving an exhaustive list of organizations and the campaigns they initiated, Tait chooses to highlight campaigns that transformed the ways organizers think about race, gender, age, and immigrant status, from late 1960s to the present day.

Some of the most interesting campaigns discussed in the book are the ones initiated by the United Labor Unions (ULU) in the late 1970s. These were autonomous labor organizations fueled by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Using an organizing approach that included issues of joblessness and underemployment in the black community, the ULU organized black teenagers in seven major metropolitan areas to march on employment offices with job applications in hand to demand summer jobs. In Boston alone, 400 high school youth marched on the employment office and then to the financial district demanding that the city and local corporations provide jobs. This organizing effort sparked a number of workplace organizing initiatives among young workers, including the successful organizing of Burger King workers in downtown Detroit in 1980, which became the first unionized fast food franchise in the United States.

A significant portion of Tait's book focuses on community and labor efforts in organizing welfare/workfare workers in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. These chapters are useful for anyone interested in probing the ways labor and community can work together or break very apart.

Workfare workers provided a concrete connection between community issues and workplace issues. Even though workfare workers worked side by side with union members, mostly in the public sector, they had no voice, were not given the same rights as unionized workers doing the same job, and were wholly dependent on the state for their wages, housing and benefits for themselves and their families. The intersection of race and gender was at the forefront of these campaigns because the state propagated racist stereotypes of the "welfare mom" as a way to undermine the program in the eyes of the public, vilifying them for being poor, black and unmarried. At the time traditional union organizing strategy was not sufficient or varied enough to address the breadth of oppression and vulnerabilities these workers faced, even though one of the main goals for the campaigns was to ensure guaranteed permanent employment with a living wage and a voice on the job. The tensions that rose between unions representing the permanent workers and the community organizations organizing workfare workers were in many instances insurmountable. Though both groups were successful and unsuccessful when they worked together and apart, ultimately the greater goal of having a path to moving the unemployed into quality permanent jobs was not a solid victory.

Tait provides numerous examples of tensions between organized labor and community organizations. In many instances Tait attributes these tensions to the different institutional cultures between...