Labor Pains: Inside AmericaÆs New Union Movement (review)

In Labor Pains, Suzan Erem tells the story of her life as a union staffer with Service Employees International Union Local 73 in Chicago through a series of short, well-written vignettes. These small slices of life provide glimpses into the new, revitalized labor movement, with all of its hope, pain, and contradictions. Together they paint a picture of a person and a local trying against all odds—and against the forces ranged against us as a movement and against her as an individual—to make things work.

Erem describes the hope that people had in the new local leadership, as Tom Balanoff, the trustee and later president of the local, consulted with members and set up structures to build a democratic union and power for workers. She describes herself and her coworkers this way, "John Sweeney was leading SEIU, and we would become his example of what new faces and ways could do to rebuild our movement. Even if it exhausted us, even if it ate us from the inside out, even if it killed us, we were loving it because we thought we were invincible."

She relates a few moments of victory: a successful organizing campaign with van drivers at a hospital; an effective boycott of a hospital cafeteria in which the workers won a grievance and got discipline removed from many workers' personnel files; the triumph of hospital workers pulling off a two-hour strike to save their hospital.

She describes even more moments of hardship: the overwork, the shallow relationships with workers and coworkers, and the inability to do anything more than scramble from task to task.

There are very few first hand accounts of life in today's labor movement. This is the book's greatest strength. Anyone who has worked their heart out trying to build an organizing model union will recognize themselves in Erem's struggles. This book would be useful for labor educators who want to provide their students with a first hand account of a union staffer's life in the tough times of the 1990s.

This book is not, however, an analysis of the new movement, and it is certainly not a prescription. I was left wanting something more: more and deeper descriptions of the situations she lets us glimpse, more about what happened to the workers and organizers she describes. I wanted her experience to lead us somewhere, to move us towards some better ways of doing this work. The book doesn't do that. Instead, it primarily gives one person's somewhat cynical, frustrated, and sad view.

Erem raises several important issues: race and reaching across the barriers created by racism; overwork, the frenetic pace and as she calls it, centrifugal force in the labor movement; the challenge of being a parent and a union staffer (an incredibly difficult combination), and the ways in which bureaucracy recreates itself.

The Service Employees International Union has done more than many other unions to try to put resources into dealing with the crisis facing the labor movement: to organize new workers, to build worker power, to build union density in key industries. It is intense and difficult work, and in many SEIU locals, the work culture is not very sustainable. There are many, many ex-SEIU organizers. Erem describes this phenomenon well, but what isn't present enough in this book is the balance of success or the hope for the future that the people who continue to do the work are able to hold on to.

What we get instead is a cynicism fueled by the difficulty of Erem's life. Trying to parent a small child almost by oneself, as she describes it, while doing a union staff job, is next to impossible. Something had to give. Add to that being publicly accused of racism, and I'm sure it is very difficult...