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  • We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing by Dana L. Cloud
  • Laurie Mercier
We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing. By Dana L. Cloud. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 236 pp. Hardbound, $55.00.

Since the 1970s, American labor unions have struggled to retain hard-won gains, such as a living wage, health care, pensions, and job security—once hallmarks of the post–World War II labor movement that expanded the ranks of the middle class. Along with the increasing power of corporations, neoliberal restructuring, and legislation that has weakened labor’s ability to mobilize, entrenched union bureaucracies have also stymied worker power. In her case study of Boeing, Dana Cloud explores how rank-and-file workers used their union both to advance their interests and to challenge the company, while they also struggled for democratic reforms within the International Association of [End Page 428] Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). As an activist and communication scholar, Cloud uses the Boeing case to ask “when, how, and why ordinary people successfully craft resistance in a complex array of institutional, rhetorical, and economic forces” (x). Cloud relies on interviews with dissidents that she recorded from 1998 to 2001 and correspondence with core activists through 2010 to address these questions.

We Are the Union traces the actions of three groups of dissident workers and their movements: Unionists for Democratic Change in Wichita, the “New Crew” (or “Rank and File”), and Machinists for Solidarity in Seattle/Everett. These groups challenged ossified union leadership and, in 1995, organized the rank-and-file to reject a Boeing-IAMAW concessionary contract and lead a strike for over two months. The workers won their demands and engendered a spirit of empowerment, which ultimately declined over the next decade in the face of new company assaults on workers.

After a historical and theoretical overview of union militant movements, the book focuses on the dissidents’ reminiscences about the rise of their movements, building camaraderie and solidarity, leadership styles, and their successes and failures. The narrators complain that entrenched union leaders often cooperated too much with management, rigged elections, and stifled worker militancy/democracy on the shop floor, in negotiations, and in the union hall. Despite years of cooperation with management and growing company profits, workers continued to see massive layoffs and threats to their craft, wages, and benefits. Reformers believed that company propaganda to “get lean” and the company’s offer of training opportunities actually led to job combinations and layoffs. They educated workers to become more skeptical and adversarial and to push union leadership to resist company directives.

The 1995 strike is framed in strategic and theoretical terms; the details of the strike, such as how workers held the picket line, mobilized workers for various tasks, and enlisted community and family support, are presented in one short chapter. Yet the interviews capture the elation that accompanied the strike, as noted by David Clay in Everett: “The membership realized that we are the union … We disrupted delivery of 777s. We banged on pipes with tools … we shook the walls. People got the idea that this thing was theirs. We shocked the union leadership” (110). The book links the mid-1990s Boeing movements to earlier rebellions against racism and conservatism in international unions and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), including the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (1967–74) and, after 1975, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Cloud also discusses the dissident movements associated with failed strikes where international unions did not aid their locals, as in the 1985 Austin, Minnesota, meatpackers’ strike and the mid-1990s’ lockout of United Paperworkers International Union members at Staley Manufacturing in Decatur, Illinois. [End Page 429]

The author clearly champions the Boeing dissidents, although she is also reflective and critical about their mistakes. Her collaboration with Wichita activist Keith Thomas is reminiscent of Peter Friedlander’s classic work on the UAW’s early militant history based on his extensive interviews with former local president Edmund Kord (The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975]). Like Friedlander, Cloud provides...

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