Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress by Steve Early (review)

Save Our Unions is a series of 35 articles, essays, and book reviews from US labour movement activist, writer, lawyer, and former union staff person, Steve Early. Most appeared in progressive and mainstream US journals.

The essays cover a number of items, divided into larger topic areas: an assessment of reform campaigns in major unions; the state of the strike weapon in this era and the potential forms and uses of workers’ right to strike; strategies to expand private sector unions; the challenges of job-based medical benefits, the “private welfare state,” and the contradictory and often hypocritical role of many unions in giving only lip-service to “medicare for all”; recent struggles in the telecom sector, featuring a case study of Verizon; the challenge of new leadership development across the larger labour movement; the experience of progressives in Vermont, in particular their important and leading fight for a singlepayer health care system in that state; and an epilogue essay that draws larger conclusions about the direction of the labour movement from the ongoing struggles between the National Union of Health Workers/California Nurses Association and the United Health Workers/Service Employees International Union (seiu).

The entire book is tied together with common threads, reflecting Early’s political and union orientation. Its characteristics include the need for greater rank and file power and participation; democracy; unions that are truly independent of employers, with an adversarial perspective that fights with and for members; new ways of organizing the unorganized (especially immigrant workers); more independence from the Democratic Party; developing alliances with community movements; and solidarity across borders. The pieces include sometimes poignant vignettes of courageous and not-so-courageous efforts to build movements which reflect the above themes, in contexts which are most often unfriendly. (Particularly thoughtful and memorable was an article that appeared in the Boston Globe on the 100th anniversary of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, “Lessons of Lawrence.”)

The essays are incisive, written in a journalistic language that is clear and accessible to working-class readers, but thankfully devoid of the kind populist oversimplification that is all too prevalent in much of what passes as labour journalism today. They also contain “postscripts,” which tell the reader what happened after the essays were first written.

Underlying all of this are two key themes: a belief that, whatever constraints and limitations the now severely wounded union movement faces, there are always experiences that provide openings, hope and potentials, that demonstrate that “another way is possible.” And secondly, those possibilities will come out of the movements built and the lessons learned from the participants in these on-the-ground struggles, defeats, and experiences. Examples include Occupy, Wisconsin, the Chicago Teachers, the May Day immigrant, and retail and hospitality sector strikes and protests; ongoing rank and file challenges that succeed in creating and re-creating union potentials such as in the rebuilding of the former Teamster Local of Ron Carey and the New York City transit workers, the California Nurses’ Association, and National Union of Health Workers; the battle to challenge the “partnership” top-down approach of seiu; and the progressive political and union movements in Vermont; and many others cited in these many essays and stories.

But in the telling, Early isn’t uncritical and doesn’t skip over the weaknesses and shortcomings of the movements he supports, as in his description of the limits of the way international solidarity is practised at T-Mobile and elsewhere (where the weaknesses of the local union movement, coupled with the unwillingness of the stronger international partner to take radical actions that threaten their cultural and institutional ties to the employer, makes these strategies fail).

Early’s take on the strengths and weaknesses of the labour movement also avoids two erroneous extremes that many left writers fall into when analyzing unions. He doesn’t slip into the trap of writing uncritically about unions under attack by neoliberal capital, the state, and...