Beyond the lunch bucket
(Page 2 of 2)
May/June 1996
Monika Baurelein Utne Reader
Part of the reason for labor's reaching out beyond lunch-bucket issues is simple, bottom-line reasoning: As the workforce becomes younger, poorer, less male, and less white, established unions must at least give token recognition to groups and concerns previously shut out of the old-boy networks. 'It's no secret,' notes Andrea Adleman in a piece for the alternative news service AlterNet (Nov. 3, 1995), 'that the most successful organizers usually look and talk like the workers they're unionizing.' The AFL/CIO, for one, has been working to reverse the plunge in union membership by recruiting young and minority organizers. Though the project, as Paul Johnston notes in Canadian Dimension (Oct./Nov. 1995), still 'operates on a relatively conventional model,' it may mark the beginning of a new approach--especially if new AFL/CIO president John Sweeney is serious about his vow to make labor a social movement again.
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Social movements, however, rarely happen from the top down, and there are people arguing that the most interesting organizing in America isn't happening in the workplace at all, but in places from which jobs have been systematically removed. Gangs, for instance, are a way for the dispossessed to gain power by association; and like any outlaw movement, they attract some of the best and brightest in their neighborhoods. The Chicago-based Vice Lords and Blackstone Rangers, to name only two, have a long history of political activism, usually with a focus on economic development far beyond what labor had to offer their communities. More recently, after the Los Angeles riots, the Bloods and the Crips prepared a complex proposal for addressing urban devastation, a plan dismissed by the powers that be in favor of the corporate 'Rebuild L.A.' project.
'What if,' wonders Bill Fletcher, Jr., in Dollars and Sense (July/Aug. 1995), 'the AFL/CIO had approached the Bloods and the Crips with a proposal to unite their efforts?' So far, established labor groups have run from such notions, loudly (and a bit ironically, given the record) proclaiming their disdain for organized crime. But whether the partners are gangs or athletic clubs, Green organizations or PTAs, there are growing indications that, as Johnston puts it, 'workforces and communities devastated together by disinvestment' can either stand together or shrivel and die separately.
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