Abstract
As the American Labor Movement has sought to stop its hemorrhaging, there has been widespread discussion of what kind of organizational change will be necessary to rebuild unions in the United States. Many have advocated moving beyond unions as “service” organizations, whose focus is largely on providing for members, to creating “organizing” unions where members are empowered to solve their own workplace problems, freeing up time and money to organize new workers. While the importance of moving to an organizing model unionism has become a conventional wisdom in the contemporary labor movement, the process of how to make this happen has been hotly contested. It has raised important issues of union democracy, in terms of who is making these larger decisions, and how to involve and build commitment from rank and file workers to this new model of unionism that in many ways turns its attention away from them.
Despite a renaissance of research about the labor movement, it is surprising how little work has actually explored the dynamic process of organizational change on the ground in local unions. Far too much of the literature had been highly rhetorical, often looking at organizational change from 10,000 feet or mired in sectarian disputes over specific unions. Laura Ariovich in Organizing the Organized provides us with a detailed and nuanced comparative study of organizational change that will forever change how we think about union renewal.
The author was very fortunate in her field work to have chosen a local union with two divisions that took very different directions toward union renewal. In the residential division on the south shore the union was successful in refocusing on mobilization and new member organizing. As so many unions have believed, local leadership assumed through membership education and appeals to reason that union members would come along and back this new initiative. In the end however, the workers did not, and became increasing disenfranchised from the union. In contrast, on the north shore in the commercial division, the union made these same efforts at jump-starting mobilizing and organizing, but in the process did not abandon workers’ issues in the workplace itself. In fact, during this time of larger organizational change, the union also embarked on a massive internal organizing program focusing on increased workloads. The net result was engaged workers who whole heartedly supported the larger union initiative.
From this example Ariovich goes on to articulate what she calls “an informal economy of favors.” She argues that efforts for any larger organizational change will founder if they break the personal relationship and reciprocity between mid-level union staff and union activists and rank-and-file members. Instead, she suggests that larger organizational change needs to link back to the real problems that workers are facing on the shop and office floor. In this way Ariovich suggests that “reformers managed to ground structural changes on workers’ preexisting grievances” (p. 269) and by “attending to mid-level leaders and activists’ views and allowing them to deploy their practical knowledge and skills” (p. 12). In this way, by addressing local workplace concerns, the union was able to engage members not just for the short-term workplace issues but for their larger union renewal effort as well.
Organizing the Organized offers a clear roadmap for union renewal. Ariovich’s findings suggest that no matter how elegant top-down plans are for union restructuring, they will fail if they do not stay connected to real workplace concerns of current members. For it is through respect for activists’ practical knowledge and reciprocity that activists and members become the fuel for larger organizational change. Ariovich’s analysis is sharp, the findings are clear and this book should be on the desk of every union activist and leader as well as scholars of the labor moment and union renewal.
In Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor, Jeff Torlina makes a passionate case against the argument that blue-collar work is only alienating, routine and dehumanizing. He does this by exploring the sociological literature on work beginning in the 1970s, and presenting findings from his interviews with blue-collar workers. While Torlina does yeoman’s work walking through the sociological work literature from the 1970s and 1980s, his analysis is somewhat dated given the emerging literature both from working-class studies and the explosion of new workplace ethnographies that have troubled the stereotypical notions of blue-collar work and skill.
As part of this research, Torlina also interviewed 31 men, half of whom were construction workers, and workers that tended overall to be relatively skilled. Given this sample it is not surprising that he discovered workers who saw intrinsic value and pride in their blue-collar work. It is important to document the lives and work lives of those in construction and other skilled occupations and their conception about work. However, we cannot extend these findings to blue-collar workers in general given the growing diversity of blue-collar work by race, gender, immigrant status, and occupation.
In his efforts to rehabilitate blue-collar workers from negative stereotypes about work, Torlina may have also overplayed his hand. He is so focused on presenting a positive view of work by those that he interviewed, that at times he seems to create one-dimensional characters, who are never bored, tired or alienated at work. Acknowledging the complex and often contradictory views we have about our work (Studs Terkel wrote brilliantly about it in the introduction to his 1974 Working) would have strengthened his argument by creating more complex and believable characters. For the question is not the essentialist one of whether blue-collar workers are fundamentally alienated or joyful about their work, but instead under what circumstance can workers demonstrate their skill and take pride in their work, or suffer the scourge of boredom and monotony.