Working America: Labor’s Promising Effort

http://www.philipdine.com/blog/2008/01/14/working-america-labors-promising-effort/

Published by Philip Dine on January 14, 2008 09:25 pm under labor organizing

I had the chance recently to participate in a two-day workshop on Working America at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. There, trade unionists, labor scholars and some activists from Europe, got acquainted with the AFL-CIO program. It’s a successful, yet still relatively unpublicized community affiliate that’s good for labor because it gives workers who don’t have a union at their place of work the opportunity to join with other like-minded folks in working for political, social and economic change.

In some three years nearly 2 million people have joined, many of them in key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. In a way, Working America reflects a bid by the labor movement to make inroads despite an organizing climate complicated by the flight of union jobs overseas, the transfer of some manufacturing to right-to-work states, and increasing employer aggressiveness in countering union drives.

For years, as I argue in my book “State of the Unions”, labor has been on a vicious cycle downward. Its inability to achieve net gains in organizing impairs its ability to push for changes in trade policy or labor laws, pretty much guaranteeing that the membership woes will continue.

That, in turn, only serves to compromise labor’s strength vis-a-vis employers in collective bargaining, making it less attractive to prospective members. And on and on.

But Working America manages to get workers and middle class people engaged in fighting for change despite the organizing hurdles. And, this, in turn, makes it more likely that the systemic factors compromising labor’s ability to increase its institutional strength can be addressed.


http://www.workingamerica.org/

I'll have to look into that!