Splitting ranks.

• Author: Buhle, Paul
• Position: Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice - Book review

Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice

By Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin

University of California Press. 324 pages. $24.95.

No reader of The Progressive needs to be reminded that organized labor in the United States is in bad shape. Of that it is barely organized at all, with two federations and a scattering of independent unions, amid a work force so changed by industrial decline and demographic shift that the very idea of continuity seems almost a bad joke.

To understand the complexities, to begin to grasp what is needed to overcome the obstacles, requires an exceedingly close look. Authors Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin are admirably suited for the task. Former assistant to AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, Fletcher also served as the federation's education director. He then went on to become the head of Trans Africa and is now a teacher and organizer at large. Gapasin, an erstwhile Labor and Chicano/a Studies professor, is a central labor council president. The two have put a lifetime of hard-bought wisdom into this book. In essence, its nineteen chapters ask what the recent split in the AFL-CIO was all about, what kind of crisis lies behind the division of (dwindling) ranks, and does either side have practical answers for the labor crisis that could make a difference at home and among working people across the globe?

We come in at the point where the Old Order seems to be fading fast. Lane Kirkland, the colorless and incompetent successor to the cigar-chomping, hawkish, McGovern-hating George Meany, had counted upon a Cold War victory by the United States to compensate globally for the steady stream of labor defeats at home. Instead, free of the presumed Red Menace, employers set out to get rid of unions and whittle down promised benefits. By contrast to Kirkland and his fellow labor leaders, the corporations succeeded grandly, and carried the top leadership of the Democratic Party with them.

But reformers and radicals in labor had struggled for a different outcome.

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The overturn of the AFL-CIO machine of Lane Kirkland and fellow fat cats by Sweeney's "New Voice" coalition in 1995 at first brought a host of fresh programs, some of the best of them staffed by radicals.

Political education flourished. New organizing efforts commenced. Many of the old CIA-linked hacks were "retired," and it looked as if the labor movement had set itself to clean off the caked dirt...