Poor Workers' Unions

Table of Contents

Introduction Organizing in the Margins
1 Unionizing the Movements: Economic Initiatives in the Civil Rights, New Left, and Women’s Movements
2 The Fight Within: Trade Unions Respond to the Movements
3 Building Economic Justice for All: A National Network for No-Wage and Low-Wage Workers
4 Community Organizing Goes to Work: ACORN’S United Labor Unions
5 “Organizing Where We Live and Work”: The Independent Workers’ Center Movement
6 Knocking at Labor's Door: Organizing Workfare Unions in the ’90s
7 Reviving an Activist Culture: The AFL-CIO’s Turn Toward Organizing
Conclusion Imagining a New Movement

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Excerpt

Organizing in the Margins

San Francisco, 1964: Fifteen hundred civil rights activists clog the elegant lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel around the clock, picketing by day and sleeping on the floor by night. The ritzy hotel hires few workers of color, and those who are on payroll work at the “back of the house” as maids and janitors. This multiracial group of protesters, most in their early 20s, has amassed to confront employment discrimination using militant tactics of civil disobedience learned in the civil rights movement. In just two days, protesters emerge victorious with an agreement for fair hiring at the Sheraton and 33 other hotels. Other industry-wide hiring agreements follow, as civil rights organizations become de facto bargaining agents for job access and equity for communities of color.

Detroit, 1980: Amid deteriorating buildings and trash-strewn streets, a picket line of teenagers, mostly African American, marches. The target is a Burger King fast food outlet in the Greyhound bus station. Holding signs that read, “Union rights are human rights,” they chant, “No more threats, no more lies, we want the right to organize.” Although many are still in high school, they know that low-skilled service work might be their only legal option in the fast-declining, inner city, industrial economy. Despite a high level of unionization in the city’s auto plants, a wave of plant closings has already thrown many of their family members out of work, and those who remain are ...

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Praise

"Finally, the book we've all been waiting for! With gripping tales of grassroots experiments in social justice unionism from the 1960s to the present, Vanessa Tait cracks wide open our concept of what a labor movement looks like, and shows how it can be part and parcel of movements for racial and gender justice. In the process, she does a stunning job of helping us imagine workers' movements that are creative, democratic, and, above all, build power from below-pointing the way to a vibrant future for labor."
—Dana Frank, UC-Santa Cruz; author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism

"At a time when the U.S. labor movement is engaging in an unprecedented public debate over the course of its future—over what course will best assure that it has a future—one of the luckiest breaks we could hope for would be for an informed and talented labor communicator to publish a book that not only advocates a focus that has been missing from the discussion, but also lays out the evidence of the past four decades for why this focus is critical to our success. Poor Workers’ Unions does all that. This is the most important contribution yet to the current debate over the smartest direction for the labor movement’s future."
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